5
Taking Back Our Media
Long interested in the indigenous-led uprisings of the early 1990s in the rural southwestern Mexican state of Chiapas, in 2012 my wife and I traveled to the remote regions of the Lacandon jungle to understand the Zapatista struggle for autonomy against the privatization of their lands. Invited by artist friends who had built a rapport with these communities by painting murals on Zapatista land, we had the opportunity to visit the community centers, or “caracoles,” of Morelia and Roberto Barrios. These two caracoles were two of the five Zapatista district centers, each of which housed decentralized governments that supported nearby farms and villages. I knew about the tactics employed by the Zapatistas in 1994 to publicize their struggle internationally through their strategic uses of early Internet forums such as Usenet newsgroups.1 The appropriation of these forums allowed the community to frame its local political struggle to attract international attention and sympathy. The Zapatistas cleverly spun their story by utilizing the technologies of the day to manage and articulate a range of narratives to their own communities, others in Mexico, and publics across the world.
We see similar practices at work today in terms of the media spectacles produced by the Islamic State (ISIS) movement in Syria and Iraq. This jihadist movement’s prowess in appropriating social media environments such as Twitter, SoundCloud, or YouTube had led to great concern and surprise. It is entirely possible that this creative use of technology has influenced the Islamic State’s global visibility and its ability to recruit disaffected youth from across the world.
Both the Zapatista and ISIS cases, despite their diametrically different political orientations, remind us that political, social, and “terrorist” movements cannot be understood without looking at their modes of mediation. Indeed, contemporary activism today, whether we speak of violent and brutal acts of terror or nonviolent grassroots struggle, must be partially viewed through the prism of their engagements with media and technology. Drone strikes on targets in Afghanistan where the perpetrator sits behind a computer thousands of miles away from the target, well-produced ISIS videos showing the beheadings of hostages, the hijacking of Twitter hashtags, or the collection of suspicious individual phone data—these are all contemporary examples of how technology is appropriated for geopolitical ends.
I remember feeling connected with the Zapatista cause as a high school student some twenty years ago without knowing any of the details. These sentiments were inspired by the occasional messages I read on Unix-powered machines that hosted Usenet discussion groups. I note now as a scholar that the creative use of technology at the grassroots is critical to shaping both local and global strategies. Different “publics” can be influenced and coordinated through an organized campaign that bridges a range of media strategies and tactics.
The Zapatista use of technology in the mid-1990s inspired identification with their cause despite the fact that very few in Mexico or the outside world had specific knowledge of the conditions the people were experiencing. The protesters forced the mainstream media to discuss the story, for example via the widely viewed American CBS program 60 Minutes, which covered the story for an audience of millions in 1994.2 Subcomandante Marcos, a public spokesperson for the movement who was neither indigenous nor from Chiapas, was seen as an inspirational figure by people across the world. Mexican audiences increasingly sympathized with a rural movement taking place within their own borders, thanks partially to the ways in which the international media networks influenced the domestic sphere. The Zapatista case thus illustrated how a “new” media technology of the time could be appropriated to influence a range of audiences and was one factor amongst several helped this movement reach a wide domestic and global audience.
Zapatista technology use speaks to the importance of communications within the battlefield. The negative international press attention given to this rural and regional movement pressured the Mexican regime to capitulate to the protesters’ demands. Yet in contrast to their use of new technology with global publics, Zapatista activists communicated with one another and their stakeholder communities orally, through familial or political networks, or via the powerful technology of community radio, which I have recently begun to study in Bolivia. Short-wave radio, in particular, was used as a communication platform by Zapatistas in their responses to the encroachments by the Mexican military.
I was grateful for the opportunity to visit two of these caracoles in 2012, given my interest in thinking past universalist metaphors such as “global village.” After several hours’ travel, we arrived at the Morelia caracol and sat outside the local office waiting to meet the junta, a rotating group of community members who formed the local government. The junta included different Zapatista subgroups, including teenagers and women. Masks covered everything but the eyes of junta members. I introduced myself as a scholar of media studies and explained my interest in learning how the technologies of the day could be appropriated to support the Zapatista cause, much as the community had done nearly twenty years before in its use of online news and discussion groups.
I noticed many beautiful murals throughout the community, including one of a skeleton figure by the graffiti artist Banksy. This mural was displayed next to a shack painted with the words “Taller Appropriada Technologia” or “workshop for appropriate technology.” The appropriate technology movement dates back to writings from the 1960s questioning the meaning of technology for local communities.3 The writings of Fritz Schumacher, in particular, were concerned with how technology could support sustainability. They criticized the “technology transfer” model that was popular at the time. In contrast, this movement was interested in imagining efforts with technology that could be less capital and energy intensive.
A young member of the Morelia junta told me I could learn more about his people if I spent time establishing rapport with them through the creation of mutual trust and respect. This resembled my experience with the Zuni discussed in the previous chapter. We were thus encouraged to visit this community and other Zapatista caracoles across Chiapas. A week later, my wife and I visited the caracol of Roberto Barrios elsewhere in the province, located about sixty kilometers from the famous Mayan archaeological site of Palenque. We waited for over an hour before the junta opened its doors to us. When I asked community leaders how I could be of service, the response I received was “Quien sabe?” or “Who knows?” I pressed on, asking what the goals of the Zapatista movement were, and received the same two-word response. Finally, when I asked what the best route was to return to Palenque, their response was the same: “Quien sabe?”
Reflecting on these experiences, I sensed that “Quien sabe,” like the stories I shared of plastic plants and frosted windowpanes at Zuni in chapter 4, speaks to how the Zapatista communities could be persuaded to collaborate with a scholar like myself but only on their own terms and for their own purposes. It is a set of local, community-specific understandings that frame how the caracoles choose to engage with the external world. Following the argument of this book, we must think about the design and meaning of technology in the same spirit of supporting community voices.
“Quien sabe” may not speak directly to the ethical questions surrounding collaboration, but it may offer a glimpse into the knowledges and cosmologies of these communities. “Caracol” in Spanish means “snail” in English, and perhaps like “Quien sabe” reflects a slow, internally reflective process by which nature and temporality are processed. The ancestors of the Zapatistas lived during an era when memory and movement were primarily defined by the ecology and environment of the places in which they lived. Their descendants, of primarily Mayan indigenous ethnicity, were interested in maintaining these practices. In that sense the Zapatista cause is an epistemological rebellion against how we know and think. As Thomas Urban, a graduate student in archaeology in Oxford University, points out:
The potential of the Zapatista ideals, if fully realized through the agency of the sign, manifests in the larger world outside. . . . [T]he Zapatistas connect with their past and communicate this to the world with signs that reference that past as an agent for a better future through specific actions in the present. Ideas about the past, whether real or perceived, are relayed by the symbol of the snail, a small conduit in a very large symbolic action, the connection between past and future, local and global, the diminutive caracol de Resistencia (snail of resistance), is indeed a vast repository of meaning.4
The characteristics described here are in contrast with the instantaneity, speed, and violence of neoliberal information markets that pride themselves on their use of predictive analytics, “big data,” and just-in-time decisions.5 Unlike the metaphysics of the caracol, the French philosopher Paul Virilio has argued that notions of speed encoded into globalizing technologies virtualize our experiences of the here and now, detaching us from the present. By controlling the infrastructures of technology those in authority have a great deal of power over the shaping of experience. Coining the term “dromology,” or the science of speed, Virilio states, “Whoever controls the [technology] possesses it . . . not [because of] laws and contracts, but first and foremost [due to] a matter of movement and circulation.”6 From Virilio’s perspective, contemporary technologies remove us from the local—the here and now. Yet to assume that technologies inherently and immutably serve the purposes of technocrats overlooks the possibility that they could be rethought through collaborations with communities across the world.
