International Colloquium Communication and Democracy: Technology and Citizen Engagement 2004
Wednesday, August 4 - Friday, August 6, 2004
Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada

Since the early 1990's, governments, industry and commercial organizations, public agencies, non-governmental organizations, communities and individual citizens have embraced the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICT), expending extensive resources on their deployment and adoption.

Along this digital journey, on one end of a continuum, claims have been made about the revolutionary and emancipatory potential of ICT. Promoters exhort the urgency of its adoption to realize citizen empowerment, institutional transformation and transparency, direct democracy, and the erasure of time and space to create an electronic global village.

At the other end of this continuum of debate, critics argue that the potential benefits of ICT are being outweighed by a growing digital impotence for citizens, who are increasingly bound by new forms of regulation, institutional electronic rigidities, market regulation, the extension of commercial practices deeper into social life, and technical design myopic of human needs.

The broad themes of citizen engagement, democratic inclusion, and socio-economic betterment for citizens, communities and nations have emerged as key research concerns that cut across issues such as the digital divide, convergence, e-commerce and the dot com bomb, e-learning, e-health, gaming, virtual communities, community informatics, connectivity, broadband, and government online.