THE SOCIO-TECHNICAL CONTRACT OF ICT4D
Introduction
As the previous chapter argued, a particular political imagination of networking, which underpinned the dual focus of HKYD on ICT skills training and community
empowerment, endowed the local community with political authority. Yet at the same time, local populations were subjected to depoliticized governmental technologies of development as well as information-capitalist control. This chapter investigates emerging contradictions between sovereignty and governmental and capitalist control in the CSR ICT4D governance networks. It argues that these were settled on the basis of a socio-technical arrangement that constructed the global and the local as two separate zones of governance, approached through distinct techniques of governance: governmental control and participation.
First, I look at how NGO employees and volunteers defined skilling in a much broader sense than preparing populations to meet demands of information capitalism. NGO affiliates saw skill training populations as an open-ended processes empowering populations by acquiring skills to participate and contribute to society. Although this alternative
definition of skills expresses the NGO’s commitments to participatory self-governance, I note that, like their other CSR ICT4D governance partners, the NGO promoted concepts and mechanisms of participatory life and democracy exclusively in relation to local affairs.
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Second, I explore the consequences of the contradictory fact that ICTs were supposed to benefit participatory democracy yet that they were themselves not produced through such participatory politics. I focus on the multiple workings of “e-democracy” discourses which claimed an intrinsic relation existed between ICTs and participatory democracy. On the one hand, I argue, these discourses were myths, in Roland Barthes’ sense, that eclipsed the actual experiences with so-called e-democracy applications and in doing so forestalled the
development of more “inventive” technologies. On the other hand, not as myths but as specters, these discourses were appropriated by HKYD and LA-21 affiliates for claiming political authority for local communities and opening up new political spaces.
Third, I focus on the LA-21 City Councils as political spaces situated within the organizational structure of “network governance.” These Councils, although to some extent designed by the partnership between HKYD, the UN, and corporate partners, operated rather outside the purview and control of these governance actors. I highlight the ways that the designation of local communities as social entities with political authority triggered developments irreducible to either corporate control or NGO policy-making.
Skills for Life
According to the NGO volunteers and employees working on ICT4D, their programs targeted everything but the simple expansion of markets and consumer bases. The volunteers and employees at HKYD claimed the training participants were not just trained to become consumers or narrowly skilled workers, but that they developed themselves in ways that were empowering and enriching. The ICT projects coordinator, Bora, who was employed at the NGO after having volunteered for it, emphasized, “We are not an institution that offers
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telecommunication skills; we are a civil society institution.” He added, “I am here because this is a social responsibility project.”80
His words reiterated Sezai Hazır’s statement that CSR ICT4D was “not simply a project toward increasing computer literacy” but an “activity that strengthens our other activities by triggering social change.”81 Similarly, master trainer Eda suggested that “our main goal is not only related to the use of computers, we are also trying to increase the consciousness of young people in Turkey, which we find to be even more important. It is a social project.”82
She pointed out that upon completion of the course, participants only received a certificate of participation [katılım belgesi], and not a test score that would measure and prove specific competencies. In other words, participants were not just prepared to become consumers and workers who had valuable skills according to regimes of value of information capitalism.
Similarly, volunteer instructor Kaan, quote above, argued, participants and instructors were offered opportunities to develop themselves by attaining skills for critical thinking and the capabilities to be autodidacts in the future.83 Kaan suggested that the actual goal of the trainings was not just teaching people a limited set of skills, but stimulating self-learning. Kaan’s approach suggested something of an open-ended capacity for learning and
transformation. Discussing “learning” in this sense, he argued that people nowadays were able to be self-reflective and critical [özeleştiri yapmayı bilmesi gerekiyor] and that the goal of the NGO was to trigger such potential so that self-awareness, self-development, and
80
Personal interview, Istanbul, June 9 2011.
81 See http://www.microsoft.com/turkiye/basinodasi/2009/PR0707001.aspx , accessed on May 23, 2012.
82
Personal interview, Istanbul, July 9, 2011.
