Conference Programme and Papers

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Conference papers (updated 1 July 2003)

This page includes the abstracts and full-text of papers presented in parallel sessions. Papers are organised by session.

Abstracts of plenary session papers can be found in the Conference pack (paper only). E-mail details of authors can also be found on a separate sheet in the Conference pack. 

Parallel sessions 1: Exclusion in the information society

Parallel sessions 2: Citizenship in the information society

Parallel sessions 3: Community and community media

Parallel sessions 4: Flexibility in the Information Society

Parallel sessions 5: Domesticity in the Information Society

Parallel sessions 6: Quality of life in the information Society

Special Saturday Session

Please note: If you quote from or refer to the papers presented at  the EMTEL Conference please use the following style: 

Name, Surname (2003). Title. Paper presented at the EMTEL Conference, 23-26 April 2003, London School of Economics, London. Available online at http://www.emtelconference.org

'I don't know how to fit it into my life'; The gap between inclusion initatives and the personal stories of the excluded

by Els Rommes

In the last two years, the Dutch Municipality of Amsterdam has set up a project to include previously excluded groups, such as elderly people, women, and people who were not born in Western countries, in the ' information society'. The main way in which the founders of the project tried to achieve this goal was by offering free courses ' Basic Introduction to the Computer and the Internet' in parts of the city in which a large number of excluded people live. In this paper, I will critically analyse both the design-process and the effects on some of the course-participants of this initiative: what was the inclusive potential of this project and inclusion in -what- was achieved?

I have interviewed the main policy-makers of the project, the designer of the course and a teacher. I have analysed the course-material, the leaflets that were made to attract participants and I have analysed the policy-documents that were made to set up the initiative. How did the founders of the project perceive the problems of excluded groups, what implicit stereotypical user-representations did they make of the excluded groups they aimed to reach and what kind of solutions did their problem definitions result in?

To test the assumptions of the founders of the project and the results of the course, I have interviewed ten participants of the course. In these interviews, I focused on their 'technobiographies': the relationship they had had with computers and the Internet, their expectations, fears and hopes regarding the Internet, their skills and knowledge and previous experiences with technology and computers and the way the course interfered in this relationship. I also interviewed them a year after they had followed the course, to find out more about the long-term effects of the course. From a first analysis of the data, it became clear that the course has mostly affected the attitude of the course- participants towards computers and the Internet: instead of having high expectations of the Internet, they became informed rejecters. The policy-makers, the designers of the course and the teachers did not manage to 'translate' computers and the Internet to make it fit the lives of the excluded. The description of the design-process gives some insight into where the 'gap' between the user-representations and the goals of the designers and the personal experiences of the excluded could have been avoided.

Because this paper is part of a larger European project 'Strategies of Inclusion of Gender in the Information Society', it is possible to compare the inclusive potential of a training course with other types of inclusion strategies in the Netherlands and other European countries.

Ireland’s Information Society Commission was set in 1997 by the government to, among other functions, promote awareness and understanding of information and communications technology amongst the general public. This noble aim harmonises with the broad aspirations contained in the eEurope document and the Information Commission itself would, in name and mostly in its aims, resemble similar bodies in many EU member-states. But anecdotal evidence suggests that the Commission in Ireland may so far have performed certain aspects of its duties differently.

In "New Connections", the government Action Plan published in March 2002, the Commission boasts of the significant successes Ireland has achieved in "positioning ourselves as a world leader for e-business and knowledge-based economic activity". Articulating these successes and the plans for the future, the document is largely silent on the position or involvement of Ireland’s fast-growing minority ethnic and immigrant groups despite the fact that "ethnic minorities, Travellers, asylum seekers and refugees" had been correctly identified among the groups most likely to suffer exclusion from the information society in a report published by the Information Society in December 2000.

It appears that these most vulnerable groups, also identified in many studies as those slowest to adopt new technologies, are in danger of being left behind in Ireland’s determined march to the new information age. There is a real danger that ‘new connections’ have so far maintained or re-enforced old exclusions. I am convinced these groups and other similarly marginalized entities have the most to gain from quality access to new information and communication technologies, given the potentials and advantages offered by these modern means of communication and interaction.

My paper will examine the structure and composition of Ireland’s information Commission with the aim of determining whether this helps or hinders the fulfilment of its role, especially that of including every group in the new information society. It will also evaluate the Commission’s policies and activities to ascertain the extent its membership has influenced and shaped its priorities. The paper will also examine the impact of the commission’s policies and activities on the Traveller Community and on African immigrants. Statistics for this part of the paper will be obtained from existing documents and from interviews with community groups and their representatives.

The full presentation will shed light on the recent transformation in Ireland’s ethnic and cultural landscape and detail the major reasons responsible for them. It will highlight the status of Travellers (the oldest and largest minority ethnic group in Ireland) and African immigrants, emphasising the systematic and institutionalised discrimination that has hindered their development as viable ethnic groups. I will also attempt an analysis of the degree of new media access and usage among these group, focusing on the impact (or lack of it) of the policies and activities of the Information Commission.

"Youth work in its various facets plays an important role for the socialization of youths. This is especially true for underserved young people, who are often regular visitors of youth centres, and vice versa are a main target group of respective pedagogical interventions. An increasing number of these centres have been offering youths opportunities to engage with ICT on different levels. Expectations and assumptions about the educational and social benefit of these activities are high but have been remaining mainly unproved besides anecdotal evidence. This in-depth qualitative research project scrutinizes the different meanings of computer-supported youth work in urban environments. It is guided by the question about how these activities can contribute to the creation of positive milieus within youth work to counter milieu-specific processes of disintegration and its accompanying crisis of orientation and meaning which go along with certain live stages and phases of many youths. The creation of these milieus is an important contribution to successful societal integration of adolescents in the ‘digital’ age. The cliques or peer groups who stay in a center regularly share similarities in social background and common experiences. Such cases can be described as belonging to a common or ‘conjunctive experiential space’.

These spaces are particularly important with regard to its ‘conjunctive’ or collective orientations. The orientations emerge from common stocks of knowledge resulting from similarities in socialization history which are represented and revealed in respective discourses. Specific experiential spaces establish the focus of the discourse or make up its primary frame of reference depending on which aspects of socialization history the participants share. Thus it is possible, to distinguish overlapping experiential spaces which are characteristic, among others, of a given gender, generation, development stage or migrational background. The reconstruction of these collective orientation patterns can be revealed by primary analyses of group discussions applying the ‘documentary method’. Due to the different ‘conjunctive experimental spaces’ orientation patterns and collective habitus of different peers (i. e. migrant youths from a secondary school who occupy a youth centre in the city centre compared with ‘white’ middle-class youths attending high-school and using a youth centre in the suburbs), orientation patterns vary considerably. Eventually in the course of the creation of types the relations between the specific orientations of youth on the one hand and the existential background where the origin of these orientations can be found on the other hand are worked out and transformed into different milieus. The analysis of the group discussions is completed by biographical interviews and participant observation. The findings of this part of the project also provide the basis for the involvement of centre staff into the research. By using manual-supported open expert interviews with staff members it shall be worked out to which point the perceptions and orientations of youth workers with regard to the utilization of computer-supported program components are likely to incorporate the needs and problems of adolescents revealed within the orientation patterns and ‘conjunctive experiential spaces’ of youths. This is considered as being an indispensable precondition of a milieu-sensitive computer-supported youth work.

The internet's potential as a tool of empowerment in everyday life

The impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) in political participation has gained much attention, however in the paper ICT´s impact on empowerment in everyday life will be discussed. Based on an internet based quantitative inquiry and on qualitative interviews with patients, the paper will discuss patients’ use of the internet in order to find information in relation to their illness and how this activity might entail an increased involvement of the patients in the negotiation and decision-making process about the treatment in the healthcare system. The healthcare system is a field which traditionally is characterised by a high degree of specialised knowledge and by experts’ intervention in the life of the patients. Traditionally the doctors have monopoly on the knowledge and the decisions concerning the definition of a given illness and its treatments. However research into this field indicates that the individual's experience of illness to a great extend is connected to everyday life. Whether the individual patient defines him or her self as ill, thus rather depends on the situated experiences of the symptoms, than on the medical diagnose. The apparent polysemantic character of the medical field makes it interesting to investigate how the patients’ involvement in internet based information forums initiate a negotiation about the meaning of the terms and a redefinition of the patients’ role in the treatment of the disease. Thus the paper will discussed whether the use of the internet for health information entails a redefinition of the patients role in relation to their illness and the treatment of it, and whether this entails an increased empowerment and politicisation of the patients´ identity. Further the paper will discuss the blurring of the boundaries between layperson and expert as the patient get access to knowledge, which was earlier only available for medical experts. In relation to this last aspect the paper treats the consequences of how the increased access to information can expand the space of possibilities for the patients as they acknowledge the possibilities for treatments in other European countries which are not available in their country.

