The Social Dynamics of Information and Communication Technology

For some years there has been a network of European researchers from telecommunication departments, universities and operators together with independent consultants that at different points in time have collaborated as successive COST actions – originally COST 248, then COST 269 and at the time of writing COST 298 . These cross-disciplinary groups have been analysing the social dimensions of people’s relationships to information and communication technologies using the frameworks outlined above and others. In September 2003 COST 269 organised a conference at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki entitled The Good, the Bad and the Irrelevant: The User and the Future of Information and Communication Technologies. This conference was unique in the degree to which it was an international and interdisciplinary event addressing a broad range of ICTs. Its broad remit to consider the social context of ICTs is shown in the titles of the conference strands: ‘the extended human’, ’users as innovators’, ‘dealing with diversity’, ‘the reconfiguration of society’. The issues that were discussed included current theoretical frameworks, contemporary research projects, issues in and approaches to the design of ICTs, ways of analysing people’s experience of these technologies and potential social implications.
This book brings together chapters that we developed from some of the original papers of that conference covering the socio-dynamic character of ICTs, the factors that we should consider when predicting adoption and use, their relevance to people and how they should be evaluated. Two leading questions shaping the choice of material in this book were:
1. In which ways may ICTs serve as tools in the reshaping of everyday life?
2. What social dynamics are involved in the adoption and rejection of ICTs on the personal and organisational level?
A sub-question is then: What is the ‘additionality’ of ICTs in people’s everyday lives and its contribution to their quality of life? ‘Additionality’ refers here to the added value or the change potential that ICTs offer in particular socio-economic settings. At the same time, the opposite question is also crucial: How do the social dynamics of people’s lives influence the ways in which they experience these ICTs?
The aim of this book is to discuss the adoption and use of ICTs in real life settings. In the classical technological and marketing oriented literature, the ICT user is all too often generalised, without considering the specificities of his or her everyday life and work situation. Or else he or she is segmented according to classical socio-demographic criteria that only provide a partial explanation of adoption and use. This book synthesises and builds upon a selection of the contributions from the above mentioned conference in order to explore the social dynamic character of the adoption and use of ICTs by individuals, social groups and organisations. The empirical research presented in the book is unique in terms of its breadth, because it provides grounded insights into how and why different kinds of ICTs are, or are not, or are only partially, accepted, used and integrated into everyday life.