Originally published by
FLACSO, Sede Ecuador, as
Internet y sociedad en América Latina y el Caribe
© FLACSO, Sede Ecuador, 2001. All rights reserved.
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Perpustakaan Negara Malaysia Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
The Internet and society in Latin America and the Caribbean/
edited by Marcelo Bonilla and Gilles Cliche.
ISBN 983-9054-37-6
1. Internet (Computer network) – Social aspects – Latin
America. 2. Internet (Computer network) – Social aspects –
Caribbean Area.3. Information society – Latin America.
4. Information society – Caribbean Area. I. Bonilla, Marcelo.
II. Cliche, Gilles.
303.4833098
In July 1999 the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO-Ecuador) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada) decided to sponsor under their PAN programme <http://www.idrc.ca/pan> a competition for research projects on the social impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The key objective of the competition was to foster efforts to identify and evaluate the changes that the Internet is bringing about in different areas that are strategic for the region's development (education and culture, public health, governance, democracy, productivity, human rights, administration of justice, and environment), as well as to promote research into methodologies and the development of applications in this field. The research-competition programme focused on issues relating to equity and the need to address the technological and socioeconomic divide that has traditionally excluded certain urban and rural groups.
A jury panel of international experts defined the parameters of the competition and, in early 2000, selected the eight winning projects. This publication presents the results of those research projects in the hope that they may help to break new ground in the region by stimulating debate about public policies for the Internet, its potential significance for encouraging citizen participation and, consequently, for building a new political culture based on the right to communication and culture and Internet rights that will provide citizens with free access to knowledge and information under principles of social and cultural equity.
The ideas and experiences presented in this book are the product of the eight winning research projects from the competition. They address the social impact of the Internet in the context of schooling (case studies from Colombia, Chile and Argentina) and local governance (case studies from Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and the Chilean towns of Rancagua, Puente Alto and El Bosque). The volume also includes a description of two tools that were developed in the course of the competition. The first was prepared in Colombia to measure the social impact of the Internet on the basis of social variables (gender, education, and media access, among others): It was developed for Linux platforms and is available at <http://www.colnodo.apc.org/registro>. The second was prepared in Argentina as a multimedia application for introducing children to a culture of citizen participation in relationship with their surroundings and their local community: this tool has been published at <http://www.telpin.com.ar/interneteducativa/proyectounq/unq/web>.
The research projects themselves, as well as the tools described above, were presented during an international seminar on Communication, Internet and Society in Latin America, which was held in Quito on May 16 and 17, 2001. This book also contains articles written by six experts who participated in that event, relating to copyright and the Internet; a proposal for franchising telecentres; public policies for the Internet; an analysis of MISTICA, a virtual community experiment; and a description of a project for monitoring Internet policies in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Fernando Carrión
Director
FLACSO-Ecuador
We wish to express our most sincere appreciation to Clotilde Fonseca (Fundación Omar Dengo, San José, Costa Rica), Alicia Richero (IDRC/CIID, Montevideo, Uruguay), Enrique Draier (Netsystem, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Patricia Thompson (Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago) and Claudio Menezes (UNESCO, Montevideo), who, as members of the selection jury for the Competition for Research Projects on the Social Impacts of Information and Communication Technologies in Latin America and the Caribbean, made invaluable contributions to defining the programme's objectives and its evaluation mechanisms and, above all, to the process of selecting the winning proposals.
We also wish to thank the FLACSO-Ecuador team, and in particular Wilson Pancho, manager of the computerization division, for their assiduous work in designing the competition's web site and the research programme's Internet communication systems. As well, we are grateful to Cristina Wholerman for her help with the organization and logistics for the planning sessions that were held during the project's preparatory phase.
Finally, we are deeply indebted to Santiago Carrasco, President of Fundación para la Ciencia y Tecnología (FUNDACYT), for supporting the research programme on the social impact of ICTs through the REYCIT-Capítulo FLACSO project, which provided the networking technology for running the competition.
Nor can we overlook the unconditional support provided to us by all the research coordinators and teams from the winning institutions and by the speakers who so kindly took part in the results presentation seminar and in the preparation of this publication.
Marcelo Bonilla and Gilles Cliche
Editors
Miguel Angel Arredondo
Education researcher with the Learning Workshop Team for the Interdisciplinary Research Programme in Education. MA in Education, Universidad Metropolitana de Ciencia de la Educación, Santiago, Chile. Specializes in pedagogical and research projects on the cultural consumption of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in school settings.
Luis Guillermo Barnola
Programme Officer, Institute for Connectivity in the Americas at the International Development Research Centre, Canada, studying the use of ICTs for development. Degree in biology from the Universidad de Los Andes, Venezuela, MA in Sciences from McGill University, Canada, doctoral candidate in adult education and participatory action research at the University of Toronto (Canada). Active member of the MÍSTICA virtual community since its inception.
Marcelo Bonilla
Coordinator for the Research Programme on the Social Impact of the Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean, FLACSO-Ecuador. Doctor in Jurisprudence from the Pontifica Universidad Católica of Ecuador. Candidate for master's degree in anthropology from FLACSO. Academic Coordinator for FLACSO-Ecuador from 1997 to 1998. Specialist and researcher in the cultural consumption of the Internet in Latin America from the viewpoint of political and symbolic anthropology.
José Cabrera Paz
Teacher and researcher with the Educational Training Programme, Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. Degree in psychology from the National University of Colombia. Specialization in educational communication, Universidad Central, Colombia. Engaged in pedagogical and ethnographic research on the appropriation of ICTs in schools.
Julián Casabuenas
Director of the Colombian Association of Non-governmental Organizations for E-mail Communication, Colnodo. Chemical engineer, Fundación Universidad de América. Specializes in development of the social Internet in communities and in local development.
Gilles Cliche
Senior Programme Specialist at the International Development Research Centre, Canada. MSc in Geography from Université de Sherbrooke. Devotes his career to action research in information sciences and natural resource management, with a special focus on social approaches to development issues, primarily in Latin America.
Susana Finquelievich
Coordinator of Urban Studies for the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani at the University of Buenos Aires. Doctorate in urban sociology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. Engaged in research and teaching related to the development of ICTs in urban environments and their impact on citizen participation in local government.
Carlos Gregorio
President, Instituto de Investigación para la Justicia, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Doctorate from the University of Buenos Aires, Faculty of Law and Social Sciences. International consultant and researcher who has conducted many multidisciplinary projects on issues relating to public policy, human rights and the administration of justice, and the design and implementation of information systems.
Agustín Grijalva
LLD and MA in political science, University of Kansas. Professor of economic law at the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar-Ecuador. Currently pursuing doctoral studies in political science, University of Pittsburgh.
Silvia Lago Martínez
MA in science and technology policy and management, Centre for Advanced Studies of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Sociologist, researcher and teacher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, UBA, specializing in interdisciplinary urban studies relating to governance, citizenship and the new information society.
Daniel Light
Senior Researcher with the Center for Children and Technology of the Educational Development Center, New York. Doctor in Sociology, New School for Social Research, New York. Specialist in the design of international projects on the implementation of ICTs as part of the educational reform process. Expert in the development of qualitative and quantitative tools for education research.
Juliana Martínez
Researcher with Fundación Acceso, San José, Costa Rica. PhD in Sociology, University of Pittsburgh. Researcher, teacher and consultant on social policies with an ICT focus.
Daniel Pimienta
Director, FUNREDES, Dominican Republic. Doctor of Informatics, University of Nice, France. Researcher and specialist in ICT projects for developing countries.
María Sol Quiroga
Architect, Universidad de la Plata. Specialist in the history and critique of architecture and urban development, University of Buenos Aires. Researcher with the Priority Research Programme ALDEA XXI, and Assistant Professor, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Specialist in matters relating to urban utilities, geographic information systems, technical innovation and society.
Scott Robinson
Professor and researcher with the Anthropology Department of the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Mexico City. PhD in Social Anthropology, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Author of various socio cultural anthropology studies.
Roberto Roggiero
Coordinator for the ICT Policy Monitor project (2001–2002) for the Association for Progressive Communications (APC). Postgraduate studies in population and sustainable development, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for Development Studies, India.
Ester Schiavo
Director of the Priority Research Programme ALDEA XXI and Associate Professor, Universidad Nacional de Quilmes. Architect, University of Buenos Aires (UBA). Specialist in urban planning, Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urban Development, UBA (1988). Researcher and university lecturer on urban issues relating to networks, technical innovation and the information society.
Uca Silva
Chilean communicator. Honours degree in communication, University of Ottawa, Canada, and master's degree in communication, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. Researcher with the Centro de Estudios Sociales Sur Profesionales and the Centre for Media Studies of the Faculty of Communication Sciences at the Universidad Diego Portales, where she teaches. Specialist in studies on ICTs, citizen communication and participation, communication and gender.
Adriana Vilela
Provincial Coordinator for TELAR–IEARN MA in Education and Development, Teachers' College, Columbia University, USA. Researcher and teacher in the pedagogy and applications of ICTs for learning. Manager of several educational projects on the use of the Internet in the school systems of Argentina and Latin America.
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Globalization is a process of aesthetic, cultural and economic change, characterized by a series of complex phenomena at both the global and the local levels – for example, there is an ongoing reconfiguration of the functions of states as the principal players in social policy and as the wielders of sovereign jurisdiction within their territories. Other phenomena that characterize the globalization context are the explosion of old patterns of government organization into an infinite number of national expressions and the growing role of large transnational enterprises as their international capital base expands.2
In parallel with this reshaping of international power relationships, in which the nation-state has yielded to a dominant order based on the disproportionate accumulation of wealth among the business elites of the so-called developed world, new social actors are appearing (women's movements, indigenous movements, youth movements, human rights organizations, etc.) as the expression of a struggle to enforce respect for their individual and collective rights through new concepts for reconstituting their identities and reshaping power relationships at the local and regional levels. These groups are seeking a more equitable social model, in the face of the obviously unjust distribution of material and symbolic goods and the state's abandonment of its leading role in social policies.
We may summarize these ideas of globalization as representing a new field of competition in which two different currents and philosophies collide: on one hand, the spreading imposition of a system governed by large transnational consortia and based on the principles of accumulation, utility, efficiency and productivity, and on the other hand, the resistance of local cultures and groups which, by actively reinventing their identities and ways of life, are striving to adapt and survive in the face of this dominant pattern. This process, at once global and local, tends to weaken national sovereignty, specifically that of developing countries, and to promote the concentration of wealth and knowledge among the elites of industrialized countries.3
All of these global and local phenomena are occurring in parallel with the gradual widening of the gap between rich and poor countries, between the rich elites and the impoverished majorities of countries that are classified, by agencies addressing the poverty problem, as poor or underdeveloped.4
This gap is not solely economic, and it cannot be measured adequately by indices of income per capita: it is also a symbolic divide, characterized by an unequal distribution of knowledge and of cultural goods that are essential for an individual, culture or society to act and survive in a globalized and highly competitive society. José Bengoa(1999: 24–25) speaks of the current distribution of cultural goods (in particular, education) in the following terms:
If the distribution of income is in general unsatisfactory, at both the international and the national levels, we must say that the distribution of knowledge is even worse. While the ratio between the lowest and highest quintiles internationally is 0.007 to 92.40 in terms of income distribution, a rough calculation using UNESCO data shows that expenditure on education per student in the lowest quintile is 0.001, compared to a concentration of educational expenditure of 95.5 in rich countries.
This gap between worlds, regions, countries and groups of people takes on complex dimensions because of persistent tendencies towards cultural exclusion, through ethnic, racial, gender5 or generational segregation. The consequence of this new global model of inequality and exclusion makes itself felt in the inability of marginal social groups and segments to participate in society.
The new information and communication technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, which are growing at a pace unprecedented in human history,6 are part, and indeed strategic instruments, of this inequitable concentration of symbolic and material incomes at the world level. Cyberspace and its "Web" constitutes a field that stimulates the unequal and inequitable exchanges that characterize the present-day world of globalization and exclusion;7 the selective distribution of this tool and its language produces and deepens the symbolic and material gap referred to above.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, use of this technology has spread widely in geographic terms, but it is of benefit only to specific groups: the national and regional elites.8 Thus, the first problem that the Internet poses in Latin America is that of equity: how to employ it as an instrument that has the potential to generate "equitable" exchanges of knowledge that will benefit the great majority of the population.
This situation of cultural exclusion points to the need for research into the social impact of the Internet within the cycles of cultural and economic production and consumption in Latin America and the Caribbean, a region in which we find, at the same time, the selective spread of the Internet, massive growth in the consumption of symbolic products or their messages via television, and steady impoverishment among the people, characterized by sharply declining incomes.9 From this viewpoint, research into the social impact of ICTs is useful for shedding light on the design and implementation of public policies relating to communications and Internet culture that will seek to reverse the dynamics and realities of cultural and material exclusion that characterize the region.
This is the historical context in which the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO, Ecuador) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada) decided to sponsor in July 1999 a competition for research projects on the social impacts of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean. This initiative led to the selection10 within the region of eight research projects on the social impact of ICTs in four priority development areas: (1) education and culture, (2) democracy and citizenship, (3) law and justice, and (4) methodologies for evaluating the social impact of the Internet.11 All of these themes stress the problem of equity and the need to close the technological and socioeconomic gaps that have traditionally excluded certain rural and urban groups in Latin America and the Caribbean.
This introductory paper does not attempt to summarize or describe the eight winning projects. We have focused on a limited number of critical issues12 common to all the research projects and articles that make up this book and that are vital for the study and design of public policies for communication and Internet culture consistent with the principle of social and cultural equity.
The reader will have the opportunity to learn about the eight research projects in the main body of this book, which also includes contributions from six specialists13 on Internet copyright issues, public policies relating to the Internet, a proposed franchising system for telecentres and an analysis of experience with the MISTICA virtual community in building an equitable and socially responsible Internet culture.
In the first part of this paper, entitled "The instrumental view of technology and the construction of a new habitus for the flow of knowledge", we contrast Internet practices that were identified in school projects (based on case studies from Chile and Colombia) and in governance at the municipal level (based on case studies from Buenos Aires, Montevideo and the Chilean towns of El Bosque, Puente Alto, Los Andes and Rancagua) with the concept of the Internet as a new symbolic field for the flow and exchange of cultural capital and as a system for distributing signs and symbols (knowledge) through an innovative education initiative (introduction of the Internet in the school system of Pinamar, Argentina), as well as the establishment of the MISTICA virtual community.
In the second theme for consideration, entitled "The Internet, a space for reproducing the dominant order and the emergence of new cultural propositions", we examine how the logic underlying traditional uses, viewpoints and power relationships is reproduced by introducing ICTs into schools and by experiments in local governance (analyzed in the case studies referred to above). We also look at the tensions that arise between this dominant philosophy and the emergence of a new way of representing and constructing social relationships mediated by the Internet, a contradictory dynamic that poses the principal challenges for managers of ICT projects and policies, in terms of incorporating them creatively into local spaces and cultures as a language and instrument for supporting social change. In this analysis, we include a case study that addresses the incorporation of ICTs into the schools of two communities (Tanti and Zapala) in Argentina.
Under the third theme, entitled "Challenges in building a fair and equitable legal framework for the Internet in Latin America and the Caribbean", we consider the importance of reinforcing the "right to communication and culture" and "Internet rights", as a starting point for the strategic changes that are needed in the juridical frameworks of Latin America and the Caribbean consistent with the construction of an Internet culture that respects personal and collective rights. We focus on the issue of ICTs in relation to the individual's right to privacy, problems of copyright law, and the right to communication as the foundation of a system of community telecentres.
The conclusion of this paper, entitled "The Internet: an environment and a tool for building a new political culture", presents some ideas about the need to promote alliances among civil society organizations, the academic world, government and the private sector, as a way to build an information society based on freedom of communication, citizen participation and collective access to knowledge. These ideas are the central thread of the conclusion.
A common finding of researchers who have examined the social impact of the Internet on schools as well as on the notions of citizenship and governance is the predominant tendency to make use of this tool in a merely "instrumental" or "technical" way, thereby losing sight of its potential as a language and system of representation through which young people and citizens create and recreate relationships and their visions of themselves and of society (see José Cabrera Paz on "The conceptual focus"). The predominant approach today neglects the social dimension and function of ICTs as part of the processes of producing, consuming and distributing knowledge.
Miguel Angel Arredondo, in his research report on "Introducing new information and communication technologies in two rural schools of central Chile" (see discussion on "the school routine and the use of ICTs"), argues that this lack of integration is reflected in the ritual practices that school authorities insist on as compulsory rules for students wanting to use computers (e.g. requiring children to cover their shoes with plastic bags before entering the computer room, and the steps they must take, turning off the equipment, covering it up, etc.). These habits reflect a view that makes the computer something sacrosanct, while in effect reducing it to just one more technical tool within the school system. He notes that priority is given to technical training (which converts the computer into a simple database tool) rather than stressing its potential as an instrument for communication and creativity.
José Cabrera, in his study of cultural practices with the Internet among school students in Bogota, describes in detail the failure to integrate the Internet into school life and how its functions have been reduced to those of a conventional school encyclopaedia (see his "The crisis of administered knowledge"), which merely perpetuates conventional teaching methods and learning approaches (such as slavishly memorizing texts without an investigative and critical mindset), frustrating efforts to encourage more participatory and creative learning. Reducing ICTs to a tool in this way loses sight of their potential for fostering new relationships, new teaching methods and new forms of communication and learning.
We find similar phenomena in terms of the instrumental use of the Internet in experiments with introducing ICTs at the local government level. The research team headed by Susana Finquelievich, which examined experiments for incorporating ICTs into local government in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, shows how the Internet has played only a very conventional role in disseminating information, as a kind of newsletter "promoting traditional governance", without attempting to foster a culture of citizen participation or "cyber citizenship" (see their "Does Buenos Aires have electronic government?").
Uca Silva, in a study on the social impact of new ICTs in the Chilean towns of El Bosque, Puente Alto, Los Andes and Rancagua, shows how the introduction of ICTs in these towns has merely served the internal needs of local governments to improve their political information or marketing services (see Silva on "The relationship between the municipality and the community").
As we can see, the instrumental approach to using ICTs is the predominant one, both in the school system and in local government, and it fails to appreciate the Internet as a new language or system of representation and communication: learning to use it requires the transmission of cultural or symbolic capital that will empower citizens and allow them to appropriate this strategic tool.14
The predominance of the instrumental view of the Internet as a tool divorced from the context of cultural change, power relationships and changes in symbolic systems and the circulation of knowledge15 means that we must develop and use new approaches, methodologies and teaching methods in order to make social use of ICTs. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the work of the team from the National University of Quilmes, coordinated by Ester Schiavo, which set out to create a new habitus16 for the citizen, i.e. new ways of perceiving, acting and participating in society through the innovative use of ICTs, by incorporating them into the school system (see their "The network society as a new field").
Another relevant experiment in this area was conducted by the MISTICA virtual community, managed by Fundación Redes y Desarrollo (FUNREDES, Dominican Republic), which has attempted to develop a "cyberculture" based on the principles and practices of solidarity and democratic participation among the members of this networking community. We have included a detailed description of this experiment in the present book.
As will be appreciated, there are two conflicting tendencies or approaches when it comes to introducing ICTs in schools or in local governance: the predominant approach, which regards the Internet as a technical tool, versus the approach that seeks to restore its potential as a system of communication and of constructing representations, new forms of learning and social participation. These two tendencies are part of a more complex process in which two currents collide, the one that produces conventional forms of domination or power and the other that subverts that order, as the sign of a new way of learning beyond the traditional education system, a new order that is based outside the school, in spaces where we can see the emergence of new forms of interaction and socialization (see José Cabrera on the "horizontal context"17). In the next section, we consider how these two currents meet.
The Internet does not produce change by itself, since it is surrounded by cultural, political and social orders and contexts and, generally, has been converted into an extension of existing power institutions. In the education field, Arredondo shows how the disciplinary system of the school is reproduced through the use of ICT and how this new language or tool is reduced to a means of exerting control and power within the school. The computer classroom becomes a strategic part of the school disciplinary system (e.g. when students are punished by barring them from the room).
On the other hand, this space becomes a point where the teacher loses authority, since the informal dynamics of interchange that it generates between students during computer practice tend to neutralize and diminish the teacher's capacity to control. In this respect, the virtual classroom is an arena in which students' playful pursuits collide with teachers' authority: it is an amorphous, ill-defined field, one without rules or a predetermined structure to order the process of learning and teaching. Arredondo and Cabrera see this failure to incorporate ICTs into school culture as a product of the lack of a comprehensive teaching philosophy, which is just part of the broader issue of bringing about in-depth change in the relationships and methods that apply to teaching and learning.
The virtual classroom, through the computer screen, becomes a way of escaping the teacher's control. The Internet marks the frontier between experience inside and outside the classroom, inside and outside the educational order. This point of conflict also marks the tension between the book-based culture, conceived as a form of pedagogical relationship and control over the student, and new forms of learning by navigating in cyberspace, which students pursue outside the school and away from the teacher's control. These practices combine televised codes, sound, reading and chat rooms as a new form of socialization and a way of building new identities (see José Cabrera on the "horizontal context").
This duality between the two opposing currents or philosophies requires a systematic effort at integration and synthesis that will incorporate the language of ICTs into school life and local culture, as part of a meaningful change in conventional teaching and learning methods. On this point, according to the evaluation by the research team coordinated by Paula Pérez and Adriana Vilela of successful experiments in incorporating ICTs into two rural schools in Argentina, success made itself felt in the ability to incorporate the Internet into local community life and to articulate education projects with efforts at improving local governance.
From this perspective, we may conclude that one of the factors for success in building new teaching methods to make use of the Internet depends on incorporating it into the local culture and on the responses that it offers to local needs (see Paula Pérez et al., on "Goal"18) through using it strategically in accordance with principles that will allow for the horizontal and equitable exchange of knowledge.
The same tension between traditional ways of exercising power and the emerging Internet culture, external to institutions, can be seen in the area of citizenship and local governance. The projects that addressed this issue arrived at a common conclusion: introducing ICTs into current models of electronic government merely serves to reproduce paternalistic local power relationships. Uca Silva shows how the web sites of the Chilean towns studied are used as a conduit for promoting the image of local leaders and in this way diluting the link between the municipal government and the citizenry, which should be strengthened by the introduction of ICTs (see Silva on "The relationship between the municipality and the community").
Along the same lines, the team coordinated by Susana Finquelievich describes how local government practices in Buenos Aires and Montevideo do not encourage the use of ICTs, since this instrument is reduced to the function of a bulletin board or newsletter (via the Web) and loses sight of the kind of citizen interaction that could be achieved through the social use of ICTs (see their "Does Buenos Aires have electronic government?" and "The social impact of ICTs in Buenos Aires and Montevideo: similarities and differences").
In school life we find anachronistic and paternalistic power relationships surrounding the use of ICTs. In his ethnographic study, Arredondo describes how, in rural schools in Chile, Internet access and learning also depends on bonds of understanding and dedication between students and teachers (see "Theme 2. Achievers and non-achievers: schools and the perpetuation of the digital divide"). This point brings us to the need for ideas and activities to promote citizen-oriented teaching methods for ICTs, based on a new school culture, as the basis for building more participatory and just societies in Latin America and the Caribbean. We shall delve further into this issue in the conclusion of this book.
The research sponsored by FLACSO and IDRC found that efforts to promote the use of ICTs in the schools and in local governments are often undertaken through isolated initiatives by groups of technical experts from different institutions. These initiatives are generally limited and kept within the traditional forms of power relationships (paternalism, promoting the image of local leaders, adapting technology to the school disciplinary system, etc.).
One way of neutralizing this tendency to reproduce the dominant culture through the instrumental use of ICTs is to foster projects that will articulate Internet use with integral approaches to local development and new citizen-oriented teaching methods (see Scott Robinson's "The components of a hybrid model").
A recurrent idea in much of the research, and one that arose throughout the discussions during the seminar at which the project results were presented, is the vital importance of consolidating the right to communication and culture, which includes Internet rights, as the key to ensuring equitable access to ICTs and fostering citizen participation. This is the central objective for the agenda of civil society organizations that promote social policies in different fields (health, education, local development, women's rights, cultural rights, etc.).
Uca Silva (see "Communication as participation") shows that an essential requirement for the exercise of citizenship rights is to use the right to communication as the basis for building links between local government and citizens, as a participatory relationship in which the citizen has the opportunity "to see, hear and speak", i.e. the right to communicate must be conceived as a horizontal relationship that allows citizen participation.
This new principle or right must therefore be made the basis for any rules governing the exchange of knowledge, the exercise of citizenship and the freedom of expression through ICTs. These ICTs are conceived as a tool and a language, the social application of which can provide horizontal support to the exercise and development of social policies (relating to education, health, social security, local development, scientific development, human rights, citizen participation, etc.: see Juliana Martínez on "The intersection between national policies and the Internet"). The adoption of a horizontal approach to communication, such as can be done through the Internet, would not only help to improve the level of political participation but would also make local governance (see Susana Finquelievich et al. in "Introduction: the reshaping of civil society") and social policies (see Juliana Martínez on the topic noted earlier) more transparent.
Yet, in promoting the right to communication and culture19 through Internet rights, we need to strike a balance between the free flow of knowledge and ideas (conceived as a collective right) and the individual's right to privacy (conceived as a guarantee that protects a person's sensitivities). The research team coordinated by Carlos Gregorio (see "The right to privacy, intimacy and personal data") warns of the danger facing citizens in societies and states that lack a democratic tradition with respect to the possible violations of fundamental human rights that may occur through the indiscriminate use of personal information (on health, economic status, political affiliation, religious beliefs, etc.). This hazard has its roots in the powerful and publicly accessible search engines now available over the Internet and in the availability of databases that include personal information. Based on a detailed analysis of legislative history, international legal instruments and various laws in countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, their research proposes ways of balancing the right to communication and culture (free circulation of information and knowledge, freedom of expression) and the right to privacy, intended to protect personal integrity.
Agustín Grijalva (see "Copyright and the Internet") addresses another issue relating to the balance between the free flow of knowledge and the exclusiveness of information. He notes that in developing countries, especially those in Latin America, there is a need to develop legal instruments that will provide for harmony between the right to communication (dissemination of knowledge) and laws governing copyright (which protect intellectual property in a work as an exclusive right). The author suggests that excessively strict limits on the dissemination of knowledge could become a straitjacket and could generate unequal relationships that would impede technological, educational and cultural development in the region, which means that a balance must be struck between the permitted uses of intellectual property20 and the enforcement of copyright laws.
Scott Robinson (see "The components of a hybrid model"), in explaining his proposal for a franchise system for community telecentres, defines the right to communication as a fundamental requirement for achieving meaningful and equitable public access to the Internet. Finally, Roberto Roggiero reinforces this viewpoint by noting the need to encourage development of Internet rights as a direct corollary of the right to freedom of expression. This objective is the foundation for the project on monitoring Internet policies in Latin America and the Caribbean, one of the goals of which is to strengthen social networks and alliances working to defend Internet rights (see his "The Latin America and Caribbean ICT Policy Monitor").
As we can see, a normative model for equitable access to and appropriation of the Internet must be based on a right to communication and culture that establishes a balance between individual rights, such as those to privacy or intellectual property, and social rights, such as that to the free dissemination of knowledge. A legal model of this kind, so essential to developing relationships of equity in access to knowledge, culture and the exercise of citizenship, can only be achieved by fostering strategic alliances among civil society organizations, the private sector, and national and local governments.21
The dominance of an instrumental approach to technology and the tendency to confine the use of ICTs within traditional power relationships have the effect of accentuating inequalities and forms of exclusion that are characteristic of Latin American and Caribbean societies.
To understand how the Internet reinforces unequal exchanges, exacerbating the gap between rich and poor countries, between the elites and the great uninformed masses, we must understand it as a language and tool that exists in the midst of different cultural and political contexts. It is essential to interpret it in each of these contexts and to ask: How does it work? To what end? To whose benefit? In other words, we must understand the Internet as a field of competing forces (composed of social groups that are subject to unequal power relations of domination and subordination) in which various social factors (state, private and civil society) interact.
Using the Internet as a language and tool that will allow for the equitable distribution of knowledge and the full exercise of citizenship (with respect to local or national governments) is feasible, provided we can strengthen civil society organizations (see Juliana Martínez on "Strengthening organizational capacities") and involve them in developing and defending social policies (education, health, human rights, etc.), while at the same time promoting strategic alliances for building a political culture and a notion of citizenship based on exercise of the right to communication and culture, which includes Internet rights, in accordance with principles of social and cultural equity. An undertaking of such magnitude will only be possible by promoting three parallel and convergent processes:
1. Constructing a new vision and habitus for the Internet, i.e. a new cultural proposition through projects to encourage the use and appropriation of ICTs as forms of social integration, adopting new and more participatory and horizontal teaching philosophies (projects that will necessarily involve qualitative changes both in schools and in governance, at the local, regional or national level)
2. Reinforcing the right to communication and culture and Internet rights in daily practice as well as explicitly including them in national and international legal frameworks
3. Forming strategic alliances between civil society and its organizations, the private sector and government (local, regional or national) in an effort to foster the social development of ICTs (in terms of both access and the use or social appropriation of this tool)
More detailed considerations on these three processes will be found in the conclusion at the end of this book.
1. Throughout this introductory paper we use the term information and communication technologies (ICTs) to embrace all technological and communications developments based on the Internet (videoconferencing, chat rooms, discussion lists, e-mail, web-based systems, etc.).
2. Saskia Sassen (1999), in his paper entitled "The impact of the Internet on sovereignty: Unfounded and real worries", explains: "New transnational regimes and institutions are creating systems that strengthen the claims of certain actors (corporations, the large multinational legal firms) and correspondingly weaken the position of smaller players and of states", (p. 189).
3. José Bengoa, in his unpublished article "Globalization, income distribution and human rights" (1999), explains: "The consequence of the recent processes of globalization in peripheral countries has consisted in a reduced ability on the part of states to control economic development within their countries (...) In many cases the governments of peripheral countries have made a great effort to place their national economies and their human and natural resources at the disposal of the forces and needs of the international market".
4. "World inequalities have been rising steadily for nearly two centuries. An analysis of long-term trends in world income distribution... shows that the distance between the richest and poorest country was about 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973 and 72 to 1 in 1972" (UNDP 1999: 38).
5. The 1997 secondary school enrolment rate for females in the least-developed countries was 24.6 percent compared to 66 percent for males in the same year; in developing countries as a whole, the rate for females was 54.8 percent compared to 83 percent for males; in industrialized countries, the rate was 96.3 percent for women and 100 percent for men (UNDP 1999: 232). These figures show the extent of gender inequity in access to education. If we were to study and measure ethnic exclusion in education, we would find similar or greater inequalities.
6. The Internet has the greatest growth capacity of any technology in human history. "The number of Internet hosts (computers with a direct connection) rose from less than 100,000 in 1988 to more than 36 million in 1998" (UNDP 1999: 58).
7. The following data from the UNDP report (1999: 62, 63) will help to understand the selective distribution of the Internet: 0.5 percent of the population of Southeast Asia (which accounts for 8.6 percent of the world population) are Internet users, while the figure for Arab countries (accounting for 4.5 percent of the world population) is only 0.2 percent.
8. In 1998 only 0.8 percent of people in Latin America and the Caribbean had Internet access, and 90 percent of these people were in the higher-income groups. Other poor regions of the world have similar or even lower percentages of Internet users (UNDP 1999: 63).
9. Martin Hopenhayn and Ernesto Ottone (1997: 278–79), citing statistics produced by Fernando Fajnzylber, show that "during the 1980s in Latin America... the number of TV sets per thousand inhabitants rose steadily, and the purchasing power of the urban minimum wage fell continuously... Latin America and the Caribbean, at first glance, have the greatest number of TV sets for every thousand people and at the same time the worst income distribution of any region in the world... For 1993, on average, the region had 165 TV sets per thousand people... East Asia and Oceania had an average of 59."
10. A jury of international experts selected the eight winning projects from the competition in early 2000, based on the criteria published in the international call for proposals which was posted on <http://www.flacso.org.ec>. The project results presented in this book have also been published at the same web site (see the detailed list of electronic sources at the end of this article).
11. One of the winning projects, entitled "Measuring qualitative and quantitative impacts: design and implementation of online registration systems for telecentres using Linux platforms", sponsored by the Colombian Association of Non-governmental Organizations for E-mail Communication, Colnodo, called for developing a registration system for evaluating the use and application of ICTs according to the variables of gender, education level, age, and physical distance between home and community centre, cross-referenced to variables on occupation or employment, level of access to communication media and user perceptions of the centre providing the service. This instrument is of great use to the coordinators of community centres that provide public ICT access, in conducting qualitative and quantitative evaluations for adjusting their service policies. On the other hand, it is also of great use to students interested in the social impact of the Internet. It is publicly available at <http://www.colnodo.apc.org/registro>.
12. On May 16 and 17, 2001, the International Seminar on Communication, Internet and Society in Latin America was hosted by IDRC and FLACSO-Ecuador, with the support of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), to discuss the results of the eight winning projects.
13. The editors are grateful for the contributions of Juliana Martínez, Daniel Pimienta, Luis Barnola, Scott Robinson, Agustín Grijalva and Roberto Roggiero, not only in the discussions during the seminar but also in preparing the papers included in this book.
14. This statement can be generalized for Latin America as a whole, remembering however that the case studies presented in this paper refer to pioneering experiments in the region on the application of the Internet to education and local government.
15. It is crucial to examine the social impact of new ICTs as part of the dynamics by which material and cultural capital is reproduced, the continuous conversion of material goods or assets into symbolic goods or assets, within social fields or social areas in which a set of actors and groups interact in correlation with forces that occupy different positions and represent different levels of capital accumulation (this thinking uses the theory of symbolic and material capital developed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, 1991: 114).
16. We use habitus in the sense defined by Pierre Bourdieu: "the system of arrangements... principles that generate and organize practices and representations... collectively orchestrated" (1991: 92). The project coordinated by Ester Schiavo, entitled "Towards the construction of habitus among the citizenry", based on an evaluation of local experiments with electronic government, has produced a multimedia tool or application intended to foster a habitus of citizen participation among children through their relationship with their local environment, as a way of overcoming the instrumental practices and vision of the Internet. This tool has been published at <http://www.telpin.com.ar/interneteducativa/proyectounq/unq/unq/web>.
17. This study provides a detailed ethnographic description of how the Internet is articulated with school discipline and the world of representations and symbols outside the school, among public school students in Bogota. It describes in detail the new approaches to reading, the new ways of building social relationships through chat rooms and, above all, the new forms of identity that young people are developing via the Internet.
18. This research study describes how students in a rural school in the Argentine community of Tanti (in the province of Córdoba) shared their experiences and developed joint activities with students in a similar institution in a distant part of the same country in undertaking a local reforestation project. A similarly successful experiment was undertaken by another group of students in a school in the town of Zapala (in the province of Neuquén), who established a relationship with students abroad that resulted in incorporating ICTs into the system for learning English. A further example is the use of the Internet by students in a school on the Argentine coast to share experiences from their efforts to save penguins threatened by oil spills.
19. We understand "the right to communication and culture" to mean the guarantee that citizens can be heard and that their opinions will be taken into account in governance and decision-making in their community or country, and that they can receive transparent information on social actions and policies that local or national authorities undertake on their behalf. This guarantee also includes the right to political participation through free access to information and knowledge. Implementing this also calls for effective exercise of "Internet rights", a collective guarantee that includes the possibility of physical access to ICTs as well as learning and social appropriation.
20. Grijalva, in his analysis of international trends relating to copyright and international legal instruments, such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty and the Andean Decision on Copyright, describes how commercial interests in developed countries produce pressure to increase protection for intellectual property. This situation threatens the balance that should exist between the dissemination of intellectual property (right to communication and culture) and ownership rights over intellectual authorship. He explains that only with such a balance between these two rights is it possible to ensure a positive flow of knowledge and to encourage technological and cultural innovation.
21. Juliana Martínez (see "Building alliances") and Scott Robinson (see "The components of a hybrid model") both stress the need for building strategic alliances in order to implement social policies and programmes related to ICTs. Susana Finquelievich and her team warn of the need to enlist the cooperation of civil society organizations, the academic world and government in the preparation of social and technological policies for cities (see "ICTs, democracy and social capital").
Bengoa, J. (1999) Globalización, distribución de ingresos y derechos humanos. Unpublished paper.
Bonilla Urvina, M. (2000) Investigando las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (NTIC) como campos de lucha simbólica en América Latina y el Caribe. Paper presented at the Pan Lac 2000 meeting, IDRC. Ottawa, September. <http://www.idrc.ca/pan/panlacbondoc1.htm>.
Bonilla Urvina, M. (2000) Las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (NTIC): campos de lucha simbólica en América Latina y el Caribe. Revista Novamérica, 87 (September): 44–7.
Bonilla Urvina, M. (2001) Las nuevas tecnologías de información y comunicación (NTIC), herramientas de empoderamiento simbólico en América Latina. In: Cuadernos de Iberoamérica, globalización y nuevas tecnologías: nuevos retos y nuevas reflexiones. Madrid: Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos para la Educación la Ciencia y la Cultura.
Bourdieu, P. (1985) ¿Qué significa hablar? Madrid: Ediciones Akal.
Bourdieu, P. (1991) El sentido práctico. Madrid: Taurus Ediciones.
Bourdieu, P. (1998) La dominación masculina. In: P. Bourdieu, A. Hernández and R. Montesinos (eds), La masculinidad, aspectos sociales y culturales. Quito: Ediciones ABYA-YALA.
Conway, J., S. Bourque and J. Scott (1999) El concepto de género. In: Género conceptos básicos. Lima: Gender Studies Programme of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru.
Foucault, M. (1980) Vigilar y castigar. Mexico: Siglo XXI Ed.
Hopenhayn, M. (1996) Los mil reflejos de la globalización en la subjetividad. Unpublished paper.
Hopenhayn, M. and E. Ottone (1997) La dimensión cultural en los nuevos escenarios de globalización: Una perspectiva de América Latina. In: M. Liana et al., La invención y la herencia: Globalización, modernización y equidad en América Latina. Santiago: Cuadernos ARCIS/LOM.
Laclau, E. (1996) Emancipación y diferencia. Buenos Aires: Ed. Ariel.
Martínez, J. (2000) Visión social de la Internet y políticas públicas: Ideas para debatir estrategias de incidencia desde la sociedad civil. Paper presented at the Pan Lac 2000 meeting, IDRC. Ottawa, September. <http://www.idrc.ca/pan/panlacjulaant.htm>.
Sassen, S. (1999) The impact of the Internet on sovereignty: Unfounded and real worries. Paper presented at the symposium "Understanding the Impact of Global Networks in Local Social, Political and Cultural Values". Dresden, February.
Scott, J. (1999) El género: una categoría útil para el análisis histórico. In: Género conceptos básicos. Lima: Gender Studies Programme of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Pontificia Universidad Católica of Peru.
UNDP (1999) Human development report. New York: United Nations Development Programme.
