Digital Peripheries: Internet and Socio-spatial Practices in the Rurban - Hardcover

Lorena Melgaço

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786609606 ISBN 13: 9781786609601

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2022

Synopsis

Despite an unprecedented presence of digital technologies in the everyday, a clear urban/non-urban divide in accessing and effectively using the internet remains. This divide is identifiable not only in the Global South—perceived as peripheral—but also in the Global North—regarded as advanced and the motor of technological development. Such a phenomenon suggests the emergence and endurance of socio-technological peripheries, places where socio-spatial inequalities are reinforced by unjust access to the internet.

To understand how such peripherality is manifested and challenged in rurban settings—where the rural and the urban mingle and clash—the first part of this book draws from dependency theory and the decolonial thinking to discuss the impacts of uneven production, access, and use of digital technology. The second part draws on Actor-Network Theory as a methodological frame to understand the recursive entwinement of the everyday and the use of the internet in three villages: two in Brazil and one in the UK. By bringing to the fore challenges that cross North-South divides, Digital Peripheries proposes an open theory of the connected rurban as a framework that addresses and accommodates the specificities of these communities in the twenty-first century.

About this title

About the Author

Austin M. Freeman (PhD, systematic theology, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School) specializes in the theology of fantasy literature, especially that of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Edition details

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1786609606
• ISBN 13: 9781786609601
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 176