Abstract
(Un)bordering Technology
The digitization of life is a worldwide phenomenon, but so far it has been mainly studied in European and North American contexts. Most of the current works have been focusing upon what is taking place in highly developed countries, often assuming that the changes in Europe or in the USA will ‘trickle down’ to developing countries sooner or later. This presumption is questioned by the several ways in which technologies travel, are used, and adapted to different times and spaces (Anderson & Adams, 2007). It is also now widely acknowledged that game-changing projects can be created and experimented first in non-Western contexts (Breckenridge, 2014), and the expansion of tools such as the mobile phone is transforming developing societies to an extent that needs closer scrutiny (Brinkman & Bruijn, 2018). The fast pace at which ‘mobile money’ (payment via mobile phone) has developed in Kenya is a first example (Park and Donovan, 2016); the current implementation of the national biometric identification in India is another one (Abraham & Rajadhyaksha, 2015; Cohen, 2016; Rao & Nair, 2019). Furthermore, for fields such as entertainment, sport and social media (television and cinema, online entertainment portals, national and international sports leagues and social networking sites for instance), the boundaries between the West and the non-West are porous.
This special issue explores the new ways of governing, of producing and capturing value, of shaping subjects through digital technologies and practices that circulate worldwide. However, against the often Euro-US-centric views upon digital technologies, we question the global nature of these technologies through variations on their situatedness, their ability to circulate and their capacity to increase flows of persons, goods and ideas. To this end we put forward several articles that cover various domains such as digital health services, sport and entertainment, databases and identification practices, network infrastructures, and social networking sites and activism. The case studies covered by these articles deal with different scales, from global sports events to national systems of access to health. The articles show the geographical entanglements between richer and less developed countries through the different methods from comparison between countries to multi-sited approaches. They also take into account how the use of digital technologies is embedded in the production of the Nation, for instance through debates upon freedom of expression, and at the same time how the production of the Nation takes place in an international techno-political context—illustrated by the Special Economic Zones and Export Processing Zones favoured by governments and dedicated to the export of goods and services.
The broader aim of this journal issue is therefore to offer an STS approach of digital technologies, which would be particularly careful about the material inscription of the digital in socio-cultural and geopolitical contexts—paying great attention to the effects of organisation and power, which result from such inscriptions. The strategic locus we chose to lead this investigation is that of the ‘border’. Our issue title, ‘Technologies without borders?’, critically mobilizes the notion of border as territorial limit and cognitive representation. All the articles in this issue go against a shared vision according to which digital technologies would be universal and go freely across the borders. At the same time, they take into account the massive standardization processes at work in digital technologies, and the phenomena of expansion and globalization through which these technologies take place. For instance, the IT corridor connecting Chennai to Cuddalore is a material space in which technologies are produced and the site of expansion of the digital world. At the same time, this area is constantly framed by transnational flows of financial capital, technological standards and human labour. Furthermore, the articles give an account of how ‘borders’, be they metaphoric or tangible, take part in the production of technologies, frame them, are contested or overcome by them. For instance, projects such as Aadhaar in India not only bear on identification and authentication of the people, they also incorporate material conceptions of how borders separate residents. By distinguishing between national and non-national residents, Aadhaar complements traditional territoriality with digital demarcations. In that sense, technologies interact with the geographical aspects of States and they further problematise the notion of border enforcement.
The literature used by the authors of the issue borrows mostly to Science and technology studies, but also media studies and to some extent critical geography and postcolonial theory. That way ‘border’ can be understood less as mere delimitation than as ‘method’ to understand how contemporary technologies, standards, discourses and material practices shape continuously the global world (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013).
Problematizing Border Through the Analysis of Technology
The article by Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Eric Dagiral ‘Governance and Accountable Citizenship Through Identification Infrastructures: Database Politics of Copernicus (France) and National Register of Citizens (India)’ analyses two national databases and their associated identification processes take two case studies in France and India. The article explores digital governance practices, and problematises the emergence of new ways of institutional registration and targeted services, through the central role of the ‘identifier’ in databases.
The article by Sohan Sha and Mathieu Quet ‘From Expression to Expulsion: Digital Public Spaces as Theaters of Operations in Nepal’ is based on the study of activism through social networking sites and shows how the freedom of expression is controlled by the Nepali state. Through digital ethnography, it will analyse in particular the inscription of the digital in multiple institutions, regulations, modes of action and the entanglement of arguments and operations through which freedom of expression is produced.
The article by Vidya Subramanian, Marianne Noel and Harmony Paquin ‘Tweet, Set, Match: Negotiating the Boundaries of Digital Technologies in Elite Tennis’ studies how IT companies mediate the idea of sport. Studying top rung tennis events, it will consider transformations in training, game play, publicity, fan interactions, judging, betting, analytics and broadcast to understand the politics of the digital in global elite tennis.
The article by Marine Al Dahdah and Rajiv K. Mishra ‘Smart Cards for All: digitalisation of Universal Health Coverage in India’ focuses on a smart-card based national health coverage scheme for the poor (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana). It deconstructs how the digital infrastructures of this scheme complicate access to health services. By questioning the assumption of inclusive digital services, this article explores new patterns of exclusion, resulting from the challenges of digitally driven health policy.
The article by Shailesh B. Pandey and Nischal Regmi ‘If You Build It, Will They Come? Exploring Narratives That Shape the Internet in Nepal’ takes a strong stance on the question of access to internet in Nepal. It engages with dominant narratives of development and broader access to show the multiple inequalities that shape access; it also methodically uncovers how metrics contribute to the production of access enthusiasm. Inclusion and exclusion are nuanced through the analysis of the gradation of access.