Technology and Governance

The notion of ‘e-governance’, along with such other ‘epithetized phenomena’ as e-learning, e-banking, e-marketing etc. played a major role in shaping the futuristic e-topias of the global information society discourse. Woolgar (2002, 3) points out that ‘epithetizing’ various existing activities and social institutions with notions such as ‘virtual’, ‘digital’, ‘electronic’ (or simply ‘e’), ‘cyber’, ‘tele’ etc. helps to ‘conjure up a future consequent upon the effects of electronic technologies’. Given the backdrop of the increased involvement of new media technologies in delivering e-governance, it is important to understand the social and historical specificities of the emerging technological systems that facilitate the construction of the notion. It is also pertinent to take a closer look at the relativity of technical design and absorption into the culture and strategies of actors (Feenberg 1999) in order to discuss e-governance from a nonessentialist perspective. Social constructivism provides some provisional but meaningful theoretical foundations to look at e-governance in nonessentialist terms. One of the important conceptual endeavours to understand e-governance initiatives from a constructivist perspective would be to disaggregate the question of technology from the differential perspective of the dominant and subordinate subject positions of the actors involved. Arguably, e-governance projects are rationally planned and implemented by technocrats in an effort to exercise a far more effective control over resources and social organization. Nevertheless, common people encounter these technologies of systematization as part of their life world and appropriate, reject or force revisions in the designs as well as systems.

Civil Society, Community and ICTs

One of the consequences of the idea that ICT/community-based projects are necessarily virtuous was that most of the early approaches in ICT4D and Community Informatics did not critically examine how the historically formed social structures and social divisions within communities would impact the nature of ICT adoption and access. Ferdinand Tönnies, in his seminal study, made a distinction between communities (Gemeinschaft) and civil society (Gesellschaft) as two basic types of social groups (Tönnies [1887] 2002). He defined a community as an absolute unity that excludes the distinction between the parts; it is an indistinct and compact mass, an aggregate of consciousness bound in such a way that the parts cannot be separated. This is important because it does not allow any fragmentation within the community. This would then also mean that concepts such as class are not relevant for the community. Tönnies' definition tends to ignore class differences. The concept of community will thus be hiding social divides. It would then also mean that there would be no class consciousness – that consciousness be of the same nature, or very similar, is a necessity; the community is essentially the blood community, and family is identified as its nucleus. The advent of the Internet resulted in a renewed interest, both online and offline, in the study of community formation.

Two Rural Vignettes and the Beginning of a Story

The following introductory paragraphs appeared in an article published in the Canadian Journal of Educational Communication in 1987:

The Cyber–Libertarian Turn

The convergence of development rhetoric and information society theories in discourses on the digital divide and informational capitalism marks a cyberlibertarian turn in development studies. While critiquing the tendency to conflate civil society and information society, Sparks (1994, 39) draws attention to the emergence of a widely held deterministic position that the increases in productivity brought about by Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) would lead to a progressive weakening of power structures that formed the basis of social organization under industrial capitalism. Sparks particularly highlights the approach of ‘new times’ theorists of the now defunct magazine Marxism Today for advancing the argument that communication technologies can ‘undermine strong power pyramids more directly’ (Sparks 1994, 38). This approach largely ignores the deep contradictions of informational capitalism characterized by increasing income inequalities, reinforcing development divides, social exclusion and dependency (Parayil 2005). The new cyber-libertarian approach in development theory is characterized by two interrelated arguments on the political economy of development. On the one hand it argues that in the advanced industrial capitalist world, wider use of ICTs would provide the basis for the creation of a more equitable and democratic society, thereby obviating the old concerns of radical social transformation, while on the other hand it proceeds to show that a diffusion of ICTs to the less-developed countries and within less-developed countries to rural areas would help to bridge the development divide and create a more equitable world order.

