New Technologies in Developing Societies

From Theory to Practice

L. Obijiofor

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137389329
• eBook ISBN: 9781137389336
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

New technologies may have transformed human societies, but not much has been written on how they are impacting people in Africa and other developing regions, in terms of how they use technology to enhance their socioeconomic conditions in everyday life. This book critically examines these issues from theoretical, practical and policy perspectives.

1

Introduction

Of all the innovations that have affected human lives in the 21st century, none has been as far-reaching as new technology. This is particularly true for people in the industrialised world. Their lives are affected in one way or another by technology. Whether they are awake or asleep, whether they are at work or at play, whether they are adults or infants, they interact with technology in some way. The infant who plays with toys connects with technology in a different way. As Last Moyo (2009a, p. 122) noted with particular reference to developed countries, new technologies such as computers and mobile phones have a profound impact on ‘how people communicate, vote, buy, trade, learn, date, work or even play’.

In the health sector, technology is the engine that drives many services. Doctors use technology to communicate with nurses, patients and paramedical staff. Patients with access to technology do not have to wait to consult their doctors before they can get some idea about their ailments. They can google the symptoms of their illness in order to find information on the possible causes of their conditions. Availability of modern technology facilitates telemedicine or telehealth, through which patients in isolated and remote communities are connected to medical specialists in cities with better medical facilities for assessment of their medical condition. This is usually done through videoconference or teleconference technology.

Telehealth is deemed valuable in many ways because it saves money previously spent on air travel, accommodation and food, which patients had to pay for to be able to meet their specialist doctors in distant locations. It also reduces or, in some cases, eliminates the time that patients devote to travel to keep their appointments with specialists. In addition, telehealth offers several other benefits, such as providing web-based health education for community members; it facilitates greater interaction among health workers in and outside local communities; it also makes it possible for patients to access specialist medical services. In the HIV/AIDS prevention campaign, technology is helping people living with the virus to access relevant information online about how to manage their condition and adopt appropriate behaviour to prevent the spread of the virus. In the campaign to stop the further spread of HIV/AIDS, there has been a shift in strategy from use of the mass media to use of social media and other digital technologies to reach the youth, to create awareness and to sensitise the public to the disease.

In the education sector, technology has transformed the mode of teaching and learning at the primary, secondary and university levels. University students need not be present physically in lecture halls to access lecture notes, to understand what was taught or to interact with lecturers. In various universities, especially in developed western countries and in some technologically resourced developing countries, students can access the audio version of lectures, as well as PowerPoint slides of lectures. With access to printers at home or at the university library, students can print learning material. Similarly, students can submit assignments online. Not only is technology facilitating distance education, it is also making it possible for children in remote and isolated communities with limited educational facilities to remain in their communities and to continue their education through the Internet. This is what is known in some parts of the world, such as the northern Ontario province of Canada, as the Internet High School. The Internet High School shows that, in isolated communities that suffer from economic and social deprivations, education doesn’t have to be delivered through a face-to-face medium. Technological transformations have affected the mode of teaching and learning.

While technology is affecting people in many ways in many countries, there are a large number of people in developing countries who lack access to basic technology, not to mention access to digital media. However, despite the dearth of digital technologies in various parts of the world, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones has helped many people to close the gap between the technology ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. In rural and remote parts of the developing world, villagers are using mobile phones to communicate and connect with their relatives in distant places. In the past, messages, news and information were passed on mostly by word-of-mouth communication in the rural communities of developing countries, but the situation is changing noticeably. Now technology is the main tool for news and information dissemination. Villagers use the mobile phone, for example, to relay important and urgent messages to relatives who reside in city centres and other distant locations. Small and medium-sized business owners, fish farmers in remote locations, men or women involved in the marketing of local textiles, carved wood and other art and craft can all expand their businesses to reach customers in far-flung locations they would never have been able to reach without technology. Mobile phone technology and the Internet have made it possible for these people to create awareness about their products on a global scale and therefore extend the reach of their products to buyers in many parts of the world. This is the value of new technology.

