ICT and Social Inclusion

ICT and Social Inclusion

Thinking about the role of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for social inclusion (eInclusion) from the vantage point of social capital can make existing initiatives for bridging digital divides more effective. This approach also points to new strategies that could better harness the power of ICT for social inclusion in a wider sense. Thus, social capital provides a promising conceptual framework and policy tool to support the implementation of the European Union policy agenda for eInclusion, as most prominently articulated in the June 2006 Riga Ministerial Declaration on eInclusion.

What is social capital?

Social capital refers to the extent, nature and quality of social ties that individuals or communities can mobilize in conducting their affairs. Social capital is not a new concept, but gained prominence in the policy arena in the late 1980s, when it found its way into many policy programmes for social integration and cohesion in North America and Europe. How does social capital relate to social inclusion? A robust and growing body of empirical research confirms that: a lack of social interconnectedness is, in itself, an important dimension of individual deprivation. Exclusion is not only a matter of poverty or a lack of material resources. Social isolation poses risks to individual well-being and health, as well as social cohesion. This makes the strengthening of social capital within groups at risk of social isolation an important aim for social inclusion efforts; social capital facilitates learning and the acquisition of skills. Learning is a social process and social networks and communities of practices are indispensable spaces for informal learning, providing opportunities for individuals to seek advice, discuss ideas and upgrade their work-related and other skills; ƒ social capital creates economic opportunities. It helps individuals to find a job, enhances their employability and productivity and generates the trust and reciprocity between co-workers and business partners required for efficient markets; and, social capital stimulates political participation, civil engagement and community governance. Ties between friends and colleagues are found to be important motivating structures for civil engagement.

To sum up, social capital is an important objective and cross-cutting policy tool for addressing some of the root causes of social exclusion. It can serve as an early warning diagnostic to detect a breakdown of social cohesion and the onset of individual alienation. It also directs attention to the various bottom-up networks, community initiatives and other civil society organisations that can be mobilized for outreach and inclusion efforts. How can social capital inform and support e-Inclusion efforts?

Mirroring the multiple interlinkages between social capital and social inclusion, a social capital approach promises to enhance the design and implementation of eInclusion initiatives at various levels:  At conceptual level, it helps us to better understand how ICTs are adopted and ICT skills are learnt in social learning environments, thereby providing guidance for making ICT literacy and skill initiatives more effective; At the programme level, it puts the support of social networking aided by ICT firmly on the eInclusion agenda. It also emphasizes the significant opportunities offered by a new generation of increasingly popular ICT-led social networking tools and platforms, commonly labelled as Web 2.0, for fostering social capital formation and inclusion. At the same time, it alerts us to the challenge to make these emerging online meeting spaces and tools accessible for all;  At the operational level, it directs attention to the pivotal role of civil society and bottom-up community initiatives in reaching out to people at risk of exclusion. Civil society and bottom-up community initiatives are indispensable partners in the design and implementation of social inclusion initiatives, including eInclusion efforts. 

At the service design level, it leads to the insight that individual citizens often interact with online public services via networks of intermediaries. As a consequence, the design of such online services needs to take into account the information needs of this additional client group of private or civil societybased intermediaries. What does this mean in practice? Experiments with social capital informed approaches to eInclusion are being carried out in many countries. Examples with regard to ICT literacy initiatives include the use of peer trainers and peer learning in day activity centres in Denmark or the use of existing youth workers as ICT teachers for disadvantaged young people in youth centres in Germany. Support for online 10 self-help groups and communities of practice for care givers and support groups is a central element in some active ageing initiatives in Finland, while a web project in the Netherlands catalyzes the networking and social integration of ethnic communities through the provision of a very popular online discussion space and news service for North African immigrants.

Moreover, with regard to reaching out to target groups and supporting their social networking, e-Inclusion efforts can also take a cue from the private sector which has recognized the importance of new online meeting spaces and is setting up a virtual presence to become visible and engage more closely with target audiences. This strategy might also help the designers of online public services and elected representatives to reconnect with specific client groups, such as young people, that are difficult to reach and motivate through established communication channels. These examples illustrate the breadth and diversity of current social capital informed approaches to eInclusion. They confirm that a social capital approach aligns itself very closely with the European eInclusion agenda, which aims not only to combat social exclusion in its various dimensions with the help of ICT but also seeks to prevent new generations of ICT from generating new socio-economic disparities. Early evidence points to encouragingly positive outcomes for these social-capitalinformed projects and suggests a wider application of the social capital perspective for eInclusion, which in turn will require a more systematic stock-tacking and comparison of innovative projects and emerging good practice in this area.