<http://www.flacso.org.ec/TIC> This web site provides detailed information on the competition "Research Projects on the Social Impacts of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Latin America and the Caribbean" and offers the electronic version of the eight winning projects and the five additional papers included in this book, which were presented and discussed at the International Seminar on Communication, Internet and Society in Latin America held in Quito, Ecuador, on May 16 and 17, 2001.
"Navigators and castaways in cyberspace: Psychosocial experience and cultural practices in school children's Internet". Project presented by the Programa de Formación en Educación of the Universidad de Los Andes, Bogota, Colombia. Coordinator: José Cabrera Paz.
"Introducing new information and communication technologies in two rural schools of central Chile: An ethnographic approximation." Project presented by the Programa Interdisciplinario de Investigaciones en Educación (PIIE), Santiago, Chile. Coordinator: Miguel Angel Arredondo Jeldes.
"Learning from the pioneers: Best practices as exemplified in the TELAR network". Project presented by Fundación Evolución, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Coordinators: Adriana Vilela and Paula Pérez.
"The social impact of introducing ICTs in local government and public services: Case studies in Buenos Aires and Montevideo". Project presented by the Asociación Civil Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina, Coordinator: Susana Finquelievich.
"The social impact of information and communication technologies at the local level". Project presented by SUR, Centro de Estudios Sociales y Educación. Santiago, Chile. Coordinator: Uca Silva.
"The Internet and local governance: Towards the creation of a community habitus". Project presented by the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Coordinator: Ester Schiavo.
"Measuring qualitative and quantitative impacts: Design and implementation of online registration systems for telecentres using Linux platforms". Project presented by Asociación Colombiana de Organizaciones No Gubernamentales para la Comunicación Vía Correo Electrónico (Colnodo), Bogota, Colombia. Coordinator: Julián Casasbuenas.
"The impact of new information and communication technologies on privacy rights". Project presented by the Instituto de Investigación para la Justicia, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Coordinator: Carlos Gregorio.
"Copyright and the Internet". Paper presented by Agustín Grijalva, Professor of Economic Law, Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Ecuador campus.
"Towards a model of franchises for community telecentres in Latin America". Paper presented by Scott S. Robinson, Department of Anthropology, Universidad Metropolitana Iztapalapa, Mexico.
"The Internet and socially relevant public policies: Why, how and what to advocate?" Paper presented by Juliana Martínez, Fundación Acceso, San José, Costa Rica.
"The social impacts of ICTs in Latin America and the Caribbean: The MISTICA virtual community and the OLISTICA observation network". Paper presented by Daniel Pimienta, Fundación Redes y Desarrollo (FUNREDES, Dominican Republic), and Luis Barnola, International Development Research Centre (IDRC, Canada).
"Introductory notes for the analysis of ICT policies in Latin America and the Caribbean". Paper presented by Roberto Roggiero, Association for Progressive Communications (APC).
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Do we know what we are doing with the powerful tools we've created? Or do we just know how to create them? (Howard Rheingold, Awakening to Technology's Impact2)
The Internet was born as a way for the military to communicate during the depths of the Cold War. Just as with the first electronic computer, the Internet was introduced essentially at the behest of US military interests of the time. For two decades after its creation in 1969 the Net was a luxury item accessible only to academic communities in the developed world. Then, in the early 1990s, the creation of the World Wide Web launched it on a spectacular growth path unparalleled in the history of any other communication technology.
A cultural phenomenon like this that has promised so much in such a short time is bound to generate expectations that extend far beyond its utilitarian uses. The Internet serves as a perfect object of desire, one that promises us everything we could want: imagination, creativity, wealth, information, relationships. The Internet is clearly much more than a technological object – it represents a cultural shift that affects all the dimensions of a community, a group or a society. The public schools in our countries are generally seen as wanting in terms of planning, resources, teachers or initiatives. When a technology that promises abundance is introduced in the schools, it generates expectations of a whole new magnitude and unleashes a complex chain of actions and ideas about the object itself and the cultural experience that it represents. Many people will come to think that the Internet is the answer to all their needs. Others will think the contrary. Looking at the Internet in terms of school culture, we can see sharp generational differences in people's technological skills and a contradiction between the way teachers view education and the way their students experience it. Every person's previous experience in the process of technological socialization builds a different context for appropriating Internet culture. While to an outside observer the behaviour of a class of students in front of the computer screen may appear homogeneous, what happens inside each user's head when relating to the Internet will have different meanings. Some pupils, those who have some background and are able to move nimbly through the "media circuit", come ready and prepared to travel via the Net, and by fusing themselves totally with the machine they become skilled navigators. Other pupils, and most of their teachers for that matter, overwhelmed by the technical challenges, with little training in technological fields and with few tools in their cultural capital, will quickly despair and, like shipwrecked sailors, become castaways. Many of these young castaways, pressured to move with the cultural current that is sweeping their classmates along, will struggle to keep up and will sometimes achieve unexpected success. In a sense, these two groups make up a complex scenario that gives rise to some important questions. What is really happening here? How do they see themselves in relation to the Internet? What does digital technology mean to their daily lives? What does it have to do with the meaning of school?
In the end, perhaps, it boils down to a single question: what do young students do with computers within the symbolic limits of school culture, and vice versa? The answer is probably not as much as they could, perhaps less than they would like and surely more than they think. These are the issues that we shall attempt to address here, from a psychosocial viewpoint using ethnographic tools, in order to appreciate the successes and the setbacks that navigators and castaways experience in the "hypermedia" realm of the Internet.
Most of the theoretical and practical approaches to new media such as the Internet are encumbered by a predominantly quantitative focus, rooted in market research. When it comes to social studies, particularly in the communications field, such research finds powerful support in the tradition of "impact studies" (Orozco 1995: 191). This basically quantitative approach has produced census figures and information on global trends, reception coverage, available equipment and other highly useful data for configuring a global panorama for the appropriation of ICTs (information and communication technologies) in the region. Yet, apart from these practical uses, as many researchers have shown (Martín Barbero 1987, 1996; García Canclini 1995; Orozco 1995), impact research and quantitative methodologies are limited in their ability to reveal the profound social impacts of the changes that the media (old and new) produce in different contexts, and the logics governing their use. For example, it is important to know not only how many people watch television, listen to the radio and use computers, or how much they like certain content, but also why, and what happens to the consuming audience (and to the technological objects consumed).
In a context such as that of our country, Colombia, which is riddled with social and cultural discrepancies marked by inequality, inequity and social conflicts, defining the form in which computer technology is appropriated and used may require us to recognize some unconventional aspects of "cultural rationality" that are often openly opposed to contemporary scientific and technological rationality. This puts us in a situation of conflict when it comes to appropriating the new ICTs, and it is on this basis that we have formulated our research question: what are the principal psychosocial experiences and cultural practices generated by Internet use among students in the public secondary schools of Bogota?
We adopted a focus that represents a meeting between the psychosocial and the cultural spheres. The convergence inherent in the question was designed to make explicit the blurring of frontiers in the social sciences field. The psychosocial perspective of the question indicates the complex theoretical approach in which personal experience is connected with social experience, i.e. the subject in his individuality is connected with the subject in his interrelationship. The Internet is a network of interpersonal and intergroup contacts, and in the relationships that derive there – from the field that we shall be exploring here – new facets have begun to emerge in the construction of individual and collective identity.
One of the key aspects of social psychology, and one that allows us to relate significant practices with group and individual experiences, is the theory of "social representations". From the pioneering work of Moscovici et al. (1986), through the constructivist contributions of J. Ibáñez (1992, 1994), the concept of social representations has opened up a promising field for linking problems that straddle the limits of various disciplinary traditions (Banchs 1994). In asking about the ways new technologies are appropriated, we were in effect asking about the building of representational structures and about social perceptions and shared meanings. In interpreting the information collected, we assumed that social representation is articulated in a "story" that we can interpret, as a narrative structure that organizes its meanings in different ways and interconnects them as hypertext. Thus, we have interpreted them as we would hypertext: we went through the maze of data establishing meaningful relationships, trends and groupings, on the basis of which we produced the interpretation presented here.
We are also convinced that using a technology like the Internet involves relating not so much with an object as with the universe of cultural representations3 with which that technology is articulated in students' social life. The Internet is an object that is appropriated within a relational universe where other objects, spaces and practices "resignify" it.4 To consider the impact of the Internet on the lives of youngsters is to delve into the structure of meanings in which the Internet is inserted and the jumble of relationships that are established with it. To do this, we reconstructed the "narratives" that the students gave us about their relationships with the Internet. In this way, we assumed that what happens with the Internet relates both to the use of the object and to the meanings with which it is represented. Using the Internet is both a practical and an interpretive operation. The Internet is structured as a relational technology. When a technological object is incorporated into a cultural space, a structure of relationships implied in its use and meaning is also incorporated. The Internet is not only a communicative format or tool, it is a communicative–cultural structure that reorganizes the experience of knowledge and of information, the practices and symbology of human interaction. Taking this concept as our basis, we have assumed that the Internet is incorporated into a space of cultural relationships whereby the object is "resignified" and in turn transforms the spaces that receive it. How does this happen? What meaning does it hold? These are the questions that guided our research. Given the multidimensional nature of the object of study, the school setting was not the only one that we considered in our research, but it was a central focus in terms of organizing our understanding. The interpretation that we present here relates to two points in time: in the first, we conducted an investigation of the Internet in the school itself. Daily practices, educational experiences, teaching cultures and organizational dynamics were the key vectors in the interpretation. As well, recognizing "the transverse structure of the narratives" of the players (the fact that their development always relates to several contexts), we explored practices and meanings that define the interaction of students with the Internet in spaces beyond the school (not in the sense of school as a physical space but rather as a symbolic space). This viewpoint, which refocused our initial perspective in the study, emerged from one broad conclusion: what happens with the Internet in the school culture is defined, to an extent that is difficult to calculate, by what happens outside the school in the social and cultural spaces in which students live, in the places where vital meanings are constructed: those involving peers, context, mass media, cultural industries and technological socialization.
The psychosocial perspective was essential to our efforts at understanding. In addition, we also made use of two specific concepts: the "cultural capital" of Bourdieu (1985, 1990) and the "consumption" of Douglas and Isherwood (1990). The notion of cultural capital helped us to read the relational dynamics of the students, based on symbolic experiences accumulated in their cultural context. The concept of cultural capital, understood to be symbolic as well, is not that of a substance but of a social relationship. As interpreted in this research, social capital functions as the symbolic experience that a subject has accumulated and can "invest". This capital is a function of the social space in which each individual exists, and it is there, in the interrelationships that constitute it, that it will be accepted or rejected, and where the individual will either enjoy power and mobility or find himself beset by limitations and exclusions.5 The concept of consumption, on the other hand, arose from the interpretive needs of the study. It allowed us to think about the social value of objects consumed and to understand more clearly the way in which they take on meaning in the social world. As García Canclini (1995: 42) puts it, restating Douglas and Isherwood, "consumption is the set of sociocultural processes in which products are appropriated and used". Consumption is not an unthinking act, nor does it signify docility and passivity on the part of the consumer: it is a deliberate, symbolized act that communicates and integrates with others. "Consumption is defined by its capacity to make sense" (Douglas and Isherwood 1990: 77). It is without doubt an act of shared meaning (García Canclini 1995: 45). Computers, the functioning of the Internet, digital objects – all have multiple uses that are particular and differentiated. They have a function and they therefore serve as a tool: they make it possible to operate within one or several given aspects of a setting. Yet, beyond their functions, in the "world of goods", objects "serve to make and maintain social relations" (Douglas and Isherwood 1990: 75). This is the proper perspective for understanding a technology like the Internet. What began to emerge from Rand Corp. in the mid-1960s was not only a computational structure for establishing relationships and information flows for verifying disasters, it also – unintentionally – created a system for communicating the domestic successes of a country's scientists and the exploits of its warriors.6
A methodology must always be selected from a range of possibilities. Consistent with the perspective of interpreting "representations", we have opted for a qualitative approach, in the hope of "positioning" ourselves within the subjects' universe of meanings. Although that might turn out to be a fond hope rather than a real possibility, the attempt to work within the setting of the daily life of the players and with a high degree of interaction gave us the opportunity, if not to get inside their symbolic universe, at least to share it in interaction with our own, and on that basis to interpret it. The qualitative perspective that we adopted has an ethnographic focus (Goetz and Le Compte 1988) adjusted to the circumstances of the study and to the nature of the research object. The qualitative ethnographic model in this project is designed to "reconstruct the narrative with which the subjects construct the meaning of their relationship with the Internet". As Gergen (1996: 232) says: "We do not merely recount our own lives as stories: there is also an important sense in which our relationships with others are lived in narrative form." In other words, telling who we are, what we want and what we do, how we make it possible to be, to want and to do. "Our stories are the universe of meaning in which we represent ourselves and in which we can be represented." Hence, the construction and interpretation of players' narratives, reconstructed with different instruments, has been the key strategy for establishing the most systematic approximation possible to the research question that we set for ourselves.
This research had two kinds of subject population. The first consisted of a group of approximately 30 high schools, most of them public, which were investigated directly in order to establish a global approximation.7 The second group, the main one, consisted of 6 public institutions, selected from among the larger group. One of these, a privately run school that received official funding, was in the process of becoming public. Two of the schools are located in low-income districts (one of them, in particular, is located next to the historic centre of the city) characterized by poor public services and high rates of violence. Two other schools are in "lower middle-class" neighbourhoods, but have a highly diversified student body drawn mainly from low-income households. The remaining two schools are located in different middle-class districts, one commercial and the other residential. One of these latter schools is exclusively for boys: it offers a technical curriculum and excellent physical and organizational conditions and is well equipped technologically. The course of studies is divided into areas of specialization, including one relating to systems (from which the subjects for that school were selected). We selected groups of boys and girls in grade 10 from each of the six target schools (which went up to grade 11). Of those responding to the questionnaire, 54 were male and 20 were female, and their average age was 16 years. A focus group of about 12 users was formed at each school. Slightly more than 70 percent of these completed the navigation sessions and the series of extracurricular group discussions.
It has been calculated that Latin America will have an Internet coverage rate of 12 percent by 2005. Comparatively speaking, this rate is fairly low (Valdiosera 2001). Colombia currently has 1 percent of its population online.8 Most of these people, 55 percent, are upper-class, and 40 percent are middle-class. At the beginning of 2001 the country began to implement a flat rate for connection and to reduce taxes on equipment purchases, as part of a programme to lower the cost of Internet connectivity and expand its use. In the education field, the capital city has experienced a real take-off since 2000 in the REDP programme, intended to provide public high schools with Internet connection facilities.9 The way this big network was implemented has been criticized by the education community, and in many of the institutions we found that perceptions as to its impact varied from satisfaction to frustration. The last major educational meeting devoted to the issue of computers in city schools showed clearly that introduction of ICTs was well behind schedule, despite the great enthusiasm and high expectations that people had about the programmes that might be developed. Using this information, the contacts we made, and the observations and interviews from our fieldwork, we were able to establish an overall inventory of profiles showing how the Internet is functioning in a fair number of public schools in Bogota.10
Using the information obtained from the institutions, primarily from the principals and teachers, we established an overall inventory of problems and possibilities with respect to Internet technology. Preparation of the profiles relied largely on the perceptions of the players themselves, rather than on any empirical testing, which was not our objective.11
Lack of equipment and slow and inefficient maintenance service are major problems. The equipment is frequently offline because of minor problems that often take months to fix. Much equipment was lost to theft in some of the crime-prone areas. Apart from the REDP programme computers, most of the equipment is obsolete. The current official programme has had to postpone equipment delivery repeatedly, and this has led to uncertainty and scepticism in the institutions. Organization and management of the equipment in the schools is very inefficient. The equipment is often kept locked up and unavailable for use, for fear of damage or pilfering or because of administrative complications.
Resistance and fears, hidebound teaching methods and the lack of teacher training have conspired to produce institutions with no educational concept of using ICTs. Given the fragmented nature of the curriculum, a project design with no real applicability, and an average of three or four students per computer with only two hours of computer time per week, the institutional setting is not very conducive. The crisis in staff management and professional tension between the central agencies and the public schools are part of the organizational constraints facing work with ICTs. Teacher training has been focused on handling office suites, and the virtual training sessions that are now beginning to be offered have not been very successful, either because of the way the system is organized, the content and methodologies used, or the fragility of the software in use. This means that in schools where the technology has recently been introduced, even though it falls far short of needs, it is underused. The cultural perspective of teachers with respect to ICTs, generational differences and the difficult and complex environmental, community and working conditions in which they must operate have produced a group that is very leery of working with ICTs. Internet penetration prior to the REDP project was minimal and was not sufficiently documented. Despite a few isolated efforts at innovation, the few experiments that can be observed are still in their initial stages and are reduced to viewing the Internet as a source of information only, ignoring the possibilities of its other, more "collaborative" resources. The contrast with high-quality private education is glaring in terms of projects, equipment and Internet teaching. The current approach of REDP is still tenuous and has a number of shortcomings, and despite the government's intentions it has had minimal impact on conditions in the schools, large numbers of whose students live in conditions of poverty, violence and social marginalization.
The great expectations that institutions have for the new equipment, the tremendous and sustained effort that the city's education authorities are making, the teacher training plan and, above all, the open and innovative attitude of most of the teachers make up what we might call the "available capital" for improving teaching conditions and institutional projects for incorporating ICTs creatively into public education.
We started by conducting an overall survey of the way the Internet was being used in some 120 public high schools. With this information, we conducted direct observations in 30 schools.12 Our main objective was to select a group of 6 institutions with significant Internet activities in terms of appropriation, equipment, student experience and functioning connectivity.13 We then set up focus or discussion groups with which we delved further into the most significant aspects of the study. As a result of frequent technical breakdowns and shifting school schedules, we found that in order to find a room with proper Internet equipment we often had to work with the students in places outside the schools.14 We pursued a participatory process of observation both in the school and in the extracurricular sessions. We interacted with the children through chat rooms over the Internet, and in several cases we arranged for audiovisual self-reporting on the progress of their navigation.15 The Internet work itself was divided into "guided" and "free" navigation sessions. In the guided sessions, students carried out activities proposed by the researchers, while in the free sessions they could devote themselves to navigating without any restriction on the contents they were accessing.16 We created a web page for publicizing the project and collecting information from participants through free and open chats. We also posted a daily newspaper on "my experience with the Internet", and we prepared collective stories on technological life and conducted an online survey of teachers and students.17 We interviewed teachers and students in depth on a number of issues relating to the context, the institutions and their personal experience.
The most important, reliable and meaningful information came from the interviews, the discussion groups and the navigation sessions: we organized that material into a group of narratives from which we could detect emerging categories, and we classified the most important themes in order to establish trends and interpretations.
This report presents most of the main findings from the study, although for reasons of space we have had to pass over some that were just as significant.18 The presentation is divided into two settings: the "school context", defined by the significant frameworks that the school imposes on representation and the use of the Internet, and the "horizontal context", which refers to the way the Internet inevitably functions in interrelation with non-school thinking and spaces. The classification of these contexts is of course analytic19 and, in the end, their dynamics and meanings are constantly intersecting.
Every school is a microcosm of relations and conflicts, each of its spaces consisting of ruptures and continuities, diversity and uniformity. We have a public school that is conservative but heterogeneous, insufficiently connected with its surroundings and facing a real crisis in defining its goals. It is a school with enormous organizational problems and a fragmented pedagogical perspective. The fact that the student body is low-income and urban gives it certain identifying traits and leads to a series of essentially shared experiences. There is no single type of school. Nor is there any one way of being a teacher or student, much less any clear and consistent approach to producing learning. Nevertheless, the problems in terms of organization, teaching and interpersonal relations show degrees of continuity and similarity among the different public institutions examined in the study. Digital technology is being introduced, then, into a school that finds itself in a profound organizational and pedagogical crisis. The Internet has arrived in its midst, as did earlier technologies, as an imperative, without any textbook for understanding it and with only an abstract promise of resolving fundamental problems. This has generated excessive expectations, considerable dismay and recurrent frustrations. Once the object was there, available, exuberant and tangible, it offered a number of possibilities: the process of trying out alternatives created doubts, resistance and disappointment. Digital technology, as a relational space, has arrived in the school and is transforming it: it will serve either to reinforce the school's traditional experience and making its crises more visible, or to foster innovation and institutional development. With this technology, the school will either renew itself or break apart, it will think of itself as a unified project or it will disintegrate as an institution. These are the two possible extremes, and between them some significant variants emerge. Although the Internet is a very recent technology for the country's public schools, its impact can be seen at various levels of school life. The complexity that the school world represents, the symbolic forms it takes and experiments with, and the ideas and practices that give it meaning constitute the key places where the transforming impact of "Internet technoculture" makes itself felt.
No tradition is intrinsically inadequate. It is only from the perspective of modernity, with its symbolic flows of constant change, that tradition comes to be regarded as an experience that must be overcome. The school world represents a contradiction in this respect: even in its modern form it has served as a place for conserving traditional practices. It is the tradition of the teachers, of the organization and of the community itself that has defined what the school is to be and how it should conduct itself. This is in fact a major part of its mission as a cultural organization. We may say that contemporary society looks to computers, much more than to other technologies, as a source of renewal. When introduced into the cultural space of the traditional school, into its universe of practices and rituals, technology has a number of impacts. In every institutional setting the introduction of the Internet is producing a dynamic in which various viewpoints about Internet technoculture converge. We shall go further into the main impacts that the Internet produces in school culture. The set of dynamics described represents an interpretive structure. And although we have based our interpretation on trends, it is not always easy to identify, in the practice of each school, the pure characteristics of a single class of behaviour in the face of the educational and cultural process produced by the introduction of a digital technology. On the contrary, we frequently find the school swinging between different dynamics in its relationship with the technology.
In thinking about the meaning of the Internet in the school, we must first think about the meaning of the school itself. School culture, its codes and representations, is certainly not the most important thing in the symbolic space in which students move. The media and peer groups have increased their power as a socializing frame of reference, one with which the school is frequently out of tune. "Youngsters", in the various social and cultural manifestations of this heterogeneous group, have begun to bring their own symbolic capital to the school, and the school is often unprepared for it. Children want to behave as kids in school, and yet the school seems to have room only for "students". One teacher in the school that had the greatest sociocultural problems in the study said something very revealing in this regard: "It is here that kids find their vital space because they cannot find it at home. They don't come here to learn – that is the last thing that interests them. They come here because this is where their friends are. When a kid is expelled from school, it is a fatal blow. The worst thing that can happen to a student is to be expelled – they will put up a real fight, they will weep; it's really striking. Or for a student to be told that he's not going to pass is the end of the world because he won't be there with his classmates at graduation. Kids feel that this is the only promotion they are ever likely to have in their lives, it's the only time that they will be putting on the cap and gown" (T-1).
The most meaningful aspect of school life for youngsters is not the learning experience or their role as students but the fact that they are "kids" together. It is a place where their relationship with their peers and their shared cultural codes are the central point of reference and give meaning to their lives. More than for any other player, their role is ambiguous and under constant tension: they are at the centre of school life and at the same time at its margin. Perhaps our school does not yet have a way out of this dilemma: we have more accumulated knowledge about what youngsters need in terms of school culture (how many basic subjects mastered, how many minimum codes, how many skills, etc.), but we do not yet know what the school needs and can handle in terms of youth culture.20
We frequently meet youngsters who have learned to structure their life's goals outside the school or despite it. Even if they do not actually drop out and abandon school, institutional life holds no meaning for them in the terms that the school has set for itself. For them, the school is not a meaningful world of knowledge – on the contrary, it is often viewed only as an abstract requirement for some future that they will never achieve and that has for them ever less credibility. While for most of the children in the schools we studied school life had little meaning for the future they saw for themselves, in one school the discrepancy between schooling and future prospects was especially sharp. A teacher at that school, well informed and well respected in the education community, told us: "When I arrived, I found myself in a completely new world. I found myself among a group of kids who wanted to get through school but for whom school had no meaning. I had the impression that they were coming to school because there was nowhere else to go, and that schools like these did not meet their expectations.... They come from very poor backgrounds, where their family, or whatever they have by way of a family, does nothing to create sound habits and does not see the school as holding any possibilities for personal or academic growth. The only thing the family hopes for is that the kids might one day get a diploma that would allow them to find a better-paying job than their fathers have, but what we have found in fact is that the kids end up doing the same kind of work as their fathers, and under even worse conditions" (T-4).
Teenagers have constructed various spaces of "symbolic recognition" that show how the modern school has lost its meaning for them. Music, sports, the media, social affirmation within their age group, their audiovisual consumption patterns and their strategies of social expression constitute a parallel world of knowledge and in many cases stand in contradiction to school culture. One youngster told us: "It's a real sacrifice for me to study because I would much rather be out in the street fooling around with my friends. I like to do things that are fun, but when I buckle down to studying I am always bored" (S-37). The hedonistic tendencies of youth, the way they manage their time, their focus on today and their strong preference for being in a group constitute symbolic records of what concerns them most in their lives.
For other social sectors, where for the most part children are enrolled in private education,21 the school by contrast represents a place that is well articulated with its social setting. There, youngsters' plans and ambitions for their future life are woven tightly and coherently into their social structures and they have no difficulty in projecting their futures. This is the counterpart to the "school in crisis" that we frequently encountered in this study. For two groups in this study, in particular for one hybrid public–private school, school life represents a place for achievement, recognition and real social advancement. And this happens for several reasons: because of the school, because of the sense of self that it communicates (through its practices and ritualization), because of the fact that there are sectors of the community, family spaces and middle-class cultural contexts that value the school for everything they believe to be true about it, or because they have found in their own lives that the school has been a positive factor for social advancement.
Every age experiences its own outlook, which, at each social moment, constitutes a "field of vision", of objects that are discovered and objects that are hidden. The contemporary field of vision that is being built in the life of the Internet is multiple, disorderly and fragmented. It has gained in depth, territory and angles, while it has lost unity and has become dispersed. There are today a greater number of objects to look at and various ways of looking at them. And youngsters represent the Internet to themselves in this way, as a space where everything can be seen and everything can be shown. It is frequently represented as a space without censorship, available to anyone who wants to fantasize by looking at objects of desire. One girl told us: "With the Internet, you have nearly the whole world in your computer, and you can investigate a lot of things that you never thought you could..., even the Sea of Japan, which is way over there" (S-23). As a result of this "symbolic availability" with which they represent the Internet, youngsters see it as a space where everything is visible to the navigator, whether he goes looking for it or simply stumbles across it. Increasingly socialized in an audiovisual culture, kids find in the visibility that they attribute to the Internet a space of great cultural gratification. This representation of the Internet's visibility is consistent with an elemental experience in the urban cultural life of these kids: the city's shopping malls. Regardless of their social group, their institution or their interests, most of the youngsters in the study said they were frequent visitors to these places. One girl boasted of how familiar she was with them: "My favourite places are shopping malls, I like to go there a lot, even if just to look, I just like them, I can't say why, they enchant me. I feel good and every time I go I find something new, I know where everything is and if I see that they have replaced a pair of jeans with new ones, of a different colour, say, well I take that all in" (S-27).
The symbolism that the shopping centre radiates is: "Come on in, see it all!" It is built in such a way as to enhance the visibility not only of things but of people too – it is the perfect place to "see and be seen". Children see each other, they show themselves off, they form circles of mutual recognition and social interaction, they ogle the wares, imagining them their own, they rekindle their fantasies of possessing them – but since they have little money, they rarely buy anything. In a place dedicated to consumption, youngsters who have no real purchasing power reinterpret the consumer dynamics of the mall, converting it into a place for socializing and interrelating with others. Now on the Internet they behave just as they do in the shopping malls – they want to see and be seen. In the chat rooms they seek out relations and advertise their own availability for a relationship. They surf through the pages of brand products that identify them as a generation of consumers, even though very few of them have ever bought anything over the Internet.22 They indulge in the fiction of buying online, even while they complain of the advertising overload that swamps web pages.23 From this viewpoint, their experience has much of the "intentionality" that Barthes (1985: 158) attributes to media culture: "Mass culture is a machine for showing desire. 'Here is what must interest you,' it says, as if it has guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves."
Just as in the shopping centre, children navigate without any fixed direction – every object is a "possible desire", every place is a point of reference. They have no starting point and no goal to reach, only ceaseless to-ing and fro-ing. It is this sense of drift that shopping centres were designed for: every corner of the place invites us to linger, to wander from one spot to another without ever leaving. On the Internet, every link is a temptation to move on to another link and to stay online, to find ever newer and more enticing objects of desire. As one boy put it, "You reach another site and you find it interesting navigating in another theme. Let's say you're looking for stuff on football. Then you find something that sends you to another page and you end up learning about tennis or something else. If you're really keen, you'll stick with football. But sometimes you start out looking on the Web and you find something more interesting and you think, well, football isn't that great, so you forget about it and move on" (S-13).
In this "logic of the visual", the Internet functions as a vast and opulent shopping mall of planetary scale, and yet this exercise of looking at things on the market, which identifies them as a generation of young consumers, also reminds them of the limits imposed by their own poverty. The abundance of "other people's objects" is the mirror of what they themselves do not have. "We have information overload", said one boy, "and it really opens your eyes. The Internet gives us the chance to be better informed and to appreciate more clearly how little we can get here, locked away in an underdeveloped country" (S-25). The things that can be seen on the World Wide Web serve to highlight what is unavailable locally. The globalization on which the Internet is built becomes a symbol for the limitations of one's own space. The user's gaze is expanded to embrace other territories, a wider place, desired objects that are beyond reach and available only in the "developed world" of others. That distant and hardly imaginable space is the space of abundance, of greater pleasures and desires, with objects that "we never dreamed we could explore" (S-23). Their own space, compared to the wealth of others, is suddenly seen as poor and underdeveloped. Their relationship with the technology recalls an old progressive legacy: we look at ourselves in the mirror of the journey that someone else has made and that serves as an "example" for what we want to do.
From this perspective, the Internet represents for youngsters an enormous shopping centre where "others" exhibit an opulence that they can only contemplate and dream about. One of the differences that the children cited most frequently about their contacts in other countries had to do with the objects that those people had, including technology. This probably reveals the logic of "being through having". Experience differed significantly between the study groups. The differences were directly related to cultural capital and social position. For those higher on the scale of cultural and economic capital, the world of the Internet is less inaccessible and more familiar. In contrast to teenagers from poor backgrounds, who pass through the shopping centre without consuming, these children have been socialized as effective users of the products and services of a city that, in the neighbourhoods they inhabit and frequent, is fully transnational. For these children, the Internet is a space for reaffirming their identities as consumers. The fashionable clothing, the latest recordings, the first-run movies and the designer tennis shoes they seek over the Internet are all at hand. As they see it, the Internet functions as a source of information about their daily lives.24
Jorge Luis Borges, in a suggestive piece, related the story of the Aleph. This is a point in space where we can experience all times, all places and all knowledge simultaneously – terror and beauty in the same instant. The Aleph is a frequent metaphor and, for many users, a near-perfect description of the Internet. One of the most frequent representations of the Internet that youngsters constructed was very similar to the Aleph.
It was common for the children, in their stories, to reconstruct the image of the Internet as a limitless space inhabited by all available human knowledge, as a reservoir of infinite objects. This representation has some peculiar characteristics. One youngster translated the image in these words: "The Internet is like a huge library, the library of life, of the world, the library of the whole world; we can look there for whatever we want and this is good for the sake of humanity. For example, you see something that you know is far away, something you really like, something you had always wanted but you thought it was for when you are grown up, that you would have to wait your whole life to get there and do those things, but now you can get there in a flash through your computer" (S-41).
Together with the representation of the Internet as a source of abundance, something instant and visible, there emerges the image of an object that embraces everything and is therefore omniscient. Every culture creates its places of wisdom and gives certain people the role of sages. For the school, wisdom used to be found in books and it was administered by the teacher. For these technoculture kids, the digital Aleph of the Internet is the place to find contemporary wisdom and it is available at their own initiative. "There's a tremendous amount of information that you can find on the Internet," said one boy. "We find information of every kind, about schools, universities, professions, all fields. That's what keeps us informed about everything that's going on in the world" (S-25). The wisdom of the Internet, its capacity to contain everything that is humanly available, has a profound implication for youngsters: it keeps them informed about what is going on in the world. In this respect, the Internet functions as "a symbolic device for connecting to the world". This is the logic of a youth culture that is focused on the present. "Current" information becomes one of the fundamental values of their audiovisual and digital consumption. Much of this information is useless and irrelevant for practical purposes, but other information becomes indispensable material for their social relations. With their data on sporting events, the romantic adventures of their audiovisual heroes, musical hits and new outfits, children build "networks of conversational interchange". They turn information into an object of daily relations with others. In their stories, edited and rewritten with material from their technological imaginings, the children confirm their social and cultural identity. In their chat groups they discuss their media tastes and their favourite songs and personalities, or they argue the prowess and prospects of a football team. Information makes it possible to relate socially with their peers. And in youth culture, this has great symbolic meaning. That is why it is so important to keep themselves informed – in this sense, the wisdom of the Internet is uniquely and irreplaceably useful: not only does it convey information, but the source itself is often a sign of prestige. Untiring in their pursuit of social relations, eager to enter into multiple relationships, to explore the world of others and to demonstrate the "specialness" of their own, youngsters identify the Internet as an object that, because it is all-knowing, is increasingly all-powerful. "For the future", said one youth, "I see the Internet as the greatest source of information, much more than television, and certainly much more than radio or the press, they are no use, there is only the Internet, soon it will be the main thing" (E-26).
This representation of the Internet probably corresponds very closely to what we might imagine the Aleph to be. But in one important aspect the match is imperfect, or at least it suggests a variation to the metaphor. That aspect is time. The Internet meshes very well with temporal space, with youngsters' preference for focusing on the present. Immersed in the symbolic ambit and dizzying pace of the audiovisual media, adept at decoding the codes of fashion, they see in the Internet the image of things that have no past. The original version of the Aleph embraced both the present time and all times. The version of children today focuses on what is now and what is new. The Internet is not a story that can be told in the past tense. "The Internet", said one student, "shows kids. There are no pictures of old people, the Internet doesn't show outdated things, it shows everything in colours" (S-33). In the present, nothing is accumulated and yet there is abundance; it is a context of constant transition and mutation. In many cases, the quality of a web site will be measured by the timeliness of the last update. Nothing can be old on the Internet. To be out of date is the worst thing that can be said about something on the Internet. Since everything is transforming, updating and renewing itself, the Internet signifies for youngsters a place of perpetual motion. "The best thing about the Internet", said one boy, is "the ability of the technology to keep up with trends – the Internet is 'with it', it's constantly being brought up-to-date, it keeps pace with everything, if you're on the Internet you're really plugged in because you know everything that's going on right now in the world" (S-33).
For many young users, the Internet is the realm of instantaneity. The computer industry has constructed a culture where everything can be replaced by an updated version, which is always better than the previous one. A program can be updated, supplemented, perfected. There is always an "updated" version of a program, but there is never a "final" version. Or if there is, it means that the program has failed and the company making it has disappeared. "In the digital world everything is perfectible." This rule applies with special force to the Internet. Current and immediate are the criteria for judging the importance and truthfulness of what exists. "Truth", a value that school culture promotes strongly, comes to mean for the youngsters "the latest". On this point, one girl said: "If you are looking for up-to-date information on Colombia's economy in books, you won't find it because books only show things the way they were when they were published; but if you look on the Internet, you'll find things the way they are right now, not the way they were three years ago" (S-23).
Not only is the book – the school object par excellence - seen as a symbol of the past, but the Internet is the technological space of the present. The Internet is constantly being updated and producing "more truth". For a young student, three years is an eternity. As in video games, time is a record to be beaten. The speed of the technology is one of its commercially most significant features. Digital objects have been advertised as products of the greatest and swiftest change in the history of the world. In three years the most popular computer operating system can go through two versions, or a spectacular new software company can appear, and each new generation of chips doubles the capacity of the previous one, and so on. Nobody can doze off on the Internet – and this is not only because the chat rooms never close or because of time differences between the hemispheres, but rather because users demand and producers supply a new version of the object and the old one instantly loses its value.
The public school in this study tends to be a traditional institution, with a vertical division of roles and an administered distribution of knowledge. The linear curriculum is the most tangible expression of its approach to knowledge. Through it, the school culture defines what children must know, in what order, in what quantity and with what emphasis. School culture is a clearly delimited space and the school as an institution imparts the knowledge that society believes should be taught. It is into this organization and this form of social time that the Internet is being introduced. The relationships, content, formats and ways of conveying this technology are far from uniform. Its accessibility, its many expressive codes, the information that it conveys, the communicative experiences that it evokes, and its contextual relationship all function in a way that is opposed to the organization and timing of knowledge in school culture. This opposition produces varying experiences in relation to the administration of knowledge offered by the school.
Giving voice to what many of her classmates have experienced, with classes of more than 40 students, dissatisfied with the traditional offering of her school, complaining of examinations and teaching methods, one girl told us about her daily routine: "We study and they assign us four or five pages of this textbook or that, and the books come and go, but I'm not very impressed. All that information, and by mid-year we've forgotten everything" (S-22). This school experience signifies a routine approach to study, learning a text, filling in the blanks, passing a test – academic work is seen as nothing more than acquiring arid knowledge that is confined to the pages of a book. Resentful of having to perform monotonous, repetitive and meaningless tasks, these youngsters – who are used to the heady pace and varied fare of audiovisual media – see the school, with its rigid and limited teaching approach, as an experience that runs counter to their media-acquired knowledge, their pace of learning and their needs for new connections with their environment. In this context of dissatisfaction, the Internet appears, with all its new, instantly available and manipulable objects, to reinforce the audiovisual codes they have developed. As a symbol of connectedness to the world, to "today", the Internet breaks down the logic underlying the school. In the first place there is the territorial symbology. The classroom, where the teacher rules and where knowledge is exclusively organized and imparted by him, is confronted by an object that is outside the classroom, that opens a window on the world, that connects to the environment and contradicts the inside – outside dichotomy. The Windows interface, which since the late 1980s has become the most popular digital iconography, contains a permanent representation of viewing space. A window is always a design for communicating spaces – when placed on the walls of a school, it is a symbol that breaks down its boundaries, a "centrifugal object". For a teacher, a child perched by the classroom window gazing out impatiently at the playground and waiting for recess is the most discouraging spectacle because the child is in the classroom but wants to be outside. The teacher finds this incomprehensible – such behaviour is simply not allowed in the orderly setting that school learning requires. Once digital technology arrives in the classroom, cloaked with educational authority, thanks in part to the advertising it carries, the activity of this same student, seated before the virtual window of his computer, seems much more legitimate for the organization of the school, even though he is still seeking an escape and indeed is looking much further than the school yard. These are two distinct windows, the first reprehensible, the second undefined and not yet controllable but undoubtedly more centrifugal and powerful as a means of escape. "Contact with technology", said one boy about the Internet, "opens new horizons for a student to learn because if you're sitting there with the teacher writing things down on the blackboard and saying, pay attention and copy this, it's no use, you have to work with a computer and then you can see further. Outside school there is a lot of useful stuff" (S-24).