In some cases, technology has enabled low and medium-scale business people to cut out the middlemen and women who often constitute obstacles in the business chain. Cutting out middlemen and women has also led to increase in profits. With technology, these business people can deal directly with their customers. They are also able to access information about prices of their products in markets near and far rather than rely on information provided by middlemen and women. In many impoverished communities in developing countries, the mobile phone has empowered women in various ways and is helping them to access information that enables them to break out of the cycle of poverty and to improve their socioeconomic conditions.

There are other ways in which new technologies are helping people to improve their living conditions through provision of employment opportunities, knowledge acquisition, cultural preservation and promotion of lesser used or minority languages. For example, Internet technology such as multimedia web service provides a forum where Indigenous people from different countries can meet online to share ideas, to tell their stories and to share experiences. The ability to meet and communicate online allows Indigenous people to enact and maintain their cultural practices, and to share ideas about the common challenges that affect them in different parts of the world. When Indigenous people in remote and isolated communities create and communicate through their home pages on the web, they use these not only to reduce the impact of isolation, distance and idleness in their communities but also to provide insights into the lives of many of their families, including their ancestral history and their relationship to the land (Ramirez, Aitkin, Jamieson and Richardson, 2004; Jansen and Bentley, 2004).

It is important to point out that technology does not have a homogenising effect in terms of the way people use it in developing and developed countries. In diverse cultures, new technologies are helping people to monitor their health, to undertake careers in education and to advance their businesses and their economic activities. In other words, technology use and adoption are occurring in different contexts and cultures under different conditions. Therefore, to understand the way people in Africa and other developing regions use technology, it is important that we understand the specific contexts. That is why the focus of this book is on technology use in Africa in particular and in developing countries in general. Even in our modern world, some communities are technologically well served but others are poorly equipped and lack access to technology, and so find themselves lagging behind other communities.

This resonates with the concepts of digital divide and poverty divide that exist within countries and between countries. The digital divide can be explained as the inequalities that exist between those who have access to new technologies and therefore have greater access to information and those who lack access to new technologies and are therefore disadvantaged. Norris (2001) describes the digital divide as a concept that should be understood in three distinct forms, namely as the global divide, the social divide and the democratic divide. ‘The global divide refers to the divergence of Internet access between industrialized and developing societies’ (2001, p. 4). The social divide refers to the information gap that exists between rich and poor people within every country, while the democratic divide refers to the difference between those who use and those who do not use the range of ‘digital resources to engage, mobilize, and participate in public life’ (Norris, 2001, p. 4). Like the digital divide, digital poverty refers to various aspects such as the inability of people to afford information and communication technology services, as well as the lack of skills to use new technologies. It also refers to the lack of infrastructure to deliver the information and communication technology services (May, 2012).

There is poverty in remote and rural communities. There is also poverty in metropolitan cities in industrialised western countries. It was generally thought that people in developing countries lack access to new technologies such as mobile phones, the Internet and social networking sites. While this is arguably true in comparison to the situation in developed countries, the situation is rapidly changing. Research shows that Africa is now the world’s fastest-growing market for mobile phones, followed by Asia in second position (Aker and Mbiti, 2010; Chéneau-Loquay, 2010; LaFraniere, 2005). While technologies are transforming human activities in Africa and other developing regions in positive ways, it is important to acknowledge that they have their shortcomings. Some people use technologies as tools to commit crimes such as financial fraud and identity theft. In this way, new technologies have brought new challenges to human societies.

