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So Where Now? 153

leading to the acquisition of valuable and empowering ‘twenty-first-century skills’.
Although it is still assumed widely that employment and labour in the new
knowledge economy requires higher levels of creativity, cooperation and innova-
tion, a growing body of research now points to the ‘inconvenient truth’ that vast
swathes of the knowledge economy in fact do not need these skills (e.g. Brown
et al. 2011). At best, most of the ‘informational’ jobs of the twenty-first-century
would seem to be centred around technology-based divisions of labour where most
workers are no longer expected to exercise independent judgement or contribute
creatively to the value-adding process. In this way, the continued implementation
of educational technologies over the past twenty years can hardly be said to have led
to a transformation of power relations between working classes and middle classes.
Thus, as Shafiul Alam Bhuiyan (2008, p.100) concludes:

The so-called information society is a metaphor that has been coined to hide
the features of contemporary capitalism. In the information society, big cor-
porations, which are multinational and guided by profit motives, own and
control the mode of production. To generate maximum profit and maintain
total control over the mode of production, they discipline the workforce.
This disciplining is done through various methods.

At this point, it is perhaps useful to return to the concerns of the post-colonialist
approach. As outlined in Chapter 2, this stresses the importance of taking a historical
perspective on unequal power relations between different groups and different
countries. Importantly, it also encourages us to explore spaces for alternative
arrangements, interventions and resistance. From a post-colonialist perspective, then,
much of what has been covered in the past seven chapters should warn us against
viewing educational technology through an exclusively Euro-American lens, and
instead consider educational technology from ‘other’ perspectives. As has already
been implied, when educational technology is perceived from the perspective of the
‘global South’ it is often difficult to see it as anything less than an imperialist project
designed to create markets for multinational corporations that operate at the heart of
the information society – i.e. those interests that own and operate (as well as
produce and sell) information technologies. This is perhaps most evident in the
frequent association of educational technologies with vague notions of ‘modernisa-
tion’. Of course, there is little doubt that the rapid growth of digital technologies
and transfer of knowledge, skills and technologies from ‘developed’ to ‘developing’
regions has enabled considerable progress. Yet, at the same time, it is difficult to
overlook the vested interests that these dominant actors have in encouraging indi-
viduals and institutions in poorer countries to engage with and adopt ‘Western’
ideas, practices and devices, and therefore go some way towards becoming more
productive components of the global knowledge economy.
Indeed, one of the striking features of the field of ‘educational ICT4D’ appears to
be its tendency to obscure (and often silence) a number of historical tensions within