From the Global to the Local: Building Community Spaces on the Internet

Abstract

As the previous chapters demonstrate, much of the discussion of information society and ICT has been extremely generalised and debates around theories of the information society formulated at a high level of abstraction (Ducatel and Halfpenny 1993). This has resulted in a great deal of speculation concerning the future information society and of the kinds of social relationships which might emerge through electronic means of communication. So far I have argued that the information society and the networks which have flourished within it have been used to good effect by global elites in order to maintain their dominance in both physical and virtual spaces, to retain a corporate structure which produces extensive profits and to perpetuate a neo-liberal ideology which emphasises the responsibility of the individual over that of the state, but I have also argued that this is not the whole story. If it were it would be easy to dismiss the Internet and ICT generally as tools of a repressive and dominating social hierarchy with little to offer any other users and to place oneself firmly in opposition to the techno-evangelists and their ‘hegemonic hype’. However, there is clearly more to the information age than this.