1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910787962903321

Autore

Chan Anita

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cambridge, Mass. : , : MIT Press, , [2013]

©2013

ISBN

0-262-31953-5

Descrizione fisica

1 PDF (xxvii, 258 pages) : illustrations

Disciplina

303.48/330985

Soggetti

Information society - Peru

Information technology - Peru

Digital divide - Peru

Technological innovations - Social aspects - Peru

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Bibliographic Level Mode of Issuance: Monograph

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.