For many years, women were hard to find on the Internet; the Internet was a man’s world. Last years, this situation has changed. More and more women have discovered the Internet and have started to use it. However, many women still do not see the Internet as their domain. In order to change this, many public and private initiatives are developed to encourage women to use the Internet.

‘Women on the Web-The Netherlands’ (WOW) is a an interesting example of how women have worked hard themselves to become active users and designers of the Internet. The designers of WOW have succeeded in creating an internet-usergroup of more than 4500 women, which makes them the largest internet-usergroup of The Netherlands. This paper analyses how WOW reached this result by means of recruitment as well as socialisation activities. Furthermore, based on interviews with designers as well as users, questionnaires, and mailing list observation, an assessment is made of the capacity of change of the inclusion-strategy of WOW. The paper concludes with insights that can be useful for policy-makers who want to include groups who are at the moment excluded from the world of computers and the Internet.

Digital divide - questions beyond access

"The general assumption often is that as soon as we provide people the access to new media technologies and some training to use those technologies, we have guaranteed ourselves happy people who are motivated to use Internet in order to enhance their own lives. This paper will look at the issues of digital divide beyond access. In order to describe the digital divide better, we should include besides access also other dimensions. This paper offers possibility to find digital divide in four different dimensions. First we can see the differences in accessing the tools (for instance networked computers) and accessing the content. The other dimension is skills: for using the tools and for using and understanding the content that is accessed via those tools. When we split the digital divide in those dimensions, we see that providing access to computer and elementary skills to use them, does not guarantee involved and participating citizen gaining full profit from the new media. Besides access and skills, motivation and possibility to integrate Internet in the everyday practices may become the key concern. Thus an attempt is made to outline different levels of involvement with new media technologies - starting from consumption and ranging to profit making. Those levels will also be illustrated by empirical data from large representative Estonian survey from December 2002. Survey enables us to compare Internet usage in it's different dimensions to overall activities and participation in everyday life and see how deeply are Internet and everyday life and practices integrated with each other.

 News Agency Hegemony and the Prospects for a Democratic Information Society

Paper Proposal for the Media, Technology and Everyday Life Network Conference, London, April 23-26 2003 News Agency Hegemony and the Prospects for a Democratic Information Society My focus are significant impediments to the realization of a democratic and ""user-friendly"" information society - specifically, the concentration of corporate control over public affairs information in the context of emerging news distribution mechanisms. As news providers on the Internet increase in quantity, the original sources of consequential international news stories remain few. Global information conglomerates Associated Press and Reuters dominate Internet news in various ways. Through still poorly understood layers of mediation, the news product and news perspectives of major wire services are reproduced directly and indirectly in the web content of cyber-news providers, often despite claims of editorial independence. Novel new services have attempted in recent years to challenge the dominance of the leading agencies in on-line and television news distribution, but few have met with success, due mostly to a lack of interest from investors. The forces of information globalization and convergence have generally strengthened, rather than weakened, the dominant position of the traditional news wholesalers. Various detrimental consequences for society are discussed. Chief among these is the well documented marginalisation of minority groups and pro-Western, pro-business perspective of the traditional news wholesalers. This paper is based on recent content research into international news content on the Internet, along with interviews with leading new media outlets. This paper ultimately addresses the consequences for European policy-makers of the phenomena described. Policy makers must be cognizant of the historical advantage traditional information industries possess as they invest in the technologies and practices of digital convergence in order to ensure their continual domination of global information flow. It is vital that the Internet not been seen, as it has often been in the past, as a democratising force and an inherently inclusive technology capable of alleviating information poverty. Analysis of the structures of news provision among the leading Internet news services in Europe and North America demonstrate quite the opposite. Careful monitoring of international information flow in conjunction with support for alternative information providers and publicly funded on-line media are potential European responses to the problem. This work contributes to the objectives of the Fifth RTD Framework Programme of the EU, for Creating a User-friendly Information Society, especially in regard to the mandate of ensuring that the benefits of the information society for Europe meet the needs of individuals and (especially, civil sector) enterprises.

The intensification of exchanges produces dynamic effects on minority groups that would not have grown on the national and European spheres without overtaking traditional communication. Using new technologies, ethnic media are exploring new forms of participation in the information society. Cyberspace and satellite are becoming a vital link and meeting ground for a civicly engaged and politically mobilised stratum of the polity. A consequence of the new (ethnic) media is the reworking of political reality, which is apparent in a number of trends, such as deterritorialisation of social relations, decentralisation, transnationalisation, significance of culture and identity, proliferation of political identities and actors, significance of information and communication technologies in the constitution of political life.

Ethnic media are playing an increasingly centrality to the exercise of full citizenship. We would refer in this paper to the habermasian notion of active citizenry: citizenship should not only be understood in a legal sense, but as a key word in debates over desirable combinations of rights, responsibilities and competences. An effective participant democracy can only succeed if the individual, the subject, the actor or the citizen has a real capacity of action on the public sphere. In its turn, this capacity is real only if the individual can use supports or resources: that is to say a rational, cultural, political or economical knowledge permitting the development of new strategies. These supports or resources, which lead to skills and competences, are acting as a guarantee of independence.

Ethnic minorities, through their media, intend to be involved in the society of residence (at both a national and European level) and to give models for their communities. For them, being a good citizen means sharing rights, responsibilities and competences. But globalisation and new technologies affect citizenship in many ways. In this context, the migrants, thanks notably to their media, contribute actively to the reinterpretation of the notion and practices of citizenship. This paper will be based on two comparative research studies on the Turkish language media and the Muslim media in Britain, Germany and France. It intends to show how the ethnic media have brought new opportunities of citizenry to minority groups.

Political participation in the information society is widely treated as an activity desirable for a healthy democracy. New information and communication technologies (ICTs) have boosted expectations of an increasingly participatory and deliberative democracy, as they offer relatively inexpensive channels of communication for groups to organise themselves and the representation of their interests. Much research has been dedicated to mapping how underprivileged and marginal groups use ICTs to create a presence for themselves in public deliberation. At the same time, relatively little attention is paid to marginal groups that current consensus considers undesirable for a well-ordered democracy. Some authors focused on the resurgence of ""hate groups"" on the Internet, but rarely from the perspective of deliberative participation. Such research in fact often concluded that the technology itself may work against democracy. In this paper, I rely on a Hungarian case to propose a more nuanced treatment of the issue that the Internet may introduce undesirable non-mainstream preferences to politics. The ethnographic research and textual analysis of an online Hungarian discussion forum dedicated to politics reveals a constant struggle between groups of participants to define the realm of deliberative inclusion, manifest in the agenda of discussion and the range of arguments admissible to deliberation. Groups and individuals rely on ICT-enhanced communication tools for ensuring their continuing representation and participation on the forum. For them, online discussion is an important way of political participation. For the people responsible for maintaining the forum, the bitter and corrosive contributions are to be tamed, even through exclusion from the discussion. From their perspective, ICT-enhanced participation of groups representing certain marginal views can be potentially harmful for the deliberation on the forum. I want to argue that in everyday talk, groups may take extreme and offensive stands in order to attract attention to legitimate positions. The ambiguous position of the Internet in terms of publicity makes it an intriguing ground for creative and authentic deliberation, which may on the other hand foster greater incivility. If, however, we take the principle of deliberative inclusion seriously, we also need to account for these manifestations of the everyday political uses of the Internet.

E-democacy has already been widely studied in institutional settings, exploring the relationships between governments and citizens or among citizens concerned with public matters. However we argue that in order to expand the understanding of how new technologies affect citizenship and democratic participation it would be tremendously interesting to look at how these new media affect pattern of democracy inside enterprises and business. Co-ops is a kind of enterprise stressing mutuality, solidarity and democracy as its founding values. It has been calculated that in over 100 countries all over the world co-ops associate nearly 1 billion people and provide over 100 millions jobs. Basically, a co-op is an enterprise owned by its workers or users. As a consequence, in its traditional form, co-operative democracy has blended features of direct and representative democracy as well. Because of the size of the phenomenon and the unique patterns of its democratic processes, we are going to look at how new technologies can be integrated into the dynamics of co-operative democracy and how they could affect the governance of the enterprise, specially as far as the relationships between members worker and management are concerned. This study is both theoretical and empirical. At a theoretical level we are going to look at the way the model of co-operative democracy can interact with models of e-democracy. At an empirical level, we are going to show how new technologies have been appropriated by co-ops in the Italian context (one of the more important worldwide). We are going to analyse both democratic features embedded in web sites and, in more detail, in intranets. Both presences and absences will be taken into account as meaningful in order to understand the phenomenon. The conclusions of the study – about the way new technologies can interact with democratic processes in a specific setting – are aimed at expanding the understanding of dynamic of innovation related to technology in democratic practices as a whole.

