Seeing digital technologies from the margins

The social, political, cultural and economic issues raised by digital tools are usually seen from the perspective of highly-educated and wealthy young urban adults in North America and Western Europe. ‪ ‪The call for papers for this issue of ‪ ‪Journal des Anthropologues‪ ‪ sought to encourage authors to take a different approach. We wanted them to problematize the challenges raised by digital technologies and their utilization ‘at the margin’. ‪ ‪Thus, contributors were first asked to seize the significance of the digital technologies outside American and European societies or, at least, at the margins of these societies. What forms does the digital economy take in these spaces? How do individuals adopt products in this economy? Our objective was also to understand how, whether at the ‘margin’ or in the ‘centre’ of the global system, minority actors mobilize digital technologies to achieve their social, cultural and political goals, while being conscious of the limits of these mobilizations.

Cedric Parizot, Tristan Mattelart, Julie Peghini, Nadine Wanono Gauthier. ‪Seeing digital technologies from the margins‪. Journal des anthropologues, 2015. ⟨hal-01539501⟩ - lien externe