New Media, Development and Globalization E-Book

Don Slater

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Bildung
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 443

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

New media, development and globalization are the key terms through which the future is being imagined and performed in governance, development initiatives and public and political discourse. Yet these authoritative terms have arisen within particular cultural and ideological contexts. In using them, we risk promoting over-generalized and seemingly unchallengeable frameworks for action and knowledge production which can blind us to the complex global patterns and promise of social reality. This compelling book forces us to look at these terms afresh. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Latin America, West Africa and South Asia, Don Slater seeks to challenge these terms as voicing specific northern narratives rather than universal truths, and to see them from the perspective of southern people and communities who are equally concerned to understand new machines for communication, new models of social change and new maps of social connection. The central question the book poses is: how we can democratize the ways we think and practise new media, development and globalization, opening these terms to dialogue and challenge within North-South relations? Rooted in sociological debates, New Media, Development and Globalization will also be a provocative contribution to media and cultural studies, studies of digital culture, development studies, geography and anthropology.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Dedication

Title page

Copyright page

Acknowledgements

1: Introduction: Frames and Dialogues

Ethnography

Back to Banalities: Redefining New Media, Development and Globalization

Conclusion

2: Communicative Ecology and Communicative Assemblages

The Media Are Not the Message: A Story from Sri Lanka

Communicative Ecologies and Communicative Assemblages

‘The Media’ and (Western) Modernity

Connections and Exclusions: Communicative Algorithms

Conclusions

3: Media Forms and Practices

Media Modalities in Accra

Media and Modalities

The Monologic of ‘Information Society’: A Utilitarian Modality

Conclusion

4: Making Up the Future: New Media as the Material Culture of Development

Two Development Theorists

Northern Narratives and ‘Network Ethics’

Tools and Transformations: The International Division of Ethics

Conclusion

5: Scaling Practices and Devices: Globalizing Globalization

Globalization as Development Narrative and Scalar Narrative

Scaling, Scaling Practices and Scaling Devices

Asturias: Scaling Cultural Flows in Northern Spain

Scaling and Development

Development as a Scaling Device?

Conclusion

6: Conclusion: Politics of Research: Forms of Knowledge, Participation and Generalization

ictPR and EAR

Development as an Assemblage

Participating, Theorizing and Learning

The Symmetries of ‘Learning’

References

Index

For my three girls – Jo, Bella and Rosa – without whom this book might have been finished years ago but life wouldn't have been so much fun.

And for Eileen Cadman (1950–2013): author, editor, intellectual, feminist, gardener, astrologer, etc. …

Copyright © Don Slater 2013

The right of Don Slater to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3832-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-3833-1 (pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7982-2 (epub)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-7981-5 (mobi)

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Acknowledgements

This book draws on many partnerships and conversations, formal and informal, because of its roots in numerous collaborative research projects and because of its over-long gestation.

Firstly, being so project-based, there are funders and co-workers to whom I am indebted. More specific acknowledgements are made in con­text, but overall the research projects on which I've drawn are as follows:

US/UK (1996–7): Sexpics trading on IRC (self-funded).Trinidad (1998–2000): Daniel Miller (UCL) and Don Slater (LSE). Travel funded by the University of London; the rest by credit card debt.Sri Lanka (2002): Monitoring and Evaluation of Kothmale Community Radio and Internet Centre. Lead researchers: Don Slater (LSE), Jo Tacchi (QUT), Peter Lewis (LSE). Funded by the Department for International Development; research conducted under the auspices of UNESCO. Particular thanks are due to Wijayananda Jayaweera (UNESCO) and the main researchers, Lasanthi Daskon and Tanya Notley.ictPR (ICTs for Poverty Reduction) (2002–4): Lead researchers: Don Slater (LSE), Jo Tacchi (QUT); project co-ordinator, Ian Pringle. Funded and implemented by UNESCO. Particular thanks are again due to Mr Jayaweera for his exceptional leadership of this seriously brave programme, to the research co-ordinator Savithri Subramanian, and to the enormously enterprising and hardworking researchers on that programme. The latter are listed and acknowledged in the table of ictPR projects in Chapter 6.Information Society (comparative ethnographies of ICTs and poverty reduction) (2003–5): Lead researchers: Don Slater (Ghana), Jo Tacchi (India), Daniel Miller (Jamaica), Andrew Skuse (South Africa). Funded by the Department for International Development. The present book draws exclusively on the Ghana ethnography, which I conducted in partnership with Dr Janet Kwami. My then doctoral students, Dr Jenna Burrell and Dr Matti Kohonen, were conducting their fieldwork in Accra at same time and I benefited enormously – in conversation, ideas, contacts and medical care – from this rare experience of actually being in the field with students.Asturias, Spain (2007): Cultural Maps and Cultural Development: A Study of Youth Culture, Technology and Cultural Policy. Lead researchers: Don Slater (LSE) and Tomas Ariztia-Larrain (LSE). Funded by CCON and administered through EnterpriseLSE.OLPC, Uruguay (2009–present): As referenced in Chapters 1 and 6, I have benefited greatly from supervising the fieldwork and doctoral research of Daiana Beitler from about 2009 onwards; I also benefited greatly from related visits to Montevideo to put together a large research programme there which, though ultimately unsuccessful, was a very important learning experience for me.

