Workshop access
Social integration

As a means of communication, Internet has effects over the whole society and, specially, on the virtual communities formed by the internauts. Formerly, many opinion leaders and theoreticians of the field of communication disseminated what we could call the "technicality utopia". This assumption --still effective in some discourses-- intended to say that advanced information technologies would be "per se" the way to solve the problems of the society: density of population in the cities, economic sluggishness, unemployment… Time to contrast these theoretical assumptions against the existing reality in the Net, to think about the social impact of the Internet and about the interactive relations built up there has come.

The workshop will focus on these topics:

• Relationships and interactive social relationships born in the computer networks and specially in the Internet. Their advantages, achievements and their pathological effects, if they exist.
• The potential risk, which comes from any communication based in a technology which is not

available for everybody (for economic, cultural, politic reasons or whatever), of deepening the
territorial, grouping and individual unequal conditions pre-existing in the consumer society.
• The changes, which some Internet services may introduce in social or labour integration problems suffered by disabled people, immigrants, unemployed and ethnic, political or religious minorities.

• The technicality utopia draw from the theoretical social benefits of advanced information

technologies like telework or teledemocracy.

• Marcelino Llano
• Sergio Rodríguez
• Josep Lluís Eras