Answer:
1.1 Dimensions of Tele-access
ICTs involve much more than just access to information or the technology of the computer, implied by conventional discussion of the information ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ ICTs shape an individual's, household's, firm's, or nation's access to information, people, services, and technology. The concept of tele-access highlights how ICTs shape access—both electronically mediated and unmediated—to a wide array of social and economic resources.
Social and technical choices about ICTs can reconfigure electronic and physical access to four inter-related resources: information, people, services, and technology (Dutton 1999). The most commonly recognized is access to information. ICTs not only change the way people get information, but also alter the whole corpus of what a person knows and the information available to an individual at any given time and place. ICTs play a role in making some people information rich and others comparatively information poor. But access to information is only one set of relationships shaped by ICTs, and not necessarily the most socially significant.
ICTs also shape access to people. Choices about the design and use of ICTs not only change the ways individuals communicate with one another, but also influence whom individuals meet, talk to, stay in touch with, work with, and get to know. ICTs can connect or isolate people. For example, throughout the 1990s, the most common use of the Internet was for electronic mail (e-mail), that is, for gaining access to people, not for access to information per se.
Third, ICTs shape access to services. ICTs do more than simply change the way people consume information, products, and services. They also influence what products and services a person consumes and whom an individual purchases them from. ICTs can render obsolete a local business or an entire industry, but also create a new business or industry.
Finally, access to particular technologies—equipment, know-how, and techniques—shapes access to other technologies as ICTs interconnect and depend on one another in many ways. For instance, the Internet can provide access to vast numbers of computers around the world, yet a person needs a computer and other ICTs (such as a telephone line, a cable connection, or wireless device) to access the Internet.
There are many other ways in which ICTs can reduce, screen, reinforce, or alter tele-access, such as the content and flow of information, by accident or design. ICTs do not just provide access to more information or more people, many of whom a person would not be in touch with otherwise: they change patterns of interaction between people, information, communities, and organizations. As a substitute for face-to-face communication, for example, ICTs can provide benefits such as reducing travel, saving time, and extending the geography of human community. They may replace valuable human contact with a much less rewarding form of communication, fostering social isolation, or permit communication among people who might never have an opportunity to meet face to face. Tele-access encompasses all these substitutions, enhancements, and much more, by highlighting how people make social and technical choices about ICTs in ways that will reshuffle society, influencing who's in and who's left out.
