I live between California, Japan, and France; and childhood was in Punjab, India. I am the East and the West. I am a mother, wife, and a woman, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, an artist, an intellectual, and a social activist. Such multidimensional identities are not so unique in our interconnected global society. Thus, I am one of over 7 billion people sharing this earth with many other species of animals and plants. So today, we are here to build a dialogue on what is that balance between me—the individual—and the community in macro and micro scale. The community is physical, emerging, and it is virtual. Our world community is made up of many physical, emerging, and virtual communities: from a sports club, to a Facebook group, to a Nation. But we are all interdependent and interconnected simultaneously in multiple ways.
As I was working on how to build the discussion on “Citizens, Communities and Multi-layered Identities,” I started to think maybe our next discussion needs to be why we need identities, and how they are developed, or the human being’s needs are much more fundamental. For security and protection, we gather ourselves in communities; for emotional expressions we need the company of others. In the 21st century of disruptive technology, our need for security, protection, food and shelter, and emotional contact are being addressed in rapidly changing ways. Thus, developing multiple identities, we are constantly connected to new people as we take on new identities while layering them on our existing identities. The negotiation of multiple layers of identities is true for individual citizens, and the communities which are physical, emerging, or virtual. Here today we will focus on “Citizens, Communities and Multi-layered Identities,” and how to build a sustainable relationship between I and society.
In 1972 “The Limits to Growth” report by the Club of Rome announced that due to the limited natural resources of our earth, the world cannot have infinite growth. Here we want to go a step further: that our world not only has limitations due to its natural resources, but it also has limitations due to human nature to adjust to disruptive changes. We can see this all around us: the anxieties to globalization of our identities and economies, just like genetic modification of the seed versus slow modification of the seed in the nature. Given this, the need of the time is to redefine the concept of Citizen and Community.
