Technology and society as embedded: an alternative framework for information and communication technology and development

Introduction

The rise of the ‘Information Society’ has emerged as one of the most influential and dominating factors of contemporary transformations. With developments of new information and communication technology (ICT) and the increasing integration of its use in our lives, the development field has begun to ask what is the role of ICT for development. In the past years, there have been numerous new projects and ideas to examine and experiment with this question. The actors in this discussion have come from various fields, including multilateral organizations, multinational corporations, national and local governments, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

Within these projects, there have been claims that ICT is a ‘core catalyst’ or ‘key strategic resource’ for economic and social development (Pade-Khene et al., 2011; Rashid and Hassan, 2012). This approach to ICT assumes that technology is inherently positive – an assumption that does not consider the interaction of ICT and social or material space.

Development projects frame ICT as a tool to create a more equitable place, but ignore that it is within an unequal society that these technologies are created, and it is through an unequal society that these technologies will be used. Society has significant and multiple roles in the ICT process. Thus, we cannot assume that the technology is alone in shaping and forming a new society; rather, we need to approach technology as a ‘socio-technical product’ (Wajcman, 2002). In this vein, Saskia Sassen (2002) provides a useful analytical framework that accounts for how technology and society overlap, allowing us to ‘[recognize] the embeddedness and the variable outcomes of these technologies for different social orders’ (p. 365).

This reframing of ICT has significant repercussions to how we examine and understand the role of ICT for development. To explore the implications of this re-conceptualization of ICT for development, I apply Sassen’s analytical framework of technology and society as embedded to a case study of community ICT centers in rural India. In contrast to the usual assessments of ICT centers, whereby technology is unquestionably assumed as a tool for development, I avoid a technological determinism that camouflages real social divisions. This approach calls into question the emphasis on development projects to offer positive and measurable outcomes without accounting for the hidden or unexplained, though no less significant, changes that so often occur from these interventions.

Current discourses of ICT and development

A common framing of ICT and development is the ‘digital divide’, whereby the focus is on closing the gap between those who possess these new technologies and those who do not (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 2000). ICT is located in exclusionary spaces, created due to unequal resources, skills, and accessibility. However, it is assumed that by closing this divide, economic and social development will follow.

Increasingly, international donor agencies, governments, business corporations, and NGOs have become interested in ICT for development. This is a questionable combination of interested parties. Current conglomerations concerning ICT and development, such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) or Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D), have frank pro-market affiliations with the private sector (Gurumurthy and Singh, 2006). The commodification of ICT has also allowed for new affinities between multilateral organizations and private sector ICT corporations, like that between United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and Microsoft (Leye, 2007). Ironically, the ICT corporations that exacerbate the digital divide are called on to address the very phenomena that they helped create.

The current state of ICT has led some to question the exaggerated optimism of information society as linked to creating enterprising subjects within neoliberal frameworks (Ong, 2007), and ICT as a means to produce consent for economic liberalization (Basu, 2010).

Alternative approaches have focused on the possibilities of ICT to create opportunities for social justice rather than inclusion in the status quo. Some hope that these new forms of information sharing will allow for a more decentralized society, where information (and power) is no longer concentrated among the elite (Reddi and Vemraju, 2006). For example, open-source software and hardware have allowed for more democratic access to ICT (Powell, 2012). In developing countries, where licensing fees often make commercial ICT inaccessible, open-source can be a way to make information truly a ‘public good’ for development, as seen in the state-sponsored open-source initiatives in Kerala, India (Thomas, 2014).

A welcomed addition to this literature is from those scholars who have highlighted the gender divide that exists within the digital one (Gurumurthy et al., 2006). They consider the socio-cultural divisions that place women at a disadvantage in terms of ICT use, especially in developing countries (Primo, 2003). Scholars have rightfully asked whether – since these policies are seeking to use ICT for development, but there is a persistent gender gap in ICT use – ICT will benefit or further disadvantage women (Goyal, 2011; Hossain and Beresford, 2012; Reddi and Vemraju, 2006).

It is apparent that the discourses surrounding ICT and its role for development are diverse. Yet, throughout these hopes, possibilities, and suspicions, there is consensus that ICT is changing our society, including the way we discuss and practice development.

