The major features previously used to define rural life now fail to describe much of rural America, as changes that place rural areas in the vanguard of American society are manifest in rural landscape, institutions, economic activity, and life. The principal policy thrusts of modernization and urbanization and the related theories of product cycles and growth centers have been the backbone of a public policy designed to destroy ruralism and to overwhelm, reduce, and undermine rural values and institutions. Rural development activity is still plagued by communities that have failed to respond to national growth trends, people left behind by changing occupational patterns, overdevelopment, lack of cultural preservation, and urbanism. Rural America is, however, entering into an advanced social system, and new rural policy must now be formed on the basis of the major alterations occurring in five sociotechnical dimensions: the rural economy, occupational patterns, technical capacity, future orientation, and decision-making institutions. Key features of that policy include encouraging new links between education and economic development, establishing technology development centers on an experimental basis in some rural areas, developing new planning and development technologies and techniques, and using capacity sharing techniques. Such policy can help rural communities become the basis for a new civic pattern of low density smaller towns and cities linked by technology but maintaining separate identities. (SB)