I've had technology-community-identity on my mind for a while.  Technology as the enabler and facilitator, community as a safe environment which encourages information flows and relationships, and persona or identity as that which becomes a part of my DNA as a result, and mirrors who i am.

Some of the linkages i see around me - this is just a starting point : 

• youth tribes/communities with distinctive lingo, rites of passage, rituals and values built around shared technology like IM, texting, etc
• blogs, community and a sense of belongingness resulting in tacit or more overt membership in various communities with shared affinities
• new forms of identity - how often have you been called or called yourself a 'blogger', a 'Ryzer' - i know i have been called these often - and they are some of my sources of identity today. Orkut-ian ? Ecadem-ician ? Tribe-r ? LinkedIn-er ? Flick'r-er? Zerodegrees-er ? - perhaps SNS providers should put some thought into naming their services in order to lend themselves to easy identity - afterall they're supposed to be about community and networking - and its a much stronger statement of belonging and identity to be able to say 'i'm a Ryzer', than to say 'i'm on Ryze'

What are the benefits of these linkages - perhaps the most obvious is that you feel a sense of belonging, ownership and pride in the community you belong to.  And you begin to get addicted to the give and take.

Marketers would benefit so much from building such communities around their products and brands. MTV club, Skypers, iPod-ers, XBox-ers, eBay-ers, Amazon-ers, communities built around lifestyle brands or even insurance for that matter. For marketers, there could be so many benefits - apart from their customers feeling this sense of ownership towards the product or brand (and we know how useful that is in building loyalty), these communities could provide feedback chains, testing grounds for innovations, referral systems, and so much more. 

Would love to hear about the linkages you see between technology, community and identity.  And how communities around technology could be beneficial to you.