Descripción
This central dossier of Telos is devoted to an area of great present and future transcendence for our society: gender and the use of ICTs. As in other areas, the Internet reveals a gender gap to the detriment of women as far as use of the Web is concerned. The articles in the dossier provide examples of this gap but at the same time offer encouragement to fight for technological and digital equality.
Coordinated by Cecilia Castaño, a professor of Applied Economics (Complutense University) and renowned researcher in this field, the central dossier focuses on the call for papers made by Ms Castaño and published on our website. The call quite clearly expressed her views on the gender-biased uses of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs): "The concept of gender can help us to understand the unequal use of the Internet by the two sexes, as it is a social construct that assigns different roles and responsibilities, behavioural models and relationships to women and men throughout their respective life cycles. The differences in the use of the Internet among women and men cannot therefore be considered to be merely the result of individual freedom of choice but rather they depend on a whole set of expectations and restrictions that are linked to these different social roles in terms of employment and family."
This issue of Telos includes the editorials entitled 'Political Communication without Citizenship?' by Félix Ortega Gutierrez, and 'Cultural Policies: an Outdated Reality', by Alfons Martinell Sempere. The guest author is Aníbal R. Figueiras Vidal, who makes reflections on collective intelligence and ICTs.