The Zapatista movement is neither an illustration of utopic, Western-centric narratives of the “digital revolution,” nor does it validate the dystopic belief that new technologies inherently serve neoliberalism. Rather, it is a community strategically appropriating a number of technologies, old and new, to support its practices and values.
Webs and Spiders
In March 2013, my wife and I traveled briefly across New Mexico and Arizona in the American Southwest from a meeting at the Zuni Native American reservation. We journeyed to Spider Rock in Canyon De Chelly on the Navajo reservation in rural Arizona. As we approached the canyon overlook, we were amazed to see a giant spiraled pillar rising hundreds of feet above the earth. We peered over the canyon walls at the spire and pondered the meaning of this sacred site to the Navajo people and their ancestors. Inscribed on a plaque next to the overlook was the passage:
As the myth goes, Spider Woman began her many creations by spinning and chanting (or singing), first developing the universe in four Chapters—- east, west, north, and south. Within the space sprung the birth of the sun, moon, and stars, which immediately banished darkness from the world. Next, she took shells of turquoise, red rock, yellow stone, and clear crystal [with which] she next created the mountains, oceans, and desserts. Then the earth goddess herself became the womb from which mankind sprung over time; gradually, as is the case with childbirth. To create various races, it is believed that [she] used many different kinds and colors of clay. Using her remaining thread, the goddess bound each of her human creations directly to her. . . . The Navajo culture also credits Spider Woman for their unusually talented weaving abilities. As the story goes, a young Indian girl wandered into the desert where she viewed a wisp of smoke coming from a hole in the ground. Peering into the hole, the girl saw Spider Woman spinning a blanket.7
The myth of the Spider Woman, described in the above quotation, explains how the world is a web of interconnectedness, woven by ancestral beings. This web connects the peoples and beings under the earth and above the sky.8
Our experience at Spider Rock is a reminder that the “web” has long been a metaphor among diverse communities and cultures. The word “web” existed long before its incorporation into today’s digital vocabulary. From the Navajo perspective, a web, produced through the act of weaving, is a living architecture that integrates spirituality, history, and aspiration. Sociologist of science David Turnbull offers the following example of weaving from the Incan people of South America:
Textiles were the primary visual medium for the expression of ideas, the fundamental art form of the Andean peoples. Their “weaving insists that messages be embodied in and expressed by structure.” Stories join ideas, string joins things together, and both are dependent on tension. String and cordage derive their connective capacity from tension in knots, binding, or twining. Weaving depends on the tension between the warp and the weft.9
I share my experience with the Zapatistas and my journey to Spider Rock as a reminder that the digital tools of today are neither neutral nor universal, but rather socially constructed by the imaginaries of their creators. Technologies, just like metaphors such as the “web,” can be reimagined in relation to a range of epistemologies and ontologies. Yet we seem to have reached a moment in time when we ascribe metaphors to new technology in ways that are far removed from actual human experiences and histories.
The Last Billion
The vast majority of people in our world have been left out of the discussion of how networked digital technologies are developed, for what purposes, and with what meaning. While we evangelize terms such as “global village” in our discussions of technology, we fail to consider the economies, voices, and agendas behind its infrastructural, social, political, or economic deployment. The elites of the world have power over not only the metaphors by which we think about technology, but over its actual design and deployment. Users and communities across the world are supposed to passively accept a narrative of technological immateriality, inevitability, and evolution defined primarily by the rich and powerful. Terms such as the “last billion” are increasingly circulated to define those who remain digitally disconnected. With such homogenizing language, 15 percent of the world’s population is reduced to a single category and presumed to be technologically “needy.” Not only does this terminology ignore the many different facets of and reasons for being disconnected; it more perniciously presumes that “our” tools can edify the “other.”
During the TED 2014 conference in Vancouver, Larry Page, cofounder of Google, was interviewed by journalist Charlie Rose about his hopes and dreams for the company.10 Page spoke with great pride about the Google Loon project,11 which deploys a set of high-altitude balloons to remote regions of the world in order to connect people in these remote areas to the Internet. Stating that “[our project] can provide hope to two-thirds of the world population that does not have strong Internet,” Page’s assumptions became transparent. Listening live to the conversation as an invitee to the TED Active meeting, I wondered whether Page believed that billions of people were hopeless without Internet access. Did he assume that access to digital tools was more important than access to water or food? It seemed like Page presumed that that the Internet access these communities would want would be based on his company’s terms of service. As I have argued, initiatives like Google Loon and Facebook’s drone connectivity make possible certain forms of access while precluding others, limiting what the Internet can be for these new users. Sadly, it seems impossible to block these objectives from moving forward. How, for example, can rural users protest against an automated system thousands of meters above their heads in the sky?12
It is far more meaningful to re-envision technology from the perspective of these communities cast as “users.” We can turn our gaze away from the stratospheres where Google balloons or Facebook drones fly and remember that at the end of the day technologies exist to serve human beings and the richly diverse communities within which they live.
Disciplining Knowledge
This book has pointed to the ambivalences associated with “participation” in new media technology. It has praised the creative practices through which users have approached digital platforms and recognized the opportunities these uses have presented so they can support themselves in an increasingly networked world. Yet we must continue to ask, When is a creative use of technology still a reenactment of the agendas of those with power and privilege? Whether one speaks of participating in technology efforts led by the government, or open data projects supported by a company or nongovernment organization, French philosopher Michel Foucault’s lectures on “governmentality” speak to how passive engagement with technology can threaten freedom and autonomy.13
I discuss this Foucauldian critique not to dismiss the world of social media as it stands but to provoke us to think about the conditions which enable technologies to limit users’ discursive control and manipulation. Governmentality describes the ways in which citizens can be disciplined via seemingly innocuous policies adopted by states, corporations, or organizations. One can imagine a similar outcome emerging from the way technologies are designed and deployed. If we simply accept the world as it stands, we fail to question the underlying voices and agendas that drive the initiatives that appear on the surface to be neutral. We can imagine other possibilities by first critiquing that which exists.