Sensing that the school is teaching them content out of context, anachronistic and fossilized knowledge, the children take to the Internet with the gusto of someone who has finally found what he was looking for – the "outside world". This is one of the tensions that the Internet introduces into the restrictive space of the classroom. It places youngsters in an ambiguous position with respect to the boundaries between the school and their surroundings. On one hand, we might say that those boundaries are expanding and that the school is becoming more connected with its environment, that bridges are being built between the school and the world. With the Internet, we have a school that is "less school" and "more world". This meets one of the most ardent desires of youth: to know about the contemporary world. At the same time, we could say that the ambiguity that the Internet produces in the boundaries of the school has to do with a redefinition of two key notions about its symbolic space: the "inside" and the "outside" of school life. Although these categories have been the subject of much debate in postmodern literature, it is important to consider their meaning in relation to our project. On one hand, redefining the "inside/outside" dichotomy of the school has to do with the type of content and experiences that enter into the school when the Internet is introduced to it. When a student secretly joins a chat group or listens to music during class, this means that a fragment of the "non-school world", with content that means nothing in the current definition of school, has now penetrated it. On the other hand, if a student practises a second language through a letter-writing program, this is quite legitimate in terms of the school–world relationship. In terms of the current self-definition of the school, it is not always clear at what point the Internet is really introduced into its culture, even if it is physically there. With the earlier technologies that were introduced to the classroom, it was easier to manage and place limits on what was "school content" and what was not. If students were watching a football game on television, it was clear that this audiovisual experience had no place in the school, except perhaps as a special innovation by some teacher who wanted to show the impact of mass events on society.
With the Internet, this division is not always clear, at least for the groups covered by our study. We must ask, then, when the children are navigating with a computer in the classroom, whether they are really in school, or rather whether the Internet is really there. The situation becomes even less clear if the teacher fails to do what is normal in the classroom: to control the organization, supply and assimilation of content, conduct evaluation tests, lay down guidelines to prevent his disciples from scattering, and impose discipline on a large group within a cramped and uncomfortable space. The navigation experiences that the youngsters reported with the Internet betray a general pattern of control by the teachers. Contrasting Internet use at school with their independent navigation during our study, students were in agreement with this view: "In school we're not allowed to join a chat room, we have to go to educational web sites and it has to be something that has to do with our project – they give us no time for chatting, and if I want music or if I want to chat I have to do it outside class time, I have to ask for permission and it absolutely has to be something for school, it can't be anything else" (S-18). Judging from their navigation habits when there is no teacher to control things, students tend to navigate in their favourite subjects, and these have little to do with education as the school sees it. In the navigation surveys, the percentage of academic topics covered was very low, compared to an 80 percent rating for musical themes. Without a teacher, without homework to do or without a test to worry about, children are no longer really in the school world when they are allowed to navigate independently at school.
It is in this sense, then, that we may reconsider the transformation of the school/world boundaries, or redefine the meaning of "inside/outside" school. What difference is there between navigating in a cyber café and navigating in school? Navigating the Internet in school does not imply, in principle, that the Internet is in the school. Rather, we could say that the Internet has introduced the "outside", that it has brought the "outside world" in, but no pedagogical plan has been articulated to define its educational nature. It is not a question, such as is generally posed in the school, of what kind of content is or is not considered educational. With the earlier audiovisual technology of television, much of its crisis had to do with the view that realizing its educational potential boiled down to producing educational television. Given the evident fact that children and teenagers learn more about ethics from the moral dilemmas facing a character in a drama, a soap opera, or a made-for-TV movie than from educational programmes about values, we need to reconsider whether content control is really the best way to take advantage of the Internet's pedagogical value. If we listen to the stories of the youngsters in the study, Internet technology is in many aspects the least "scholarly" experience these children have had. The Internet school is less a school and more "juvenile Internet". In other words, it has more to do with the outside world, with audiovisual codes, with the consumption of market symbols, with socializing with their peers and simply having fun. In other words, there is less administered knowledge, less tedious homework, less seriousness, less uniformity, less claim to infallibility. In the end, there is less effort, greater facility and more pleasure.
Judging from their more frequently observed navigation practices and their own stories and interviews, it is clear that for youngsters the Internet is a pleasurable context. By contrast, the school has become a space that normally encourages sacrifice, rewards dedication and discipline, lauds efforts to overcome obstacles and regards learning as a difficult goal. The school long practised and gave legitimacy to the learning regime as an activity divorced from pleasure. Even the most hedonistic descriptions of school life look upon play as a "tool" whereby learning will be more effective and attractive, but still "difficult". The principle that every student has to memorize is that things that are worthwhile have a cost. The curriculum has been designed to administer increasing doses of difficulty. Revealing this Internet/school dynamic, as a kind of reflection of contradictory voices, one student said: "Before we had computers, when we had an assignment we had to go to the library and spend hours and hours going through books for a task that I can do in one hour with the Internet. The Internet has made my life a lot easier. My parents tell me sometimes that it encourages mediocrity. But when they were in school they had to spend a whole weekend finding information and reading it, while I simply look on the Internet, find it, copy it and it's done" (S-25).
When it is introduced to the classroom, the Internet produces ambiguous tension at the school/world frontier, tension that has begun to show up in the line taken by teachers and parents. Since this is a technology that arrived with tremendous pedagogical prestige and yet still is so little used and appropriated by adults in the school, the reaction it produces in them is ambiguous and changeable. For the school, accustomed to supervise and manage what is tangible, the "escape" that children experience through the windows of the Internet is something that is still too intangible to be regulated and controlled successfully. At most, the school can impose censorship based on a heteronomous image of the student: since he is incapable of governing himself, and since there is no learning structure that will allow him to do so, decisions must be taken for him.
"From prohibitions you can tell what people normally do – it's a way of drawing a picture of daily life," says a character in one of Umberto Eco's novels (1995: 80). The school bans games, pornographic pages, music and other amusements with the Internet and computers. From this it is easy to deduce what children do when they are allowed to navigate freely, or when the teacher is not looking: "At first", said one youth, "they told us we could go anywhere we want, as long as it was not pornography or Satanism, and then when we started to visit chat rooms what happened was they imposed a rule that said we could not go there and we could only visit educational sites, which meant of course no X-rated sites and such, but in fact it is the teacher who decides what is course-related, and what he says goes" (S-18). This story opens a further set of questions. On one hand, there is the issue of what happens when censorship is imposed – children come up with resistance strategies. According to one student, navigating outside school was "much better because we can surf freely, while in the classroom, when the teacher comes, we have to switch windows quickly with Alt-Tab" (S-18). In even the most strictly controlled areas of the school, students develop mechanisms of resistance, and censorship over Internet content is no exception. As we shall see later, for young cybernauts, "prohibited" subjects are hard to avoid because they are so abundant and tempting on the Internet. Bypassing certain content poses a complex psychosocial challenge: not only is the prohibited object all the more seductive and enticing, but viewing it becomes a matter of group complicity and solidarity. A group plot to elude the teacher's control is easier than might be thought, not only because schools generally have or use no software to block access, but also because outwitting the censor becomes like a video game, a challenge to see who is the most skilled in getting around school restrictions. Finally, the generational difference in technological abilities plays in favour of the students, who swiftly learn or invent strategies for escaping the teacher's visual control.
With teachers and adults so intent on monitoring the content they access, concerned on one hand to fulfil the Internet's broad pedagogical promise and yet alarmed by all the imaginary perils they see it, the school has begun to encourage a split in the use of the Internet. The Internet is the least "scholarly" thing about school. When the school introduces the Internet with the knowledge control and management habits to which it is accustomed, the Internet comes to represent an object from the past, a library for doing homework, a huge database, or a boundless book that must be administered. The Internet comes to be represented as exclusively an information database. It has little association with communication, interaction or shared intentions. Around this form of appropriation there emerges a fundamental dichotomy with respect to the Internet. The Internet becomes a source of tension between "what the kids want to do and what they have to do": the homework Internet and the amusement Internet, the Internet from which homework can be lifted and the Internet that offers chat rooms, the Internet that is a chore and the Internet that is fun. One girl summed up her two-sided experience with the Internet: "The teacher came and said do this and that, and we started to do what we were told, although nobody wanted to; when we navigate alone, all I do is chat and chat and then it's fantastic because I get to know more people and customs" (S-5). This split encourages two possible dynamics with the Internet at school. In the first, the Internet, viewed as something aestheticizing, seductive, multicommunicative and entertaining, transfers its logic to the pedagogical dimension: it hypermedializes and diversifies the school. In the second dynamic, the Internet comes to be an experiment in control, divorced from pleasure and serving merely as a huge library. In this case, the Internet is inserted within the traditional school culture. The latest technology, then, can be made to behave like the most traditional of objects of the pedagogical world. The second dynamic would seem to be the more frequent, given the experiences and practices examined in this study. The first is not excluded, but it is less apparent in the youngsters. At times, the two intersect and reinforce each other, or produce tension. In any case, the dichotomy is there, and the Internet as a relational object, despite the school's declared intentions, is not yet a clearly pedagogical experience.
In place of the tension between what is educational and what is not, we are left with a problem that is more difficult to resolve – above all, if in general what the school is trying to control is access to advertising material that portrays the latest fashions over the Internet and which young cybernauts tend to explore. A quick glance will only reveal the juxtaposition of two social discourses: that of the school and that of advertising. Advertising, although understood today as a complex device that sets the stage for cultural interaction between the symbolic world and the economic world, between collective desires and the productive apparatus (Pérez Tornero 1998), is viewed by the school as nothing more than a vehicle for the alienation and manipulation of consumers. This way of looking at advertising is most evident in the instrumentalist view that the school has of television in particular and of the media in general. Sticking to the old paradigm25 of the "all-powerful and manipulative" media versus the "passive and manipulable receptors", the school makes the message of advertising into an object of criticism, contempt and suspicion. Yet, despite that, advertising continues to infiltrate through the countless interstices of the school–media–youth relationship. Despite the school's declared opposition to advertising, its symbolic heart (i.e. the image) has penetrated and conquered the school world by different routes. Students have seized many of its messages and reinterpreted them in light of their own cultural structures, using them as spaces for self-representation. One youth said, "I really like the advertising slogan for Sprite - it says a lot. Even though what they're trying to sell is a brand, in fact it says a lot. The image is nothing – I can see a physically beautiful girl in the street, but she may be empty inside – so the image is nothing. Unless I know someone, I can't give a clear judgement on that person" (S-28). The representation of the advertising image in the school is ambiguous and tension-ridden. Its commercial message is viewed with suspicion, but at the same time its semantics is used extensively and rationally and treated as profound and vitally important.
In today's media culture, the image has become an omnipresent communication code (Jameson 1997). The image gives tangible meaning to social reality. With the overwhelming flow of visual signals through the media, reality can only be presented through visualization. Social and anthropological studies of the city have found that many of the most basic urban experiences, such as the concept of place and the collective feeling of belonging, are being mediated by the power of television (García Canclini 1995). Although visuality has been a growing force behind the construction of Western culture (Jenks 1995), it is with the surge of media images that its greatest symbolic protagonism and its anthropological power over urban life are generated. It has involved one of the most characteristic social phenomena in constructing today's sphere of communication, the intense and generalized deployment of aestheticization in the different communicative agents of society (Jameson 1997). Politics, sexuality, private life, the city, the economy, among many other fields, tend to be staged in an aestheticized way. Even wars, wherever they occur, have become the object of direct broadcasts and careful media explanations, complete with graphics and typically cinematographic simulations in order to catch the viewer's attention. Technological devices, their design, their user interfaces and the organized activities they imply are obviously designed to be "enjoyed", and to be first and foremost "visually seductive". Of course, it is not only the media but social and political life as well that have reappropriated and dramatized this dynamic.
Socialized by aesthetic advertising through the media, youngsters find different lines of continuity and acceptance of digital technology in the school. With the Internet, its visual availability and its growing colonization through advertising, youngsters find a space that is very familiar to them. "In school", said one girl, "we have had access to the Internet in the library, and that is great, because with the Internet we have all that information at our fingertips, and it's really incredible, it's just divine, our work goes really well, super well, and when we present a job on the computer it looks really pretty, we can put in little cartoon figures, in Word, in Excel, we can give slide presentations, it's great to interact with technology and it helps me tremendously" S-27). This view, peculiar as it may be, crops up quite frequently in the arguments that children use about the power of digital technology. For many students, much of the Internet's value lies in its capacity to be a huge reservoir of graphics, illustrations and caricatures for making conventional schoolwork look better. Similarly, although they often complain about the number of "banners" on the Internet, some of them confess that one of the reasons for visiting and staying at the web site is the richness of its graphics, its visuality and the attractive advertising it offers.
Although it may seem merely a prosaic gesture, in fact it reveals the ambiguous nature of a paradoxical relationship between the media world, digital technology and the school. As we can see from the social representations and practical uses that children make of the Internet, introducing the Internet traces new lines of continuity and tension between various views of school culture and popular culture. The institution swings back and forth and, without wanting to, builds bridges to its environment while removing frontiers, which swiftly disappear through the escape windows of the Internet and the navigation practices of its young users. If this ambiguity is seen as a problem of competition between the school and its environment, it will not be readily resolved, especially since it involves confronting experiences that occur in the complex structures and dynamics of cultural life. On the other hand, if it is approached within the current framework for incorporating the Internet into the school, as part of the effort at renewing education, it will probably be easier to resolve, by making the possible relationships explicit more in terms of an alliance than of competition.
It is also essential to build within institutions an attitude that is sufficiently sensitive to the organizational, cultural and pedagogical changes that the Internet can mean for a school. The difficulty that can arise from "schoolifying" the Internet, under the current approaches described here, would imply losing much of its educational potential. Similarly, reducing the possibilities of the Internet to a mere information mechanism is a questionable association. This is a difficult issue because, for the school, the debate over content-focused education is not new. If the Internet can do no more than provide access to content, however new and varied, the debate will get bogged down in arguments over the type of information that should be accessed. It is not that the question of content is useless or secondary, but rather that to regard it in this way ignores the possibilities of the Internet for generating relationships, cultural logics and communicative processes.
The debate over the importance of content in schooling leads us inevitably to the problem of reading and writing in relation to incorporation of the Internet into the school. As can be deduced from our ethnographic work, reading skills among students are passing through a stage of crisis and transformation. Assessments of "academic skills" in various areas of schooling, including language, reveal a key problem in the city's public education. The results of these tests show very low success rates. Even more alarming results have been produced in national tests, where mathematics and language skills among the school population are clearly inadequate.
The traditional school has a central object that defines it: the book. School culture is book culture. The book has functioned as the object of knowledge. It concentrates the most valuable knowledge that the school can offer. But for the school, the book has a special function. It has become a cult object. It is static; it sets and preserves limits. From whatever viewpoint we choose, it is, and has been, the standard for evaluating the acquisition of school knowledge. The school as an institution has been supported in the appropriation, circulation and cult of the text. This has long been the space of certainty for teachers. It has guided their path and calmed their doubts. More than reading, it is the book itself that has defined the meaning of school life. The growing distance that separates youngsters from the world of book readers reveals a number of phenomena that in some cases contradict the explanation of reading deficiencies. The relationship with the media, just as with the new digital objects present in the classroom, allows us to see that the crisis in school book culture has to do less with the book and more with the relationship with reading that the school, through the book, insists on.
For youngsters, the schoolbook is the symbol of a compulsory and unpleasant task. Even among those at a higher sociocultural level, reading is not a frequent practice. At school, the book becomes an imperative for learning. Those who do not read will be cut off from knowledge. Similarly, the book is an object of permanent pedagogical control. Students are tested on the basis of books and their contents. Students look upon books as something with which they have an uneasy and disagreeable relationship. "I don't know why, but books bore me," said one boy. "I know there are some terrific books, but on the whole I say, what a drag!" (S-31). This feeling about books becomes even more critical because, through their control, children exercise little autonomy in organizing their own learning. The relationship of pedagogical control that books represent in the school produces in students less autonomy and more subordination. Students frequently feel that they would "like" to read a book until the time when they "have" to read it. All it takes is an order from the teacher assigning a book as a task to kill any desire to read it. We might ask, what would happen to book culture in a school where reading were not compulsory?
On the other hand, the experience of one young reader suggests that the crisis is less one of reading and more one of the way textbooks function in the school. "The only thing I read is gossip magazines, Shock for example, where they have chic girls in the latest fashions, or Soho, or magazines like that, worthless stuff, silly stuff, the kind of thing that you walk into a newsstand and pick up and start flipping through, there's no content, it's just junk, but it's the only thing we dare read, we don't even read it, we just flip through the pages" (S-14). A number of studies of lower-class reading habits suggest that identifying book reading as the only legitimate kind of reading tends to devalue other reading practices in the eyes of the readers themselves. There are clearly many interconnected reasons why children do not read, but one reason is that they do not identify themselves as readers when it comes to certain material. The crisis of the written word is not, then, a crisis of reading but rather a crisis of its relationship with the school. With the arrival of Internet technology, the picture becomes even more complicated and yet it helps us to understand more clearly that the crisis in reading habits refers more to a process of change in decodification rather than to any loss of a particular skill. As one student put it, "I think that just looking at a white page with black letters is a big bore, while the little characters that appear on the Internet screen with colour writing in all sizes, that can really catch your attention. After all, people only read what interests them, and then you have these little characters that pop up, where at least it's amusing, but you don't have to sit there reading line after line and then finding that you are lost and saying, hell, I didn't understand this, and having to read it all over again, since on the Internet you only go to stuff that's interesting and you don't have to sit there all alone reading page after page, you can be a little more relaxed" (S-14).
This story helps to explain several aspects. First, the aesthetic character that differentiates the printed word from hypertext on the Web. "Hyper-reading" on the Web is accompanied by various registers of decodification: diversity, interlinkages, the possibility of self-regulation, the self-construction of navigation routes – these are the most decisive features that allow children to experience a bond that is totally opposed to the book object. Youngsters feel a great familiarity with this new hypermedia format because they have had prior training in the process of decoding with audiovisual media. Much of what young people do with the Internet involves using it as a kind of "televisual reading", i.e. treating it like television. This brings us back to the question of what reading means for youngsters. One of the advantages they find in the Internet compared to their reading experience is the nature of access. "The Internet is great", said one boy about his experience, "because for me it's a lot better than going to the library and consulting all those fat books, and then you don't find what you're looking for and you have to go back and stand in line with five other people and ask how do I get this" (S-27). Access means more than just facilitation. It has to do with the relationship with reading that is established in school culture: not only because training readers requires a lot of social support and cultural capital available in familiar and communal settings, but because the dynamics of education have made the book a symbol of a kind of school that is "not connected" and also because the written text has been represented to have a value quite different from that of the mass media. Evidence that there is alphanumeric decodification in "hyper-reading" can be seen in the fact that many children make a practice of downloading and printing material from the Internet so they can read it later.26 This not only shows us how readers have redefined their habits with digital formats, but it also suggests that access to electronic reading is seen as quite different from book reading (not so much because of the kind of decodification as the context of reception). When they are on the Net, children no longer think of themselves as readers but as "navigators", "explorers" or "cybernauts". The "hyper-reader" see themselves as technologized; the same cinematographic imagination that goes with their social representations about technology gives them a new image of themselves that bears little relationship to the self-image they had when they were using printed books. With the Internet, children have fewer teachers imposing reading assignments and so it is easier for them to find points of escape, to plot their own routes and explore the Net at random. To a large extent, then, we may say that youngsters read via the Internet because they don't realize what they are doing.27 Their own representation of reading as something boring does not jibe with the emotionally attractive and active experience of navigating the Web. Their devotion to chatting – textual chatting – also shows the vigorously active side that breaks down the reading/consumption paradigm and establishes that of textual productivity. The problem of what they are reading or how much they read and what kind of material they read is also an important aspect since, with the hypermedia formats of the Internet, not only does the relationship with the written medium change, but the representations of what young navigators find and produce in their new "hyper-reading-writing" spaces are redefined.
The book-centred school used to teach about a "distant world", presented as remote and incomprehensible. From the perspective of these youngsters, Internet technology has reinvented the notion of space, allowing children to imagine that the most distant places and cultures can now be accessed more readily with a simple click of the mouse than with all the (often fruitless) effort involved in going to a traditional library for information. External reality, "the world of others", was, in the textual style of the school, a kind of knowledge that was narrated and retold in solemn, terse, precise and uniform formats. It is the kingdom of the sacred and infallible book, which for kids of this pleasure-seeking generation is a synonym for boredom. A book narrator, omniscient and impersonal, with a language in which the narrator himself disappears, talks about the geographic features of the Pelopennesus or about Hindu philosophy. With the Internet, impersonal intermediaries tend to disappear and give way to protagonists in the eyes of youngsters. Speaking out loud in hypermedia register, the colonialists lament the domineering and bloody-minded attitude of their predecessors, the nationalists talk proudly and fondly of their pre-Hispanic wealth and Orientals tell their own version of history. And although children spend less time on geography, science and history and more on horoscopes and sports, hearing the actors' voices and seeing their bodies is an experience that is invaluable for distinguishing between how they learn over the Internet and how they learn in the school of books. As one student put it, "I can look at photographs on the Internet, I can see videos, I can listen to sounds, I can do a lot of things, I can get written information from people who have lived through these situations and that makes it very easy for me because nearly everything is there" (S-23).
As we have seen, the Internet behaves in different ways within the school. Sometimes it is inside, with its young navigators, sometimes it is outside, captivating them and taking them beyond the bounds of the school. The kinds of "schoolification" that happen over the Internet produce "traditional" uses of the new, expressive formats of the Web. In a school focused on learning from texts, many youngsters have developed a negative image of books. And since the book, despite their resistance, is a fact of daily life at school, children have also learned to put up with what they cannot avoid. A sign of this is the way they copy fragments of books and hand them in, unchanged, to the teacher as their homework. "Research", as students normally call it, is nothing more than plagiarizing from various books. To a large extent, the book-centred approach of their teachers has made these children "turn off" from the wisdom to be found in books. In this respect, one boy told us, "When the teacher assigns us some project for research, and we just talk about what we think of the topic, the teacher doesn't like that at all because for him the only thing that matters is what's in a book and not what we think about the topic" (S-22).
In the book-oriented culture of the traditional school, the most difficult thing was to find a book to copy. Now, from the viewpoint of those who see the Internet as merely a gigantic library, copying is an easy matter. "I think", said one girl, "that the Internet offers a lot of facilities, but that depends on what you want to make of it. If I want to be lazy, I just download something" (S-23). Teachers also recognize this phenomenon: "For example," said one teacher, "a student may be working on a written assignment and he will go and copy something and hand it in, but if you ask him anything about the project he has no idea at all" (T-36). Although the Internet may occasionally inspire feelings of guilt (which youngsters overcome readily enough), it is becoming for youngsters a synonym for the book, offering knowledge that they simply have to copy and paste, but which they do not try to understand, not only because they don't want to but because they feel they cannot. Because they have problems with independent interpretation, plagiarizing books becomes for them a kind of practice where knowledge is always "someone else's knowledge". And since this results in infallible knowledge, a youngster who copies from the "Internet book" becomes almost paradoxically a pirate of old texts.
Up to this point, we have been examining some of the redefinitions that the Internet introduces through its hypermedia structures into reading comprehension and decodification. The relationship with traditional reading has been substantially modified and different practices are emerging, together with the notion of the "hyper-reader" navigator. Yet this is not to say that youngsters' experience with the Internet is giving rise to a generation of more critical and better-trained readers and decodifiers. We do not have enough information to say that - indeed, taking our observations of navigating youngsters, we find considerable continuity between media consumption and cybernautic practices which would seem, in principle, to point to the creation, not of more critical readers, but rather of more hyperactive consumers. The fact that they may be dissatisfied with what they find in the media, that they may be turned off by excessive advertising over the Web, or that they are disgusted with "consumerism" does not imply the development of more analytical, thoughtful and active readers in the face of advertising devices and the big media and communication corporations. This is not to say, of course, that youngsters' relationship with this space makes them more docile or submissive. On the contrary, whatever the intent of the output of these big communication companies, we find in the culture of students, and in the school, major currents of "resignification" of the symbolic content of the mass media and digital technologies.
The Internet is beginning to produce a particular redefinition of the pedagogical relationship with knowledge in the culture of the traditional school. With a technology that offers amusement, the Internet gives youngsters the possibility of learning without books. Learning with the Internet, even if it involves reading what is there, is still learning without books. This method of learning is deeply disturbing to teachers because it has a considerable impact on the identity of the book-oriented school. One teacher said, "The kids don't even use the library ... they were not raised in a book culture ... they find it very difficult to look for information, to go to libraries, they don't know how to handle them, they don't know how to do research" (T-34). For teachers trained in book-based teaching and pedagogy, these new dynamics represent a threat to their educational competence. In the first place, many of them are unable to see the pedagogical meaning of the Internet, or of computer culture in general.
In this respect, a cardinal aspect that we observed in our study was the generational difference between students and their teachers. Although many of the low-income students in the public schools have no direct, intense or early exposure to digital technology, they were born into a society where computers are a naturalized representation associated with youth. However novel the computer may seem to youngsters who come to it later, they can relate to it much better than can many adults. The situation is different for teachers: the computer appeared only when many of them were adults, when they were already thoroughly steeped in the book-oriented school and had little exposure to technology. For nearly all of their school life, they learned from linear texts and their relationship with the media, the technology closest at hand although outside the school, was mediated by the paradigm that discounted their educational possibilities. Those who were exposed to the computer in the early days of its development did not find it a gratifying experience because the interface with it was so difficult and unsatisfying to handle. This probably explains much of their unfamiliarity and discomfort with computer technology. For many teachers, this generational difference is clear. One of them summed it up this way: "These kids are living in the heyday of the computer; they were born at the same time as this technological revolution. When I started to fool around with my first computer, I was already 35; and here are these kids in grade 8, only 13 or 14 years old, and they are already navigating" (T-36).
The generational difference in technological skills induces tension in teachers. In the first place, youngsters see themselves in their own self-representations as "explorers" of their own lives, and this sets them apart from adults. The difference becomes clear in relation to digital technology. "The teachers are stuck in a rut, and I don't think they ever look back to when they were kids, when they too needed to see things differently, they are too serious about things and they won't admit that someone might need to see things differently" (S-27). The search for difference and the pursuit of novelty are codes that youngsters adopt as distinctive trademarks of their identity. Their great affinity for the Internet lies in the fact that it offers a wide spectrum of objects and up-to-date symbols and things that can be "explored". In this juvenile representation, the Internet represents change and novelty and it is precisely these qualities that they find lacking in adults, whom they see as "stuck in a rut".
For the teachers, nearly all of whom are at least twice as old as their students, this difference sparks an initial fear: the fear of losing control, the fear that technology is not their terrain, and that they will be overtaken in terms of knowledge. It is the fear of being shunted aside. In a school built on a scheme of someone who knows and someone who does not know, this is sufficient reason for teachers to keep their distance, particularly because they see it as an attack on their identity and on the role that the school has traditionally assigned to the teacher. Moreover, since technology is frequently associated with youth (in the media and among the kids themselves), many adults feel that venturing into technology means losing "control". Similarly, the representation of technology as subject to constant renewal generates significant resistance in the teaching culture. Although the teaching body itself may have doubts about it, pedagogy is hardly a field of constant innovation – youngsters are much more likely to have had a conservative educational experience than an unconventional one. It is not easy to reconcile conservative pedagogy with an object that bears the social stamp of invention and uncertainty.
On the other hand, the collective representation that circulates over the Internet occasionally introduces frightening images into the social scene. "Adults look at computers in a certain way, fearfully," said one youth, "because the media tells us every day about some new fraud, some new virus, some X-rated page, and so on, and there are a lot of scary things on the Internet" (S-33). Seen in this way, as the unruly offspring of television, full of dangers and strewn with unsuspected traps, the Internet becomes something to be controlled, to be censored and to be handled with caution. It is a common psychosocial reaction to the unknown to feel an emotional and cognitive void that is generally filled with the most negative images available. This polarized representation of a cold, dehumanizing, dangerous technology that will "conquer the human species" is one of the reservoirs of the popular imagination that provides the most fuel for these ways of seeing the Internet.
As a technology, the Internet was preceded in the history of the school by the introduction of different media. In the days before the Internet, the audiovisual media, primarily television, created great expectations about the impact they could have on school culture. If we examine the technological history of the school prior to the Internet, we see a picture of technological uncertainty: "Educational technologies," said one teacher, "which were the first to be brought into the school, were never assimilated by the school itself, not even in terms of infrastructure, and certainly not from the viewpoint of teaching. Now they have brought us the computer, the Internet. Without knowing how to use the movie language of television or video, nobody knows it, nobody has any interest in it, they don't use it and they don't care about it. People continue with the traditional classroom approach, expository, verbalist, or they exchange it for constructivist practices such as workshops" (T-4). Generally speaking, we found in our study that the school is not technologically well-equipped and that what it has is poorly maintained. Despite a significant institutional effort, the school is far from achieving an adequate level of infrastructure. Moreover, quite apart from material shortages, the school has made little progress at incorporating the media into its teaching approach or into any organized educational philosophy. Attempts by the teachers to explore the media have not met with great success. In part, this is because their professional training was lacking in this respect, in part because the culture of the book-oriented school has stood in opposition to the mass media. For the school, the media have had a negative image: they have been viewed as manipulative, as "anti-educational", as discouraging sound reading habits and as producing violence in student behaviour.
Despite the sound commercial strategy used to proclaim the educational benefits of the Internet, many teachers and adults in the education community see it as a synonym for "another massive object" that carries with it dangers and creates negative habits that are bad for school performance and the sociability of students. One student told us: "Many people think that because a kid has the Internet he won't go out, he won't go to the library, they say you just give him a task and he will send it back by e-mail and he will never leave the house, he will just stay there hibernating in front of the computer, and they think that he's going to become totally dependent on the computer and that he may even become addicted, and this is what scares them" (S-33). As the depository of new fears about "the foibles of youth", the Internet becomes a place of suspicion that must be controlled. This is not only because it "makes things easier" for students, something that is severely frowned upon in a school that prizes hard work, but also because the technology is also seen as something that dehumanizes, isolates and individualizes the student. Ignoring the overwhelming tendency to seek relationships through chat rooms, adults and teachers imagine that young cybernauts have broken with the social bonds that keep them human and have become part of the machine.
Under current circumstances, for many of the institutions we studied, the Internet has arrived in a technologically archaic setting. Although we should not think that the media must be introduced in sequence, starting with the book, moving on to television and finally arriving at the Internet, it is clear that the preceding technologies have not created a healthy and appropriate context for receiving the Internet. It could be that the best strategy is to generate a communicative circuit in which the Internet can be introduced. The audiovisual media can still do much to improve the school pedagogically and, in association with digital technologies, their potential should increase significantly: perhaps, then, the best way of using the Internet would be to do so through a "technological network of various media". For developing countries, the cost of doing this is prohibitive, but even with the low level of equipment available in the schools of countries like ours it is possible to imagine many other possibilities for using the Internet together with the media available. It is worth noting that none of the institutions studied had any sense, technological or pedagogical, of the linkages between technologies. In a way, even though the Internet is recognized as the "medium of all media", it is still seen in the school as a distinct communication or information tool, unrelated to its predecessors in the technological landscape.
Although our research did not focus on the theme of teaching culture in relation to the technology, the teacher's role as mediator, remote or visible, turned out to be a fundamental element for interpreting the processes that the Internet introduces in the lives of young students. When it comes to understanding, handling and using the Internet, there are among the teachers many different attitudes and positions. Some of these are more widespread than others, none of them are stable, and there may be intersections or mutations between several of them. Our classification is provisional, but it can help us to visualize the diversity of reactions to digital technology in the school. In the first place, we shall consider the results of an online survey of teachers, some of whom belonged to the target institutions.
Our findings led to a paradoxical conclusion about these teachers, in the sense that we expected them to take a higher profile in introducing the Internet into the school. The survey was answered by 34 teachers, evenly distributed by gender, with an average age of 35 years. We may assume that most of the teachers in this survey were familiar with the Internet and used it at least at an intermediate level. Most of them were teaching computer science and language subjects. These teachers scored high in handling the computer, and yet the variety of activities and the diversity of programs they used were not substantially different from those of any average user. Most of these teachers were users rather than producers of software, and very few reported engaging in programming work or using multimedia tools. For this group, the principal difficulty in introducing the Internet to the school was the negative attitude of their colleagues with respect to computer technology.
In terms of usage, these teachers shared many of the habits of their students. They distinctly preferred chat rooms and e-mail to other Internet resources, and very few of them had a web page. Nearly 60 percent had a computer at home, and half of these had Internet connection; the others, those who reported no access at home, gave the cost of service as the principal reason. With more than four years of Internet use, and with the high ranking they assigned to its educational importance, it was surprising that only 20 percent were using the Internet for teaching and that most of them (66 percent) should say that they had no pedagogical plans for the Internet. We were also surprised to find that of these teachers, who had the most experience in working with the Internet in school, only 6 percent were using the Internet to seek information on education. Even fewer, 2 percent, reported exploring the Web for information resources.
Although the survey could be improved as a tool, both in terms of the construction of the sample and its applicability and technical construction, its results are an important aid in understanding some of the difficulties with the Internet that we observed in the school culture.
The following typology has been constructed from our field observations and from the narratives of students and teachers. It is not an exhaustive classification since there may well be other possible types. We have tried to focus on those characteristics of teachers that could be explored directly. On the other hand, each type is more a metaphor than a uniform category.
"Using a local network," said one teacher, "they provided literacy training for the teachers, for all of us, and it lasted about a year, during which the teachers could come and work alone in the computer room. They started giving courses on MS Office, computer use, everything to do with informatics, all the basics for making the computer useful in our daily work. There was much enthusiasm initially, and great expectations, yet after a while attendance dropped off and finally no one came" (T-36).
Computer technologies, presented and accepted as something "revolutionary" through campaigns for "digital literacy", create excessive expectations in the schools. Even if it makes no claims to the status, teachers see the computer as a "teaching panacea". Yet, very soon, various factors conspire to work against this. The courses are reduced to formal and technical rather than pedagogical training. Moreover, organizational and professional tensions emerge and affect the process of teacher training. Despite the good intentions of the city's education authorities, there are crucial shortcomings that quickly discourage the teachers. Despite government concern about informatics, there have been some enormous failures.28
Such failures tend to generate the prototype of a teacher who is easily excited by the technology but who, without any visible, concrete and creative applications to educational practice, soon becomes unable to relate actively and structurally to digital technology as a tool. These teachers speak positively about the use of the Internet, but they quickly forget the intentions and, as transient passengers, they get off halfway down the road and return to their magisterial and inactive teaching habits. At best, they may complete the journey, but it will be very short.
We have already referred to this type of teacher. He sees the Internet exclusively as an enormous computerized book bank. For these teachers, the Internet is the best tool for "documentation", perfect for preparing long exercises to be completed on paper. For them, the computer is nothing more than a sophisticated paperless typewriter or a cheap and very attractive slide projector. And although they praise the virtues of the Net, their teaching approach is merely a traditional variant with a modern tool. These teachers may well have been "transient passengers" at one time; and although they have not abandoned the digital train ride, they are moving at a slow pace in the most conventional wagon of Internet pedagogy.
The generational differences to which we have alluded in terms of the way certain teachers relate to the Internet, combined with the teacher training process itself (with little appropriation of digital technologies), have produced the image of a teacher with little interest in digital culture. For this type of teacher, the computer is a complicated and sometimes magical thing that is extremely difficult to handle. These teachers frequently point to the "marvels" of the digital world as further proof that the computer is inaccessible and unintelligible. Some of these teachers betray their fear of digital culture through defiant rejection, arguing that the computer is an alienating object. On occasion, they will pin the blame on the Internet for the poor performance and "intellectual laziness" of their students. Their relationship with computers usually progresses from fear to technophobia: an object that creates fear is an object to be rejected.
A clear example of this type of teacher was described in one interview: "A characteristic of the official teacher is that he is very apathetic to change... the greatest problem in public schools is a negative attitude and even fear on the part of teachers. For example, I have here two computers that are available whenever they want, but very few come for them" (T-10).
This type of teacher is midway between the pedagogue and the technophile. He may be enthusiastic about all kinds of technology, proclaim them publicly, justify them and, in a haphazard way, try them out in his teaching practices. Generally, he tends to focus his interest on the technical dimension of the tool. His goal is to have the equipment in his classroom. Although he does not view computers in pedagogical terms, he may innovate with them and his efforts may be successful, more because of their novelty and his own enthusiasm than for their consistency with any structured teaching approach or any concern for sustainable development. Since his educational intentions are focused more on objects than on processes, this type of teacher is usually abreast with the latest developments in technology but not with those in pedagogy.
This is one of the most common teacher types found in the schools. He represents, par excellence, the magisterial classroom, the blackboard, oral performance and, of course, the textbook. This teacher is usually viewed as something of an anachronism by his students, who see him as representing the survival of an outdated school culture. This type of teacher is not bothered by technology and the Internet, he is not afraid of them and he does not disparage them – they are simply a dimension that does not exist in his pedagogical world.
One student, who seemed sufficiently informed to be able to assess the technological abilities of his teachers, referred to several types, including the teacher of the oral tradition: "The trigonometry teacher wants nothing to do with technology, he uses only the blackboard and chalk, we don't understand anything; on the other hand, the chemistry teacher brings slides to class and we understand her very well because she knows how to make us understand her; the physics teacher brings films, but the trig teacher is totally out of date" (S-22).
This type, together with the next one, would seem to be one of the most promising in defining the Internet's future in the school. It embraces those teachers who, although they have not worked with the Internet, have high expectations for it. Through the media, institutions and their own explorations, their curiosity has been piqued and their imagination awakened. This type of teacher is the one that needs the most attention, since any disappointment in their growing but still-undefined interest would turn them into sceptics or even technophobes. It is usually, but not always, the younger teachers who have the most open minds, not only towards digital technology but towards the possibilities of pedagogical renewal in general.
"In the future," said one teacher, "my role as a computer science teacher will have to disappear, it will have to become that of a facilitator for involving other teachers and resolving teaching problems – the teacher as such will disappear; I can see that I will have to disappear."
This type of teacher has a refreshing attitude to digital technology. He tends to understand that his goal must be rethought. He accepts that technologies like the Internet will result in less teaching and more learning. Aware of his students' technological skills, this teacher encourages them to collaborate and explore. He understands digital technology as a means and not an end, and he is more concerned with pedagogical problems than with technical problems. He is in effect "suicidal": he will kill off the traditional teacher inside him to give way to a new one, less bossy and more collaborative, less "teacher" and more "learner". He will be working in a school where progressively less is being taught and more is being learned.
"At one time," said one teacher, "they allowed us to chat in school. But then there was a revolt; the girls became addicted, they broke the window in the door to the Internet room where there were 20 computers, all that the school had. So there was no more access. The children became Internet addicts. At lunchtime they had access to the room and they could work on different things. There was a time when they were allowed to chat, but then they became addicted and the room was no longer open when it should be; they put locks on it and you had to have a card to open the door. One day they broke a key in the lock because so many girls were trying to get in, and they were so excited that they broke a window. Then we said, no more computer room, and the room was closed for about three months" (T-23).
