Digital Capitalism and Development: The Unbearable Lightness of ICT4D

Jan Nederveen Pieterse

Chapter 13 in Emerging Digital Spaces in Contemporary Society, 2010, pp 305-323 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract The application of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in development policies—in short, information for development or ICT4D— follows ideas of “digital divide” and “cyber apartheid.” This discussion situates ICT4D in critical development studies and global political economy and argues that information for development is primarily driven by market expansion and market deepening. As the latest accumulation wave, digital capitalism generates information technology boosterism and cyber utopianism with the digital divide as its refrain. The first part of this discussion criticizes the discourses and policies of bridging the digital divide; the second section views information for development as part of a package deal in which cyber utopianism is associated, not exclusively, but primarily, with marketing digital capitalism. This is examined further in the third section on the relationship between digital capitalism and cyber utopianism of which ICT4D is a part.

Keywords: Intellectual Property; World Trade Organization; Digital Divide; Software Piracy; Digital Literacy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-29904-7_50

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230299047_50

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