L4D Learning for Democracy

"                                 1. Aim of the report
This specific EMTEL Final Deliverable aims to assemble findings from the various EMTEL
project studies with regard to the key issues of “living and working in the Information Society”.
Special emphasis is given to the relationship between Information and Communication
Technologies (ICTs) and quality of life. As set out in the EMTEL project structure, the report
centres around the results from the Key Deliverables produced by the EMTEL Young
Researchers and on the cross-cutting insights gained during the debates held at the EMTEL
network meetings and the EMTEL Final Conference.1
The dominant discourse on technological change claims that the relationship between (new)
technologies and quality of life is straightforward. Technologies are invented to improve
efficiency and the overall standard of living, and to make our lives easier, better and more
enjoyable. Common sense tells us that new technologies will always promise a better world as it
is difficult to imagine that they were intentionally invented to complicate our lives.
Nonetheless, policy makers are concerned with making sure that technologies are developed and
diffused in ways that are indeed beneficial to individuals, companies, organisations and society
as a whole. The European Union’s “Lisbon objectives” for instance, aim explicitly at building a
competitive, socially cohesive and sustainable European society through – among other means –
more and better technologies. The eEurope 2005 Action Plan (the Information Society roadmap
towards the Lisbon objectives) shows similar social and economic concern, and aims to further
the efforts of the last 10 years to boost ICT use across (an Enlarged) Europe.2
The EMTEL research projects reflect on these policy initiatives in the light of selective
empirical insights into how ICTs are experienced by users and non-users, in everyday life. The
reports offer snapshots of the contemporary use and non-use of ICTs in different settings such
as migrant highly-skilled researchers in Norway and Germany (Trondheim Study), the so-called
“Web Generation” in Belgium (Brussels Study) and Internet use in the local setting of an Irish
coastal town (Dublin Study). Future technology visions of Ambient Intelligence in everyday life
are also discussed (Sevilla Study). These studies offer a qualitative exploration of the ever
evolving and, in some ways, contradictory relations people develop in every day life with the
technologies they are confronted with.
In this report we have chosen to highlight some of the tensions and ambiguities found within
and across the case studies, with a view to interpreting them in the more global context of ICT
potential for improving quality of life. They help us to address the following topics and
questions: