2
Digital Stories from the Developing World
The previous chapter discussed some of the histories associated with digital technology, including the treatment of knowledge as a fixed entity to be classified, stored, and retrieved. I have explained how these shifts in technology design and deployment are sociotechnical, that is, they shape and are shaped by values, beliefs, and the peoples and places with which they are associated. The limitations we see in many technologies today thus speak to the disproportionate voice and power of Western and first world elites in their design and deployment. Part of the problem with blindly embracing these “storage” technologies as they stand is that by doing so we limit our imagination of what they may be. We run the risk of ignoring how technologies may support the deeply human practices of communicating, sharing, expressing, and performing. This chapter discusses the potential of rethinking technology from the perspective of storytelling, linked to the sharing of voices within and across users and communities. Through ethnographies I share from South India, it reveals what might be possible when rural and nonliterate “users” are transformed into creators and storytellers using digital video cameras.
Digital Storytelling
Storytelling is a timeless means by which peoples and communities share their beliefs and values. The growth of digital subcultures associated with storytelling is staggering.1 Ethnographer Mimi Ito’s ethnographic study of anime fan cultures in Japan2 builds on an earlier history of media appropriation and storytelling that dates back to the days of pre-Internet television that involved communities like the recognized and well-known Star Trek fans.3 Importantly, these examples reveal the power of storytelling within particular communities to support local agendas.
Seen through the process of storytelling, technologies can support grassroots community voices and agendas. Today, in contrast, many social media sites take personal or community-created stories and share them far and wide, which may unfortunately misrepresent the contexts by which they were created. While global audiences can learn from specific place-based stories, it is important to recognize that storytelling has long been a means of supporting local communities.
This book shares storytelling experiences that include indigenous communities in the Americas and Australia, immigrants from Somalia, and rural communities in South India. Local communities can take technologies and shape them to support their aspirations. This term powerfully describes the potential communities have to use technology to articulate their relationships with the “modern” and global forces with which they increasingly collide.
Visual anthropologist Eric Michaels has discussed the different layers of meaning, perspective, and engagement of Australian Warlpiri aboriginal communities with whom he collaborated in their storytelling encounters with satellite television.4 He describes how the boundaries between outside and inside worlds are navigated in such postcolonial encounters. His perspective suggests that collaborations are sensitive, complex, and dynamic. The ways a community narrates, reflects on, and shares knowledge is always incomplete and subject to change. And it should be respected as such.
While many grassroots communities may appropriate, or creatively use or repurpose the technologies that have entered their worlds, it remains important to not merely celebrate these acts. We can go further by thinking about how technologies themselves can be created, designed, and implemented in keeping with the voices and practices of diverse communities with which we collaborate. Most off-the-shelf systems follow precreated metadata and ontology standards and thus command how information about or for a local community is described, classified, and retrieved. This tends to favor the perpetuation of the standards of the software creator rather than support of diverse, local community-based ways of thinking and knowing. Rather than treating new technologies as fixed in stone and incapable of modification of redesign, we can rethink how they are created and deployed. We can rewrite the ways knowledge is articulated via technology, or ontology, to respect community voices and practices as they stand.
Before diving into the power of digital storytelling in supporting community development visions across the world, it is important to recognize that mere access to technology reproduces rather than combats inequality. The sobering insight that access to technology hardly remedies economic or political stratification would seem to confirm a conclusion that the spread of technology is a net-negative for marginalized communities across the world. Instead of rushing to such a conclusion, I reveal through my fieldwork within communities in rural South India in the latter half of this chapter that the destiny of technology relates to how it is crafted, appropriated, and rewritten to support local voices.
Digital Inequality
Since the 1980s, there has been discussion of the McDonaldsization of our world, where through “flexible modes of control” neoliberal partnerships between states and corporations have shaped economic and political power.5 While many have debated whether liberal capitalism has delivered on its promise of offering greater opportunities to all, as New York Times political columnist Thomas Friedman claims,6 there is little doubt that at stake is the survival of local industries and self-determined practices. We need to consider how digital technologies are implicated within this discussion. It raises questions as to whether the spread of new technology accentuates inequality despite its flattening promise.
If “global” means the exporting of Western values, then we may be ignoring diverse traditions, values, and beliefs.7 An alternative approach toward thinking of the term “global” could be to focus on the power of place, community, and culture. This approach opens up space to think about technology from the bottom up rather than impose it from the top down.
Yet as things stand, we see evidence that mere access to new technology reinforces rather than combats inequality. The empirical work by scholars such as Manuel Castells, a sociologist who has explored the social impacts of globalization and information technology,8 and Eszter Hargittai, a social scientist who studies how uses of the Web influence social and economic standing, have shown that on average access to the Web is far from sufficient to combat social or economic stratification.9 This is true partially because access is hardly as simple a concept as usually portrayed. Although access may be seen as simply technical, in fact it is interwoven with related issues involving infrastructure, literacy, existing social networks, value systems, and aspirations. Certain well-intentioned professions, such as public libraries, must reflect upon their mission of spreading “access to information.”
On a global level, we know that an increased number of developing world citizens have access to mobile phones, yet most have only a basic functionality that lacks access to the Internet and multimedia. To take one instance, rural India has a number of environmental and social challenges to deploying computer-based interventions: intermittent power and connectivity, long travel times, variable population density, and lack of secure places to store valuable equipment, limited education, underemployment, and limited disposable income.10 Computing and technological literacy tends to be skewed toward the rich, urban, male, educated, and English-speaking populations, leaving a substantial portion of India’s population absent from the rhetoric around “India’s digital revolution.”11
Nicole Zillien, a German Internet sociologist, and Hargittai argue that we must think past binaries such as technology user versus nonuser, and consider the range of activities by which people engage with these tools. What we do, rather than the technology itself, ultimately shapes economic and social inequality. Unsurprisingly, those with higher status in their research tend to have better technical equipment, faster connections, and stronger digital literacy,12 defined as the skills needed to use a digital resource as one wishes and be able to do so effectively. To demonstrate how mere information access reproduces inequality, Zillien and Hargittai turned to a data set related to a heterogeneous population in Germany. They gathered data on hardware proficiency, the skills to search for and interact with information, years of use, and the level of interest.
The authors found that “status-enhancing” online activities, such as the use of economic or political websites, characterize those of higher socioeconomic status; in contrast, those of lower status more often spend their time looking at entertainment and health information. Economic and political websites can enhance one’s status, for if used correctly and with ample resources they may be used to increase one’s economic and political power, for example through financial investments or contributions to political campaigns. But if one does not have such resources, meaning that one is already poor, these websites have little value.
Even while controlling for infrastructure and facility with technology, Zillien and Hargittai were able to confirm these “digital inequality” findings. The rich get richer even when access, infrastructure, and technology literacy are equally distributed, which is rare in reality. The online activities that enhance political and economic power are disproportionately exploited by the already rich. Noting sociologist Everett Rogers’s innovativeness-needs paradox,13 the author write that “those with more resources—whether technical, financial, social, or cultural—end up using the web for more beneficial purposes than those who have considerably fewer assets on which to draw.”14
These scholars show us that what people have off-line determines their ability to exploit the online. Online access is not just a one-time experience and inequality is not bridged simply by providing infrastructure and literacy. It is not overcome simply by bringing “light” to the dark regions within the two maps I have presented.
This research reveals that while access to the Web may produce occasionally positive and creative outcomes for local communities on the surface, the digital “revolution” actually makes the poor poorer. Yet is such a sobering outcome inevitable? I argue throughout this book that what needs to occur is a fundamental rethinking of technology itself. We must develop tools in accordance with the aspirations, visions, and knowledge practices of the communities whose agendas we wish to support.
Mark Warschauer, a scholar of education, technology, and learning, argues that what is missing at present amongst poorer peoples are the “skills and understandings involved in using [technologies] to locate, evaluate, and use information.”15 While his perspective likely homogenizes the poor as a single category, it is consistent with consensus amongst other scholars that access to technology is insufficient to combat inequality.
On a macroeconomic level we can see the effects of digital inequality in terms of labor patterns and the buying and selling of corporations. Technology critic and developer Jaron Lanier has pointed out that in the very month that the social media start-up Instagram—which employed thirteen people—was sold for a billion dollars to Facebook, Kodak—which employs more than a hundred and forty thousand people—went bankrupt. He thus points out that social media’s “free” networks do little other than to make the rich even wealthier.
An amazing number of people offer an amazing amount of value over networks. But the lion’s share of wealth now flows to those who aggregate and route those offerings, rather than those who provide the “raw materials.” A new kind of middle class, and a more genuine, growing information economy could come about if we break out of the “free information” idea and into a universal micropayment system. . . . [T]he particular way we’re reorganizing our world around digital networks is not sustainable.16
Lanier’s words are a grim reminder that the cultures and organizations that control how data flow, how technologies are used, and how information is ordered disproportionately gain from the expansion of technology, particularly within today’s social media and big data climate. Whoever has the biggest computer and best processing power can manipulate “the network.”
Lanier has stated in a recent interview that “even if people are created equal, computers are not.”17 To resolve this dilemma, Lanier suggests that we must think not just computationally but also culturally and ethically. The free services provided by top-down social networks not only empower economic inequality, but if left unchecked, also impose particular cultural values worldwide on peoples from diverse communities and cultures.
Despite the concerns I have shared, this chapter shall demonstrate my argument that digital inequality is not written in stone. It is useful to consider how access to technologies asymmetrically shapes connection and communication. This explains why we must understand and critique the intersections between the global spread of technology and our world today through concepts such as network society.
An Imagined Network Society
Network society is a term that originated in the 1980s to describe social, political, and economic changes caused by the spread of information and communication technologies. The term has also grown in popular discourse to reflect the supposed decentralization of communication infrastructures, including the spread of mobile phones. Despite the seduction of this term, as we think about the future of the Internet and digital media it is important that we maintain an awareness of the social boundaries of local place, culture, and tradition. We cannot simply fetishize technology-mediated connections and infrastructures without remembering the places, peoples, and cultures that we may implicate.
Humanities and media studies scholar Wendy Chun reminds us not to simply take this term for granted, but rather to ask why it has surfaced and proliferated. In her work “Imagining Networks,”18 she asks her readers to consider what is gained or lost as “network society” enters the popular postmodern vernacular. In asking this question, Chun reveals the social, economic, and political choices that are made when certain terms (such as “digital divide” or “network society”) are advocated. “Network society” contributes to a discourse that sees digital technology as “exceptional” or “liberatory” rather than situated or historicized.19 Admission to the “global village” facilitated by the Internet is seen as the ideal outcome despite research that shows the many flaws with this narrative.
Extending this critique, Michael Hardt, literary theorist and political philosopher, and Antonio Negri, an Italian Marxist philosopher, argue that “network” conversations mask a reality in which the vast public has little to no power.20 An understanding of a complex diverse public is discarded in lieu of the myth of networked connectivity. Hardt and Negri hold out the hope, however, that the diverse identities of poor peoples across the world will surface through social movements that hijack technology.
Technologies represent insightful objects for critical inquiry when viewed through the matrix of culture, context, and society. With such inquiry, we can move past blindly accepting terms such as “network society” or “digital divide,” which I discuss below. Organizational theorist Wanda Orlikowski has argued that interactions with technology “will always enact other social structures . . . for example, a hierarchical authority structure within a large bureaucracy, a cooperative culture within a participative work group . . . or the dominant status of English as the primary language of the internet.”21
While the idea of the Internet as English-dominated is increasingly unhinged by a massive parallel Chinese Internet, Orlikowski’s point is well founded. We must step away from the meta to view technology in situ and recognize that if the practices associated with expanding technology access fail to challenge inequality, then technology is likely complicit with the dynamics that perpetuate stratification. One must understand the practices of local community life, place, context, and culture to rethink the practices by means of which we collaboratively design and develop new technology projects.22
Sociologist Manuel Castells argues that we need more deeply “utopic” thinking around the design and deployment of networked technologies.23 I believe such utopias cannot rely solely on the abstractions of evangelizing philosophy. By collaborating respectfully and when appropriate with local communities across the world, we can more easily consider a whole range of strategies and solutions that consider how technologies can support issues that range from a lack of political agency and economic development to public health and education.
A discussion of utopic thinking must also consider the issue of profit and power in a networked society. While there have been few studies that normalize value across the different actors involved in Internet, social media, or mobile telephone-based communication, it can be sensibly argued that the outsourcing of technology provides greater value to corporations than to a developing world call center worker. Companies like Intel, Nokia, and Qualcomm have all employed ethnographers who study the uses of their technologies in the developing world. While part of this process involves seeking and understanding better ways to manufacture and sell these technologies worldwide, these ethnographers for their part must serve the financial bottom line for the corporations for whom they work.
Marginalizing the Marginalized
I have discussed the argument that the unchecked diffusion of technologies tends to reify rather than diminish inequality. Inequality cannot simply be traced to continental geographies but is also related to who extracts greater value through the networks they control and the information they can exploit. While poor citizens of the global South may remain relatively disadvantaged compared to European or North American citizens, their countries have also witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of billionaires. These individuals have extracted great power and wealth due to their advantageous position in a world of networks, whether as founders of outsourcing companies or call centers, or in other ways. Indeed, many of these networked elites may live side by side with urban slum dwellers in cities like Mumbai, India, or Lagos, Nigeria.24 Poverty is thus no longer simply describable in terms of rural versus urban, or global North versus global South but via vocabularies of networked asymmetry or inequality.
