Evaluating ICT for Education in Africa - Royal Holloway, University of ...

These examples make sense when framed within a wider developmentnarrative. For many years, development interventions propagated amodernist approach (Simon 2003) and unsurprisingly this has hadsignificant impact in shaping current widespread aspiration. As Ferguson(1999 p.14) acknowledges, „the myth of modernisation (no less than any othermyth) gives form to an understanding of the world, providing a set ofcategories and premises that continue to shape people‟s experiences andinterpretations of their lives‟. As a result, the vision of development as alinear track towards modernity, and its associated symbols of technology,becomes commonplace. Although development professionals may now bepromoting an alternative logic (Wagner et al. 2004), that technology isvaluable for what it facilitates rather than what it represents, the result ofprevious sustained interventions combined with private sector marketingensures that the modernist logic is deeply engrained. Indeed, although someacademics and NGOs may highlight alternative uses of technology (Hamiltonand Feenberg 2003, Vogel 1995), the majority of financial power lies withthose who actively seek, or implicitly subscribe to, the perpetuation of thecurrent orthodoxy. Simon (2007 p.206) encountered this in Nigeria, wherehe notes that young people resent NGO-type interventions because theyimpede „their own vision of local development, which is western-stylemodernisation ... what the youths claim to want is more modernisation-asdevelopment,not less.‟The aspiration for modernisation is a primary motivation for manybeneficiaries when engaging with ICT for development (Mercer 2006) andcan be outworked through a mindset that Heeks (1999) terms „technologyfetishism‟. In considering this, it is useful to draw on Marx‟s system of classbasedsubjugation, in which value is defined by categories of use or exchange(Wenning 2002). The use of technology fetishism is not a direct comparisonwith commodity fetishism because there is not the same direct attachment tolabour (Marx 1867). Indeed, aspiration could be viewed as a third category inaddition to use and exchange value. Even if without direct use or exchangevalue, an object may still be valued, or aspired to, as a representative symbol.354