impatience for change?

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impatience-for-change

Illustration by Ming. You can find him on twitter @24hashtags

Of late in my conversations with fellow development professionals I have begun to realize that we are becoming more and more “comfortable” in the slowness of the social change process and I would go on a limb to say that we are guilty of slowing it down further. It almost makes essentialist, that the positive change for whose agents we claim to be is slow because those who are the beneficiaries of this change are hard to convince. While simultaneously the same colleagues are eager to adopt new social media tools for bringing about social change. So why this contradiction. At one end the slowness of social change is being taken as a given but at the same time this euphoria around social media as a way to leapfrogging social change? Grasping at the straws are we?

Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the way we are going about the business of international development. Traditional approaches to international development place greater emphasis on planning and strategy development relying heavily on ex-ante analysis, projecting an image of certainty and control through detailed fore-planning which often places penalties on deviations from plans during implementation. This approach though tries to break away from “one size fits all (OSFA)” by being consultative in its design at the on-set but repeats the draw backs of OSFA approach by assuming that on going lessons from implementation are irrelevant to planning. So now we have a situation where the plans no matter how well planned from the outset are being followed rigidly and monitoring is done only to ensure that they do not diverge and compliance with planned activities or outputs is controlled. As an international development worker this would offer little opportunity to be creative or flexible in responding to information emerging from implementation. Which is where the euphoria for new tools such as social media provides a release for jaded development workers. It provides this appearance of being able to change course, appear to move quickly in face of new information. This in my opinion creates an illusion that ‘improvements’ to plans can be executed in a way that lead to positive change in “real time” which traditional development approach cannot.

The idea of social media has seemed to promise answers which are attractive both to who espouse the traditional approaches and to those looking for non-traditional ways of social change – because social media is associated with those committed to ideas about participation and grassroots empowerment. Since a lot of the people who are adopting social change may or maynot be directly connected in their day to day functioning with the grassroots they think because social media connects them to a certain kind of grassroots, that seems to be solving the connection issue. But this impatience in my opinion does more harm than good, it is IMHO what sensational journalism is doing to investigative journalism.

Impatience for seeing change happen is important but it should not be overtaken by illusion of change. It provides international development actors ways to network, find supporters, fundraise, inform and lobby online. But real meaningful change in lives of individuals, poverty alleviation, improve program implementation – it does not. As long as that is clear we can justify the % of resources we spend on it.

Update 25 July 2013:

When I saw this in xkcd I had to add it here! It makes sense here. I do not like how every programme implementation conversation ends up having someone always ask but what about how we use facebook, or twitter.

From: XKCD.com For more go to http://xkcd.com/1239/

was internet designed to change power structures?

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I am asking a question that might seem almost dumb but am not so sure it is. Just because we have repeated something many times does not make it true. Internet is, above all else, a decentralized communication system. It is decentralized because as a network of networks it allows other networks to be added on as long as they abide by certain protocols. However just because a communication system is decentralized it does not mean its configuration was meant to decentralize social power structures. The technological effects of the internet is to build the internet itself which it achieves through the principle of ‘open-ness’ and is reflected in actions, standards and protocols at several levels. The relation between technology and humans however is “external” to the technology. The effects of a technology are a product of the interaction of its components with other components, where each component has a purpose and is a technology in itself. The subjectivity of humans can be (is) imposed on the technology towards ends that may be socially desirable but it does imply that it was the constitutive configuration of its components. To achieve socially desirable results what is required is the need to change the conditions under which technology can interact with humans to “improve the quality of life of all”.

So to assert that Internet ought to have been equalizing social and economic opportunity is highly problematic. Not because internet does not afford social and economic opportunities but the “equalizing” attribute points to a broad set of assumptions about the configuration of the technology to achieve that. Which it does not have. The “equalizing” attribute is not in the DNA of the technology, however open-ness to a large extent is. Recognizing this distinction is important, especially when we employ the technology for achieving socially desirable results. The factors that contribute to dismantling unjust power structures, bringing inclusiveness as the “effects” of technology are outside of it. As long as we keep this in perspective then the employment of technology for social, economic and political gains can be understood perhaps in more “realistic” terms and measured appropriately.

As Inge Kaul, Isabelle Grunberg and Marc Stern said in 1999, “… the Internet is a global public good whose publicness has to be deliberately sought.” So if internet were to have an equalizing effect it has to be sought but cannot be attributed to its existence. They continue to explain, “At a global level, it is equally important to ensure global public goods are accessible to all, especially if the production effort has been a shared endeavor”. Again this points us to the fact that technology by itself is not the solution but “access” to it, and its many services, is what will allow it to change power structures into favorable terms for the dis-empowered.