We must not make the mistake of assuming that more wealth is being distributed to those on the lower rungs of technology labor chains and that they are somehow “better off” than before. New classes of technology workers remain at the mercy of networked time and geography. These workers tend to occupy subordinate positions in transnational, horizontally distributed companies managed by elites worldwide. Cultural studies scholar Raka Shome’s discussions of call center laborers, University of Wisconsin sociologist A. Aneesh’s analyses of the algorithms that dominate digital labor and obliterate normal sleep cycles (what he calls “algocracy”), and television director and producer Morgan Spurlock’s 30 Days cable program (“Outsourcing” episode, season 1) reveal the negative effects of networked globalization, all aided by the Internet and other digital technologies.25
From overcrowded cities and bizarre sleep cycles to increased economic inequality, critics argue that “virtual migration” and networked power have had very direct and unequal effects on the world. University of Chicago sociologist Saskia Sassen has contributed to this discussion by illustrating how new technology has transformed the “neighborhood” into part of the global city.26 She explains that those left disadvantaged in such a world face a “democratic deficit.” Despite being seen as beneficiaries of technology they are unable to voice their social, cultural, economic, and political agendas. With the dramatic increase in urbanization worldwide, if left unchecked, distance-bridging technologies concentrate economic, educational, and political opportunities into nodes of power in a global network.
New technologies only amplify such inequality due to the better position of wealthier users even before they take a seat at the “digital table.”27 Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai describes a world of complex, globalized inequality as “a world of flows . . . [that] are not coeval, convergent, isomorphic, or spatially consistent.” These flows are characterized by disjunctures of inequality or “vectors characterizing this world-in-motion that produce fundamental problems of livelihood, equity, suffering, justice, and governance.”28
It is true that access to the information or contacts provided by networked technology tends to offer better economic opportunities than if one were completely disconnected.29 Telecommunications scholars Rohan Samarajiva and Peter Shields point out, however, that while users and communities on the margins may gain something through this process, the overall macro effects of this deployment tend to accentuate the power of the wealthy.30
The sobering story I have told assumes the status quo. However, if a technological network was reconstructed to focus on “lateral connectivity” which would strengthen connections within and between communities, opportunities may emerge for communication and organization that could challenge an existing system of power and privilege. I consider these possibilities in the third chapter in relation to my collaborations with nineteen Native American reservation communities dispersed across the rural regions of Southern California. Along with the fourth chapter, it presents alternatives whereby technologies are designed and deployed to support communities on the margins.
Nonetheless, a bias toward deploying technologies in the image of urban elites currently persists. This occurs through projects that objectify peoples and communities on the margins, asking them to “participate” in projects envisioned and implemented by those at the top. Business Bibles like University of Michigan professor C. K. Prahalad’s Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid point to the power and profit that can be made from Tier III and IV markets, populations that are poorer yet larger in number.31 Selling more at a smaller price gives corporations and profiteers the opportunity to produce an enormous financial windfall.
Considering this position, media studies scholar Arvind Rajagopal32 points out that we must critique the fields from which studies of technology are based. For example, Prahalad’s research presumes that selling more technologies to larger numbers of users is a positive outcome. Technology researchers who work with diverse communities must thus remain vigilant as they collaborate, analyze, and articulate their work.
Digital Divides
Chapter 1 demonstrated that technologies should not be read as neutral but in relation to a matrix of historical, epistemological, and cultural contexts. The influence of learning theories on graphical user interfaces or Enlightenment-era notions about collecting on databases is a reminder that beliefs and values shape the design of technology. Correspondingly, we can think of how a user or community may no longer be the subject of top-down research but be an active agent in shaping its own world.
A common term used in mainstream policy, academic, and professional discussions around the global spread of technology is “digital divide.”33 The term relates to the inequities between the “haves” and “have-nots” based on access to technology. It presumes that these inequalities can be overcome by spreading digital tools and Internet connectivity. Over the years, digital divide research has been discussed in the field of Information Communication Technologies and Development, or ICTD. Our world today features over 5 billion people who own mobile phones and approximately 3 to 4 billion with Internet access. These numbers are complicated by the reality that access is hardly as simple in practice as the word may connote. Infrastructure, digital literacy, and other existing constraints confound an oversimplified digital divide narrative. Each of these factors may compromise the ability of a given user to extract value from his or her digital access. The concept of the digital divide can be interrogated by relating it to the contexts in which users and communities engage with technology.34 We cannot accept the hype that simply spreading digital technologies automatically empowers users and communities who are already marginalized from spaces of political and economic power.
Researchers have increasingly concluded that technology projects must carefully consider the social environment in which that technology is introduced. One cannot simply presume that technology brings about an ambiguous “developmental magic.” Technology design and research must consider what these tools support within a community rather than buying into the assumption that the technology “naturally” shapes the interactions between members of a community and those outside it in ways that are positive for all involved.
A classic example of a digital divide effort is the Hole in the Wall experiment, which placed a touch-screen kiosk in a hole in walls within various urban slums in north India.35 Evangelizers of this effort have pointed out how rapidly youth in these communities were able to make sense of this technology, using it to play games, browse the Internet, and more. Another well-known example is that of MIT Media Lab founder and technology futurist Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC). The OLPC effort was launched with the goal of getting a low-cost laptop into every child’s hand worldwide, particularly within developing world nations. The idea behind this project was that mere access to this technology could empower learning and circumvent bureaucratic and corrupt institutions, such as schools and governments.36
Both the OLPC and Hole in the Wall projects have been widely critiqued for falling short of their revolutionary promises. They have been questioned on ethical grounds for clinging to the presumption that mere access to a technology, dropped from the sky, will empower learning and development. Scholars have pointed out that these types of digital divide projects fail to consider the values, practices, and protocols of community life.37 For example, Mark Warschauer argues that simple “access-only” projects, particularly those that fail to focus on a specific issue, do little to empower community development.38 They often fail to cultivate and work with the existing literacy practices of a given community.39 He argues that we must recognize literacy for what it is—a cultural, local, and collective practice of encoding, decoding, expressing, and reflecting upon information.
Scale is not the only measure used to evaluate digital divide efforts. Scholars of postcolonial computing argue that we must consider the intentions behind technology initiatives and the ways they are framed. Women’s studies scholar Kavita Philip and colleagues criticize an advertisement intended for OLPC donors, featuring African boys engrossed in laptops and urging donors to “empower” these children.40 The advertisement implies that mere access to technology would uplift these youth from manual labor, transforming them into middle-class knowledge workers. This advertisement claims to speak to the intentions, practices, or aspirations of these youth. Yet in reality the boys are silent and invisible, only discussed insofar as they are eligible to be “saved” by the laptop. Philip and colleagues force us to confront a number of important questions, including:
What labor conditions enable the manufacture of such an inexpensive laptop? Do these children labor to get the cash that enables the supply of Monsanto seeds, tied into land ownership, irrigation strategies, and techniques?41
The voices, experiences, and realities of African youth are homogenized into the category of a child needing to be “saved.” Yet who decides what saving means? Or what development means? Or what access to technology should mean? Far too often, technology designers and funders have complete power over the project’s destiny while distant users are left objectified. In contrast to this, a postcolonial computing approach asks us to recognize and respect “history, political economy, and ethnography, and specific resource, community, and technology dynamics.”42 They ask us to consider the social, economic, and cultural subtexts that accompany the introduction and distribution of any new technology. These values frame the technology’s “public” meaning and command the ways in which it is designed, distributed, and embedded.
The critiques I discuss emphasize the power of context and collaboration around technology efforts. This approach is consistent with what historian Warwick Anderson describes as “semiotic formalism”43—a process in which the continuing absence of historical and social specificity allows Western epistemological paradigms to be applied to non-Western contexts. The problems lie not just in a myopic, Westernized reading of technology but also in the social sciences, which remain closed to the description, characterization, and ontologies that fail to fit within the Western or technocratic canon. In their treatise on postcolonial computing, Philip and colleagues argue for the importance of:
- 1. Characterizing “difference’ (between Western and non-Western beliefs) to rethink what is creative and possible.
- 2. Respecting “design practices” that are culturally situated, while understanding that all translation is both linguistic and spatial.
- 3. Recognizing that most user-centered technology design principles perpetuate a “master-designer, God-type complex” by failing to consider the complexities of culture, economy, education, and politics.
- 4. Recognizing that human subjectivity has historical and social ties.
As we think about technology outside elite, urban centric contexts, it is important to reject the false binaries of colonial versus postcolonial, traditional versus scientific, or developed versus developing. We can move past these distinctions to consider collaboration and learning.
Laptop Lights
In the spirit of thinking past the creation myths of technology, we can see the power in understanding their unintended uses. For example, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project can be understood not solely through its computational potential but as a source of light to be used when the sun is not accessible. As Nicholas Negroponte mentioned in a 2006 TED talk:
A little more recently I got involved [in OLPC] personally. These are two anecdotes. One was in Cambodia in a village that has no electricity, no water, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. These kids, their first English word is Google. They only know Skype. They’ve never heard of telephony, they just use Skype. They go home at night, they have a broadband connection in a hut that doesn’t have electricity. The parents love it because when they open up the laptop it’s the brightest light source in the house.44
While the above discussion is driven by the belief that digital technologies “naturally” spread and benefit all, it also offers a more surprising observation, namely, that the computer laptop serves the more basic need of lighting a house in a community that lacks electricity. Thanks to its use of a hand crank the laptop can function without an infrastructure that can provide a reliable power supply. Perhaps most helpful for these communities is not the laptop as “information device” or “learning tool,” but as “house light.”
The juxtaposition of Negroponte’s discussion of Google and Skype alongside the use of the laptop as a flashlight is striking. The first observation gives us insight into a technology creator’s hope that the Internet will play a fundamental part in these youth’s lives. The second reveals the villagers’ unanticipated appropriation of this device to support a far more primary need.
I wonder whether there has to be such a gulf between the predictions and understandings of a technology developer and the functions it actually ends up performing in a community at the other end of the world. With this in mind, I offer a series of examples from my fieldwork throughout the rest of this book that consider technologies relative to collaborations between myself and communities from whom I have learned a great deal. This chapter focuses on stories from a multiyear partnership with two villages in Andhra Pradesh, India. It emphasizes the power of praxis, a collaborative process by which we move past our own privileged position as scholars who theorize “oppression” or “postcoloniality” to listen, learn, and practice humility.
Information Technology and Development
Information Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) researchers, in their best moments, tend to recognize the marginal positions occupied by developing world communities and focus on how technologies may assist such communities in overcoming a range of barriers.45 At one level, ICTD research focuses on moving past existing inequalities in order to have access to information. However, the field has begun to pay attention to grassroots initiatives that consider the subtleties of subcultures rather than the simple homogenization of community. These new initiatives “contest, interrogate . . . and create forms of knowledge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and the nation state system . . . on behalf of the poor that can be characterized as a ‘grassroots globalization’ or ‘globalization from below.’”46
ICTD projects have ranged from providing farmers with crop prices, delivering information using different languages and subtitling,47 developing e-governance portals, providing telemedicine advice, developing more sophisticated mobile and wireless infrastructures, sharing farmer-created videos across a distributed community,48 and bridging gaps in understanding between citizens and governments.49 Some efforts work to localize information in “folk-forms” as well as to cultivate voices from within a community. These projects are designed to increase awareness within communities about how they are being represented by governments and developmental organizations.
It is far too easy to place a given ICTD project on a pedestal simply on account of its engagement with a community. We must go beyond simply accepting the language of participation and scrutinize the extent to which community voices and perspectives drive the effort. Community participation can often be objectified to drive what geography scholar Frances Cleaver has described as the “development project.”50 From this perspective, the reason rural and marginalized communities are that way is because they have not effectively followed the lead of those in power. These efforts thus fail to cultivate an “open and informed debate” between development groups and technology users,51 remaining tethered to the priorities of an NGO, academic researcher, or government official.
It is notable that some participatory efforts start with an ethnographic framework rather than solely the presumptions of a policy maker, technologist, or charity. At times these efforts may question the relevance of a technology, including the modes by which it was designed and deployed. On the other hand, participatory efforts are often critiqued for their lack of scalability and their inability to be absorbed into the logic of the state. This is unsurprising given that much of developmental funding focuses on implementing distributed, larger-scale solutions and policies.52 Debate persists around the appropriateness of particular measurements and indicators of development, including considerations of how to think about shorter- and longer-term goals, deeper cultural and social context, the purposes of the technology, levels of observation, and the methods of approaching the data. Some argue that researchers need to reconstruct their definitions of the “divide” or the capacities they want to optimize a priori and then develop more incremental measurements.53 Perhaps this debate reflects a tension between sustainability and scalability, the former related to local voices and the latter to funding and policy.
In their best moments, ICTD discussions include dialogue between engineers and technologists, social scientists, humanists, artists, and activists. These conversations may produce holistic solutions that bridge wider contexts around society and development with a more fine-tuned local understanding of culture and community. Synthesizing multiple perspectives, Ken Keniston, human development scholar from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and colleagues argue for the importance of recognizing four distinct digital divides between:54
- (1) the rich and poor in every country;
- (2) those who speak English or that nation’s lingua franca and those who do not, including the importance of sharing and creating digital content in languages other than those dominant in a country;
- (3) rich and poor nations, recognizing the power of wealthier nations to disproportionately profit from technology’s global diffusion; and
- (4) elites and ordinary citizens, within and between nations.
