![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
Abstract
This essay situates ICT for Development (ICT4D) perspectives in relationship to the neo-liberal rationality characteristic of the WTO, World Bank, and G8 economic frameworks. Using James Carey's (2005) pragmatist perspective and recent work on problematization, the essay proceeds in three steps: 1) it situates the emergence, role, and organization of the UN ICT Task Force in amplifying ICT4D perspectives, 2) it discusses the importance of problematization in the articulation of communication to international development frameworks, and 3) it recommends supplementing studies of the digital sublime with a pragmatist perspective better able to illuminate the practices of transnational policy networks.
Acknowledgements
Chris Russill would like to acknowledge the helpful research assistance of Rahkee Chatbar, and the generous reading and comments of John Sloop and two anonymous reviewers. An early version of this manuscript was presented to the Annual Australian Cultural Studies Association, November 2005, Sydney, Australia.
Notes
1. James Carey, “Historical Pragmatism and the Internet,” New Media & Society 7 (2005): 443; Vincent Mosco, The Digital Sublime (London: The MIT Press, 2005), 6.
2. James Carey and John Quirk, “The Mythos of the Electronic Sublime,” in Communication as Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 140–41.
3. Carey and Quirk, 116–18.
4. Carey and Quirk, 132.
5. Tony Bennett, Culture: A Reformer's Science (London: Sage Publications, 1998), 82–83; Jack Z. Bratich, Jeremy Packer and Cameron McCarthy, Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality (New York: SUNY Press, 2003), 11; Ronald W. Greene and David Breshears, “Book Review,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1 (2004): 213–18.
6. Ronald Walter Greene and Darrin Hicks, “Lost Convictions: Debating Both Sides and the Ethical Self-fashioning of Liberal Citizens,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 101.
7. United Nations ICT Task Force, Third Annual Report of the Information and Communication Technologies Task Force, 6 June 2005, http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=E/2005/71 (accessed 3 July 2006).
8. Nick Couldry, “The Digital Divide,” in Web.Studies, ed. David Gauntlett and Ross Horsley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 185.
9. Richard Heeks, “Information Systems and Developing Countries: Failure, Success and Local Improvisations,” The Information Society 19 (2002): 102.
10. Couldry, 187–88.
11. Couldry, 186–87.
12. United Nations ICT Task Force, Fourth Annual Report of the Information and Communication Technologies Task Force, 5 May 2006, http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/340/39/PDF/N0634039.pdf?OpenElement (accessed 3 July 2006).
13. Derrick Cogburn, “Partners or Pawns?: The Impact of Elite Decision-Making and Epistemic Communities in Global Information Policy on Developing Countries and Transnational Civil Society,” Knowledge, Technology, & Policy 18 (2005): 52–81.
14. Cogburn, 79.
15. Task Force, Fourth Annual, 6.
16. Task Force, 6.
17. Task Force, 9.
18. Task Force, Third Annual, 19.
19. United Nations ICT Task Force, “About,” http://www.unicttaskforce.org/about/ (accessed 1 December 2006). This quotation reproduces the original accurately.
20. United Nations ICT Task Force, “List of members,” http://www.unicttaskforce.org/panel/ (accessed 1 December 2006); Also see “Panel of advisors,” http://www.unicttaskforce.org/advisors/ (accessed 2 July 2007).
21. Task Force, “About.”
22. United Nations Development Program, Human Development Report 2005: International cooperation at a crossroads: Aid, trade and security in an unequal world (New York: United Nations Development Program), 99.
23. United Nations Development Program, 103–4.
24. Arturo Escobar, “Power and Visibility: Development and the Invention and Management of the Third World,” Cultural Anthropology 3 (1988): 435.
25. Key works include Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995); Arturo Escobar, “Place, Power, and Networks in Globalization and Postdevelopment,” in Redeveloping Communication for Social Change: Theory, Practice, and Power, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 163–73; Ronald Walter Greene, Malthusian Worlds: US Leadership and the Governing of the Population Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999); Michael Goldman, Imperial Nature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
26. Robert Hunter Wade, “Bridging the Digital Divide: New Route to Development or New Form of Dependency?,” in The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts, ed. Chrisanthi Avgerou, Claudio Ciborra, and Frank Land (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 202; Ian O. Angell and Fernando M. Ilharco, “Solution is the Problem: A Story of Transitions and Opportunities,” in The Social Study of Information and Communication Technology: Innovation, Actors, and Contexts, ed, Chrisanthi Avgerou, Claudio Ciborra, and Frank Land (London: Oxford University Press, 2004), 34.
27. Karin Gwinn Wilkins, “Introduction,” in Redeveloping Communication for Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 4.
28. Escobar, Encountering Development, 17, 21–24.
29. Escobar, 6.
30. Escobar, 24.
31. Arturo Escobar, “Economics and the Space of Modernity: Tales of Market, Production and Labour,” Cultural Studies 19 (2005): 171. This chapter is not found in Escobar's central statement, Encountering Development, but is the second chapter of the dissertation from which that book is derived. Also see Escobar, “Discourse and Power: Michel Foucault and the Relevance of His Work for the Third World,” Alternatives 10 (1985): 377–400.
