iSociety Report puts the Local back into ICT Use

"Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm" is the latest report into the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on British life from iSociety.

The report argues that ICT is habitually seen as weakening the dependence communities have on shared locality. 'ICTs enable larger and more dispersed social groups to coordinate themselves through the use of telecommunications, publishing and broadcasting. Over the past decade, a number of new ICTs have entered mainstream society in the UK, including the internet and mobile phones, and early analyses tended to depict them as long-distance communication devices. The internet in particular was associated with globalisation, and seen to remove the constraints that geography places on social interaction.'

However, it goes on, as far as everyday users are concerned, two developments have occurred in the UK that challenge this depiction of ICT:

* New ICT has become significantly more pervasive: ICTs are only used predominantly for very long distance social interaction by the minority of people who travel frequently. Once a device is more commonplace, its users are less dispersed and develop more local uses for it. In environments where the internet is genuinely pervasive, such as offices, its long-distance uses can become overshadowed by its short distance uses.

* Policymakers seek new ways of supporting local community: Long-distance forms of social interaction mediated via telecommunications and transport are now recognised to have negative spillovers and to undermine local community. It is now a priority for policymakers to help people connect with one another on a local level and participate in local governance. ICT can be re-orientated to support this.

Groups with high levels of ICT access give a glimpse of some short distance social functions of ICT. The report draws attention to:

~ Supporting weak local networks: Wired communities have already demonstrated that it is possible to use the internet or an intranet to disseminate information easily on quite a small scale. Diverse localities in which there is little shared culture or strong norms of cooperation may have most to gain from the ability to share information without face-to-face interaction.
~ Helping to link communication to location: ICT only reduces our dependence on geography if we want it to. It can also strengthen it by interweaving communication with spatial data and maps .Already, an estimated 80% of internet content contains some form of spatial data: local services and community portals distribute information of general local interest; and emerging uses of mobile phones can link communication to specific locations for users to pick up.
~ Flexibility of scale: The most important function that the internet could perform for contemporary British politics is the ability to connect small, very local communities into larger, less local communities and so on up to the national level.The medium has the rare ability to support any scale of social group and users can connect to local and non-local networks simultaneously, creating bridges between the two and staving off the danger that strong local community involves turning away from national or global politics.

Finally, author Will Davies suggests our ability to channel these sorts of benefits towards the public has been hampered by a lack of clarity over who should be responsible for doing so.

Associated Link: Proxicommunication: ICT and the Local Public Realm

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