The direction ICTD projects and research should take has been the subject of significant debate. For example, a mailing list discussion occurred between researchers Kentaro Toyoma, who comes from a physics and computer science background, and Jenna Burrell, an ethnographer and qualitative sociologist. Reflecting upon their discussion, the two researchers coauthored an article entitled “What Constitutes Good ICTD Research”55 highlighting the tensions between quantitative and macro forms of research versus qualitative and ethnographic approaches. The goal of their piece has been to bridge different kinds of research, for example, between quantitative correlations between mobile phone access and gross domestic product (GDP) in West Africa and ethnographic studies of segregation and Internet scams in the same region. Toyoma and Burrell point out the limitations of each approach. Researchers who only look at correlations may do little to explain causality or make visible the microeconomic factors that shape the mobile phone’s relationship to income. Yet a study of microeconomic behaviors alone may be limited to a specific individual, family, or community. There are thus inherent epistemological differences between their ways of looking at technology research and design. Given this, Toyoma and Burrell’s article focuses on points of agreement. They are interested in research that is methodologically defensible while still contributing to the goal of the field—of understanding how human and societal interaction with technologies shapes social and economic empowerment.56
I believe such work is important but must also consider the visions, aspirations and worldviews of peoples who often are often objectified in both types of studies. As per the argument of this book, we must embrace collaboration and as much as possible do away design and research initiatives that objectify users and communities.
The Presumption of Usability
Thus far I have discussed technology in the context of development and the ideal of information access, critiquing both concepts. I personally experienced this situation as a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory when I was sent to work with a number of Indian villages in Haryana, north India, as part of a joint “Media Lab Asia” initiative. As an engineer and a socially minded technologist, I assumed that the system I would design to support community knowledge-sharing across a set of villages could be easily built in the laboratory center where I was working and then “user tested” in the communities. I could gather useful statistics from villagers where I could look at user data such as how many topics were clicked, how much time was spent in a single system session, whether comments were made, and so on. All these statistics were to be built around a paradigm of use that I had taken for granted—one computer per user, basic computer literacy, and a supposed presumption by all that the technology I would develop was beneficial, natural, and useful for everyone in the village.
I soon learned of the difficulties involved in developing a set of categories to aid the villagers as they shared information. Topics such as agriculture, health, and education made no sense to the people I met. When I asked them for a better way of structuring the system, they responded with puzzled looks. Why would they need such a technology when they already spoke to one another and preserved knowledge through their traditions?
My assumption that I could “test” one user at a time was quickly confounded. The spotty electricity and my approach toward user testing did not seem to make sense to a group that wanted to use the computer collectively rather than individually. It seemed like the information I was making available, provided to me by the regional government, was of no interest to the people I was meeting. I had assumed that I could import my engineering lab training guidelines to create a meaningful technology for distant users. I quickly learned otherwise. I realized that the user statistics model by which we were taught to test technology presumed a particular scenario of interaction—one person per computer, computer-gathered statistics, and the desire to filter out any unanticipated technology uses. The idea that these users may transform our system into something altogether new, to take the technology and run with it in unpredictable directions, was a nightmare we wished to avoid at all costs. Looking back on this experience, I see it as a clear learning moment that inspires my work today and into the future.
The naïve approach I had taken is consistent with what Lucy Suchman, feminist ethnographer and designer from the University of Lancaster (U.K.), describes as “design[ing] from nowhere.”57 Without considering the power of local knowledge practices, which I articulate in my discussion of ontology in chapter 3, new technologies only maintain rather than interrupt historical patterns.58
Mobile Phones, Ethnography, and Grassroots Innovation
Despite my criticism of top-down efforts around understanding development and technology, it is important to note that bottom-up methods of understanding technology use have become increasingly popular. Technology corporations that produce the mobile phones available in the developing world have thus employed ethnographers. Like so many other issues, we must not simply accept the use of ethnography within technology businesses as sufficient to resolve the problems of voice and participation that motivate this book. Yet it is important to share stories of corporate ethnography to better justify my argument for the power of grassroots, community-driven digital storytelling.
Described as the “James Bond of design research” and one of business magazine Fast Company’s most creative people, hybrid anthropologist-designer Jan Chipchase explains how he “just came from six weeks on the road: Tokyo, London, Beirut, rural Uganda, Kenya, Barcelona, New York . . . [staying] in the Trump Towers, a $10 shack near the Sudanese border, and traveled with a Hezbollah fixer on a motorcycle.”59
Chipchase tells ethnographically rich stories that describe the creative ways in which globally diverse communities engage with and use mobile phones. He reminds us of the power of local cultural life and creativity, explaining that we must see “peripheral” communities as active, creative, and dynamic entities rather than simply basic objects for study. On the surface this perspective seems very much in line with the arguments of this book. Such stories can be imagined not just with regard to phones but with many other digital technologies that have spread asymmetrically across the world as well.
Nonetheless, the mobile phone has been seen as a “killer app” technology by broadening information access and sharing, connecting users, and creating supposedly horizontal, democratizing networks whereby in theory any user can call any other without having to sublimate him or herself to some corporate agenda or corrupt middleman. With 4.2 billion users in 2009, mobile phones have been lauded as an effective means to improve market efficiency, particularly in agricultural markets,60 and to foster access to health information, money, and jobs.61
Yet further inquiry, including within the digital inequality research I have shared, demonstrates that an unbridled “pro-mobile” narrative is not so straightforward. Much like Internet access, mobile networks tend to pattern and extend inequality based on factors such as who has better access to infrastructure, literacy, and existing social networks. Device users may be unaware of how the data gathered about them is used and also have little ability to control that process. The payments they make to buy phones or “talk minutes” end up building the profit margins for the companies that manage the larger network infrastructure.
Nonetheless, Chipchase argues that the diffusion of mobile phones has everything to do with their convenience. They allow anyone, in theory, to transcend space and time in a way that is both “personal and convenient. . . . [You] don’t need to ask [for] permission to use it.”62
We are supposed to marvel here at the powerful reach of mobile telephony and accept that an ethnographic narrative justifies the actions and assumptions of first-world technology corporations. We must focus on what technologies can make possible, rather than see the limitations and costs around how they are used. Chipchase may recognize that mobile phones are not yet in the hands of everyone, yet he seems to assume that once the access issue is remedied every user will be able to “transcend” the constraints of space and time. The exceptionalism of mobile phones is justified on the basis of concepts such as transcendence and universality. But we cannot take such language for granted and must instead identify its philosophical underpinnings and cultural biases.
Even a cursory analysis of “mobile transcendence” tells a different story. People in the developing world often lack the needed credit or “talk time” to make calls. Many use their phones only occasionally to receive calls. For example, in regions of New Guinea where I have traveled in the past it seemed that more people used their phone lights to hunt crocodiles than to speak to one another. Moreover, many such phones lack the capacity to access the Internet. The diffusion of this technology is highly asymmetric.
For many people phone plans are prepaid, such that if one has no money, making a call is impossible. In India and other parts of the world, poorer users engage in the “missed call” phenomenon, initiating the call and hanging up before it can be answered, indicating to the other party they want to be called back. While this practice reveals local creativity in action, it also speaks to an unfair dependency on those with the resources to make a phone call. It is absurd to think that a mobile phone can magically uproot users from the existing economic, political, and environmental inequalities they face.
Chipchase praises the power of “street up innovation,” explaining that in the developing world people will find elegant solutions and innovate without centralized control. He presents captivating examples like Uganda’s “Sente,”63 where kiosk operators trade “talk time” credits with one another, essentially developing a system of exchange without needing to rely on a financial system or the presence of banks.
Similar to this is the Kenyan and Tanzanian M-Pesa effort, which was launched on mobile phones to engage new technology users across rural and urban regions within these East African nations. M-Pesa is an example of innovation from the grassroots, recognizing that mobile phone transactional trading is far more beneficial for communities that have long experienced an absence of formal technological and financial infrastructures. This is one of many examples whereby a technology was designed for the conditions and realities faced by communities and nations at the margins. It is an example of how we must rethink innovation, design, and ultimately what technology is or is not in accordance with the constraints and material realities that people face across the world in their everyday lives. Yet we cannot forget the political economies at play even in this effort, recognizing that it was launched by mobile provider Vodafone for major telecommunication providers Safaricom and Vodacom. In that sense, while its design is community-resonant, it may not be a venture that empowers the autonomy and sovereignty of its grassroots users.
Grassroots practices of technology appropriation, the use of a technology in creative and potentially unintended ways, speak to the ubiquity of the “informal economy” in the developing world. This economy describes those who work outside the registered formal industrial sector. They are outside the world of social security numbers and census calculations. Individuals in this economy must adapt and innovate in order to access money, food, or the services they need to survive in a volatile world. The informal economy operates within and through social networks associated with local place and community, a system of social relationships rather than relatively anonymous transactions between individuals. It is consistent with what the late anthropologist Clifford Geertz, in his poetic ethnography of Morocco, called “bazaar economies.”64 Thus, an informal economy has emerged around the mobile phone, not just at kiosks, but also in repair shops, locking/unlocking, hacking, and more. It takes nothing more than a flat table and a soldering iron to reverse engineered phones that in the Western world may head to landfills.
Chipchase concludes that we must carefully observe the ways in which local communities innovate from the grassroots and design from that perspective. What remains problematic, however, is his assumption that these practices turn every technology user into a Western, liberal, freedom-craving subject. Not only will this not occur in practice, but it is ethically problematic as it presumes the superiority of Western values, which may themselves be full of paradoxes. Technological projects that originate in the West tend to be loaded with such ideological and philosophical baggage. It is high time we did away with such assumptions and instead considered how technologies may support diverse values rather than the ones we wish to export. We can open up our understandings of innovation, creativity, and technology to listen to and learn from communities and cultures across the world.
Nonetheless, it is easy to see why we marvel at the diffusion of the mobile phone. The infrastructures used for mobile phone connectivity are far simpler to construct in remote environments than their wired telephony precedents. Yet they are not invisible—indeed, it is important to think of the numerous layers of infrastructure that went into the construction and mobility of a mobile phone tower from the ships that brought its components from China to the other infrastructures that needed to be set up to build the tower.
In many parts of the world where I have traveled, I have seen tables set up on the side of the road with hand-painted or written signs indicating that it is a mobile phone kiosk. What these kiosks mean and how the mobile phones they provide are used is a question that can only be understood by looking at place, culture, and community. In my own fieldwork worldwide, I have observed a range of creative practices on the ground in association with the mobile phone. Local communities in the developing world have found positive uses for this technology due to its cheap prices (often using Chinese-produced “knock-offs”) and variable pricing systems that require no identification or routine payments. Most importantly, these phones accrue value from local appropriation and “reinvention.”65 That value could hardly have been anticipated by those outside the immediate cultural and social context.66
Consistent with my argument, media studies scholar from the University of California, Santa Barbara, Lisa Parks has argued that mobile telephony must be “conceptualized [within] sites of variation and studied in relation to particular socio-historical, geophysical, political, economic, and cultural conditions.”67 Parks engaged in “footprint analysis” ethnography in her study of over one hundred mobile access points, seeing how each of these points was connected to a range of other technical and social infrastructures. Parks’s insights center on place, culture, and technology in interaction, and cannot be fully captured by prognostications from afar. She points out that mobile phones have now been appropriated in Mongolia in a manner that “combines the collectivist ethos of communism with aspects of digital capitalism, and reinvents nomadic practices in urban space.”68 This type of research speaks to the value of approaching media and technology “on the ground” with collaboration, integrity, and respect.
One example Parks describes is of “walking phone workers” on urban streets who provide mobile access to paying customers. They shape the traffic of phone use within an infrastructure partly owned by Mongolian companies. Mobile phone penetration, according to these and other ethnographies, defies the simple narrative of one-size-fits-all flattening and supports “variation.”69 Technology is but one small part of a wider infrastructural, cultural, and social environment.
Ethnographic research that has studied the mobile phone in the context of local environments or infrastructures reveals that like many other technologies it tends to be translated, adopted, and shaped as it moves locally and laterally. For example, Internet ethnographies in Trinidad70 and Jamaica71 reveal the power of local value systems and social networks in shaping the destiny of the phone. These studies consider technologies in relation to existing networks of interaction, including social networks, economies, politics, and infrastructures. Such research reflects on how classic anthropological concepts such as “kinship” are transformed as a result of the ways in which technologies are appropriated. This in turn transforms preexisting notions of time and space.72 These dynamics occur as local communities imprint, shape, and domesticate new technologies.
Such insights indicate that the mobile phone, like other networked technologies, does not simply flatten users into passive consumers. Nor does the fact that these technologies are locally appropriated mean that people in the developing world become the equals of their first-world brethren. Researchers and technology designers must consider information environments,73 which are “social settings or milieu in which resources, relations, and technologies undergo a structuration type process of change called informing.”74 These settings can include different forms of access, business models, infrastructures,75 mediating institutions,76 and already existing capacities that influence the ability of the user or community to act in ways they may desire.77
Innovation for Whom?
As we think about innovations and applications associated with the mobile phone, a story of ambivalence is revealed. We see powerful examples of community creativity in action, where existing tools are appropriated, hacked, and innovated upon to support peoples and places far removed from its initial technological design. We see interesting narratives of grassroots activity being circulated by corporate ethnographers. Yet we also see mistaken presumptions and conclusions, ones that seem to fit far more into a Westernized corporate narrative than one of grassroots action and mobilization. Jan Chipchase, in his TED talk titled “The Anthropology of Mobile Phones,” implies that the corporations of the Western world and consumers of the developing world have entered into a mutually beneficial relationship. Such an assumption fails to consider that the reinvention of such tools may not always fit the agendas of a distant technology corporation.
