Networking peripheries : technological futures and the myth of digital universalism / Anita Say Chan.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Chan, Anita.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Information society--Peru.

Information society.

Information technology--Peru.

Information technology.

Digital divide--Peru.

Digital divide.

Technological innovations--Social aspects--Peru.

Technological innovations.

Peru.

Physical Description:

1 PDF (xxvii, 258 pages) : illustrations.

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2013]

Language Note:

Text in English.

Summary:

In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to "network" the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source--based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Contents:

Introduction: Digital reform: information age Peru

Enterprise village: intellectual property and rural optimization

Native stagings: pirate acts and the complex of authenticity

Narrating neoliberalism: tales of promiscuous assemblage

Polyvocal networks: advocating free software in Latin America

Recoding identity: free software and the local politics of play

Digital interrupt: hacking universalism at the network's edge

Conclusion: digital author function.

Notes:

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Includes bibliographical references and index.

OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.

ISBN:

0-262-31953-5

OCLC:

881289032

Publisher Number:

9780262319522