Entre discursos e práticas: a inclusão digital e as desigualdades sociais.

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate the relations between paradigms, discourses, actions and the brazilian public policy of Digital Inclusion (DI), especially the use of the Internet, in what concerns the promotion of citizenship and social inclusion in the physical and virtual world. We conducted a case study in João Pessoa – PB. Based on key concepts, we observed how the DI public actions promoted by the governments and the Federal Institute of Paraíba (IFPB) brought citizens closer to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and the contributions of these actions to the benefits idealized by cyberculture, regarding to citizenship and inclusion. The results suggest that contemporary societies conform as networks supported by ICT in social, economic, political and cultural aspects; although the actions and policies bring elements of inclusion in their discourses, as if this process had been moved in the universal sense, globalization presents itself as a selective process of agents in the networks; research in government portals suggests efforts in actions that corroborate with the discourses, including in connection with the multidimensionality of human life, but there are contradictions caused by discrepancies and inequalities in DI processes, and therefore the result is the increase or the maintenance of exclusion; it is important to rethink the cycle of public policies, with participatory and democratic decisions, involving governments, companies, institutions and citizens; the experiences in teaching, research and extension in IFPB, relating ICT and DI, have at times connected themselves to government policies, and have suggested that infrastructure problems in some places do not even guarantee access to these technologies, and that actions that develop the technique without connection with citizenship, reduce the reach of these technologies in human terms, restricting their social results; effective digital education for inclusion requires sense for ICTs, respect for contexts, qualification in citizenship, horizontal relations with communities, and their protagonism in the cycles of institutional actions and government policies.