We are limited by these presumptions and are supposed to accept trite expressions such as “the newly connected want to be part of the conversation.” In blindly accepting such assumptions, we fail to question whether there really is a “global conversation” and if so, who defines its contours and direction. We mistakenly presume that developing world users want to connect with others across the world, rather than pay attention to empirical data that show that the vast majority of phone calls are made between people living within geographic proximity of one another.
To productively extend my discussion and introduce my research based in India, I consider two issues in the following section of this chapter. First is the theme of political economy, which considers the political and economic agendas underlying a technology effort, and second the theme of grassroots voice, which considers how technological projects can be designed collaboratively to respect the beliefs, values, and knowledges of local communities.
Voice and Political Economy
I have argued that the nature of technology use depends not just on the cultural and infrastructural factors with which it is associated, but also on the economic status of its different users and communities worldwide. We also must consider the possibility that technologies can be actively appropriated not just for the purpose of innovation, but also to shape movements or intentions that may diverge considerably from their original intended uses. This focus represents a subtle yet powerful shift in conceptualizing what technology is and the ways in which it can be engaged.
An important set of questions about technology relates to the theme of political economy—examining who controls the networks, economies, and agendas associated with a digital platform or device. We can consider different types of economic or political systems that could or should be associated with a mobile phone project. This would involve thinking about different revenue and/or profit models, considering a range of labor practices, data retention and aggregation, and business ownership. We must examine these assumptions and more if we are to truly think about technologies in the service of diverse user communities. For example, developing world users may be even less aware of what data is gathered about them than their first-world counterparts. A major question in new media studies and activism must thus focus not just on how people use technology, but what types of social, economic, and political agendas profit as a result.
As media studies scholar from Amsterdam Geert Lovink pointed out in a conversation with me, most mobile phones force developing world users to be “on call” in the sense that they are forced by existing economic systems to be unable to make calls on their own. Instead of blithely celebrating the mobile phone’s existence and diffusion, we can critically examine and therefore reimagine the infrastructures by which the technology is deployed, asking important questions such as, “What values and ethical principles do we inscribe in the inner depths of the built information environment?”78
The projects I introduce throughout this book respect diversity at its deepest level. Feminist studies scholar Gayatri Spivak’s famous essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”79 has long been an important catalyst for academics interested in thinking more critically about the voices of peoples on the margins of an increasingly unequal world. Yet instead of simply treating communities as “subaltern,” I believe through collaborative projects we can respect the creativity and agency by which people across the world live their lives. We can reject objectifying categories such as “enlightened user” or “subjugated subaltern,” choosing instead to develop respectful collaborations that challenge systems of power and oppression.
Local communities in today’s world are more than capable of making choices about how they wish to engage with new technologies. Many of their choices are neither pro nor anti-technology, but instead about how these tools or systems may be appropriated. As telecommunications scholars Harmeet Sawhney and Venkata Suri point out,80 even the supposedly luddite Amish in the United States have selectively worked with technologies in ways that support local priorities and values. The strategic choices by which communities such as these appropriate and adopt certain technologies reflect their “lateral’ sensibilities, recognizing the power of values, beliefs, and knowledges as articulated at the local level. This is in contrast to the traditional central-peripheral model that dominates most technocratic thinking about technology, media, and culture. In this sense, thinking laterally represents a productive rethinking of media studies that is consistent with my repeated uses of the terms local, place, and community throughout this book.
We can confront a discourse that predicts or frames what development or technology means on the basis of values and economic objectives too far removed from local community life. Top-down presumptions saturate far too many prognostications of new technology. We see those without steady Internet access as technologically disenfranchised, in need of hand-me-downs from the West. With that access, magical transformations, whether cultural, social, economic, or political, will occur, ostensibly in ways that support Western aims. This view sees the Internet as a technological master-infrastructure that subsumes all others rather than as a tool that is coconstitutive and linked to a set of practices and processes in ways that are often surprising and fascinating.
Technology infrastructures and systems are sociotechnical—daisy-chained to place, community, and environment. In her more recent work, Lisa Parks argues that one cannot understand mobile telephony and Internet access in rural Zambia without examining how these are tied to a range of other technologies and infrastructures from hydropower to cars and gasoline.81 Projects such as Hole in the Wall or One Laptop Per Child encounter their undoing because of the values they presume and the predictions they presuppose. They operate on the assumption that a technology designed in Massachusetts or New Delhi “transmits” values to other communities or cultures irrespective of where they are located and who they may be. Traditional structures of learning in a community are problematic, according to such technocratic perspectives, seen as inefficient roadblocks to progress. We can no longer ignore the power of praxis and collaboration, and the ways in which this may shape the design and development of technology.
Appropriation and Participation
To shift our understanding further toward the grassroots actions that communities and users across the world may take with technology, I next discuss important reflections on the concepts of technological appropriation, the active reshaping of a technology or text to support local uses and visions, and participation, the ability to share one’s voice and therefore participate, through the use of a tool.
Henry Jenkins, media, communications, and film studies scholar from the University of Southern California, argues that the twenty-first century is an increasingly participatory culture, and that it is therefore all the more important to embrace new media literacies like play, simulation, performance, and appropriation.82 Jenkins also recognizes the incomplete extent to which such participation has extended, and the lack of awareness of the histories of media and the inequalities produced by globalization.
Designers and scholars of media studies can engage communities as active creators and designers rather than as passive users of technology, as revealed in Figure 2.3. Each step in this diagram represents a further imprinting of a community’s voice on the very texts or “codes” of a technology from the telling of a story using a technology to the recrafting of interfaces, algorithms, and databases. The ethnographies I present in this and subsequent chapters present examples of this.
This figure also asks us to interrogate the concept of participation, analyzing different components and features by which this may occur. We must ask questions about how broadly we can praise a “participatory turn” in the way people use social media and Internet technologies.83 Revealed in the figure is the concept of appropriation. Work on appropriation considers how media and technology can be incorporated into everyday life or “domesticated.”84 Appropriation focuses on reinvention and repurposing, respecting engagements with technology that may significantly differ from its “intended use.”
Appropriation studies research builds on a history that focused on television and film audiences. Despite the argument that television is a passive medium that diminishes a community’s “social capital,”85 researchers have argued that under particular conditions an audience may actively and constructively engage with the text (whether written, audiovisual, or interactive). As Jenkins has illustrated in his earlier work on fan cultures, active television audience members may appropriate media by organizing and constructing “fan cultures,” for example by creating alternative Star Trek episodes.86 The fan is no longer a passive reader or observer in these cases, but instead a producer and creator of an alternative text, reshaping the media technology accordingly.87 Nancy Baym,88 communications scholar and researcher at Microsoft Research, has argued that through appropriation audiences are able to generate new social bonds and practices as they collectively move between media platforms, blur online and offline distinctions, and create and imagine new stories and futures.
Figure 2.3. A continuum of voice and power over technology use and design. I thank Chilean media artist Diego Gomez, from UCLA’s Design|Media Arts department, for his help in producing this image.
While appropriation rarely engages in the task of reengineering a technology, it takes a people and community-first conversation around technology much further than typical access-oriented research. This is due to its attention to the ways in which users can locally and creatively reshape tools. In this sense appropriation represents the first important marker in the trajectory traced in Figure 2.3.
We could easily concern ourselves with simply celebrating appropriation in a way that is conceptually detached from the politics of the technology project. However, I believe if we simply accept appropriation as the trope of our times, as we see in many discussions around “participation” today, we run the risk of overly Westernizing our analysis of appropriation. We must ask whether a transmediated remake of Harry Potter, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Star Trek can shape identities and movements that have long been stifled. How emblematic are these cases of the visions and practices of peoples in the developing world?
Exemplifying this concern, Craig Watkins, a scholar of digital media and youth culture, argues for the importance of “participatory politics” by discussing hip-hop as a remix practice that takes its texts from mainstream cultures and reappropriates them within an emerging vernacular of youth culture.89 This example stands in contrast to the long-standing debate around stereotypes in media industries whereby, for example, African Americans are presented as athletes, criminals, or sexualized beings. Social, political, and economic hierarchies can indeed be perpetuated by media industries without making such discourses visible and undermining them in every manner possible.90 In addition to this, other media studies scholars describe the modes by which mainstream discourses may be refashioned as subcultural and intergenerational.91
My discussion of appropriation relates to Welsh cultural studies scholar Raymond Williams’s triad of dominant, residual, and emergent concepts for understanding the ways in which culture operates.92 Williams argues that one can understand the practice of culture by examining the interplay between the dominant, residual, and emergent. The dominant perspective is embedded in the majority of a society at a given time, yet may not be practiced or adopted by all, even at an implicit level. Within such dominant perspectives, however, are traces of the past, or residual elements, that represent the subjective means by which memory is practiced to legitimate the present, as it is reinterpreted, framed, or projected. Only when the residual and dominant discourses are in tension with one another can either of them be undermined. Finally, emergent elements of culture, which differ significantly from the dominant perspective, may also be present at any time. Williams points out that it is important to study the interplay between these three modes of practicing culture in order to understand the complexity of society and they must be considered in relation to media and technology practices.
This book’s call for collaboration with and respect for diverse and often marginalized communities worldwide makes it important to consider technology appropriation with an eye toward race, ethnicity, and the legacies of colonialism. Ethnic studies scholar George Lipsitz’s work on “strategic anti-essentialism” considers how a community may choose to define itself in relation to the “other.”93 Lipsitz’s discussion of popular music and genre describes how majority and minority cultures strategically define themselves through the selective adoption, interpretation, and rearticulation of various cultural texts and practices.
Minorities are not alone in engaging in strategic anti-essentialism; those who hold positions of economic, political, and racial power do so as well. Lipsitz’s Footsteps in the Dark: The Hidden Histories of Popular Music discusses a range of examples that include the seemingly contradictory practices associated with techno music subcultures amongst inner city black youth in Detroit, the articulation of multiple Latin nationalisms through mainstream music genres, and the seemingly inclusive Ken Burns Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) series.94 In each of these examples power is shaped through the improvisations that bridge mainstream white and subaltern minority cultures. There are secret meanings at play, shaped by community and place. This explains why we cannot simply presume that a media object or text can be understood from afar or in singular terms. Instead, chains of movement and strategic practices tell a far richer story of the situated realities of inequality and power. Lipsitz’s writings remind us of how important it is to interrogate profound and seemingly ever-increasing inequalities associated with race, gender, and class.
Authorship, Local Creation, and Curation
To push the conversation further and consider the activist facets of participation and appropriation, it is powerful to consider the potential of using technology to support the telling of one’s story and the release of one’s voice. Given this, we should ask: How can grassroots uses of technology support authorship by otherwise marginalized users and communities and promote development and mobilization from within?
Anthropologist Faye Ginsburg discusses community-driven authorship and reflection in her visual anthropology research. She argues for the power of “strategic traditionalism,”95 her term for the creative ways in which indigenous peoples have taken hold of various media technologies:
The cultural activists creating these new kinds of cultural forms have turned to them as a means of revivifying relationships to their lands, local languages, traditions, and histories and articulating community concerns. They also see media as a means of . . . revers[ing] processes through which aspects of their societies have been objectified, commodified, and appropriated; their media productions and writings are efforts to recuperate their histories, land rights, and knowledge bases as their own cultural property.96
Ginsburg’s research forms the foundation of indigenous media studies, which is associated with an ethical shift through which ethnographers and anthropologists have turned toward collaboration and praxis and away from merely the “study of.” While visual anthropology features a history of documentary and visual texts created by researchers that are supposed to be representations of culturally diverse communities, anthropologists since the 1980s have taken a “reflexive turn,” recognizing that the stories they tell about others are reflections of themselves. “Scientific” and “natural” descriptions of culture have been increasingly rejected because of the ways in which they objectify communities. I argue in this book’s first chapter that we must push the process even further to consider collaborative ethnography and decolonizing methodologies.
Ginsburg points out that as of 2008 only 35 percent of the world’s 7 billion people were Internet users. Terms like the “digital age” or “digital revolution” therefore smuggle in a number of blanket assumptions that ignore the different parts of the world where technologies may have migrated or been reinvented.97 The digital world must thus be explored within each specific cultural and social context to help us best understand what it means and what it can be used for in the different communities involved. While Ginsburg asks us to curb our (overly simplistic) digital enthusiasm, media anthropology demonstrates how technologies can shape storytelling to help mobilize indigenous and grassroots movements.
Media anthropologists have described their collaborations with diverse communities, and in so doing have shown how storytelling through digital technologies has shaped the social and political agendas of local communities. Important research on this topic includes, for example, the study of video in indigenous political and social movements in Brazil,98 Inuit communities and video/television in Canada,99 database-driven systems in Native American and Yolngu Aboriginal communities,100 and networks of old and new media that now connect previously peripheral communities to one another.101
Anthropologist Terrence Turner’s work with the Kayapo indigenous people of the Amazon has revealed how grassroots authorship can impact political mobilization.102 Turner notes the political means through which stories were told with video cameras to document the negative effects of government hydroelectric dam schemes, for both local and global audiences. This video documentation was brought back to the community by the appointed storytellers and used to inform the different tribes of the impending danger. The Kayapo further found that using their cameras gave them a degree of legitimacy when they interviewed and questioned Brazilian bureaucrats and politicians, forcing the government to answer their questions, partly because of the “modern” cachet associated with such technology. This effort turned a local, place-based struggle into an international issue, allowing the Kayapo to articulate their land claims on a stage that threatened the international credibility of the Brazilian state. It is important to note that this global spectacle came up from the grassroots rather than being imposed from the top down.
