ICTs and communities in the twentyfirst century: Challenges and perspectives

This article is organized around four of the major challenges that seem necessary to address in the effort to tease out this complex relationship. After introducing the challenges, it examines how past studies have tackled them. It concludes with an assessment of how well these challenges have been addressed and where we should go, in theory and research, to move beyond the present understandings. One of the first challenges is to go beyond utopian and dystopian visions of the new ICTs. New communication technologies that reach a critical mass of adoption generate a litany of hopes and fears-utopian and dystopian visions of how the technology will afford solutions to previously intractable problems, or will create intractable problems. In the case of ICTs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the perceived decline in the viability and vitality of communities of place was one of the main problems addressed by ICT visionaries.