By Don Slater
New media, improvement and globalization are the main phrases in which the long run is being imagined and played in governance, improvement projects and public and political discourse. but those authoritative phrases have arisen inside of specific cultural and ideological contexts. In utilizing them, we danger selling over-generalized and likely unchallengeable frameworks for motion and information creation that can blind us to the advanced international styles and promise of social reality.
This compelling booklet forces us to examine those phrases afresh. Drawing on greater than ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in Latin the US, West Africa and South Asia, Don Slater seeks to problem those phrases as voicing particular northern narratives instead of common truths, and to determine them from the viewpoint of southern humans and groups who're both involved to appreciate new machines for verbal exchange, new versions of social switch and new maps of social connection. The relevant query the e-book poses is: how we will democratize the methods we predict and guidance new media, improvement and globalization, establishing those phrases to discussion and problem inside North-South kin?
Rooted in sociological debates, New Media, improvement and Globalization can be a provocative contribution to media and cultural stories, reviews of electronic tradition, improvement stories, geography and anthropology.
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Additional resources for New Media, Development and Globalization: Making Connections in the Global South
Sample text
The job of the researcher, I was consistently informed, was to discover or confirm those properties around which media and their proper developmental use could be defined. Hence, I could not understand or get a critical perspective on what was going on without moving beyond disputes about the specific properties of media to a consideration of how the very notions of media and media properties organized the field I was researching. And the urgency of this question was intensified by the fact that the framing of media was clearly more than just an interesting side issue in a world that was increasingly defined as transforming into an informational or network society: what was at stake was the very characterization of the future on the basis of claims about the properties of ‘media’.
And the urgency of this question was intensified by the fact that the framing of media was clearly more than just an interesting side issue in a world that was increasingly defined as transforming into an informational or network society: what was at stake was the very characterization of the future on the basis of claims about the properties of ‘media’. Assemblage approaches to media (whether ANT, material culture, practice-based, Deleuzian or DeLandan) potentially release us from sterile debates about the properties of media, but rather more importantly they may help distance us from the role of normative definitions of ‘the media’ or ‘new media’ in the organization of communication and development.
The idea of an infra-language, of using banal concepts, is simply a way of making central and unignorable the relationship between my concepts and ‘theirs’, and therefore to foreground the ways in which that relationship is or isn't transparent, responsive and democratic. It is a move to a neutral or empty space in which conversations can take place and where the baggage that all participants bring with them can be opened up for inspection. One last introductory point about infra-languages. So far I have been emphasizing analytical symmetry, but there is another dimension to asymmetry that runs throughout the book: what might be called ‘ethical’ asymmetry (see particularly Chapter 4).