The Appropriate Technology for the Masses

One of the important questions that CSOs attempting to play a pivotal role in moulding a rural network society had to address was that of technology innovation. There were at least two major questions that they needed to answer in this domain. The first was the way in which existing technology could be adapted for the rural environment. The second was with respect to the need for promoting a series of inventions and innovations wherever the existing technological mix was found to be inadequate to launch the carefully planned ICT projects. However, the powerful and pervasive discourse on the use of ICTs that captured the imagination of a wide spectrum of academics, technicians, CSO activists and development practitioners in India, was not followed up with adequate coordinated efforts to understand the needs of each community and to evolve suitable technological packages that attended to their specific requirements. Nevertheless, many organizations and ‘social venture capitalists’ realized the need for developing appropriate technology for rural masses to get inroads into the markets at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BoP). It was believed that the social bottlenecks in reaching the poorest of the consumers could be addressed by the developing imaginative and cost-effective ICT innovations.

The ICT-based activities of CSOs were characterized by a focus on providing individuals direct access to technology, and the protocols of their delivery mechanisms were dominated by a high level of technology applications.

When I began this study on the state, civil society and information communication technologies (ICTs) nearly a decade ago, the area now identified as ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development) or ICTD (Information and Communication Technologies and Development) had not evolved into a full-fledged discipline. Nevertheless, the last two decades of the twentieth century had seen the emergence of perceptive studies on the social and economic impacts of ICTs and it was only a matter of time that the field acquired a name of its own. ICT4D, or ICTD, is now an advanced field of research and teaching in Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS). My study, keeping a critical distance from the mainstream concerns and methods of research in ICT4D or ICTD, draws on multiple theoretical, ideological and political perspectives that attempt to examine ICT–society interfaces in diverse social and economic landscapes.

Nevertheless, I share the idea that there are understated distinctions between ICT4D and ICTD, and that they cannot be used interchangeably. The difference, as far as I understand, is not just one of semantics, and it goes beyond a mere objection to the assertiveness of the implied linearity represented by the numeral 4 in the former acronym and preference for the ambivalence brought in by removing the numeral in the latter.

Nations and -Isms

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, Europe continued to lead the way in the dual process of industrial advancement and pollution accelerated by James Watt's steam engine, thus leading towards the crisis that we face at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the analytical approach to stages of human development adopted by Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson and others was taken forward but was also subject to some distortion.

In 1815, Napoleon was finally defeated at Waterloo. In exile at St Helena, he talked of the aims for which he had worked while in power. He said that he had tried to merge the peoples of Europe into nations joined together by ‘unity of codes, principles, opinions, feelings, and interest’. He had thought of setting up a central assembly on an ancient Greek or a modern American model, to take care of ‘the great European family’ with the guidance and protection of his empire. In spite of his defeat, he still believed that what he had worked for would ultimately be realised.

Even in the long run, Napoleon's alleged dream was to fall somewhat short of realisation. More immediately, the Congress of Vienna, on which his remarks might well have been intended as a critical comment, did very little to order the affairs of the continent in anything like the manner that he envisaged.

Globalisation

The 1968 revolution does not appear as profound now as it did then, perhaps, but it certainly encouraged the global approach to the problems facing humankind. This approach was stimulated by a previous event occurring in 1967, the detonation of a Chinese H-Bomb, which signalled the end of the Western domination of the world that began in the sixteenth century. Was China on the way to becoming a third superpower? Then, the global view received a boost in 1969 from the moon landing, which reinforced the impact of photographs taken from space showing earth and its thin coat of atmosphere in all their fragility.

Before human history began, earth's continents had drifted apart. But so-called primitive peoples were great travellers, and moved freely around and between Eurasia, the Americas, Africa and Europe before the arrival of the early civilisations. In a sense, therefore, the reverse process to continental drift, bringing the continents together again, began early. The classical and medieval periods saw significant connections, too. The Greeks and the Romans penetrated central Asia, for example, while Vikings crossed the Atlantic Ocean, Arabs reached China by sea, and the Chinese sailed to Africa. From the point of view of European discovery and colonisation in particular, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries marked an acceleration in awareness of the world as one. This realisation developed further with the expansion of empire from the eighteenth century onwards, with the USA and Japan joining in at the end of the nineteenth century.

