“[T]he unevenness between economic cores and peripheries is rarely leveled by ICTs.”
Mark Graham 1
How can we make sense of the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in/for Development, from the perspective of the people living in margins? Our blog, Perplexed Periphery, sought to articulate, from as many perspectives as authors are here represented, what ICTs mean for forgotten crises like Yemen, women-led social protests in Iran, the double-edge sword that technology offers women for empowerment and inclusion, and the performative debate about ‘decolonizing aid’ that has been hijacked by Euroamerican institutions, particularly NGOs and academia.
As students, we remain perplexed: the application of ICTs in the realm of development is messy, complicated, and bewildering. It is true that tech is neither good nor bad; nonetheless, it is definitely not neutral. The historical and compounded effect of socioeconomic and environmental factors in the sites where people’s lives occur, do influence people’s capabilities to engage meaningfully with technology. People in the peripheries of the world, those who have been pushed to the margins by the precarisation of life and work offered by neoliberalism and extractivism, might be the most exposed to a paradoxical situation, in which they are “included” as consumers and data sources, while being denied ownership over their own data, privacy, and freedom of speech and information.
The topics we reflected on in this blog are complex and dynamic, and through engaging you- the reader with them, we hope to have given some interesting insights. We believe sparking critical thinking paves the way to more answers and advances in current development issues.
We are happy to have had the opportunity to share this time with you. We hope to have inspired you in some way.
Goodbye from the Perplexed Periphery team, and thank you!
[1] Graham, M. 2019. Changing Connectivity and Digital Economies at Global Margins. In: Graham, M. (ed.). Digital Economies at Global Margins. Ottawa, ON/Boston, MA: IDRC/MIT Press.