This book has discussed governing institutions from Indian policy makers to colonial museums, both of which are obvious candidates for the Foucauldian critique. However, theories of governmentality encourage us to consider more public institutions, such as hospitals or schools. Foucault argues that disciplined subjects enact discourse as they “freely participate” in such systems—for example, by choosing which schools to attend. Similarly, citizens would seem to hold agency in their choice to participate in public technology efforts such as the project I describe in this chapter. I believe that we must think critically about Foucault’s idea of governmentality in relation not only to the types of projects I have discussed throughout this book, but also more broadly in environments today where “open” projects in government, science, culture, and the arts are lauded far and wide. We must think long and hard about what types of open projects truly speak to the democratic labeling with which they are associated. We can ask a number of important questions. For example, do projects that make data open for grassroots use mask agendas associated with data collection, monetization, surveillance, or the feeding of algorithms?
Social theorist Nikolas Rose has argued that a Foucauldian critique of technology can best be undertaken in terms of two categories, technologies of self and technologies of market.14 “Technologies of the self” relate to the construction of identity while “technologies of the market” relate to the social world. Rose explains that “expertise” is a key component of the disciplining of self. The protocols in systems of neoliberalism discipline subjects by suggesting and popularizing various categories as reference points by which users define themselves. To live a quality life, you must conform to the protocols through which rewards are given and avoid actions that generate punishment. As this is often framed in relation to the language of empowerment, it demonstrates how discourses of governmentality provide a user with an illusory sense of freedom and autonomy. For example, people receive rewards and badges through their online participation on sites such as Foursquare or Yelp, the number of followers they may have on Twitter, and so on.
“Technologies of the market,” Rose’s second category, extend the notion of “self” into the social and economic world. Confirmations of identity and acts of aspiration are coded to affirm the privileged position of those who profit from “open” market patterns. These technologies brand commodities to affirm “free choice.” One can think of the predictive analytics suggested by various technology companies, ranging from Amazon to Netflix, as examples of “free choice” underlying ontological prescriptions and protocols. Discourses of power and inequality are reenacted through initiatives framed as democratic and participatory.
Applying the critique of governmentality to new technology is insightful. It reveals how much of today’s contemporary experience of the Internet across the world is rooted in the flexible framework of neoliberalism whereby a technology user is presented with a series of “free” choices, including access to open data, that may lead to outcomes that support the agenda of the organization designing the information or technology system. At stake in the numerous examples I share in this book is the tension between the top down and the bottom up, the global and the local, and the preclassified and the emergent. Foucault’s writings are a useful compass to keep in mind as we navigate the multiple ambivalences associated with digital technology and its global spread.
Provincializing New Media
This book has argued that mere access to new technology neither creates “open societies” nor resolves existing forms of economic and social stratification. The “global village” has not come to pass. We know that multiple linguistic Internets exist in parallel and that one’s use of social media technology often promotes demographic homogeneity. We also know that Twitter is a heavily African American space of conversation, but very few of these conversations cross ethnically demographic boundaries. We know that a massive Chinese Internet exists that rarely intersects with pages written in other languages or published via social media networks.
While it is important to learn about other people, cultures, and communities on their terms, we must respect the power and importance of local, cultural, indigenous, and community-based creative uses of technology. Conversations that surpass the bounds of community can and should emerge but only when the voices of their participants are truly respected. From this perspective, the “global village” is the problem rather than the solution. We must reject assumptions about technology and culture that are dictated by Western concepts of cosmopolitanism.
To embrace diverse voices and rethink technologies, we can attempt to “provincialize” digital media by locating the collaborations we create within the situated realities of time, place, and community. Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman draws on theorist Dipesh Chakrabarty15 to discuss what provincializing may make possible:
To provincialize digital media is not to deny their scale and global reach, particularly in the circulation of finance capital and in the aspirations of transnational corporations; rather, it allows us to consider the way these media have become central to the articulation of cherished beliefs, ritual practices, and modes of being in the world; the fact that digital media culturally matters is undeniable but showing how, where and why it matters is necessary to push against peculiarly narrow presumptions about the universality of digital experience.16
Technologies can support diverse communities when they are not thought of autonomously but as part of a process of ethical, respectful collaboration. What they produce and how they are designed can be powerfully opened up, considering the examples I have provided throughout this book. Instead of perpetuating the false metacategory of “technology” as some sort of given, the task of provincializing should consider the materialities and design practices associated with specific devices and tools within the context of community life. We should recognize the importance of designing technologies with the cultures and communities they are supposed to serve. In so doing, they can support not only the local ontologies and voices of these peoples but empower performances and practices that bind and sustain community.
Chapter 2 has described how the process of telling stories through the use of video cameras can support greater collective reflection and mobilization in rural India. Chapters 3 and 4 have extended this analysis to demonstrate how the codes of digital technology—its databases, algorithms, and interfaces—can be rewritten to support the knowledge practices, or ontologies, of indigenous Native Americans. When we remember the people and places which give shape to technology, we stop thinking of people and communities as objectified ‘users.’ We can engage with technology without being ‘captured’ by it.
Cosmopolitan Solutions
Jan Chipchase, corporate ethnographer of technology, explains in his 2007 TED talk that rural Africans and inner-city Chinese use mobile phones because they want to be part of “the conversation.”17 His perspective is that as new technologies are developed, it is only a matter of time before everyone on the planet comes within their embrace. Yet who is “everyone” and who defines what this “conversation” is? If we ask this question and reflect on it honestly, we must recognize that terms such as “everyone” mask the reality that very few voices are included in the conversation. To illustrate my argument that contemporary thinking around technology fails to focus on the lived realities and visions of developing world communities, I would like to discuss two recent texts that have made an impression on scholars, activists, and a public interested in where the Internet is headed.
Civic media scholar Ethan Zuckerman’s Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection,18 and technology critic Evgeny Morozov’s To Save Everything Click Here,19 poignantly critique the oversimplifications of technospeak. Yet neither of them sufficiently emphasizes the power of grassroots community agency. Morozov, building on his previous book The Net Delusion,20 takes aim at the dreams of “solutionists” or those who believe in introducing technologies that solve problems that may not even exist. He explains that this denies society the opportunity to reflect, discuss, and collectively imagine alternative futures outside the ideologies and practices of Silicon Valley. Zuckerman in contrast discusses how the digital world may isolate rather than connect peoples from different cultures and nations. He thus argues that we need to rewire the Internet so that people across the world can interact with one another easily, explaining that the big problems in the world are global in scale. Zuckerman is particularly focused on how the Internet tends to support trivial and local experiences at the cost of cross-cultural awareness. While scholars have long been concerned with increased civic disinvestment in the United States since the 1950s, Zuckerman’s concerns are almost the opposite. He argues that the world faces global challenges and if the technologies of our time fail to empower global conversations, we need to rewire the Internet.