Every other television show broadcast in Britain seems to end with such an invitation yet online debate in general was almost unheard of only ten years ago. There are now literally hundreds of web "discussion" pages linked to television output based in Britain alone. This paper discusses one of these new "spin off" sites as a representative of the TV anchored but online web forum: the BBC’s Question Time.

The paper, which makes a case study of Question Time’s online space, helps to address the question of what a user-friendly society would need to undertake to encourage citizen participation in the information age. Offline, the programme has been highly successful at engaging the general public in weekly discussion during the course of successive parliaments for over twenty years. The central premise of the show is that each week it should rove the country discussing topical question written by different local populations of national and international importance. The questions are discussed by the audience an invited panel of politicians and other experts. However, now that the online world can come to it, how is it succeeding and failing to encourage civic participation?

The central finding is that, in contrast to much of the rest of political culture it is succeeding, on its own terms at least, to sustain the interest of the public. How it is doing this requires some in-depth and wide ranging investigation using a multi disciplinary approach including linguistic pragmatics, communications and political theory.

There are a number of features built into the BBC web site which make it rather advanced in terms of interactivity and therefore ideal as a focus of discussion in the civic participation strand of this conference. The programme makers are encouraging the public to influence future productions by voting for the topics they would most like to see discussed on the following week’s show and to put forward suggestions for future panelists. The paper will consider whether this is a fundamental interaction or merely cosmetic window dressing.

There is also a lively debate forum which picks up on the subjects discussed that week with many messages supporting or opposing views already aired and submitting fresh insights. I will present in depth linguistic analysis to illustrate how the difference in context, forum to forum, has a significant influence on the language orientation of the resulting debates. I will show how it is succeeding in maintaining a very strong orientation towards that most elusive of political phenomenon: Will formation.

The conclusions of this paper are not however uncritical of the BBC’s efforts on and offline. In the spirit of Harvey Sachs I took part in the recording of one its programmes in March 2002 and was able to observe first hand problems related to the transparency of it’s editorial process and a tendency towards institutional narcissism which could undermine the very real work it has done in the field. Sharing these observations and the concrete research findings will bring a fresh take on civic participation in online times.

The effect of different voting media on democratic participation: the first results of large-scale field studies

Many western democracies have seen a dramatic drop in voting turnout figures at local and national elections. Citizens are failing to get involved in the electoral process. A lot has been said about the potential of Internet voting to increase democratic participation. Proponents and opponents discuss possible effects and implications of Internet voting, but because of the lack of large-scale experiments with online voting systems their arguments are rarely based on existing data. True-Vote is a EU project designed to realise a secure Internet based voting service that will provide users with a tool for expressing their opinion. The system will be useful within a range of voting options from public and private elections, referendums, opinion polls, to different surveys. Within the project a large number of field studies are carried out in order to investigate the use and effects of Internet voting. The field studies will take place in five different places: in three local situations (Newham, a neighbourhood in London; Orsay, a small town in France; CGIL, the Milanese department of an Italian trade union) and in two virtual communities (Rete Civica de Milano, RCM and Glocal, a rural community network in Finland). Besides studying privacy and surveillance concerns, trust issues, learning effects and usability and organizational aspects, we analyse media effects of the voting technology. We offer different voting/polling media, in order to be able to investigate the effect of media on participation and voting outcomes. In the three ‘real communities’, the voting will be done by dividing the population into three groups using a different medium: traditional paper-based voting; electronic voting in special voting kiosks; and online voting from home. This variety of used media enables us to examine whether the medium influences participation and the opinion of the voter, as theories of social identity suggest. The field studies, which will be held in December, January and February, are designed to enable comparison such that data can be combined into one data set. We combine several methods and tools: 1) Questionnaires before and after the voting measuring personal characteristics, opinions about e-voting, exit polls. The same will be done with respect to the registration process. 2) Direct observation and use of log files, 3) Voter interviews. 4) Analyses of ballots (turnout and outcomes per voting medium/technology). 5) Interviews with the ballot organizers about problems that occurred during the ballots. Without data from large-scale Internet voting experiments it is difficult to clarify the influence this new voting method will have on the turnout of voters. With the TruE-Vote project we hope to be able to gain some more insight in this issue. Furthermore, the field studies should provide us with knowledge about the political implications of new voting technologies for overall political participation and the quality of representation. We will also gain an improved insight in social and technical design issues of e-government systems. This paper will present the results of the field studies as carried out by the True-Vote project.

Community Networking, Social and Political Participation in Two Suburban Localities

Since the proliferation of computer use and Internet connections, there has been a growing interest in the potential role of computer-mediated communication in the development of social ties and civic involvement among members of geographically based communities. Community networking refers to the process by which computer supported communication serves the local geographic community and responds to the needs of that community (O’Neil, 2001). The use of computer mediated communication in geographically based communities has the potential for supporting and developing face-to-face community relations and perhaps decrease the problems associated with decreasing community participation (Wellman and Hampton, 1999). First, community networks provide opportunities for political participation. At the very least individuals might use geographically based computer supported communication to express their opinions on local issues as well as to organize collectively (O’Neil, 2001; Tonn, Zambarano and Moore, 2001). Second, community networking may become a source for information on social, cultural and political activities. The dissemination of information provides an opportunity for residents to become involved in local activities (Tonn, Zambarano and Moore, 2001). Third, community networking provides opportunities for the formation of local social ties. Extensive social ties have been found to be associated with the ability of residents to organize and mobilize resources to improve their communities (Logan and Spitze, 1994), and to fend off attempts aimed at changing the social and physical nature of the area (Mesch, 1996). This study is based on a research project in which we conducted a survey of active subscribers and performed a content analysis of messages posted in two mailing lists operating in two towns in Israel (Ramat Beit-Shemesh and Modiin). The research addresses the following questions: · What are the uses that residents are making of the mailing lists? · Does participation in a geographically based mailing list encourage social integration and civic involvement in the neighbourhood and in the local community? It was found that although participation in the mailing list did not affect the extent of neighbourhood interactions, it increased the number of individuals one knows in the community. Civic participation in local issues has been described as a major community problem. Dual career families with young children have limited amounts of time. This lack of time restricts their ability to express their opinions on local issues. Our findings suggest that community networking appears to provide new opportunities for citizen participation and involvement in community issues. Our study provides some evidence that the local mailing lists enhance the participation of residents in politics. Close to 40% of the survey participants reported that they used the mailing list to express their opinions on community and neighbourhood issues. Residents that use the mailing lists to express their opinions are more likely to be contacted by other residents and more likely to receive phone calls, be invited and be sent private e-mails by other residents. In this sense, the mailing lists can be viewed as a new opportunity for community building and to broaden the extent of involvement of residents in local issues, as they allow residents to be involved citizens in their spare time.

States and local authorities in the European Union have committed themselves to provide more and more services on-line. This commitment includes a promise that new digital tools would significantly improve citizens’ possibilities for political participation i.e. access to information, facilities for interaction and incentives for political engagement.

Rhetorics of optimistic visionaries notwithstanding, the development of digital democracy renders a complicated process of cultural appropriation. New technologies are accommodated to particular cultural settings with their peculiar modes of action and political traditions.

Our paper focuses on the development of digital democracy in Finland and particularly the city of Tampere. Each of them make an interesting case internationally in two respects. Firstly, they both pretentiously claim themselves a leading position in the development of Information Society (Finland among nations and Tampere among cities). Secondly, they represent political cultures in transition. Traditionally the governance in Finland and Tampere has based on representative democracy with a strong executive role assumed for bureaucracies. From the late 1990s this model has been questioned by (neo-liberal) sentiments endorsing a more significant role for customers and clients in public affairs. Calls for participatory citizenship have been voiced as well, mainly through new legislation. In van Dijk’s terms Finland seems to move from legalist democracy towards a infocratic model of democracy.

Our paper presents an "interventionist" study in which a group of formerly unorganised local residents in Tampere have been actively involved in local political participation. Part of their deliberations have aimed at making an impact to the development of online democracy. The group has conceived a written proposal about digital tools they would like to see developed. A special attention in the proposal is paid to the possibilities of "social navigation" for citizenship provided by internet-based applications of Geographic Information System (GIS).