32. Greene, Malthusian Worlds, 57.
33. Escobar, Encountering Development, 194–95, 202.
34. Greene, 191–93.
35. Goldman; Maarten Hajer, The Politics of Environmental Discourse: Ecological Modernization and the Policy Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
36. The funding mechanism is the Global Environmental Facility (GEF). It is administered by the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program, and United Nations Environmental Program. Non-western nations argued strongly to detach this fund from the World Bank. They failed and a key figure in the “greening” of the World Bank, Mohamed El-Ashry, was named head of the fund. For one account, see Philip Shabecoff, A New Name for Peace: International Environmentalism, Sustainable Development, and Democracy (London: University Press of New England, 1996).
37. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, Second Edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 508. Castells served on the Panel of Advisors for the ICT Task Force. See Task Force “Panel of advisors.”
38. John Merson, “Sustainable Development Networking Program,” http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/earth/stories/s13895.htm (accessed 5 July 2007).
39. This account compresses the perspectives offered in Redeveloping Communication for Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 89–102, and Gregg Walker, “Public Participation as Participatory Communication in Environmental Policy Decision-Making: From Concepts to Structured Conversations,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 1 (2007): 99–110.
40. Of course, “free flow of information” is an original concern of the United Nations and UNESCO due to the insistence on this principle by the United States government and press. For a brief account of this “quixotic campaign” and its implications for international communication policy, see Fred Cate, “The First Amendment and the International ‘free flow’ of Information,” Virginia Journal of International Law 30 (1989): 374. A more detailed and comprehensive account is also found in Cees J. Hamelink, The Politics of World Communication (London: Sage Publications, 1994).
41. For concern about participatory discourse as empowerment, see Ronald Walter Greene, “Governing Reproduction: Women's Empowerment and Population Policy,” in Redeveloping Communication for Social Change: Theory, Practice, and Power, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (New York: Rowman Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 27–38; Faye Ginsburg, “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?,” Cultural Anthropology 6 (1991): 92–112; Alopi S. Latukefu, “Remote Indigenous Communities in Australia: Questions of Access, Information, and Self-determination,” in Native on the Net: Indigenous and Diasporic Peoples in the Virtual Age, ed. Kyra Landzelius (New York: Routledge, 2006), 43–60.
42. Greene, “Governing Reproduction,” 32.
43. Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Unvanquished: A US—UN Saga (New York: Random House, 1999), 161, 163.
44. Boutros-Ghali, 163.
45. Chuck Lankester, “The Role of Informatics in Sustainable Development,” http://www.sdnp.undp.org/docs/papers/wru.htm (accessed December 1 2006).
46. Lankester.
47. Lankester; also Shabecoff, 186, for the claim development aid declined 10 percent in the two years following the Rio Conference; also Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 218.
48. Mosco, 13–14.
49. Emanuele Santi and Lucia Grenna, “Environmental Communications Assessment: A Framework of Analysis for the Environmental Governance” (paper presented at the 7th biennial Conference on Communication and the Environment 2003), 2.
50. Goldman, 243.
51. Santi and Grenna, 8.
52. World Bank, “Communications Congress starts a Worldwide Conversation,” http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTDEVCOMMENG/Resources/WCCDWBarticle.pdf (accessed 1 December 2006).
53. Walker, 99–110.
54. Jody Waters, “Power and Praxis in Development Communication Discourse and Method,” Redeveloping Communication for Social Change, ed. Karin Gwinn Wilkins (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 89–102.
55. Michael L. Best and Ernest J. Wilson III, “Editorial: Information Will Be Free,” Information Technologies and International Development 3 (2006): iii.
56. Task Force, Fourth Annual, 19.
57. Best and Wilson, iii.
58. Best and Wilson, iv.
59. Best and Wilson, iv.
60. Best and Wilson, iii.
61. Goldman, 231.
62. Goldman, 270.
63. This account draws from Chris Russill, “Book Review,” review of Connected for Development: Information Kiosks and Sustainability, ed. Akhtar Badshah, Sarbuland Khan, and Maria Garrido, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies (2005) http://rccs.usfca.edu/bookinfo.asp?ReviewID=348&BookID=266 (accessed 5 July 2007).
64. Akhtar Badshah and Sarbuland Khan, “Introduction,” Connected for Development: Information Kiosks and Sustainability, ed. Akhtar Badshah, Sarbuland Khan, and Maria Garrido (New York: Secretariat of the United Nations ICT Task Force, 2003), 1–2.
65. Savita Bailur, “Using Stakeholder Theory to Analyze Telecenter Projects,” Information Technologies and International Development 3 (2006): 62.
66. Bailur, 63. The quotation is attributed to F. Proenza, “Telecenter Sustainability: Myths and Opportunities,” Journal of Development Communication 12 (2001): 110–24.
67. Digital Partners, “INDIA: Drishtee Village Information Kiosks,” Connected for Development: Information Kiosks and Sustainability, ed. Akhtar Badshah, Sarbuland Khan, and Maria Garrido (New York: Secretariat of the United Nations ICT Task Force, 2003), 149–50.
68. Digital Partners, 150.
69. Wade, “Bridging the Digital Divide,” 189.
70. Robert Wade, “US Hegemony and the World Bank: The Fight over People and Ideas,” Review of International Political Economy 9 (2002): 201–29.
71. Carey, “Historical Pragmatism,” 443.
72. Wade, “Bridging the Digital Divide,” 204.
73. Wade's own work suggests this path. My recommendation is to ground this perspective in empirical work detailing struggles over earlier forms of media access rather than invoking earlier forms of international policy debate.
74. Wade, 185.
75. Mosco, 15. Robert McChesney, The Problem of the Media: US Communication Politics in the 21st Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004).
76. Couldry, 191.
77. Ginsberg, 92–112; Latukefu, 43–60.