New Deals, No Wheels: Social Exclusion, Tele- options and Electronic Ontology

Attention has largely fallen on the grand providers and users of new information communication technologies, such as corporations, government and municipal authorities with their needs to reduce public expenditure bills, but there are new dimensions to social existence opened up by these technologies at the community and individual levels which have been repeatedly ignored. The paper explores, from a radical organisational perspective, the extent to which new tele-technologies provide new social options for the previously marginalised and disadvantaged: tele-options can greatly assist in the delivery of the New Deal whilst simultaneously reducing the negative quality of the current urban transport environment. The new electronic communication technologies have the potential to alter radically power structures and equalise power, through increased transparency, heightened reflexivity and the opportunity for electronic dialogue, between clients and experts, communities and politicians and students and teachers. The power-knowledge discourse is all set to take a new form: a form which fits with Habermas' conception of the ideal communication situation. In this context, the paper explores the ontology-epistemology relationship which new technology brings into play.