When we began our extramural navigation sessions during this research, there were two types of children: those who chatted regularly and those who did not. The first group, who spent more time on the Internet on average, served as evangelists and quickly initiated their classmates to the pleasures of real-time typed conversation. Once they were all in the same setting, after a few sessions it was hard to tell which of these two groups was spending more of its computer time in chatting. Suffice it to say that, for most users in this study, chatting was what they spent the most time on, after music (although their access was often limited by teacher control at school). Those who had a computer at home, the minority, were used to chatting. Whether through enthusiasm, curiosity, boredom or a fighting spirit, the children believed that the chat room was "a pleasure trap" from which they could not, and did not want to, escape. Once they were aware of the fun to be had, the relationships they could establish, the youngsters could not imagine any other resource that could connect them so effectively to others. And if that resource were to disappear, through the vicissitudes of technology or some lethal virus, many of these children would have trouble conceiving of life after the chat room.
Because this habit is so ingrained in young cybernauts, we offer below an ethnographically documented approximation to some of the main dynamics, structures and communicative rituals that the participants in this study exhibited in Internet chatting.
Belonging to different groups is a social trend of modern urban life, something that Maffesoli (1990) has called "neo-tribalism". This differs from conventional tribalism in the fluidity and instability that characterize the makeup of its groups. Affective experience, the level of contact and the sense of belonging are the constituent elements of the new tribes. Each tribe constructs an "aesthetic ambience", i.e. an internally shared way of feeling. This new tribalism is expressed in the multiplicity of groupings that are produced in daily life and it is woven with symbols from a great variety of cultural backgrounds. As Maffesoli says, "What characterizes our age is precisely the flexible intertwining of the multiplicity of circles whose articulation defines sociality" (1990: 143). The dispersion, segmentation and fragmentation of urban life produces, under various contexts, the establishment of a multiplicity of shared spaces. One youngster interviewed put it this way: "You can catalogue things in several ways. You can catalogue classmates and friends in the school. In our course there are more classmates than friends... there are also other spaces, what we call roscas or cliques. There is a little clique of repeaters. They don't mingle much with us. Or there is a little group that is lagging behind in the course... they tend to look out for each other" (S-19).
With surprising frequency, youngsters participate in multiple symbolic spaces. They are used to shifting from one context to another, from one identity to another, from one time to another, from one chat room to another. To belong to a symbolic space is, in a sense, to be incongruent with any other of what used to be or still are symbolic spaces of belonging. Belonging to one reference group does not mean breaking with another group, but rather mixing and combining the meaning of each. With respect to a reference group, "the coefficient of belonging is not absolute, and anyone can participate in a multiplicity of groups" (Maffesoli 1990: 251). Groups are understood here as symbolic complexes that may occur in various everyday settings, including the Internet. The new tribalism of youth, superimposed over the Internet, produces a mosaic of cultural voices, of supportive encounters and conceptual relations. Each tribe establishes itself within a specific territory, assumes a role and wagers its "cultural capital" on it as a sign of differentiation and identity.29 With this "neo-tribal" perspective, the concept of what is collective about the Internet becomes more open and unstable. What young navigators have "in common," what their unity rests on, is more a set of shared intentions and symbols than the existence of any so-called "youth" group. The common element that they seek and offer over the Internet is more a multiple and changing object than a solid and tangible legacy.
In the chat room, youngsters are constantly reestablishing their "affective contracts" with the symbolic group to which they claim to belong. Daily life is a favourite emotional setting for youthful tribalism, whereby they surf and talk about music, singers, sports and horoscopes. With these themes they build "niches of recognition" for contacting each other, for reaching out and touching each other, with the "symbolic tactility" of the Internet because, as Maffesoli (1992) says, we are living in an era of tactility where everything urges us to proximity and to contact – hence the importance of the festive and the aesthetic as identifying signs in youngsters' conversations in their chat rooms. To the extent that they are shared forms, they become bonds for establishing relationships with others. In the chat room, children tend to seek each other out through a primordial affective tautology: "because" porque sí. For youngsters, the social bond is constructed through affectiveness, which can function as a strong bonding agent but also, of course, depending on the nature and intention of the relationship, as a trigger for the "pitched battles" that often break out in chat rooms over the Internet.
What kind of life, what kind of experience must a youngster have had for an event of anonymous communion in the chat room to be so attractive? The chat room becomes for youngsters the place where they can act out many of their dreams and imaginings, something they find very special; but this perception is possible only because the chat room generates an internal relational dynamic such that one of the main effects is to produce an emotional openness to their interpersonal relations and to their subjective world – a subjectivity that breaks through and shows a youngster an enormous and unexplored potential within his internal world. As one girl put it, "In the chat room we can do things that we could never do face-to-face.... You can go half crazy, at least that's what happens to me, I go on chatting like a fool, I say things that I could never say in public, like we get all emotional, we can drag out things from inside ourselves that we would never display to the whole world" (S-23).
The emergence of subjective experiences comes in a sudden eruption. This would seem to suggest the emergence of a "contained subjectivity", which becomes visible because a youngster finds two basic conditions that allow it: an affective bond with others and a place where he does not feel censored. His subjective experience in the chat room becomes a menu of possibilities through which he can show "what he is and what he wants to be". An anonymous space emerges that offers a variety of opportunities for identity, as a virtual experience without censorship, to reveal itself. In this respect, the chat room becomes a place for the youngster's "internal" exploration. This exploration in turn leads to the discovery of a "youth identity", an identity that relates to "what we kids like", where enjoyment tends to function as an aesthetic criterion for saying who one is; a space of "aesthetic identity" with which youth defines itself as such. After two or three hours on the Internet, one boy said, "We were chatting with a Mexican girl... and things clicked, we found that the things she likes are the same things that I like, the rumba, music, discotheques and such, and then we got into a real chat" (S-10).
The chat room, then, presents itself as a "menu of aesthetic experiences", a place for expressing pleasure, where there are options for sensitivity, where there is appreciable cultural and symbolic capital available, the product of shared experience in audiovisual consumption, in the symbols of globalization and the cultural industries. Of course, for people with other cultural heritages and different expectations, the chat room is likely to contain quite a different symbolic capital, with a different scale of emphasis. Nevertheless, for most of the youngsters in this study, the experience offered by this Internet resource represents an attractive menu of symbolic possibilities for exploring subjectivity and constructing social expressions of their identities. The tribal feelings, the identary experiences, the affectively charged language and the proximity that children experience with each other are associated with a practice that is just as relevant: the representation of the chat room as a broad space of relationships. "In the chat room we are more at ease, everyone is willing to recognize everyone else, something that does not happen in the street" (S-18). Because they see it as crucially different from the other spaces, these youngsters are always eager to enter into a relationship, to get to know new tribal spaces and different options for relating to each other. Even in the most esoteric chat groups, there is always someone willing to make contact. The most popular sites that children visit at any time of day, or even early in the morning if they have a computer at home, tend to be peopled by children seeking or offering a partner. "No one can be lonely on the Internet", and this is something of great value for children who are tremendously eager to make contact. As one boy said, "In the chat room it's easy because there are a lot of people you can talk with, we can have groups of 30 or even 40 people and then we can strike up a conversation with anyone" (S-13). Under different circumstances, the structure of contact, the social filters and the ritualism of personal interaction would make it much more difficult to do what they do in the chat room: to enter into a relationship with each other without any preliminaries or excuses.
The promise of "an abundance of relationships" makes the chat room a prime setting for revealing the neo-tribal nature of youth. Yet the hypersociality of youngsters reveals itself even outside the Internet, although in relation to it. Among the rituals of computer use is the chat group: "It's more fun to chat in a group", said one girl, "because in the group you can imagine saying more things. If someone asks how things are going in the country, you're not going to lie. And the other person will understand and think that makes sense. It's terrific!" (S-23). The physical placement of computers in the schools fosters this kind of collective navigation. Whether for engaging in verbal battles or for winning someone over to the group, children tend to de-individualize use of the terminal – not only because they want to but because there are usually at least three students for each computer, and more in some schools. As well, as part of their tribal behaviour, children are used to grouping together to "plug themselves in" simultaneously to various objects of the "media circuit" (radio, television, computer). Music or televised sports events are a good opportunity for doing this: "Since the game was to take place that morning," said one boy, "we brought a television set and hooked it up in the classroom and we sat there watching the game and at the same time chatting with children in Bolivia, dumping on the Peruvians" (S-18). These neo-tribal encounters via technology make clear the strength and ease of circulation that exists in the mass-media communication structures. This in itself reveals the daily interrelationship that occurs over what we might call the "techno-communicational macro-net", and it shows how the Internet is not only displacing the other media but allying itself with them to play a more effective role within the multicultural entertainment business.
In conventional daily life, encounters between individuals are usually mediated by different rules of interaction. Psychosocial research (Moya 1994) has identified what happens in the first moments of contact between strangers. The first reaction that serves to identify the other person for us involves the emotional interpretation of his state of mind. Gradually we configure a profile of that person, using available information (appearance, intonation, attractiveness, etc.). Next we will make a "causal attribution", i.e. we will attribute intent to the other person. Depending on our identification of the cause (politeness, hostility, deception, etc.), we will respond in different ways. The entire process allows us to configure the scheme of thinking within which we will classify the other person with all the information that we judge, on the basis of our own experience or knowledge, to be most relevant. There are many such schemes that every person adopts for situations, individuals and feelings under different circumstances. The essential point in the process of relating to another person is that we are always interpreting and, on that basis, predicting possible courses of social action and, in general, we understand the other person as a subject of intentionality. With what we know of affectiveness, intentions and behaviour, we interpret the other person by analogy to ourselves. This was clear in the way one youth imagined his chat partner: "What I always imagine is that the person I'm chatting with is right in front of me, in the same situation as mine" (S-20).
This process reveals to us a complex map in the interactions of face-to-face encounters. When it comes to relationships in Internet chat rooms, there are important similarities and differences in the way the interaction is ritualized. Our perception of other individuals in the chat room is based on indicators. We interpret others through their written marks and we then draw our own conclusions, as we would in guessing that a truck has passed by because there are tyre marks in the snow, its "footprints", except that on the Internet we have real-time footprints: we interpret them at the same time as they are produced, and we are aware that we are producing footprints in the same way.
Among the activities attracting the youngsters in this study, chatting was well in the lead. Consistent with the image of the chat room as a great virtual field for cultivating their "hypersociality", youngsters engaged there in a ritual of interaction that was frequently the same among different groups of navigators in the schools studied. We can identify a structure of interaction within the chat room that resembles a labyrinth of options, where in moving from one level to the next we pass through a kind of filter that allows us to decide the next step in the conversation. The first point of decision is the selection of the chat room. The most popular ones are in Spanish and are found on commercial web pages. Children will be aware of these addresses through their friends, or through radio or television tips. These children are not great readers of the press and, apart from "reading" the city's bulletin boards, they never reported visiting a site because of printed advertisements. Having made their choice, they go to the site – and among the topics explored, they opt nearly always for the same thing: love or romance.
In contrast to other social spaces, where acquiring communication skills is a long and laborious process, the chat room is a place where even the least experienced can quickly learn the keys to the ritual of interaction. Once inside, the children start to use an interactive repertory with which they are very familiar. As one student said, referring to his feelings in the chat room, "It's really refreshing because I already know what they're going to ask and I know more or less what I am going to answer, I have a stereotype of what we're going to say, what questions I will have to answer: How old are you? What's your name? What are you like?" (S-18).
The chat room is like the Golem of Borges: "In the letters of rose is the rose and all the Nile in the word Nile." The first indicator that the other person gives of himself, the footprint that defines his identity, is his name, his nickname. Through it, youngsters reveal a first mark of identity that they want to communicate. When it came to selecting a nickname in a chat session, one girl said: "I believe that it goes along with everyone's personality; for example, if I call myself "Ugly Betty",30 I'll be looking for a Pancratius or something like that, I like that name, my chat partner's name would be something modern" (S-10). Borrowing the names of popular personalities, movie stars, cartoon figures or sports heroes, children try to economize in their language so that communication of the identity they want to portray is as condensed and brief as possible. Besides being a symbolic footprint, their nickname contains essential information for establishing interaction: their sex. If their gender cannot be readily identified, this will evoke a negative or suspicious reaction. On this point, one student said: "What happens is that in the chat room they can use a name, well let's say a man is writing and he uses a girl's name, and then you get confused and the conversation goes on, for example they use pseudonyms in the chat room, like Crave, and you don't know whether that's a boy or girl, you have no idea" (S-10). In our observations and interviews, very few youngsters reported chatting with people of the same sex. Boys and girls alike preferred to establish heterosexual relations, which is understandable if we consider that romance is one of the most popular topics among our focus groups.
Once we are through this naming filter, we come to a radical selection criterion, which is age. This is generally the first question, sometimes even before the greeting. Many children, when entering the public space of the chat room, throw out questions such as "Is there anyone here under 14?" "I'm looking for a girl of 15", or simply "Hi to every guy who's 16". Boys and girls both use age as an initial selection factor. Most of the time the relational range is one or two years, maintaining the cultural tradition that matches younger girls with older boys – but only slightly older, in chat rooms. There are of course exceptions of various kinds. One boy said, "Once this funny thing happened, we were talking with a lady who was 40 years old and as soon as we said we were 16 she said bye-bye and she cut us off" (S-18). In some cases reported by teenaged boys, the relationship with adults is viewed pragmatically as adding to an "affective database" of persons who have the experience to "instruct". As one of them put it, "When we talk with an adult, we talk about work, about what we're doing, what we're studying, what we like, why we like people, and such things" (S-10). Once they have established gender and age, the children proceed to strike up a conversation. In many cases, more often involving girls talking to boys than vice versa, they ask whether the other person is married and confess their own marital status. The answer to this question seldom varies: girls and boys tend to say that they have no boyfriend or girlfriend and no commitments or that they have terminated or are breaking off a relationship. In terms of what we know about the participants, however, this was far from true in many cases.
For methodological and technical reasons, we were not able to observe in-depth and systematically the content and progress of conversations, especially since once they got into the chat room most users engaged in private conversations. Once they are through the brief and fleeting filter of the above decisions, they launch the conversation with a "ground reconnaissance" exercise of topics, seeking similarities and compatibilities. Questions such as "What do you like?", seeking shared symbols, or "What are you studying?", looking for common school interests, are used to assess whether the potential partner shares certain spaces that are vital to youth culture.
Similarity or difference of interests provides a defining thematic criterion for continuing the conversation. Although they may talk about love or war, the fact is that most youngsters use a highly exclusive criterion that we might call the "amusement rule". Given youngsters' representation of digital technologies as a place for fun, chat rooms are unlikely to admit any topics that are not "amusing". When asked why they liked to chat, the typical response was, in one boy's words, "We chat because it's fun just to talk about things, not about the state of the country, for God's sake. There are specialized chat rooms, of course, but to look for them or create them is, like, really boring... the very commercial chat rooms are only good for amusement, nothing more" (S-10). With apologies to Postman (1986), then, we may say that in the chat room the rule is "have fun or die".
There is a great diversity of topics, of course, but those that are considered "serious" are banned from the chat room. This does not mean that there can be no serious or in-depth chat about an amusing topic. "One of my friends is always carrying on in a style that makes the subject exciting and fun" (S-18). Yet it is the social character of the dialogue that typifies chat topics. Love (or its want), pleasures and hobbies, the meaning of identity and of life will crop up in fragmented and interwoven patterns in the course of a wandering dialogue. Some children will keep on chatting with a number of people, while others will zero in on just one partner. One particular group of children, those with the longest experience in chatting, had a special ritual: they treated the chat room as a territory to be conquered. When they were surfing as a group, in a special and well-equipped room, they saw their mission as that of tribal conquistadors, with the trophy going to the one who could amass the greatest collection of telephone numbers in a session of some two hours. Each little list of numbers was a sign of inter-peer prestige. In a similar way, the pleasure of group chatting was enhanced by little conspiracies and games of seduction shared by the group. Chatting in company, they could turn themselves into their interlocutor and corroborate the data that the others had obtained. They could also identify the different roles that each interlocutor assumed with each of them. The children engaged in this exercise frequently in the navigation sessions we observed, as they did at home (those homes with a computer and Internet connection) or at school, at times when they could escape the teacher's gaze.
There is a dimension that we might define as the final chapter in the ritual of online interaction, and that is the face-to-face encounter. In some cases, there was a significant difference between groups of schools. It appeared that the less experienced youngsters or those with more modest technocultural capital tended to see the post-chat encounter as something beyond their reach, that they could hear about but would never be able to experience. "I never thought I would meet anyone from a chat room", said one boy, "because they live, say, 'way off in the United States and here we are poor, we're not going to go there and they're not going to come here, so all we're going to do is talk, just talk, talk about romantic things" (S-10). Another student, more experienced and from a higher sociocultural level, explained: "Generally speaking, what we're looking for in a chat is to make friends and have the chance to get to know someone physically, and then when we enter a chat room we already know the others, at least those from our country" (S-20). Among the users who hoped to meet their chatting partners in person, a majority preferred to stick to chat rooms from their own city or country. Although at the outset they tended to navigate indiscriminately, the best way to make friends was to find chat groups where others in the same geographic area were navigating. These users, middle-class and with a symbolic capital more appropriate to a certain image of the "reality" behind the Internet, were the ones who reported the most personal contacts with friends that they had made through chatting.
These real encounters tended to be preceded by a number of steps, usually in quick succession: a few telephone calls, a greater level of confidence, a declaration of emotional compatibility, identification or rejection through a certain tone of voice, and then a personal meeting by mutual agreement, preceded by very high expectations. Having had plenty of time to idealize the other person, they arrived at their first meeting expecting to find "the object of their desires". One girl spoke of her post-chat experience: "I got into a chat room one day, and I was looking for friendship. I gave this guy my telephone number, and I talked with him all the time, we made a date, we got to know each other. The first time we chatted, it was great because we didn't tell everything, we didn't look each other in the face. But when we got to know each other personally we found that both of us had given somewhat different data" (S-23). At the post-chat meeting, the children find themselves in a situation where, depending on their previous level of communication, their control skills and the way they handle personal stereotypes, the bond they have established in the chat room and over the telephone will be reinforced or shattered.
These rituals that flow from interaction in the chat room exhibit variants and singularities – what we have described are the principal trends that we found in the group we studied. It is interesting to note how aware youngsters are of their repertory of interaction. Many of them assume a high degree of "modulation" in their behaviour, their questions and their responses, and they may even find some excuse ("I typed it wrong", "I didn't understand you") to make changes that will please their interlocutor. One girl said: "Of course I don't usually tell lies. But sometimes I will change things just a little, the things I say to the other person. After all, who's going to know whether I'm in university or in high school?" (S-23). This level of knowledge responds to the need to act with a certain "instrumentalist" strategy, especially for those who want to establish real bonds with their interlocutors. In the end, to get hard data, a mailing address or telephone number, is the goal that determines behaviour, although we cannot say that the interaction always takes place in this way. What we can say, however, is that every conversation goes through the different stages with distinct affective tones, with varied degrees of emotional and informational depth. Although all interlocutors can become deeply involved, there are some chatters who readily jump from one relationship to another, giving only the barest of data and the skimpiest of information on themselves in each case.
"Is it so hard to believe? Your clothing is different and the hollows of your body have disappeared. You have hair again. Your aspect now is what we call a residual self-image. It is the mental projection of your digital self." (The Matrix31)
What we are has to do, in a very basic way, both with the representation of our own image and with the image others have of us. We always construct ourselves in relation to someone else. The "self" is an entity in relation, as Gergen (1996) puts it. For Lacan (1981), taking the psychoanalytic perspective, image plays a key role in constructing the identity of human beings. In his travels, every navigator wants to recognize and be recognized. Every trip is the history of his searches and every object found is, in a sense, a reflection of what he is, has and desires: a reflection of himself, of the "self" constructed in the infinite sea of Internet symbols. Man is a species that needs to mutate, and he "suffers if he does not change", as Bachelard wrote (1987: 18); and in Internet space, transformation and reinvention are daily occurrences. The "self", made up of mutations, changes and instabilities, is the "digital self" of the cyberspace navigator: a self that projects desires and limitations, a self that exists in relation to the Internet, even when it is not connected to it. In a very essential way, although a youngster's life takes place outside the Internet, the linkage to its symbolic space can remain open. "We are outside the direct relationship with a technological object, but we are not foreign to the symbolic world it mediates for us, above all because, although we are outside the Net, we remain connected to the media circuit of which it is part."
The digital self is a symbolic construction, a representation that is constantly updated within the cultural practices of users of the media circuit. With the singularities inherent in their relationship with the Internet, within the symbolic space created with it, youngsters seek an opportunity for expression. Each of their experiences is an "identity avatar", a search for being, the kind of transaction between the tensions that define what the digital self desires and what it finds in its daily navigation, particularly in chat rooms. These tensions are present because limits and desires move and intertwine. Each of our young navigators is open to new experiences that allow him to redefine his identity and the ways he represents himself (as will be discussed below).
Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly, focuses upon a single signified, which is "I desire you", and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. (Barthes 1985)
The first identary experience that children have when chatting has to do with representation of their existence through a textual record.32 It is a practice that is closely linked to the linguistic meaning of the processes by which the human identity is formed. Language is the primary structure through which an individual makes sense and order of the world. As Lacan (1981) sees it, we enter into the human world, with its subjectivation and the possibility of relationship, when we enter into language, which allows us to put a name to the Other, to be named by the Other, and to recognize ourselves as subjects in that naming. Language is the first, and probably one of the most essential, of collective structures. To be inside language, "to be in language", is to be inside the most complex and primordial web of bonds woven by our species in its process of humanization. "Through relational coordination language is born, and through language we acquire the capacity to make ourselves intelligible. Thus, the relationship replaces the individual as the fundamental unit of social life" (Gergen 1996: 309). As a being in language, the individual is relationship. As an individual, his identity has been constructed in the relational language and his identity is therefore a narration, a historicization of what we have been, of how our relational microcosms have been constructed or destroyed. We recognize ourselves in language and we narrate/constitute ourselves through it. Relational life, which is structured in language, is the sign of an inevitable alienation, the "primordial alienation", which constitutes the subject (Lacan 1981). Before being "self" or subject, one is Other, because we use the Other's language, because we are the Other's language, because we name ourselves in it, because we move in its world of meaning, and once there, named and namers of the world, we are the Other, the Other of the "relational self" to which Gergen alludes.
Language introduces us into a cultural order, into rules for the construction and circulation of meanings. To be in language is to have a place in the world. A vantage point. An angle. A way of observing. "Beyond", "disorder" and "nothing" are words that begin to order the human view. "I look from language": the word allows us to see. We frequently find ethnographic examples that help to reveal this: for certain Inuit tribes, snow has as many as a dozen shades of white. Their language has many expressions for "seeing" the snow. There is a decisive connection between language and the way we view the world. "It is commonly held that language is the representation of the world. I would like to suggest the reverse: that the world is an image of language" (Von Foerster 1994: 100). And even if that were a solipsism, it would be absolutely correct for the world of chat rooms.
While the romantic writers in pen and ink of the 19th century were astonished when they explored their own subjectivity in depth, for today's youth those long mornings immersed in the digital text of the Internet reveal their hypersociality, mediated by the haphazard and disorderly words of the chat room. We have a generation of talkative chatters who are passionate about electronic text, not only in chat rooms but in e-mail and the romantic ads sections of the Internet – chatters who have perhaps never darkened the doorway of a post office and are now turning the mail into an institutional species on its way to extinction.
The writing that youngsters produce in the chat room is fractured, hurried; and its fragments have to be completed by the interlocutor. They believe in economy of language; and even when they stay online for long hours, they are aware of the fleetingness of time, of the possibility that their partner may disappear at any moment, and that they have absolutely no power to detain him. Short statements, monosyllables, succinct questions – these are the dominant features of chat room writing. The children are not used to developing their ideas and they start from a broad basis of shared assumptions. Being recognized as part of the media circuit saves them from providing great quantities of data on themselves. With little information available and with merely ritual questions as their tools, the youngsters must use the skimpy data they have to construct the image of the other person: in these circumstances they ask what they consider the most essential questions for identifying the partner: What do you like? Have you listened to this? Have you seen such-and-such? Do you like the rumba? Video, music and parties are the identifying codes of a generation that is completely caught up in the media circuit that crisscrosses their daily life.
With its short and fragmentary texts, chat conversation signifies not written projection but "communicative intensity". In several sessions, many of the habitual chatters reported that they "talked for the sake of talking", that when the session was over there was nothing left, they had simply experienced the fleeting pleasure of the passing word. It is an anonymous conversation, and the next time it will begin all over again at point zero and for many it is likely to end there as well. In this sense, chat communication is prolix and, beyond its content, it reveals the importance of relationships, of entering into contact with others. We also find reiterative chatters, who always use the same predefined structure of brief communicative formulas. This type, more common among boys than among girls, finds in chatting that kind of creativity that invents not words but relationships. These children will usually write the same messages to all their partners – what counts is not the creativity of their words but the invention of a relationship.
For a generation of youth that is frequently taken to task for distancing itself from the culture of writing and books, it is surely paradoxical that one of the most frequent practices of young cybernauts is textual chatting. To a large extent, as noted earlier, this is because chatting is an experience that is not represented as a reading–writing exercise, and much less an academic reading – writing exercise. Yet, in our view, it is also because chat language is clearly not a written language, at least not in the sense that youngsters understand writing, and even less in the way they construct that language.
If we look in greater detail at how chat language functions, we find a great similarity with the functioning of a communicative code that children have thoroughly mastered: that of audiovisual consumption. Chatters type out quick messages composed with the predefined letters and symbols available on the keyboard, repeating letters and words, playing with acronyms, mixing upper and lower cases, and taking advantage of the infinite possibilities of combining characters. They frequently accompany their messages with predesigned images as well, in the form of little icons (a heart, a smiling face), or the participant's nickname. On the other hand, their brevity of style and the need to capture the partner's attention require a language focused on establishing contact, on creating a link, and so chatters use a kind of "special effects" language to keep the partner alert and interested. And every chatter has the same assumption: if someone enters the chat room, it is for amusement; and knowing this, everyone assumes that to keep the chat going it must be amusing for the partner. One boy said: "When we go online that means we're not very busy, which is usual, right? So if you're not very busy, you want to amuse yourself with something and it's very nice because when we go online and start to amuse ourselves everything goes very well, right? Because we're not committing ourselves to anything, we're just doing something that will make us laugh and that will be fun" (S-23).
Determined to amuse and to be amused, to have an impact and to feel one too, to experience an intense emotional involvement, the children use simple typing games and ready expressions, constructing in this way a "special effects" language. If we observe online conversations, we will find no lengthy narratives with elaborate metaphors – on the contrary, everything is concise and fragmentary. "What the youngsters like about chatting is not writing but communicating." The intensity of the communication lies not in its length but in the imaginary context of the relationship. Their shared cultural capital and the constant assumptions they make about each other help turn the chat room into the stage for an emotional relationship, either to entice the other party or to fight pitched battles online.
"The chat room", said one boy, "Is also a way of letting off steam, and then hiding when people look and say you're really awful, I don't like you, I don't want to chat with you... in the chat room you can cut loose and say what you want... or if you want to seduce33 someone over the Internet, or anything that occurs to you, you can do it, and if someone suddenly says, hey, you're mean, you're gross, well fine, but nobody can kick you out, nobody can say, hey, scram" (S-14).
Although in daily life there is no explicit consciousness that "we are bodies", we often think about our body, in the way we present ourselves and in the way we act in front of others. Our body is an exclusive or inclusive sign, and in interrelationships it functions as a symbol of different degrees of attractiveness depending upon the group and cultural standards of socially accepted beauty. We are probably most aware of our body when we are in an affective interaction. Youngsters who are just emerging from an adolescence in which corporality has great social meaning feel their body either as a bridge or as a boundary, something that either unites them to others or separates them. When they are chatting, they become progressively more involved in their words and, in the opposite direction, there is a symbolic process of "psychological disembodiment". In a sense, the "textual existence" that the chatter acquires implies a shift in his communicative relationship with his body: in chatting we are less body and more language.
In comparing personal communication with what happens in the chat room, one boy said: "There are some people who say everything they can... they say all kinds of things, they open right up and they say anything and then later when you are talking personally, they shut up, they become more timid, but let's say in the chat room there's an atmosphere that makes us feel expansive, like free" (S-20). In daily life we judge people from what we see. On the Internet, the digital realm of the visible, where children can "let it all hang out", it is paradoxically impossible to see the body of the other person. This experience has two important consequences. The first is the perception that there are "no limits". Without physical limits, the children feel released from self-censorship of the kind that governs their communication in other spheres of social life. In their daily lives, individuals think more than they say, but their ingrained social regulation creates degrees of self-control that facilitate interrelationships. In the chat room, children lose many of the characteristics of normal social interrelations: first the body, then self-censorship. The limits on communication dissipate, or rather become wider. The youngsters who admitted to having weaker communication skills in their daily life expressed this most emphatically.
The second consequence of "psychological disembodiment" is the perception that one's interior world is expanding, an experience that emerges with great expressive force. Feeling themselves freer and uncensored, young chatters communicate the things they feel most deeply about in their personal life. After passing through the bonding filters referred to earlier, they begin to represent themselves as two essences in contact. With no body to be seen or criticized, with their imagination excited by the notion that the other person is the object of their desires, they plunge quickly into an ambience of strong intimacy and subjective exaltation. In the world of fragmented speech, chatters communicate in a way that is almost mystical, with intense contact and strong sincerity. Normally, online conversations become a complex process for exploring subjectivity. One youth narrated how chatting led him into unexplored dimensions and facets of his identity and subjectivity: "It's like knowing about another facet of yourself, if someone is not there in front of you, you can say some pretty suggestive things (such as papito34) and get away with it... we did this once and had a lot of fun with it! We all have a creativity that is, like, impressive. So I think that we suddenly get to know ourselves, we can unburden ourselves of something that we have kept very close, and we know that the other person is not going to tell anyone" (S-23).
In this expressive and expansive atmosphere, young chatters can explore a wide range of possibilities for their digital identities. Without pretending to an exhaustive classification, we may organize the identities represented in the chat room into three basic functional forms. First, we have youngsters who prefer to represent themselves with the same self-image they have in their daily lives. These are the children who say they are "really themselves" when they are chatting. They are the most likely to achieve a prompt and advanced degree of intimacy with their interlocutor. Second, there are the youngsters who represent themselves by what they would like to be, with a certain image that they would like others to have in imagining them. Chatters of this kind like to engage in role-playing games where they represent people with features that represent their ideal. A third category of chatters relates to those who present an identity that they think their interlocutor is seeking. These children are experts at modulating their personality, jumping from one role to another to meet the demands expressed by the partner. They train themselves to interpret schemes typical of the partner, they are aware of a wide range of possibilities, and they expect each partner to act more or less in a certain way. They are the most versatile of our three types since they have to constantly reconfigure their representation of their digital identity to adapt to other people's expectations.
Although we may imagine a broader classification, this one is what emerges most clearly from our observations of student behaviour in this study. Each of our chatters can exhibit these three ways of representing himself, separately or in combination, even during the same session. What most commonly happens is that the children will assume one of these types depending on their motivation, the places where they are navigating or the relationship they have established in their chat. For example, if they are seeking someone to play with and have a few minutes' fun, they will jump right in and start communicating without worrying about content or downstream goals. When they are navigating at school or at home, in the company of their peers, they will tend towards tribal behaviour. Demonstrating courage and inventiveness becomes a reason for going online to represent personalities and play role games that will fool the other person. As amusement, this practice serves to win recognition among their peers, and the same is true with acts of courtship. Boys more than girls (although girls too do this more often than they care to admit) seem compelled by tribal feelings to convert the search for "virtual conquests" into a kind of competition.
"When I'm good I'm very good, but when I'm bad I'm better." (Mae West)
Role-playing, fiction and identity games are recurrent practice in the chat room. Testing how far one can push the invention of "self" leads to "a strange logic of truth" in online conversations. One boy declared: "If you're there in a chat, first you don't know whom you're talking with. Second, you don't know if everything he says is true. So you can talk with him and tell him your version of things and then he will do the same, but you don't know if it's true. It's fun to talk, but you can't be sure that what they are saying is always the truth" (S-23).
From their own experience with chat rooms, children are suspicious that others may be lying to them. And having done it themselves, they are aware that truth in chatting is always fragile and relative. The analogy of understanding others by what we ourselves do is common in everyday interpersonal interpretation. In constructing the truth about others, there is an implicit reciprocity. On this point one student said: "Maybe I wasn't telling the truth, but I wasn't sure whether they were telling me the truth either. So I just talked normally" (S-23). In the chat room, children construct truths and fictions at different scales. Assuming personal characteristics that they consider desirable, they may tell falsehoods to entice the other person and to establish a subsequent relationship. Or they may pretend to the opposite traits in order to annoy and insult. In this case, the common practice is to pretend to be a person of the opposite sex from that of the partner: boys pretend to be girls and girls pretend to be boys. The game ends when the deception is finally revealed to the other partner. It is a demonstration of aggressive power in the face of a partner who is "presumed" to be sincere. There is of course a paradox in the logic of "truth in the chat room": it means assuming the other person's sincerity in order to deceive him. In this sense, then, we must put parentheses around the notion that chatting always involves lying.
In the game of representing the other person that takes place in these cases, there is an evident deviousness that implies being able to assume a role as well as possible. Starting from the premise that everyone may be a liar in the chat room, the youngsters know that in principle the others are on guard against being deceived. In representing their personality, then, they make a great effort to appear sincere. When they assume a "good" personality, they will say everything imaginable that is good; at the other extreme, when they are simulating an "evil" person, they will dredge up everything they can think of that is bad. Finally, one way in which the paradox of this strange logic of truth becomes clearest is when the children, guessing that they are being lied to, decide to be profoundly sincere. How does this happen? In one narrative, quoted above, a girl said she behaved very sincerely, although knowing that people might be deceiving her, because she knew that if she said something very personal, something that she would soon be sorry for having confessed, she could always say it was not true whenever she wished. This made her feel more comfortable since she could be as sincere as she wanted, even if everyone might be lying to her.
What love unveils in me is energy. Everything I do has a sense to it... but that sense is an inaccessible finality: it is no more than the sense of my own strength.
(Barthes 1985)
An age-old theme, as old as our species, jumps out at us from the chat sessions. "I got into this chat site", said one boy, "because right up front it says love and then I think, wow, love, and in I go" (S-10). At every online chat site there will be channels called "pink zone" or "for lovers", or "seeking a mate" or simply "love". At most of the chat sites used by youngsters, these rooms are classified by international geographic zone and by city for each country. Of course, the chat room does not have to be defined by its creators as a place for love talk in order for children to seize upon it as such, promptly and massively. Many chat sites carry ads in their interfaces offering free electronic greeting cards that carry love messages. Some sites offer a repertory of cute little love sayings, available for instant use. As well, the most popular chat pages on the Internet offer dating and matchmaking services and sources of advice for the lovelorn.
Love sells – there is no doubt of that – and Internet companies know it. Users, for their part, find in the Internet a place to find and fall in love. Chat rooms are thus a popular place for seduction. Although both sexes like to seduce, it is the boys who seem to be more active at it. It is generally the boys who welcome girls to their conversations. In the chats we observed, at least during daytime navigating hours, girls, or at least female nicknames, show up in fewer numbers than males. When a girl joins a group, she is likely to be welcomed by many male chatters at the same time. This structure would seem to make girls "rare commodities" and thus highly sought after. We rarely found this in the case of boys. Probably for that reason, it is the boys who take the initiative to make contact with several female chatters, hoping that at least one will respond. The chat room seems to become a marketplace for seduction, a place where everyone can desire, where everyone can seduce, but it is swamped by messages from boys and the "hard to catch" behaviour of the girls reestablishes the normal active–passive ritual.
Most of the students in the public schools had no computer or Internet connection at home, but those who did had a favourite time for engaging in love talk: "For kids, Internet love is nocturnal." "At my cousin's house last night, we went online at nine o'clock and we got off at five in the morning," said one boy (S-29). When they have access, the best time for sharing love talk would seem to be at night. While the censor at school is the teacher, at home it is the parents – and they are more worried about the cost of the connection than they are about what the children do online.
The nature of love talk on the Internet is similar to the textual forms described earlier. The narrative style swings between two extremes: the classically romantic and the explicitly sexual. In the latter case it is the boys who say they are the less inhibited. The girls, while hardly indifferent, insist that they reject such content. The two kinds of love talk can be interchangeable and one may "morph" into the other. Similarly, "cyber romances" (limited to the Internet) are less frequent than post-chat encounters. Even boys who never thought of a "real" encounter as a possibility seemed to have no interest in a relationship conducted exclusively over the Internet. It may be that Internet-focused love relationships arise because of geographic distances, or because users are just beginning their relationship with the Internet, or perhaps, as we have seen, because they do not believe that other people can be more real than the fiction of their written words. We think, nevertheless, that it is geographic distance that in the end determines how long it will take for a virtual relationship to become a face-to-face one. Perhaps it is not very satisfying to have a "cyber girlfriend" living in the same city. On this point, one girl related her experience: "It was when I was just starting on the Internet, and I really wanted to visit Argentina because I like Argentine boys... so I went and I got to know a boy and we started to talk, and he sent me e-mail and I sent him e-mail. And then we got engaged over the Internet, we became "cyber fiancés." And that went on for some time, then we stopped sending e-mail" (S-23). For a relationship of that kind, where affection can grow over time, if the partners had lived closer to each other, a personal meeting might have been the most feasible denouement.
Idealizing the other person in the midst of amorous discourse is something that occurs frequently in online conversation. When youngsters imagine the other party, they set up in their fantasies idealized objects with all the socially accepted beauty features: "The Internet would seem to have no room for the homely." "Many times", said one girl, "we imagine something ideal, OK? So if I want that other person to idealize me, I will say, no, I'm not tall, I'm about this size" (S-23). In this way the chat site functions as a place for updating and projecting the stereotype of one's object of desire, not only because one is seeking it but because each person can appear there as the most desirable partner. This "erotic dynamic" of chatting also has its counterpart: the public display of hatred and aggression. In several sessions and in the interviews, the youngsters, more frequently the boys than the girls, related situations of group aggression on the chat line. The boys had various strategies. When they could do so at school, they arranged among themselves to join a specific chat room and began as a group to insult selected participants in the public section of the site. They did the same thing when they set a time to join a chat room from home and began throwing insults. They functioned exactly like a tribe of warriors. This situation was highly analogous to that of video games that pit teams against enemies with one clear goal in mind: to kick them out of the chat room. One boy said: "Take the Argentines, for example. Those guys are really conceited, even on the Internet. So we pepper them with insults. For example, we will throw back the same words they use, for example the word boludos (jerks)" (S-20).
