Digital change in emerging economies: no global convergence (1)
The growing strength and influence of the world’s ‘emerging economies’ is one of the more significant global developments of the past decade. At a time of crisis in developed economies such as the United States, Britain and Japan, the so-called BRIC group (Brazil, Russia, India and China) recovered swiftly from the 2008 financial crisis and is now enjoying high-growth rates once again. At a recent meeting in Beijing, the BRIC nations plus South Africa called for a new global financial order that is less reliant on the US dollar whilst criticising NATO’s intervention in Libya. This sustained growth has been accompanied by the rise of ‘new middle classes’ that increasingly demand from their governments improved services (such as health and education), infrastructure and, in some national contexts, greater freedom and democratic representation (see Wei 2006).
Although there is a bourgeoning academic and journalist literature on these ‘Second World’ developments (Khanna 2008), the part that digital media may be playing in social change in emerging economies remains poorly understood. Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Israel, Spain, Britain, the United States and other countries have drawn public attention to the potential uses of social media for protest and political mobilisation. Important as these developments are, they distract from less visible forms of media-related change that can have as much long-term significance as the more spectacular ‘media events’, for instance, micro-processes of digital media appropriation into domestic, educational, work and leisure settings.
Five traditions
Five academic traditions, if approached critically, have much to teach us about digital media and social change in emerging economies (and indeed elsewhere): development communication; ICT4D; media sociology; media anthropology; and the cultural consequences of media innovations.
Development communication is a field that flourished in the Cold War era whose initial aim was to drive the mass media ‘vehicles’ in order to attain modernisation. Social change was considered a ‘unilineal process of modernisation’ (Peterson 2003:42). The ‘dominant paradigm’ associated with Lerner, Schramm and others saw the relationship between mass communication and social change in a manner that was “simple, linear, deterministic and tinged with optimism” (Melkote 1991, quoted in Peterson 2003: 43). From the mid-1970s the dominant paradigm came under increased fire for treating many poor countries as if they were tribal societies, therefore ignoring markets, bureaucracies, legal systems, and so on. This led to more ‘pluralistic’ views of social change that still characterise the field today (Peterson 2003).
A second and related tradition, known as ICTs for Development (or ICT4D), originates in computer science and for decades has attracted designers, programmers and quantitative social scientists optimistic about the possibilities opened up by the new technologies. Since the early 2000s it has been reinvigorated by the boom in mobile phone uptake around the global South, giving rise to a Mobiles for Development (M4D) offshoot (Heeks 2008).
If the first two traditions are characterised by their optimism, media sociology is more pessimistic. Rooted in political economy and British cultural studies, the sociology of media has produced a very substantial body of work on the production, circulation and consumption of media in modern Western societies (Couldry 2004).
Fourth, media anthropology is a growing subfield of anthropology that has thrived since the 1990s, effortlessly joining the ‘ethnographic turn’ taken by a number of British media scholars a decade earlier whilst greatly expanding the geographic and thematic remit of media ethnography (Ginsburg et al 2002, Postill 2009).
Finally, there is a long tradition of popular scholarship – much of it North American – on the social and cultural consequences of new media technologies, from television and computers in the mid-twentieth century to social media and mobile telephony in the present era. This popular genre has produced a string of bestselling books over the years, with intriguing notions such as ‘global village’ (McLuhan 1964), ‘virtual community’ (Rheingold 2000), ‘network society’ (Castells 1996) and ‘the long tail’ (Anderson 2006). These are notions that can border on the oxymoronic but have nevertheless inspired a great number of scholars and students.
Missing from the various specialist literatures, though, is a common theoretical framework that will help to organise and compare existing research on digital media and social change in emerging economies, as well as identifying gaps and generating new questions for future research.
I will discuss this framework in a future post.
References
Anderson, C. 2006. The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. New York: Hyperion.
Castells, M. 1996. The Rise of the Network Society, Vol. 1, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.
Couldry, N. 2004. 2004. ‘Theorising Media as Practice’, Social Semiotics 14(2): 115–32.
Ginsburg, F., L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds). 2002. Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Heeks, R. 2008. Ict4d 2.0: The Next Phase of Applying ICT for International Development, Computer 41(6).
Khanna, P. 2008. The Second World. London: Penguin.
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media. (Gingko Press, 1964, 2003). p6.
Melkote S.R. 1991. Communication for development in the Third World: theory and practice. London: Sage Publications.
Peterson, M.A. 2003. Anthropology and Mass Communication: Myth and Media in the New Millennium. Oxford and New York: Berghahn.
Postill, J. 2009. What is the point of media anthropology?, Social Anthropology 17(3), 334-337, 340-342.
Rheingold, H. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, retrieved 17 April 2011 from http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/
Wei, R. 2006. Lifestyles and New Media: Adoption and use of wireless communication technologies in China. New Media & Society 8(6), 991–1008.
John,
As a Masters of Public Issues Anthropology student, I was pleased to read this blog post with respects to “…the part that digital media may be playing in social change in emerging economies.” I was wondering what your thoughts are on Appadurai’s 5 dimensions of cultural flow which were postulated prior to the emergence of web 2.0 and living in the cloud. Do you think this theory should be reconceptualized to enclude the new levels of engagement, sharing and collaboration we are seeing via online social networks? Kira
Thanks for dropping by, Kira. I am rather sceptical of this flow metaphor, and of the stress on transborder processes at the expense of domestic processes. Yes, international exchanges are certainly important, but so are intra-national exchanges.
For example, Spain’s indignados movement cannot be understood without reference to domestic politics and the national economy – but neither can we neglect international factors, e.g. transborder links with activists in other European countries, or relations between Spain’s goverment and the governments of Germany, France, the US, etc.
What troubles me about Appadurai’s model of ethnoscapes, financescapes, etc, is how it presumes a far more deterritorialised, post-nation-state world than the one we live in. As I have argued in various places, I take sovereign states to be the prime culture areas of our age. This does not mean they are sealed off from the rest of the world. Even North Korea is far from being cut off. Rather that most people acquire their cultural practices and worldviews within the state/country of their upbringing, including their digital practices. This happens through the mediation of their families, peer groups, schools, mass media, social media, etc.
So someone who emigrates to the US in their 20s or 30s from India will carry with them very different cultural baggage from someone emigrating from France, Senegal or Brunei. I know this is glaringly obvious, but in social theory we often forget the obvious.