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Book Cover
E-book
Author Chan, Anita

Title Networking peripheries : technological futures and the myth of digital universalism / Anita Say Chan
Published Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2013]
©2013

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Description 1 online resource (xxvii, 258 pages) : illustrations
Contents 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
Summary 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
Analysis INFORMATION SCIENCE/Internet Studies
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY/General
SOCIAL SCIENCES/Anthropology & Archaeology
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 215-241) and index
Notes Text in English
Print version record
Subject Information society -- Peru
Information technology -- Peru
Digital divide -- Peru
Technological innovations -- Social aspects -- Peru
Digital divide
Information society
Information technology
Technological innovations -- Social aspects
Peru
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2013006956
ISBN 0262319527
9780262319522
9780262319539
0262319535