Superpower

Everybody should have fully realised after the A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that world history had entered a new age. However, scientists appear to have understood the new situation more completely than statesmen, and even they began to disagree among themselves about how to proceed. The scientists dilemma was expressed in different ways by J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller. At first, they appear to have agreed that further research could not be stopped, that, as Teller put it, they should not try ‘to say how to tie the little toe of the ghost to the bottle from which we had just allowed it to escape’. However, while Oppenheimer continued to work for international understanding and restraint, Teller's anti-communism and Russophobia came to convince him that the USA should pursue its own research.

In November 1945, Oppenheimer gave a speech to fellow scientists at Los Alamos. ‘It is not possible to be a scientist’, he argued, ‘unless you believe that the knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences’. He went on to say ‘that atomic weapons are a peril which affects everyone in the world, and in that sense a completely common problem, as common a problem as it was for the Allies to defeat the Nazis’.

After the photographs taken of a solar eclipse verified Einstein's theory of relativity in 1919, articles on the subject immediately began to appear in the Times of London, the New York Times and other newspapers. Books discussing relativity by Arthur Eddington, James Jeans and Bertrand Russell soon entered the best-seller lists. Einstein himself deplored the application of the term in other branches of enquiry, including history, and to the human experience in general. However, J. D. Bernal aptly commented in 1969 that

Here, we will go with the popular flow, as we apply the term to developments from 1921 to 1939 in general. Undoubtedly, European ‘disillusioned intellectuals’ could no longer accept the coherence of Europe as accepted by Gibbon and Burke in the eighteenth century and others since, while their American counterparts of the ‘lost generation’ no longer possessed their prewar certainties either.

The New Imperialism

The phase of the Anthropocene Era from 1871 to 1914 may be looked upon as the period of the ‘New Imperialism’, as the great powers struggled to carve up the rest of the world between them before the showdown of the First World War, and of the Russian Revolution – internal instability was another of the period's distinguishing features. Joseph Chamberlain was to talk at the turn of the century of his vision of an empire for the common man, of a broad patriotism that would maintain harmony between the classes, and similar remarks were made elsewhere. Thus, historians have put forward the idea of ‘social imperialism’ – the pursuit of a vigorous foreign policy with at least the partial aim of providing a safety valve for domestic discontent. At the time there was much talk too, following Darwin, of the ‘survival of the fittest’ at home and abroad.

There are a number of other features of the ‘New Imperialism’. A second industrial revolution of steel, oil, electricity and large-scale organisation began to push capitalism beyond national borders much more than before. Much of the investment and accompanying search for markets and raw materials was carried out in Europe itself, but more went to Africa, Asia and the Antipodes, while the largest injection of capital was in North and South America. Emigration now became a river in flood in comparison with the former modest stream as 25 million Europeans crossed the Atlantic to the USA in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and a considerable if much smaller number moved in other directions, including Britons to outposts of empire and Russians to Siberia.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, Crutzen and Stoermer concede that to assign a specific date to the onset of the Anthropocene Era seems ‘somewhat arbitrary’. However, they suggest that the new era began in the latter part of the eighteenth century, because the initial creation of ‘greenhouse gases’ and ‘biotic assemblages’ occurred at the same time as James Watt's ‘invention of the steam engine in 1784’. Here, we might also appear arbitrary in our choice of the year 1763. However, this is not a random selection, for the following reasons.

Let us briefly recall the argument of our introduction: that evidence from the study of history and other humanities, as well as from the social and natural sciences, must be examined in any adequate analysis of the Anthropocene Era, and that it is the history on which we will concentrate. In 1763, a significant global conflict came to an end. It was marked by a victory of Great Britain over France, whose power was broken in Canada and India and reduced in Europe. The way was clear for Great Britain to become the workshop of the world via the Industrial Revolution. For example, K. N. Chaudhuri observes: ‘The final stage in the dynamic movements in the Indian Ocean was reached in the second half of the eighteenth century when British military and naval power fused with European technological revolution to redraw the civilisational map of the Indian Ocean.’