Social navigation is a concept developed in the course of our study. It assumes that online services (such as digital maps) should be designed for uses of citizens, who wish to analyse and produce social data about their own milieu. This view – albeit stated by figures like Howard Rheingold and a number of scholars of geography and urban planning – is radically opposed to the dominant idea of navigation services, which takes a motorist finding her way in an unfamiliar city as its leading image of a user.

In the paper citizens’ proposal represents an option for citizens’ oriented on-line service against which we can analyse the "official response" articulated by the governments of Tampere and Finland. The response will be collected from various sources: actual negotiations between the group and local authorities, feedback received by other means (e-mail discussions etc.), public statements of authorities and politicians, policy papers etc. In the analysis a special attention will be paid to contextual phenomena such as features of Finnish political culture, information society policies etc.

The role of the mass media in the adaptation and enculturation processes of new immigrants has been widely investigated in different fields of the social sciences. On the one hand, the mass media in general, and particularly those of the host country, serve as the central agent of socialization and source of information for newcomers and as the main tool for learning about the new society and adjusting to its norms and demands. On the other hand, the mass media in the immigrants’ language may contribute to ethnic cohesion and cultural maintenance of the immigrant community.

However, a subject that has virtually not be studied is the role of mass media in the integration process of a special category of immigrants - Returning Diasporas - immigrants who have returned to their historic homeland. In this type of migration, cultural, ethnic or religious criteria usually determine the right of entry and entitlement to automatic citizenship as well as to certain economic and social benefits. Hence, one may suppose that their historic and ethnic connection to the host society will lead to different patterns of media use and faster integration of these immigrants into a new society.

In the beginning of the 21st century, two countries - Israel and Germany - provide fertile ground for examining the role of the mass media in the process of adaptation and enculturation of such immigrants. During the 1990’s, Israel and Germany have admitted larges wave of immigration from the former USSR, consisting of ethnic Jews and Germans who decided to return to their respective historic homelands.

This unique situation provided an opportunity to conduct a comparative study on the role of the host media (in Hebrew and German), as well as the Russian media, in the integration process of these immigrants in their new societies. The study focuses on the ways the immigrants use different media in both languages to fulfil their instrumental, integrative and cultural needs, especially the need to adopt the host culture vs. the maintenance of their cultural heritage and the strengthening of the in-group solidarity.

The research included three main methods: the structural analysis of the Russian-language mass media (print and broadcast) that have developed in Israel and Germany during the 1990’s; the analysis of in-depth interviews with Russian immigrants; and the analysis of telephone surveys among representative samples of Russian immigrants in both countries.

Despite their common cultural origin, the immigrants in Israel and Germany show almost opposite patterns of the mass media use. The Russian immigrants in Germany are characterized by very intensive use of the German mass media, while the Russian immigrants in Israel mostly prefer the media in Russian. Such different patterns of media use are from the results of the differences in the Russian media map in both countries, as well as the different absorption policy and cultural capital of Jews and Germans in the former USSR.

The study also shows that the intensive use of the host media by the Russian immigrants in Germany does not lead to their faster integration into the society and that they feel a strong sense of alienation even after a long stay in Germany. The Russian immigrants in Israel, on the other hand, despite their almost exclusive use of the mass media in Russian, consider themselves as full citizens of Israel and feel a strong sense of belonging to the Israeli society.

This leads us to the conclusion that the extent of exposure to the host media is not necessarily translated to quicker integration of new immigrants. Therefore we should take into account the exposure to different contents in host and immigrants’ languages as well as some structural factors of the host society, such as the absorption policy and the social climate regarding new immigrants.

Many young Muslims in Britain are becoming more confident about asserting a specifically religious identity. This desire to be ‘Muslim’ is reflected in the social, cultural and educational activities they participate in and other aspects of their behaviour are strongly influenced by the increasing importance of Islam in their lives, including their consumption of media. The role of the media, especially Muslim media, in the development of Muslim identities and communities is increasingly evident. As this media form develops it provides a rich resource for the construction of British Muslim identities and presents Muslim communities with a platform from which to communicate amongst themselves and evolve as a minority population within Europe. For young, second and third generation Muslims, these media forms can offer new ways of thinking about what it means to be Muslim and can help develop new cultures which combine parental traditions with norms from the host society. Muslim media also provides opportunities for dialogue with wider society, thus being one of the most potentially useful ways of building relations with other groups in society. The processes of globalisation have impacted on the development of media and the information available to young Muslims has become more varied in content, which influences how they see themselves not only as British Muslims but as part of a wider European and global umma.

In order to investigate the relationship between media culture, the social landscapes and changing concepts of ‘community’ in which Muslims find themselves, and articulations of their identity, this paper examines the lives of young Muslims in relation to their consumption of Muslim media, both traditional and those using new information technologies. To contextualise their media consumption and present real examples of Muslim media, an overview of Muslim publications will be given, offering a political economy of Muslim media in Britain. Some aims and objectives of media editors are also presented giving an insight into how they see themselves as contributing to a knowledgeable society.

As a mass cultural form, magazines reach millions of women from all walks of life, with messages that inextricably entwine consumption with notions of femininity, identity and belonging. In choosing to buy a particular magazine, readers are proclaiming their adherence to a specific set of interests and, in turn, the magazine provides them with a ready-made sense of community. As such, the consumption of women’s lifestyle magazines can be seen as a shared experience that reinforces points of commonality among people. Lifestyle magazines are, however, an essentially white medium and remain conspicuous in their ethnic homogeneity. Titles aimed at post-colonial minorities are a very recent phenomenon both in France and the UK. Republican, universalist values run counter to the notion of a minority ethnic-specific medium in France. The growth of magazines such as Divas and Arabika in France, or Pride and Snoop in the UK, however, suggests that minority ethnic populations in both countries feel the need to supplement an unsatisfactory diet of mainstream magazines. With healthy circulation figures, these niche magazines provide an important insight into the cultural space that post-colonial minorities have carved out for themselves in the UK and France. This paper is based on a year-long textual analysis and comparison of two of these niche magazines (one French and one British) both within their national contexts and within the world of women’s glossies. The focus will not only be on the themes broached in these magazines but also on advertising, iconography, photography and readers’ letters. Interviews with the editor in chief of each title will provide an insight into the history of these magazines, how they are run and the identities that they wish to project. This cross-national study aims to map out constructions of femininity in the magazines and to shed light on whether these challenge simplistic and stereotypical media representations of minority ethnic women in France and the UK. At a second level the paper seeks to unpack notions of identity and belonging in the magazines. Immigration is a key political issue in the 21st century, and minority ethnic groups are the focus of increasing debate in the development of public policy both in France and the UK. Within the current sensitive climate, the media play a pivotal role in shaping popular attitudes, and women’s magazines, with their sizeable readerships, undoubtedly feed into this process. The French government, for example, has sought to harness the power of the media by supporting TV programmes designed to improve inter-ethnic relations. The interest of this paper lies, therefore, in the fact that it focuses on a section of the media that is burgeoning but essentially ignored, a section of the media that addresses an audience which is routinely marginalised and yet is at the heart of the political agenda in Western societies, a section of the media that has the potential to shape values and, ultimately, to act as a mechanism of cultural change.

Recent debates on multiculturalism evolve around the dilemmas of recognition and redistribution and the antithetical premises on which these are based. Yet for much political theory, this dilemma is implicitly addressed. This seems to be the case in deliberative democratic models, which view as politically relevant only public discussion based on reason and argumentation, and which also view consensus as the only valuable political goal (e.g. Habermas, 1996). In so doing, such models assume that questions of difference, and inevitably of recognition, are ultimately politically irrelevant and thus need not be addressed in the political sphere but in a space outside the political. Indeed, this space is the cultural public sphere, where, for Habermas, (pre-political)identities are developed and shaped, and where forms of communication other than rational argumentation are primarily used. This division is taken up by Nancy Fraser (2001), who delegates questions of recognition to the cultural sphere, and questions of redistribution to the political sphere. Although in analytical terms distinct, in empirical terms it is very difficult to find where the borders are between these spheres, while the analytical logic that guides this separation is lost in more empirically (and pragmatically) oriented analyses. The current paper presents an analysis of 6‘minority’ web sites in the UK (Asianet, Blacknet, The Muslim Council of Britain, UK Islamic Mission, Black Britain, and UKIndia) in terms of the communicative goals they seek to accomplish. The analysis poses a set of questions to these web sites, concerning their addressees, and the forms of communications, with a view to understand the role(s) undertaken by such minority web sites. Methodologically speaking, the analysis has traced the internal and external links of these sites, which were subsequently classified in terms of their addressee and communicative content. The choice of the Internet as the focus of the analysis is highly significant: digital divide issues notwithstanding, looked at from the ‘production’ side, the Internet as a mass medium is much more accessible by ‘minorities’ than any of the more mature media, in both financial and regulatory terms. Given this new space at the disposal of ‘minority’ groups, how do they choose to use it? What (cultural and political) ends do they pursue? And what does this tell us both for multicultural citizenship and politics as well as for the political uses of the Internet? Finally, how can this empirically oriented analysis contribute to political theoretical concerns regarding the conduct of politics by different groups in society? The extensive range of communications and associated communicative ends pursued by these web sites suggest the increasing relevance of these new spaces in the construction of ‘common worlds’ (Hannah Arendt). This in turn points to the necessity of considering the political relevance of the so-designated cultural sphere. This type of Internet usage seems crucial for the development and articulation of political demands within cultural contexts, including issues of recognition and redistribution, thereby making it central to a pluralist understanding of democracy.

