Many of the liberating and empowering technologies that gave us freedom and improved the quality of our lives turned out to be corrosive to community. Automobiles freed us to commute in rush-hour traffic from remote suburbs, sealed in our individual vehicles. Air conditioning let us wall in those front porches where the neighborhood used to talk to itself. Radio and television brought us images from the surface of the moon; they also bombarded us with commercial messages and turned us into passive consumers of massive amounts of imagery.

If technology got us into the alienation dimension, is it simply madness to consider using technology to help rebuild what we've lost? Does the problem with technology lie in the way tools have been used, or in the tools themselves? Can people use virtual communities to enrich and restore real communities?

Doug Schuler, author of "New Community Networks: Wired For Change," (Addison-Wesley), not only believes that computer-mediated communications can and should be used for community-building, he's spent the past several years studying the worldwide phenomenon of "Community Networking" or "Civic Networking": Computer networks with a geographic focus and a broad committment to local community-building activities, knitting together citizens with discussions of local interest, chamber-of-commerce style business information, and access to local libraries, university facilities and regional government services. The idea that computer networks can be used in this way has been explored for nearly a decade by pioneers like Santa Monica's Public Electronic Network (PEN) and the original Cleveland FreeNet (which, though not on the Web, is accessible via telnet). But in the past three years, community network experiments have blossomed by the hundreds.

Schuler's book is primarily about community; you only get into the details of hardware and software in the second half of the book. He's not an uncritical techno-utopian by any means. He identifies the pitfalls and obstacles on the way to the goal. For those who want to graduate from armchair theorizing and get out there and build a community network, this book is the place to start.

I asked Schuler -- who is chairman of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility -- four questions:

• What do you mean by "new communities?"

  Being part of communities is an essential part of being human, but it's becoming increasingly difficult...

• Community networks used to pay the bills as Internet service providers, but Internet service has now become a low-cost commodity. How can community networks survive economically?

  Community networks are not just "on-ramps to the information superhighway" -- whatever that is!...

• Give us a positive but plausible vision of how computer networks might contribute to a beneficial scenario of the future?

  It's important to realize that there is no silver bullet....

• Can you cite some examples of community networks where specific community activities justified the time and expense of a network?

  The Seattle experience is probably typical of the evolutionary stages...