Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Drawing on the author's ethnographic and textual analysis research over a five-year period in the United States, the paper observes that older generations of workers are getting used to the new models of technology-driven communication but may not feel "at home" in them. The author suggests steps for policy makers to stimulate and reward older workers, whose roles in the "new work" are both vital and threatened. Proceeding from data suggesting that work status often drives home computer and Internet competencies and usage in the lives of Americans over 50, the author acknowledges that the advancing age of Baby Boomers will cause some generational differences in competency and usage to disappear, but cultural differences among elders will persist. Effective public policy for curing the Digital Divide must include attention to older Americans on the margins, many of whom are single women, racial minorities, and residents of central-city or rural areas, the author claims. Recommendations include:
1. Tailor retirement systems for individual differences.
2. Make employment sectors elder friendly.
3. Make the educational system non-discriminatory.
4. Eliminate ageist practices inside the academy.
5. Strengthen policies to deter age discrimination by employers.
6. Encourage inclusive images of older workers.
7. Stop retrofitting facilities to "shoehorn" in disabled (often older) workers.
8. Encourage intergenerational learning communities.
9. Pursue age studies and intergenerational research.
The author concludes that citizens must assume a collective responsibility for re-creating social environments that will accommodate unprecedented complexities of intergenerational living in today's world.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: In the past three decades, federal, state and local governments have launched an array of new policies to create high technology development. Some contend that existing agglomeration and locational processes are the central forces behind high technology development and question the benefits of these policies. Using a conditional change design, we examine the effects of these policies along with those of location and agglomeration factors on change in high tech employment in metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) between 1988 and 1998. Financing policies and high tech parks promote high tech employment net of agglomeration and magnify the benefits of agglomeration advantages. Research programs compensate for deficits in agglomeration resources. These results indicate that a mix of infrastructural and entrepreneurial strategies using financing, research parks and research grant programs can contribute to high technology employment growth.

Publication Type: Extended Abstract
Abstract: Recent research in the diffusion of innovations paradigm seems to suggest that technology clusters are often superior predictors of adoption, rather than the more conventional measures of innovation attributes. However, the treatment of technology clusters by communication researchers has often been inconsistent. For the most part the measurement approach has been ad-hoc with lists of potential clusters or related technologies being formulated without any systematic reasoning other than some apriori assumptions about cluster relationship. Often, the technologies included have no isomorphic relationship with the technology being adopted. The current research systematically evaluates the composition of technology clusters, and the boundaries of innovations. To this end, the study employs metric multidimensional scaling (MDS) using the Galileo system to map out the perceived dissimilarities between thirty telecommunication innovations. The map would provide spatial measures of cluster membership, distance, and centrality, and help accurately determine the boundaries of technologies. The results will be compared across adopter categories to measure the perceived differences in technology cluster composition.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: In order to explain and understand relations at an international level, scholars and policy makers view the world through various lenses: realism, liberalism, constructivism and their accompanying ?neos,? to name a few. The same is true at a subnational level, in which socialists, Maoists, liberals, conservatives and Greens (among others) all compete for influence on the policymaking agenda. Given these disparate and often competing points of view, this paper would like to apply these tensions to a specific policy arena and ask, ?How and how much does political ideology have an impact on the formulation of information technology policy at a national level??John Street ("Politics and Technology," 1992) analyzes three models to understanding the relationship between politics and technology: 1) autonomous technology, 2) technological determinism and 3) the political choice model of technology. His approach is to explain how the political process has an impact on the development of technology. This research will use his models but adapt the direction of the approach just a little. Instead, we will examine how political processes have an impact on the development of IT-related policy.In their book, ?Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule,? (2003) Kalathil and Boas paint a picture of what many would consider similar types of authoritarian governments and the very different ways that computer networking ? and the Internet in particular ? are being used by governments and citizens. Taking their research as a starting point, this paper will compare IT-related discussions and policies in four countries: Brazil, a socialist country that has been at the forefront of technological experimentation in politics; Estonia, a formerly communist country and an emerging democracy often held up as a leader in IT-development in that region; Singapore, an authoritarian country that prides itself on its networking and technological development; and the United States, a representative democracy which is recognized as a global leader in technology.Applying Street?s models to the comparative case studies, this paper will examine if and how various factions (political parties, government ministries and bureaucracies, intellectuals, interest groups, grass-roots movements) within a country ? given their stated platforms, mandates, goals, ideologies and/or visions ? have an impact on IT-related policy.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Regarding the relationship between technology and democracy, scholars present mixed and even contradictory pictures. Technology can break the state’s control over information, and paradoxically turns to be the tool manipulated by the state to strengthen its control as well. Realizing the contingency of technological impact, this paper therefore proposes a state-society relationship perspective to understand the issue. We argue that the nature of technological impact is a function of intertwining the life cycle of a technology with the state-society conflicts at the time when the technology is used. At the early stage of new technology, it will become popular if its technological characteristics can articulate the most salient state-society conflicts at that time, but because of this it will be soon regulated. When the development of the technology becomes more mature, the negotiation of regulation and anti-regulation will change the society’s usage of the technology and the state’s control measures. This process will keep going until the state-society conflicts change or the technology becomes out of date, whichever occurs first. Then new technologies will replace old technologies and the cycle will repeat. We illustrate this mechanism by investigating how changes of news media technology – print, broadcasting and internet – affect political communication in society in China and Russia over the last three decades.