Clash of Communities

This abstract argues that research into media, communication technologies and communities is not only a question of how émigré and ethnically distinct groups use media and communication technologies. It is also a question of how producers of media and communication technologies employ material from émigré and ethnically distinct groups. While my research does not seek to deny the importance of local appropriation of global technologies, it draws attention to the equally important global appropriation of local material.

In 2001, LEGO launched Bionicle.com taking the well-known LEGO product into the new terrain of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Bionicle.com proved to be an instantaneous success creating a real buzz throughout the toy industry. It was recognised as a both new and innovative product. Yet, while Bionicle.com is both new and innovative, it also draws on familiar notions of community.

LEGO emphasises that symbolically the Bionicle story resembles the development of children on their way to adulthood drawing on ideas of participation, cooperation and community building. However, this is far from the only symbolism embedded in Bionicle. Shortly after its launch, the Maori people of New Zealand voiced protests stating that Bionicle.com uses Maori names and myths, thus abusing the Maori minority culture and violating Maori minority rights. The Bionicle community is a bit too real - at least in the eyes of the Maori people.

The significance of this "clash of communities" between Bionicle.com and the Maori people draws attention to the tendency of global producers to appropriate material from local communities, which are often characterised by distinct cultural heritages embedded in myths, symbols and collective memories. This tendency transcends geographical borders, and thus the boundaries of Europe. In the case of Bionicle.com, it involves a producer (LEGO) from an EU member state (Denmark) drawing on myths and symbols of an indigenous community (Maori people) literally from the other side of the world (New Zealand) in order to develop a product (Bionicle) which is sold across the world.

Thus, the tendency of global appropriation is by no means limited to Europe. Yet, it is highly relevant to the European case, because it raises questions of how apparently solid cultures rooted in distinct communities may become fluid with the intervention of media and communication technology. In other words, it addresses the question of the relationship between cultural communities and globalising tendencies. This relationship is at the very heart of Europe in which a vast number of cultural communities struggle to deal with the type of globalisation involved in (prospective) EU membership and in the notion of a European culture.

Bridging cultural and digital divides. Signifying everyday life, cultural diversity and participation in the on-line community Video Nation

The discourse on the digital divide is characterised by an emphasis on the notion of (equal) access to specific types of media technologies. Populations are divided into information haves and information have-nots and policies are oriented towards the stimulation of the adoption of these technologies. As such this discourse has become (and/or remains) a ‘digital myth’ (Frissen, 2000), which is predominantly media-centred and technology determined thus reducing the social complexity to the virtual binary. Although the digital divide discourse should be considered problematic at the empirical, conceptual, ideological and epistemological level, some elements of the digital divide discourse are worth saving, more specifically a broadened notion of access, and the emancipatory discourse of a struggle against social exclusion that lies hidden somewhere behind the discursive complexity of the digital divide discourse. This paper aims to return to these basic premises by broadening the scope and focusing on the abilities of ICT to stimulate access, interaction and participation. To provide empirical support for this (re)analysis and re-articulation, a case study on the British Video Nation project will be addressed in this paper. The original version of Video Nation was launched in the autumn of 1993. Fifty ‘ordinary’ participants were given equipment and training, and were asked to film their everyday lives. Editorial control was (at least partially) handed over to the participants, eventually resulting in (amongst other programs) a series of short clips (Video Nation Shorts) that were aired on BBC2. Recently this project has been turned into an ‘online community and archive’, which (still) has the following ambition: ‘It's about handing over the agenda to members of the public, encouraging them to record what they think is important. The aim is to reflect everyday life across the UK in all its rich diversity.’ (Video Nation-website 2002). The Video Nation case study will not only illustrate the possibilities of a public broadcaster in creating access, interaction and participation, but also the need for its articulation within a framework of diversity and empowerment.

Discussing email in the working place: flexibility for the employees?

The aim of this paper is to identify how employees perceive flexibility at work provided by their usage of email. After interviews with the employees in four different organisations, I identify four basic ways in which employees conceptualise flexibility at work: in terms of teleworking (but not exactly), in terms of connecting to distant others, and also of making the hierarchy of the organisation more available and approachable. They furthermore perceive that technological arrangements are not the exclusive condition in order to achieve teleworking in the organisation. These discourses are then linked to various institutional arrangements within the organisations, such as their hierarchical structure, the email introduction practices and their email diffusion level.

Telework - information work carried out away from the central office, based on information technologies - increasingly becomes a regular feature of office work organisation, particularly in highly qualified segments of the workforce. Most obviously, work undergoes a process of disembedding from the organisation in terms of its spatiality and temporality. Of particular interest here are the reasons for the emergence of telework as a form of work organisation as well as the question of how an individual re-embedding of work does take place. A rather 'obvious' explanation for the evolution of telework as a new form of work is the emergence of its technological basis. However, this explanation is neither sufficient, nor does it offer a proper basis for assessing the logic or consequences of the new form of work organisation. Beyond technological changes, it is thus necessary to focus on the motives of the workers and on the corresponding interests of management to agree to a telework arrangement, in order to explain why people actually do telework. The premise is that there has to be some kind of consensus between the particular motivations and interests of both parties, and that the introduction of telework arrangements by force is unlikely because management depends on a certain degree of compliance on the side of the workers. A central finding of a study of German home-based teleworkers is that three significantly contrasting forms of telework - "family-centered", "work effort-centered", and "self-centered" telework - are to be distinguished, where workers' motivations and companies' interests match in particular ways. Thus, each type of telework supports different personal relevances regarding the individuals' work-life balances and career orientations, as well as different functions for the company in order to use labour power and integrate it into the organisation. Home-based telework is thus to be interpreted as a means of work organisation for a highly qualified workforce whose individual motivations for telework, based on their particular biographical situation and both career and private life orientations, are compatible with managements' interests referring to these workers. Which points to the second question initially posed. On a general level, a particular relevance of (different types of) telework lies in the fact that our industrial work culture's fundamental separation of employment and 'private' daily life in terms of space and time is being lifted. Beyond all managerial and practical restrictions imposed on the teleworkers' decision how to shape one's workday, there is some scope for agency on the workers' side in order to lift the separation of daily life into two distinct time and activity zones. In a sociology of work perspective, then, new forms of an individual structuration of work (and private life) in the context of one's home are to be developed by the workers, and controlled by the organisation. Changing work practices are thus based on the workers' abilities (and willingness) for 'self-management' of their individual work process, as well as on the organisations' use of more 'indirect' means of control by objectives and work output rather than by surveilling the work process itself. The point in question, then, is whether the workers' subjectivity under these conditions has to be theorised as a "productivity factor" that is being instrumentalised by management in exchange for subjectively more favourable work arrangements and working conditions.

Many revolutionary changes in the world of work were predicted in the last decade: few have come to pass. Only computerisation has come close to fulfilling the hype. Over the last ten years, the spread of new technology into UK working life has been startling. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have penetrated most sectors; most employees use at least one ICT to do their jobs, even unlikely candidates; and in most companies, some standard work processes have been computerised.

That much is clear. What is much less clear is what effect all this technology is having: on individual work styles and team performance, on organisational behaviour – and ultimately, on the UK’s economic system. The available evidence has a great deal to say about how much technology is out there, but much less to say about what companies, and particularly individuals understand and are doing with it.

This paper takes a distinctive approach to this problem. Using ethnographic perspectives and drawing on original primary research, it explores the impact of ICT on everyday working life from the user’s perspective. It seeks to interrogate and explore the rhetoric around new technology and new ways of working; and to contrast the ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ narratives and explanations that often exist. It will move beyond the well-worn stories of ‘the networked company’, ‘laptop man’ and ‘headset man’ to explore the vast middle territory between these extremes.

