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Komito, Lee
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Komito, Lee
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Komito, Lee
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Now showing 1 - 10 of 29
- PublicationBeyond the individual: Culture, nationalism, communitySocial changes over the past fifty years have seemed to encourage people to live increasingly isolated lives. Since World War II, people have left their urban neighbourhoods to live in anonymous suburbs. They have moved locations as their employers expect them to work anywhere in the world. With new technologies, people can work from home, shop from home, bank from home, and even socialize from home. The common experiences that created bonds amongst people in the same place seems to be diminishing. Yet, human beings are social creatures; we want to live in webs of social interaction, even if we have to create them ourselves.
93 - PublicationDevelopment Plan Rezonings: The Political PressuresRezonings and section four motions have made planning an issue for public discussion, media publicity, and professional conferences, but debates have tended to focus on planning problems, such as proper land use, future rezoning requirements, financing local services, and so on. Rezonings are not so much a planning problem, as a political problem. The real issues are the political pressures behind planning decisions and the role of community opinion in determining planning policy. In this context, politicians are not necessarily villains; they too are victims of the Irish political system and voter's expectations.
173 - PublicationIndividuals and social changeIn recent chapters, discussion of the Digital Revolution and Information Society has moved from technology, economics, and politics to broader social issues such as rural development, life-long learning, and working from home. Such issues are crucial, since to lose sight of the social dimension is to reduce the Information Society to computers and the market. This is a social transformation - a transformation in the way people live, the way they relate to either other, and they way they perceive the world at large - or else it does not warrant the attention that it has received. How are individuals’ lives outside of work changing, and are these changes significant or superficial?
99 - PublicationPolitics and Administrative Practice in the Irish Information SocietyThe Information Society is expected to transform political relations in industrial societies, but the extent to which transformations have already taken place is often under-estimated. In the past, Irish politicians provided real or imagined patronage in exchange for the electoral support of citizens. The introduction of office information systems in the Irish civil service has lessened politicians' monopoly on administrative information. This increased public access to information has altered traditional politics in Ireland and enhanced democratic participation. However, any further changes should result from conscious policy decisions rather than as unplanned consequences of efficiency-driven IT investments.
164 - PublicationBrokerage or friendship? politics and networks in IrelandStudies of Irish politics have often emphasised clientelist relations between voters and politicians. A survey carried out in the 1970s indicates that the importance of politicians has been overstated. A significant percentage of people chose non-political figures as brokers between themselves and the state. Differences in urban and rural community social structures, which are not reflections of age, education, or socio-economic status, correlate with different brokerage choices. Such findings cast doubt on both modernization and dependency explanations of brokerage. Further research on social networks of friendship and exchange are necessary, since informal personal networks emerge as important links between individuals and the state.
107 - PublicationInformation Society PolicyIn this chapter, current developments in information technology and information systems will be discussed, focusing especially on the social and political implications of such developments. Current technological developments have led to a shift in focus from information to the communication of information; the most visible evidence of this shift is the development of social networking sites that enable individuals to contribute and share information. This is the popular tip of a more fundamental iceberg, which has implications for privacy, security, governance, digital divide, surveillance, and increased dependency of individuals on technology and the organisations which design, produce, and support such technologies.
95 - PublicationBrokerageBrokerage is a process in which individuals (brokers) act as intermediaries between individuals or groups who do not have direct access to each other. The broker provides a link between these segmented or isolated groups or individuals, so that access to goods, services or information is enabled. Brokers possess specialist knowledge or resources that enable them to act more effectively than individuals or groups could themselves.
219 - PublicationThe Experience of Virtual Communities: Cosmopolitan or Voyeur?There are many perspectives on being cosmopolitan; even the commonplace sense of the word, with its implication of the sophisticated traveller, who is conversant with and adapts with relative ease to many different cultures, stands in notable opposition to the idea of the provincial, whose perspectives are typically narrower and more limited. This commonplace sense is ultimately derived from the Greek Stoics’ assertion that one should not be a citizen of any one state but of the whole world. Often, knowledge of different spheres was the result of physical travel, enabling face-to-face interaction with people in a different society over some period of time. With faster and richer means of electronic communication, and the global diffusion of material culture, such participation would seem to be getting easier, without the requirement of physical travel. In addition, new technologies are enabling the creation of new electronic communities. Increasingly, then, it would appear that one could be ‘cosmopolitan’ without leaving one’s armchair, simply dipping in and out of a variety of cultures, experiences and communities, including electronic communities. Is it possible to consider participation in virtual communities, and typically in electronic communities, in the context of cosmopolitanism? This is the issue which I shall explore in this essay.
143 - PublicationVoters, politicians, and bureaucrats: a Dublin surveyThe examination of clientelism has been a major theme in Irish politics and administration. People usually understand clientelism as referring to exchanges in the electoral arena: politicians intervene, on behalf of voters, in the administrative process, and, in return, voters reward politicians with votes. If most citizens do not recognize the term, they recognize the phenomenon: politicians using their personal influence to obtain state benefits for constituents and, in return, constituents providing their votes. Politicians are viewed as brokers, mediating between the state and the public.
192 - PublicationMigration, Community and Social MediaNew information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been linked with the “annihilation of space” so that distance no longer limits communication and interaction between people, the exchange of goods, services and information amongst people, or the movement of people from one locality to another. The result, it is often suggested, is the emergence of new forms of society. Whatever debates may have developed regarding the accuracies of such claims, people vary in the extent to which such claims might apply to them. Those living in small communities who interact largely with neighbours they see daily may feel little impact of any “death of distance” (Cairncross 1997: ii). On the other hand, the lives of individuals who feel connected with people or places at a distance may be greatly altered as a result of new technologies. There is little doubt that individuals, who due to limitations imposed by distance, previously would have had little possibility of contact with each other, can now communicate and maintain social relations. Thus, the social capital debate (Portes & Landolt 1996; Putnam 2000) has been extended to include “network capital” (Larsen & Urry 2008). In most cases, individuals use multiple modes (face to face, email, texting, and so on) to communicate with each other (e.g., Boase et al. 2006; Lenhart et al. 2007; Slater & Tacchi 2004).
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