I appreciate both these texts because neither writer accepts the world of technology as it stands. “Solution”-providing technologies should not replace the public imagination nor should they be limited to cultural, national, or demographic bubbles. Yet the focus of both authors on elite technologists or journalists is limited, as in so doing they fail to sufficiently consider the experiences and voices of the marginalized themselves, specifically in the global South. Zuckerman’s work certainly is sympathetic to this critique, as his advocacy for the Global Voices effort represents an attempt to bring together activist bloggers who support stakeholder communities.
Morozov’s critique of a culture of gadgets and apps is advanced through a critique of “technological exceptionalism,” or the overstated prophecies that accompany new technologies. He notes that the term “Internet” (with a capital “I”) has become hallowed ground that can never be questioned. Such deification blocks the possibility of productive reimagining. No one dares critique terms like “openness,” “generativity,”21 or the “Internet” in such a world. Yet how these terms are interpreted depend on who holds the power to define and apply them: “Before the idea of ‘the internet’ hijacked our imaginations, we made such trade-offs all the time. No serious philosopher would ever proclaim that either transparency or openness is an unquestionable good or absolute value to which human societies should aspire.”22
Sociologists and historians of science have long made the types of arguments that Morozov popularizes. Historian Peter Galison has written about a technology-obsessed world in which “progress” marches onward at the cost of experimentation, reflection, and improvisation.23 Similarly, sociologist Bruno Latour asks us to question the methods by which facts are made public, describing the distinction between “matters of fact” and “matters of concern.”24 “Matters of fact” often produce a narrowing of vision, blocking a far more complex reality. Latour argues that just as we need transparency in the social construction of truth, we also need a social tool called “reversibility” which makes visible the concerns, actors, and chains of events that shape an agenda to which science or technology is deployed.25 From this perspective, we can view our public as “ever in the making,”26 open to improvisation and new possibilities rather than coded by the invisible algorithm of some “app.”
Unlike Morozov, whose writing is primarily critical, Zuckerman’s piece is a call to arms. We must rewire digital infrastructures and networks so they will support value systems consistent with cosmopolitan connectivity. The Global Voices project, initiated by Zuckerman and Internet freedom advocate Rebecca Mackinnon, connects bloggers and citizen journalists across the world. The effort is dedicated to presenting news that has not been editorialized by the mainstream media or filtered by social media technologies. Global Voices stories can shape mainstream media coverage and reach users worldwide, thanks to the project’s emphasis on translation. While language represents powerful “glue” that creates and supports community, to Zuckerman’s thinking it is also a barrier that can separate people. Zuckerman’s point that multiple linguistic Internets exist in parallel, most notably on the Chinese and English language networks, underscores his belief in the importance of bridging such divisions. Zuckerman thus celebrates the xenophile, the one person who loves the other, arguing that this individual can become a “bridge figure” who links communities that are currently linguistically, culturally, and technologically disconnected.27
I had the privilege of attending the most recent Global Voices summit in Nairobi, Kenya, over several days in the summer of 2012. I fondly recall interacting with a youthful, open-minded group of volunteers who shared a belief in the undelivered promise of digital technology networks to bring peoples and cultures together. Indeed, Zuckerman’s argument is seductive—many scholars who attended the summit openly wondered what the world, let alone the Internet, would look like if it were more like the Global Voices community.
Zuckerman is correct to say that many of today’s challenges, such as climate change, require global conversation and cross-cultural awareness. Yet not all challenges are global and that indeed thinking globally about people’s traditions, knowledges, struggles and identities may unintentionally exclude them from positions of control and power. We should not be forced to think globally at the cost of our own communities, particularly when globalization has contributed to their disenfranchisement. For example, one “problem” that is not global is the crisis the world faces around disappearing linguistic and cultural diversity. Engaging with this challenge must require respecting the voices and knowledges of local communities who represent such diversity. It cannot be modeled from afar or above. Indeed, imposing a rewired Internet upon these cultures could threaten rather than support diversity.
I have paid special attention here to presenting major arguments drawn from Morozov and Zuckerman’s recent books, as I believe both authors’ views represent provocative and mainstream perspectives toward the question of how new technologies can better support diverse communities and cultures worldwide.
A local community should not be an implementation site for a development project or a venue to gather more technology users. As chapter 2 has argued, we should not make assumptions about information, communication, or technology before thinking about what development means from a community’s perspective, recognizing that it is something all of us can strive toward, independent of place and culture. By supporting the decentralized networks that the Internet was supposed to be founded upon, we can respect the diverse ways in which people may choose to live their lives, and consider how technologies may be designed or used to achieve such an aim. Supporting diversity does not have to be at the cost of cross-cultural communication. Yet perhaps the best way to confront global problems is to recognize and respect our differences. We can think about new technologies similarly.
A Third Space for Technology
Perhaps it is time to move past the pro- versus anti-technology conversation to consider a third space, one that focuses on the actions we take and sees technologies as part of processes and relationships. Cultural studies scholar Homi Bhabha describes his notion of a “third space” as an alternative to the false binaries which, he believes, were produced through centuries of colonialism:
The theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of multiculturalism or the diversity of cultures, but on the inscription and articulation of culture’s hybridity. It is the in-between space that carries the burden of the meaning of culture, and by exploring this Third Space, we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves.28
Bhabha is asking us to recognize that the stories we present are partly about ourselves as well. To serve as a force of mobilization, the third space cannot be promised or dismissed from afar. It could, however, direct our attention toward local communities—their ontologies, practices, and ethics.
We should remember that living experiences are far more diverse than the ways in which technologies may code them. Anthropologist Clifford Geertz cleverly describes the humanistic experience of living as an ethnographic algorithm.29 In contrast to this, many popular terms today such as “big data,” “search,” or “personalization” are blindly embraced as neutral, progressive, and innovative. Each reflects particular regimes of interpretation that “take place within horizons of culture that are embedded in contexts of power.”30 This is why it is all the more important to move past the blank acceptance of such language to consider more deeply our actions and intentions around technology. With this in mind, I think of sociologist of technology Phil Agre’s concerns that globalization and its interactions with networked technology would bring about a world of “shallow diversity.”31 Agre’s discussion of “deep diversity,” in contrast, considers the importance of respecting local knowledge.
