After the Internet

Ramesh Srinivasan, Adam Fish

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781509506187, 9781509506170
• eBook ISBN: 9781509506217
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In the wake of Edward Snowden's revelations, and concern that the internet has heightened rather than combated various forms of political and social inequality, it is time we ask: what comes after a broken internet?

Ramesh Srinivasan and Adam Fish reimagine the internet from the perspective of grassroots activists and citizens on the margins of political and economic power. They explore how the fragments of the existing internet are being utilized - alongside a range of peoples, places, and laws - to make change possible. From indigenous and non-Western communities andactivists in Tahrir Square, toimprisoned hackers and whistleblowers, this book illustrates how post-digital cultures are changing the internet as we know it - from a system which isincreasingly centralized, commodified, and "personalized, " into something more in line with its original spirit: autonomous, creative, subversive.

The book looks past the limitations of the internet, reconceptualizing network technology in relation to principles of justice and equality. Srinivasan and Fish advocate for an internet that blends the local concerns of grassroots communities and activists with the need to achieve scalable change and transformation.

1
Reimagining Technology with Global Communities

In the summer of 2009, Ramesh Srinivasan, one of this book's authors, was able to arrange a trip to the Sepik River of Papua New Guinea (PNG) thanks to a local guide, Seby Mai, whom he met in the nearby town of Wewak. The Sepik is famous for its dramatic landscapes featuring winding rivers and swamps with villages interspersed every few miles. The village communities of this region are known to have maintained relatively distinct indigenous practices of worship, performance, and language. While Pidgin and English were “taught” to the local people by the colonial missionaries, PNG's several hundred indigenous languages continue to thrive.

In line with the story we share, we recognize how important it is to be wary of the ethical transgressions, historical and contemporary, and heed the words of scholars who are wary of social science work that has contributed to the objectification of tribal and non-Western peoples worldwide (Clifford 1989; Hayes & Hayes 1970). An experience of other places or peoples may perhaps be better understood as one of the “borderland” (Badone 2004; Rosaldo, Calderón, & Salvadívar 1991), a theory that recognizes the heterogeneity of any place, culture, or community. Our telling of this story is thus not intended to essentialize the “other” but instead to reveal the potential agency and ingenuity of all peoples.

Having reached the river long after dusk following several hours of transportation via cars, buses, and donkey carts, Srinivasan and Seby were picked up by the guide's brother in his large dugout canoe. Seby explained that night-time was a time of great success for his community's crocodile hunting trade. He and his family would try to capture these reptiles alive and then imprison, feed, and skin them. Yet to find them in the river, the hunter would have to detect their luminescent eyes in the pitch dark. The days of flashlights had long passed, however, because batteries were too expensive and in short supply. And there was no working electricity in any of the villages except for those communities that had been able to purchase generators.

How, then, could such hunting occur in the dark? To answer, Seby's brother pulled a mobile phone out of his pocket along with a mirror and used these together to project a light in different directions, illuminating the night-time sky.

This anecdote is notable because it reveals how the tool of the mobile phone was repurposed to support local economic and cultural practices. The phone was not used to make or receive calls, let alone to browse the internet or send text messages. But it was appropriated in an unanticipated, creative manner. It is a reminder of Tim Ingold's expression that we “know as we go” (2000: 229). Ingold's point is that knowledge is revealed through actions, practices, and movements. The creative repurposing of the mobile phone, rather than the tool itself, is an example of knowledge in action.

We introduced this chapter with this experience within PNG to emphasize the power of agency that exists within communities across the world, and particularly those of the global South, that have recently been exposed to the internet and new digital technologies. This is a reminder that despite centuries of colonialism, indigenous and non-Western peoples are neither permanently marginalized, nor inherently dependent on institutions or infrastructures produced by first-world elites. Nor are they merely objectified users of new technology. Indeed, despite systematic marginalization, as various global communities engage with new technologies they practice what Steven Jackson (2014) describes as “innovation within constraint.” This is in direct contrast to the myth that sees internet users worldwide as passive beneficiaries of existing systems and infrastructures, waiting for first-world hand-me-downs.

This chapter presents three cases to reveal how indigenous communities have reimagined network technologies in line with their visions, aspirations, and practices. Like our story from PNG, the examples we share are of assemblages crafted by diverse communities across the world. These assemblages reveal that the internet and new media technology cannot be separated from the belief systems, knowledges, and local geographies, politics, and economics of community life. Instead, they are interconnected as assemblages.

In the sections that follow, we discuss much of the literature around the internet that objectifies indigenous and marginalized global communities, and specifically the misguided notion of the “digital divide.” We discuss how theories of “information access” and their implementation threaten rather than support cultural diversity. In contrast, we argue that we must learn from diverse communities as we rethink epistemologies around technology use that are mistakenly embraced as universal truth. We can instead gain a great deal by learning from assemblages that fuse cultural practices and beliefs with technology.

Digital Divides and Their Apostles

This book's introduction described the danger in treating the internet as autonomous, sovereign, and immune from critique. When we treat technology as such, it becomes a “stable reference” rather than a point of inquiry. This is consistent with Martin Heidegger's (1954) concept of Gestell, which refers to the means by which technology “enframes” – or presents an all-encompassing view of – what human existence is or should be. Such a treatment of technology evangelizes it in some platonic and immaterial form while failing to imagine or reflect upon what else may be (Ciborra 2002).

