30 Sep 2014
Chris Foster and I have had the opportunity to participate in the Network Inclusion Roundtable: organised by IT For Change in Bangalore.
Our short paper, titled ‘Geographies of Information Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa‘ is available at this link.
The paper is a beginning to think about what connectivity means to inclusion in the ‘network society.’ Connectivity certainly isn’t a sufficient condition for inclusion and equity, and we need to ask whether it is a necessary one.
We point to connectivity as an amplifier: one that often reinforces rather than reduces inequality. We therefore need to move towards deeper critical socio-economic interrogations of the barriers or structures that limit activity and reproduce digital inequality. The categorisations developed in the paper offer an empirically-driven and systematic way to understand these barriers in more detail.