Page 134 - Education in a Digital World

International Development 121

human right” (Fuchs and Horak 2008, p.11). Yet it could be countered that argu-
ments of this sort vastly overestimate the importance of technology, while under-
estimating the social nature of inequality. Instead, it can be contended that reducing
inequalities in power is not simply a technical matter of increasing technological
capacity and technological access within disadvantaged nations. Instead, appropriate
consideration needs to be given to what Doreen Massey referred to as issues of
‘power-geometry’:

For different social groups and different individuals are placed in very distinct
ways in relation to these flows and interconnections. The point concerns not
merely the issue of who moves and who doesn’t, although that is an impor-
tant element of it; it is also about power in relation to the flows and the
movement. Different social groups have distinct relationships to this anyway-
differentiated mobility; some are more in charge of it than others; some
initiate flows and movement; others don’t; some are more on the receiving
end of it than others; some are effectively imprisoned by it.
(Massey 1993, p.61)

From this perspective ICT4D projects, programmes and initiatives are clearly located
with complex sets of existing differentiated power relations and social structures,
which can often mitigate against the empowerment of the ‘disadvantaged’ people
that they seek to reach. In contrast to the global claims made for technological
change, it should be remembered that these existing social relations are entrenched
within local contexts, regardless of technological provision or digital connectivity.
As Mark Warschauer (2004) points out, if one considers the existing social structures
of a country such as India, then any enhancement of the agency of the rural poor
through digital means can only occur alongside a more fundamental transformation
of class, caste, ethnic and gender relations within which many poor people exist. To
complicate matters further, these social structures vary from region to region. In
hill-forest areas of India, for example, where almost entire communities suffer from
poverty, class contradictions are minimal. In contrast, in the Indian plains a major
cause of poverty is landlessness, with huge contradictions persisting between
the landless-poor and land-holders. Similarly, religion and caste distinctions are
more pronounced in some regions than others. All in all, in a context such as India,
there is often no one clear ‘need’ that technology can be used to ‘address’, or one
clear ‘enhancement’ that technology can ‘provide’ for all. Thus as Rizvi and Lingard
(2010, p.157) observe, few educational technology interventions address

the broader historical and political contexts that produce disadvantage in the
first place, and none looks seriously at the conditions under which access is
provided and might succeed … These assume that access alone is enough
to produce educational justice. In this way, they work with a very weak
definition of justice.