Studying Communicative Ecologies: An Ethnographic Approach to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)
Jo Tacchi · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2006
An anthropological and ethnographic approach to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) takes us beyond the immediate contexts of access and use to a consideration of how these technologies and their various contents are embedded in quotidian lives - how users, consumers and/or producers are ‘themselves imbricated in discursive universes, political situations, economic circumstances, national settings, historical moments, and transnational flows, to name only a few relevant contexts’ (Ginsberg et al 2002:2). The notion of communicative ecologies has provided myself and colleagues with a conceptual framework for a comparative ethnographic study of the relationship between ICTs and poverty among low income groups in India, South Africa, Jamaica and Ghana. Communicative ecologies focuses our attention on the communication-related aspects of the contexts in which the people we are studying operate, which nevertheless are in turn imbricated in other structural, social, economic and cultural contexts. One of the main themes that arose early in fieldwork in India was that of ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion’. Certain structural factors, including gender, land ownership, employment and caste, significantly affect experiences and levels of inclusion and exclusion, and along with this access to information, services and media and communication technologies. A focus on communicative ecologies led to an appreciation of how low income groups lived and negotiated livelihoods, and of the necessity to explore issues of social and communicative inclusion and exclusion as complex, shifting and negotiated. Rethinking the notion of communicative ecologies and applying it to earlier work on the domestic consumption of radio sound in the UK, in this paper I interrogate the ways in which a focus on media and media technologies can help us to develop broader understandings of contemporary everyday life in two very different contexts.