Spectacular Mobile Technologies: The State and the Remote
Jennifer Blaylock · SSRN Electronic Journal · 2015
The rise of mobile phone use across the globe has prompted many NGOs to enthusiastically embrace information and communication technologies as a means for improving health, democracy, and agriculture in parts of the world that seem excluded from basic infrastructure. Through phone applications, SMS, and data capture, new technologies that share and collect data appear to radically change the way information is exchanged globally. Yet, the international discourse surrounding the promises of these technologies echo 1930s and 40s interest in documentary film to teach colonial Africans. Starting in 1939 British colonial governments used cinema vans to exhibit WWII propaganda films to isolated areas. After the war cinema vans became development tools that spread information about health, agriculture, and eventually voting to newly independent African nations. In Ghana, the government-run mobile cinema van program has been operating continuously since independence, collaborating with state agencies and NGOs to show films for a variety of development purposes. Using examples from Ghana, this paper asks what a comparison between two mobile technologies for development--mobile cinema vans and mobile phones--can reveal about the relationship between the spectacular newness of technologies and their use as development tools. I argue that the mobility of mobile cinema vans and mobile phones permits the state to define itself in relation to the remote subjects that it incorporates into state democracy. Furthermore, the anticipation that mobile phone technologies will reach further than mobile cinema vans legitimates the development state by recapitulating and reaffirming the existence of the âremoteâ that needs to be included.