83
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progress would become possible.84 This open-ended transformation would not be only an individual process but also a knowledge creation process. When Kaan described his job as a volunteer, he corrected himself to claim that his job was not just “providing” education and knowledge but “sharing” knowledge. He thereby made a distinction between the centralized, institutional dissemination of authoritative knowledge and networked sharing, which would be about circulation and exchange of an open-ended body of knowledge. Kaan argued that in return for sharing knowledge, his students gave him new perspectives and he received a “positive energy” from them. Instead of focusing only on digital skills, HKYD worked on a broader set of skills, mentalities, and “awareness” that, according to the NGO, were
important capabilities for “participation.”85
As Ms. Saral explained, besides the ICT4D programs, the NGO provided a variety of trainings that mostly focused “on human rights and youth rights.” Further trainings and programs covered an array of topics from documentary making to reproductive health, diversity, and financial literacy. According to the NGO, these trainings helped people, primarily youth, to gain awareness of their rights and to get involved in whatever social and political issues mattered to them. The NGO’s interest in ICTs had to do with political imaginations of networking, reviewed in the first section, according to which information access and exchange were fundamental for participatory governance. Through the LA-21 program, which claimed legitimate political authority for local, self- governing communities, HKYD promoted participatory citizenship and social change. As LA-21 coordinator Mr. Emrealp said, the LA-21 program encouraged local populations in cities to establish their own “networks,” consisting of working groups and councils, to decide
84
Personal interview, Istanbul, August 14 2011.
85
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their own interventions and activities.86 These platforms of self-government promoted the principles of “ownership” over one’s city and “active participation.”
As discussed in the previous section, Bernard Stiegler (2010: 162) uses the Heideggerian concept of the Gestell to critique socio-technical networks that are “short- circuited”—that enlist us by incorporating us into a pre-constituted, non-negotiable system. Stiegler (2010) also envisions networks that are “long-circuited,” which disrupt the socio- technical networks sustained by service industries that limit capabilities and lock consumer- citizens in. The unanticipated outcomes of enrolling subjects in such long-circuited networks of sharing knowledge and transferring skills consist in the generation of new and deviant knowledges and skills. Such “long-circuited” enrolling would constitute not a narrow set of technological skills, but savoir faire: capabilities to live in participatory ways and to co- determine socio-technical trajectories and developments. NGO affiliates clearly had this latter concept of individual and communal learning and acquiring skills in mind. Both corporate discourses and critical literature (including, for instance, Sassen 2005) on the digital divide tend to measure (the lack of) skills, in terms of “talent.” However these approaches reconsider “skill” in relation to possibilities for participation in a much broader sense. 87
The redefinition of skills by NGO employees and volunteers expresseses their commitment to participatory self-governance. However, it is rather striking that, along with
86Personal interview, Istanbul, May 27, 2011.
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Somewhat similarly, the notion of mass intellectuality by autonomist theorists comprises “an ensemble, as a social body” that is “the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation” (Terranova, 2004: 87, 88). Importantly, mass intellectuality is not about knowledge workers, as exclusively those involved in a specific set of professions. Mass intellectuality is a “quality and a distinctive sign of the whole social labor force in the post-Fordist era” (Paolo Virno, quoted in Terranova, 2004: 88). The concept refers to a “general propensity of the post-Fordist proletariat and not of some ‘recomposed vanguard or leading sector’” (Virno & Hardt, quoted in Dyer-Witheford, 1999: 231).