How can we think about technologies similarly? We need to develop projects that respect rather than ignore the multiple ways of knowing, or ontologies, that are part of a diverse community life. They may have to consider that no knowledge can ever be fully represented by a database, algorithm, or interface, no matter how it was designed. Shallow diversity, in contrast, is perpetuated when the framework of knowing is predetermined, when architectures for managing knowledge are developed independently of the experiential and interactive possibilities of that knowledge. Agre argues that there is a great deal at stake in such a decision:
A world without deep diversity would leave us poorer as human beings. Perhaps we will maintain always-on connections to everyone we know, but that will do us little good if none of those people knows or feels anything that is deeply different from what we know or feel in our own lives. It is only through the encounter with difference that we are able to question our own assumptions, and it is only through the encounter with difference that we can distinguish between our own heads and the radical strangeness and challenge of the real world. In a world of shallow diversity, we will prosper and we will die. We must learn to value and conserve deep diversity, and we must learn what it would even mean to replenish what has been lost.32
Our deeper differences are at stake if we push forward with technology efforts that export shallow diversity. A world of deep diversity would respect the sovereignty and autonomy of cultural difference and consider technology accordingly.
Taking the Digital Up
Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, and Jared Cohen, head of Google Ideas and a former U.S. State Department employee, argue in their latest book, The New Digital Age: Transforming Nations, Businesses, and Our Lives, that the global spread of technology will naturally support liberal, democratic values.33 They suggest that there is something “natural” in networked digital technologies that spreads these values. Cohen and Schmidt, together with a number of other writers, presume that the Internet is a naturally open space. They apply this thinking to their discussion of politics and governance, arguing that nations such as China that reject “transparency” will find themselves increasingly excluded and isolated.
In a New Republic piece, Evgeny Morozov lambasts Schmidt and Cohen’s views as hype, citing the Singer brochure of the nineteenth century that was full of similarly overstated rhetoric about the sewing machine: “Schmidt and Cohen are full of the same aspirations—globalism, humanitarianism, cosmopolitanism—that informed the Singer brochure. . . . The goal of books such as this one is not to predict but to reassure—to show the commoners, who are unable on their own to develop any deep understanding of what awaits them, that the tech-savvy elites are sagaciously in control.”34
Morozov’s point is that all new technologies are accompanied by a great amount of overstated hype. Far from being simple bluster, such hype can reinforce the power and privilege of those who create these machines. By being blindly celebrated rather than critically scrutinized, technocrats are supposedly able to impose their political and economic wills on a silent public. Yet this perspective, according to cultural anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, fails to recognize that many communities across the world cannot be defined by these false utopias.
The discourse of the digital age smuggles in a set of assumptions that paper over cultural differences in the way things digital may be taken up . . . (invoking) neo-developmentalism that assumes that less privileged cultural enclaves with little or no access to digital resources—from the South Bronx to the global South—are simply waiting, endlessly, to catch up to the privileged West.35
Morozov’s focus on overstated rhetoric ignores a reality, namely, that while the sewing machine never fulfilled its utopic prophecies, it was still deeply meaningful to particular communities and their livelihoods. This is because many communities carve their own destinies around technology in ways that cannot be predicted. They take the digital up.
For example, if we only consider the hype associated with the sewing machine, we tend to ignore groups such as the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union, one of the largest grassroots organizations that fought for social justice related to women’s rights and labor practices.36 The workers’ union was not trapped by a “liberation versus doomsday” conversation about how they should organize around this technology. We can recognize the strategic means by which technologies are being appropriated by communities throughout the world in similar fashion.
Ginsburg illuminates the importance of paying attention to how the “digital is taken up.” Such an understanding reveals how labor movements, geographies, and identities shape and modify their practice around technology to support their agendas. These social and cultural actions cannot be captured only by the “magic” of technology, and are better described by how it was “taken up.” Feminist scholar of science and technology, Sandra Harding, has argued that all knowledge attempts are socially situated, grounded by peoples and places. Yet in stratified societies, “the activities of those at the top both organize and set limits on what [the] persons [who] perform such activities can understand about themselves and the world around them.”37
Jared Cohen, Eric Schmidt, and even critic Evgeny Morozov’s perspectives reflect “standpoints” of power, restricting the social and cultural meanings of digital technology. Yet from Harding’s perspective, these views are nothing but standpoints, stories like any others that claim the mantle of truth. This false dualism erases another story that recognizes the agency of local communities and reimagines digital technology accordingly. This standpoint imagines a new path forward toward collaborating and supporting community-driven technology efforts.
Revolution and Repair
To offer a contemporary example of my argument that we can best understand the meaning of technology by how it is “taken up,” I turn to the misguided discussion of “social media revolutions” with which I began this book’s first chapter. I revisit this theme in the hope that the preceding chapters can inform a deeper reading of the actions people around the world are taking to fight for justice and change. I speak here of the wave of revolutionary movements that have occurred in several regions of the world since late 2010, spanning student protests in Europe and South America, regime-changing Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and the struggle for economic and social justice in the Western world. Given the insights from this book, it is clear that the notion of these revolutions being “technologically powered” falsely emphasizes the exceptionalism of new technologies and their creators.
We see yet again here the fallacies of technocentric thinking that ignores local context. While there has been important empirical work that has examined media and technology use contextually in these movements,38 most popular punditry remains fixated on blindly praising the democratizing potential of social media tools or categorically dismissing them. Neither seems particularly interested in “culture” or “people-first” stories that examine the meaning of these tools in relation to the tactics, knowledges, and practices of activists on the ground.
Clay Shirky’s “Political Power of Social Media” argues that “when we change the way we communicate, we change society.”39 Shirky’s position implies that any contemporary political discussion must place social media and the Internet at its center. In contrast, writers like Malcolm Gladwell, in his New Yorker piece from October 2010 entitled “Small Change—Why the Revolution Will Not Be Tweeted” argue that while social media may promote “shallow” information sharing, it could also support the agendas of despotic regimes. Shirky’s writing lauds exceptional cases in which decentralized groups of activists come together via a Facebook group, while also extrapolating from Internet memes, such as “cute cats,” to make the claim that social media brings people together. Gladwell’s article, in contrast, discusses examples of “slacktivism,” such as clickable petitions that fail to translate into a sustained political movement.
These examples of technology use are interesting yet problematic because they simplify our understanding of what technology can mean by failing to discuss the deeper contexts of place, community, or culture. The fact that an activist blogs or creates a Facebook page is not as important as who he or she is attempting to reach by using this media or how this social media activity coordinates with other nondigital actions undertaken by that same person. Indeed, activists may use such tools to spread misinformation rather than supporting Shirky’s overstated notion of “building community.” By focusing on the hybrid manners (online, offline, both, or neither) that activists use to shape the world around them, powerful stories emerge that cannot be limited to a conversation about the “nature” of technology. Instead, they are all about how the digital is “taken up.” What is missing on both sides of this debate is the recognition of local community voices and knowledge, which if considered would open up a multiplicity of explanations for how technologies may or may not assist a political movement. Looking at places and peoples provides valuable insights that consider how people struggling for social change shape newer and older technologies.