Complementing the Kayapo case is the work of Eric Michaels, a pioneering media anthropologist based in the United States and Australia, and the Warlpiri Aboriginal community of Central and Western Australia. Michaels collaborated with this group to design a low-power transmitter that allowed tribespeople to produce and access locally produced television programs. Michaels argues that the predominantly oral cultures of these aboriginal communities smoothly transitioned into the electronic systems of this video infrastructure, precisely because the appropriation of the infrastructure was directed toward community-produced content and a bottom-up understanding of how the technology could support their social, cultural, and political lives. As he says: “There is no necessary translation from orality to electronics; we are instead seeing an experimental phase involving the insertion of the camera into the social organization of events.”103
The examples of the Kayapo and Warlpiri reveal the potential of using technology to shape authorship and storytelling as a catalyst for social or political change. Accompanying these examples is the famous case of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico—an indigenous-led political movement for self-determination announced the day after the signing of NAFTA, on December 17, 1992. While this movement also involved collaborations and partnerships with nonindigenous peoples, as among the Kayapo and Warlpiri, it is notable that different groups aligned with the Zapatistas creatively appropriated various technologies to suit their own political ends, to build solidarity with indigenous, regional, and global publics. For example, while shortwave and citizens band (cb) radio supported local communities and activists dispersed across the Lacandon jungle in rural Mexico, Internet newsgroups were appropriated to build sympathy with journalists and wider audiences across the world. Harry Cleaver, a Marxist economist, has argued that the Zapatistas were able to “use electronic networks in conjunction with the more familiar tactics of solidarity movements: teach-ins, articles in the alternative press, demonstrations, the occupation of Mexican government consulates and so on.”104
Such an “electronic fabric of struggle”105 by different elements within the movement, including nonindigenous allies, demonstrates the clever means by which local communities can appropriate technologies to tell stories that influence their movements and agendas. The ability of the Zapatistas to become a global poster child drawing in environmentalists, human rights activists, and politically discontented citizens worldwide to support their cause, speaks to their appropriation of a wide range of technologies, including those outside the “technology research” paradigm. The creative repositioning of content to shape and influence different publics is a key to the story and remains a central theme in grassroots activist and indigenous movements today.
The examples I have given illustrate the potential of communities on the margins of political and social power to create, circulate, and benefit from indigenous information and media. Each reveals the power of authorship combined with do-it-yourself (DIY) visioning from the grassroots. These efforts point to the potential of indigenous media projects to give voice to self-determination and strategic articulation, moving past a binary described by Faye Ginsburg as a “Faustian contract or Global Village.”106 Across all these projects, communities took power as authors, producers, and storytellers, inverting a technocratic history and policy that imposes tools on local populations to support the systems and actors in power.
Sterile user statistics-focused research loses sight of the emergent and unanticipated practices that are central to each of the cases I have shared from across the world in this chapter. We must think broadly about mediation, opening ourselves to the unexpected.
Authorship and Reflection in South India
Many of the examples from across the world that I have shared throughout this chapter bring together researchers and communities in the spirit of collaboration. They reveal the power of telling one’s story using technology to shape viable “participation in policy-making and shaping of environments and communities through direct action and self-reflection.”107 Many reveal the power of active technology authorship as opposed to passive technology use. Authoring, creating, and sharing one’s story or voice allows a perspective to be shared and reflected upon.
The term reflective practice relates to a set of theories that argue for the importance of self- and collective awareness in the support of learning and growth.108 It is described as “an important human activity in which people recapture their experience, think about it, mull on it, and evaluate it.”109 While most academic theories on reflection consider its meaning in relation to education research themes such as thinking and learning, the community media examples I have shared suggest that it can be a catalyst to support communities whose voices are largely ignored in technology and development projects.
Technology and development researcher Richard Heeks points out that communities are often excluded from articulating their visions for ICTD projects.110 In my personal experiences as a volunteer and graduate student in South Asia, I too recognized that the community members I met rarely had any voice in the projects we designed. It is common in this part of the world to receive a polite yet disengaged “yes sir” to any question one may ask. At other times, there may be no response or communication at all. Although it is important to respect these moments, they speak to the challenges that block deeper communication between those who have the power to implement technology initiatives and those who remain at the sidelines.
With these thoughts in mind, as a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory I examined how to develop and design information systems to support refugees from Somalia who had recently immigrated to the New England region in the United States. Thanks to departmental funding I had acquired a number of video cameras that I hypothesized may assist community members who wished to share video stories with others in their community. I observed how the Somali process of video storytelling and viewing facilitated difficult conversations about topics normally considered culturally taboo, such as genital circumcision and Islamophobia. A range of issues on race, citizenship, public health, and identity became part of an internal community conversation. Honored to be invited to witness some of these conversations, I recognized the potential of seeing technology as a tool of creation and reflection.
I became interested in whether technologies could support creative and reflective practices within a community. This would be in contrast to most technology efforts that view local communities as passive technology users, magically edified through their exposure to information broadcast from the top down. Arjun Appadurai has argued for the power of an emancipatory “grassroots imagination” in the rethinking of technology and development efforts. He explains that “it is . . . through imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled. One task of a newly alert social science is to name and analyze these mobile civil forms and to rethink the meaning of research styles and networks appropriate to this mobility.”111
Mainstream narratives that pitch new technologies as “solutions” are far from neutral. They can be easily associated with discourses that frame what a user is and the experience he or she should have when given access to information or technology. These discourses come from the top-down and have long been popularized by technology corporations and development agencies. I believe they must be inverted to combat the fatalism that has afflicted many poorer communities: “More concretely, the poor are frequently in a position where they are encouraged to subscribe to norms whose social effect is to further diminish their dignity, exacerbate their inequality. . . . In the Indian case, these norms take a variety of forms: some have to do with fate.”112 Appadurai here discusses norms that reinforce inequality due to the ways in which they shape the fatalistic outlook of poor citizens. The discussion of these norms is meant to inspire transformations that come from the bottom up rather than reinforce a history of hand-me-downs that reinforce hierarchy.
Anthropological and philosophical theory that links poverty and fatalism is consistent with psychological research in India that reveals how one’s unequal position in life may shape cognitive outlook.113 Supporting aspiration and reflection from the grassroots in a way that defies pedantic projects and patronizing rhetoric is thus all the more important. All our practices of everyday life are formed through routines, actions, and modes of identity building that are both individual and social.114 These routines, regardless of culture, community, or social strata, provide us with cognitive security. Yet in some cases cognitive patterns, cultural practices, and fatalistic attitudes may reinforce inequality. Reflection, which may interrupt habituated routine, is fundamental to the development of all peoples and communities. Yet it is a luxury rarely afforded to those who must struggle daily to survive, in part due to a lack of capital.
Appadurai writes of the “capacity to aspire.”115 He links this to work in capacity building, a common term used in development studies to reflect the skills or assets needed to transform one’s current state. This capacity is tied to reflection and mobilization, and a concept that has rarely entered the development studies lexicon. Appadurai explains that wealthier people have this capacity “because they have a stock of available experiences of the relationship of aspirations and outcomes . . . opportunities to produce justifications, narratives, metaphors, and pathways through which bundles of goods and services are actually tied to wider social scenes and contexts.”116
Building on what I learned from my experiences in Haryana, India, and with the Somali immigrant community that I described in this chapter, I became interested in supporting the ‘new narratives” about which Appadurai speaks. Folklorists and ethnographers alike have long understood the power of stories—not solely as a medium for information sharing, but also for anchoring norms and values. Stories articulate the boundaries between sacred and profane, normative and deviant, aspirational and degraded. Not only do stories function as a medium for information sharing; they also serve as “containers” of social and cultural values. If technologies could similarly cultivate storytelling and local communities’ “capacity to aspire,” fueling new stories and reflections from within, a new direction for development studies and ICTD may emerge.
I contacted nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academic colleagues, and activists far and wide to see if I could examine the potential of reflective media in South India, close to my heart given that it my own ancestral region. After several months, fortune smiled. A colleague introduced me to the Byrraju Foundation in the city of Hyderabad (Andhra Pradesh, India) in late 2005. The foundation had worked for many years to support infrastructure, education, and agricultural projects with rural communities in the Godavari region, a fourteen-hour train journey from their urban location.
As I walked into the offices of the foundation, surrounded by palatial gardens and marble staircases, I wondered how the realities of villages could be recognized and supported by those living and working in such lavish surroundings. Yet I was grateful to find a ready embrace of my interests, ideas, and experiences. The foundation leadership assured me from the start that they would be very interested in collaboration, starting with a visit to the organization to develop a project strategy. Perhaps this was due to my “status” as a new professor at UCLA, or perhaps it was due to the credibility of our mutual connection. I still do not know.
The Byrraju Foundation was created in memory of the wealthy philanthropist Satyanarayana Raju by his son Ramalinga Raju. The family is from the Godavari region of the southeast Indian province of Andhra Pradesh. Figure 2.4 shows a map of India, illuminating the Telangana and coastal Andhra provinces, which Godavari spans.
Raju is well known in India as the former CEO of Satyam Information Technology Corporation, though he resigned from the company in 2009 due to a financial scandal and was subsequently jailed for white-collar fraud. In my sole meeting with Raju in late 2007, I noted how seriously he seemed to take the mission of supporting rural development in the Godavari region. He asked me several direct questions about how technology authorship and storytelling might shape capacities, aspirations, and socioeconomic outcomes in the villages where I might collaborate. His questions were driven by a sense of technical skepticism, but I appreciated how they forced me to speak to my own intuitions about reflective media and the ethical principles that would motivate my effort. Even more hands-on, Raju’s wife Nandhini attended our periodic brainstorming sessions and strategically advised the Foundation directors, most of whom came from the Indian Information Technology (IT) industry.
India’s middle class boom is often lauded as an outcome of the growth of the IT industry. While macroeconomic data have revealed a significant growth in the percentage of the middle class relative to the overall national population, it is noteworthy that many estimates put the overall numbers at under 25 percent of the overall population, with approximately 20 percent living below the poverty line. Indeed, some studies indicate that India has the largest number of people in the world below the poverty line, approximately 360 million of the nearly 1.2 billion population. While it is not fully accurate to attribute Indian middle class growth solely to the IT industry, many leaders of Indian software corporations are widely viewed as heroes, new fathers of the nation who have taken their country to a place of greater global visibility and power. Deregulation of these industries and the support of the private sector has become a platform on which the current national government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, operates. The common narrative in India today is that it is only a matter of time before the rest of the population will learn from the stories of the nation’s fathers of Information Technology.
Implicated in contemporary global urbanization across the world are questions about technology’s diffusion and use. Many technologists, bureaucrats, and scholars in India have freely shared their opinions on the future of rural life across the nation. Some, including Narayana Murthy, billionaire founder of India’s Infosys Corporation, have argued that urbanization is inevitable and necessary given that it is in cities that jobs may be found. The prevailing narrative is that the only way the rural poor can hope to find employment and earn an income is by migrating to the cities.117 Some disagree, arguing that these dynamics only exist because the villages have not been effectively incorporated into these development plans and thus urban flight has been the logical result. But what remains unchallenged is the assumption that a neoliberal IT-outsourcing industry is the positive path forward for all.
This perspective toward the rural population as needy of “transformation” contrasts with that of the father of the modern Indian state, Mahatma Gandhi, who argued for sustainable, self-supported, grassroots “village industries” driven by local self-determination. Discourses about development and technology in modern India seem to assume that the only choices are to either end rural life completely or better connect rural communities to outsourcing opportunities. In either case, the urban dominates the rural and the voices across village communities remain largely silent. “Subalternity,” to reference cultural and literary studies scholar Gayatri Spivak’s writings on those left out by Western epistemologies, runs into trouble when deployed to see rural and poor people as objects of study rather than active agents of change and mobilization.
It was thus unsurprising for me to enter a posh foundation led by former IT managers who claimed to be dedicated to the theme of “uplifting” rural peoples in their province. Nonetheless, the pragmatism of my goal of supporting grassroots community reflection and aspiration resonated with the Foundation leadership. At the same time, I was asked several tough questions, including: Why was I not interested in simply providing a service and measuring its outcome on development? Were reflective media and storytelling not too open-ended and ambiguous?
The Byrraju Foundation, like many other Indian organizations wedded to the IT industry, was interested in infrastructure, access, and resource provision—each seen as technical tasks rather than subject to the type of social and technical complexity I describe throughout this book. Many Foundation activities involved exporting services to communities—meaning more schools, Internet access, call centers for business outsourcing, community tourism, or health care access. These are the types of projects often supported by development organizations, private foundations, and governments. It is notable that what brings these together is the mistaken belief and assumption of what effective development should be. New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman, an outspoken proponent of global trade, had recently visited the Foundation and praised its efforts to “flatten” the relationship between its constituent villages and domestic industries.
My goal was to find an alternative to this conversation, both ethically and reflectively. I approached the Foundation in order to explore the power of collaboration, praxis, and media storytelling to shape collaboration with the communities that the Foundation “served.” I had become increasingly drawn to exploring low-cost video technology to shape my effort based on these conversations. Creating simple videos could be done with little to no training and I hoped it would help catalyze reflection and action in the villages in which we would collaborate.
The Byrraju leaders explained that they had developed a “vision protocol,” a document over ten pages long that asked villagers dozens of questions about education, technology, health, agriculture, and more. The questions and categories to be assessed in this survey reflected the assumptions of the Byrraju administrators. The goal was to allocate services based on the data collected. Yet the answers they received were more likely related to the questions asked rather than an awareness of the context in which they were asked.
