Module description
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What does the internet look like away from reliable infrastructures and always-on connectivity, far from the familiar platforms of Google, Facebook and Amazon? New users of the internet are mostly from the Global South – but is the internet they encounter the same as ours? What histories are embodied and reinterpreted in their internets? What potentials do they hold open or foreclose? What challenges or opportunities do they present – for a farmer in China, a slum-dweller in India, a university student in Ghana, or perhaps a government suddenly confronting the digital age without adequate human and technological resources to grapple with its complexities? By juxtaposing traditional literature on the digital/information society with empirical and theoretical studies that take the Global South as their starting point, we traverse the multiple histories, infrastructures, uses, politics and failures that are inscribed into digital technologies, and discover the constellation of different practices, contents, and understandings that exist around the world and what they can tell us about the future of the (global) internet.
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Assessment details
Class presentation 10%
Portfolio submission 90%
Educational aims & objectives
While the majority of new internet and mobile phone users are located in the Global South, most scholarship regarding digital phenomena is still focused on the US/European internet and Western companies. In this module, the students will study the history, politics, and social aspects of the use of digital technologies in non-Western countries.
The aims of this module are to:
- Provide a theoretical understanding of the history and current trends in the development and use of digital technologies in the Global South, with a particular focus on mobile phones and mobile internet.
- Develop an ethical and culturally-specific awareness of different technological pathways, different users and different uses.
- Prepare the students for a career in companies and non-profit organizations with a multi-cultural user base, or with a focus on non-Western markets.
Learning outcomes
By the end of the module, students will have achieved the following learning outcomes:
1. Knowledge and understanding: students will acquire a systematic understanding of the multiple, intersecting worlds that converge on digital technologies. They will also engage critically with the different trajectories of digital technologies in the Global South, and understand how they subsume and reinterpret a wide array of histories, infrastructures, and uses.
2. Cognitive skills: students will develop a critical attitude towards deterministic and Western-centric accounts of the internet, as well as critical responses to current debates over digital technologies in the Global South; through practical exercises, they will also suggest new approaches to the topic
3. Performance and practice: through their final project, students will incorporate a critical ethical dimension, which includes issues of sustainability and justice, to their thinking about technology in non-Western contexts, from a theoretical and practical perspective.
These learning outcomes are aligned with the skills required in jobs that take place in multi-cultural settings, both for and not-for-profit, or in companies and organizations that are active in non-Western countries, e.g. understanding of different digital eco-systems, awareness of diverse infrastructural challenges, diversity of users, etc.