Page 122 - Education in a Digital World

International Development 109

programmes and initiatives. Here, the transitional ethos has been replaced by a
prevailing faith in ‘leapfrogging’– i.e. the implementation of advanced technologies
that can support accelerated rates of economic development and social progress.
Technological leapfrogging can be described in uncritical terms as “the imple-
mentation of a new and up-to-date technology in an application area in which at
least the previous version of that technology has not been deployed” (Davison et al.,
2000, p.2). A much-celebrated example of technology-based leapfrogging during
the 2000s was that of Cambodia – one of the first countries where mobile phone
users outnumbered fixed-line telephone users. As Latchem and Jung (2010)
describe, huge parts of the Cambodian population were judged to have progressed
into using mobile digital telecommunications having made little or no previous use
of telecommunications technology at all. Thus in the eyes of many commentators,
the otherwise non-industrialised country of Cambodia demonstrated an ability to
advance to the status of a post-industrial ‘information society’ without having to
endure the stages of ‘smoke-stack’ industrialism that blighted much of the Western
world throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
While appropriate and intermediate technology initiatives continue to play a role
in some international development efforts, much more attention is now directed
towards the use of digital technologies as advanced solutions to development pro-
blems – not least in the area of education and educational development. These
efforts have coalesced over the past ten years into the field of ‘information and
communications for development’– or ‘ICT4D’ as it has come to be known.
ICT4D certainly represents a more aggressive and ambitious approach to technology-
based development than its predecessors, the appropriate and intermediate
technology movements. Here an emphasis is placed on using digital technologies to
achieve system-wide economic, social and political growth, as well as supporting the
increased participation and empowerment of individuals and local communities
who otherwise face conditions of ‘poverty’ and ‘marginalisation’ (see Colle and
Roman 2003). In these terms, ICT4D is built around an explicit assumption of a
direct linkage between the use of digital technologies and economic growth and
‘enterprise’, as well as liberal democracy and enhanced ‘governance’. ICT4D efforts
are therefore based around distinctly Euro-American notions of development –
usually centred on goals of “progress and growth towards a greater good, be this
economic, social or political” (Unwin 2009a, p.9). Thus, while ICT4D interven-
tions are concerned ostensibly with using digital technologies to help poor and
marginalised people and communities make a difference to their lives, they nevertheless
operate within a decidedly business-oriented basic framework. As Chakravartty and
Sarikakis (2006, p.54) observe:

[an] emphasis on ‘business models’, the involvement of private industry with
the corrective presence of civil society organizations and the assumed neutrality
of communications technologies are some of the key features of this new
global policy framework.