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THE ‘SOCIAL IMPACT’ OF ICT

William Davies

Senior Research Fellow,

Institute for Public Policy Research

‘Towards an Information Society for All’

Bucharest, 14th October 2004

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What is an ICT?

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Two characteristics of ICT

1. They enable us to store knowledge so that it can be used at a different time.

2. They enable us to transmit that knowledge so that it can be used at a different place.

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(a word from William Mitchell)

Four ways of communicating, with or without ICTs:

At the same time At different times

In the same place Face to face; instant messenger in the office

Emailing someone in the same office

In different places A telephone call Postal service

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So why ‘The Information Society’?

• Since the 1960s, ICTs have undergone four fairly dramatic changes:

1. Their ability to store and process knowledge has increased - memory

2. The speed with which they transmit information has increased - bandwidth

3. Their ability to integrate separate informational, social and cultural systems has increased - digitization

4. They have become decentralised - the information society

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The politics of technological decentralisation

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Where does ICT have ‘social impact’?

1.Markets

2.Communities

3.Democracy

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Markets

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Markets

Thesis:

By vastly expanding the quantity and availability of information to customers, businesses and employees, ICTs flatten competitive advantage, remove geographic constraints and create unprecedented market demand for knowledge-processing.

“The end of the business cycle”

“The New Economy”

“Weightless world”

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MarketsHowever

• The end of information scarcity places ever greater emphasis on forms of competitive advantage other than information:

– Tacit knowledge - the growth of the ‘symbolic analyst’

– Customer service - the growth of the low-wage service sector

– Social networks

– Culture, place and cities

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Markets

Threats

Inequality - ICT potentially supports a growing division between ‘routinised work’ and ‘judgmental work’, played out both

within national labour markets, and between nations.

Opportunities

A New Economy - ICT leads to increased productivity, growing competition between large and small businesses, and higher value-added work

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Communities

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Communities

Thesis:

By enabling communities to break free of the constraints of time and place, ICTs facilitate a shift from communities formed around shared place to communities formed around shared interest.

“The death of distance”

“The global village”

“The virtual community”

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CommunitiesHowever:

• Shared place is a shared interest, and ICT can support it as such. – Supporting offline social networks and associations– Wired communities– Local portals

• Communities of interest use ICTs to coordinate their interests across different times and places, but occasionally use ICTs to congregate in the same time and place.

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Communities

Threats

New social divides - ICT can be used to police communities in an exclusive fashion.

Opportunities

Scalability - the flexibility of new media offers the possibility of helping civic activities ‘scale’, expanding grass-roots activism, and helping it connect to larger, more

formal political activity.

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Democracy

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Democracy

Thesis

ICT can facilitate direct interaction between government and the people, cutting out the need for mediators and achieving higher levels of trust, transparency and responsiveness as a result.

“e-Democracy”

“Open source democracy”

“Open.gov”

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DemocracyHowever

• ICTs lend themselves more easily to surveillance and transactions than to political dialogue:

– E-government is largely about integrating back office functions, and providing convenient access points for transactions.

– Individuals seek safety from the state, as much as legitimacy.

– Often there is no difference between personalisation of a government service and surveillance.

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Democracy

Threats

Public/private blurring - We fail to work out legitimate uses of data-sharing, allowing government to become part of our private lives but no longer a central part of our public lives.

Opportunities

Self-governance - e-government is not just about self-service, but also about self-governance.

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Looking forward

As ICTs become smaller, cheaper and more pervasive, they will become more entwined with the physical environment.

• RFID

• Geo-tagging of data

• Smart places and mobile phones

As individuals become more media literate, they will become better at using ICTs to find and avoid people, places, services and products to suit their interests best.

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Looking forward

We at the ippr are publishing a Manifesto for a Digital Britain in April

We are holding over 20 seminars on various aspects of the Information Society over the next six months.

Follow our progress and interact with the project at the weblog:

www.digitalmanifesto.org

Thank you!