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

hierarchy, with the donors at the summit, and the objective of developmentassistance being to „uplift‟ the recipients‟ (Simon 2003 p.27).Allowing only market forces to dictate the diffusion of ICT to developingregions means there will always be marginalised regions (Kelly 2005), withthe „bottom billion‟, or „long tail‟ growing more slowly than any other (Collier2008) due to the inherent focus on maximising returns and continualexpansion. Corporate social responsibility has a significant and complex rolein this context but will always be entwined with and ancillary to the profitobjective (Blowfield 2005, Ford 2009).Recognising that „western market forces will continue to meet the needs ofdeveloping regions accidentally at best‟ (Brewer et al. 2005 p.25) is valuablein identifying the increased significance of digital marginalisation. However,such approaches still largely fail to question the assumption that diffusion ofICT is necessarily good, promoting a reduction of the „digital divide‟ (West2006, Panos 2004, Kelly 2005, Roy 2005). Heeks (2008 p.27) demonstratesthe same assumption, suggesting that when standing „on the threshold ofICT4D 2.0, we confront the key technical question of how to deliver theInternet to the remaining five billion people who lack such access‟. Again, thekey point is his uncritical acceptance that delivering, providing andpotentially imposing the internet is something that should always be aspiredto. The benefits of access to information and participatory communicationmay result ultimately in affirmative answers to this question, but it isnecessary to explore the reasons underlying the assumption, rather thansimply accepting it as truth.Acknowledging that ambiguities are introduced to people‟s lives as a result ofdigital technology enables discussion to focus on the contested place of powerembedded within technology and reveals as fallacious the assumption that„connectivity is always advantageous‟ (Mansell 2005 p. 85). Anacknowledgement of the potential for both empowering and disempoweringconsequence leads Mansell (2005 p.86) to call for increased focus of debateon the politics of technology and embedded ideological agendas (Kleine54