A leading agricultural scientist from the Foundation anonymously explained to me that “these people would not know how to come up with visions on their own—they should trust us in the foundation to make choices for them.” Rural people in his view were too “traditional,” too conditioned by their traditions and families to make such choices about development. In contrast, my project was dedicated to inspiring reflection and dialogue from the communities with which I would collaborate. I wished to respect existing traditions and practices while recognizing that they had partly been shaped by the dynamics of marginalization.
My challenge was to convince a group of technologists and urban development specialists to consider an alternate vision—one that rejected the myths of rural obsolescence and top-down development studies. I asked for patience and assured my partners at the Foundation that even if what we learned took us far away from our previous “development map,” we may arrive at a place far richer.
Stories from Godavari: Meetings and Coconut Trees
It is mid-September in 2006. The Byrraju Foundation has asked TLS Bhaskar, a sociologist and ethnographer, to support our efforts in the Godavari region in Andhra Pradesh, South India. After a night of uneven sleep, I pull open the window and see multicolored homes, rice paddy fields, and coconut trees, all illuminated by bright sunlight. The land has a rich dark colored soil and seems to support dense green natural vegetation and farming. Bhaskar was the only social scientist I had met in my initial three-day visit to the Foundation’s headquarters. He voiced his unbridled enthusiasm for every idea I proposed. His usual work at the Foundation involved survey deployment and collection, which he felt had disengaged him from the communities he wished to support and learn from. The Foundation had dismissed ethnographic practice, as it did not provide data that could be quantified or compared.
Bhaskar was an excellent field collaborator given that I could only come to India during the periodic breaks offered by my home institution, UCLA. He appeared open to unlearning his own assumptions about fieldwork, which I challenged whenever he made sweeping statements about the village communities we would be visiting. All researchers have hypotheses and assumptions about the communities they study, but Bhaskar’s seemed particularly rooted in the language I had sometimes heard at Byrraju. It was a form of unintentional paternalism. Initially he said, “[The villagers] won’t know what do [with a reflective media project]—we must tell them how to learn from this project.” Leaving ourselves open to the unexpected was a challenge indeed, but one that I hoped in our time together in these communities to overcome.
The Godavari region is notable not only for its agricultural fertility and prawn farming, but also its intense heat. Stepping out of an air-conditioned train compartment at 8 a.m. was an intense sensory experience. For field researchers and practitioners, however, it is always important, although rarely discussed, to maintain our own vitality and health under such conditions. Our abilities as researchers to listen and collaborate are contingent on our own health and personal presence, which could very easily be threatened by scorching heat.
That morning, Bhaskar and I visited the Byrraju district office in the city of Bhimavaram before heading to two villages where the Foundation had done little work. The Foundation leadership had set up “hub” district offices in small cities close to hundreds of surrounding villages so as to better structure and organize its operations. I had been granted permission for our team. By this time, Bhaskar and two assistant field researchers had joined the project. We asked for permission to collaborate with two villages with which the Foundation had only minimal contact. I preferred to do it this way so as to avoid any biases about the Foundation as we began our collaboration. I also recognized the value of collaborating with two communities that had little interaction with one another. This would allow us to learn from each one while minimally affecting our efforts in the other community.
In addition, I chose to collaborate with two villages with similar overall demographics in terms of economic status, male-female breakdown, and religious and occupational diversity. I recognized the power and pitfalls of such statistical information—yet also knew that as long as I held such data at arm’s length it could help orient me in my fieldwork. Our team’s goal was to collaborate with each village to explore how technologies we may introduce could shape reflection, mobilization, and development.
Bhaskar and the Foundation leadership recommended that we visit the villages of Kesavaram and Ardhavaram. Located near the coast in the West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, Ardhavaram and Kesavaram are approximately fifteen kilometers, or a little more than nine miles, from each other yet from what we had learned they had little contact with one another. Both are prawn farming and agricultural communities and have basic schools that educate students to the eighth grade. For further schooling, villagers have to leave the villages and (often) the Godavari region as well. Because employment tends not to be available outside the agricultural and occasionally the construction sector, younger and more highly educated villagers have begun to move to cities in the province, many heading to Hyderabad, the provincial capital of Andhra Pradesh, 425 kilometers, or about 260 miles, away.
Both villages had robust electricity and television infrastructure, and mobile phones had begun to circulate in each one, although with uneven access and coverage. For services and everyday necessities, the villagers had to travel to Bhimavaram, the main city in the district where the Foundation hub was located. Both also faced similar challenges, according to Foundation surveys. Consistent with what we later learned ethnographically, the dynamics that affected the communities included inadequate medical facilities (public health), public sanitation, job availability, dissatisfaction with local politicians, and divisions between castes, genders, and across religious lines (both villages were approximately 80 percent Hindu and 20 percent Christian). The sections that follow briefly introduce each village and describe our initial visits to each.
Kesavaram
Kesavaram is a small village with a population of approximately 1,200 (as of 2006 when the last “census” statistics were collected). It is primarily agricultural although it also engages in small-scale prawn farming with basic mechanical labor and services. It is relatively diverse in terms of caste and gender breakdown with the traditionally “lower” castes, or Dalits, representing approximately 75 percent of the total population. Divisions in caste, while unfortunate and the residue of history, still tend to shape Indians’ lives in cities and villages.
Family homes in Kesavaram are stratified by caste, a division common across the region and nation. Very few families have the resources to develop any physical infrastructure in the village, such as roads, electricity, or plumbing. Byrraju survey data indicated at the time that approximately 65 percent of the community’s households had access to electricity, and most field estimates have concluded that the community has about 50 percent overall textual literacy, with this number highly skewed toward those from higher castes or with greater economic resources.
Bhaskar and I arrived in Kesavaram and were greeted by the village community leadership council (in Sanskrit called “Gram Vikas Sammidhi”). An elderly man, who had been a upper-caste schoolteacher in the community, presented me with a small bouquet of flowers as a welcome. While honored, I was mindful of the formal nature of this greeting. Formality and respect for visitors is a widely practiced norm throughout rural India. While I certainly appreciated this, I recognized it could also work to distance me from the people I would meet.
My goal was to approach the Kesavaram community without specifying a project, although I was excited by the idea of working with video creation and reflection. I did not wish to enter the community as a voyeur and recognized that my introductions would have to come from our field researchers who had visited the community in the past. I found it inappropriate to think I could easily absorb myself into the community’s everyday life, given that I was a visitor. Instead, my goal was to be honest without imposing the reflective media project I had imagined. I described my interest in using whatever resources I could muster to support local goals and visions, and spent most of my time speaking with people in the community about their own lives to the extent they were willing to share. At the same time, I shared my own stories, including my connections to the neighboring province of Tamil Nadu. I visited several local farming fields, local businesses, and local schools. It was important for the council to bless my visit and our relationship through a darshan, or religious blessing ceremony, that would occur at the local Hindu temple by day’s end. A respectful and collaborative effort could only come about when I made myself personally, ethically, and intellectually transparent.
Although women comprised half of the leadership council, it was mainly men who interacted directly with me in Kesavaram. The women who did speak to me directly were either my age or older. Many women in rural Godavari marry under the age of twenty, but these young newlyweds were generally very shy in their direct interactions with me.
Every culture and community maintains practices, values, and protocols that are specific and local. That said, my visit to Kesavaram reminded me of my other ethnographic experiences working with communities around the world. At the same time, I recognize that this sense of similarity was rooted in my own experience of self rather than that of the community. Those with whom I initially interacted were people similar to myself—relatively more educated and more affluent males who had political and social capital in their community. I attempted to be mindful of the shortcomings of these elite voices to which I was initially exposed. It was clear that to move past a “curated” experience of Kesavaram, many future visits would be needed. Our team needed to actively reach out to those who tended to remain silent while respecting the choices they might make to continue to distance themselves from us.
Bhaskar would later detail in his field notes that Kesavaram had a greater sense of cohesion and communication between castes than Ardhavaram, which I will next introduce. People born into the higher castes in Kesavaram would often reach out to others lower than themselves, understanding that together they could develop and support the village’s collective goals. While we observed that the upper castes traditionally initiated this relationship, Bhaskar and I wondered whether a two-way dialogue could surface over time.
Ardhavaram
Ardhavaram is somewhat larger than Kesavaram, with a total population of 3,500 during our initial visit in 2006. It resembled Kesavaram in terms of its demographic profile with respect to gender, religion, caste, profession, and economic class. Like Kesavaram, Ardhavaram’s past involvement with the Byrraju Foundation had been minimal, while the infrastructural challenges it faced were similar to those of Kesavaram, according to Foundation reports. Survey data described water access, electricity access, sanitation, and employment as challenges, and estimated that literacy was at approximately 50 percent, although these numbers tended to be higher for women in both villages.
Ardhavaram had one Internet center in 2006, as did Kesavaram. It is on the outskirts of the village, where some villagers (approximately 50 in total) work in “Business Process Outsourcing” (BPO) centers. Here villagers use Skype connections to answer calls outsourced from call center hubs located in urban Indian metropoles such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune. The Byrraju Foundation had supported the development of this center. This extension of call center labor to the villages is consistent with the neoliberal outsourcing model that animates many projects that explore the role of technology in shaping development. Not only do call centers expand out of wealthier nations to poorer ones, but they were now also shifting from the city to the rural village. Information technologies in Ardhavaram were thus deployed to “network” villagers to urban-centric political and economic models. Such a dependency-oriented configuration of technology creates a network that places the rich and powerful at the center while all others are positioned to support architectures of inequality and hierarchy. The project I was attempting to develop was designed to support an opposite outcome by cultivating practices of reflection and grassroots development.
While our visit to Kesavaram was highly formal, it was notable for the rich, vibrant communication initiated with the villagers I met. Perhaps this was simply a performance designed to impress an outsider. That said, I was struck by how every villager I met—a group that included different castes, both genders, and even those who were shy—seemed to radiate confidence when speaking and communicating with one another.
Our visit to Ardhavaram was in direct contrast to this. I experienced far less eye contact and a great deal of silence. This was so not just when villagers spoke with me but also with other community members. I had a sense that a two-way conversation about any issue would be close to impossible. I was concerned that I was “talking at” the community rather than listening, and collaborating in the spirit of praxis and collaboration. Wary of Brazilian philosopher and educator Paulo Freire’s critiques of a “banking education”118 which disempowers the process of learning and maintains injustice, I nervously sensed that our well-intentioned visit would do nothing but perpetuate the subordination experienced by this community. Bhaskar explained to me that because of the relatively large population of Ardhavaram fewer resources were available for distribution to those less well off in the community. To his mind, this was responsible for the sense of strife and distance that we felt between villagers.
A Tale of Two Villages
Our initial visits to the two villages gave us many insights. Despite their similar developmental survey results, our ethnographic experiences were quite different. Villagers in Kesavaram seemed open to the reflective media project I had envisioned. In contrast, Ardhavaram community members seemed burdened by divisiveness and fragmentation. This made it all the more interesting to see whether over time Ardhavaram, the village to which we would ultimately choose to introduce video, would engage in the types of reflective practice about which I have written. However, this intervention would only begin after several introductory months of meetings.
Many of our initial insights associated with both villages were confirmed in the sustained, longitudinal ethnographies we undertook over the following twenty-four months. I visited the villages every three months. In the meantime, Bhaskar and his assistant Raju would either live in the communities, visit them biweekly, or live in the neighboring city of Bhimavaram. Our primary challenge was to foster a collaboration that could support the voices and perspectives of community members.
My interest in exploring reflective media and storytelling was partly motivated by the partial absence of written literacy in each village while recognizing that literacy is hardly uniform or singular. Although prior measurements by the Byrraju partners had found that both Ardhavaram and Kesavaram were 45–50 percent “textually literate,” we recognized that these statistics needed to be critically interrogated rather than blindly accepted.
I also recognized the potential of these interviews, ethnographies, and surveys to shape my deeper understanding and respect for both villages. If we could explore the impact of the process of creating and sharing video on the actions and aspirations of community members, this could support a decolonized agenda of thinking about technology where grassroots community priorities were at its center rather than seen as unintended effects. We wished to compare the effect of video authorship and sharing with the traditional, “control” process wherein development conversations occur in villages in India by simply speaking about goals and visions without any tools being used to facilitate that dialogue. Over a twenty-four-month period, we would thus better understand the effects of one intervention (reflective media) versus the standard one (focus group discussions). Given the higher level of openness we found in Kesavaram, we decided to choose it as our control, where meetings would focus on in-person discussions. Ardhavaram would be where our reflective media intervention could then occur. We recognized that “control” could be an objectifying and inflexible term.
In view of the greater divisiveness we sensed in Ardhavaram, we decided to observe how these dynamics might change over time. We anticipated that what would occur would be likely unpredictable. Training field researchers to work with communities without overspecifying their roles or activities is often a challenge for development organizations. However, over the course of a three-day workshop, Bhaskar and I trained our lead field researcher Raju and his assistant Vimal. They would both maintain an ongoing presence in both communities to the extent that Raju was welcome on account of his support of existing education, health, and infrastructure projects. Via this entree into the community, we hoped to learn what issues were important the villagers with whom we could collaborate. Then we could form focus groups to study the relative effects of collective video creation and viewing.