The analysis presented here focuses on information and communication technologies and their impact on the everyday lives of people in Africa and other developing regions. The analysis shows the interconnections between new technologies and the socioeconomic development of Africa, in the area of health (e.g., the fight against the spread of the HIV/AIDS virus) and in terms of how technologies are used by African youth to engage in participatory communication in the public sphere. It examines the challenges that new technologies pose to Indigenous people in terms of their rights to protect their traditional knowledge and their right to protect and preserve their intellectual property. The role of public service broadcasting in the socioeconomic development of Africa and other developing regions, as well as how public service broadcasting is being used to promote and preserve minority languages, is analysed. Also discussed is how technological changes and the growing involvement of people in online activities have transformed the way ethnographers conduct research in people’s natural environment and in their online social spaces.

This chapter provides an important link to the rest of the chapters, not only in terms of the overarching ways that new technologies inform development activities but also in terms of the interconnection between theory and practice. Arguments have also been advanced to justify the focus of this book on practice rather than on theory, as is common in other texts. Each chapter is primarily concerned with or explores assumptions about the use of new technologies in different contexts.

Technology as the key concept that connects all chapters

Technology adoption and use is the common thread that links the chapters. Each chapter is primarily connected with theoretical explanations and practical examples of how people use new technologies in different cultural, political, social, structural and educational contexts. The point is made that, in the development of human societies, technology is the instrument that propels economic growth. It is the tool that helps to advance education and healthcare. Therefore, in all the chapters, technology is positioned as the agent of change. Each chapter questions and synthesises divergent theoretical assumptions relating to the role of technologies in human societies. In general, the diverse ways in which people use technologies constructively – to improve their health, to engage in politics and facilitate participatory democracy, to conduct ethnographic research, and to promote economic growth and language development via public service broadcasting – are analysed. The link between uptake of technology and development is widely discussed in the development communication literature.

In the field of development communication, a number of dominant theoretical paradigms stand out. These include but are not limited to the modernisation, dependency and culturalist paradigms (Houston and Jackson, 2009) and the social entrepreneurship approach (McAnany, 2012). McPhail (2009, pp. 8–9) summarised the principal arguments of modernisation theorists thus:

modernization theory took hold and carried with it an element of economic determinism along with a parallel drive to expand democratic concepts and practices, such as the importance of voting behavior. Although the theories all recognized, to varying degrees, the role and importance of communication, they came from a number of social science disciplines. Sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists, psychologists, social workers, media scholars, and others touched on aspects of modernization approaches. Many also took ideas and strategies from developed, industrialized nations and applied them with some fine tuning to the southern hemisphere. But the long range goal was similar. To make the inhabitants of poorer nations in the South more like the wealthier peoples of the North.

The modernisation theory, which was dominant between 1945 and 1965, is regarded as the first theory that was associated with the transfer of technology. Western scholars such as Lerner (1958), Schramm (1964) and Rogers (1969), who pushed this theory, regarded technology, including media technology, as the key facilitator of socioeconomic development in developing societies (Houston and Jackson, 2009). The modernisation ‘model of change is based on the notion that there is a direct causal link between five sets of variables, namely, modernizing institutions, modern values, modern behavior, modern society and economic development’ (Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 107). In their view, therefore, ‘modernization tends to support the agenda to transfer not only technology to “traditional” societies, but also the sociopolitical culture of modernity’ (2009, p. 107). One of the key assumptions of this paradigm was that exposure to mass media would lead to an increase in the literacy rate, the growth of cities and industrial development. In the modernisation paradigm, development was conceived as and equated with economic growth as determined by a country’s gross national product (GNP). As a reflection of the mood of that era, the post-World War II policies of many developing countries mirrored such an assumption. Based on experiences in the west soon after World War II, western scholars recommended that countries aspiring to achieve socioeconomic growth should invest in new technologies as a solution to problems of underdevelopment. Where this was not feasible, developing countries were advised to use foreign assistance packages to initiate economic development.

