Both my previous post discussed social media’s compatibility with development. Both of the posts also expressed rather optimistic stances coming to the democratising ability within social media, how it is grassroots oriented and functions as a medium which allows for accessing information, communicating ideas and mobilizing actions. Judging from these posts, Social media for development is a victorious composition that make the great bulk of development problems feel much more solvable. This sound too good to be true, and quite accurately – it is! There are many theoretical and practical difficulties within the notion of social media as an entirely virtuous democratising tool. This post will discuss a few of critical perspectives.
One of the initial critiques of ICT and ICT4D (including Social Media for development) is the digital divide approach. This theory discusses how the ICT stances for solving development issues are dependent on those who “have” and thus disregards the “have-nots”. In order words, the ICT approach re-affirms the uneven global distribution of technologies, which is a pre-requisite for accessing e.g. social media channels. As a reaction to the digital-divide approach, Manne Granqvist explains in his Assessing ICT in development: A critical perspective (2005) how the digital-divide theory in itself reflect a modernist worldview, where focus is given to uneven global distribution, which is not a new phenomenon, and thus, conceals the political nature of technical systems (Ibid:286). By such, the digital- divide notion reasserts the idea of development as a series of stages and where the Western society is the ideal (ibid:287).
Following this line of thought, Nederveen Pieterse argues that ICT4D and the discussion of “bridging the divide” is a part of a package deal where cyber utopianism is associated with marketing digital capitalism (Lovink, Geert & Zehle, Soenke, 2005:11). Pieterse explains that ICT4D promotes a techno determinist attitude where the spread of technology equals development, thus promoting a neo-liberal world-order and re-assuring developing countries dependency to the West considering that the technologies promoted are predominantly Western commodities containing western values and norms (ibid:11-13).
Within the idea of using social media as a tool for development is also the pre-requisite that the counterparts are media literate, which Friedrich Krotz explains is a concept derived from the knowledge gap theory (Carpentier, N., Pruulman-Vengerfeldt, P., Nordenstreng, K., Hartmann, M. and Cammaerts, B. (Eds.), 2006:179). The knowledge gap theory focuses on how information uptake is associated with socio-economic backgrounds. However, Krotz in line with the other theorist, affirms that viewing ICT and development from the digital-divide and knowledge gap angle is insufficient since it solely focuses on technologically and economically driven development instead of the actual desires of individuals, societies and communities (Ibid:180).
It is thus obvious that social media for development, as a part of ICT4D, is not entirely free of embedded complex difficulties. Since the idea of ICT4D is still rather new, finding sustainable and suitable approaches are hitherto difficult. It is therefore even more important to continue exploring, researching, scrutinizing and discussing the idea of ICT4D and perhaps not regard it as an already determined commodity for development.
Litterature:
Carpentier, N., Pruulman-Vengerfeldt, P., Nordenstreng, K., Hartmann, M. and Cammaerts, B. (Eds.) (2006) Researching Media, Democracy and Participation. Tartu: Tartu University Press
http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/reco_book1.pdf
Granqvist, Manne (2005) in Hemer, Oscar & Tufte, Thomas (2005) Media and Glocal Change. Rethinking Communication for Development. Buenos Aires: CLACSO. http://bibliotecavirtual.clacso.org.ar/ar/libros/edicion/media/media.html
Lovink, Geert & Zehle, Soenke (2005) the Incommunicado Reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures. http://www.networkcultures.org/weblog/archives/IncommunicadoReader.pdf