Ethnographic Perspectives on the Information Society: A Review Essay
Heather A. Horst · Information Technologies and International Development · 2013
In the arst decade of the 21st century, the idea of the “information society” captured the imagination of a range of governments and other organizations around the world. Computers, and the various centers and programs constructed to house them in communities, were viewed as key objects and spaces through which people could begin to “bridge the digital divide.” Through access to educational resources, price information, government documents, and generalized information about the world, the “information society” promised to enhance and even facilitate the mobility of individuals and nations in their quest for social and economic development. This essay reviews two ethnographic monographs that describe and reoect upon the notion of “the information society” through the experience of everyday “users” living in two culturally and geographically distinctive areas of the developing world. Taken together, the monographs enable scholars and others to consider whether the increase in use of digital technologies around the world has delivered the vision of the information society, whether its “ideals have actually come into being, whether the material terms of online participation indeed communicate and support such ideals, and whether such ideals are shared or ultimately adopted by these newcomers” (Burrell, 2012, p. 183). Payal Arora’s Dot Com Mantra takes up this challenge through an examination of the interactions between computers and other technologies in rural India. Drawing upon the critical studies of development and sociocultural learning theory, she focuses upon the interrelationship between contexts, communities, and conducts. Arora begins her analysis by attending to the historical imaginations of technology development in Almora, located in Uttarakhand, North India, including the implications of this experience for such contemporary development initiatives as computers in agricultural development. She then turns to the speciac programs built around the arrival of the computer in Almora: the e-Agriculture program and the widely celebrated Hole-in-the-Wall initiative. The book concludes by delving into the mundane computing practices in local