Treating the internet and new technologies as fixed and magical gives rise to the problematic “digital divide” mission of blindly connecting the many billions to the internet. Part of what fuels the myth of the digital divide is the notion that a single internet can or does exist, and that extending access to networked technologies (including mobile phones) is all that is needed to bring about some ambiguously defined form of development or empowerment. Yet as Nicole Zillien and Eszter Hargittai (2009) point out, “the Internet cannot be assumed to be ‘inherently good or inherently bad.’ …Like all other technologies, the affordances of the internet are related to its history, its design, and the context of its adoption and usage” (2009: 274). These scholars' research on different forms of technological use across social strata demonstrates the absence of a single internet, instead emphasizing the variety of starting points, literacies, belief systems, and points of contingency that shape the lives of users across the world.

A quintessential example of the universalizing approach taken around the digital divide can be seen via the actions of Google, the world's most profitable company. At the TED 2014 conference, Google co-founder Larry Page explained how his company was dedicated to bringing “hope” to peoples across the world, while citing an advertisement of a Kenyan farmer thanking the company for providing his community with useful information (Page 2014). Moments before, Page had spoken with great pride about the Google Loon project, which deploys balloons over the stratosphere to spread internet access to “dark spots” in the world.

Both these examples reveal Page's presumption that access to the Google version of the internet is merely a technical challenge to be bridged rather than part of a complex assemblage that brings together technologies with a number of cultural, social, and ethical dynamics. Google, blindly assumed to be an unambiguous good, will spread access to “its” internet. It is dangerously assumed that poorer and non-Western communities “wish” for internet access on Google's terms, even if this internet is tiered, meaning skewed toward advertisers who have paid Google to be made visible.

Similar to Google's efforts, in 2014 Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced his company's “Connectivity Lab,” which will deploy drone technologies to spread internet access worldwide (Zuckerberg 2014). For Zuckerberg, as for Page, “connecting” everyone to his company's version of the internet is merely a technical challenge. Yet both of these examples fail to question what such connectivity looks like, who would drive it, and what obstacles it faces. If a user community, for example in rural Africa, prefers an alternative, non-commercial, and relatively more open version of the internet, how can it protest against an automated system in the sky?

As Lisa Parks and Nicole Starosielski (2015) argue, technical statements of internet access pose as neutral while masking a number of hidden agendas. Like any technology, the infrastructures by which internet access is provided must be read relative to the social, political, or economic arrangements by which they were designed and deployed. Google Loon or Facebook Free Basics, supported by the Connectivity Lab, must be seen as assemblages in their own right, and dissected to unpack the values and political economies with which they are associated. Yet these arrangements are mostly impossible to decipher when the balloons or drones we speak of are high up in the sky and far out of range of our proverbial “sight” (Fish 2015). The issue is echoed when we speak of the underwater fiber-optic cables that form the physical infrastructure of the internet. These may seem neutral and equalizing, yet they actually work to reinforce unequal geographies, as demonstrated, for example, by the few connections linking the formerly colonized continents of the global South (South America and Africa).

An analytical look at the global internet as it stands reveals geographies of inequality consistent with the asymmetric flows of people, capital, images, and media that are part of our world today. In a powerful narration of neoliberal globalization, anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (1990) described these phenomena in his article titled “Difference and Disjuncture in the Global Cultural Economy.” Appadurai's theories are supported by research around the theme of “digital inequality,” whose findings argue that the benefits provided by internet use tend to be disproportionately enjoyed by those already in positions of privilege as opposed to their poorer counterparts (Zillien & Hargittai 2009). Such work connects and exposes the neoliberal social and political climates that affect what the internet means and how it is interwoven with everyday life. Similarly, in her work examining the intersection of social and digital inequality in natural disasters, Mirca Madianou (2015) finds similar consistencies between social inequalities and the asymmetric means by which digital resources are wielded to support user communities.

A number of scholars have thus shown that access to the internet on average reinforces rather than resolves social and economic inequality (Castells 2000; DiMaggio, Hargittai, Celeste, & Shafer, 2004; Hargittai 2008; Zillien & Hargittai 2009). Unsurprisingly, those with higher economic, political, and social status tend to have better technical equipment, faster connections, and stronger digital literacy (Hargittai 2008; Howard, Busch, & Sheets 2010; Warschauer 2004), defined as the skills needed to use a digital resource in an autonomous, individualized, and effective way.

The myth that spreading technologies empowers all equally is further rebutted by scholarship that reveals how digital technologies disproportionately empower specific geographies and peoples at the cost of others (Sassen 2002). The majority of the world's population tends to be left absent from determining how technologies could or should diffuse. The term “silent majority” in this case can be safely replaced with “silent billions.” Even ethnographic research of tec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: After the Internet
• 1: Reimagining Technology with Global Communities
• 2: Hacking the Hacktivists
• 3: Media Activism: Shaping Online and Offline Networks
• 4: After the Cloud: Do Silk Roads Lead to Data Havens?
• Coda
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement