The Role of Information Communications Technology in Retrieving Local Community

Abstract

The article explores the decline in social connectivity and the questions of whether and how local populations can use information–communications technologies (ICTs) to help reconnect. At the center of this debate are problems in conceptualizing community in today's globalizing network society. As well as challenges to older ideas about community, these problems include the impacts of numerous contemporary societal and global pressures on communities themselves. The first step of community renewal is what Scott Lash (1994) refers to as the “retrieval” of community, which is to be a genuinely participatory process, rather than presuming community already exists or engineering a consensus about what it is or what it wants. Some governments are now suggesting that a way to reconnect local populations in order to recover lost sociability and rebuild social infrastructure is through using ICTs as a major tool. Using the New Zealand Government policy contained in the Connecting Communities programme (2002) and the Digital Strategy (2004), the article explores and provides a critique of the strategies being advocated, particularly with respect to the use of the concepts of community and connectivity. A case study of the development and use of ICT tools for community retrieval within a particular local area is used to identify some pitfalls and argue for approaches to connectivity that effectively utilize ICTs as community networking tools.