Ethnographic methods are useful when they step away from presuming what should be “collected” and focus instead on the technique of participant observation.119 Our ethnographic discussions occurred through twelve to fifteen person focus groups that convened on a monthly basis over the two-year period. Yet because these discussions tended to favor those who were more vocal, confident, or socially empowered, we also conducted individual ethnographic interviews with focus group members every two months. This allowed us to separate what we learned at the individual and group levels. We also asked each of the community members with whom we were able to collaborate a set of general questions to learn about the villagers’ satisfaction, aspirations, cohesion, and community spirit in each community. We believed such general questions could be asked in both villages while also remaining open to modifying our approach over time.
Our team worked with one focus group per village, each of which had twelve to fifteen members. Bhaskar and Raju explained that the themes of gender, caste, village geography, and political affiliation were important to the group in Kesavaram. Our team saw these as salient social factors based on our initial ethnographies. In Ardhavaram, we found that economic class, gender, and caste were most relevant, and thus we recruited our focus group accordingly.
The following three months of fieldwork allowed us to identify key commonalities that shaped life in both villages. We found that economic class was more divisive and therefore more pronounced in Ardhavaram. While caste shaped social life and identity in both villages, economic class was less pronounced in Kesavaram. One dynamic that persisted throughout the entire project, however, was that changes in economic class failed to combat the importance of caste as a form of stratification. Though it originally spoke to the economic division of labor, caste also played a huge social and cultural role in the lives of both sets of villagers.
Listening as Decolonization
Much of my discussion throughout this chapter has reviewed theories and applied case studies and my previous experiences to explore the role of technology in supporting community appropriation and authorship. Part of the personal and reflexive experience of collaboration in community-based work involves examining one’s existing assumptions and moving past them. Our collaboration in Ardhavaram and Kesavaram brought this lesson home. It reminded me that even the most well intentioned global technology researchers, professionals, and activists are often puzzled by their first encounter with diverse communities.
“How have the information kiosks in your village shaped your life? Do you believe in the power of such technology?” “Yes, sir.” Such a pattern of question and answer often characterizes community-based research in parts of the world where researchers and practitioners assume and enact their privilege—everything that I was attempting to avoid. Indeed, we witnessed some of this in our initial visits to these communities.
Two weeks after our first visit, when Bhaskar and I visited Kesavaram and Ardhavaram again, we noticed several changes in the way we were treated and received. This was consistent with my experience of the importance of putting in “face time” in collaborative projects. Many community-based projects, despite the ethos of participation after which they are labeled, are often implemented in turnkey fashion with the lead researcher rarely being physically present, and research goals being prespecified without consideration of community voices. Despite my full-time employment at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), I was determined to avoid this. Over the two-year project, I managed to attend meetings in each village at least once every three months and far more often during both summers, when I lived in the Godavari region.
The significant change I found on our second visit was the openness of villagers in Kesavaram to speaking with Bhaskar, Raju, Vimal, and myself when out of earshot of the village council members. Either their openness was the result of the council’s public endorsement of our efforts, or simply the fact that they saw our faces again. We were invited to have tea in various homes, present our stories at local schools, and partake in a tour of local farms. In contrast, in Ardhavaram the villagers would speak with me and open up their workplaces and homes, but only when no one else was present, particularly people from different caste or class groups.
In both cases, I noted how my own South Asian, specifically my Tamil South Indian background, allowed me to converse with community members in a rough version of their own Telugu language, though many spoke local dialects of their own. The rural landscapes where my mother had grown up, which I had visited several times as a child, reminded me of these communities, with their fertile land and the mostly agricultural labor they performed. Both villages featured Hindu temples with deities. As a Carnatic music-trained singer myself, I was able to perform short songs in each holy place, much to the delight of our hosts. I began to feel familiar and confident in these surroundings.
It was remarkable to see how quickly we developed an informal and open relationship with community members in Kesavaram on just our second visit. While our first visit was marked by important initial rituals such as the offering of garlands and a visit to the local temple, our second visit featured cups of chai, visits to the schools and fields where community members worked, and long, casual discussions during which stories were shared. But there was no such lack of formality in Ardhavaram. We continued to hear privately from individuals about their problems with others in their community. This was fascinating, given the demographic similarities between the communities, and evidence that demographics are but one way of understanding culture or community and that like any other they may be flawed.
Despite the willingness of the village councils in each case, our sense of ease and informality could not have been more different. This remained the case throughout the next several months of our work. Yet eventually the story would change dramatically.
Video Visions
The goal of our work was to stop seeing new technologies as externally removed from community life. By exploring the potential of video to release and share the voices within Godavari, Bhaskar and I hoped to support the visions and aspirations that might emerge.
In each of our monthly meetings in both villages, we moderated a discussion with the focus group around the possibilities and themes of “development.” The focus groups would discuss their visions of development based on a set of questions that they had developed and iterated upon. These questions were designed to elicit visions, goals, and experiences from fellow community members. Either Bhaskar, Raju, or I would ask the group to discuss successes and shortcomings they had experienced in their personal lives as well as the larger community, recognizing that trust and rapport would only come over time. We encouraged the participants to look at the present as well as the past as they reflected on community life.
We anticipated that the focus group meeting notes might be biased in favor of those who were more vocal. Thus individualized interviews and survey data were also collected and maintained separately from the larger focus groups to encourage open sharing by all individual participants. Survey and interview questions measured the level of connectivity experienced by participants within the larger village, the level of positivity felt toward the village and the focus group, their sense of knowledge about development, the level of agency toward decision making that impacted each person’s life, and the aspirations each person had for the village’s future. Our research thus gathered focus group transcripts, ethnographic field notes, individual interview notes, and surveys.
This qualitative data was analyzed using the thematic analysis technique, a multi-step model that finds categories within ethnographic data.120 These patterns were subject to change over the course of the study and were iteratively created and modified. The gathered longitudinal data, bridging both qualitative and quantitative data sources, applied the technique of triangulation to uncover shared insights.121
Our ethnographic and focus group experiences raised a number of interesting questions about the role of video making, reflecting on, and sharing development projects within the village. We were curious whether and how over time this would impact mobilization and consensus building within the community, and more philosophically how our effort might have interrupted existing forms of fatalism and aspiration.
Apart from these research questions, our goal was to learn from the communities in an open-ended manner. Altogether, the focus groups, surveys, and interviews asked participants:
- To discuss their lives, families, and occupations to the degree they felt comfortable.
- To reflect on their participation and engagement with village life.
- To reflect upon ongoing, planned, or past development projects in their village.
- To discuss what development meant to them and their village.
- To reflect on the relationship between certain subgroups in the village versus others, as well as the village relative to its rural and urban counterparts.
Our effort was notable for its roadblocks as well as its epiphanies. Indeed, in just three months our focus group in Kesavaram surprisingly reached a level of stagnation in terms of the discussions and the dynamics of communication it featured. Larger village dynamics related to caste issues reared their head in the focus groups. The standard protocols around who should or should not speak seemed to have continued rather than been interrupted by our intervention.
In his field notes, Bhaskar described the situation as the continuation of an “invisible dialogue” wherein community members with less political or economic capital would describe their community as incapable of change. Collaboration, communication, and imagination seemed to be insurmountable goals. This was surprising, given the excitement and openness with which we were initially received in Kesavaram. However, just a few months into our work our progress stalled.
In contrast, despite deep-rooted divisions over economic class, we were fascinated by how the social dynamics became unhinged in Ardhavaram over the course of these two years. In this village focus group members were given two video cameras to share with one another. Subgroups from the focus group would create and share different video stories at each meeting. To minimize the chances of our team influencing the focus groups in the making and theme of the videos, we abstained from providing them with any production or editing training. Ardhavaram participants were only shown how to turn the camera on and off, “zoom” and “pan,” and recharge the battery. This method contrasted with our approach in Kesavaram, where the focus group member meetings were structured around oral conversations without any use of technology or video cameras.
While initial video pieces in Ardhavaram were created without any deep knowledge of the camera’s functionality, our team was struck by what was recorded and how it impacted focus group conversations and the interviews we gathered from individuals. For example, an initial piece showed footage of the local school, a brief interview with the school administrator, and a tour of Ardhavaram’s main street. None of these topics was surprising to us. Indeed, they reflected the practice of everyday life in the village. Yet we were struck by the five-second snippet in the middle of the video featuring a contaminated local water source at a pond located between the school and other small buildings on the main road.
This snippet activated the focus group in a way that we could never have anticipated. Those who had always been much quieter in our monthly sessions challenged the reign of more vocal focus group members. This surprised us, given that it was only the fourth month of the project. J. Lalitha, a farm laborer from the Dalit (poorest) caste, took charge of the video camera in this moment, rewinding, fast forwarding, pausing, and manipulating the video piece so that we could repeatedly analyze the contaminated water source. Our sense was that taking power over this technology made possible a conversation over a topic with which the entire village felt a connection. The focus group was debating a theme that had previously been an internalized source of frustration. Instructed to pause the video, focus group members animatedly asked one another a number of questions, including:
- How was the contaminated water source affecting the school?
- Could the school advocate for cleaning the water source?
- Was the water source positively or negatively affecting the “spiritual cleanliness” of the temple?
- Could classes in the school move from the classroom to other parts of the village, including inside the temple?
- Were there ways to bring more attention to the school and its priorities to the larger village through the temple?
The release of such questions resonate with what Amartya Sen calls the “capacity” of voice.122 Voice in this case lay not just in the aspiration of ridding the village of contaminated water, but also in the technical decoding of this issue into actions, practices, and strategies that continued after the sharing of the video and in the discussion we observed. Voice also relates to collective reflection, which we observed in action in this moment. This reflection was not made possible through passive access to Foundation information or the provision of data from a government database, but through the collaborative process of using a technology to create and share stories within the community. As Bhaskar later e-mailed me:
[Community members of Ardhavaram] represent voice. They are starting to believe that they can be newsmakers in the village regardless of their place in life. . . . Villagers encourage them to actively participate in whatever they do . . . There are also villagers who discourage the whole video activity, come in the way and try to obstruct etc. Yet they are being stopped. Another line of gossip is about people who are given the charge of taking care of videos. I have selected two people to keep the whole equipment with them. I think many NGOs or development work really did not “involve” them, and the approach always was top-down or give-take, donate-accept models. Here in the current project, it’s not about money, it’s not about any program that benefits instantly, and it’s all about coming together and talking about village, their needs. It is like a discourse that is taking various routes each time. (January 15, 2007)
Bhaskar’s words speak to the potential of media authorship and reflection as a catalyst for community action. This is in direct contrast from most research focused on the “study of” a focus group. Bhaskar points to the “disruptions” that occur when aspiration and reflection are unlocked. The power to imagine, hope, and act can be cultivated from within. And technology can have a role in catalyzing this process.
Our experience in this fourth month was but the first domino to fall. Indeed, we found that in almost every month from that point onward either an entire video or a snippet in it would inspire conversation, debate, and proposals for change.
I discuss these insights in relation to four themes in the following sections: Viral media; agency; prioritization and aspiration; assets as capacity; and collective action.
Viral Media Practices
From the fourth month of our collaboration, instead of simply following our limited instructions the focus group in Ardhavaram developed an internal system of sharing the video cameras, using rotating teams of authors, producers, and collaborators. Our research team steered clear of advocating any single set of “rules” about collaboration. Instead, we observed and learned from a process whereby the camera migrated from being a focus group tool of conversation to a catalyst for a larger village-level conversation. This migration speaks to our first insight, that of virality.
We were unsurprised that interest in the video cameras was initially high. One often finds both seduction and excitement in new tools. What surprised us was that this interest did not plateau a few months after this fourth-month episode; on the contrary, it increased over the nearly two years we worked with the Ardhavaram community. Communications scholar Everett Rogers’s writings on innovations123 and their modes of diffusion were of interest to us in our own study. While his writings have primarily influenced corporate marketing and sales, our project remained intent on appropriating the concept to consider grassroots media practices.
Recognizing that the video effort was directed at the community itself, villagers shifted the stories they created to cover events in the larger village. They created videos around internal issues such as local marriages, discussions of urban migration, their political relationship with the district government, and rural outsourcing projects. Thus we saw new themes emerge as stories as focus group members grew increasingly confident about the video making and sharing process. The videos also shifted from specific topics to engage strategic and imaginative themes. Thus, the women in the focus group created a video that imagined a community where women were truly equal. Videos were created that examined longer-term strategies toward development, questions about power and authority, and reflections on cultural histories and values. At times, these videos challenged the role of external organizations, including the Foundation with which they were collaborating!
After eight months, we noticed how the camera had begun to move outside the focus group into the hands of villagers across social and demographic strata. By the end of the project’s first year, videos were being produced in higher frequency by a greater number of villagers. The cameras were thus being treated as mobile, rugged devices—moving between families, occupations, genders, castes, and economic classes. Not only was the technology moving, but so too was the content it produced. Videos were screened in homes across the village, during community meetings, and at events such as religious festivals or marriages at the local temple.
Villagers asked our field researchers whether they could show these videos on the local television network, and one villager even asked whether videos that documented undelivered promises from the government could be placed on YouTube to attract more attention. This emergent interest in social documentation124 surprised both Raju and Bhaskar, as our team had never planned to use video in this way.
The video camera followed paths and practices that resisted the scope of a narrowly defined project. As the camera moved into new hands, it became a tool to support the reflection and imagination of a wider number of Ardhavaram villagers. No longer could we simply understand our project as the study of a focus group. Instead it became a catalyst to shape aspirations and reflection on a larger scale. What we learned took us off the predicted and planned “research map” to consider not just our preconceived assumptions and hypotheses, but also the unexpected and emergent.