ICT and social networks

Early speculations and rather anecdotal evidence tended to view the impact of a new generation of ICTs, such as the Internet, as quite negatively and suspected that ICT would follow in the footsteps of television and precipitate a further erosion of social capital. However, more recent and more grounded empirical investigations convey quite conclusively a different message: far from undermining the formation of social capital ICTs are found to enable individuals to thicken existing ties and generate new ones.

ICT in the form of mobile phones or email, for example, are used to stay better in touch with close friends and family members, making it possible to retain close communication while meeting increased demands for mobility, or, through enabling teleworking arrangements, reducing the need to spend time outside the family home in the first place. At the same time, ICT in the form of interest-oriented online discussion groups or networking spaces come in handy to develop more new ties to like-minded people in what are looser, more fluid, differentiated, interest-based, elective and far-flung networks for a wide variety of purposes, including professional skill and career networks, common hobbies and socializing or self-help groups to cope with specific problems. A growing number of studies confirm this enhancing and transformative impact of ICT on social capital.

ICT and local communities The question remains whether this transformative impact might have a negative effect on one particular type of social capital, the social ties within a geographically defined, local neighbourhood. Although no conclusive evidence is available there are also reasons to believe that ICT has the potential to enrich rather than to undermine local life for several reasons.

Despite its virtual, borderless image, it is estimated that up to 80% of the information available on the Internet has a place-bound geographic aspect to it. Most communication and networking tools provided by ICT do scale. This means they can handle the networking needs of small and large communities alike and make it possible for local networks to expand and interlink with other local communities, thereby supporting bridging and linking social capital and enhancing the networking and collaboration opportunities for local networks.

A new generation of ICT applications and business models are built on unlocking the power of the Internet for local neighbourhoods. New geographic information platforms such as Google Earth, make it possible to visualize, annotate and share local information of all types with unprecedented ease and effectiveness. New local search tools have emerged that help to better target searches and retrieve locally-relevant information from the online space. Finally, local online marketing is viewed as a major untapped revenue source for websites and therefore has evolved into a major incentive for innovation and experimentation in online publishing to develop locally targeted content collections. All these trends conspire to make the Internet and the information and applications that it provides more place-sensitive and more relevant for local communities and their information needs.

ICT-enabled opportunities for social capital

There is ample evidence to suggest that ICTs are helping to expand, transform and diversify social capital. And they do so by providing: Tools for communication and collaborative information sharing, ranging from simple email to interactive publishing tools such as blogs and to sophisticated collaborative work platforms that allow to jointly create, annotate and share information items, such as wikis or social tagging applications. Meeting spaces, where like-minded people can gather and socialize. These online spaces started with the bulletin boards of the early internet, then morphed into tens of thousands of thematic discussion groups carried by Usenet or on websites and are by now developing into sophisticated multimedia online social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook populated by well over hundred million users and their networks of friends, as well as increasingly popular virtual words such as Second Life that mimic ambient aspects of real environments and enable participants to develop sophisticated online alter-egos. Collaborative projects that serve as attractors to bring together volunteers and seed networks around initiatives to share Internet connectivity, to jointly develop software (e.g. thousands of open source projects), or to build online content resources (e.g. the Wikipedia project to build an online encyclopaedia currently with 67,000 active contributors working on over 4,6 million articles in more than 100 languages.1 multimedia online social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook populated by well over hundred million users and their networks of friends, as well as increasingly popular virtual words such as Second Life that mimic ambient aspects of real environments and enable participants to develop sophisticated online alter-egos. 

Collaborative projects that serve as attractors to bring together volunteers and seed networks around initiatives to share Internet connectivity18, to jointly develop software (e.g. thousands of open source projects), or to build online content resources (e.g. the Wikipedia project to build an online encyclopaedia currently with 67,000 active contributors working on over 4,6 million articles in more than 100 languages.

A big challenge from benefits for the few to benefits for all

However there is another important message that clearly emerges from the literature. All these opportunities for building and expanding social capital with ICT are currently benefiting mainly those that are already privileged and well-endowed with social capital in the first place. Growing evidence suggests that it is the already highly educated and professionally advanced that use ICT to enhance their skills and network for career advancement, that it is the already politically engaged that harness online tools for mobilizing and civic participation, that it is the already well informed and well networked that actively seek out common interest groups online and fresh information resources of relevance to their lives. At the same time, the provision of ICT left to the market alone and its appropriation taking place in the context of existing socio-economic inequities does not make ICT work for expanding social capital of the marginalized and disadvantaged. New ICT are unlikely to link-up people with low networking skills, are unlikely to create networks from scratch where there are no pre-existing motivations and are unlikely to build ties and bridges across diverse communities with differing interest.

In a nutshell, without enabling policy measures and dedicated eInclusion efforts it is not possible to fully and equitably realize the significant opportunities that ICT presents for strengthening social capital and the concomitant opportunities for improving individual lives, prosperity and communal cohesion.