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the other CSR ICT4D governance partners, the NGO promoted concepts and mechanisms of participatory life and democracy exclusively in relation to local affairs. I argue that the NGO consented to a particular socio-technical arrangement that constructed the global and the local as two separate zones of governance, approached through distinct techniques of governance: governmental control and participatory self-governance. At stake was what I call a socio-technical contract. This informal “contract” was unspoken, yet it had practical relevance. The contract enabled the multi-stakeholder partnerships between HKYD, the UN (LA-21), and ICT companies by establishing common grounds between them, aligning their interests, and organizing their governance practices. This contract implied that all partners consented to participatory, local communities having political authority in relation to local
affairs. However, while they promoted concepts and mechanisms of participatory democracy on the local level, such political authority was absent with regard to affairs that were
destignated to be not of a local or national but of a global nature, including the
standardization of software and ICT devices, information capitalism as a mode of production, and the mechanisms of global governance through which the CSR ICT4D project was
planned and implemented. As a consequence of this socio-technical contract, sovereignty and citizenship were not just graduated (Ong, 2006), but also relative to certain spheres of life and scales of social and technical organization.
The following section will explore further the emergent contradictions of the combination of governmental control and political authority articulated as participation in relation to “e-democracy” discourses and ICT applications in community empowerment projects.
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Bringing “E-Democracy”
For HKYD, as stated before, the connection between the ICT4D efforts and the efforts targeting community governance, part of the UN’s Local Agenda 21, resided in the expectation that training populations by familiarizing them with ICTs would increase their ability to participate in self-governance as well as impact local and central policy making by state authorities. Meanwhile, ICT companies were invested in producing “e-democracy” applications and, as part of their CSR ICT4D efforts, providing these to participants in community empowerment projects. In the following, I explore the consequences of the contradictory fact that ICTs were supposed to benefit participatory democracy yet, as tools, they were themselves not produced through participatory- political processes. While hailed by CSR ICT4D governance partners as tools for empowerment, participants of community empowerment projects were not convinced of the e-democracy applications, and ICTs in general, being key to their own empowerment. However, “e-democracy” discourses, I argue, functioned both as a myth that empowered ICT companies and as a specter that empowered the participatory community.
The stimulation of ICT-based self-governance and participation was especially targeted through the project Strengthening Youth Networks in Turkey (Türkiye'de Gençlik Ağlarının Güçlendirilmesi Projesi, T-GAG), conducted between 2008 and 2010. This project was a collaboration between HKYD, Cisco, Teachers without Borders, and the United
Nations Development Program (UNDP). On the HKYD website, the project was announced as one that focused on using ICTS to increase the capacities of the LA-21 Youth Councils, which were a component of the City Council. The project centered on the web portal of the national youth council, www.ulusalgenclikparlamentosu.net. This virtual platform was
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supposed to function as a database to make self-organization among the Youth Councils all over Turkey more effective.88 In 2009, T-GAG received the UN World Youth Award in the category “Create Your Own Culture,” competing in different categories with 612 projects from 101 different countries.89 However, this celebration of the web portal as an instance of e-governance and e-democracy stands in contrast to the experiences narrated by participants and NGO employees. Through interviews with UN and NGO staff as well as with
representatives of local youth councils in the national youth parliament, I learned that the experiment with e-governance and e-democracy, in general and with regard to the web portal in particular, was not at all a straightforward success. Ms. Saral (at HKYD) told me that the NGO had experienced some technical problems with the T-GAG website. One of them was that the platform was not set up to realize a network that would expand to include new members, other groups, and unorganized youth. After two years, the executive board of the national youth parliament decided to abandon the web portal of the award-winning T-GAG project and use Facebook instead. Speaking more generally, Mr. Emrealp, the LA-21 project coordinator, told me that he was rather disappointed with the ICT-based practices of the City Councils’ youth platforms. Results fell below the expectations of e-democracy applications, even though, as Mr. Emrealp saw it, everything was available: “the networks are there, the communication channels are there, and we collaborated with a number of agencies
specialized in technologies, calling them [the communication channels and platforms] e- democracy.” 90 He continued: 88 See http://www.habitatkalkinma.org/tr/html/1125/Turkiye_de+Genclik+Aglarinin+Guclendirilmesi+Projesi , accessed on June 10, 2012. 89
See http://www.habitatkalkinma.org/tr/html/1135/Odullerimiz/, accessed on June 10, 2012.
