Routledge Understanding Creative Users of ICTs - Routledge

This Routledge publication explores how individual users creatively adopt information and communication technologies based on their complex social relations and meanings, rather than conforming to designer intent. The book examines the surprising gap between how ICT developers envisage technology use and how users actually implement these tools within their pre-existing social networks. Instead of adapting their social structures to new technologies, users integrate ICTs into established webs of relationships, often generating innovative applications never anticipated by original designers. The contributions collected here analyse how users function as active social actors who shape technology use through their own needs and contexts, revealing the sophisticated ways people repurpose digital tools to serve their communities and individual circumstances.