Vital links for a knowledge culture: Public access to new information and communication technologies

The primary contribution of this book is to illuminate the cultural and social nature of public access to and exclusion from NITs by exploring certain primary connections between access to technology, NIT literacy or know-how, and full participation in what can be called a knowledge culture within a network society.

This line of inquiry is never framed exclusively as a question of technology. The essays instead adopt historical, statistical, theoretical and descriptive methods to investigate the value of the Internet for societies, citizens and communities, and to suggest how government policy makers and their partners in the corporate and civil society sectors can foster the multifaceted potential of NITs. This involves understanding how closing the access gap can maximise the potential for human and cultural development.