ICT centers for rural development

Numerous public and private sponsored initiatives have emerged with the goal of using ICT for development. In developing countries, where urban–rural divides can be strikingly wide, many of these initiatives address how to bring digital development to rural areas. A popular initiative is the development of ICT centers in rural areas. The centers offer services such as Internet browsing, e-mail, e-governance services, and computer training. Many of the centers are owned and operated by private entrepreneurs, although some are government and NGO schemes or public–private partnerships.

It has been noted that adequate infrastructure, equality of access, relevant content, and training are important variables for the success of the centers (Sundarajan, 2006). Overarching these issues is the importance of the community having a significant role in the conceptualization, implementation, and running of the centers. Although at times, where community can be divisive, as is common in rural villages in India, centers can further contribute to the further alienation of disadvantaged lower caste and minority communities (Sreekumar, 2007).

While much of the discussion remains positive and optimistic, the success of linking ICT and rural areas is much more complicated. The impact of these projects varies, with contradicting assessments of the success and failure of these centers (Basu, 2010). The tendency in the literature is to examine why society could not accommodate to the technology (Badsar et al., 2011; Parmar, 2009). For example, an assessment of rural centers in Malaysia measured participants’ skills, center characteristics, and type of information to determine sustainability of centers (Badsar et al., 2011). In addition, the focus on concrete outcomes means that centers often remain in ‘project mode’, over-emphasizing the successful parts at the expense of ignoring the difficulties that should be part of the discussion (Reddi and Vemraju, 2006).

Despite the plethora of initiatives to bring ICT to rural areas, much of the literature on community ICT centers remains focused on whether or not ICT will contribute to development (Akca et al., 2007; Malecki, 2003; Rashid and Hassan, 2012). Even studies that account for social relations, such as gender, limit their analysis with the same framework. Goyal (2011) writes that ICT has the potential to contribute to women’s development in poor countries; yet, her examples of flexi-time work and skill upgradation are applicable to educated, middle-class women, not the illiterate and poor. A critical analysis of technology – one that examines the sociological implications of technology for society, but also of society for technology – is missing.

Moodley (2005) offers such a perspective in his assessment of ICT for poverty reduction in South Africa. There has been unprecedented investment in ICT for development initiatives, but with top-down approaches and private sector interests, it is unlikely that the needs of the poor will be sufficiently addressed. Rather, what Moodley (2005) suggests is a ‘social shaping of technology’ approach that acknowledges the ‘dynamic interaction between social forces and technological innovation’, so that technology is shaped to fit visions of a more equitable society (p. 7).

Tsatsou (2011) adds that the social life in relation to ICT is ignored because of an environment where ‘economic and technological factors are given more emphasis to explain digital divides and to justify the role of such divides in people’s socio-economic status and positioning’ (p. 324). She elaborates that most research approaches ‘socio-cultural parameters’ as the reasons and ‘policy or regulatory parameters’ as the means for closing divides; yet, it does not ask what is the dual role of these in the digital divide (Tsatsou, 2011: 324).

This article follows Tsatsou’s advice that the digital divide needs to be revisited to account for both the nonlinear effects of technology on social life and on how society, with all its divisions, dynamisms, and variations, might have a role in the construction, use, and experience of technology. What it adds is Saskia Sassen’s analytical approach to examining technology and society as embedded by placing emphasis on the role of the social and the material in an information society. Examining the relation between technology and society with this re-conceptualization of analytical categories is needed for a more critical understanding of ICT and development.

Technology and society as embedded

The sociologist Saskia Sassen (2002) writes that most analyses focus on the impact and access to information technology (IT), thus failing to capture how technology and society overlap (p. 365). This supports the view that electronic space is embedded not only in the technological hardware and software but also within societal structures and power dynamics (Latour, 1991; MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). Sassen (2002) writes that ‘There is no purely digital economy and no completely virtual corporation or community … Power, contestation, inequality, hierarchy, inscribe electronic space and shape the production of software’ (p. 366).

She argues for the development of analytical categories that go beyond purely technological interpretations and allows for embeddedness of technology and society. She presents three analytical categories to address this question of embeddedness, ‘the complex interactions between the digital and the material world, the mediating cultures … between these technologies and users, and the destabilizing of existing hierarchies of scale’ (Sassen, 2002: 365).

