Networking Peripheries ─ Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism

In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital culturesflourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation andentrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that thereare more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. Toexplore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertakento "network" the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectualproperty of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies toopen technology activism in rural and urban zones.

Drawing on ethnographicaccounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, ruraleducators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions ofinformation classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a newcreative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights throughinformation tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source--based technologiesadvance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributinglaptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery domore than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Anita Say Chan is Assistant Research Professor of Communications in the Department of Media and Cinema Studies and the Institute of Communications Research in the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana--Champaign.