Although Internet site administrators are exerting increasing control over these situations, users find ways to keep on fighting each other (e.g. changing their name after it has been withdrawn). The target of their attack is not random: it amounts to constructing "Latin American regional stereotypes". Functioning nearly always at the country level, the youngsters in this study constructed a ranking of nationalities in which they respected some and insulted others. In the logic of these battles and in their representations of others, there is a particular geography. Colombians look down on Peruvians and insult them, and yet, reluctant to venture into unknown territory, they respect Mexicans, whose quirks they do not understand. Venezuelans simply do not exist. Hispanics in the United States are something new, and Colombians are ambiguous about them. They despise Argentines and try, unsuccessfully, to ignore them. It is interesting to note that, whether because of cultural relations, shared media symbols, language barriers35 or geographic proximity, the youngsters prefer to chat with partners from Latin America, whether to insult them or to seduce them.
As can be seen, in the chat room love goes along with dislike and aggression. The outcome depends on different variables, many of which have nothing to do with the express intention of the navigator since, as in a video game, even those least disposed to do so end up involved in the amorous logic of love talk or in the excitement of verbal "video war".
In the 1960s various kinds of group-based psychotherapeutic encounter techniques became popular. Among these was the T-group or therapy group.36 The dynamics of this kind of encounter group are characterized by a strong feeling of community, high levels of sincerity, great subjective and intersubjective exploration and an openness to emotions of different kinds. Such groups were conducted in exclusive and confined spaces. They generally had a very strong personal impact. Yet, for their critics, they had one crucial weakness: by constituting themselves as a special space, they made themselves remote from the everyday life of participants and, although the experience might provoke spectacular changes in them, they proved to be fleeting and unstable. In short, the encounter group was an intensely emotional experience that tended to fade quickly once the therapy was concluded.
If we examine the space, the relationships, the content and the emotional settings that are created among youngsters when they enter a chat room, we will find important similarities with the behaviour of encounter groups. Their communicative openness is similar. The predominance of the affective dimension and expressive openness are factors that both spaces share. They also share one characteristic that was identified as a weakness of the encounter groups: the fact that they were divorced from the daily lives of participants. Chatting tends to function as a symbolic space that is disconnected from its environment. As a result of "psychological disembodiment", of identary experiences that idealize the self and others, youngsters experience the chat room as "a world apart", one that they enter, enjoy and then leave. It is not easy to say just how far the practice of chatting really intersects with the transformation and development of behaviours and personalities, yet from the data at hand, it would seem that online conversations occupy another of the "fragments of daily experience" that may or may not be articulated with the living space of each student. Although we must not assume that life is a coherent set of experiences (quite the contrary), the description of the chat room as "a world apart" lets us identify the behaviour of youngsters on the Internet as a fragmented experience.
Moreover, youngsters' clear preference for chatting is due to its potential for social relationships. As one boy put it, "Chatting is the only way we have of meeting more people, whereas if you enter a common and current page the only thing you can do is participate in a few forums or such, but there is no possibility of meeting more people" (S-22). With their hypersocial style, youngsters seek out spaces for contact on the Internet and although there are more communicative possibilities, compared to online conversations, they prefer the chat room, not only because they are unaware of other resources or have technical limitations that impede access to them, but also because chatting offers a primordial possibility: there is always someone available, and available instantly. Without any waiting time, with cultural codes focused on the here and now, chatting represents an immediate and effective link to others.
Whether the experiences described here are desirable or not is beyond the interpretive claims of this study. Yet it is worth noting that an experience like that of the chat room can have both positive and negative aspects. What will in the end define the quality of the impact of digital technology on this population group is not the direct relationship with the object (which is rarer than we would like) but the environment and the meanings with which cyberspace culture relates to their everyday lives. What happens to a youngster when using the Internet has to do more with what happens in his life as a whole than with what he does in his determined and excited navigation through the chat rooms.
The mass media and electronic networks function as a symbolic interconnected circuit. In that kind of techno-communicative macro-network, the Internet exists in a "media circuit" where practices and meanings are exchanged. Each ICT relates to other media and to itself, as a highly complex symbolic circuit. Communication technologies have an inter-referential and omnipresent existence in the fabric of social life: advertising comes alive on television and video, the Internet sells us stations and music that we can hear on the radio, while the radio tells us about the great informational value of the Web. But this media circuit does not stop there. Our conversations feed upon advertising slogans and vice versa: the media throws our own language back at us. To repeat what one boy said, taking his words from an advertisement, "I really like the advertising slogan for Sprite – it says a lot. Even though what they're trying to sell is a brand, in fact it says a lot." The media circuit reaffirms, with the participation of spectators and users, a space of symbolic interaction. The "macro-network" of the media circuit is not only technological, it is above all cultural. In other words, before the Internet we were already connected to the "macro-net", to the media circuit of contemporary technocultures.
Today's space is like Alice's mirror shattered into bits. With the multiplicity of images of the world produced by our relationship with the media, we do not know exactly where reality begins and fiction ends, or whether that division is even valid. Before the digital networks and the audiovisual media, in that time that we can no longer imagine, we obtained our images of the world from primary groups and our local environment: they were few and clearly defined. The lifestyles that we observed were primarily those of our surroundings. This restricted setting was readily knowable. Life was based on order: everything had its name, nearly always an everyday name. There was only one mirror in which we could see ourselves. But that mirror was broken. Mass ICTs were invented and they began to produce images that overwhelmed the human capacity to process them. These technologies, directly or indirectly, now inhabit our daily lives. For the generation of youngsters in this study, who were born when the Internet was already 15 years old, their surroundings, however humble, have been peopled by objects, by communication structures, by relations and by meanings constructed within them.
The Internet emerges in this space, where youngsters have suffered a process of "technological socialization". The audiovisual media have been the greatest technological sensitizers of youth. While a society's media circuit is articulated with various communication systems, when it comes to youth there are two systems that are fundamental: music and television. At the wrap-up of one discussion group with youngsters in the study, one of them commented on his work on the topic of the media: "Well, we took a kind of survey among those of us who were discussing this topic, where we could see how often we used each of these communication media - we saw that the telephone gets used between 45 minutes and an hour, and when we have no telephone this affects us but only to 50 percent; television we use on average for 12 hours a day, and if we didn't have TV it would affect us to 90 percent; as for the radio, we listen to it an average of 8 hours a day, and if we didn't have it that would affect us to 80 percent" (S-14).
Youngsters not only consume long hours of television time, but they are aware that they do so. Through television they have steeped themselves in some of the principal logics they now use on the Internet. To some extent we may say that many young television viewers navigate over the Internet in the same way they do with television: the youngster who surfs through the ads on the Internet and navigates in multiple windows at random has long been familiar with the effectiveness of "zapping" through television channels.
When it comes to music, it occupies a social space with a complex symbolic structure, the principal scenario for which is the radio, another of the main components of this media circuit. Radio is a market of signs, types, groups, rituals, daily practices, entertainment, tastes and aesthetics. In the mid-1980s, with the great popularity of the media and the transnational growth of record companies and the mass marketing of musical video clips, youngsters came to recognize the music of the market as an identifying object. Radio, for which there is a wide audience in the country, began to establish a style based on "musical interaction" with young listeners. In the beginning many broadcasters offered youth music programmes and later "musical variety magazines" for youngsters. This meant simply that the station allowed listeners to set the programme by calling in their requests. What made (and still makes) these programmes successful was their "interactive" nature. They in fact set the style for the next decade. The 1990s saw a burgeoning of a type of radio programming based on cultural codes that were deeply shared by youths. The children would call up the station, interact with the hosts and respond to other listeners. Besides gratifying the wishes of their young listeners, these programmes appealed to them with questions about their private lives. The rumba, infidelity, love, betrayal, sexual initiation – such issues were frequently addressed over countless stations of this kind.
Radio, music and television are the main elements that shape what is a space of reception, a media circuit, a space for cultural appropriation of the Internet. Yet youngsters also find differences that, except for the cost of access, work in favour of a more "positive" representation of the Internet. The main difference lies in their perception of the Internet as a more manageable space, one where they feel more in control over content and events. "On television", said one student, "you have the programmes they are offering, but on the Internet we can look for other things that interest us, something we might want to learn, or you might have some curiosity you want to investigate, whereas with TV, well, you watch programmes" (S-30). The fact that they feel the Internet to be more open to their own decisions and that they see depth in its content creates in youngsters a feeling of greater autonomy than what they experience with the remote control unit for their television.
On the other hand, the relationship of the media circuit with the Internet also opens a space for differences that, according to youngsters, work increasingly in favour of the Internet. Those perceived differences are important: they relate to format, scope, organization, and, above all, the depth of information. On the Internet, in its representation as an "unlimited object", a space open to view, youngsters find greater depth and therefore more credibility. "Let's face it," said one boy, "television sometimes lies, you can hear a lot of lies on the news programmes, and then the next day you look in a newspaper and you find more information and you realize that's not the way they were painting it, because the communication media are already in cahoots, whereas with the Internet we can find a lot of things, you can give your own opinion, and that's great because there you can see your own point of view and what you believe, and not what the newscasters are telling you" (S-27).
In another respect, relating to the gender of users, the media circuit has important differences. Comparatively speaking, our study found that technical skills in using the Internet and handling the computer itself were greater among boys than girls. The processes of technological socialization have produced an image where men can control machines. In everyday life, women have less chance to explore technological objects. This socializing style can also be seen in the approach to the Internet, and power is redistributed over a scale that ranges from the simplest objects, the television screen, to the most complex ones like the computer: boys work with computers and girls watch television. On this point, one boy said: "I spend nearly my whole day at the computer, and the one who watches television is mainly my sister" (S-22). There are differences, too, in navigation practices: the girls will visit things like horoscopes, while the boys prefer sports; the girls go for singers, the boys for online games. Yet when youngsters find themselves with homework tasks that require Internet searching, many girls are more at ease with this than are their male classmates.
The Internet has integrated itself smoothly into the media scenario, mainly because it has affinities with its predecessors in the areas that children use most. In the media circuit, including the Internet, youngsters find a way of keeping in contact with their generation. The great capacity of fashion (an important focus of the media circuit) for informing youths about the behaviour, emotions, values and symbols accepted by other youths is what makes it so central to their lives. The latest song, the sports scores, the horoscopes, the fashion models, the special effects and the latest software are just some of the many things that circulate through the media circuit. For youngsters, the information contained there has to do with the world that is important to them, far more than the daily routine of school, family or tradition. On this point, one youth observed: "The communication media teach everything, everything a person can learn: vocabulary, teaching, learning" (S-21).
To show you where your desire lies all I have to do is prohibit it a little...
(Barthes 1985)
A frequent concern of teachers when they leave students alone with the Internet is that they will visit pornographic sites. And of course students confirm their teachers' expectation. For youngsters, the prohibited sites are the X-rated pages. Visiting them awakens tribal emotions of complicity, praise, delight and other shared states of mind that arise when navigating through "porno" pages of the Web. The awareness that they are breaking a rule, that what they are doing is prohibited, makes them even more determined to navigate through censored sites.37 In this respect, one student stated: "There are lots of things on the Internet that are prohibited, and so they have a real cache. Anything that is prohibited is going to be even more exciting when you can finally get to it. If political pages and such were prohibited, then everybody would be rushing to political pages to see what they're all about" (S-25).
Applying the logic of this narrative, it will be clear that if we want to achieve a certain goal we must first "prohibit it a little". The act of jumping over the bounds of prohibition has two principal aspects, in the context of our research. First, the function of accessing pornographic material is a form of confrontation against school regulations. In many cases, the main reason for visiting "X" pages is to enjoy the thrill of being disobedient or rebellious. "At school", said one girl, "what happened is they used these screen savers of girls, naughty girls all bent over, and they said they couldn't sleep at night because of the scandal the guys were causing" (S-12). The second aspect relates directly to the complex process of personal development in a cultural setting that makes a strategy of exhibiting the body as a visual product. That issue is beyond the scope of this study, but we may say that in their psychosocial development these youngsters show signs of vague but real cultural stress over their sexuality. The off-limits "X" sites in effect make the Internet a place where the things they are forbidden to look at are on full and open display. If the principle that everything can be shown on the Internet brings with it censorship, then the "X" sites become really seductive: if something is prohibited in a realm where everything is visible, the children will have all the more desire to see it. In any case, amid all this visual abundance, the "X" sites are equations that are solved by the "order of desire" that a culture constructs.
Because of the way the images of ICTs are disseminated in our countries, they have been converted into an oversignified object, more imagined than real, an ambiguous cultural object that is both desired and feared. As "technophiles", we are dazzled, enchanted and seduced by computers; as "technophobes", we look upon them with scepticism and suspicion and are quick to denounce the dehumanization to which they are leading us. Perhaps we are not at either of these extremes, which apply to many objects of human technology; perhaps we are in some intermediate and shifting position. Perhaps not. For some people, digital technology could be (and this is merely a hypothesis) the representation of a globalized world, modern and hyperwired, from which we as a peripheral country are excluded; for others, that technology is probably something magical, inexplicable and anthropomorphic lurking in some recess of their daily lives. Whatever our attitude, it is impossible to be indifferent to it, and we are bound to construct some image of what it is, even if we have not tried it yet.
In the fields of work and communication, computer technology is a tool widely recognized for its potential for increasing productivity. In the world of education and in everyday life, its possibilities, as we have seen, are still limited and unexplored, at least in our country. In our context, existing technology is inequitably distributed in the midst of an educational structure that is notably segmented and socially differentiated in terms of quality.38 Recent studies of public education (Parra 1995; Castañeda 1996; IDEP 1999) have shown that the educational structure is very weak, with an undertrained teaching staff, rigid school organization and dynamics, systemic instabilities, discontinuity in planning, and education policies that have little impact – as well as a chronic lack of funds, which are increasingly being siphoned off to fight the guerrilla war or to mitigate its consequences.
Similarly, various academic achievement tests administered to students in mathematics, formal reasoning, maternal language and foreign language skills (which are essential in view of the spread of English as the predominant language of the Internet) have shown enormous shortcomings in the development of the country's children and youth. Given the limited degree to which ICTs have been incorporated in the schools and the problems of appropriating them culturally, there is a need to rethink the strategies for using ICT in education, starting with primary and secondary schools, which are the least-served levels of the system in this respect. This is of course a problem of huge scope that can be viewed from many angles – to start with, by analyzing the problem we have addressed in this study: the psychosocial experience and cultural practice of students with the Internet. In a world that seeks to become a planetary society, where the circulation of knowledge and communication are the keystones of its functioning, "technocultural skills" must be a fundamental issue for the education agenda of all Latin American countries, especially when we recognize that the unequal appropriation of ICT is having an ever more decisive impact on the international scene.
Moreover, the impacts of the new ICTs that we have attempted to examine here need to be recognized in rethinking social policies for ICT, reorganizing the school system and developing training policies and refresher courses for teachers. Current educational thinking is assigning the teacher a new role, one that is highly promising in the debate over ICT in education. The United Nations Education Agenda declares: "The teacher is increasingly a learning facilitator, a skilled mediator between multiple educational opportunities and the motivations and expectations of students" (Gómez Buendía 1998: 229). If the teacher is to be a facilitator and mediator, there must be a more cooperative relationship between students and instructors. The generational gap in technological skills can complicate the pedagogical relationship, because teachers are not always well trained in the use of digital tools, but it can also be a valuable opportunity to share knowledge, to redefine teaching–learning roles and to foster a climate of cooperative exploration between teachers and students.
When it comes to the appropriation of ICTs in the school culture, we must question the frequent representation of that process as simply having a "machine" and learning to manipulate it. International experience and the results of this study show that technology, however complicated, sophisticated and accessible it may be, requires a suitable context for appropriation. If it is disconnected from planned education projects, from organized experiences, from systematic cultural and pedagogical designs, it will have little chance to produce innovations that will improve the quality of education and promote social equity. Technology "is not just a question of working skills". In the case of the Internet, as we have seen, the inability to take full advantage of it stems from the social relationship in which it is introduced. The success or failure of the Internet, whether in the school or in society, will depend on the cultural space of appropriation: the best technology can disappoint in the context of an unstable social, cultural and educational relationship.
1. Besides the lead researcher, this study involved advisors and research assistants in the fields of psychology, anthropology, systems engineering and pedagogy. The following were members at various times of the interdisciplinary team: Rocío Rueda, Elizabeth Castillo, Ivanna Castaño, Mauricio González, Paola Pardo, Paola Agudelo, Andrés Pérez, Elkin Garavito, Marcela Ortiz and María Fernanda Otero Hernández.
2. See <http://glca.org/mellon99/rheingold.shtml>.
3. Of course, in addressing the cultural practice component that is also implied in the question, we are thinking in terms of an assumed link to "cultural studies": culture is understood here as the realm in which meanings are produced. To understand the "meaningful practices" in which culture operates is to recognize a highly visible fact: the urban dynamics that characterize contemporary culture are strongly tied up with the new forms in which cultural meaning is produced and communicated.
4. As we shall see in this study, such "resignification" does not mean placing all the emphasis on the user's autonomy in order to indicate his capacities for freedom, strength or resistance with respect to the Internet. Although we keep a healthy distance from viewpoints that treat the media as "powerful, omnipresent and manipulative", we also steer clear of the opposite pole of "total resignification", which assumes that the audience is just as "resistant", free and autonomous as we would like it to be. What is certain is that subject–technology relationships take shape within a complex web of interplay between technological objects, meanings, contexts and users from which multiple directions, determinations and reciprocities are constructed.
5. Of course, the concept of cultural capital is of a magnitude and complexity that far exceed the bounds of this study. Nevertheless, as an interpretive tool it has allowed us to approximate the cultural dynamics essential to our research goals.
6. The different versions of its origin that circulate over the Internet all agree that from its earliest days e-mail and bulletin boards were among the widely used resources, the content of which typically referred to the daily lives and personal relations of scientists, academics and military personnel, who were the principal users at that time.
7. In the first exploratory phase we sought information on a sample of about 120 public high schools.
8. Data for Colombia were taken from marketing research by M. Puertas, published in El Tiempo Bogota, October 15, 2000, Section 4.
9. This programme includes an equipment component and a training component for teachers and education officials. According to its own data, REDP is to be implemented in three phases: in the first, 200 schools will be connected, in the second 492 and in the third 35. An operations centre has been established to administer and run the service. Schools were equipped in accordance with two scales, ranging from 3 to 10 computers each, the latter cases including a server.
10. We should point out that, apart from the REDP figures and project implementation data, available information on the previous status of the Internet in Bogota is hopelessly inadequate.
11. The global inventory also highlighted how social representation plays a key role in ICT efforts in the city's education system. Indeed, the problem lies not only in what happens but also in how it is viewed: for one school, getting 2 computers could be the answer to its dreams, while for another the 20 new computers it has just received might fall far short of its expectations.
12. A few of the schools were private: they were selected because certain similarities and variables such as experience and gender made them interesting to explore, and particularly because they offered useful information that could be generalized to all the target schools. A well-equipped private girls' school, with a socially mixed student body, was the principal source of information on how girls behaved with the Internet.
13. Paradoxically, despite the broad sample we started with, we had great difficulty in selecting our focus group because the information mechanisms on the education system are sketchy and highly disorganized in this respect. There is no consolidated information available at the central level, and not enough is known about experience in the schools. Moreover, outsiders face considerable hurdles in gaining access to the schools.
14. This experiment was crucial in observing how the school setting, which is more symbolic and physical, affected the representational dynamics of the Internet among the students.
15. With a video camera focused only on their screen, the children talked about the steps they were taking in their navigation. Despite its tremendous potential for capturing direct information, this tool was not very useful to us because of technical difficulties and the fact that the children frequently neglected to record their doings.
16. As one might expect, it was the free navigation sessions that were most in demand.
17. The student survey was open, but it covered only information from the target schools. The teacher survey was administered to each teacher on a voluntary basis and included the non-target schools. Although the interviews were not as systematic as we would have liked, they did shed some interesting light on basic aspects and thereby helped to confirm our qualitative interpretations.
18. We preferred to be focused rather than exhaustive in presenting our findings. The CD-ROM that was prepared as part of the research contains more interactive and in-depth ethnographic information, in video, audio and text formats.
19. In accordance with our ethnographic approach, the report is designed to highlight the players' own voices. Their stories, recast to make them readable in written form, are identified as follows: S or T, followed by the number of the ethnographic database file in which the story is recorded. "S" refers to student and "T" to teacher.
20. There is also another possible option: the difference in the two cultures may be sustainable and perhaps the "resignification" of school means that the school must differentiate itself and enhance its identity, i.e. it may be that the learning experience it offers is so significant as to be not the exclusive space for knowing and learning (in today's society there are many other contexts where intense knowledge and learning experiences can be had) but rather the place for a particular kind of knowledge and learning that is not out of tune with students' cultural surroundings but complements them and allows the students to represent them differently.
21. In this study one of the six institutions selected offered a good example of a school that is integrated with its cultural setting. Another one came close; and although it was a public school, its geographic and cultural setting coincided in general terms with those of a middle-class institution. Some students in a third school belonged to the middle class and had some real sociocultural possibilities. Most of the other schools in the preliminary phase of the study fell under the category of schools in crisis, as described earlier.
22. Commercial transactions over the Internet were reported by only a few students from the school with the highest socioeconomic level and by one student from a public school, whose well-off parents had participated in online auctions.
23. They navigated with skill and enthusiasm through the sites of their favourite singers and actors, the web sites for their favourite television programmes and online magazines, and yet, paradoxically, both in the interviews and in the discussion groups, the students complained openly about excessive advertising on the Internet.
24. In the course of planning their careers, some of them have been looking to foreign universities to pursue their postsecondary education. A boy from the highest-income school, with a "technological imagination" fed by living in his well-equipped high-tech home, said: "Most of us want to study something related to mechatronics. There is no way to do that here in Colombia. I know already that I am going to study in Spain and that my parents will foot the bill" (S-19).
25. There is an extensive literature on this point. For a synthetic summary, see Hernández (1998) and Martín Barbero (1996).
26. One student told us how she reads with the Internet: "I download the information, I print it all out, I look at the pages of the magazines and I print some of them, and I have an album of everything I printed out, everything that I have looked at" (S-23). Incidentally, electronic magazines are among the pages most frequently visited by the students we interviewed.
27. For its part, the school tends to ignore this "hyper-reader" exercise in its "reading–writing" component.
28. The teachers reported a recent negative experience with a massive virtual training course, which aroused great enthusiasm among teachers in Bogota but, because of the technical and pedagogical weaknesses of the software, generated frustration and rejection within the education community.
29. For the notion of cultural and symbolic capital, see Bourdieu (1985, 1990).
30. From "Betty la fea", a popular Colombian television series (translator's note).
31. The Matrix is a 1999 film produced by Warner Brothers, written and directed by the Wachowsky Brothers.
32. The observations and statistics in this study indicate that the only kind of chat in which the youngsters engaged was in written form. Video and voice sites (even a predefined voice selected by the user) did not enter into their experience in navigating the Web.
33. Levantar in youth slang.
34. Papitos, flirtatious compliments with a heavy sexual undertone.
35. One of the questions in the survey used for this study asked about knowledge of English on the Internet. The students generally scored quite low, perhaps the lowest for any question. If we are planning the rigorous introduction of the Internet at school, we will quickly run into a still-unrecognized problem for the public school: the low level of second-language skills. In the national tests given to students in the last year of high school, English was the subject in which scores were the lowest throughout the country, both in public and private schools.
36. For our discussion of encounter groups, we have relied on Dreyfus (1977) and Schutz (1973). Dreyfus reviews the literature and the classics from the heyday of the encounter group, while Schutz, a proponent of one of its currents, addresses the topic from his own psychotherapeutic perspective.
37. As well, there is an element of gender differentiation. Boys are more likely than girls to be interested in pages with explicit sexual content.
38. The differentiation of the new ICTs in Latin America is growing. For Finquelievich (1998), ICTs have split the city in two: a rich one and a poor one. This division is not new but, in the big cities of Latin America in particular, a new duality has emerged together with the intensification of knowledge and information activities.
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As the development of the information society is increasing the opportunities for access to data and facts, education should enable everyone to gather information and to select, arrange, manage and use it. (Delors 1996: 23)
In today's globalized and wired society2 certain ideas about "development" have become so socially ingrained that they appear to have moved beyond debate. In countries like ours, where on a daily basis broad segments of the population face poverty and lack of opportunity for improving their lives, we can discern formulas that have taken root in the social imagination of our region as ways for resolving these problems. One of these solutions is to seize upon education as an engine of social mobility, providing the only possibility for the bulk of the population to improve its living standards. "Education in the so-called postindustrial society – which is so complex and ambivalent – seems to be the preferred means for achieving tomorrow what we lack today: a productive dynamism with social equity and a democracy based on citizenship without exclusions. Inherent in this expectation is the risk of future disappointment since such objectives can only be achieved through a broad, systemic effort in which the education system can play an important role but can in no case offer the 'keys of the kingdom'" (Hopenhayn and Ottone 2000: 34).
To this we may add the conviction that one of the historical and structural conditioning factors that have perpetuated the backwardness of our region is the low level of technological development of its productive apparatus, which instead of fostering innovation and creating added value is in fact merely a secondary receptor that simply serves to maintain this underdeveloped economic status.3
Thus, we are faced with two utopias, the educational and the technological, both of which hold out the promise of overcoming poverty, if only we will make a sufficient and determined wager on them. The first utopia nourishes the belief that if people at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder are given a better education they will have greater social mobility and access to more tools for coping within a society in constant change. The technological utopia, for its part, sees underdevelopment as something that can be overcome through greater use of technology, both in production and in information.4
We face a problem when these "wagers" or decisions, which have a social and historical character (and are reflected in public policies), are given the seal of absolute and unquestionable truth. At the very least, we need to adopt a more critical stance towards them. Our research, which examined some of the contradictions and mistaken assumptions involved in introducing information and communication technologies (ICTs)5 in schools, is intended as a contribution in this direction.
As a first step in explaining the concepts underlying the Red Enlaces, we shall provide a brief chronological review of the steps that have been involved in this process. The beginnings of the initiative can be traced back to 1992, when the Chilean Ministry of Education declared the need to build "a National Educational Network linking all government-supported public and high schools in the country". This first stage included a pilot plan involving a dozen schools in the capital city, Santiago, which was later extended to the Ninth Region (the political and administrative division with the largest proportion of indigenous peoples), where a total of 100 schools were enlisted in this initial development stage. The testing phase ran until 1995, when a real growth plan of national scope began to take shape. By that year it was considered feasible to make ICT resources (equipment, software and Internet connections) available in all Chilean schools within the next five years. Consistent with this plan, an exponential increase in coverage can be seen from 1996 on as the programme became truly national in scope. By 1998, computers were already considered an integral part of the secondary school curriculum, with the status of a "horizontal objective", i.e. it was recognized that the implications of working with ICTs extended to all aspects of the training imparted to students. The following graph charts the progress made with the Red Enlaces:6
According to Education Ministry officials, these figures speak of outstanding success in transforming the education system through this initiative for mass access to ICTs.
Given these results, it can be argued that the effort to equip Chilean schools with computers, software, Internet access and peripherals has been broadly successful.7 Although there is still a noticeable imbalance in the availability
of these new technologies between schools located in major urban centres and those in more remote rural areas, it is equally clear that rural schools are gradually being incorporated into the plan and that these discrepancies should be overcome in the medium term. Generally speaking, we can say that in one way or another ICTs are becoming a normal part of the school landscape. This is confirmed in the wide media coverage that has been given to the entire issue of introducing ICTs into society and in the consequent expectations of teachers and students alike.
Clearly, this modernization of education is based on a concept that relates technical work, such as establishing a computer network, to the goals, needs and challenges currently facing education. Such a large-scale investment would be inoperable without an ideology that defines exactly what are the basic parameters guiding the entire Red Enlaces project as a government programme.8
These guidelines address some of the main questions that have emerged with the introduction of technology into education: for example, deciding the pedagogical orientation to be given to ICTs once they are in place in the classroom, what kinds of new knowledge and skills students can obtain through ICTs, how school management can be improved through the use of computers, and the idea that the teacher can use resources available over the Internet as a supplement to classroom instruction. Moreover, one of the conceptual underpinnings of the Red Enlaces project "considers information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a tool in the service of individuals, the main players in the process of teaching and learning: students, teachers principals, supporters and officials of educational establishments.... The goal is not only to equip the K-12 schools with computers, but to integrate them into an educational network through which they can communicate with each other and with the world, exchange ideas and experiences, regardless of the region or town in which they are located. This is consistent with one of the key objectives of the education reform: to achieve greater equality of opportunity for children and youths to gain a better education" (Ministry of Education of Chile 2000a: 11).
From the above description, we can detect an assumption that, while not explicit, sets the direction that this process of technological change is intended to take: we are referring to the tremendous degree of confidence that information technologies have for a self-activating potential for change.
This presumed quality of ICTs, when transferred to the education sphere, should enhance its quality and make it equitable as soon as all students have the same "window of access" to the world that the Internet offers, and it should turn students into "world citizens" with the capacity to understand and participate in the process of globalization. As the planning unit for the Red Enlaces project sees it, ICTs are not only a tremendously important teaching tool but are also related to the lifestyle that the boys and girls now learning this technology will experience. "This educational revolution has to do with lifelong learning, distance education and ICT-based education. Countries that fail to make this change will be widening the knowledge and technology gap that separates them from the more dynamic parts of the globalized world and will find themselves cut off from the knowledge-based economy and the information society (Brunner 2000: 214). According to these arguments, the introduction of information technologies in the education system is an answer to the urgent need for Chile's education system to adapt to the requirements of globalization.9
Consequently, this research was driven by questions such as these: Is this technology really being incorporated as a new teaching tool in schools? What cultural impact does the introduction of this new, globalizing technology have on the rural environment? What happens to the teacher–student relationship in a rural school when information technologies and their related teaching innovations are introduced? How do students react to this new educational resource?
These questions apply to both the theoretical and the practical aspects of the assumptions underlying the Red Enlaces. We believe there is a need to look beyond the claims, based on figures showing coverage and number of teachers with ICT training, that significant progress is being made in improving the quality of education and that ICTs are tools that really make it possible to overcome poverty. In fact, if ICTs are to have a true impact in reducing the equity gap, they must be given a more cultural dimension as well, and we must understand thoroughly the real social and practical uses that are made of ICTs in schools.
Our research was conducted among low-income groups in rural areas, where we attempted to identify social practices linked to the use of ICTs. We selected the commune of Maule for this purpose because it met the requirement of having elementary schools integrated into the Red Enlaces project. In our ethnographic work, we were therefore able to approximate the daily use made of ICTs in two local schools.
To understand the context of this research, it is useful to review some aspects of the commune of Maule. It is located in the Seventh Region of Maule, along the south bank of the river of the same name, some 288 kilometres to the south of Santiago. The regional capital, the city of Talca, is about 20 kilometres to the north and only 15 minutes by highway from the main village of the commune. The commune has 13,769 inhabitants, of whom 11,007 are in rural settlements; the one "urban" settlement accounts for the remaining 2,762 people. Because it is so close, Talca, as the economic, population and political centre, exerts great influence on the development of the commune of Maule. It is fairly safe to say that the future of Maule, as an administrative entity and a human settlement, is closely linked to movements to and from Talca.
The municipal government has its headquarters in Maule, which functions as the political centre of the commune. This locality has the greatest number of public services (a polyclinic, the largest communal school, the civil registry, the post office, the fire department and a police station) as well as the beginnings of a commercial centre. Human settlement in the commune can be described as dispersed among small centres. This means that, within the broader territory representing the Municipality of Maule, there is a long list of small localities with intermittent public services (health posts, schools and sometimes police) and a great number of shantytowns or ranchos scattered haphazardly along the roads that run through the commune. Among these poor villages we may mention Duao, Colín, Linares de Perales, Callejones and Numpay as examples. The interesting point here is that the area covered by the communal administration is very large considering its relatively small population, which is scattered among several very small centres. These features make it difficult to provide adequate coverage of public services, particularly in the winter when heavy rains can severely disrupt intra-communal travel.
As noted earlier, the local economy is heavily dependent on activity in Talca. Most of the commune's farming output (which represents the primary source of income and work) is sent to markets in the regional capital. This means that the constant fluctuations in Talca's demand for agricultural products translate structurally into higher or lower incomes for people in Maule and its surrounding areas. Moreover, as an urban centre, Talca represents a much bigger commercial and labour market than does Maule, which means that the local economy remains very weak if we evaluate it in terms of its potential for generating incomes and benefits for its inhabitants.
Maule, then, is marked by high levels of poverty: 42.4 percent, with an indigence rate of 13.6 percent.10 It is sufficient to say that, according to figures in the latest UNDP Human development report, the Maule region has the worst performance. Moreover, in the 1998 human development index ranking (UNDP 2000: 25), communes of this region fall in the lowest quintile.
The extreme poverty in which most of the people of Maule live can be laid to a number of factors: the high adult illiteracy rate, at 13.7 percent (although this trend is being reversed among children, thanks to expanded educational coverage); poor health conditions reflecting inadequate sewage facilities; the low value placed on manual labour, which keeps family incomes low; and the high degree of local dependence on social assistance from the municipality. Such a situation can exist only when the local population has very low incomes and, far from being able to pay municipal contributions, requires whatever direct assistance the local authorities can deliver.
Despite the foregoing, living conditions are nowhere near as bad as those frequently encountered in the marginal zones of major cities such as Santiago. In this respect, the rural poor have in their hands a number of mechanisms that, to some extent, mitigate the disadvantages of living below the poverty line. One of these, and the most obvious one, is the immediate availability of food on the farm. Despite the concentration of land ownership and the use of practices such as sharecropping, farm work still provides a stable source of family income and prevents poverty in these localities from being even worse. In addition, proximity relationships and cooperative networks are much stronger in small rural communities (in contrast to the cities, where they are extremely limited) and these qualities of sociability in the rural world offer an additional channel for obtaining resources. Local people are able to stabilize their living standards by resorting to small favours and exchanging work for food, among other strategies.
"Any ideas you want to express?" We want more computer time! The teacher keeps promising. We want to work more with computers. These were some of the most frequently heard comments from the children we spoke with. Their eagerness to get into this room, so distinct from the other schoolrooms, is evident in the pushing and pulling in the waiting line and the speed with which the children cover their feet with plastic bags so as not to dirty the computer room (this is a requirement for entering the room). Several times we watched this ritual, which takes place before the computer class begins. At some point it becomes impossible to hold back the crowd of boys and girls clustered around the narrow door, which reads "Computer Room", with the "Schedule" posted below. The teacher in charge of the group tries to maintain some semblance of order among the students. Finally he gives the word that they can now enter the room, with the warning that they must do so "calmly". The students immediately scatter to the equipment: this previously quiet room, especially outfitted to house the Red Enlaces project, is suddenly converted into one with a swarm of children moving chairs about to form groups with their friends, some complaining of the selfishness of a student who refuses to share "his" computer, fiddling with the keyboards to start up the computers; while others, with a sense of frustration, are left to sit at the tables arranged in the middle of the room. Thus begins yet another computer class in one of the schools of the commune of Maule, part of the Red Enlaces sponsored by the Ministry of Education of Chile.
The social space that provided the setting for the issues on which our research focused is the classroom that functions as the "computer laboratory" in the rural schools in question. In addition to passing on knowledge and serving as a socializing institution (activities that are common to urban and rural schools alike), rural schools perform certain "complementary functions" that are not present to the same extent in the cities. We know that, as an institution, the rural school is expected not only to impart formal knowledge but also to transmit values associated with national identity. The rural school, then, can be understood as an extension of the national state, and the teacher has a greater degree of social authority in his relationship with the community in which he is serving. Representation of the state as a political entity is clear in the teaching of national history, in the celebration of national anniversaries (for the most part commemorating military events) and in national holidays, for example. Thus, compulsory school attendance (which was recently extended to full days) is superimposed on the community's own dynamics, where children's work in the fields illustrates the extent to which the school fulfils its function. Now, since the introduction of ICTs in the classroom, we may ask ourselves: how are the schools adapting to this new scenario marked by technological change?
With these concepts, we focused our ethnographic research primarily on observing the various dynamics that manifest themselves within the room housing the Red Enlaces project. This is not to say that we treated this room in analytical terms as an "airtight compartment" without any relationship to the surrounding administrative, social and cultural contexts. But, in our view, this was the best locus for defining and investigating the uses, expectations, practices and representations associated with the introduction of ICT.
In this connection, it is very useful to look briefly at how ICTs have been integrated into the practice of teaching. The facts described below are intended to establish a continuum, the purpose of which is to provide a frame of reference as the basis for the discussion at the end of this article. This is very important for the critique that we intend to level against most of the commonplace arguments in favour of initiatives for introducing ICTs into society: our research is based primarily on direct observations. Through our ethnographic work, we have tried to identify firsthand the social representations concerning ICTs that make themselves felt in the classroom, thereby inverting the traditional order of things, which in Latin America always ends by imposing public policies "from above". In our view, this tendency has pushed the assumptions surrounding the introduction of ICTs to their limits, to the point of adapting reality to the requirements of those policies.
We may begin our story by looking at the preparations that are made before the actual instruction session begins. Generally speaking, initial instructions are given in a normal classroom. There is a practical reason for this: the class has to be divided into two working groups before the session begins. Since the number of computers available is inadequate, the only way to keep the number of students working at each computer to a reasonable number is to resort to this approach. What this means is that the time allocated to use of the computer room is in reality cut in half. While the first group goes to work on the computers, the second group is confined to watching from the middle of the room or is kept in its regular classroom working on some activity that the teacher has assigned. Once the teacher has explained the tasks that the children are to perform, the first group goes to a room that has been specially equipped for the Red Enlaces project. There they are made to line up in front of the door. As described earlier, the children become very anxious as they await the chance to go in and start using the computers. Here, in front of the computer room door, we can observe the practice that produces the greatest perplexity, betraying an attitude that treats the equipment as something sacrosanct. We are referring to the custom of forcing the children to cover their shoes with plastic bags before they enter the computer room: in fact, the session will not begin until all the boys and girls have followed this order. What is the sense of all this? From the teacher's perspective, this room has to be kept especially clean, and the students must be prevented from tracking mud onto the carpet installed in the room.
As we see it, this scene is not just a simple anecdote but reflects much of the apprehension that most of the teachers feel when they are faced with having to master the tools of information technology. It is natural enough to expect that children will track mud into the room, especially in a rural setting, but the interesting thing is to see how this simple order by the teacher reflects the special status accorded to the computer room. We must not forget that the computer room is a special place where normal standards do not apply, starting with the broad U-shape arrangement of furniture, which already suggests an attempt to modernize the traditional classroom layout. Traditional classroom control is ignored (at least for the moment) and disciplinary standards are relaxed (the children talk loudly, move all over the room, show off their achievements to their fellow students, trade their latest findings, play jokes on each other, and so on) – one might almost think it was recess time. Moreover, we must remember that in most cases the other half of the class is kept waiting, either in the laboratory or in the classroom, for its turn to use the computers. Under these circumstances the teacher's ability to enforce normal classroom discipline is seriously undermined. The children are very aware of this, and they take maximum advantage of the opportunity to "push the limits" beyond the rigid rules that govern behaviour in a normal classroom.