The paper asks: what are different individuals’ real attitudes to and uses of ICT in the workplace? How, if at all, is new technology changing the working lives and experiences of workers in different sectors, and in different parts of the labour market? How does position in the labour market and in the organisation affect one’s experience of, access to and attitudes to new technologies? How do individuals’ and their employers’ understandings and approaches to new technology differ?

These individual perspectives are contrasted with a range of management views, and fed into a wider discussion about technology and organisational change. Revolution in rhetoric in often evolution in practice: change happens far more slowly, unsteadily and unpredictably than many commentators suppose. The paper will use the ethnographic insights to generate a rich discussion in this area. What are the importance of ‘social hardware’ and social support systems in implementing and embedding new ICTs? And how does all this affect our understandings of the nature of technology, organisational and social change?

Recently, politicians and policy makers in the Netherlands are putting ‘social values’, ‘respect for others’ and ‘social cohesion’ in cities high on the political agenda. Information and communication technologies are perceived as ‘tools’ that may solve (parts of) the ‘erosion of mutual respect’. This paper wants to contribute to this discussion by providing a socio-technological view on how people posit themselves in the private as well as the public sphere, in the physical as well as the virtual world.

Everyday reality is ‘unbundling’. We live in an infrastructured world, in which roads, railways, the electricity network, but also radio, television, the (mobile) telephone network and the internet enable us to expand the scope of our everyday life. In this process of widening our horizon, our experience is increasingly decoupled from physical reality. Connectivity (being in relation to) becomes more important than contiguity (being next to). In this process of ‘time-space compression’ - the collapse or reduction of time and space barriers - physical reality becomes one of the windows through which we experience the outside world. Our everyday life fragments and becomes a sequence of different realities. (Marvin and Graham, 2001)

Parallel to this process of unbundling, people ‘rebundle’ their experience in newly created networked spaces. The organisation and design of physical as well as virtual space serves as a counterbalance for our fragmented everyday life, by providing a recognizable coherent experience (Castells, 1996). These networked spaces can be characterised as controlled environments which are branded or carry out an explicit identity, and are aimed at immersing its visitors in a rich or special or safe experience. From this perspective, virtual space serves the same purposes as physical space. Sometimes, these networked spaces have the character of comfort zones, where people retreat from their everyday life. Theme parks, computer games, but also carefully stylised interiors are examples of this kind of space. In other cases, people choose to visit or live in these environments for reasons of fear, safety or belonging. Gated communities, but also women’s chat rooms on the world wide web and religious television programs are manifestations of this type of space.

Media like the domestic telephone, radio and television initially sharpened the already present symbolic and cultural division between the public and private sphere(Frissen and Punie, 2001). However, the role of the categories of the private and public seems to blur in this rebundling process. This paper investigates the way in which public and private space are reconfigured with the large scale dispersion of networked spaces. This socio-cultural investigation is carried out by exploring how public and private space are organised in the physical and virtual world. Are they still relevant categories in this world crowded by all kinds of different spaces? How do people ‘rebundle’ their everyday life as ‘private’ and ‘public’? In order to answer this question, four cases are analysed.

Physical Virtual

Private space Dutch households Immigrant family

Public space Club On-line communities

The paper will provide an overview developments structured around networked spaces. Therefore, the case studies serve as examplary, and are based largely on existing material.

Castells, M. (1996). The Power of Identity. The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture. Volume 2. London: Blackwell.

Punie, Y. & Frissen, V. (2001). Present users, future homes. A theoretical perspective on acceptance and use of ICT in the home environment. Delft: TNO STB.

Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (1996). Telecommunications and the City. Electronic spaces, urban places. London: Routledge.

Graham, S. & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism. Networked infrastructures, technological mobilities and the urban condition. London: Routledge.

Domestication as a concept is commonly used within cultural and social studies to describe people’s relation to domestic appliances in our everyday environments. During the last decennium we have been witnessing a shift in terms of what kind of technology that is being used within this setting. Information technology (IT) is now entering this new use domain – our homes. The predominant scientific approach to IT has been to regard this technology as tool and thereby examine it from an instrumental angle. However we argue that to be able to create a richer understanding and learning about values and sense making of people’s IT-use, there is a need to move away from this attitude by extending the notion of domestication. Reported domestication research informs about what happens when we invite information technology into our homes, it explains the process when we shape it to fit our needs and it explains how we shape our homes to make them suitable for this new technology. We claim that this kind of research misses out some important angles of people’s IT-use. Empirically, this paper builds on two case studies where the subject’s IT-use is explored. These two cases serve as illustrative examples, showing that domestication is not sufficient as an analytic tool when examining sense making of IT-use. Rather, the empirical findings show aspects of IT-use that is not fully captured in earlier attempts. We believe that by adding virtualization to our understanding, we are able to shed light on these missed out aspects of IT-use. Virtualization builds on the grounds of domestication but it also reveals what happens when we equalize our physical world, in terms of value, with the symbolic world offered by IT. Our findings show that physical reality can in some aspects, integrate with the virtual, and together they create a wider definition of reality for the user. This is what can be referred to as domestication through virtualization. Virtualization movements are not easily captured or understood. Yet, they are important to explore since they can provide us with knowledge of an almost untouched area of knowledge –people’s sense making of their IT-use. Conclusively, this paper argues that ongoing domestication studies of IT needs to extend their research approach by broadening the analytical toolbox with the notion of virtualization and consequently, open up for possibilities to capture richer aspects of domestic IT-use.

The consumption of the internet in the household has become a matter of increasing interest for academic research, both in an international and an Irish context. For instance, a rapidly growing number of households in Ireland have obtained access to computers and the internet in the late 1990s. This paper applies a social shaping of technology perspective (SST) to assess how the internet becomes embedded into the everyday life of the user and the daily domestic activities of the household. The SST perspective provides a valuable method of explaining why users domesticate the internet in certain ways. It offers a framework in which to explain user engagement with the technology, to gauge how they assign meaning to the ICT, and to assess the social processes of domestication. This project involves in-depth qualitative research focused on a sample of domestic internet users in Dublin, Ireland. It looks beyond the stereotypical conception of users as presented by industry studies – as young, middle class males working in an office environment. It employs an ethnographic approach to analyse how patterns of use and meanings are constructed in the domestic setting, and is sensitive to the influence of social factors such as class, gender, age and household configuration. Using qualitative research techniques, it is possible to gain a clearer vision of domestic users and internet consumption. This paper presents statistical evidence based on original empirical data from field observation and time/use diaries. In-depth interviews were used to inform a series of six case-studies, highlighting in intimate detail the influence in each household of social characteristics on the use, consumption, domestication and conceptualisation of the internet. The research testifies that appropriation of ICT technologies is influenced by factors other than the technology itself. This paper presents both empirical and theoretical arguments on how to re-conceptualise the notion of domestication from a user’s perspective. It also traces the growing prevalence of ‘consumption convergence’, the idea that the consumption of media networks in the home are converging, both in spatial and temporal terms. The paper argues that social characteristics must be taken into account when assessing how and why some technologies are domesticated in different ways to others, and why some are rejected from the household setting.

New Media in Single Parent Households: Practices and Identity-Formation in Relation to the Public Discourses of Technology

Since the time of their introduction, new media technologies have been invested with a wide array of hopes and expectations. Computers are widely believed to be an important component of social change, and thus their mastery is the path to social, economic and cultural success for individuals. As a result, public policies within Western societies have focused on providing access to new media technologies across the entire spectrum of the population. However, such directives are based on the assumption that by simply owning ICTs and having them in one’s own home, individuals would take advantage of the potential opportunities offered by these technologies and, thus, would improve their quality of life. Indeed, these policies tend to overlook social, cultural and economic factors that affect people’s media consumption. This paper aims to explore those factors.

The data for this paper is drawn from a large multi-year ethnographic project in the U.S. titled "Symbolism, Meaning and the New Media @ Home." This effort is interested in investigating the uses and discursive locations of old and new technologies in everyday family life, and includes interviews with persons across a variety of family structures, socio-economic backgrounds, and racial/ethnic identifications. The paper presents some preliminary findings on the narratives and practices of single parents as they negotiate their family’s new media uses in relation to the expectation-filled discourses of contemporary public policies.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau (Fields and Casper, 2001), in 1999 around 16 million children (ages 0-18) were living only with their mothers, and almost 6 million were split between living with only their fathers or with no parents at all. The situation is not that different from the member states of the European Union. Indeed, according to the European Commission (2001), the percentage of children living with only one parent has grown from 8% to 13% in the last fifteen years. According to population projections, in the U.S. half of the children born in the 1990s will spend some time in single-parent households (Amato, 1999). This trend is fuelled by the increase in the divorce rate and the number of children born outside of marriage. In the last census, there were 12 million single-parent households of which 2 million were male householders.