With the goal of respecting and humanizing the peoples and places in the political landscape of the Arab Spring, I have collaborated with activists in Egypt since 2011. My ethnographies have revealed that activists have increasingly learned how to exploit different technologies to achieve their own aims, not by using them simply as prescribed but by creatively appropriating them to support grassroots goals and priorities.40 From this perspective nothing in these tools “naturally” generates revolution. They may, however, be wielded to support the visions of activists on the ground.
As of January 2011, Cairo—the most infrastructurally advanced Egyptian city—had less than 10 percent Facebook and 5 percent Twitter connectivity. Some scholars have assumed that the revolutionaries had no means of communicating with one another without such technology, described as the “collective action problem.”41 Yet this assumption is confounded by the reality that very few of those who protested actually had access to the technology. I learned how activists strategically used technologies to influence the far more pervasive mainstream media, shaping a larger “media ecology” whereby television networks and social media platforms inform one another. This influenced the coverage on networks like Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, which are broadcast into millions of homes throughout Egypt, where satellite television access has been nearly ubiquitous since its deregulation in the early 1990s. I was stunned in the midst of my fieldwork in 2011 to discover a shack on a rooftop in the old Islamic neighborhood of Cairo that only had one electricity outlet connected to a makeshift satellite dish that could access these channels.
Journalists are increasingly subject to a twenty-four-hour, “always on” news cycle, and thus turn to social media platforms as a useful way to help source their stories. This gives activists who use social media the opportunity to amplify what they wish to share. While this is hardly sufficient to make a revolution possible, it is an example of how activists may manipulate and influence journalists and their audiences through the creative use of social media. My research in Egypt reveals the creativity, bravery, and intuition that drove this revolutionary movement’s goals of achieving “bread, freedom, and social justice.”42 Within the overall research there is space for writing about the appropriation of technology. What we cannot do, however, is continue to believe the hype that revolutions are somehow made possible by social media and the Internet.
When we continue to debate the “native” capacities and potential of particular tools and technologies without considering the far more interesting question of how diverse communities shape such tools in accordance with their own visions, aspirations, and ontologies, we insulate ourselves in an elite, technocratic narrative that defies the reality on the ground. This manner of speaking places the elite technologies of the developed world at the start and the end of each such story. The heroic youth we see in the mainstream media are portrayed as willing and eager “users” of technology, rather than creative and dedicated activists devoted to transforming their nation through whatever means possible.
Figure 5.4. A shack on a rooftop in Islamic Cairo, where I observed the indirect effects of social media.
Egyptian blogger and activist Gigi Ibrahim, featured on the cover of Time magazine’s February 28, 2011 issue, explained to me that the West “needs to believe that we could not have [made revolution possible] without their digital toys.” The Time magazine story filters out many facets of her identity, including her political values, connection to a fifteen-year-old labor movement, her history of protest, and knowledge of the street. She is fetishized as a young Arab technology user, part of the “social media generation changing the world.”43
The longer we speak about digital technologies as disembodied, the longer we perpetuate myths that disrespect the power and potential of communities and cultures worldwide. Not only do we misunderstand revolutions but we also fail to recognize how technologies are shaped and often “repaired” to support grassroots agendas and economies. Sociologist and cofounder of New Delhi’s Sarai collective, Ravi Sundaram, has written vivid ethnographies of the “grey markets” of South Asia, where technologies are hacked on the street and recontextualized within informal local economies. He points out that we should understand the diffusion of digital technologies as a type of “recycled modernity” in a dynamic world of instability.44
Consistent with Sundaram’s narratives, information scientist Steven Jackson discusses decay, erosion, and “repair cultures” in the developing world.45 His work contrasts dramatically with squeaky-clean innovation discussions that are increasingly part of technospeak. Jackson tells another story about technology that considers the risk, uncertainty, and improvisation in parts of the world where certain digital tools may have spread. In this world dialectics and dichotomies abound—we marvel at the creative ways in which the iPhone is soldered on the street in inner cities worldwide, while recognizing how exposure to e-waste is shaping a cancer epidemic in West Africa. Jackson asks us to pay attention to the flows by which such devices travel and recognize how their spread shapes power and privilege. We can humanize peoples, places, histories and stories.
Indeed, while we embrace a narrative of growth and progress from the perspective of the “heroic innovators” who first developed digital technologies telling stories of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, when we trace the uncanny movement of industrial ships to the shores of Bangladesh or landfills of Central Africa, different realities become visible. It all depends on our frame of articulation—how we choose to46 understand and process a range of different realities. Jackson’s research is a reminder of the need to respect and learn from the creativity, resilience, and reinvention exhibited by communities on the margins. Yet it is also a reminder that such practices are interconnected with environmental devastation and e-waste as part of an unjust world.
Innovation and repair are thus two sides of the same coin, demonstrating that we cannot understand technology simply as it is developed. Instead, as these tools spread to different places and communities over time other realities reveal themselves.
In this spirit, Jenna Burrell’s research in West Africa looks at how technologies shape the aspirations and tactics of Ghanaian and Nigerian scammers. She shows how the obsolete technological junk of the elite world is appropriated by these communities to shape “rumors.”47 Instead of seeing the scammers as desperate criminals or as antithetical to the Internet’s “ideals” from a privileged perch, Burrell humanizes their communities, revealing their agency to act as they can in an unequal world.
Western mantras such as “global village” or “social media revolution” hardly apply to the examples that abound in Jackson or Burrell’s fieldwork. Instead, what we see are examples of improvisation and intuition. They defy farcical narratives of innovation, described by philosopher Shiv Viswanathan as the “tyrranies of official science.” As Portuguese sociologist Boaventura Santos and colleagues argue:
Over the last decades there has been a growing recognition of the cultural diversity of the world, with current controversies focusing on the terms of such recognition. . . . The epistemological privilege granted to modern science from the seventeenth century onwards, which made possible the technological revolutions that consolidated Western supremacy, was also instrumental in suppressing other non-scientific forms and knowledges. . . . [It is now time] to build a more democratic and just society and . . . decoloniz[e] knowledge and power.48
These scholars argue that a democratic and just society does not mandate what counts as knowledge but instead learns from its communities and constituencies. At the same time Nobel laureate and Harvard economist Amartya Sen, in his keynote address at the recent World Culture Forum, warns us to not valorize diversity at the cost of remembering the rights and values that bind us all.49
Figure 5.7. A Congolese laborer extracting Coltan, panning for minerals for more than twelve hours per day. Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk.
Figure 5.6. Laborers assembling the iPhone in the FoxConn corporation (Shenzen, China). Source: http://armored-column.com.