Returning to our description of a typical class, when the teacher gives the go-ahead there is a stampede of boys and girls racing to grab the best spot in front of the computer screen. And when we say "the best spot", we must recognize that the limited number of computers means that these spots are limited, despite the division of the class in two. When the class begins, then, we may see three or four students sharing the mouse, the keyboard and the screen. At this point, the teacher has already given the final general instructions linking the subject of study (science, mathematics, history) with the use of ICT. We must remember that the official curriculum treats ICT as a tool that must be inserted into each of the subjects that the children are studying. This leads us to wonder what level of utilization, knowledge and integration of ICTs is possible under the working conditions that we have described.
Our class continues with the use of the available educational software. Of the programs used as teaching resources, the most popular one with teachers (and, to a lesser extent, with the students) is certainly La Plaza.11 As the teachers see it, the environment that La Plaza delivers makes it possible to switch from one subject to another without great difficulty. In other words, it can be used for a mathematics class or for a science class. It works in this way because the program itself is designed to combine the main content to be covered for each course in a "common space", and it also allows for communication by e-mail through special applications. We may say, then, that La Plaza is the starting point for much of the routine coursework observed. This does not mean, however, that work in the computer room is limited solely to using this software since there is quite a wide variety of programs available.
The key role assigned to La Plaza reflects the fact that it delivers a wide variety of content within a single set, where much of the content is already processed and virtually ready for application in the classroom. This feature is greatly appreciated by the teachers since not much of the available computer time needs to be spent on detailed programming. The instruction "Go to La Plaza" is repeated constantly in most of the courses we observed, and it is clear that the work that the children do with this program is not very differentiated. In fact, there is a curious uniformity in the way they work with this program, and most of the children spend their time moving from one section of the program (museum, library, hospital) to another without any clear order or direction. At this point, it would seem that the principal criterion for using La Plaza, and in the end ICTs, relates primarily to the children's own preferences. We frequently found children visiting the various features that La Plaza offers with no apparent motivation other than to amuse themselves with the pictures and sounds offered by the multimedia format of the program. This is another finding that needs to be examined further – the disconnected, random and essentially recreational use the children make of computers – in light of the requirements of each specific subject.
In fact, La Plaza (as a homogeneous set of applications) offers a wide variety of content that can be used for any subject matter in basic education. All of this is contained in a very attractive multimedia architecture that readily captures children's attention, to the point where it becomes their favourite and most-used program (a point that takes on greater weight when we realize that the children are completely free to select the application with which they are going to work during the class). With all these features in its favour, why aren't all the possibilities that it actually offers exploited? There are several reasons that may help us understand this shortcoming in the use of this educational software. In the first place, we found on repeated occasions that the teachers were rather lax in their supervision of students' work with ICTs. This was reflected in the lack of clear and precise directions for classroom work. Far from assimilating the content that this software offers, the children quickly began to surf the different sections available in La Plaza, mainly for their own amusement. The video images, sounds, puzzles and drawing boards fill up the time that each student has for working with the computer (remembering that there are three or four children for each computer and that the other half of the class must patiently await its turn – this is another weakness that we shall discuss further later). The problem lies in the way the students use La Plaza12 – the program is essentially a series of sounds and images that grab the children's attention but do little to transfer knowledge.
A good example is the "anatomy centre", a window in La Plaza that offers very good graphics representing the different systems of the human body. At first glance, no one could dispute the quality of this material, the versatility and variety of which should be a great help in teaching natural sciences. The contradictions become evident, however, when we note that the available multimedia resources do not represent a school assignment in the conventional sense. The images and the memory puzzles, the purpose of which is to explain through play the organs and functions of each of the systems of the body, end up being used simply for entertainment, and the students are incapable of going beyond the immediate excitement of the game to see that there is some knowledge that the "anatomy centre" is trying to pass on to them through play. That, of course, is positive in itself, but this admission is far from saying that learning and the transfer of knowledge should be not merely relegated to the background but completely banished. Our assertions may seem fairly radical, but they are based on our classroom observations, where we frequently found that memory games, which are supposed to provide graphic support to the teaching of natural sciences, are reduced in their scope to the status of simple games, which in the end are stripped of their educational content. This criticism is intended to strengthen the use of ICTs in ways that will reinforce learning. The words of Nicholas Negroponte (1995) are highly illustrative of this point: "An important part of learning, no doubt, is achieved through structured teaching – but it must be sound teaching imparted by good teachers. An even greater portion is achieved through exploration, 'reinventing the wheel' and discovering things for oneself.... Since now virtually anything can be simulated by computers, there is no need to dissect a frog in order to learn its anatomy. Instead, we can ask the children to draw a frog, to construct an animal that behaves like a frog, to change that behaviour, to simulate the muscles, to play with the frog."
Beyond the doubtful plausibility of such an assertion in rural schools in a country like Chile, it is still interesting to see how such intensive use of ICTs in education can undermine the status of the teacher as an authority in knowledge intermediation. In rural areas, a teacher's performance is frequently judged not so much by the formal knowledge that he can transmit and teach, but rather by his ability to control and win the respect of a group of students under his responsibility. To help appreciate this statement, we need to take account of the fact that the dominant social representations in a rural setting like Maule tend to stress the concepts of paternalism and authority, the demonstration of which requires practices consistent with these ideas. In other words, we could say that there is an "authoritarian personality" that, as a cognitive system, stamps the construction of the social system and therefore establishes the basic coordinates that govern the relationship between teachers and students (from the community viewpoint, of course). These concepts are deeply rooted in daily thought and action, and no social researcher can afford to overlook them if his purpose is to formulate public policies consistent with the social spaces in which they are to be applied. Under these conditions, to speak as Negroponte does, "constructing a frog instead of dissecting one" will not happen automatically but only after a lengthy process of acceptance.
In light of the above, one of the great obstacles that is slowing the introduction of ICTs in the schools lies in the plethora of rules and regulations that many teachers impose on their classes when the time comes to visit the computer room. Carried to an extreme, these regulations transform ICTs into a disciplinary tool. In this respect, we may note, for example, that in some cases children are punished for bad behaviour by forbidding them access to the computer room, which means that the computer is basically perceived as something for children to play with for their amusement, rather than as a learning tool. This is a good example of the way teachers view the role that the computer assigns them in the educational process. On this point, we may cite a passing comment made to us by one teacher, which helped us to appreciate directly the relationship that is established between the teacher and the student through the presence of computers in the classroom. We were discussing children's complaints about how strict some teachers tended to be when it came to the computer class. The children complained about the excessive rules and the steps that had to be followed in booting up the equipment and settling themselves in front of the screen. This was the message that we were trying to convey to the principal, in terms of a very real complaint by students who wanted more freedom of action in using the computer. Interestingly enough, the principal immediately and spontaneously admitted to us that some of his colleagues were excessively strict when it came to the computer class. The principal's comment was this: "I already know whom you're talking about. What happens is this teacher gets very uptight. She insists that the cover has to be folded in just a certain way. I tell the kids not to worry about it and to pull off the cover any old way. I do it myself lots of times. I'm not going to worry about silly things like that in using the computer."
One very important element in this comment is that there are at least two ways of approaching and conducting classes in the Red Enlaces room. On one hand, the use of ICTs is taught and transmitted from a strictly formal viewpoint related to basic operations (booting up, using the mouse, opening the program, closing it, shutting down and covering the computer) without much possibility for experiment and learning through the conventional (and very useful) "trial and error". The other approach, the success of which remains to be seen, would be to allow children more flexibility and more room for experimenting in using the computer – assigning tasks and giving a few general instructions on the topic for the class so that the children themselves can decide how to find the actual information required by the teacher.
During the course of this fieldwork, we observed sharp differences in the structure (and the attitude) of the class, depending on the teacher. As we became more familiar with the internal dynamics of each school, these differences stood out more clearly. In fact, each teacher's approach is different, depending on his accumulated knowledge of ICT use, his skill in transmitting it to his students, his willingness to incorporate ICTs as a classroom resource, the type of relationship that he has with the class, his ability to organize a group of children in an atmosphere that differs from the traditional classroom layout, etc.
These factors taken together reveal enormous differences in the structure of each class conducted in the Red Enlaces room, ranging from extremely rigid teachers who will not allow any use to be made of the computer if it deviates from the instructions initially given, to the opposite case where, as it seemed to us, the teacher took no interest at all in what was going on between the students and the computers. In the face of these findings, it might be argued that these differences are nothing surprising and that they are to be expected when we consider that each teacher has a different way of running a class, based on such factors as personality, professional background, formal training, etc. Yet we were struck by the clear discontinuities in something that was defined as a "horizontal objective" of education, where the teaching and transmission of skills and knowledge in working with ICTs were supposed to be subject to minimum standards and should not deviate significantly.
With this brief description of the introduction of ICTs in the schools, we may now turn to some considerations that emerged from our field observations. To illustrate the elements discussed in this section, we thought it useful to focus the discussion on a system of opposite pairs, to take into account the various practices, valuations, representations and expectations that surround the introduction of ICTs in these rural schools. By establishing these opposing themes of analysis, we can give some order to the major considerations that arose from our research and thereby provide a basis for a critical discussion of the impact of ICTs.
Another viewpoint from which we may consider the data collected relates to the way in which computers are used in the schools. This duality (familiarization vs. specialization) seeks to explain how the schools can exhibit two approaches for dimensioning the relationship that teachers and children establish with the computer and also how the computer has been introduced in the schools – whether it is integrated into the daily dynamics of the school or, on the contrary, constitutes something entirely strange and foreign.
The first point to consider here refers to the opportunity that the children have to make use of the computers in their school. From the outset, we noted that access to the computers was restricted: they were located in a special room (the computer room) well away from the children, thereby producing an isolation that was both spatial and symbolic. The computer room in fact is separated from the other rooms and, very symbolically, it is located close to the principal's office,13 quite apart from the places normally frequented by the children. It is not, then, a "children's room",14 someplace where they go every day, but rather a "special" room, for which special behaviour is required (such as covering their shoes with plastic bags so as to keep the room clean). It is also the only room with carpeting and with all its windows intact, and the arrangement of the chairs and desks is different from that of the normal classroom: they are set up in a U-shape, instead of in rows facing the teacher. The computer, then, is located in a place with special features that set it apart as something different and remote from everyday life.15
The very idea of setting up a computer room implies restricting the computer's presence in the school milieu and controlling access to it. In fact, the computer room is not always open and the possibility of using it outside regular school hours depends on the willingness of another person (the computer custodian, who is generally a teacher). This means that each student has only minimal access to computer use, a fact made even worse by the very little time that each student gets during computer class to work with the machine. Clearly, from this viewpoint, the computer represents a special element in the school milieu, and this makes it difficult for a child to identify with it.
For their part, the teachers also have to cope with the novelty of the computer's presence and its impact on teaching dynamics, and the way they do this has direct implications for how the computer will be accepted in the school. Broadly speaking, we can identify two approaches that relate directly to how the teachers accept the presence of computers in the school. On one hand, some teachers see the computer as a device that has to be handled very carefully, and so they restrict the use that children make of the computer for fear that they may break something. This is a fear based on a lack of confidence both in the computer (which is seen as something extremely delicate and fragile) and in the children, and it frustrates any attempt to establish a bond of familiarity between the student and the computer. This approach stands in contrast to another one that takes a less respectful view of the computer and is more comfortable in interacting with it, as reflected in the case described above, where the principal of one of the schools, in response to students' complaint about a teacher insisting that the cover be folded in a certain way, told the students to pull off the cover any old way. This case provides clear evidence of the contrast between the repressed (and repressing) approach to computer use and the approach that accepts the computer as just one more element of daily life.
As noted earlier, the way the teacher accepts the computer (and of ICTs in general) as a tool that will help him in his work will have an impact on the dynamics of the computer class.16 On this point, we found, broadly speaking, two forms of class structuring. On one hand, some teachers apply a dirigiste approach where the atmosphere in the class is extremely strict, with the teacher dictating and controlling each step to be followed by the students (from when to boot up the computer and how to move the mouse to an almost pathological concern with how to fold the cover): the teacher's presence here is a permanent cloud over the children's use of the computer because his attention is focused on maintaining control rather than on guiding their work with the computer. In contrast to this approach, we find a more flexible one where the teacher does not try to control computer use (without suggesting that he is not concerned with proper care of the equipment) but leaves the students to work with the computers on their own, to the point where the teacher may seem to have little interest in what is happening in the class.
The problem is that both of these approaches to structuring the computer class fail to take real advantage of the computers in the school. On one hand, excessive control prevents the children from becoming really familiar with the computer, and the teacher passes on to the children all the fear and mistrust that he feels about computers in the school. Yet, on the other hand, the totally hands-off approach, while it allows the children to familiarize themselves with the computer, does little to encourage educational use of the device or to involve the students in the learning process, suggesting that the teacher himself does not see it as a working tool that will help him in his teaching efforts (observing these teachers, we had the impression that they were simply putting in the required time). It is not enough to introduce the computer: what is needed is to allow children to become familiar with it as a tool, to make use of all its possibilities, to be able to think of new uses for it and, at the same time, new possibilities that they can open for themselves through the use of this technology.
Despite the foregoing, we were surprised at how the children grasped the computer and at the great interest they showed in using it every time they had the chance to enter the computer room: indeed, they preferred this to any other "conventional" school activity. Computer class became a highlight of the school week, allowing the children to take a break from the everyday routine and do something that, if not new, was certainly rare. This was clear in the pushing and shoving and the joking that went on while waiting outside the computer room, where the children had to cover their shoes with plastic bags before they could go in – a ritual that reinforced the almost sacred image that the computer has gained in the school, and yet the veritable stampede once the children were inside the room meant that for them the computer was far from sacrosanct. Once they were inside, we saw that the children suffered no complexes in the presence of the computer but, on the contrary, were attracted and excited by it. The computer room and computer work is for them a recreational activity that allows them to work as a group and play with the computer. Here we have the key to children's interaction with the computer: it is very much a plaything, and this speaks for their capacity to appropriate the computer as something relevant to their interests, as a thing that they can control in order to achieve something that interests them, providing clear evidence that, in contrast to their teachers, they have no fear of computers and they recognize clearly that computers provide them a great service.
It is interesting that the teachers seem to be quite aware (perhaps intuitively) that the children enjoy playing games with the computers, and in fact they promote the view of the computer as a plaything rather than a serious educational tool. Evidence of this is the widespread practice of punishing student misbehaviour by barring offenders from the computer room.17 As well, students are warned not to visit multimedia sites or the Ministry of Education will descend upon them. "I went there once, but the teacher said we shouldn't because the ministry would come and want to know what we were learning," said one student. This shows clearly how these teachers see the role of the computer in children's education.
It is precisely this amusement aspect, this playing with the computer on the part of the children and the ambiguous reaction of their teachers, that illustrates one of the main contradictions surrounding the introduction of ICTs in the schools and that poses the question of what is the basic objective of the initiative – seeking to familiarize children with computer technology is, after all, quite a different thing from trying to strengthen conventional teaching through the use of computers, which means highlighting the computer as a teaching support, as a kind of Technicolor blackboard. The two are contradictory. To familiarize students with ICTs, the important thing is that they should lose their fear of the computer; and this will only happen if children are allowed to experiment, to play with it and to share it. On the other hand, if we want to make practical use of the computer as an efficient transmitter of knowledge (as in the conventional classroom), then there must be some control in place. The attempt to combine these two objectives in a single process in these schools has produced ambiguity when it comes to integrating the computer, and this is why some teachers are so strict in controlling the child's every step with the computer, while others simply look the other way from what is going on.
This confusion over the real meaning of introducing ICTs into the schools leads in the end to a collision between two distinct approaches to the computer – on one hand, the children "instinctively" seek to familiarize themselves with the computer and appropriate it for their purpose (which is play), and on the other hand the teachers try to turn it into a tool for teaching their subject. This conflict is not easy on anyone – the children chafe in frustration at the control imposed, while the teachers are left feeling powerless.
The introduction of computers in school, together with all the technical, economic and political paraphernalia that accompany these projects (such as the Red Enlaces), has been done with one great objective in mind: to go as far as possible towards closing the infamous digital or technological divide that separates developing (or, frankly, underdeveloped) countries from the developed countries (or what we may now call the postindustrial countries). All of this is taking place within the context of globalization and the ever-greater technological demands that it imposes.
From the perspective of this digital divide, we may ask: With all their computers and Red Enlaces paraphernalia, how are the schools trying to close this divide? In other words, how are the schools going about making students "digitally literate" for this new world?
With respect to this question, we may look first at the work plan adopted for helping students learn and understand what the computer means. As described earlier, the computer room functions on the basis of group dynamics, given the scarcity of computers (which means that one group is always waiting), but this group system seldom implies group work (being together is not always the same thing as working together). The creation of groups reflects an economic scarcity and not a deliberate methodological approach, which means that the group system is not pedagogically inspired; in fact, the groups are formed solely on the basis of friendships: it is the children themselves who decide their composition (with the teacher intervening only when this leads to disruptions). Beyond the methodological issue of what is the best way for a child to learn how to work with the computer, we may identify a very interesting feature of the working dynamics that arises from this group system. We noted that there was a kind of competition among the children as to who would control the keyboard and the mouse – one or two children always seemed to monopolize them. These, then, are the children who will actually take advantage of the computer's interactivity, while the others are merely observers. Since there is no group-work methodology,18 the teacher does not interfere with this "competition" (intervening only when the group makes too much noise) and so does nothing to ensure that all students have access to the computer controls.
A second finding, which flows from our observation of work with the computers, is that it is the child's own wishes that take precedence in many cases, since most of the time the teachers limit themselves to giving the order, "go to La Plaza", but are unable to make effective use of the program. This means that most of the children simply spend their time hopping from one section to another (museum, library, hospital and so on) without any order or direction, retracing their steps many times. It would seem, then, that it is the children's own preferences that determine the use they make of La Plaza and of ICTs in general: this is not always a bad thing, yet in light of the foregoing it is clear that the children who really make the decisions are those who have control over the computer.
From this, we may conclude that the children who really grasp the computer are those who win in the competition (either because their interest is stronger than that of their fellow students or because they have power or influence over the others). From what we observed, then, we may say that the group-work system that operates in these schools ends up favouring those who are the "achievers", to the detriment of their fellow students. It is these achievers who have the greatest chance to familiarize themselves with the computer and to learn how to handle it, compared with those who are merely onlookers. This is not to stigmatize one group of students as oppressive or abusive with respect to another, helpless group, but simply to recognize that the use of the computer in these schools is complicated by the individual characteristics of each student (as in many other activities) and that for some students it is more "natural" to work with the computer, either because they are more interested and feel more comfortable with it, or simply because they find it more entertaining.19 This strikes us as a factor that should be taken into account in examining the problem of introducing ICTs into the schools, since it raises the question of whether we are not reproducing the digital divide that we are seeking to close, but on another scale.
An interesting example that highlights the case of "achievers" is that some former students from the schools (now enrolled in the high schools of Talca) continue to return there in the evening to do their homework on the computers. They have acquired computer knowledge and skills superior to the teachers, and it is in fact they who have "appropriated" the computer to the point where it is for them an effective work tool and one that can open new horizons for them. They have achieved this ability through their own efforts, because they like computers and they find them useful. From this, we may conclude that the real development of this knowledge takes place outside the classroom and relies, above all, on the possibility of permanent access to a computer, which is indeed the way to transform the computer into an educational tool.
This is where another, extracurricular factor comes into play, one that has to do precisely with this possibility of achieving greater access to the school's computers so as to become thoroughly familiar with the technology. Since very little time20 is available for computer use within the school curriculum, the decisive factor is the extracurricular environment, beyond the institutionalized sphere. At this point, personal relationships come to play a central role, since the decision to grant special access to the computers lies with the teacher responsible for the computer room or with the school principal. Thus, when we asked whether some students knew more than others, a girl in the eighth grade at the Colín school said: "We have a better chance to get into the computer room if we clean up the office – the teacher said if we would clean the office we can use the computers." This suggests that the real possibility of closing the digital divide has to do not only with technical issues and resources but with an entire social dimension, which is the empathy that a student may have with one or other of the authorities, who will then give him special privileges.
On the basis of the above considerations, we may conclude that, in practice, the attempt to close the digital divide, which is the goal of the Red Enlaces project, depends on a great many unanticipated extracurricular factors21 that imply the risk of reproducing that divide at a smaller but no less worrying scale. This means that the issue of technology in the school cannot be addressed from a purely reductionist perspective that holds that simply introducing computers in the school will provide the desired results, as if by magic, without recognizing that technology, like any human activity, carries with it complexities that cannot be overlooked.
As we have noted throughout this section, there is here a clear relationship with what we said about the duality of "familiarization vs. specification", in the sense that only those who are able to establish a relationship of familiarity with the computer will be able to appropriate it and make use of its potential, not only as a work tool but, above all, as an instrument for development that will open new possibilities. On the other hand, those who succumb to the institutional rationale of the school will lag behind the others. We are faced, then, with a complex paradox whereby the school rationale can reproduce the digital divide and only those who break with this institutional rationale, or who manage to work in parallel to and outside the curriculum, will be able to close the technological divide.
One of the most interesting issues that arose during our research relates to the underlying tension that we found between the expectations that children have for the use of ICT, both as an information and communication medium and as a tool for their future work and standard of living, and on the other hand the everyday reality they experience within their locality and their family.
Children's expectations began with the imminent act of using the computer, and they showed great excitement in simply going into the computer room, which made them feel in some way that they were making contact with a new reality. Perhaps for this reason, the children were very enthusiastic about being able to use this technology in the school, and that in turn generated much competition within the computer room.
Their positive attitude survived despite the obvious discontinuities between working sessions with the computers and the fact that their visits to the computer room were random or irregular.
Another issue related to children's expectations of ICTs is the fact that the children had lived nearly all their life in rural localities and that virtually none of them were familiar with any city other than the capital of the region, Talca. For most of them, Santiago was a place they knew of only through the media, such as radio and television. There is clearly, then, a degree of isolation, either because their experience is limited to their own community or because rural areas are to some extent considered marginal in comparison to the cities. This produces an obvious interest in learning about other places and in being "open to the world".
"The Internet gives us greater possibilities" (girl, grade 7).
"We can talk with other people" (boy, grade 7).
"We got to know someone over the Internet and we even sent her a photo, she was Chilean but she lived in the United States" (girl, grade 7, Callejones school).
Here we can see clearly that there is a great congruence between what the children want and one of the most repeated postulates of the Red Enlaces programme: bringing the world closer to students in remote places. This link between the global and the local no doubt deserves to be kept in mind when looking at the more complex expectations that youngsters build for themselves on the basis of this utopia, which relates to the relevance, or not, of learning to work with ICTs with a view, above, all to their future employment.
"Although we are now in grade 8 we have to learn more, but I like it better here" (girl, grade 8).
"We also have to take full advantage" (girl, grade 8).
"Why?"
"Because my sister graduated from intermediate school and she never took computers, maybe once a year" (girl, grade 8).
"The girls are really eager to learn computers because some of us in the class are hoping to go to secretarial school" (girl, grade 8, Colín school).
Girls have a clearer idea of the relationship between computers and work, since they discover in one way or another that computer skills are needed in the vocations in which they expect to work – whether as secretaries, teachers or policewomen (as some girls suggested to us) – all of which call for handling files and networking with data. They think of these occupations in entirely practical terms, recognizing that their parents cannot afford to send them to university, or that it will take many years to get there.
"As for the boys, they will need to use computers because they will be studying mechanics or furniture-making" (girl, grade 8).
"I would like to be a mechanic, and computers will help me" (boy, grade 8).
"I would like to study automotive mechanics, and I think computers will be helpful" (boy, grade 8).
"And I want to be a mechanic too. You can use the computer to make parts" (boy, grade 8).
"I will work with my parents in their tomato business, and afterwards maybe do something for the family" (boy, grade 8, Colín school).
The perceptions of these children provide a good illustration of the linkages between learning to use computers and their future work, but we can also see how thoroughly rooted they are in their daily reality, as with the boy who says that he will help his parents with the tomato farm and then see what happens. There seem to be two outlooks that coexist with each other: excitement over the possibilities that these technologies offer and, at the same time, a frank admission that farm work does not require computer skills, at least for the time being.
"I would say no, farming is one thing and computers are something else" (boy, grade 8).
"There are some manual machines that you can attach a computer to" (boy, grade 8, Colín school).
"My dad is taking computer classes – he works in a nursery where they have a computerized trickle irrigation system" (boy, grade 8, Callejones school).
This boy's case is exceptional for two reasons: First, nobody's father knows computing, much less works with a computer. Secondly, the only ICTs available locally are those in schools. Against this background, we may ask what use it is for the children to learn ICTs. We believe that one of the best ways to learn is through practice, not only at school but also at home. We must consider that this is only a first step in bringing these children together with ICTs (through the school), and it is clearly better to have a few computers in the school than none at all. Yet we need to contextualize the level of use and meaning that the children assign to the possibility of using ICTs, in terms of this complex relationship between desire and reality.
As indicated earlier, there is a certain contradiction between the Ministry of Education's objective of turning computer technology into a tool that can be used horizontally in the teaching of all subjects and the fact that not all teachers are trained, even at the basic level, to meet the challenge of teaching children these new technologies. While teachers may face problems such as lack of time at school and may not be able to afford a computer at home, there is also a certain fear of technology, which we shall examine in the next section.
In our research, we found that teachers approach this technology in a variety of ways. As we deepened our understanding of the internal dynamics of each school, we came to recognize the differences in this area. As noted earlier, each teacher's work will differ depending on his familiarity with the use of ICTs, his ability to transmit this knowledge to his students, his willingness to integrate ICTs as a real classroom resource, the kind of relationship he has with the class, his ability to organize children into groups in an atmosphere different from the conventional classroom layout, etc. All these factors taken together produce tremendous differences in the structure of each class in the Red Enlaces room. Some teachers are extremely strict, forbidding any use of the computer that strays from the initial instructions given, while at the other extreme there are teachers who give the impression that they have no interest in what goes on between the children and the computers.
In light of this, there is a great deal of irregularity and discontinuity in the integration of ICTs as a further element in the various subjects. Obviously, there are some classes and subjects where no use is made of the computer and its development potential is virtually ignored. Thus, our attention is drawn to the glaring discontinuities of an aspect defined as a "horizontal objective" of education, in which the teaching and transmission of basic skills and abilities in working with ICTs should be subject to minimum standards and should not fluctuate so obviously.
Similarly, one of the most widely used programs, if not the most widely used, is La Plaza, described earlier, which offers a good variety of content within a homogeneous set of activities that can be applied to any subject in basic education. It also has an extremely attractive multimedia architecture that readily captures the attention of the children, to the point where it has become their favourite program (a fact that becomes even more important when the children are free to choose the application that they will be working with in the class).
Another fact illustrating that the much-vaunted horizontality is only modestly effective is that all the computers in the schools are to be found in one room. This already gives computer use the aura of a special event and makes going to the computer room something out of the ordinary, almost like a sacred rite, for students and teachers alike.
These observations make us wonder if computers and ICTs are not being treated as just another subject, rather than being integrated as a work tool in all courses. In our view, this would seem to be the case. One of the main reasons for this is the fact that teachers have little training in these technologies and even less practical familiarity with them, quite apart from the obvious resistance that some of them may feel.
Another interesting point is the extent to which going to the computer room has become a question of rewards and punishment. As noted earlier, many children told us that teachers often punished them for poor performance or disorderly behaviour by refusing to take them to the computer room.
"We don't come because the teacher keeps promising and nothing happens" (boy, grade 4).
"The other day we had a test and the student who came first got to go to the computer room" (boy, grade 4, Callejones school).
These comments provide ample evidence that teachers must have unwritten agreements about rewarding students' good behaviour by letting them work with the computers. The right to enter the computer room is still seen as a special privilege and not as a necessary and compulsory routine.
Teachers seem to be virtually unanimous in seeing the computer (and its software) as a valuable asset. This in itself is nothing unusual, but most of them show a tendency to be too protective of the equipment, often going to the ridiculous extremes of forcing the children to fold the computer cover in a certain way. Underlying this conceptual approach that the teachers take to ICTs is the feeling that computers are pieces of property that must be very carefully handled.
As we have noted, a teaching methodology based on linear instruction will only induce conservatism in the use of technology, reducing all its potential to a minimum, unless a teacher clearly shows a greater interest in experimentation. Thus, we see the teaching and transmission of ICT use from a very formal approach related to learning basic operations (booting up, using the mouse, opening and closing the program, etc.) without further possibilities of experimentation through the necessary (and very useful) "trial and error" approach.
"Sometimes the teacher doesn't know what to do" (girl, grade 8).
"Sometimes we use the computer as a typewriter for practice, but we already know how to type as fast as possible" (boy, grade 8).
"I know that I can type fast, I like typing and I am good at it" (boy, grade 8, Colín school).
This view of the computer as something sacred denotes, as we have already said, a certain conservatism in the use of technologies, and so does using it as a word processor. The fear of damaging the machine shows up explicitly in the strict control over what the children are allowed to do in front of the monitor. We must be clear that this fear is due essentially to the fact that teachers view the computer more as a source of problems than as something that can help them in their work. This is because they know so little about using the computer, and even less about how to fix problems (when the system crashes or a program is wiped out), and they see training as something that is difficult and that eats into the few free hours they have. There is also the underlying notion that they are dealing with something entirely different from what they have experienced and learned (the generation gap plays a part here since most of the teachers are over 40 and computer skills were not offered when they took their training).
"At the beginning we didn't even know how to boot it up or shut it down. I was really nervous" (boy, grade 6).
"The teacher drew a computer on the blackboard and explained it to us. She said we must be very careful in handling it" (girl, grade 6).
"We mustn't get them dirty, we mustn't fool around with them" (boy, grade 6).
"We have to look for things that are useful to us" (boy, grade 6, Colín school).
Finally, we must consider that the teacher is faced, perhaps for the first time, with the dilemma of acquiring knowledge that is not only new to him but that often seems to be more readily learned by his students. This realization no doubt makes the teacher feel insecure and even hostile to ICTs, so he will not only exert maximum control over what the children do at the keyboard but will have little interest in experimenting with new methods for using the potential offered by ICTs in teaching his subject. In this way, the teacher takes a defensive posture in the face of this new "agent" that has entered the school.
After reviewing and considering the different themes that arose from our research, we have reached some tentative conclusions about the problems of introducing ICTs into the schools.
In Latin America today, one of the angles from which the poverty problem is viewed is the so-called digital divide, i.e. a technological backwardness that prevents successful integration into the globalization process. One of the tools for overcoming this disadvantage is therefore education. "Among other reasons reinforcing this image of education as the key, we may highlight the following. First, the growing economic importance of innovation and knowledge makes education not only a high-return investment but a field that will decide the future fate of individuals and of entire societies: they will either be part of the information revolution or be left behind; they will either have access to intelligent jobs or be relegated to low-tech and low-wage services; they will either be integrated into knowledge circulation networks or abandoned to the wilderness of cybernetic illiteracy. Secondly, education appears as the principal field for reducing inequalities in the future and as the best way to overcome the intergenerational reproduction of poverty. The arguments on this point have been around for decades and refer to the virtuous circle between better education, social and occupational mobility and higher incomes." (Hopenhayn and Ottone 2000: 37).
In this connection, we noted that the perception prevailing in Chile, and reproduced in the Red Enlaces project, sees the solution to overcoming this problem in strictly quantitative terms, whereby this technological backwardness is due to the country's low technological coverage as reflected, for example, in the inadequate number of computers per capita and the even lower rate of Internet connections.
As we see it, this view addresses the problem only in part, because it assumes that technological change requires nothing more than the introduction of machines, whereas it also requires cultural appropriation on the part of users, who must integrate and understand ICTs in the context of their daily lives and thereby come to appreciate these technologies in all their potential.
The only way to close the digital divide effectively, then, is to create a broad process of "technological literacy", a process that will help users to develop their own "technological culture" that will go beyond mere mechanical use. This, in our view, is one of the principal weaknesses in the implementation of the Red Enlaces project.
This aspect was clearly evident when we looked at the training given to teachers for the Red Enlaces project. A great many factors conspire to impede success in this process. Because it is given from an exclusively technical perspective, training becomes a matter of simply passing on procedures to be followed. This prevents the teacher from becoming an active player in his own learning and reduces him to a passive receptor of instructions delivered by engineers or "experts". That leads to a contradictory situation for the teacher since he then reproduces this very passivity in the classroom. He therefore faces the paradox of being reduced to the same level as his students. It is not surprising, then, that teachers look upon training courses as something imposed on them by the Ministry of Education and not as an opportunity that will empower them in their work.
In light of the foregoing, we think that any attempt to optimize the introduction of ICTs in schools must begin with training of a kind that treats the teacher as an active subject in the process of learning the technology so that he will have a thorough understanding of the nature of ICTs as they apply to education. In other words, it requires teachers who, through practice, can lose their fear of making intensive use of technology and who are able to see the potential of the computer in their work. This is the only way to make the teacher a motivating agent for active appropriation of the culture by students. Otherwise, we will merely be reproducing what we see today – a teacher with resistance and fears, who instead of facilitating learning ends up hindering it and becoming a stumbling block that discourages students from learning.
Finally, we believe it timely to raise an issue that needs to be discussed in order to optimize the introduction of ICTs and to begin reducing the digital divide. This involves analyzing the underlying assumptions on which programmes such as Red Enlaces are based and the ambiguity with which their ultimate objectives are proposed. In our view, the user profile that is supposed to be created through teaching in high schools has never been clearly spelled out, either in official statements that rely on vague concepts such as "citizens of the world" or in teaching practices that discourage the real integration of ICTs into the curriculum. Is the Ministry of Education trying to teach children to handle a computer or to assert ownership over information technologies? Questions such as this will remain unanswered if we do not understand them in the context of a complex society where the issue of learning and training is often divorced from the real needs and conditions that society offers these youngsters.
To view this problem as merely a question of teaching computers in the school is to reduce it and strip it of any perspective in terms of progress for society as a whole. It is this notion of the autistic isolation of the school that in the end transforms the computer into a mere technical device, essentially a typewriter with memory. If we are to optimize the teaching of ICTs, we must view these technologies as an integral part in the process of educating active subjects and equipping them with the tools they need to enter fully into the information society.
1. Interdisciplinary Programme for Research in Education, PHE, Santiago, Chile.
2. There has long been talk of a newly emerging society, and many definitions of it have been proposed: the postindustrial society (Bell and Touraine), the consumer society (Baudrillard), the global village (MacLuhan), the information society (Costell), the computerized society (Nora-Minc) and the digital society (Mercier). In each of these conceptions there is both an implicit and an explicit vision of development.
3. The factors that have caused our region to lag behind have of course given rise to a very broad debate on the issue of development. A discussion of those factors, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
4. "Thus, 5,300 schools are participating in the Red Enlaces. Although it seemed impossible six or seven years ago, today it is a reality. Under a contract signed with the CTC Company, those schools today are part of the worldwide Internet network, which means that 90 percent of students in the Chilean school system are now connected, free of charge, and the Internet is now much more widely used. In other words, we are educating nearly the entire school population on the basic aspects of life in the society of the future, and we are closing the gap that existed until very recently between school culture and global culture." (Arellano, 2000: 11).
5. While there are many definitions of ICTs, we use the one proposed by Della Crovi Druetta in her book Satel lite technology for teaching: "These new technologies replace the analog system by the digital system, which makes possible new systems of distance transmission in the communications field.... Moreover, the new technologies include both hardware, the machinery itself, and software.... They have been defined as reflexive and interactive. Reflexive because they result from the application of human reasoning, which, in relating to them, can adapt the services they offer and adjust the software component as needed. Interactive because in some cases they can respond to the user and because, in contrast to conventional media, they do not represent a simple menu of media, but rather integrated systems in which media combine and interact" (2000: 12–13).
6. "Progress achieved by the end of the decade can be summarized in two statements:
90 percent of Chilean students have a computer room with Internet connections in their school.
Computers have been incorporated into new study programmes and are part of the daily work of Chilean students.
Implementation of the Red Enlaces has meant:
Training 20 teachers in each school for two years, i.e. approximately 70,000 teachers trained through a nationwide university-supported technical assistance network.
Distributing 38,000 computers to schools, as a function of their student population.
Equipping the schools with educational software in support of study programmes.
Creation of a web site <http://www.enlacs.cl> offering a selection of educational content and services for teachers and students (Ministry of Education of Chile, 2000a: 7).
7. "The Red Enlaces was conceived as a 'seed' project to equip each school with sufficient computers so that teachers could evaluate the technology in the context of their school's teaching plans. The equipment was distributed as follows: for schools with up to 100 students, 3 computers, 1 printer; for schools with 100 to 300 students, 6 computers, 2 printers; for schools with more than 300 students, 9 computers, 2 printers" (Hepp, P. 1988: 130).
8. The Red Enlaces project is financed by the World Bank.
9. "From the perspective of an educational experience that will be relevant to the world in which Chile's children and youths will be living in their adult lives, computers and computer technology occupy a central place. They offer access to information and knowledge and make it possible to communicate and network with others, and it is this model of linkages that is the basis of how the modern world functions" (Arellano, 2000: 11).
10. Education plan for the Commune of Maule 2000.
11. The La Plaza (or Town Square) software was created by the Educational Computer Technology Institute of the Universidad de la Frontera. It has four spaces: the "kiosk", where children can post notices for all to read and which also contains stories and comic strips; the "cultural centre", listing various discussion groups; the "post office", which allows children to send and receive e-mail; and the "museum", which contains small databases with various kinds of information, from how to produce a school newspaper to the voice of Pablo Neruda reciting a poem.
12. This view is confirmed by Victoria Uranga in her study New technologies: information or communication? The Enlaces Project (Chile), in which she poses this question: How do children and teachers use Red Enlaces? "The great majority of network users participate by writing seriously in La Plaza (97 percent), which shows that they place great value on the new technologies and are ready to use them. This was confirmed by what the children said in the focus groups, where they demonstrated a high degree of motivation and interest in using them. A further discovery is that children and adults have opposing interests. What adults like about La Plaza is rejected by the children, and vice versa. This was clear in their preference for different sections. The children's favourite is the "literary corner", while for the adults it is "pedagogical innovation". Another example is the fact that the sections preferred by the teachers attract zero participation by the children. With respect to the topics that users write about, there are also enormous differences: for the children, the favourite topic is friendship (39.6 percent), while for adults the favourite topics are related to technical matters (45.1 percent). The explanation here is that the two age groups make different use of La Plaza. In 79.2 percent of cases, the children use it for fun, while 84.6 percent of adults use it in a utilitarian way. This is reinforced in the connection between the messages from the network and the school environment. In the case of children, only 16.7 percent make this connection, while the figure for adults is 84.6 percent."
13. Anyone who has been in school knows that no noise is allowed near the principal's office and that if they go there at all they must behave especially well.
14. Remember that, in general, each class has a specific "homeroom" and that it is the teachers who move from one classroom to another, depending on the subject to be taught.
15. There are of course technical reasons for the room's features (such as protecting the computers from dust and humidity), but this does not diminish the symbolic impact of its isolation.