The emphasis on technology adoption is understandable. Many western countries had lived through the period of industrialisation, witnessed its impact on their economies and believed it to be a vital instrument that propels socioeconomic growth. The argument then was that, if technology assisted in the economic development of western countries, it would unquestionably engender a similar outcome in developing countries. Communication technology became a catchphrase for national socioeconomic development. Communication technology, particularly mass media technology, was strongly perceived as a major stimulus for economic growth. Accordingly, acquisition of mass media technology became a major objective of developing countries. Nevertheless, one critique of the modernisation theory is that it regarded ‘modern life style’ to be of better quality, so that development is seen as an effort to help the Third World ‘catch up’ (Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 109). Another theoretical perspective – the dependency paradigm – that arose in the 1960s symbolised

the goals of emerging nations for political, economic and cultural self-determination within the international community of nations. Much of the development promoted in this perspective is concerned primarily with political decisions focused on relationships between and within societies in regard to social, cultural, political and economic structures.

(Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 113)

It is within the dependency perspective that the concepts of cultural dependence and media imperialism are explored. It is argued that multinational corporations that manufacture mass media hardware and software dump these products – especially the software – at cheaper prices in developing countries where a local audience craving continuous entertainment actively consumes them. The media imperialism thesis is also seen as contrary to the dominant perspective on the role of the media in development (Fejes, 1981). Theoretically, media imperialism represents the ‘rejection by many Third World countries of Western models of modernization of which the earlier communication models were a part’ (Fejes, 1981, p. 281). In the media imperialism thesis, the mass media were seen not as an instrument for national development, but – ‘in a transnational context’ – as instruments for the domination of the developing nations (Fejes, 1981, p. 281).

A related theoretical model of technology is the Marxist perspective. The Marxist view on the role of the mass media perceives the broadcast media as an arm of the ‘ideological state apparatus’ and western capitalism. The Marxist view argues that the broadcast media, in concert with the bourgeoisie, the elite and the multinational corporations, promote needs, appetites, tastes and consumption habits that help to sustain capitalism and the status quo. This argument is fully represented in the dependency theory of development. Despite its attraction to critical scholars in developing countries, the dependency model was criticised for ‘focusing too heavily on externalities and for being exaggerated in its claims that dependent development is always caused by outside investment’ (Houston and Jackson, 2009, pp. 113–114). Nevertheless, one positive feature of the model is that it has enhanced public knowledge of the ‘negative effects of technology transfer’ (Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 114). Contrary to modernisation and dependency models of development, participatory development theory highlights the importance of empowering local people to initiate and engage in development projects at their own pace. According to scholars such as Servaes, Jacobson and White (1996), participatory development encourages the empowerment of ordinary people in developing countries to promote democracy and socioeconomic development of their societies (see Houston and Jackson, 2009). In participation, ‘issues of cultural identity and context take precedence’ (2009, p. 114).

In order to understand the extent to which new technologies have been adopted into local cultural practices, four important conditions have been outlined. The conditions are

a) the use of a given technology for purposes other than those for which it was originally intended; b) adaptation of local materials to meet the recurrent resource requirements of imported ICTs; c) modification of the technologies themselves to meet local needs; and d) modifications in personnel requirements, operational processes, and the like to suit local conditions.

(cited in Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 114)

One benefit of participation theory is that it encourages the involvement of local people. Within the participation model, development projects are initiated and implemented by local people. Participation theory therefore ‘emphasizes the ability of local communities for self-determination’ (Houston and Jackson, 2009, p. 115). Nevertheless, participation theory is not without its drawbacks, one of which is that it ‘glorifies and idealizes local relations, yet they may be laden with exploitation. It assumes that the local community will act equitably and efficiently, yet this is not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. New Technologies and the Socioeconomic Development of Africa
• 3. Public Service Broadcasting for Economic Growth and Language Development
• 4. Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights in a New Age
• 5. The African Public Sphere in the Electronic Era
• 6. Changing Technologies and the Changing Role of Citizens
• 7. Tradition Versus Modernity in HIV/AIDS Prevention
• 8. Ethnographic Research in ‘Offline’ and Online Worlds
• 9. Mobile Phones Transforming Public Communication in Africa
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index