Secondly, there are many friends and colleagues with whom I have discussed aspects of this work over the years; to avoid getting too effusive I'll name just a few who have had the most direct formative in­fluence on this book: Daniel Miller, Jo Tacchi, Nick Couldry and Jo Entwistle.

Thirdly, I have been blessed with some fabulous Ph.D. students who have played a huge role in my intellectual development (whatever my role in theirs) during the writing of this book; amongst those who have had the most direct impact are several who are explicitly cited in the text as collaborators as well as interlocutors: I am massively indebted to Tomas Ariztia-Larrain, Daiana Beitler, Jenna Burrell and Lena Simanyi for key aspects of this book; but I would also specifically like to acknowledge Oriana Bernasconi and Sandy Ross for particularly challenging and important conversations that have really helped me figure things out. I would also like to acknowledge several years' worth of my MSc Culture and Society students on whom I piloted many of these arguments and stories, and whose critical responses have been more formative than they might have realized.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the role of three of my oldest friends, none of them academics – Mike Hughes, Andy Moye and the late Eileen Cadman – in forming and challenging the ways I make sense of life in conversations that now go back over thirty years.

1

Introduction: Frames and Dialogues

Over the past few decades, the three terms in my title – new media, development and globalization – have fused into a holy trinity through which people increasingly organize and act upon their beliefs about the future. Individually, each term invokes cosmologies that structure our conceptual and practical universes around fundamental aspects of life: communication and mediation (new media); social change over historical time (development); and connectedness at different spatial scales (globalization). They are also so tightly interwoven that each term appears as both manifestation and cause of the other two: new media (or ICTs or digital culture or cognate terms) are understood as inherently globalizing and as constituting the inevitable informational future for social development; development is normatively, even commonsensically, narrated as a transition to unimpeded and technically enabled global information flows and associated forms of organization and sociality (‘networks’); and globalization designates an informational reconstitution of space and connection that is often taken for granted as describing our collective socio-economic future.

Together they make a compelling and seemingly irrefutable case about the way the world is going within which ‘everyone’ must position themselves, as if people everywhere were adapting to an altered natural habitat: individuals, households, communities, nations, the globe, have been set, as their fundamental tasks, the need to comprehend these changes, to imagine the new agencies and qualities that will emerge from them and, on the basis of these knowledges and desires, to forge strategies for surviving or advancing or ‘developing’. These interlinked processes are confronted as dangers and threats, as challenges, as opportunities, even as final solutions to the problems previously posed by unequal development or capitalism or pre-modern techno-cultures. In all of these cases, however, these interlinked terms have come to be understood in a thoroughly realist mode whereby they provide the analytical frameworks in and through which people are to organize social thought and action. More concretely, as academics who are researching and teaching this stuff, we are channelled into operating within containers labelled ‘new media’, ‘development’ and ‘globalization’, and their interweaving, in our production and circulation of new knowledges.

The aim of this book is to reposition these three terms and their conjoint narrative as just one kind of story about the future, told by certain kinds of people, and therefore as performatively part of the construction of whatever future will actually eventuate: the aim is simply to achieve an anthropological distance from these terms so that they can always be traced to someone's cosmology somewhere, and so that all contributions – northern or southern – to debates about communication, change and connectedness might be treated as equally or symmetrically cosmological. Stated more academically, I am concerned to demote all three from acting as analytical frames or metalanguages that contain (and constrain) research and political action, and to recognize them instead as part of the fields we study and act within, to render them as topics rather than resources. In this sense, I am not primarily concerned with criti­quing these concepts, or debunking them as fictions or hype, or presenting new findings that confirm or refute or revise them, or adding new concepts that would help practitioners do (or contest) media, development or globalization ‘better’, though some of all that will inevitably be involved.