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Book Review: Community Informatics: Shaping Computer-mediated Social Relations Leigh Keeble and Brian D. Loader (eds) Routledge, London, 2001, xxiv + 388pp, ISBN 0—4152—3112—4, £18.99 (pbk)

For a number of years now, Routledge has been one of those publishers interested in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). Some of its key publications have been edited collections based upon the work of the Community Informatics Research and Applications Unit at Teeside University (Hague and Loader, 1999; Loader, 1997, 1998; Thomas and Loader, 2000). Indeed, these have been coming out at such a rate that Community Informatics is no longer the latest in the series. What these books have done is to provide an important resource for social scientists and theorists from across a number of disciplines. Based upon an international conference that brought together academics, practitioners and activists, Community Informatics explores the implications of ICTs for communities and communal relations. Over the course of 19 chapters, the book ranges widely across a number of themes and debates, but returns constantly to some central questions: Is the influence of ICTs benign or otherwise? Do they contain the potential to regenerate community relations or to fragment them? Are new forms of virtual community being created? Is this to be welcomed or regretted? Is remote, online, technologically-mediated communication superior to face-to-face interaction or not? What kind of new public sphere(s) is (are) emerging? As with most edited books, Community Informatics offers no precise consensus. What it does do is express a cautious reflective approach that recognizes the ambiguities and social embeddedness of ICTs. Like its predecessors, it offers a welcome alternative to an earlier literature in which boosterism alternated regularly with apocalyptic warnings of a new dark age. For social policy, the obvious attraction of the book lies in its relevance to issues of social inclusion and exclusion. The ‘digital divide’ has long been of concern to both researchers and policy makers (i.e. the means by which new technologies reflect and consolidate social inequalities and divisions). One or two facile opinions on this subject can be found here. For instance, take Barry Wellman’s quaint view that ‘The good news is that the cost of computing is becoming so low that in the developed world the digital social-class divide should get smaller just as the digital gender gap has’ (pp.