Humans have traditionally turned to the self or to the community to guide morality, and those resources, while enormously important, in a sense have run their course, Gergen says. Before radios, TVs, telephones, airplanes and computers, people used to sit outside on their porches after dinner and exchange stories and information. The advent of new technologies is creating a new state of relational being in which information is at our fingertips and we communicate with faceless, even nameless, people. Such influences as the profusion of information and fragmentation of society and of language have contributed to the shift. In regard to memories, each of us may carry them, but relatedness created them.
Computer technology reinforces that image of relatedness with webs, networks, matrices.
We generate meaning together, and so, Gergen proposes, the beginning of an alternative way of generating an acceptable moral society arises. Problems arise when concepts, including good ones, conflict with one another.