Community Networking and Civic Participation in Canada: A Background Paper

Subsequently published as: Longford, Graham (2005) “Community Networking and Civic Participation: A Canadian Perspective,” in Geoff Erwin, Wallace Taylor, Andy Bytheway, and Corrie Strumpfer, eds., CIRN 2005: 2nd Annual Conference of the Community Informatics Research Network – Proceedings, Cape Town: CIRN 2005 Conference Committee, 355-376.Social scientists and policy makers have been grappling for a number of decades with an apparent decline in civic participation in many western liberal democracies. The mass media and the rise of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are often implicated in explanations for the decline. On the other hand, some have claimed that new ICTs hold the potential to help reverse this trend by revitalizing and strengthening democratic participation and community involvement. This paper explores the relationship between new ICTs and civic participation by examining the role played by specific kinds of ICT-enabled community organizations, namely community networks, in fostering civic participation in local, geographically-based communities in Canada. It will be shown that community networks foster civic participation in the emerging knowledge-based economy and society (KBES) by providing both access to the internet (‘connectedness’ in the technical sense) and opportunities for its effective use by individuals and communities to communicate and interact with one another electronically (‘connectedness’ in the social sense).Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) - Initiative on the New Economy Public Outreach Grant; Canadian Research Alliance for Community Innovation and Networking (CRACIN)