Olu Oguibe’s voice stands out in our nine-week discussion on issues associated with new media. We have not heard such an impassioned call to activism in our own work since we read Hans Jonas’s thoughts on technology and the environment. Oguibe’s opening story about the boy in Guadalajara who couldn’t effectively communicate his need for water across a simple language barrier resonates throughout these chapters. His story serves as a simple metaphor for the millions of people who still do not have access to the web eight years after this chapter was written. In the case of the boy in Guadalajara, access to the web wasn’t really the solution to the problem at hand. Access to a virtual world would not necessarily help him fulfill his real world needs. Oguibe reinforces this metaphor by juxtaposing the boy’s need for water against the entirety of the theory, debates, enunciations, and intellectual flirtations of the other conference participants dining in the restaurant at the same moment.
While this metaphor of rich versus poor isn’t unique, it is refreshing in the context of critical theory. Certainly similar sentiments are found in the work of many theorists, but Oguibe’s real world references present his theories in terms more easily understood by an average reader. Just as access to the information on the web is limited by an end user’s technical literacy, theory may be limited by a reader’s prior knowledge and exposure to the virtual world of critical theory. The intellectual circles in which these theories are discussed appear to be even more exclusive in membership than the World Wide Web. Rather than lament the fragmentation of a minority within a minority, we might ask where these seemingly disparate worlds meet.
Oguibe points to mostly failed attempts to represent the underrepresented in which the liberal tendency to speak for others predominates. He sees the unregulated web as a means to further exploit and infringe upon populations on the outside of the network. He asks if the web may even further disenfranchise and incapacitate populations trying to catch up with the ongoing march of technology. He problematizes the drive to bridge this technological gap by asking if it is even appropriate to extend connectivity when basic needs for sustenance haven’t been met.
While supporting Oguibe’s theories, Anna Munster also provides a few examples of hope for use of the web by discussing artists that address these issues in their work. It is appropriate that two of her examples come from India, a country that has a large stake in the proliferation of web and information technology based services. While she draws parallels between the exploitation of cheap information labor and the garments industry in India, she also reveals work that incorporates the technological gap into an aesthetic. The lag between Indian snail mail and real time digital transmission is beautifully illustrated in Shilpa Gupta’s sentiment-express. The differences in these modes of communication are further highlighted by Gupta’s inclusion of images of the laborers involved in the transmission of the letters. The social cost of the process of transmission is brought to the foreground in her work.
Should we accept the responsibility for revealing the collective labor required to generate our digital work? In addition to crediting the programmer and technicians, should we credit the laborers who carefully forge our creative instruments? Taking this question of responsibility a step further might lead us back to the boy in Guadalajara. What does our work do to address his need?
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