Issues of Development and Human Liberation Ultimately Remain Questions of Politics and Economics

The enthusiasm generated by the application of new communication and information technologies to issues of development communication is considerable. These technologies, through empowering individual social communication on a wider scale and through the greatly reduced entry barriers to their implementation, most certainly contain the promise of more equitable and dialogic communication. While there remain serious problems of access, and even more of access quality, it is nevertheless clearly the case that mobile technologies have made at least some forms of connectivity a reality even in situations that were apparently unpromising. There are, however, good grounds for expressing some scepticism towards some of the claims commonly made in this context. The issues of equity and empowerment, and thus ultimately those of "development" in anything other than the crude and unilinear definition of raising economic productivity and embedding western modernity, are not primarily technological. As many people have noted, the key issues at stake are those of usage, and thus of human agency rather than technical affordance. It needs to be remembered, however, that human agency and the practices that it entails, are not the result of individual choices but are deeply inflected by social structures. In this respect, the implementation of new communication and information technologies in a developmental context implies a confrontation with those intractable issues that have in the past proved effective barriers to the liberatory potential of earlier technologies. There is, indeed, even some evidence that the conditions upon which the widespread utilization of the potential of these new technologies -- notably a relatively educated, self-confident and socially equal user base -- are ones that run directly counter to the needs of more traditional drivers of development like industrial development, infrastructural construction and economically-driven mass migration. This paper takes the view that while technologies might provide new means of self-organization (alongside enhanced means of surveillance) the issues of development and human liberation ultimately remain questions of politics and economics.