The Arab Uprisings of 2011 can be seen as a turning point for media and information studies scholars, many of whom newly discovered the region as a site for theories of digital media and social transformation. This work has argued that digital media technologies fuel or transform political change through new networked publics, new forms of connective action cultivating liberal democratic values. These works have, surprisingly, little to say about the United States and other Western colonial powers’ legacy of occupation, ongoing violence and strategic interests in the region. It is as if the Arab Spring was a vindication for the universal appeal of Western liberal democracy delivered through the gift of the Internet, social media as manifestation of the ‘technologies of freedom’ long promised by Cold War. We propose an alternate trajectory in terms of reorienting discussions of media and information infrastructures as embedded within the resurgence of idealized liberal democratic norms in the wake of the end of the Cold War. We look at the demise of the media and empire debates and ‘the rise of the BRICS’ (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) as modes of intra-imperial competition that complicate earlier Eurocentric narratives media and empire. We then outline the individual contributions for the special collection of essays.
This article examines how the global discourse of ‘telecom for development’ has clashed with competing discourses that critique Western modernity in the context of the postcolonial Indian state and its changing relationship to science, the market and national development. I draw from recent postcolonial theories of the nation state in order to locate a historically rooted debate on the role of technology in national development, which, I argue, lies at the heart of policy debates over telecom reform in India today. This article provides an historical examination of two distinct periods of telecom policy-making that preceded the era of globalization in the 1990s: a period of techno-nationalism between 1965 and 1980, and a period of techo-populism between 1980 and 1989. I argue that the ruptures in discourse that we trace in between these two periods, set the stage for future battles over reform. At stake in these debates, I argue, are differing claims on the postcolonial state that remain incomprehensible unless we engage with the complex questions of development and modernity.
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