Moderniteit in opbouw. Een vergelijkende etnografie van het internet

Samenvatting

Modernity in Construction. A Comparative Ethnography of the Internet. Analyzes a community radio and Internet project in rural Sri Lanka, and argues that new economies, information technologies, and global networks are being constructed in this 'peripheral' site as well as in those that are considered to be the centers of such developments. We demonstrate how the very idea of new economic and organizational forms, widely associated with emergent technologies, are being constructed in relation to colonial and postcolonial experiences that generate different senses of the modern and the global. Technologies do not have inevitable and consistent effects on all places. Moreover, technologies and their properties are enlisted within specific biographical and social projects that in turn are reconfigured by these new objects. Here we investigate some of the ways in which technology, 'freedom', and the 'new economy' were played out within the specific world of one community media center, making the point, that new technologies appear as both idiom and practical rallying point establishing spheres of freedom and innovation in tension with established social structures. 5 References. Adapted from the source document.