16. This point of course embraces a series of variables, such as a teacher's real mastery of ICT, the kind of relationship he has with the class, his ability to organize a group of children in an atmosphere different from that of a conventional classroom, his methodological training, etc. But even so, a key element of judgement for understanding the structure of a computer class is the teacher's real willingness to integrate computers (and ICTs in general) as a classroom resource (with all the challenges this entails).
17. It would be unthinkable, for instance, to punish a child by barring him from a mathematics or science class.
18. Even the design of the software is more conducive to individual than to group work.
19. It was fairly common for some students to stay in front of the computer even after the recess bell had rung.
20. As noted earlier.
21. As well as the entire weight that the outside community can bring to bear from this perspective, something that we did not examine.
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Since the 1960s, continuous progress in microelectronics, information technologies, computers and telecommunications has brought about a deep and all-embracing transformation that has culminated at the beginning of the 21st century in a new global economic, social and political system (Castells 2000). Today, the gap that has always existed between developed and developing countries and between rich people and the poor has been accentuated by inequalities in access to this new global system, for which the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide the gateway. The 1999 UNDP Human development report shows that in 1998 only 0.8 percent of Latin Americans had access to the Internet, and the overwhelming majority (90 percent) of those who did were members of a small and wealthy elite.
The problem as it exists in Latin American societies is not limited to the scarcity of computers and Internet connections: it is much more complicated. The resources needed to access this new technological world not only require people to have the technology and the technical training but also the intellectual skills to use that technology and turn it to their own purposes (Wilhelm 2000). ICTs are not simple tools, but rather processes that must be developed – processes of communication, information or production. In these processes, thanks to the facilities ("user-friendly" programs, digital productions) that the new technologies offer, the distinction between users and creators is disappearing, and those who were once merely users of ICTs can now be creators as well. But to reach the point where they can create things for themselves, users must have the necessary intellectual and technical preparation (Castells 2000: 31).
Bonilla (2000) argues as follows: "Cyberspace, virtual communities and networks represent new fields of play that are reproducing and extending the existing unequal social and cultural distribution of material and symbolic capital in the Western world; nevertheless, they also constitute an arena that offers the potential for empowering excluded social groups and helping them to improve their living standards through strategic use of these new tools, while encouraging the processes of reinforcing identity and building citizenship."
The fast-moving changes that new technologies have brought about have exerted tremendous pressure on governments, schools and other educational institutions to find ways of integrating technology into education. While many government projects start out with good intentions, they soon run into barriers that prevent their effective and successful implementation. Schools are complex institutions that are difficult to mobilize. Technology projects often fail for lack of proper planning. The task of transforming a school is daunting indeed, and failure in this respect is no surprise. Yet the fact is that we know very little about what it takes to integrate technologies successfully into Latin American schools.
In an early effort to bridge the growing divide, the government of Argentina in 1994 introduced the Social Education Plan, as part of the wide-ranging education reform inaugurated by the 1993 Federal Education Act, Law 24,195. One of the objectives of this plan was to promote the integration of technology as a means of improving the quality and equity of public education. In cooperation with IEARN (International Education and Resource Network) Argentina, which has been in existence since 1989, the TELAR network was established. TELAR (the Spanish acronym for Todos en la red, or roughly "Everybody into the Net")1 is a network of schools, teachers and students in Argentina, run by Fundación Evolución. Between 1994 and 1998 it was supported and financed by Programme 1 of the Social Education Plan2 of the Argentine Ministry of Culture and Education. TELAR is associated with IEARN,3 an international education network that allows students to participate in international cooperation projects, and TELAR now functions in fact as the Argentine chapter of IEARN. In Argentina this education network is known as TELAR–IEARN.
Programme 1 of the Social Education Plan, "Better Education for All", provided support to teachers experimenting with new teaching methods, and in particular with the use of technology. As part of Programme 1, schools were supplied with computers for both information processing and telecommunications uses. Fundación Evolución,4 in cooperation with the Ministry of Culture and Education of Argentina, was in charge of providing initial training for 1,000 teachers in schools participating in the Social Education Plan. With this training, teachers were able to take advantage of e-mail for communicating with their peers in other parts of the country and the world in order to associate classroom activities with the theories of constructivist pedagogy, critical thinking, problem resolution and transformational practices. Although the Social Education Plan was terminated in 1999, Fundación Evolución has continued its efforts to bring ICTs to Argentina's neediest schools. Through its national network of provincial facilitators, it is today working in close cooperation with the Ministry of Education, the educational portal "Educ.ar" and other non-governmental organizations.
In schools that received training under the Social Education Plan, success in adopting ICTs varied from nil or very limited in the great majority of schools, to massive adoption in a few institutions (Lafontaine 1999). Our research set out to examine the reasons why use of this technology had such an outstanding impact on the education community in two public schools that were operating under very unfavourable conditions, within low-income communities in isolated zones where there were few resources available. To this end, we conducted an exhaustive study of the Provincial Secondary Education Centre No. 3 (CPEM 3) in Zapala, province of Neuquén, and the Provincial Secondary Education Institute No. 84 (IPEM 84) "Jorge Vocos Lescano" in Tanti, province of Córdoba. In both of these schools, ICTs were successfully adopted and integrated beyond all expectations, to the point where they became national and international models of success.5
"Learning from the pioneers" is an investigation into the best practices used in the TELAR–IEARN network, with a focus on the process that led to the integration of technology into school life.
By documenting the process of integrating ICTs in the two schools, we were able to identify the key elements that made these experiments successful, despite the difficulties posed by poverty and remoteness from major urban centres. The results of this research will allow Fundación Evolución to use the schools as models for further efforts to develop and improve its activities and for making recommendations to education ministries and other education authorities on the factors that must be taken into account in programmes for promoting the integration of ICTs into schools.
In the more industrialized countries of North America and Europe, there is a growing literature on the key factors essential for the design of a model technology project (Ely 1990; Read 1994: 34–41; Fullan 1991; Hawkins et al. 1996; Honey and Henriquez 1993). Although this literature relates to factors and circumstances that are very different from those prevailing in Latin America, we took those models as the starting point for our research into the conditions and factors for success in the TELAR–IEARN schools. This paper is a first step towards developing a model that is more appropriate to the Latin American context.
Research in the United States has shown that there are a number of constant aspects or factors in any successful technology project. The exact number of significant factors varies from one study to the next, but there is a minimum core group of factors that show up on all lists. As our analytical framework for examining the data from surveys and interviews with teachers in those two schools, we have selected for our research the seven most commonly cited factors. They are as follows:
One factor that appears important from the literature is a clearly defined purpose or goal for integrating technology. Moreover, such goals are clearly and significantly related to broader educational objectives. In most cases these were clearly understood by teachers, parents and the local community, in very concrete ways: improving reading and writing, enhancing technological skills or involving the community in projects, for example. Goals might vary between different technology projects, but a constant element in all of them was that the technology was associated directly with the students and their experiences.
Leadership at various levels is important if an innovative project is to take root and grow. In our study we focused particularly on leadership within the school, which is divided between the principal and the project coordinators. If a project is to succeed, there must be a person who takes the initiative for directing it. More specifically, there are several aspects of leadership that are important in a technology project.
(a) Pedagogical vision. Leadership requires a pedagogical vision that recognizes what sound education is and what the role of technology should be. The literature suggests that in many successful projects technology is used as a means for improving the educational experience, but it is never the final objective.
(b) A long-term commitment to integrating technology. Another feature of successful experiments is that the schools approach change from a long-term perspective. A complicated project requires an ambitious vision because it implies great changes, yet at the same time it demands a patient approach, taking modest steps each year. The successful schools are those that are prepared to foster and promote change over a horizon of three to five years.
(c) Recognizing the extent and depth of the problem. According to the literature, successful leaders and coordinators recognize that the challenge of integrating technology has many facets and is closely linked to all other aspects of school direction and management (financing, teaching, teacher training, assignment of classrooms, timetables, etc.). By recognizing that the integration process is complex, the school's management and the project's coordinators are ready to resolve any problems that might arise.
Training is one of the most important elements. Teacher training, in both technical and pedagogical terms, is consistently cited in the literature. This allows teachers to acquire new skills and introduce new practices and teaching strategies. In the best case, training is designed to provide direct support to a project's specific activities. Moreover, a successful project will sometimes adopt training strategies based on local experience within the school and the community.
Another strategy that appears in the literature on successful integration projects is to begin on a small scale and experiment. Every small step provides an opportunity to examine and assess progress, appreciating positive elements and revising negative ones.
Another key factor, and a multidimensional one, is time. Achieving such a great change takes time. Time needs to be viewed in different dimensions, as it relates to professional development, pedagogical vision and the commitment of the school's management. In the area of professional development, sufficient time must be programmed so that teachers can learn to integrate new technologies into their curriculum. Consistent with a constructivist and active pedagogical vision, time must be allowed for students to carry out their technological projects. The school timetable, divided into classes of 40–50 minutes, makes it difficult for students to concentrate and come to grips with a complex project. And, finally, the school's principal must be patient and allow time for the school to adjust to the complex process of integrating tools as powerful as ICTs.
Infrastructure is of great importance for the long-term success of any project that implies transforming an institution. We may divide it chronologically between preexisting infrastructure and the infrastructure that will be developed with the project in order to meet new needs. There are several important elements of infrastructure:
(a) Specialists and technical support. The support of experts and specialists is crucial for the long-term success of any technology project. The kind of support needed goes beyond mere technical know-how. Pedagogical and curricular support is indispensable. Coordinators must start by instructing teachers in how to make significant use of the technology.
(b) Physical space. In North America there is no one model for distributing computers that stands out as more effective than the others. Schools have succeeded with centralized computer laboratories as well as with the placement of computers in individual classrooms. The only important factor is that the computers must be located in a place reserved for their use so that students will have the equipment available when they need it. The placement of computers corresponded in all cases to the pedagogical needs of the project.
(c) Support from the professional community. The literature indicates that schools with successful technology programmes have enjoyed support from the teaching community. Its role is to provide collective support for teachers participating in the project as they struggle to cope with innovation, analyze emerging problems and seek advice.
Financing is a continuing challenge, but a project's success will depend on whether it can adopt a long-term sustainable development strategy. Successful projects accept the fact that technology is not a one-time investment but a continuing cost that must be accepted as part of an institution's ongoing expenses.
For this project, we employed a mixed methodology and working approach based on documenting teaching experiments in the classroom. We included a quantitative methodology to supplement our qualitative research. The central methodology consisted of two case studies of successful schools in the TELAR–IEARN network. Each school represents a world with its own social system, which is, in turn, situated within a broader context. The case study approach allows researchers to approximate experience as it is lived in each school and, in this way, to identify the particular features in each case that allowed TELAR–IEARN to grow, to put down roots and to have the observed impact.
The two schools included in our research, CPEM 3 in Zapala and IPEM 84 in Tanti, were selected on the basis of three criteria: we looked for schools that had been participating in TELAR–IEARN for a long time, those whose students had participated steadily in TELAR–IEARN projects, and those where the coordinators had demonstrated their commitment to the TELAR–IEARN national network. These factors, we felt, should indicate solid support for the educational technology and the school's connectivity to the national network. We began by advising four selected schools of our interest, and two of them were prepared to cooperate with us. Although the schools were in different regions and reflected differing situations in terms of their socioeconomic characteristics and degree of urban influence, we recognized that a study on such a reduced scale could not hope to represent the diversity of contexts among schools of the TELAR–IEARN network.
In each school, the research team conducted a series of interviews and observations over a period of one week. They interviewed the following groups of people:
The original coordinators of TELAR–IEARN
The current coordinators, if there had been change
The current principals
The former principals, when possible
Teachers who had participated in TELAR–IEARN
Teachers who had not participated in TELAR–IEARN
Students participating in TELAR–IEARN projects
Former students who had participated in TELAR-IEARN, where this was possible
We sat in on classes and participated in them, and we observed computer and telematic laboratories, recess periods, the teachers' room, extracurricular activities of students and TELAR–IEARN activities.
To round out our qualitative data on the two schools, the research team conducted a survey using a questionnaire developed by the Center for Innovative Learning Technologies of Stanford Research Institute and the University of California at Berkeley. This survey covered factors that were considered key for integrating technology in schools, as noted in our theoretical framework, and allowed us to measure the extent to which these factors applied in a given school. The questionnaire was translated and amended to fit the Argentine context and was administered to teachers in each school in the hope of obtaining an overall view of their teaching philosophy and activities, their previous training and their use of technology, as well as their relationship with the students so that we could then attempt to correlate those factors with the success of TELAR–IEARN.
CENTRO PROVINCIAL DE ENSEÑANZA MEDIA NO. 3
CPEM 3 is a secondary school located in Zapala, at the approximate geographic centre of the province of Neuquén in northwestern Patagonia. Its immediate surroundings present an arid landscape of mountains and tablelands, in contrast to the southwest of the province where there are forests and abundant vegetation and the climate is cold and humid. Zapala has a population of some 33,000. Its geographic isolation places it at a disadvantage in comparison with other cities of Neuquén. The nearest city is Cutral Co, 80 kilometres away. The capital city is 180 kilometres away. Another feature of the city is its cultural isolation. For example, the one movie theatre in town operates only sporadically. Income levels are low, and the city's youths have few if any spaces for social interaction. Even sporting facilities are scarce because of the lack of enclosed spaces and the harshness of the climate.
CPEM 3 opened on April 19, 1960, and since that time has awarded the diploma of Perito Mercantil (Commerce Specialist), to which it has now added Auxiliar en Computación (Computer Assistant). The school has an enrolment of 1,150 students, divided into three shifts, and a teaching staff of 140. CPEM 3 was one of the first five pilot schools to take part in the IEARN programme, and it is the only one in that group that remains involved with TELAR–IEARN today, 10 years later.
INSTITUTO PROVINCIAL DE ENSAÑANZAS MEDIAS NO. 84 "JORGE VOCOS LESCANO"
IPEM 84 is the only public educational institution in Tanti (Department of Punilla), a town located 47 kilometres from the provincial capital, the City of Córdoba, and 750 kilometres from the federal capital in Buenos Aires.
The area is bordered by high mountain ranges to the west and the land slopes gradually lower to the east. It is an area of many rivers that empty into the Lago San Roque, which is a major point of attraction for the city of Carlos Paz, a tourist centre located only 18 kilometres from Tanti. The economy relies primarily on tourism and on the output of regional products.
Tanti has a population of some 5,000 inhabitants. Despite its proximity to the city of Carlos Paz, it is not a "must see" on the tourist circuit. The road leading to Tanti, which branches from the main highway from Córdoba to Cosquin, ends in the mountains, and only visitors interested in adventure tourism are likely to take it.
IPEM 84 was created in 1987 by a group of parents determined to establish a public secondary school in the town. The school offers EGB 3 (grades 7 to 9) and Polimodal (grades 10 to 12), with a focus on electricity and electronics. The school's infrastructure is in poor condition, the classrooms need roof repairs, there is no heating and winter is a difficult time for students. All are therefore looking forward eagerly to the new school building that is now being built a few metres away. The school's student enrolment in 2000 was 286, and it has a very loyal teaching staff of 41 teachers, many of whom have been with the school since it was founded. Very few students leaving the school go on to university, for lack of money. For this same reason, many students have never been to the capital city of the province, although it is only 47 kilometres away.
We conducted a questionnaire survey to obtain a more accurate description of each school. The survey was designed to provide greater detail on the general context of the school, covering areas such as school culture and support, educational philosophy, teaching practices, use of technology and professional development.
The questionnaire was distributed to 90 teachers in the two schools. These teachers had been with the school for more than one year and were teaching more than one class. The response rate to the survey was 50 percent (45 responses), 36 from CPEM 3 and 9 from IPEM 84.
Responses were received from 2 principals, 37 teachers, 4 assistant teachers and one educational adviser. Eighty percent of the teachers are women. The teachers had an average of 13 years, professional experience (see Table 1), and more than 50 percent of them had been teaching for at least 10 years.
Table 1. Years in teaching | |
Years in teaching | % of teachers |
1 year | 9 |
2 to 5 years | 5 |
6 to 10 years | 28 |
11 to 20 years | 33 |
More than 20 years | 25 |
The questionnaire asked teachers whether they were using the technology with their students and how they were using it. Of the 45 teachers responding, 47 percent (21) were using computers with the students ("users") and 53 percent (24) were not ("non-users") (see Table 2).
Table 2. Ways in which teachers use the technology for teaching practices | ||
| Use with students | Do not use with students |
I assign tasks and supervise students in using the computer | 15 |
|
I assign computer use to students but they are supervised by another teacher | 6 |
|
I use computers in the school but not with my students |
| 6 |
I do not use computers in the school but I do use them elsewhere |
| 13 |
I have never used computers for teaching or any other purpose |
| 5 |
Total | 21 | 24 |
The teaching profession in Argentina is governed by factors such as the number of teaching hours and the number of students in each class. In contrast to developed countries, Argentine teachers are allowed no specific time to prepare their classes. Only classroom hours qualify as paid working time. The sample of teachers covered by the survey worked an average of 23.5 classroom hours a week (see Table 3). Since teachers in Argentina commonly hold down several jobs or teach in several schools, however, we asked them how many hours they worked in total. We found that the teachers were working an average of 32 hours a week and that "user" teachers spend more time in class in the school in question.
Table 3. Average teaching hours in the target school and total hours worked per week | ||
| Teaching hours in the school (per week) | Total hours worked (per week) |
Users | 27.2 | 34.9 |
Non-users | 20.0 | 29.3 |
All teachers (n = 45) | 23.5 | 32.0 |
Another aspect that is important in understanding the context of their work is the number of students per class and the frequency with which each class is taught. Since these data tend to vary from class to class, we asked teachers to report on the class with which they estimated they did most of their work (see Table 4). The teachers had an average of 28 students per class. Forty percent of them met with their class only once a week, while the remaining 60 percent met with their class at least twice. Eighty percent of the user teachers met with their students twice a week or more. There is a correlation, then, between use of the technology with students and spending more time in the same school and meeting more often with students.
Table 4. Number of students per class and frequency of class instruction | ||||
| Average no. of student | Weekly class frequency (average) | Teachers who meet their class only once a week | Teachers who meet their class twice or more per week |
Users | 28.1 | 2.25 | 20% | 80% |
Non-users | 23.3 | 1.50 | 57% | 43% |
All teachers | 28.0 | 1.90 | 40% | 60% |
IEARN (which subsequently came to be called the Red TELAR-Centro IEARN Argentina) reached CPEM 3 in 1990 when the principal of the Escuela de la Costa school on the Patagonia Coast, Daniel Reyes, made contact with IEARN in the United States with the idea of bringing the project to Argentina. At that time it was decided to create a pilot project with a school in each province of Patagonia. In Neuquén, the Board of Education offered the project to CPEM 3 because, at that time, it was the only school in the province that had a computer room. The main conditions for participation that the Board of Education demanded were to have a computer, to have a telephone line and to secure the commitment of the heads of the computer science and English departments. When the IEARN project was launched in Argentina, English and computer science were the two subjects that were essential for success with the project.
The department heads of CPEM 3 met to discuss the proposal. After debating all the pros and cons, they finally decided unanimously to become involved in the project.
In 1990, the Internet was little known in the world at large, and even less so in an isolated place like Zapala. Considerations were not based, therefore, on any prior experience with the technology, but rather on the possible teaching impact that teachers could foresee from the little they knew about the project. This lack of knowledge was considered a negative point in terms of participating in the project. Teachers were uneasy about this unknown technology and feared that they would not be able to use it property, and they were on the point of rejecting the proposal. Fear of the technology went hand-in-hand with the concern that it might represent a waste of money. There was also debate over the cultural impact of a cooperative project proposed by the United States and Russia. Concern focused on the risk that teaching would have to follow US curricular guidelines and would therefore no longer meet the needs of Argentine students, and that it would tend to expand the already heavy influence of US culture and values. A further negative factor was resistance to the changes that would be needed in teaching methods in order to carry out the cooperative projects.
Pros | Cons |
More resources for students | Unknown technology |
Curricular support for teaching computer | Waste of money |
science and English | Foreign cultural influence |
Cooperation with other schools | Changes in teaching methods |
Professional development for teachers |
|
Overcoming Zapala's isolation |
|
The points in favour of participating in IEARN that were debated at that time could be divided into the potential impact for students and that for teachers. Among the factors that might affect students, the most attractive from the teachers' viewpoint, was that the project would mean more resources for students in a cash-strapped school. Whether or not the experiment was successful, it represented the only way of giving the students access to this technology. Moreover, it was unheard-of for a public school to have such access, and so the project was looked upon as an opportunity to give substance to the notion of equity, which was one of the key concepts behind the Argentine education reform. The second point in favour was the linkage that the project implied between technology and subject matter. For the computer science and English departments in particular, IEARN represented an excellent curricular resource. The two department heads immediately saw the benefits that the experiment could bring, if it were successful. In effect, it represented an opportunity to improve the quality of education, which was the second guiding principle of the education reform.
In the case of the English department, teachers reported that as soon as the first English-language messages began arriving from students in the United States the local students became very enthusiastic about the subject. For the first time, students could see that this foreign language had real meaning for them. The teachers quickly realized that this technology had a potential that they had never imagined. The English department thus became a solid pillar of support for participating in international projects.
The project's most positive impact on teachers was the professional experience that it represented. At that time, the two female teachers responsible for the project were feeling frustrated in their professional career. They put in their teaching time and they liked the work, but they felt bogged down in routines. IEARN offered a change, the chance to experiment and learn something new. Not only were cooperative projects something innovative in themselves, but the Internet held out the promise of global connectivity, which would put them in contact with teachers all over the world. It offered continuous professional training in the teaching practices of many countries.
A final factor that attracted teachers to IEARN was the hope that they could thereby break down the school's isolation, recognizing that this could have a profound impact on the education community. It is important to remember that Zapala lies alone on the North Patagonian plain and that the nearest town – no bigger than Zapala itself – is 80 kilometres away. Professors and students alike live in isolation from the world, a fact that will become clear when we explain how the teachers of Zapala received their training. The new technology promised to connect them to the globe, through a virtual world where geographic distance would lose all meaning.
Although at this stage IEARN worked primarily in English, the first project in which the school became involved was in Spanish, with the Escuela de la Costa. This project dealt with an oil spill in the waters near Puerto Madryn, during which thousands of penguins became fouled and were facing death. Students of the Escuela de la Costa were able to share with CPEM 3 classes the efforts they were making to rescue the penguins. Teachers and students both considered this first project a success, but the coordinators still faced the problem of enlisting greater participation. It was now easy to motivate the students – the penguin project had aroused great interest and they were keen to take on further projects. This motivation was indeed an important factor in encouraging more teachers to participate.
The coordinators provided leadership for the project and they developed strategies to help promote it among the teachers. They planned and designed training courses to demonstrate the pedagogical utility of IEARN and created easy and clear ways to foster participation in IEARN. In order to enhance technological skills, the coordinators organized and conducted an e-mail workshop and discussion groups with their colleagues. The workshop helped teachers to overcome their initial misgivings about the technology and bolstered their confidence and their ability to introduce the technology in the classroom.
The coordinators also pursued a strategy to demonstrate the use and impact of ICTs and IEARN. The first projects at CPEM 3 included a highly public component so that other teachers, students and the general community could see the impact that these projects were having. Perhaps the best example came when the school participated in a videoconference with the Argentine Ambassador to the United States. During our interviews in CPEM 3, many teachers recalled that moment, which had revealed for them the real potential of this technology.
A third strategy that the coordinators pursued in practice was to create small activities that the teachers could incorporate into the classes. In history and geography classes, for example, teachers asked the students to pose some very simple questions relating to the course of study. These questions were sent to several schools around the world by e-mail. As the responses came in, the students were able to learn through genuine communication about the similarities and differences between people. The geography and history teachers overcame their initial doubts about the technology and realized that it could be of great service in helping their students to learn.
A fourth strategy followed by the coordinators as participation grew was to identify specific IEARN projects that would appeal to specific teachers, to create a concrete activities plan and help teachers carry it out.
Although the school principal was not involved in the project on a daily basis, his leadership was also decisive. From the outset, the CPEM 3 principal gave the project his full support. The school changed principal several times during the 10 years of its involvement with IEARN, but each incoming principal threw his support to the project. This support made itself felt in many ways. At the outset of the project, the principal set aside a small room for the telematics club. His support was also essential in granting permission for the coordinators to excuse themselves from school for training sessions.
The principal's most important contribution was to promote and undertake all the changes needed to the school's infrastructure and for its use, and to approve the expenditures to keep the project going. When IEARN arrived, CPEM 3 had only one telephone line. With the principal's consent, that line was shared with the telematics club. Later, another principal sought help from the Provincial Board of Education to provide another telephone line for the project. Because it did not have its own budget, the school could shoulder only part of the costs associated with the project, and the principal had to negotiate with the Board on several occasions to cover the balance.
Another aspect of CPEM 3 that was noted by the teachers who launched the IEARN project was that the teaching body in the school was fully behind it. The teachers knew each other and cooperated and shared with each other very well. This strong collegial spirit did much to popularize the project among the other teachers.
A final factor that was fundamental in institutionalizing the technology in CPEM 3 was the principal's establishment of a Department of Telematics. The Provincial Board of Education created the necessary time slots, which institutions were allowed to allocate as they deemed necessary. The Department of Telematics is the only one in the province (if not in all of Argentina). It is interdisciplinary in the sense that it uses its resources to promote and support cooperative projects using technology in all areas of the curriculum.
Initial training for the coordinators was complicated by the fact that the participating schools were widely scattered, with one in each province. It was therefore not possible to bring all the coordinators together on a regular basis at the Puerto Madryn school, which functioned as the IEARN-Argentine headquarters. As well, the Puerto Madryn school itself had little experience with the project, although it did have a telematics expert on the staff. The people with the greatest experience were in the United States. Nevertheless, the coordinators were able to make occasional trips to Puerto Madryn to attend technology workshops. IEARN provided manuals and printed material so that the schools could in effect do their own training.
In Zapala the coordinators made use of other training means, beyond those programmed. At their own initiative they asked the Provincial Board to fund more trips to Puerto Madryn to work with the expert there. Essentially, however, the coordinators trained themselves in telematics aspects (configuration, software, wiring, etc.) via short-wave radio links. At 10 pm each night they met at a ham radio operator's home to listen to technical instructions from the expert in Puerto Madryn. They took notes and then tried out their new knowledge at school the next day. If it did not work, they went back for another radio session the following night. Beyond the tremendous dedication that the two coordinators showed, we must note that they started from a solid basis of knowledge in computer sciences and English. The only technological aspect that was new to them was telecommunications. The head of the computer science department was already fully familiar with the computer science aspect. Not all schools invited to participate in the TELAR network had this kind of expertise available.
The fact that the project was launched at the same time in the United States, Russia and Argentina meant that the local principals, coordinators and teachers, as well as the international coordinators, were all finding their way and coping with the same problems. This provided a sense of security to the initial participants since they were all facing a common challenge. The first successes were as modest as exchanging messages between students at Puerto Madryn and their twinned school in the United States.
One of the conditions for participation that the Board of Education asked of the first school was that the heads of the computer science and English departments should be fully committed. At this time in the province of Neuquén, department heads were allotted 12 hours a week to spend on administrative duties associated with their position. This meant that in CPEM 3 the two coordinators had some time free from classroom responsibilities to devote to the project. Obviously, they spent far more time than this on the project, but those free hours allowed them time to coordinate with other teachers and students.
There were several factors within CPEM 3 that helped the launching of the TELAR–IEARN project and to keep it running successfully. Some of those factors were already in place before the project began, and others were incorporated during the course of the project.
The coordinators were faced with problems in integrating an interdisciplinary project into a conventional curriculum, without much help from other teachers at the outset. Moreover, in 1997 the coordinators lost much of their available school time for the project because of new budget programming demands on the part of the province. They therefore decided to establish a special club to promote and pursue the projects. Thus was born the CPEM 3 Telematics Club. The club was responsible for selecting projects, finding interested teachers and coordinating students' efforts to use the technology. Generally speaking, students and teachers in the club reviewed all projects submitted through TELAR–IEARN and selected the ones they found most interesting. If there was no one in the club who could help coordinate a project, another teacher was asked to take this on. Sometimes the project was integrated into the curriculum of some class, and sometimes it would be treated as an extracurricular activity.
As the project grew, it gave rise to specific needs. The principal decided to earmark specific resources to meet these needs. This led to the creation of a dedicated telematics room, which did much to enhance the coordination of activities under TELAR–IEARN.
When the need to translate messages into English exceeded the capacity of the English department, someone came up with the idea of creating the Translators Club to enlist students who had had private English instruction and whose facility in the language therefore exceeded the requirements of the official course of study. Those students helped greatly in translating international project proposals.
Financing has been a weak point of TELAR–IEARN in every school. It depends heavily on the support and the bureaucratic skills of the principal. In Zapala, the Provincial Board of Education initially refused to recognize expenditures associated with the project. For example, the project initially had to share the principal's telephone line. As expenses grew, the Board demanded adjustments. The principal refused to yield. The argument ran on for several months until the Board finally agreed to cover a portion of the costs. Later, official approval was received for a second telephone line, the costs of which were paid by the Provincial Board.
The TELAR–IEARN project enjoyed the support of the Zapala community. The local Internet service provider subsidized a portion of the subscription fee and several local firms covered the rest, as well as paying for paper, supplies and other inputs. To keep the telematics club going, many youngsters lined up sponsors among local businesses and neighbours, who paid a small monthly quota. When it came time to replace the equipment, students held raffles and other fund-raising activities. If it had not been for these additional contributions from the community, the project would never have survived.
IPEM 84 "Jorge Vocos Lescano" has been part of the TELAR network since 1994. It became a member as part of the Argentine government's Social Education Plan. IPEM 84 was one of 20 schools participating in the Social Education Plan in Córdoba. The principal of the school passed on to one of his computer science teachers an invitation he had received from the Provincial Ministry of Education to attend a teacher training session that was to take place in Puerto Madryn, in Chubut province. The principal had very little information about the event, other than that it had to do with computers. Thus, without knowing what it was all about, this teacher attended the first international IEARN session organized by the TELAR–IEARN Argentina network, together with another teacher from Córdoba whom she met at the airport. The Social Education Plan was to link 500 schools that year, but only two teachers from each province attended the training session. The two teachers from Córdoba in fact represented the only schools of that province in the Social Education Plan that are actively involved today in the TELAR network.
At the Puerto Madryn meeting, teachers spent seven days learning how to work with the projects offered by this organization. The computer science teacher felt that this meeting was very important, not only because of the training provided but also because it was a chance to meet and compare notes with other teachers involved in project implementation.
Before IPEM 84 became a member of the TELAR network, the pressures of globalization had led the Ministry of Culture and Education to introduce ICTs in the classroom. As noted earlier, concerns over fairness and accessibility meant that this was done initially in the neediest schools, under the so-called Social Education Plan. This was how IPEM 84 came by its four computers. The computer science teacher, who was at that time setting up computer laboratories in Córdoba, was put in charge of finding a place for these new computers and getting them up and running. Thus, when she came back to school from the training session in Puerto Madryn, she found that in addition to her new technical and teaching know-how she now had the resources – computers and a telephone line – needed to begin participating in TELAR.
Tanti is part of an urban community that is isolated by poverty and socially marginalized. The school leadership recognized the potential of this opportunity to participate in TELAR and promoted the project from the outset as a unique chance for the school, and for the Tanti community, given its scarce resources, to interact with other educational establishments in Argentina and around the world.
In describing the pedagogical vision of the TELAR network, the Tanti coordinators stressed the importance of the first meeting of IEARN. At that meeting she met the teachers from Zapala and many other places, including countries that already had many years of experience. As the Tanti coordinator put it, "I learned there what TELAR is all about, I saw what these projects could mean for my students." Speaking of other teachers in Córdoba who had declined to attend the meeting, she said, "The others never came to understand what TELAR could really do."
For this school coordinator, with her strong social commitment, to be part of the TELAR network represented an opportunity for her own professional development and that of her fellow teachers, and more importantly a chance for personal enrichment for all her students. Her goal was to give all her students access to new technologies and new opportunities. As she said, "My students are just as good as the others, and they should be given the same chance."
The following projects in which teachers and students participated provide examples of the embodiment of this vision. In 1997 several students took part in a project that had a pronounced impact on the community. Under United Nations supervision, they joined the Student Movement Atlas project, in which they replanted areas ravaged by forest fires. At the outset of the project their objective was to study the soil, in light of the frequent fires that swept through the zone every season. On the basis of their research, they made contact through the TELAR network with a school some 300 kilometres away that was also working on a reforestation project. The students of IPEM 84 researched the kinds of trees that were needed and asked for them. As those trees grew, the two schools were able to work together on replanting areas that had been burned. Many students look back fondly on this activity, recalling the contribution that they were able to make to preserving the environment, the widespread recognition they earned for it, and the chance it gave them to engage in real fieldwork.
Thanks to the TELAR network, many of the teachers were also able to participate with their students in different competitions: the Geography Olympiad, coordinated by Fundación Evolución, sponsored and financed by the Ministry of Culture and Education and supported by the National Geographic Society, the purpose of which is to promote geographic knowledge and understanding; the Invention, Science and Technology Olympiad; and the Argentine Health Olympiad, held as part of a national health education programme. According to participants, these activities gave them the chance to:
share their daily activities and be recognized for them
rethink their role as teachers and the way they would structure their class for the next year, based on the methodology they had used with their students in conducting the required research and on what they had learned from the Olympiad
acquire new knowledge in their own discipline
encourage their students to take a more responsible approach to their own learning and to become involved in actual and meaningful experiments
The computer science teacher, who had a technical degree and several years of teaching experience, led and coordinated the process of integrating TELAR into the school. She had the time to do this because, although no extra teaching hours were allocated, she had complete flexibility for incorporating projects into her computer class, and she could take advantage of the projects to teach the use of computers. When TELAR began in Tanti, the computer science teacher, who was also teaching in another school in Carlos Paz, decided to transfer her assigned teaching hours to Tanti so that she could spend more time in that school and work more closely on the project. The importance of this time consolidation aspect is borne out in the results of the survey, which show that one of the most important factors for integrating ICTs is to have a high concentration of working hours in the same school (see Table 3).
With all this enthusiasm, all this drive and the excellent relations she had with her colleagues, she found two strategies for integrating the TELAR projects into the school and promoting their integration into the curriculum. The first was to identify an appropriate project and then show it to a teacher who might be interested (for example, because it was related to the course he or she was teaching) and encourage that teacher to take it on, while offering constant pedagogical and technical support, for which she was well equipped. The second was to inspire the students by first showing them a project and then having them interest their teachers in it.
Projects in Spanish were generally favoured in the school, given the English-language barrier and the fact that there was no English teacher available who had time for projects.
The principal also played an important role in launching and running the project over the years. The principal's support was decisive in selecting the coordinator and also in giving her sufficient responsibility to establish the project. More important yet was the principal's support for financing the project and its required infrastructure. The principal played a key role in negotiating with the parents' association and the telephone cooperative. At one point, when some equipment was stolen, the principal's intervention saved the day. During the years of the Social Education Plan, the principal had left a portion of the subsidy untouched because the school already had computers. When the theft occurred, he was able to draw on this small reserve fund to buy a new machine.
The Social Education Plan offered very few workshops on computers and telematics. Teachers from Tanti recalled that only two workshops were held, apart from the event in Puerto Madryn, where the pedagogical vision of the TELAR network was transmitted but which was attended by representatives of only two schools. Those two workshops were the only preparation given to the schools that were to be integrated into TELAR–IEARN under the Social Education Plan.
There were other opportunities for professional development, however; for example when TELAR worked together with the Health Ministry on the Health Olympiad. In connection with this Olympiad, a course was offered on how to use research projects as a basis for teaching.
Tanti represented a special case, since the computer science teacher already had a systems analyst diploma and another one in educational technology, in addition to her teaching certificate. Within the school, therefore, she was able to organize and conduct preparatory courses for teachers and principals.
The collegial atmosphere within the Tanti school created a professional culture in which teachers shared and discussed new practices, new teaching strategies and new activities. This created a propitious setting for continuous training and experimentation. This feature of Tanti stands out in the results of the survey, which show that one of the most common forms of professional development was to learn from a colleague.
The leeway allowed for experimentation in Tanti produced solutions to obstacles in other areas: the lack of sufficient time for students and teachers to work on projects during the school day and the need for greater technical support. In the case of Tanti, the ability to adapt the computer class curriculum to incorporate ICTs was decisive. With this experiment, the coordinator was able to resolve the two problems: on one hand, she was able to find sufficient time for students to work on the TELAR projects, while on the other hand she established a technical support group among students to help with maintenance of the equipment.
Before it joined TELAR, the school already offered computer science classes, but once telematics and the concept of project-based work were introduced changes had to be made to the curriculum. The principal at the time encouraged the coordinator to modify the computer science programme to include telematics and to familiarize herself with project-based teaching. In effect, the coordinator created her own course of study. The project-based approach allowed students to learn about computers by writing a term paper, designing a web page or analyzing data from a spreadsheet as part of interdisciplinary activities such as environmental studies or local history.
The principal provided solid support from the outset; and because IPEM 84 is a technical school, most of its members looked upon the integration of TELAR as a logical step forward, and one to which they would have to adapt. Similarly, the community was very cooperative and rallied quickly behind the project, particularly since the school had in fact been founded by local parents and teachers. Thanks to this community support, the computer laboratory was fully equipped and at the time of our study had nine computers connected to the Internet.
The school coordinator was responsible for technical support, but since the school was in fact a technical institution she decided to train her students to perform technical servicing themselves. The students had access to the computer room whenever it was not being used. Since the telephone line used for Internet access was connected to a cooperative, and communication was very difficult to establish, the students sometimes had to take turns waiting and pestering for a connection. When a connection was made, they would alert all the others so that they could read any incoming messages about the projects they were working on.
The community played an important role in financing the connection. The parents' association paid for the telephone line. The telephone cooperative, which runs the telephone service for the town and is the only Internet service provider, allowed the school free connection to the Internet.
Students also contributed by holding raffles to buy new equipment, since the school had no other source of funds for the project.
During our field research at the two schools, the teachers involved in TELAR told us of the many changes that they had observed in the school and among the student body. Those changes go well beyond technical know-how. There have been changes in classroom activities, in student motivation, and in the level of autonomy and responsibility with which students conduct themselves. In the two schools visited, students in the telematics club and the technology support team play a key role in keeping activities going at the school. The students look after the equipment and make repairs, they select and promote projects and enlist teachers to work with the TELAR–IEARN network. The projects have served to extend students' learning well beyond the classroom. One important aspect is that, in order to communicate through the network, the students are learning more about many aspects of their own community.
The results of the survey confirmed the comments made by the teachers we interviewed. The questionnaire included an item on benefits observed among the students in two global dimensions: psychosocial development and knowledge acquisition. In their responses to the questionnaire, teachers indicated that students had benefited in several dimensions (see Table 5). In the area of psychosocial development, 91 percent of the teachers found greater self-confidence, 86 percent pointed to improved abilities to work independently of the teacher, and 86 percent thought that students were making a greater effort. In the area of intellectual development and learning, 76 percent of teachers reported greater comprehension, and 67 percent believed that the increase in skills applied to the student body as a whole, and not only to a group of specially endowed learners. As well, 62 percent of teachers indicated that their students were delving into more complex information.