Sen’s book, Identity and Violence,50 explains that cultural categories, when blindly embraced, may work to sow enmity rather than support dialogue and mutual understanding. For example, overstating science or technology as simply Western is problematic, given that many who “produce” these tools, perhaps in subservient positions of technology support or call centers, live in different parts of the world.51
As Figures 5.6 and 5.7 illustrate vividly, we too cannot fully grasp the meaning of an iPhone or any technology or infrastructure without recognizing the spaces in which it is produced, such as the factories of FoxConn in Shenzen, China, or the places from which its Coltan mineral is harvested, such as the mines in remote regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Just as we must peer into the repair practices by which technologies may be re-constructed long after their moments of planned obsolescence, we have the opportunity to become familiar with the environmental and labor practices that go into making the technologies we hold in our hands. We can think ethically and politically about these practices as we make decisions about how we choose to consume and interact with technologies and the corporations that produce them.
Ontologies and Seeing Like a State
Many of the community-based projects described throughout this book may be criticized for their specificity. Technology efforts are launched with scale in mind, considering policy making and developmental funding realities tied to initiatives that claim to achieve broader impacts. With larger numbers in mind, researchers, professionals, and funders can make more general arguments about the meaning of technology, at times extrapolating too broadly from specific examples.
The tension between community-centered and scale-based thinking is worth thinking about. I believe our work with community ontologies need not always come at the expense of macro-level thinking. Perhaps striving for scale is naturally not a priority for most such community-based efforts, which are notable for the value they attach to specific personal and place-based relationships. That said, in some cases communities are understandably interested in turning outward to build up relationships with external institutions and publics.
Political scientist and anthropologist James C. Scott makes an important contribution to this discussion in his book Seeing Like a State, a historical and political analysis of the relationships between information, stakeholder communities, and policy making.52 The book is about how well-intended schemes administered by governments to improve the lives of citizens often fail. Scott argues that the problem is not simply poor infrastructure, inadequate services, or corruption, but also how citizens are framed, measured, and quantified. One challenge is thus to know how knowledge is articulated, represented, and exploited, in this case specifically how the state chooses to identify its constituent citizens. Scott explains that states must “make a society legible to arrange the population in ways that [simplify functions] of taxation, conscription, and the prevention of rebellion.”53 These practices are part of the legacy of high modernism and indebted to theories of scientific and rational planning.
Not only is the government approach that Scott describes far messier than meets the eye, but its method of quantifying citizens and resources is also limited. The problem is that scientific planning approaches often assume that abstract categories can describe development issues for a vast range of communities. It is troubling to apply master models from the state that fail to adapt to the voices of its citizens or learn from their local ontologies. Yet in other cases it is understandable—it would seem that the responsibility of governing a state requires seeing the world in ways that differ significantly from bottom-up grassroots experiences. Categories can force conformity by making certain types of knowledge public and acceptable, and others invisible and silent. In the process, these forms of misrepresentation can discredit local ontologies. While communities may engage in “metis” or tactical actions, the ontologies by which they are governed will by definition fail to consider their priorities.
What then can be done to reconcile the ways of policy and scale with the importance of respecting community ontologies? One approach may be to work with rather than to ignore incommensurability. With my colleague Jessica Seddon, a developmental economist based in South India, I have explored two interventions in the context of citizen grievances in the South Indian state of Karnataka. Our first approach has been to open up data gathered by the state for local reuse and appropriation, consistent with the move an increased interest today in big data and “open government.” Our second approach has been to design systems whereby communities can articulate their grievances according to their own locally crafted fluid ontologies. Both allow data to be shared “as is” and open up a space for a group, whether a policy maker or local community, to reinterpret the data as they choose.
To illustrate our argument, Seddon and I have explored the ways in which slum dwellers in inner-city Bangalore, India, articulate concerns that they wish to report to the government and how this differs from the Karnataka provincial government’s means of recording the very same experiences. These grievances are gathered by the government using a variety of information technologies deployed at kiosks and mobile applications throughout the city. One example we have explored relates to “waterlogging,” a category used by policy makers to describe the many ways in which flooding and intense rain impacts regions in South Asian cities. Seddon and I found that this term made little sense to the inner-city communities who were supposed to report on this via the public grievance technology. The communities had specific, richly contextual ways of describing the flooding that would affect them, none of which lent themselves to the bureaucratic terms used by the government. Inner-city dwellers in the city of Bangalore, for example, would describe the effects of waterlogging using dozens of distinct terms, none of which were based on the abstraction of this meta-ontological term.
Our work on mismatched ontologies speaks to the danger of ignoring, filtering, or dismissing local knowledge. Yet it also considers what can be gained by uncovering bridges when community voices and ontologies are given the power to shape the practices of policy making.
Stepping away from Theories
I have shared stories of my collaborations with communities across the world to argue for a rethinking of how we design and understand the meaning of new technologies. Awareness of cultural diversity is essential as we think about the global yet asymmetric diffusion of new digital tools and systems. We must remember that “culture” or “community” are far too easily objectified when our discussions of new technology confine themselves to innovation-speak. We can embrace the process of learning from one another rather than clinging to narratives developed from afar. This should apply not only to how we analyze what technologies mean, but to the theories we, as activists, researchers, or publics, use as we attempt to understand the significance of technology across the world.
I have gained a great deal from this lesson of detaching myself from early-stage hypotheses and to learn instead from the communities with which I collaborate. This reveals itself in the stories I have shared throughout this book’s chapters. My effort to explore the potential of video storytelling in India in chapter 2 was driven by the hypothesis that such a process could inspire new reflections and conversations. Yet my hypothesis was hardly relevant to what I learned about how such tools could be appropriated by villagers to support their literacy practices and political and social struggles. Similarly, the Tribal Peace effort described in chapter 3 can be evaluated in relation to a hypothesis that theorized learning or usability outcomes in Native community-created interfaces or databases. It turns out that this aim was only a small part of a story that taught me to respect the power of disagreement, human networks, and community-based knowledge. My work with the Zuni and our Amidollane effort, described in chapter 4, could be articulated in terms of the hypothesis of increasing Zuni participation in conversations where they had too often been silenced. While this goal remained part of our collaboration, the stories I share in chapter 4 showed that knowledge cannot simply be captured in the realm of abstraction but must include the things we do, namely, our daily practices. This collaboration reveals the power of indigenous voices to subvert a museum-centric view of the world in favor of one that respects community diversity.
Each of these efforts taught me that the confirmation or rejection of a hypothesis means little when the original questions we ask come from a misguided place. We cannot presume to know what “technology questions” must be studied from afar—whether we live in an ivory tower or a state-of- the-art research laboratory. Viewing the projects I have shared through a technology-first lens miscasts the larger realizations of this book, that is, the unanticipated and emergent experiences that come from collaboration. Trained as a designer and engineer, I recognize my innate tendency to valorize my power to come up with a set of solutions for any challenge at hand. Yet every project I have described illustrates the valuable insights gained when I put aside my own agenda and bias as much as possible to open myself up to experiences that could not have been predicted from afar. From this perspective, design is not simply about aesthetics and usability but also a process of supporting conversation and communication.
