Seeing digital technologies from the margins
Tristan Mattelart, Cédric Parizot, Julie Peghini, Nadine Wanono · Journal des anthropologues · 2015
The social, political, cultural and economic issues raised by digital tools are usually seen from the perspective of highly-educated and wealthy young urban adults in North America and Western Europe.The call for papers for this issue of Journal des Anthropologues sought to encourage authors to take a different approach.We wanted them to problematize the challenges raised by digital technologies and their utilization 'at the margin'.2 Thus, contributors were first asked to seize the significance of the digital technologies outside American and European societies or, at least, at the margins of these societies.What forms does the digital economy take in these spaces?How do individuals adopt products in this economy?Our objective was also to understand how, whether at the 'margin' or in the 'centre' of the global system, minority actors mobilize digital technologies to achieve their social, cultural and political goals, while being conscious of the limits of these mobilizations. 3We have deliberately opted for the term 'margin', rather than 'periphery'.The latter, as noted by Pierre-Amiel Giraud and Sara Schoonmaker in this volume, has the disadvantage of implying "a space dominated by a centre".Our interest in this concept of 'margin' lies, on the contrary, in the more complex relations that the 'margin' maintains with the centre.This notion refers as much to "relegated spaces" submitted to the power of the centre, as to "relatively autonomous spaces" of experimentation or of 'avant-garde' that escape, in part, from the influence of the centre.Therefore, for this issue of Journal des Anthropologues, we wanted to widen the scope as much as possible in order to present the many ways by which digital technologies are appropriated at the margin: whether as an instrument of, or an escape from, domination and control. 4This introduction highlights a unique transdisciplinary approach forged by the articles gathered in this issue contributed by anthropologists, sociologists, specialists of information and communications sciences and geographers. Seeing digital technologies from the margins