Despite the presence in Europe and the U.S. of this sizeable and growing cohort, qualitative research on this type of family formation is at present fairly limited, especially in relation to mass media. Indeed, existing sociological studies on the family have only recently begun to consider single parenthood; and few of them have stressed the necessity of conceptualising single-parenthood as a distinctive family structure and not merely an example of deviation from the norm represented by the heterosexual couple (Chambers, 2001; Dowd, 1997; Haddon and Silverstone, 1995; Smart and Neale, 1999; Stacey 1999).

In recognition of the growing number of persons within this family structure, this paper focuses on the in-depth accounts offered by some of the single parents interviewed, and on their articulations of media consumption and attitudes toward the media within the context of their everyday lives. In particular, it discusses how the consumption and discourses around new media technologies are expressed against the large and serious number of structural and economic constraints single parents experience in their lives, exploring how new media participate in familial processes of self-actualisation, personal success, knowledge, accountability, and the raising of children.

Amato, P. R. (2000). "Diversity Within Single-Parent Families." In D. H. Demo, K. R. Allen and M. A. Fine (eds.) Handbook of Family Diversity. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chambers, D. (2001). Representing the Family. London: Sage Publications.

Dowd, N. E. (1997). In Defense of Single-Parent Families. New York: New York University Press.

European Commission. (2001). The social situation in the European Union 2001. Luxembourg: Office for Official Publications of the European Communities.

Fields, J. and L. M. Casper. (2001). America’s Families and Living Arrangements: Population Characteristics. Population Report 2000, June 2001, U.S. Census Bureau.

Haddon, L. and R. Silverstone. (1995). Lone Parents and their Information and Communication Technologies. SPRU CICT Report Series No. 12, Brighton: Science Policy Research Unity, University of Sussex.

Smart, C. and B. Neale. (1999). Family Fragments? Cambridge: Polity Press.

Stacey, J. 1999. "Virtual Social Science and the Politics of Family Values." In G. E. Marcus (ed.) Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts, Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

Agent Technology and the Delegation-Paradigm in a Networked Society

Software agents – programs that execute a defined set of tasks in an autonomous fashion – have been developed in computer science labs over the past three decades. They have been used to help administrate networks, filter newsgroups or simulate complex environments. With the success of the Web, the global Internet has become their favourite habitat and application patterns for agents technology is changing. Nowadays people use agents to haggle for them on ebay, to find and classify information using advanced data-mining techniques or to automate scheduling and communication tasks. New tasks are delegated to software agents by an increasingly disperse public – agents are leaving the inner circle of informatics, entering the domain of everyday technology. The sheer quantity of computing power nowadays available to servers and clients and the need for assistance in the highly complex environment of the networked society pushed agent technology from university labs into the public sphere, helping users to cope with the challenges of "information at your fingertips". This process is far from over: mobile technologies (smartphones, PDAs, …) with reduced interfaces, limited stocking capacities and handicapped by relatively high communication costs will strongly rely on agent technology to filter, organize and restructure information before it is presented to the user. This paper will introduce some of the technological possibilities and probabilities resulting from the coupling of mobile devices with agent technology before opening up into the broader field of possible social and cognitive consequences of technological progress in the area. Following Terry Winograd, I understand the design and development of software tools – and therefore agents – not as a mere challenge in engineering but a process of creating modes of perception and spaces of possible action. But agent technology goes even further by offering to lift some of the cognitive burdens off the user, e.g. performing information filtering and clustering using algorithms. The fact that agents once set loose, act in an autonomous fashion makes it desirable to theorize them not only as software programs, but also as "social actors" who exist in the vast information space that is the Internet. Consequently, I will address three questions: - Are agent technology and the paradigm-shift in human-computer interaction from "direct manipulation" to "delegation" a viable solution to the well documented problems of information overload and communicational stress? Will agents help making powerful mobile applications feasible and render information technology in general more user-friendly. - What are the possible social consequences of the introduction of agent technology into ever wider parts of society? Are the new actors helping in decreasing fragmentation or are they fostering it? - How can we conceive the act of programming as an active political act engaged in the structuring of perception? With agent technology going further into the human domain of decision making that "classical" software, is there a need to rethink the programmers position in society?

The concept of virtual residences is a result of people's desire for private space not only in the off-line, but equivalently in the on-line world. Adapting the notion of such an on-line private residence means generalising the concept of borders and enabling its technical implementation. Traditional residences have various kinds of borders, especially real, physical borders, giving a feeling of protection, and virtual, mental borders, dividing private and (more) public spaces.

Such virtual "privacy borders" limit access to personal information, i.e. who knows what about a subject – the observed identity. These personal information domains constitute the subject's partial identities from various observers’ perspectives. Removing privacy borders means irreversibly joining different information domains so that the observers' overall knowledge of the subject increases. If personal information has been disclosed, it cannot be reclaimed.

In deciding whom to tell what about oneself, people are applying an intuitive understanding of privacy borders and personal information domains in the off-line world. In the on-line world the notion of context is far more complex because of a lack of authenticity, anonymity and transparency. In contrast to the off-line world, building informative user profiles simultaneously for a huge number of people is possible with a much lower effort due to massive data trails, proliferated automation, digital format and mostly weak security.

Privacy-Enhancing Identity Management Systems (IMS) are being designed to restore users’ control over their personal data in the on-line world: They support users’ awareness of the current context with regard to their privacy, enabling an informed choice when to disclose information. IMS are gateways for all forms of digital communication between the private and public space.

According to the principle of multilateral security, only minimal trust in other parties should be required, i.e. control over privacy should be kept in the user's private space. Therefore, it is not sufficient to limit the amount of personal data being disclosed, but they should be unlinkable so that unauthorised parties cannot profile or even identify users by collecting and linking data trails. IMS enable this by use of different pseudonyms for different situations and fully user-controlled re-use of pseudonyms, e.g., for the purpose of building a reputation. This concept of controlled linkability is realised by cryptographic means, such as convertible credentials.

The manifold of personal information domains emanating out of IMS constitute the virtual residence. IMS help users in asserting their privacy rights and increase their self-responsibility. In the future people will have to actively manage their privacy in role-making and role-taking. Society will have to face the challenge how privacy can be maintained effectively and in a user-friendly way while taking into account diverse legal requirements and social interests. IMS will be people's privacy guardian.

Disappearing Computers Everywhere – Living in a World of Smart Everyday Objects

Juergen Bohn, Vlad Coroama, Marc Langheinrich, Friedemann Mattern, Michael Rohs

The young field of ubiquitous computing is steadily making progress and gaining attention in both academia and industry. While new gadgets and smart home appliances cannot appear fast enough for many technologists, such rapid introductions of new technologies often come with unexpected side-effects. Due to the unique scope of ubiquitous computing as a tool for our everyday life, these side-effects might have serious implications for the way we live in the future. This paper explores a number of effects that a large-scale deployment of ubiquitous computing technology in the real world may have. In doing so, we first give a differentiated view on the impact of ubiquitous computing on personal privacy by examining why personal privacy is desirable, describing when we feel that it has been violated, and then assessing how ubiquitous computing affects all that. In particular, we investigate potential side-effects of powerful surveillance and search mechanisms that are provided by ubiquitous computing. We then examine the potential impact of ubiquitous computing on the financial sector, paying special attention to conceivable consequences linked with an instant economy and dynamic pricing. We portray how ubiquitous computing improves existing business processes, how it enables the creation of entirely new business models, and how these techniques allow to provoke effects on a macro-economic scale. Furthermore, we consider both social and technical challenges that need to be met by future ubiquitous computing systems, so that reliance can justifiably be placed on the service these systems deliver. In this context, we also illuminate the problems that may stem from the delegation of control and responsibility to fully automated tools, and discuss the issue of social compatibility of ubiquitous computing technology. Finally, we describe exemplary acceptance problems of ubiquitous computing by looking at early ubiquitous computing critique. We summarize and categorize the criticisms found in today's literature and, where appropriate, link them to the implications we have discussed earlier, allowing to identify current fears and misconceptions about ubiquitous computing that system developers should to be aware of. The goal of this paper is to raise awareness for a technical design that takes into account the potential real-world implications of ubiquitous computing with regards to social, economic and ethic aspects. Also, we hope that this work may serve as point of departure for further interdisciplinary research in the field.

