The Fifth RTD
Framework Programme of the EU is presented
under the heading Creating a user-friendly
information society. It has as its main
objective the realisation of “benefits
of the information society for Europe both by
accelerating its emergence and by ensuring
that the needs of individuals and enterprises
are met”.
The European
Media, Technology and Everyday Life
Network (EMTEL) addresses this agenda
directly.
EMTEL is a
research and training network of European
social scientists investigating the social
dimensions of the Information Society in
Europe. It includes 7 partners in 6 different
countries (Ireland, the Netherlands, Belgium,
Spain, Norway, the UK). It involves more than
20 scholars, working on 7 different projects,
2 Key Themes, providing training and research
resources to 8 Young Research Fellows.
A
co-ordinated research and training programme
addresses, from a user point of view, key
issues and problems of the Information
Society through a series of thematically
interrelated case studies. EMTEL’s
objective is to investigate the realities and
dynamics of the User Friendly Information
Society .
Our Past
New
technologies have had substantial effects on
the ways in which organisations
function. Considerable research has
been devoted to the economic and commercial
aspects of the Information Society. So
far very little attention has been given to
the social implications of these potentially
revolutionary developments: to the ways in
which individual citizens and consumers adapt
to, and adopt, new technologies and
services. We urgently need to
understand the implications of their
willingness to do so, as well as the sources
of their resistance. For their quality
of life, for their capacity to work, for
their social institutions, especially the
family, the community, and for their
meaningful participation in all aspects of
European society.
EMTEL,
building on research conducted as a network
funded by the EC in its Human Capital and
Mobility programme (1995-8) and drawing on an
emerging global research agenda to which it
has already made a significant contribution,
will deepen and extend socio-economic
research on the Information Society in order
directly to affect policy making and market
management in the twenty-first century.
Our Strategy
Through a
series of carefully designed, interrelated
and co-ordinated studies EMTEL will
investigate the individual and social
dimensions of the emerging Information
Society. EMTEL will focus on the
everyday life of the European citizen and
consumer. It will examine the realities
of the new ways of living and working that
are seen to be at the core of the Information
Society. It will explore the ways in
which new technologies can be more
effectively integrated into the social fabric
of the Union, and the ways in which the
citizens and consumers of the Union can be
effectively integrated into the Information
Society.
The speed of
technological change goes on unabated.
Societies change more slowly. Impacts
are never uniform or consistent.
Markets emerge unpredictably and disappear as
fast. Competition is intense. New
policies are required to manage and to steer
the complex interrelationship of
technological and social change.
Information policies and social policies may
need to converge.
The aim of
the project is to provide policy makers and
market managers, as well as the academic
community, with empirically grounded evidence
of the social dynamics of the emerging
Information Society and on the new ways of
living and working that this makes
possible. It will engage critically
with the assumptions underlying the
discourses surrounding the Information
Society.
A number of
Reports and Green Papers from the Commission
have identified key areas where more research
and a deeper understanding of the social
dimensions of the information society is
called for. From these and other
publications EMTEL has identified seven
interrelated thematic areas where it will
undertake research in order to generate an
incisive, conceptual and empirical
investigation of the character and dynamics
of the Information Society as it is
experienced by individuals in their everyday
lives.
These are:
community, exclusion, citizenship, quality of
life, flexibility, consumption, and
domesticity. Each of these thematic
areas will be explored in the research
through discrete, but comparative and
interrelated, case-studies. Each of these
thematic areas will be linked to, and inform,
policy making at all levels of the
Community. Each partner in the network,
building on existing expertise, will take
primary responsibility for one thematic area.
Ourselves
Six out of
the seven teams in the current project were,
in one way or another, members of the EMTEL
Network funded under the Human Capital and
Mobility Programme (1995-8). TNO and
ASCoR collaborated in that programme.
Media@lse brings faculty previously with the
Sussex team in that project. The
seventh team, from the Institute for
Prospective Technological Studies in Seville,
is an EU JRC, and brings to EMTEL a wealth of
relevant and complementary expertise.
EMTEL’s
programme of research promises to provide a
major breakthrough in the social
understanding of the Information Society and
how this will lead to new ways of living and
working. Comparative studies will be
conducted alongside detailed case
studies. A major work of synthesis is
in prospect, as are a number of innovative
analyses. So far European social
science has failed to address social and
individual dimensions of technological change
in this area from the point of view of their
meaning, their significance and their
consequences for everyday life. EMTEL
will change this. This is our vision.
Anne-Jorunn
Berg
Thomas Berker
Marc Bogdanowicz
Kees Brants
Jean-Claude
Burgelman
Ken Ducatel
Valerie Frissen
Myria Georgiou
Maren Hartmann
François
Pichault
Yves Punie
Paschal Preston
Paul Rutten
Roger
Silverstone
Knut H.
Sørensen
Richard Stevens
Katie Ward