Her first examination is of the assumed divide between the material and the digital. Technology has produced notions of hypermobility and de-materialization that do not account for the material conditions on which they rely. Sassen gives the case of finance as an example. Finance is so often understood as digitalized and un-material, but she reminds us of the acres of material space, infrastructure, buildings, and so on, that are needed for financial markets. Rather than holding these occurrences as separate physical and non-physical, we need to address how the material and non-material overlap. The hypermobility and de-materialization of technology hides the fact that it is created in material spaces, spaces that are constructed within specific societal, cultural, economic, and political realities. To ignore this is to assume that technology is created within a vacuum void of any influences.

A second point of Sassen’s (2002) that reveals how technology and society are embedded is that culture mediates the practices between the technology and the user. The question is not the meaning and impact of technology on its users or the questions of access and understanding, but on the ‘in-between zone’ that creates the articulations between the two (p. 370). How do certain subjectivities, such as gender and age, mediate how a user and technology interact?

Finally, she asks how the digital and non-digital have destabilized older hierarchies of scale. National scales lose significance as subnational scales (such as global cities) and supranational scales (such as global market) gain ground. In this environment, we need to reexamine existing theory in order to account for the new non-state actors and cross-border interaction. We can no longer maintain narrow understandings of space, for example, Sassen (2002) discusses that what was once seen as ‘local’ (such as a building in our neighborhood) needs to be understood as a ‘micro-environment with global span’; it is both a localized entity and a part of a global digital network (p. 371).

Sassen’s analytical categories of the material/digital, mediating cultures, and destabilizing hierarchies of scale are extremely useful for a more critical and sociological examination of the interaction between ICT and development. It neither assumes that technology is a tool for development, nor does it ignore the specificity of socio-cultural positions that exists prior to and during these technological interventions. By addressing how technology is embedded in society, we avoid technological determinism that camouflages real social divisions.

For the remaining of this article, I explore an organization’s rural ICT centers and its goal of using ICT for development using these three analytical categories. After a short discussion of the methodology for this study, I introduce the organization and mission of its centers. Then, I will discuss the project in relation to the embeddedness of technology and the social fabric in which these centers are located. By applying these analytical categories, we are able to arrive at a more sociological understanding of how technology and society interact. This approach offers an alternative examination to the usual project assessments found in past literature on ICT and development. Rather, it seeks to add more nuanced examination of technology to account for social relations and divisions.

Methodology

This article comes out of an assessment and development project of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) Academy Community IT Centers in rural villages of Gujarat, India. I first came to know of the centers while at the Academy conducting research on a different topic. I discussed with the director of the IT centers on pursing a project that would support a community-driven web presence (similar to their successful community radio and video programs).

For the initial assessment, I conducted two focus groups. The first was with the SEWA Academy IT Team – the paid staff in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, where SEWA Academy is located. All six staff members of the IT Centers were present for the focus group. The IT Team includes four women and two men, between the ages of 18 and 50. All but one had completed secondary education. The focus group lasted one and one-half hours.

A second focus group was conducted with the IT Center village organizers and participants. There were 14 participants, from seven of the eight centers. The organizer and a regular center participant represented each center. All participants were women, with the exception of one man. Most were agricultural workers, and the highest grade achieved was 10th grade – this is reflective of the socio-economic status of the IT Centers’ participants. The focus group lasted 3 hours and was conducted at a center outside Ahmedabad.

Findings from these focus groups, in addition to informal discussions and participant observation, form the basis of this article. Next, I will give a brief introduction to SEWA Academy and its centers.

SEWA academy and community IT centers

SEWA Academy is a sister organization of the labor union, SEWA. In 1972, SEWA became one of the first unions to organize informal workers and one of the few that focuses on the needs of women. The SEWA movement depends on grassroots, community-led leadership. To inspire and support bottom-up leadership, SEWA Academy was established to provide basic education, capacity building, leadership training, communication, and research to its members.

In 2010, SEWA Academy began its Community IT Centers with two objectives: first, to create a network of rural villages in Gujarat, and second, to support development of villagers by increasing their knowledge and skills. While the IT Centers are concerned with developing the village as a whole, they emphasize women’s capacity building and, in fact, most of the center community organizers are women.

The SEWA Academy centers differ from typical ICT centers. While other centers offer a variety of services, such as Internet kiosks or printing, the SEWA Community IT Centers have a more narrow focus. Five days a week, the eight centers log on to a video-streaming portal. The host center streams a talk or video that addresses current issues of the villages, such as agriculture, education, or health. Afterwards, the participants discuss with each other the topic of the program and share their own experiences. SEWA centers are significantly different than other ICT projects in that the latter are focused on more individual access to information, and often measure success by ability to generate income and eventual self-sustainability. It is interesting to examine how SEWA’s IT Centers resist the usual practice of information and knowledge as a means to a remunerative end, but it is likely that this approach was also a necessity because of the low literacy levels of many of the participants.