We live in an increasingly networked world. We conduct our daily activities moving through physical spaces, negotiating social and personal identities. At the same time we negotiate electronically mediated personalities, tasks and spaces. More often than not, these parallel worlds present insuperable conflicts that we are asked to resolve in ad-hoc ways. Moreover, we are confronted by challenges such as information overload, attention demanding machines and unusable interfaces while we move through information space. Physical space and our social behaviour in it, is eroded by new and emerging practices in our management of information. While traditional HCI research deals with measurable quantities such as usability, error return and task completion, and cryptography with encryption algorithms and standards in the construction of information worlds, interfaces for privacy in AmI (Ambient Intelligence) space cannot be resolved with these methodologies alone. Ethnography and cognitive psychology have recently been added to the disciplines directly involved in the design of computer-mediated worlds. What we are suggesting in this paper is to look at architectural theory and environmental studies in the organization of an integrated physical/information reality where the person moves seamlessly between activities and tasks, naturally negotiating social protocols and identities according to context. Physical space, by framing human activities informs the boundaries and protocols of our social behaviour. Information, in order to be managed and used to better our lives, should likewise follow the natural contexts of our social behaviours and respect the protocols of human-to-human interaction. We propose to look at the design of privacy in computer-mediated worlds as the design of spheres of activities, some more private, some desirably public, in which the user is able to construct identity and trust using the physical world as a metaphor. The thesis of this paper will be particularly informed by a project we recently completed. Modulor II is a physical architectural space mediated by information technology where public space is both virtual and physical. Social behaviour in Modulor II is informed as much from the physical reality of the environment as it is from the information exchanged with computers. Identity is constructed by a set of activities mirrored in physical and in virtual space. The distinction, however, between public and private selves in Modulor II is as much controlled as it is artificial. As a hybrid artefact, Modulor II illustrates how information worlds need not be detached from physical reality. It addresses the design of a public space in which humans integrate information management with physical activity in real space.

In October 2000 the Dutch government created the action programme "ICT and Social Quality". Goal of this programme is to observe how ICT can be optimally used for the social quality of the society. One of the initiatives is the rise of four "Digital Breeding Grounds". A digital breeding ground is an experimental area in which ICT can be used to enhance the social quality by supporting all sorts of local ICT initiatives with experiences, funds and knowledge. Every breeding ground has its own focus, structure and character. The cities of Amsterdam, The Hague, Deventer and Eindhoven have their own digital breeding ground.

A digital breeding ground can be theoretically explained by the so called concept "Living Lab". A living lab refers to a setting that is created with specific targets and has a clear structure, but in the same time is dealing with the uncontrollable dynamics of daily life. Therefore a living lab has an open character, it is certainly not a usability lab, it is an environment in which technology is shaped out of specific social contexts and needs and where users are seen as co-producers.

Characteristics of a living lab are:

• a constructed directed setting;
• the target of the setting is related to the shaping of technology
• the focus within the setting are uncontrollable and unpredictable processes around the shaping of technology

A living lab encompasses more than just digital breeding grounds, it also stands for other constructed settings usually created and subsidised by the national government. Researchers within living labs are restricted to monitoring what is going on from the inside. On the other hand researchers are part of a living lab themselves and are able to intervene in order to (1) contribute to a better implementation of technological innovations in social practices and (2) deal with the unpredictable processes by reflecting on and consequently adjusting their own methodology.

At this moment the living lab in which empirical research is being conducted is the district called Moerwijk within the city of The Hague. In this living lab a minimal number of 500 "guinea pigs" take part, within the context of the post-war district Moerwijk, characterised by a high percentage elderly, an exceptional low use of internet and a high share of immigrants. The participants have access to necessary hardware, receive computer courses, are individually guided by professionals as well as volunteers and specific software is constantly being developed for them.

The research consists of monitoring, intervention, following of the participants by a measurement of the "zero situation" and follow-up group sessions to measure all effects. At the end of 2003 a possible change in the social quality of the participants is expected and it is up to the researchers to explain what the role of ICT in this change could have been and how the concept social quality should be further explored. After all not only ICT is related to social quality, also the number and intensity of social contacts, the context of Moerwijk and individual aspects like gender, age, education, cultural background, health, hobby’s and expectations have to be taken into account.

Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life: A function-oriented Science & Technology Roadmapping project

The "ubiquitous or pervasive computing" and "ambient intelligence" (AmI) concepts stem from a vision where the emphasis is on user-friendliness, efficient and distributed services support, user-empowerment, and support for human interactions. People are surrounded by intelligent intuitive interfaces that are embedded in all kinds of objects and an environment that is capable of recognizing and responding to the presence of different individuals in a seamless, unobtrusive and often invisible way. The idea is that Information and Communication Technologies-based artefacts disappear in the background but nevertheless remain under the control of humans.

The fundamental question is whether the coming S&T developments will effectively deliver useful, accessible and trustful new functions for ordinary people or whether they will mostly benefit the highly educated, high-tech and mobile wizzkids. The latter would mean that AmI technologies become a new source of exclusion in society. It falls under the responsibility of policy-makers to influence the ongoing evolution towards more cohesion and inclusiveness or at least to mitigate some of its negative effects.

In this context, the objectives of foresight studies are to provide global and decision-oriented overviews on coming S&T developments and their societal and policy implications, and to depict scenarios placing them in a dynamic, flexible and prospective perspective.

In this paper we refer to the "Ambient Intelligence in Everyday Life" (AmI@Life) S&T roadmapping project under progress within the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies of the European Commission Joint Research Centre.

Technology roadmapping has originally been developed as foresight and R&D management methodologies in industry. In this context, it is a valuable tool for displaying and synthesizing networks of past, present and future stages of S&T developments, components of strategies, causes or solutions to a problem, potential disruptions, and for highlighting the necessary steps to reach the market with the right products at the right time. However, it classically endorses a "technology-push" approach.

Within our project, the challenge is to integrate the interactions between the key functions to which ambient intelligence could "make the difference", the users and the S&T developments. Therefore, we are aiming at adapting the technology roadmapping methodologies to the requirements of R&D policy-making by developing a "function-oriented" approach.

• The first step is to identify some of the key functions within the different sub-fields of the study (Health; Mobility & Transport; Work; Housing & Home Automation; Education & Learning; Shopping & Commerce; Culture, Leisure & Entertainment; Inclusion & Socialisation).
• The second step is to connect these functions backwards to key technologies and therefore to R&D policy and strategy.
• The third step is to build the roadmap itself, namely to plot the potential developments of key technologies and of key functions versus time.

We illustrate this process with the specific case of "Culture, Leisure & Entertainment" and/or "Inclusion & Socialisation".

We evaluate the relevance of this methodology to highlight applications of S&T developments in terms of useful, accessible and trustful new functions and to take into consideration the major demographic, social and economic trends shaping people’s everyday life, such as aging population, mosaic society, oscillations between consumerism and "traditional" values, end of life employment , etc.

Special Saturday Session

Adoption of electronic banking: underlying consumer behaviour and critical success factors. Case of Estonia

Adoption of electronic banking: underlying consumer behaviour and critical success factors. Case of Estonia The emergence of electronic banking has been a topic of increasing interest in recent years for both academics and practitioners as the changes taking place in the field are clearly observable. However the growing interest has not been matched well enough with relevant studies that would give insight into the processes and behaviours underlying the rapid adoption of new channels. Estonia is internationally renowned for being a pioneer in the acceptance of new technologies. Currently 22.3% of the Estonian population is using Internet bank services and over 50% of private transactions are done through Internet. Only about 10% of the transactions are done via non-electronic channels. The primary aim of the study is to further the understanding how do consumers perceive electronic banking in the heyday of interactive channels. The motivation of the research is to move away from the innovation concept and analyse Internet banking as a mainstream transaction and service delivery platform. The main questions addressed in the research are: 1. Which factors influence the customers' propensity to use electronic banking as a primary banking channel. The most important issue in exploring the first problem is comparing the influence of demographic factors and attitudes towards banking-related issues to the selection of the main banking channel. 2. What are the main differences between the users and non-users of electronic banking and what are the main obstacles for further adoption of electronic banking. This research question is triggered by the need to study also the negative sides of the relationship - why some customers find the new channels unacceptable and which obstacles should be eliminated in order to convince the customers about the advantages of using Internet banking. 3. What are the critical success factors of the Estonian Internet banking? Comprehensive analysis of the framework of consumer behaviour, economic environment, government policies and banks' activities will be presented. The necessary data will be gathered through a survey conducted among the bank customers and interviews conducted with the leading banking professionals and industry experts. The research is based on the innovation diffusion theory formulated by Everett M. Rogers in 1965 (Rogers 1995). The theory has been used widely in analysing the adoption of Internet (Wolcott et al 2001), various Internet related applications (Black et al 2001, p 391, Polatoglu et. al. 2001, p.157), and also software products (Kautz 2000). The relevance of the chosen theory for the research of Internet banking adoption has been proved via introductory qualitative research on the subject by several authors.