Table 5. Teachers' views of benefits to their students from the use of the technology (percentage of teachers' responses) | |
Students feel more confident in their own abilities | 91% |
Students work harder on their own, without teacher supervision | 86% |
Students work harder at tasks when using computers | 86% |
Students have a more thorough understanding of the concepts they encounter | 76% |
Skills improvements are more evenly spread and not limited to a few outstanding students | 67% |
Students search out and interpret more complex information in a more thoughtful way | 62% |
The quality of students' writing is better when they use a word processor | 48% |
These observations have encouraged teachers to integrate TELAR and ICTs into their teaching as a tool for enhancing students' commitment and deepening their knowledge in different subject areas. One item on the questionnaire asked teachers to select the three most important objectives for using the technology, from a list of nine options that ranged from improving technological knowledge to learning other subjects. Responses varied, but there was a clear preference for objectives that make use of technology to deepen and extend student learning into other areas (Table 6). Most of the teachers cited the use of technology to seek information (57 percent) and to reinforce what students had already learned (52 percent). Next came its use as an analytical tool (43 percent) and to facilitate cooperative work (48 percent). Only 29 percent of teachers considered computer literacy itself to be the principal objective of using the technology.
Table 6. Objectives most frequently cited by teachers for student use of computers | |
Seeking new ideas and information | 57% |
Making knowledge and skills "sink in" | 52% |
Learning to work collaboratively | 48% |
Analyzing information | 43% |
Communicating electronically with others | 33% |
Improving their knowledge of computers | 29% |
Self-expression through writing | 19% |
Presenting information to an audience | 5% |
The projects that were undertaken in the schools, the interviews, and the results of the survey on benefits observed among the student body all suggest that learning is active and constructive. As well, 100 percent of the teachers using the technology declared that they had learned new teaching approaches from it, and 63 percent defined their teaching role primarily as that of a "facilitator".
The successful outcome of the experiment in the two schools studied is consistent with the theoretical framework on which we based our research. In varying ways, the education community in both institutions was able to overcome difficulties that prevented other schools from implementing the programme and integrating ICTs into school life.
IEARN International and the Argentine Ministry of Culture and Education each had their own objectives in implementing these programmes: improving the quality of life for the planet and its inhabitants on one hand, and improving secondary education on the other. In addition to these two goals, the project succeeded in both schools because the school community adapted it to its own needs (overcoming isolation and marginalization, providing basic content in computer science and English, promoting professional development, education reform and social equity).
Constant support from the principals of both schools made it possible to bring about the institutional changes required for integrating the technology into the school so as to participate in TELAR–IEARN. Extension of the project in each school was due to the efforts of the coordinators, their clear vision of the potential offered by ICTs as a means for professional and educational development for the entire school community, and their efforts at generating small-scale activities to this end.
Interviews at both schools revealed the difficulties that teachers faced in overcoming the shortcomings of the programme described by Lafontaine (1999) and in achieving their own professional training. In the absence of other resources, TELAR itself became for them a source of professional development. As well, both schools succeeded in overcoming obstacles because they had a computer science teacher with the technical know-how to move into telematics. In the case of CPEM 3, there was an English teacher whose command of the language made it possible to participate in IEARN at a time when very few projects were being conducted in Spanish.
Flexibility to experiment and adapt the programme to each school's circumstances was important. In both cases, they began with simple exchanges and experimented with concrete activities that allowed them to reorganize the institution, test out the equipment and inspire enthusiasm among students and teachers, and ultimately to achieve massive participation by the education community.
In both schools the coordinators had non-teaching time available, which they could devote to the project. This free time was generated by the schools themselves. Nevertheless, most of the time spent on the project was voluntarily contributed by the coordinators.
The experience and strategies used in both schools confirmed that computers are not the only infrastructure needed to ensure success in projects of this kind. Equally important are access to a dedicated telephone line, a secure connection to the Internet, adequate teaching and technical support, and physical space where students can use the equipment.
Interviews in both schools revealed the difficulties that teachers confronted in overcoming the lack of funding, a crucial aspect for the sustainability of efforts to integrate ICTs. With no outside support, both schools had to develop their own strategies. The project was sustainable thanks to the support and the bureaucratic skills of the principals and coordinators, as well as the enthusiasm and creativity of the teachers, the students and the community in general.
Finally, our research also points to the fact that teachers in a school can play a decisive role in overcoming the digital divide. Many teachers demonstrated a strong social commitment to achieving equity and securing greater resources for their students, in a context of economic hardship.
I want my kids to have the same access as other kids – they're just as good as other kids and they should have the same opportunities. Today my school has access, but I worry about all the other ones. (TELAR–IEARN coordinator in Tanti)
During our research we learned a good deal about the difficulties facing schools in Argentina in their efforts to integrate technology, and these findings are quite likely applicable to schools in similar contexts throughout Latin America. The two case studies highlighted the individual challenges that each school and its education community faced and the way that they overcame these barriers to improve the education they offered their students.
On the basis of this research, we have prepared a series of recommendations to guide future attempts at creating and developing other projects for integrating educational technology.
Establish clear goals for the programme, based on real life. Those goals must be flexible enough that schools can adapt the programme to their own institutional aims, their needs and those of their education community, as well as to the interests of their students.
Plan to start out on a small scale and expand the programme over time, monitoring progress carefully and making changes and improvements as experience dictates.
Select schools through competitions or calls for proposals, in which the school must demonstrate an institutional commitment to the use of ICTs in order to ensure that it has the willingness to undertake the work required.
Plan for sufficient and ongoing technical and pedagogical training, either through attendance at courses or via the Internet. Such training should include instruction in computer maintenance for selected personnel.
Create a programme based on the mother tongue or the most commonly used language of the students.
Ensure that each school has the minimum resources needed to start working on the project and, if possible, a dedicated telephone line for the programme.
Enlist the support of the school principal.
Within the school setting, encourage the selection of teachers who have the leadership potential to coordinate the programme and be the first to receive training. As leaders, they will have to be trained to have a clear vision of the educational potential of the technology for their school, an overall vision of the process of integrating ICTs and of the changes that will promote that integration, so that they can select the appropriate strategy in each case.
Develop a strategy to free up sufficient time for teachers and students. For teachers, this time must be available during the school day, while for students the approach may call for implementation either during class time or as an extracurricular extension of learning activity.
Give teachers participating in the programme the flexibility to adapt the curriculum and experiment with it.
Include activities to foster a supportive relationship between the school and the community.
Provide sufficient financing at the outset and help the school, or some other local educational body, to develop strategies for self-financing and to promote public policies that will encourage cooperation from the private sector.
Ensure continual monitoring of the schools participating in the project so as to learn from their experience and revise aspects of the programme if necessary.
One interesting fact with respect to these two schools is that in August 2000 they both applied to join the GEMS programme (Global Education Model Schools), an alliance between IEARN and the Schools Online organization, the purpose of which is to supply equipment to needy schools. Our two schools were awarded a laboratory with 10 latest-generation computers complete with Internet connections. These laboratories were installed during March 2001.
It would be interesting to monitor these schools and the other five schools in Argentina that received the same equipment in order to compare the impact of having more and better access to this technology.
1. TELAR <http://www.telar.org>. In 1989 Daniel Reyes, principal of the Escuela de la Costa school in Puerto Madryn, province of Chubut, made contact with Peter Copen, president of the Copen Family Foundation (CFF) in New York, who at that time was supporting an initiative to link 10 US schools with 10 schools in Russia in order to improve the quality of education and promote understanding among students of the two countries. That experience was so successful that CFF decided to invite other countries to join the programme, under the motto "Connecting youth: Making a difference in the world". Daniel Reyes jumped to this challenge and became the creator and guiding spirit of the TELAR national network and a founding member of the international IEARN network. During 1993 and 1994 the Ministry of Culture and Education helped to extend IEARN and TELAR to nearly 500 schools under the Social Education Plan.
2. In 1993 Argentina adopted the Federal Education Act, aimed at reforming the education system to reduce bureaucracy, decentralize management to the provinces, and improve the quality, equity and efficiency of education in Argentina. A key aspect of this reform was to improve the level of education in poor and remote areas, where equipment was lacking, facilities were inadequate, teachers were unmotivated, and school dropout and failure rates were high. This portion of the Act was known as the Social Education Plan. It consisted of three principal programmes: (1) Better Education for All, (2) Better School Infrastructure, (3) Student Bursaries. By 1998 the Social Education Plan covered 12,000 schools and 3.5 million students at the primary and secondary levels.
3. IEARN <http://www.iearn.org>. IEARN was founded in the United States in 1990 by Peter Copen and started with a pilot project for connection and interchange between schools in Russia and the United States. The main objective of IEARN is to foster responsible, humane and spiritual growth and thereby enhance the welfare of regions, countries and the planet through telecommunications. IEARN has now linked schools, teachers and students in more than 90 countries. Through this network, schools can give their students and teachers the opportunity to get involved in cooperative projects in nearly all disciplines. These projects, which are proposed by teachers and students all over the world, can readily be integrated into the school curriculum.
4. Fundación Evolución was created in 1991 to provide a legal framework for the activities of the TELAR–IEARN network and the education programmes associated with them. Since that time, Fundación Evolución has coordinated, supported and promoted participation by Argentine schools in the TELAR–IEARN network. It also coordinates education programmes and interacts closely with schools in the network.
5. The fieldwork in these two schools was conducted in August 2000.
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Civil society is in the process of reshaping itself. Computers have the potential for facilitating and continuously expanding the capacities of individuals within the institutions, businesses, organizations and governments where they work. The new information and communication technologies (ICTs) – the tools of the information society – are now working their way into all areas of activity: production, consumption, trade, administration, government, recreation, finance, business and education. Every sector of society now feels the need to find ways and means of seizing the opportunities offered by ICTs in order to enhance governance, to establish new communication channels between government and citizens, to create and strengthen community networks and to participate actively in the information society. "Citizen networks", "electronic government" and "digital cities" are commonplace expressions today. They refer to new forms of interaction between citizens and local governments and to new concepts of urban policy, using the electronic media.
The urban landscape, the built landscape as much as the social one, has been irreversibly transformed in the transition between millennia. As citizens, we have also undergone a profound transformation in our perception of space, of time, of politics, of what is public and what is private, and of what is local and what is global. As Tsagarousianou, Tambini and Bryan (1998) put it, the development of ICTs has been largely responsible for the changes now affecting our cities and our contemporary societies.
In terms of local policies, telecommunications has transformed our cities into nodes of communication and computer networking has brought changes in municipal governments that facilitate administration, communication and interaction with other levels of government and with the citizenry. At the same time, civil society and regional and national authorities are experimenting with various versions of "electronic government".
"Electronic democracy", as a means for making public institutions more responsive and accountable, has attracted the interest of academics, politicians and social activists since the 1960s when, imbued with optimism and faith in the democratic potential of new technologies, activists introduced a wide variety of communication media (such as free or pirate radio stations). Since then, the many experiments with remote communications, teleconferencing and interactive cable television have sparked much debate about the advantages and hazards of these technologies in social and political life (Tsagarousianou et al. 1998).
The concept of online government is nothing new: indeed, it has been talked of since the beginning of the Internet. Since the mid-1980s, the development of computer networks has significantly altered the terms of the debate over the democratic use of new technologies. Writers such as Rheingold (1994) maintained that ICTs have the capacity to challenge the monopoly of the existing political class over the means of communication and to revitalize citizen-based democracy. They could, moreover, empower grassroots groups to collect information, organize citizen initiatives, change public opinion and influence national and local policies.
What is new is the way Internet technology has evolved: electronic government is now possible, at least technologically speaking. Most of the software needed is already available. The next step must be a thoughtful debate about how we wish to govern ourselves.
The emergence of electronic government at the local level poses a number of key questions:
Citizens must be able to have access to electronic government services from whatever terminal they are using, whether it is old or new, private, in a cyber café or in a community technology centre.
Citizens must have access to technological tools, both in physical terms (e.g. through telecentre networks) and through educational campaigns for using these instruments.
Citizens and community organizations must have legally enshrined rights to communication.
Citizens must participate in the decision-making process. We need to understand how direct participation by urban residents affects these processes, the degree to which citizen involvement can impact policies, legislation and actions of local governments, and the mechanisms through which it can be done.
Models must be selected for offering electronic public services, involving the online provision of municipal and other services. This will require methods for ensuring security, encryption, access, record-keeping, etc.
Models of communication between citizens and municipal officials must be selected. Here we must identify the best model for each situation and local culture: electronic forums, chat lines, combination with face-to-face meetings, and others.
The content of public sites and portals must be defined. We must decide what kind of local, regional and national information should be included, how forums and chat rooms are to be administered in order to ensure dialogue between citizens and officials, and how much detail the projects posted on those sites should have.
For the most part, technological solutions to these problems already exist or are being developed. Much more important is the human and social side of this question. What will happen when the most common democratic practices – referendums, consultations, electronic voting, etc. – move to the Internet? Will this enhance the commitment of civil society and its participation in decisions that affect the quality of life and the rights of citizens? Will it make public management more transparent and efficient? If it is to do these things, this interactive space must become a shared community resource, publicly administered and accessible, in order to help improve public policies and community participation.
Many experiments with electronic democracy (including the two studied in this paper) share a number of characteristics:
The social players who initiate or participate in them see them as ways of revitalizing democratic politics, which for a number of reasons has lost its strength and dynamism.
They are perceived as ways of reducing bureaucracy and making government more transparent.
They are local or regional in nature and are closely identified with urban or metropolitan territories.
They are based on similar technological infrastructure.
This paper relates the results of research conducted by a joint Argentine–Uruguayan team (from the Gino Germani Research Institution, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires and the Carrera de Sociología of the University of the Republic in Montevideo), which represents the first effort at research into this issue. The cities of Buenos Aires and Montevideo were selected for comparative case studies because their geographic and cultural proximity makes it easier to appreciate the differences and similarities in urban and social uses of these technologies.
Our general objective was to evaluate the social impact of introducing and using ICTs in local government and in communication with the citizenry, as well as in the activities of citizens organizations that are seeking to become interlocutors with the local government. We investigated the use and effective scope of ICTs in internal government management, as well as in local efforts to integrate the population into the information society. We analyzed the use and scope of ICTs in communication between local governments and civil society, and we collected and processed data on the way community organizations use ICTs. We paid particular attention to designing a research methodology specific to the issue at hand. We used both primary and secondary data, including electronic surveys, face-to-face and electronic interviews with municipal authorities, monitoring the progress of municipal web pages, analyzing ICT plans and their implementation in both cities, and tracking the use of ICTs by community organizations through electronic media surveys and, in the case of Montevideo, through personal interviews.
A great deal of information was collected and processed in parallel for the two case studies. The researchers gave a public presentation of their work at a wrap-up event: the Binational Seminar on the Social Impact of ICTs in Buenos Aires and Montevideo, organized by the Infopolis Team from the Urban Studies Area of the Gino Germani Research Institute on April 17, 2001, in Buenos Aires. We hope that this first experiment in comparing the social impacts of ICTs in these two Latin American capitals will provide useful input for preparing policies and strategies to optimize those impacts and thereby improve the quality of life for their citizens.
Today, thousands of cities of all sizes around the world have home pages on the World Wide Web and forums of city webmasters are being organized. There are also thousands of cities, not only in the developed world but also in a growing number of developing countries, that have invested in electronic government projects using networks that allow citizens to access city government structures, conduct online transactions, obtain information on local, regional and national policies, and participate in decisions concerning the urban habitat.
Experiments with electronic government began in the second half of the 1990s. In Europe, the Telecentres Project was created and financed by the European Community to help local governments acquire resources and expertise in applying ICTs to urban management. In the United States, electronic government has burgeoned as a way not only of facilitating local management but also of trying to overcome the "democratic deficit", i.e. the lack of citizen interest and commitment in public affairs.
Electronic government is not only an ambition of developed countries. Peripheral countries have begun to use ICTs to facilitate various government activities. Brazil was the first country in the Americas to introduce electronic voting and has now moved to eliminate paper in sending draft legislation and the texts of decrees between the head of state and government ministers. This programme, dubbed "electronic government", seeks to use the Internet to reduce the bureaucratic red tape that encumbers communication between the different areas of government. It also seeks to make document circulation swifter and more secure, thereby reducing administrative costs. For the last two years, Brazilians have been using the Internet to file their tax returns and to access their bank accounts. And electronic voting was an astounding success in the municipal elections of October 2000 <http://www.clarin.com.ar/diario.2001-01-05/I-0420.htm>.
It is not just a question of setting up portals or web sites with government data, or of facilitating internal procedures. Electronic government means putting government – national, regional or local – on the Internet as a way of transforming political and institutional culture and allowing citizens to obtain information of interest to them. Yet, if these sites and other similar administrative tools are to be really viable, all citizens will need to have the know-how to navigate over the Internet, they must have access to the necessary hardware, either at home or in telecentres or other public facilities, and information must be secure as it makes its way through cyberspace. There must also be adequate dialogue with citizen networks which are now taking on great importance.
There has been much discussion of the issue of governance since the 1970s. In the last decade, a number of writers have analyzed the issue from a broader perspective. They have sought to expand the concept of governance to embrace a whole set of social factors and the international political and economic context in which they operate, "to focus thinking on the variables that determine the relationship of the state with all economic bodies and public authorities and its interaction with organized civil society, the economy and the marketplace" (Filmus 1999). These variables are essential for achieving consensus or forming "stabilizing majorities".
The idea of local governance put forward here highlights its political dimension and focuses the debate on the interdependence between the state and civil society. The underlying assumption is that if the many interests of civil society are not organized it will be impossible to guarantee good governance.
National and local governments have adopted varying policies for the use of ICTs with the intention, declared or tacit, of responding directly or indirectly to problems of governance. ICTs are a key element of government decentralization policies. The assumption is that using ICTs can enhance the efficiency and transparency of government and of its communication with the citizenry by giving reality to the ideas of accountability, predictability and honesty. This also implies decodifying technical language into a language that is accessible to ordinary citizens.
Consequently, in their political action, municipal governments face a great need to search for alternatives to the traditional models of public management. This search involves a number of challenges, including that of opening or improving channels for participation in consensus building and of modernizing management technology.
This discussion focuses on three major issues:
(a) The impact of ICTs on the government of the city of Buenos Aires, specifically on its legislative body and the agencies responsible for decentralizing the city administration
(b) The impact of ICTs on the channels of interaction and participation between the city and its citizens, in terms of the services offered by government and the demands presented by community organizations
(c) The local government programme for facilitating public access to the Internet for all citizens
The government of the city of Buenos Aires (GCBA) is an excellent case in point: the process of decentralizing and deconcentrating city management, which began in 1996 when the city adopted its constitution and created the post of head of government, has provided fertile new ground for the introduction of ICTs. This process involves the creation of management and participation centres (known by the Spanish acronym CGP, for Centros de Gestión y Participación) as political and administrative management units with clearly defined geographic responsibilities, based on a decentralization and modernization programme that calls for introducing ICTs and involving the community in city management. One of the most important aspects of decentralization is to give the citizenry a more active role. Technology is a key dimension here, as a means of "permitting citizens to enjoy greater access and participation in government decision-making through the use of computer and telephone networks".
Our information-gathering activities involved a series of interviews with officials in the Department of Decentralization and Modernization and with managers and employees of the CGPs, as well as the examination of internal documents produced to that time. We selected 5 CGPs out of a total of 16, where we conducted qualitative research through interviews, observation, and analysis of the GCBA web sites. Our fieldwork was conducted between June and September 2000.
The programme called for the computerization of the CGPs by 1998, creating a communication network (intranet), developing a hotline for citizens' complaints employing Internet-compatible technologies and technical training, and selecting staff to operate the information system in the centres. The current situation, however, falls considerably short of expectations, and the programme has been completed only in part. The complaint system is up and running, but the intranet has not yet been installed. Some comments from the interviews are highly revealing:
People enter their complaints online. This is not an intranet, it is simply Internet. The access is by telephone line through the Internet to the page of the server that the... I don't know where it is, I guess it must be a server for GCBA... The idea is to have an intranet. Now this is going to be something they call a "single window system" with 10 machines. They will all be online, and the GCBA will provide them...
The definition used for the complaint system is confusing. It has several different names and it is not clear whether it is an intranet. While the state of progress with the complaint system was not uniform and, at the time of our research, it was in the process of migrating from one system to another, it is significant that every person interviewed had a different definition for it. This can also be explained by the failure to provide proper training in using the computer and the networks – no one is sure what the operating system is. The centres do not have anyone assigned or trained for using the tools, and in some CGPs the problem is left to whoever has the interest and skills:
Here we have no one with any technical training. I never took a PC course, I know something because I'm interested in the issue myself and I read up on it. There's a decentralization group that has some expertise, but they only come here when there's an emergency and they have 16 CGPs to look after.
Little use is made of the Internet for communicating between the centres and the department. Most people prefer to use the telephone. The GCBA site has a link to the CGPs, where each centre provides information on services and activities and the e-mail addresses of its directors. The CGPs are not involved in designing the web page or its content, and merely provides information to be posted on the site. There is no possibility of interaction with local residents or with community organizations; e-mail is the only means available, and it is seldom used.
Communication with local residents and publicity about services and activities are channelled through conventional means: telephone, letters, public assemblies, committee meetings and the press. Strategies revolve around communicating with neighbourhood or barrio associations, business organizations, educational and other institutions, such as local FM stations. There are invitations to participate in workshops or discussions on priority issues, visits to associations, occasional groups of associations that work on a specific problem, and other equally conventional approaches. The possibility of using the Internet more intensively and extensively is impeded, according to the leaders we interviewed, by the restrictions on "local residents", limited Internet access for lower-income groups, the age factor, and lack of skills and initiative, among other things.
Even so, the introduction of ICTs is viewed positively, but as something for an indefinite future when conditions will be ripe for massive use, when the public will be more accustomed and local government will have better-defined and more appropriate strategies in place. According to our interviews, the use of ICTs as a tool for citizen participation is "a work in progress", "people aren't used to it", "the barrio dwellers don't really know what it is", "they aren't in a position... ". As to how to resolve this problem, there are no clear answers. It might be addressed by a government body, but the real prospects of local government through the CGPs are still remote, for want of equipment, space, human and material resources, and a specific policy. The possibility of mounting joint projects with community organizations is not seen as an alternative: government and organizations do not work together for this purpose. Although three CGPs are conducting an experiment with free Internet access (discussed further below), it is not sponsored by them but by other government agencies that are using only the physical premises of the centre; the technology access centres are not involved in the activities of the CGPs.
In short, the CGPs have been computerized, but their performance is uneven; in some cases they face technological problems and in most cases even the available equipment is underused. Some of the objectives set out in 1998 are now starting to be implemented (such as the intranet), while others have not yet begun (the single complaints window). Nevertheless, the Internet has made a significant difference in the handling of citizen complaints over problems with facilities and services, and it has had a positive impact on the responsiveness of the system.
Communication and linkages between the executive and the decentralized units are highly tenuous. There is virtually no communication through ICTs within the central organization, nor does it take part in the GCBA site. It is clear that decisions were taken "from the top down", without involving the CGPs. As a result, installed capacity is underused and there is a lack of training and proper support. Without a greater commitment on the part of the executive bodies, it will be difficult to achieve the organizational changes needed to optimize the use of these technologies.
The introduction of technology in the decentralization process has been slow and there has been little experimentation with citizen participation through ICTs. Internet tools are still not adequately used for communicating with citizens and community organizations, although some centres have undertaken innovative experiments, generally at individual rather than institutional initiative. For example, CGP No. 13 has created its own community access centre, although it is small. For the most part, however, there is little linkage to local government through the CGPs and communication technologies are not being used to strengthen that relationship, to request information or to encourage participation; and indeed they are not even viewed as alternatives for this purpose in the short run.
Activities targeted at the community reflect for the most part individual or group initiatives, rather than institutional strategies. Although the directors have a positive attitude about the Internet as a means of dissemination and communication, this has not translated into any clear view as to how to promote participation and to channel demands in this sense. The lack of any strategy or policy in this regard is glaring.
The recent political and legal changes in the city of Buenos Aires have undoubtedly opened the way to creating new public spaces for making greater use of ICTs in the local government. This "virtual" public space for community participation in management requires not only a declaration of political will on the part of the local government (as expressed in documents from the Department of Decentralization and Modernization), placing information at the service of citizens, or a political will on the part of citizens; it also requires an open institutional culture, a transparent flow of information and receptiveness to community participation in local government. Making information available to citizens through ICTs involves, above all, learning how to use the tools and changing perceptions about the use and the potential of these tools on the part of the managers themselves, starting with the executive.
We analyzed this page <http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar> from the viewpoint of the functionalist theory of communication and the general theory of hypertext. We examined the content as well as the graphic design, monitoring the page at intervals of two weeks. The home page offers a succinct map of the site, with information that is updated daily and takes the form essentially of press releases. The other pages contain static information, or data that are updated less frequently.
The team that designed the Buenos Aires page has given it animation and a wealth of graphics. Nevertheless, the page is presented as a kind of entry portal, with a series of links that are not very successful at optimizing communication and dissemination. It is divided into a dynamic portion, which is updated daily, where press releases and institutional notices are posted, and another portion in which agencies are allotted space to post information.
Most of the internal links include a short presentation on the objectives of their particular area of government, as well as more specialized information that ranges from institutional data to useful facts for citizens (such as procedures or the "How do I..." guide, which, however, do not allow forms to be filed online) and tourism information for promoting the city abroad. For example, the Health Department's site, which belongs to the portal, has information of various kinds, including the health by-law of the city of Buenos Aires and a vaccination calendar. Some of these links allow the user to send e-mail messages to health programmes, for example, or to include addresses for the authorities; most of the links are similar in this regard. The most complete links, in terms of volume of information and interactivity, are those for education, health and culture.
There are noteworthy sections on the city's strategic plans, which offer the possibility of interaction, and from the Public Defender or ombudsman <http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/defensoria/sec_defensoria_defensoria.asp>, which offers citizens the services of an institution "whose mission is to protect them from arbitrary acts, abuse of power and errors of the public administration, as well as to respond to the concerns of those who feel themselves the victims of abuse, negligence or irregularities". The section entitled "Internet services 2000" <http://www.buenosaires.gov.ar/internet2000/centros_inter2000.asp> leads to the publicly accessible Technology Centres 2000 (more on this later).
The interactive portal comes close to the concept of electronic government providing prompt information on various internal links to the entire city site. This portal allows bibliographic consultations and documentation provided by city libraries and the teaching library; it provides information on schools, facts about the city (including which CGP serves a particular neighbourhood) a hospitals map, hotel listings by category, a list of the neighbourhoods or districts (barrios) of the city with a map of each one, pictures of the city, etc. In terms of institutional information, it offers back issues of the Municipal Bulletin, a directory of city government officials with a short biography and e-mail address for each, a guide to names authorized by the civil registry, and a procedural guide that does not, however, provide any information beyond what can be obtained in a brochure from the CGPs.
As Fanta (2000) explains, in terms of their application, the tools of electronic government can be divided into successive stages incorporating new elements that make for more complete interactivity between user and government over the web page. These stages can be described as follows:
First stage: a "procedural map" of the various public services available in terms of basic information (with a "procedural booklet" that can be printed out).
Second stage: the most widely used official forms can be printed from the web site to speed up processing (when the procedure requires a form to be completed).
Third stage: the intention is to make it possible to conduct procedures electronically and complete transactions online. This presupposes automating these procedures.
Fourth stage: the objective here is to provide a single electronic window for city procedures, bringing together a number of services in one place. It will also include the ability for consulting information on public procurement.
The web page of GCBA is now at the first stage of progress towards electronic government. The interactive portal offers a procedural guide that explains the features and requirements for a series of formalities, among which the user may choose, as well as the address and office hours at which they can be conducted. This first stage is limited to providing the information needed to begin procedures, but it does not allow any other kind of interactivity, except the possibility of sending e-mail to the webmaster and to officials. The current situation stands in contrast to official pronouncements of the government, according to which the city's electronic government will be the most widely used in the country by 2003.
We examine here the viewpoints of politicians involved in introducing ICTs into the Buenos Aires Legislature, comparing achievements, progress, obstacles and delays in light of the plans set forth in the modernization programme. To do this, we reviewed newspaper articles on the process of modernizing the Legislature and monitored the Legislature's web site on a weekly basis for updates. We attended two sessions as observers. We traced, obtained and examined printed documents and web sites linked to the Legislature computerization programme. And finally we interviewed authorities and officials of the Legislature in depth.
The Legislature of Buenos Aires was established on December 10, 1997, following the elections in October that year, and marked the beginning of the city's political autonomy. Its initial sessions were held in the General San Martin Cultural Centre. On March 8, 1999, they were moved to the refurbished building of the former Deliberative Council of the city, a body of which the public had become highly sceptical because of repeated incidents of corruption, ineffectiveness and inefficiency.
To differentiate itself from the Deliberative Council, the Legislature decided to give a modern and dynamic profile to its work and to ensure greater transparency in its activities and its expenditures. A modernization programme was adopted to this end, through the Parliamentary Works Commission, entrusted to a management group consisting of two deputies from each parliamentary faction, administrative authorities, technical experts and professionals. This group began work in March 1998, with the objective of establishing organizational guidelines for the Legislature, and completed its task on October 28, 1998, with presentation of a report1 to the Commission.
The modernization programme, which was to be a systemic undertaking, proved to be stillborn. In fact it generated mainly indifference and a degree of resistance and incomprehension among legislators. As soon as it was presented, the management group was dissolved, and the continuity proposed in the document was never achieved. Electoral campaigns and political emergencies completed the job of burying the document. Efforts at modernization continued but, divorced from the work of that group, they lost sight of the original spirit of the initiative and became increasingly sporadic.
One innovation with respect to the use of ICTs in the Legislature was to install a central computer system of the latest generation to manage services in the Legislative Palace, transforming it into a "smart building". This was done at the same time as the restoration work, between December 1998 and November 1999. The system allows for synchronized control of lighting, air conditioning, fire detection and extinguishing, monitoring of elevators, and surveillance of access points and corridors of the building with closed-circuit cameras. The Legislature has also been computerized and equipped with an internal network. Each of the 60 councillors' desks has access to the Internet and intranet, and every legislator has a notebook that can be connected to the networks. A high-definition televsion system was installed to transmit sessions over closed circuit, and they can also be transmitted by the Internet. From our observation of two sessions, we found that only 12 of the 56 legislators present had notebooks on their desks in one session, and only 9 of 53 in the second session. Very few legislators use their notebooks to carry or retrieve information for debates or to communicate with their advisers.
The intranet has run into a number of problems and delays. While the physical structure is installed and well equipped and dimensioned, there have been bottlenecks in terms of content and services. The equipment is of the latest generation and includes about 800 personal computers, most of them Pentium 2 and 3. Most of this equipment was acquired with a loan of US$6 million from the Inter-American Development Bank to the city government, a portion of which was earmarked for equipping the Legislature with computers.
Despite this sound infrastructure in terms of hardware and software, the content merely duplicates that of the Internet web page. It is reduced to a merely informative page, the content of which is managed by the Office of Press and Communications. User services are limited to the provision and maintenance of some 400 e-mail accounts. The page cannot be accessed through the Internet, but only from a terminal connected to the internal network.
There are a number of obstacles impeding development of the Legislature's intranet. One of them is the lack of trained personnel. The Legislature called for tenders to provide training for all positions, from the lowest to the most senior managers, but for internal reasons only the lower categories were covered. The technical training of staff is therefore inadequate to meet needs and demands in terms of skills and qualifications.
In addition, too many staff members are assigned to the "help desk". The General Systems Directorate has 25 employees, most of whom are dedicated to maintenance and technical support for the network's 600 terminals, and there are few staff resources available for designing and developing new applications.
The previous networks (those that existed before the intranet was established) have been retained, and there are still "private" networks, holdovers from the old Council, that have resisted integration, such as those of the Parliamentary Bureau Commission2 and CEDOM.3
The survival of outdated practices and closed information circuits is another obstacle: the existence of an intranet on which classified information can be published, against the persistence of conventional information circuits, and the failure to establish user profiles with differentiated access mean that there is virtually no demand for services from the intranet. The situation is made worse by the fact that many legislators and officials are unaware of what an intranet really is.
Yet, another reason is the rapid growth of the Internet site, which is used as an information source instead of the almost useless intranet. Furthermore, content on the intranet is administered exclusively by the Press Office. This means that the intranet serves merely for information purposes and is not interactive.
In January 1999, the Legislature was officially placed online, at <http://www.legislatura.gov.ar>, at the initiative of the Administrative Secretariat, the Press and Communications Office and the General Systems Directorate, which was responsible for implementing and updating it. Originally the design, maintenance and updating were contracted out to an external supplier. This was done simultaneously with the re-inauguration, in March 1999, of the old Deliberative Council building as a smart building. These events were accompanied by an active press campaign,4 intended to portray the Legislature as a modern political institution that was efficient, transparent and participatory, in contrast to its predecessor.
The design and the architecture of the web site remained unchanged until December 1999, except for updates to its content. In itself the site was innovative, attractive in its design, and it held the promise of interaction between citizens and legislators (Baumann 2000). It had an informative section, under the headings "Know your Legislature" (information on the Legislature's history and functions), "Legislative activity" (information on sessions and draft bills tabled) and "CEDOM" (access to the municipal Documentation Centre database, the Municipal Digest and summaries of the sessions). Other sections allowed for greater citizen participation: "Live transmission" and "Legislature network". The latter page announced services that heralded an overall attempt at electronic democracy and citizen participation through ICTs: chats with legislators, discussion group lists, debating forums and on line surveys. Yet this site lasted less than a year, and the many innovations expected of it turned out to be empty promises.
Why were services announced that never materialized? The explanations offered point to the fact that the design and updating of the site were contracted out, its content was solely informative and was not well adapted to the needs and information habits of the Legislature. While the page contained features for searching legislation, interaction, etc., they were designed in ways that did not work. It was never possible to carry live sessions because the Legislature did not have the proper bandwidth. Moreover, not only were the legislators for the most part unfamiliar with using such tools (Herzer and Kisilevsky 2000), they knew little of their purposes and were frequently hostile to the initiative. Nor were there any internal mechanisms for legislators to participate in chat rooms or forums, and no coordinator for such activities was appointed.
This initial page had objectives that the Legislature was unable to meet, technologically, institutionally or organizationally. Why were such tools announced when it was impossible to implement them with existing resources? Probably because officials had to time their announcements with the inauguration of the new smart building, hoping that a drastic change of image would serve to distance them from the old Deliberative Council and its unfortunate reputation.
In December 1999 the interface and content of the page were redesigned, and it was placed directly in the hands of the Office of Press and Communications. Its design is now more austere and sober, and its architecture is sounder. Nevertheless, it has lost its interactive tools, such as the chat room, the discussion group lists and the surveys. Currently it receives about 600 visits a week, most of them from journalists and news agencies, lawyers and solicitors and, to a lesser extent, non-governmental organisations (NGOs). This "second site" differs from its predecessor in that it contains greater and more up-to-date information and it is easily navigable, with double entry (from above and from the left). Yet, paradoxically, it repeats some of the mistakes of the earlier version: it announces interactive services that in fact do not exist, such as live transmission and forums. Bandwidth is no longer a problem since it has been increased from 256 to 512 Kbps and the reference rate had been planned to reach 1 Mbps by June or July 2001.
The process of modernizing the Legislature has had some successes and some setbacks, some breakdowns and some continuities. These results (still partial) have had an impact on local government management as well as on public services, the two being intimately linked. An initial impact on management has been to generate resistance and conflict, especially since introduction of the technologies was not accompanied by any effort at institutional modernization embracing all areas of government. A second impact has been "to generate greater commitment, new kinds of cooperation and organization", which have made for greater efficiency in carrying out the institutional mandate. The third impact has been greater availability of information, both for members of the institution and for the citizenry at large. The fourth impact is negative: it may well lead to greater scepticism and apathy, and serve to impede rather than encourage citizen participation. This relates to the "delay in making available the instruments for effective citizen participation" – the fact that some tools were promised but never delivered (live transmission, forums, chat rooms) and that other tools were ignored (applications to public hearings, the Strategic Plan, articulation with the government decentralization programme etc.). It would be well if the Legislature were to turn its attention to the organizational guidelines proposed by the management group so as to create real synergy in efforts to strengthen the projects now underway and prevent them from collapsing or interfering with each other.
The effort to bring the citizens of Buenos Aires into the information society has moved out of government offices and into the barrios, offering an innovative service: we refer to the Technology Centres 2000 programme of GCBA. This provides citizens with free access to informational tools, but it does not foster citizen participation.
This experiment arose at the initiative of a small group of officials from GCBA. Essentially it provides free Internet access to citizens through computer terminals located in public places around the city. These places are known as Technology Centres 2000 (CT 2000). The initiative reflects the local government's intentions to provide equitable public access to the technologies and benefits of the information society. Based on the techniques used in telecentres (Gómez et al. 1999), they are designed as "civic telecentres" offering public access to the Internet at libraries, schools, universities, community organizations and other civic facilities. The key feature of these centres is not the telecentre activity itself, but rather that it is integrated with other cultural, educational and recreational services provided at the same place.
We explored these centres between June and August 2000. We were able to cover all the centres that were in operation at that time (i.e. eight out of the current nine). We took a combined qualitative–quantitative approach, using interviews, non-participatory observation and surveys. The open interviews were conducted with technical advisers and users at the centres. Observations were carried out at all the centres using a standardized observation format. We surveyed 100 individual users, employing a structured questionnaire. In our analysis we used a triangulation approach, contrasting results from the survey with statistical data from the Office of Information Structures and Systems. This methodology made it possible to cover all players and to observe the interaction among them and with the institutional environment.
The CT 2000 are set up in CGPs and public libraries, institutions that are thoroughly rooted in their neighbourhood and have existing infrastructure, although the computer equipment had to be installed specifically for this project. They are integrated into the regular services and activities of CGPs, and access to their facilities is circumscribed by the CGP's general operating standards. The centres are located in different districts of the city. They serve a diverse population in terms of people's economic and social levels (ranging from the working-class La Boca to the rarefied preserve of Belgrano), their sense of identity with the neighbourhood, their age, sex, motivations and interests, and their familiarity with computers, etc. The centres located in libraries have three computers, while those in the CGPs have between 14 and 18 terminals, connected in a network. Users take turns at the equipment and are assisted by technical advisers from the same office. There are no printers for public use, nor are people allowed to use diskettes, for fear of viruses. No training is provided, but assistance is available for navigating and using e-mail. Interest is very high throughout the day, and anywhere from 25 to 120 people may be served, depending on the equipment available.
Most visitors to these centres are males: the gender ratio during the period observed was 59 percent males and 41 percent females. Most of the users at the CT 2000 are teenagers and young adults, with the majority of users being 16 or younger. Most users are students, mainly from high schools. Among the non-student population, we identified workers, professionals and the unemployed.
The most frequently used services are e-mail (particularly popular among young adults) and chat rooms (used mainly