Friday, December 29, 2006

New Year's present from Google

Who could imagine i will receive a present from them... but yes, they moved my blog to the new blogger and now i will have to spend some time learning the new features. I am particularly happy about the labels, which are actually the reason why i am writing this post.

OK, now i am back to my paper :)

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Digital Divide and Modernization Theory


I am reading a book called "Approaches to development communication" and one of the chapters, by Jan Servaes and Patchanee Malikhao, is telling the story of theoretical approaches to development, basically starting with modernization, through dependency to more complex and holistic approaches.

Describing modernization, one paragraph particularly caught my attention. Outlining the modernization perspective's focus on economic growth and uni-direction evolution, Servaes and Malikhao write:

"In order to be a modern society, the attitudes of 'backward' people – their traditionalism, bad taste, superstition, fatalism, etc. – which are obstacles and barriers in the traditional societies have to be removed. The differences among nations are explained in terms of the degree of development rather than the fundamental nature of each. Hence, the central problem of development was thought to revolve around the question of 'bridging the gap' and 'catching up' by means of imitation process between traditional and modern sectors, between retarded and advanced or between 'barbarian' and civilized sectors and groups to the advantage of the latter."



And I couldn't pass by the 'bridging the gap' without thinking about the digital divide rhetoric. After all the term itself – digital divide – is based in the ideology claiming that there are the advanced and the retarded in ICT adoption, and that getting more advanced necessarily means being better off. Further reading the chapter and thinking about the link, the notion that the two are really linked grew stronger. And I think there is a caution note for all of doing research in the field, or even more so, working in the field, to treat technology more critically, to remember that technology itself is not the goal, but people are.

As the development thinking seems to be moving forward to more sophisticated approaches, the research and practice related to the digital divide should catch up. I just read another article overviewing the digital divide research since the beginning of the millennium and there is a shift, but it is slow. More on that in the next post. Have to finish the paper :)


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In case you are interested, the full citation of the article is:
Servaes, J., & Malikhao, P. (2003). Development communication approaches in international perspective. In J. Servaes (Ed.) Approaches to development communication. Paris: UNESCO.




P.S. Did you notice how the donation bar at Wikipedia jumped from some 300K to 700K overnight? I wonder what has happened….?