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We believed that cell phones could be used as an effective means of interaction and conveying your ideas to the city management and participating in the process. The channels were put in place, yet their actual use is very feeble in fact. Most of the channels were used to announce things in a one-directional way, like “the Mayor is there and there” or “is on television.”91
Commenting on the expectation that ICTs would facilitate an inclusive, participatory democracy, he argued, “When you look at our numbers this is a disillusion. Facebook has gathered around 4,000 youths all around Turkey. This should be happening in a small city of less than 600,000.”92
Admittedly, one particular HKYD campaign, which targeted lowering the minimum age for members of parliament, had been very successful in mobilizing people by using ICTs as a means for outreach and attracting attention from the established, “old” media such as the Turkish press (Saral, 2011: 102). HKYD often used it as an example of what ICTs could mean for “bottom-up,” democratic politics. However, the more daily experience of community self-governance did not confirm the advocated relation between ICTs and participatory democracy. When I visited a national meeting of the Youth Councils, I got the opportunity to conduct a focus-group style interview with about 15 participants and Ms. Saral. I tried to ask the volunteers and youth council members about their experience of the
relationship between technology and democracy. After an initial silence and lack of mutual understanding, Ms. Saral jumped in and reformulated my question to the group as follows:
If you look at this moment, do we use Facebook? For instance, when we had our meetings, we met with a range of parliamentary candidates and parties over Facebook. Do we get to see them only face-to-face, or can we use Facebook and other social sharing platforms—not just written and visual media but especially the
91 Ibid.
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internet—in order to also make other youth active and to strengthen the youth movement? To my understanding, the question is something like that. 93
After another brief silence, the dry-humored answer by one of the participants was: “We didn’t use them,” whereby “them” referred to online sharing platforms. When I asked why they did not do so or what the obstacle was, another participant replied, “We are better with face-to-face communication. We can explain ourselves better in this way. We can convey ourselves and our opinions better, whatever we want to explain.” Participants argued that social media in general were used for entertainment and that their “serious” calls and information would not be able to attract the attention of their peers in these environments. The participant quoted last added: “That’s why I need to reach out in a direct manner. I always prefer face-to-face communication over that [Facebook] with regard to this topic.”
All in all, there were clear discrepancies between, on the one hand, the discourses by participants and NGO workers and, on the other, the discourses that the NGO used to address ICTs companies and that these companies themselves used in external communication. For instance, the discursive discrepancies regarding T-GAG formed another dimension of what I identified earlier as the “politics of transparency” common in multi-scalar, multi-stakeholder governance: the construction of decentralized networks that host disparate spheres of
communication and information as well as selective patterns of disclosure and withholding.94
93
Focus group, Istanbul, June 11, 2011.
94 As discussed in the previous chapter, good governance practices of multi-stakeholderism often substituted
“success stories” and “best practices” for systematic evaluation of CSR ICT4D projects. Complementary to this trend was the recognition of local partner organizations with awards. Among the awarding organizations were the EU and the UN, which decided what would count as a best practice, and ICT companies, which awarded “outstanding partners.” Among the receiving organizations were the local NGO or the entire group of collaborating partners on a particular project. Awarding functioned as a technology of building trust and reaffirming accountability between particular actors in the governance networks. Hence HKYD was careful to dedicate a webpage to its awards. At the same time, awarding formed an occasion for generating publicity about CSR projects and therefore pleased the partnering companies.
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The disparate discourses and addressivities, directed at different audiences and constituting different governance objects, were far from innocent. For one, they provided an alibi
(Barthes, 1972) that obscured the control that global companies exercised by acting as governance partners in CSR initiatives. That is, they sustained the power-geometry of
information capitalism. Through discourses that suggested an intrinsic relation between ICTs and participatory democracy, ICT companies managed to avoid appearing as “alienating”