There is a significant body of research that discusses how designers can support the diverse social and cultural values articulated by the communities with whom they collaborate.54 Within the different cultures, communities and environments I describe throughout this book, it has been important not to see design as providing solutions, or even worse as a form of social engineering. My time in Egypt, for example, taught me that I should only put on my “design hat” when requested. There is important work to be done in gathering and sharing stories that recognize the power and sovereignty of the activists and their struggles.
As we think cross-culturally about the Internet and new technology, I believe it is time to tip the scales away from world-making and instead to embrace world-listening. We should consider whether there is a new path forward for scholars, policy makers, and activists to put their agendas aside, even for a few minutes, to consider “Whose Global Village” we choose to support. As scholars, activists, or professionals we have been inculcated with a range of worldviews. We must recognize these while opening ourselves up to collaborations that reveal perspectives and ontologies that differ from our own.
This argument is not to declare that we are meaningless in such collaborations but rather that we should place ourselves first and foremost at the service of our friends and partners. As my colleagues at Zuni pointed out repeatedly, “If you are here to support our goals and visions, then you are welcome.” Complementing this point of view, an activist in Egypt explained to me, “We do not need another NGO or a new dialog.com to solve our problems—we just need you to listen, support our voices, and pay attention to what we do.”
My research and public practice have been transformed thanks to the experiences narrated in this book. Today I ask my partners how I can be of service to them in furthering their aims and visions and navigate the ambiguity of this process together with the demands of academic publishing and research. My role in Egypt, for example, has been to observe, listen, and attempt to be of service. The greatest honor has come via the invitations I have received to discuss with activists what I have learned over the past few years spent in their nation and by sharing my professional and personal knowledge of media and social movements in other regions of the world. Having been invited to share stories of Egyptian activism with Zapatistas, Tibetans, indigenous peoples in Bolivia, and other communities across the world has been a reminder to me of how I can learn from diverse peoples and communities, and the stories they choose to share.
Splintered Networks
With 6 billion mobile phones now in the hands of people worldwide, no longer can we think of our study of technology through simple prognostications from afar or a top-down analysis. The arguments I have made across this book have raised a provocative question: What would it mean to step away from top-down understandings of the Internet and instead ‘splinter’ the way we think about technologies and the communities they may support?
Many technologists continue to push forward with their desire to “unify,” “open,” and “reform,” with only their assumptions in mind. This may originate from the best of intentions, but it lacks faith that global dialogues can indeed emerge from the bottom up by respecting local communities. We have an opportunity to listen to and support diverse communities without ignoring the global conversations and challenges collectively faced by peoples across the world.
It is notable that activists—whether through bit coins, proxy servers, block chains, mesh networks, or encryption software—have embraced the “splinternet,” or an Internet that is split along technical, commercial, political, ethnic, religious, or other social lines. Technology journalist Doc Searls describes the splinternet as the “growing distance between the ideals of the Internet and the realities of dysfunctional nationalisms . . . which contribute to the various and sometimes incompatible standards which often make it hard for search engines to use the data.”55 Searls’s solution is to “standardize information and technology to make the world better, to make the Net work.”56
There is great peril in following such a path. It is notable that Searls assumes that a networked technology (the Internet) has an “ideal,” without revealing whose values power this vision. In contrast, activists, not just in the developing world of the global South, but in the postindustrial West, have begun to recognize that an open Internet increasingly means greater surveillance and policing. They have thus begun to fight for autonomy. The following activist brief indicates as much:
Using “mesh network” technology, activists recognize that “when you run your own network . . . nobody can shut it down. . . . It harkens back to the early days of the digital universe when the network consisted mostly of university scientists and researchers communicating among themselves without corporations sitting in the middle or government (that we know of) monitoring their chats. The goal then, as now, was both connection and control: an internet of one’s own.”57
I have pointed out the perils of an increasingly homogeneous Internet, a network that claims to democratize while also functioning to support top-down political and economic agendas. I also have briefly pointed to the challenges of working with digital technology in a moment where our data can be increasingly captured and controlled by surveillance institutions and corporations. The splinternet may not be the answer to the dilemma we face, yet it is increasingly the direction taken by activists and grassroots communities concerned with where their data goes and how it is used. That said, a fragmented Internet runs the risk of isolating cultures and societies from one another, making it impossible to work together on global issues such as climate change, conflict resolution, or human rights. Purely local “intranets’ face the challenge of being unable to scale, cutting short. While this book’s chapters primarily emphasized the potential of collaboration, they revealed what can be gained when we balance the local and global in ways that respect the sovereignty of grassroots voices in informing global communication.
It is incredible to think about what may be possible when we think about technology locally and culturally rather than globally. The question is one of values, control, and voice. We are at a point in time where we can either embrace diversity or ignore it. We can embrace incommensurability without getting trapped by identity politics. We can accept that the promise of digital equality is unfulfilled. To accept these challenges, we need to stop, look, listen, and collaborate.
If we take the current Internet, as articulated by Facebook, Google, Microsoft and their ilk for granted, we are supposed to simply trust our gateways to the digital world rather than scrutinize them to imagine alternatives that are noncommercial, public, or considerate of cultural diversity. When we uncritically evangelize language such as the “cloud,” or even “Internet freedom,” we homogenize the experiences of diverse peoples. We even sell ourselves short in the Western world by failing to reconsider how networked technology can support our families, communities, and cultures. We are supposed to blindly accept the technologies we use today as “innovative,” and dismiss those who raise alternatives. But there is another path. We can instead think culturally—of values, knowledges, aspirations, and practices—to reimagine what technology can mean.
From the Lacandon jungle in the mountains of Chiapas, Mexico, Subcomandante Marcos argued in 1997 that our world had entered an era of neoliberalism which had objectified the invisible majority of the world’s population. He explained that media industries only exist for elites, presenting seductive spectacles of movie stars and politicians, designed for consumption rather than autonomy or empowerment. Yet we still do have a choice:
We have a choice: we can have a cynical attitude in the face of the media, to say nothing can be done about the dollar power that creates itself in images, digital communication, and computer systems that invade not just with an invasion of power, but with a way of seeing that world, or how they think the world should look. . . . But there is a third option that is neither conformity, nor skepticism, nor distrust: that is to construct a different way—to show the world what is really happening—to have a critical world view and become interested in the truth of what happens to the people who inhabit every corner of this world.58
Many years after this interview, Marcos’s point still rings true. Neoliberalism’s excesses have prompted social movements and revolutions across the world. The utopias associated with a global Internet have been tempered by a world in which robotic drones are sent far and wide to “manhunt.”59 The spectacular revelations brought to light by whistleblower Edward Snowden have raised concerns across the world about technologized surveillance and manipulation. Now more than ever it is time to consider Marcos’s third way. That path cannot be master wired from above, but like all historical examples of powerful democratic change, must emerge from the people. By asking the question “Whose Global Village?” we can start to think about technology futures that truly respect cultural and community diversity across the world.