From Inside Higher Ed
By Scott McLemee
A recent purge of my bookshelves saw the departure of a few volumes on “the new economy,” that hot topic of yesteryear. Information technology and innovative business models were going to create hitherto unimaginable levels of efficiency and productivity; at the same time, there would be an end to wasted industrial capacity, let alone warehouses full of excess output. Cybernetics would smack down the business cycle for good. What could go wrong?...
The Technocracy movement faded from view by the time the New Deal began. But the neologism stuck (in lower-case form) and the technocratic imagination has never really gone away. Now it usually takes the form of confidence that a sufficiently powerful technology can bring all-but-utopian benefits, rather than an explicit belief that the geeks shall inherit the earth.
“Can Technology End Poverty?” asks the cover of the latest issue of Boston Review. Inside is a forum in which nine contributors debate the subject of information and communication technologies for development. ICT4D, as it is sometimes abbreviated, is a field emerging from the confluence of two recent tendencies, according to Kentaro Toyama, a visiting researcher at the School of Information at the University of California at Berkeley, whose article leads off the symposium. One is “the emergence of an international-development community eager for novel solutions to nearly intractable socioeconomic challenges.” The other is “the expansion of a brashly successful technology industry into emerging markets,” whether through commercial efforts or via philanthropy....