ABSTRACT
This chapter is based on research that raises questions about the potential social impacts of ICT on inclusion processes and citizens’ participation in the new economy and society. Discourses on the information society afford ICTs contradictory positions that range from utopian to the dystopian. On the one hand, ICT use is considered a prerequisite for participation in the information society; on the other hand, it is seen as creating new forms of exclusion from different social processes. An extension of the first position is evident in various action programmes at European and national levels that view ICTs as inclusion ‘tools’, capable of integrating people whose involvement in education and labour markets is made difficult by lack of physical abilities, lack of skills and qualifications, lack of incomes, ageing, etc. The research outlined in this chapter questions the capacity of ICT-based programmes within two privileged fields of everyday life – the training and the working spheres – to ease integration of the less abled.