Findings

While there is much to discuss regarding these centers, I will focus on just one aspect of this project, the ‘Sanchalykas’. Sanchalykas are the community organizers of the centers and they have a significant role in the project. They learn how to use and maintain the equipment, and also to promote and manage the centers in their villages. Their position as women, having low education and technology skills, and as members of a rural community makes them a fitting example of the ‘information poor’ subject that so often comes out of the ICT and development discourse. The centers’ Sanchalykas do not reflect the type one imagines as organizers of ICT centers – often male and well educated (Basu, 2010).

Rather than examining the impact of technology on these women (and their villages) or explaining the process of linking ICT and rural areas, I will discuss how, in this particular case study, technology and society are embedded, with both impacting each other in creating new social relations and patterns. This approach allows a more complicated investigation of ICT and development.

Conclusion

In concluding, this article has examined ICT for development using the analytical framework of technology and society as embedded. It has avoided the technological determinism so often seen in the development literature, whereby technology is inherently linked with economic and social development and is autonomous of society.

While this article acknowledges that technology creates new social understandings, it follows Wajcman’s (2002) process of examining how society shapes the construct and use of technology. The impact of technology, but also the nature of technology, varies depending on the social, political, and economic factors of a society (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). I avoid technological determinism with Sassen’s (2002) analytical framework of technology and society as embedded. The Community IT Centers of SEWA Academy are presented as a case study that illustrates how this approach provides a more nuanced understanding of information society and its role in development. To summarize, this approach relies on three analytical categories to reveal this embeddedness.

First, it is important to recognize the material conditions that produce technology, since this significantly impacts how that technology is experienced. This is seen both in the extensive trainings needed for the Sanchalykas to manage the technology, but also how SEWA Academy limits the scope of the center’s mission. Since the organization strove to include illiterate or low literate populations, offering computer kiosks would have little success; rather, they created a space where participants rely on visual and oral means to communicate. This is not to focus on the limitations of the village participants, but rather to illustrate how exclusive ICT is designed to be.

Second, the social positions of the Sanchalykas have significant implications for how they use and experience technology. Culture mediates the user’s interaction with technology. This illustrated in the Sanchalykas’ recounting of having fear to use the equipment and also how the SEWA Team shape their training according to their own preconceptions of the women’s abilities.

Finally, the centers contribute to a destabilizing of hierarchies of scale. This is visibly apparent when we see how participants are able to communicate with neighboring villages, which is especially significant for women who often have restricted mobility. But this framework also accounts for how the Sanchalykas’ positions within the village has changed and are now faced with new situations (not necessarily always for the better) because of their access to IT, as seen in the example of misusing (and breaking) the equipment for a social gathering.

Sassen’s (2002) re-conceptualization of technology and society as embedded allows us to move beyond the technological determinism that is so common in the ICT and development discourse (e.g. Goyal, 2011; Pade-Khene et al., 2011; Rashid and Hassan, 2012). ICT is created within an unequal society, and thus there will be occurrences that both foster and hinder this inequality. Without recognizing this, initiatives will continue to serve only those that are able to access ICT – the educated, middle-class, and those living in urban areas (Asiedu, 2012). In fact, overlooking the relation between technology and society often results in rural ICT centers that fail to be sustainable because of the gap between technology and the local needs of the area (Basu, 2010). Additionally worrisome is the rhetoric and ideology of the link between ICT and development that conceals evidence of the contrary (Moodley, 2005; Singh, 2010).

Technology creates new social understandings just as society shapes technology. As I have outlined here, the IT Centers created particular meanings and spaces within the rural communities. A critical analysis of how technology and society overlap is vital for a more complete understanding of ICT for development.

Importantly, this approach avoids examining solely for project success; rather, it is a sociological investigation of how technology and the social fabric of a rural area interact. Development initiatives are so often concerned with finding a measurable impact – an end product to justify the means. But we have to ask what is happening in the present moment with this confluence of new forms of information communication and the highly disproportionate access to it. As Namrataben Bali, director of SEWA Academy, shared, more and more of ICT remains in the hands of the privileged, so even if the impact of the centers is small, even if there is only a slight change, this center provides them with at least some opportunity to access ICT.