Community Informatics: Building Civil Society in the Information Age?
Leigh Keeble · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2007
The ubiquitous spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as the Internet, mobile telephony and geographical information systems have given rise to a debate (Barlow 1996) about whether such new media are beneficial for community development or instead are a threat to civil society. Community Informatics (CI), the practices associated with the adoption and study of how new ICTs can facilitate the social, economic, political and cultural developments of communities, provides us with a field of exploration in which to contextualise this debate.