The new information technologies and women: essential reflections

Includes bibliographyThis document was presented as a background study for the discussion at the meeting of experts on Globalization, technological change and gender equity" (São Paulo, Brazil, 5-6 November 2001), organized by the Women and Development Unit together with the International Trade Division of ECLAC and the Centre for Women's Studies and Social Gender Relations of the University of São Paulo. It is clear from the text that the new technologies are taking us into a dizzy time of new exclusions, and that in addition to being a material reality they are also a discursive product with effects on institutions, public policies and individuals. The study reviews an extensive amount of theoretical literature, as well as most of the research concerning the inclusion and relationship of women in connection with the new information technologies and skills.

Community and Educational Opportunity in the US: The Relative Utility of Technology and Digital Literacy in a Transcultural Community

This ethnobiographic study explores the ways in which five low income transmigrants living in an urban Mid-Atlantic transcultural community made use of technology and digital literacy. Specifically, the study focuses on the ways in which participants defined the purpose, importance, and utility of technology and digital literacy in their lives. The stories reveal complex and often heroic efforts to become digitally literate and apply technological learning to their obligations as parents, breadwinners, and community participants in widely dispersed social networks that cross family, community, and national boundaries. Their stories reveal: 1) the desire for digital literacy to participate in our modern society; 2) limitations in concepts of access and equity as currently conceived in scholarly literature; 3) trust as a key component of successful programs; and 4) the importance of technology in sustaining transcultural networks. The voices of the participants reveal that immigrants recognize the need for technology training, not only for jobs, but also to aid and enhance their everyday life. They shared the need for training to include: basic classroom skills instruction for children; learning opportunities for adults; programs that include authentic tasks and design features that consider cost, time and day of the week, location, language options, and word of mouth confirmation regarding the quality of content and trust in instructors and training location. Their search for safety extends to protecting their personal information and children by acquiring cyber safety and security knowledge. This study adds to transcultural scholarly work, and also expands both digital divide and digital inequity literature that only rarely focuses on the relationship between participants and transcultural community constructs. Increasingly, computer based forms of communication are taking the place of letters, telephone and travel to maintain and expand ties to family and friends dispersed throughout the globe. Technology becomes a way to support their transmigrant identities and strengthen the networks of friends and family used to identify places to live and work. Rather than creating a homogeneous global society, technology may actually serve to strengthen national identities across borders

Voice and e-quality: The state of electronic democracy in Britain.

This dissertation is broadly concerned with the issue of electronic democracy, i.e. whether, under what conditions and how does the Internet strengthen democracy in advanced industrial polities. Specifically, this work applies the theory of participation to recent British data on online political engagement in order to understand: whether and how the Internet modifies the existing structure of political inequality; whether and how the Internet alters the context of traditional political action; whether the Internet holds a democratising potential and what is its nature. Data collected and analysed include a survey of British citizens' online political behaviour, and three smaller, in-depth surveys of citizens' online political activities within limited settings: a national online consultation forum, routine politics by young party activists and charity work by an elderly activist network. More generally, the dissertation contributes towards clarifying the ongoing debate on electronic democracy, by examining the discourse surrounding the evolution of the issue. It reviews a large portion of the existing literature on online political engagement, organised in three main approaches. It presents and analyses seminal data on British online political engagement to assess the state of electronic democracy in Britain. Importantly, it advances a theoretical framework for the understanding of the 'real' digital divide, drawing on the theory of participation. The theory is an ideal explanatory base from which to depart in order to find the factors shaping the structure of online political opportunities and the way in which preferences are voiced, and heard, through the Internet. This dissertation speaks directly to the electronic democracy debate by setting the agenda on the notion of democratic equality and by focusing on the structure of voice in the information polity

La collectivité apprenante une stratégie de développement local

The phenomenon of connected communities shows that the Internet can be a powerful tool in promoting cohesiveness between community actors. Indeed, public and nonpublic initiatives with the aim of networking members of a community through a virtual platform, and attempts to federate existing local initiatives through a collective portal are multiplying in the developed countries. This has given rise to expressions such as"connected city,"intelligent city," and"digital city." However, uses developed from Internet applications have remained primarily instruments limited to information dissemination or service delivery. In the thesis, we maintain that it is possible to go beyond the instrumental character of Internet applications and to give a developmental character to processing for designing and developing a collective portal. A learning community is a completed form of connected community that promotes local actors to develop a creative synergy that can yield ideas, collaboration, and development projects. In addition to promoting the use of ICTs, a learning community project can stimulate public participation in community activities, redefine community governance, and give rise to a relational strategy that can generate the knowledge, distinctive competences, and collective capabilities that influence the direction of community development