The Power of Agency
Creating, reflecting upon, and sharing narratives unlocked conversations within the focus group and over time in the larger village. We observed how agency, a sense of the capacity to collectively act and transform lives, took hold in Ardhavaram just months into our collaboration. After the sixth month, focus group participants demonstrated greater confidence in sharing their individual and collective reflections in the monthly meetings, perhaps because they had already seen and discussed the videos they had made throughout the village. The process of reflection defied individualistic constraints. Reflection seemed to occur collectively, via discussions and dialogue that occurred as the technology and the stories it was used to create traveled across the village.
Despite common issues faced in both communities surrounding sanitation, literacy, public health, political corruption, and more, the sense of ownership over our collaboration differed significantly over time between these two villages. In Ardhavaram, the focus group identified its own ability to develop and act on solutions for the community. In contrast, while Kesavaram focus group members developed significant comfort in discussing development topics, over time they failed to identify their own roles in resolving these issues in a strategic and proactive manner. This distinction speaks to a second attribute of agency, that of believing that one’s actions can produce effects and outcomes.
At first, the focus groups in both communities echoed a fatalistic attitude. The future was beyond their power to control. Nongovernmental organizations, businesses, and governments were sources of both strife and hope. The fatalism came from the recognition that these outside institutions were far removed from life in the village.
Once they began creating and viewing their own videos, however, Ardhavaram participants identified an internal capacity to resolve the issues they faced and to further their goals for the village. A number of members began to see themselves as partially responsible for the problems the village faced. They identified personal roles for resolving issues around public sanitation, education, and village-level decision-making. According to both our ethnographic and individual insights, the videos functioned to shape and strengthen focus group members’ personal connections with the content they and others had recorded.
In contrast, in Kesavaram the group’s finger remained firmly pointed toward the local government (panchayat), with focus group members repeatedly expressing their desire for a better government, more money, or the blessings of God. They saw their efforts as meaningless—removed from the forces behind development. Kesavaram participant, V. Suryakanthan, a local teacher, explained to us that “development is not in our hands.” Participant Suryakumari, a housewife, expressed a similar connection between future activities and those already undertaken in the village, stating, “The important activities taken up in the past just need to be continued.” Our team observed a sense of resignation, a feeling that an unsatisfactory history would likely carry on into the future and that change could only come from outside.
Prioritization and Aspiration
At the start of our collaboration, both communities identified general developmental goals though neither expressed confidence in their ability to develop and promote realistic visions for their community. These visions included the goals of making more money, harvesting more crops, and supporting political transparency. Over the course of two years, a key distinction between the two surfaced—participants working with video began to see their priorities as positively aligned with those of others in the focus group and larger village. I have described how focus group members within Ardhavaram began to think less specifically about themselves, as they shifted their concern to the larger village. Part of this change involved an increased belief in the intertwined nature of personal and village-level priorities. In contrast, throughout our collaboration Kesavaram participants argued that their own goals were more important than those of others in the village. This included the feeling that other group members’ priorities were counterproductive to their own well being. Though these individuals attended twenty-four focus group meetings, their attitudes toward development and one another remained mostly unchanged.
Creating, reflecting upon, and sharing media in Ardhavaram seemed to reduce the fatalism that we had observed in the community. This was demonstrated when villagers began to strategize and develop their own initiatives in specific ways. We noted a confidence and pragmatism from within for enacting change. Their goals included increasing literacy within the community. Community members began to critique and question existing top-down meanings of literacy and consider how to “indigenize” literacy as a community practice. Some participants even recognized that the media literacy they were developing through our collaboration could shape the development of economic, social, and political objectives.
Focus group members selected video topics based on their sense of what would appeal to the larger group. Ardhavaram focus group member V. Sujatha, who had initially been skeptical of video, explained during the eighth focus group: “Our village is [now] progressing in the right direction as all of us discuss and exchange each other’s ideas about village development [in specific, practical, and longer term ways].”
Capacity Building—Assets, Not Needs
Creating, sharing, and collectively reflecting upon videos shaped aspiration and a sense of connectedness with others. Yet there was little discussion in either focus group about what the community already had in terms of skills and resources, and how it could build upon this. This changed in Ardhavaram as our sixth focus group came to an end. From this point onward, we found that discussion focused more than before on the capacities and assets125 of the community as a starting point from which to mobilize and strategize. An asset can be understood as a resource or capacity that can be exchanged, supported, or transformed into a positive outcome for its holder. Whereas earlier the conversation in Ardhvaram had been “need”-based, that is, the community would speak about what it lacked rather than what it already had, now there was a remarkable shift in tone, approach, and outlook. This shift accompanied some of the perspectives on agency mentioned earlier in this chapter.
Ardhavaram focus group members, soon followed by others in the larger village, viewed themselves as already possessing the skills and resources by which their world could be positively transformed. They began to see their community as resource-rich rather than deficient. This realization became the basis for them to advocate and fight for developmental goals for their larger community.
Much of development studies literature identifies marginalized communities as groups with needs that can or should be resolved from the outside. The shift away from “need” to “asset” speaks to the potential of aspiration, which moral philosophers have long argued is important to peoples of all cultures and communities.126 Certainly this is even more substantially the case when it comes to communities patronizingly labeled as being in need of assistance or being saved.
Looking closely at the power of exchanging and sharing assets in a community speaks to the potential of collaborating within a community, in lieu of seeing one’s fellow villagers as competitors for limited resources in a world of scarcity. Researchers have argued that a vibrant intra-community exchange of assets can benefit not only those involved in the transaction, but also others in the larger village, city, or social unit.127 Free expression, central to all forms of democracy, is central to the project of grassroots development. In this regard, asset sharing can become an important first step toward the collective development of any community. This form of development is not legislated from outside but fought for by those living in the community.
Videos were increasingly created on the basis of innovative concepts and strategies devised by focus group members in Ardhavaram. We viewed video pieces that revealed innovative farming practices, ceremonies that bridged caste and gender in the temple, and Information Technology business models. All of them built upon existing possibilities, resources, and people in the community. They discussed community members’ ability to positively shape a collective economic, educational, and social future.
Collective Action
I have described the process by which the authorship and sharing of videos expanded outside a small focus group to recruit authors and viewers across the village and thus inspire larger scale conversations. Yet what did this change mean other than cultivating dialogue? Did it inspire action rather than simply conversation?
Over the last six months of our effort, Ardhavaram members began to strategize an approach toward sharing the videos externally as a means of influencing wider publics such as the regional government. One villager was placed in charge of contacting local television networks that reached over a hundred and fifty villages in the region, with the goal of sharing a video based on the unique practices of prawn farming in the village. They hoped that this in turn would increase economic activity and call attention to local farmers. Another group decided to submit several videos to YouTube, using newfound Internet connections. These videos focused on the undelivered promises made by the regional government and nongovernmental organizations (NGO). The goal was to put pressure on these institutions by documenting the grievances expressed by the villagers.
Ardhavaram participant and farmer Bangar Raju explained in our seventh month of collaboration that in his everyday life there was already “a significant change in the entire village.” When we tracked the responses of local laborer member P. Ramesh our findings confirmed this longitudinal shift. While initial interviews with this participant emphasized the unfulfilled promises of NGOs and the panchayat government, stating that “little has been initiated,” his later focus group comments noted the “significant effect that the development activities [our community has begun] has had on our collective life.”
These new developments speak to the potential of community-created video as a catalyst for collective action in Ardhavaram. Community members were able to create and share their experiences regardless of their level of literacy and education. All that was required, and easily adopted, was the pressing of an on or off switch and an eye behind a camera lens. The collective viewing of these pieces sparked discussion and reflection on topics that were part of the community’s collective habitus, or its habituated patterns and experiences. The ease with which a video camera could be shared between villagers allowed it to support collaboration and conversation between people from different families and social groups.
Villagers in Ardhavaram began to adopt what philosopher John Searle has described as “we-intentions” (rather than I-intentions).128 A “we-intention” comes into being when a group maintains an openness to an outcome that is independent of the biases or preconceptions of any given individual.129 We-intentions came into being as villagers reflected and communicated about the video stories that had brought them together.
In contrast, the focus group in Kesavaram exhibited little such behavior, as their discussions remained largely confined to the initial group. Focus group member VV Sharma, a wealthier landowner, stated throughout our collaboration that there was little that his focus group could do to resolve developmental issues, which would just depend “on hope and time.”
For collective action to emerge from the grassroots rather than the objectifying imagination of an NGO or a researcher, our team learned about the power of aspiration and agency. Our work in India speaks to the importance of not taking the codes or texts of technology for granted, not assuming that a video camera is the magic bullet to all developmental problems, though it may facilitate a grassroots process that uses this technology creatively and reflectively.
Exit and Voice
My experiences in South India and the insights I have shared throughout this chapter remind me of the importance of economist and development scholar Albert Hirschman’s writings on exit and voice.130 Hirschman considers the question as to whether a social group should accept the deterioration of the life it may face, particularly when it is caused by a more politically powerful entity such as the nation-state, an NGO, or a corporation. He argues that the two responses available in such a situation are “exit,” where the community withdraws from the relationship, or “voice,” where the group communicates and collectively acts to achieve the needed social change. Hirschman concludes that it is voice that empowers, as only through voice does one acquire the ability to articulate grievances and rally around their eradication.
I find Hirschman’s formulation fascinating in a time when technologies are increasingly interwoven into questions about development. As I have demonstrated in this chapter, it is difficult to see a possibility for “exit” in the case of development, technology and global communities. Technologies are here to stay and they seem permanently ensconced within questions of development. Although communities may choose to exit from these circumstances, it is far from easy to do so.
In contrast, my collaborations in Ardhavaram and Kesavaram reveal the power of voice. Voice is not merely an academic fetish or a philosophical theory. It is tied to the beliefs people have and their confidence in enacting change on their terms. Voice is intertwined with agency—the capacity to aspire and act. A technology that allows a user to receive information is not in itself voice producing. However, when we focus on the cultural and social practices that empower voice, we can transform our thinking about technology accordingly.
Remembering Scale, Sustainability, and Impact
This chapter has rejected the passive embrace of technologies as they stand to instead consider how they may support the voices and agendas of grassroots communities and users across the world. I have focused on the power of rethinking technology from the perspective of storytelling, authorship, and reflection. I hope that reflecting on my stories of collaboration in South India in the latter half of this chapter helps us rethink information technology and development (ICTD) research in ways that start and end with local communities and emerging users.
Richard Heeks, a development and technology scholar, has argued that in the ICTD field three agendas remain.131 These are sustainability, scalability, and impact. Sustainability considers the long-term potential of a project and how it may generally support appropriation, voice, reflection, and authorship. Scalability considers economic policy making and viral outreach. And impact considers appropriate indicators or measurements of development that can be articulated to investors and funders.
Heeks argues that little has been done to explore how communities can use ICTs to reflect upon, articulate, and mobilize around their own ideas, visions, and strategic agendas. A new, more “productive view” would humanize the technology and development conversation to see a community as a group that has the potential to create, share, and mobilize. This is in contrast to research that sees rural or poorer technology users as passive beneficiaries, waiting and hoping for resources to be given to them by the wealthy and powerful.
It is in this sense that this chapter presents a path forward. I have argued for the need to consider how technologies may be reimagined in the service of local voice. My goal in so doing is to rid us of objectified and immutable understandings of community or technology, and do away once and for all with a myth that takes storage technologies as inevitable and for granted. While the research I have shared in this chapter has focused on two neighboring small villages in South India, I want examples such as this to contribute to collaborative research and practice across the world that considers how increasingly globalized technologies can be reimagined to support local communities and cultures.
I end this discussion with a keynote lecture I attended in Doha, Qatar, in 2008 at the international technology and development (ICTD) conference. The location was just a few miles from the headquarters of Al Jazeera, an emerging but still quite small television network. The billionaire speaker, Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and one of the world’s wealthiest men, dissected the many challenges that face the ICTD field, explaining the important roadblocks to health, education, and democracy that ICTs may help overcome. Gates went on to present projects funded by Microsoft and the Gates Foundation he cofounded. One of them was Digital Green,132 which provides farmers with multimedia tools to help them share their best practices with one another. It was striking that Gates also mentioned how technology and development projects often fall far short of their lofty transformative goals, at best failing to resonate with communities and at worst becoming imposing and paternalistic.
As I listened to this talk, I kept reflecting on my experiences in Ardhavaram and Kesavaram. When the time came for questions and answers, I asked Gates about the inherent challenges of thinking about sustainability and scale. Foundations, agencies, and governments tend to fund large-scale initiatives. This is because they must provide comparative and longitudinal data to justify their investments, and such data can be easily generated through the use of large “big data” projects. Yet I believe that such a thirst for data ignores the ethical and philosophical bases on which development studies should be grounded.
Gates suggested in his answer to me that promoting local ownership, entrepreneurialism, and appropriation represented an ethical and sustainable way forward. He seemed to recognize the need to bridge the agendas that drive funding and research agencies with voices and outcomes on the ground. Scalable models must have enough flexibility to support local practices of appropriation, authorship, and reflection. Models of change must consider how community-based practices can expand and virally grow to shape emergent forms of collective action.
As with many of the ethnographic moments I narrate in this chapter and throughout this book, this moment was inspiring. It reminds us of the importance of doing away with master myths of the “global village” that leave so many silent and lead to technology initiatives that do little but mirror the misguided agendas of a limited few. I consider this approach further in the chapters that follow, turning next to the question of how we must intervene in the very languages or codes by which technologies are designed to respect the values and knowledges, or ontologies, of indigenous and other marginalized user communities across the world.