Conference/BOOKS (MIT Press): access and connectivity

The next two books from our virtual visit to the AoiR book fair both tackle the issue of access, connectivity and inequality. Both are very US-focused, but have interesting and timely insights to digital politics globally.

Farm Fresh Broadband: The Politics of Rural Connectivity tackles a key issue, so often overlooked in communication studies: the material, infrastructural politics of being connected. Connectivity infrastructure outside of major urban areas is rarely as seamless and taken for granted as it is in big cities. Financial, geographic, demographic and other factors are always at play, determining who is connected, and how well - and in today's increasingly digital living, connectivity infrastructure is particularly crucial. The book takes a close look into the history of connectivity policies in the US, detailing failures of the past and laying plans for how to bridge the urban-rural digital divide. (What would be also crucial to address are of course the relations between settler colonialism and digital infrastructures; or infrastructural inequalities and structural racism).

The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope is taking almost an opposite approach. Rather than looking into failures of delivering the promise of technology, the book asks, why do we always hope to solve complex social problems with technological means. Taking a critical approach to how hope is produced, rather than given, the book looks into what the author, Daniel Greene, describes as the "access doctrine" - a belief that problems of poverty can be solved with access to technology. Tracing this believe throughout economic decisions, institutions and policies, the book shows failures of technosolutionism in actually resolving social inequalities, instead turning public institutions into startups and the communities they serve - into internet entrepreneurs.(The question remains, can a critique of techno--solutionism offer other routes to social change?)