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Local Digital Practices, Worldwide

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Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten

Part of the book series: Springer Reference Sozialwissenschaften ((SRS))

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Abstract

Whereas early globalization studies tended to equate digital globalization with sociocultural homogenization, social scientific approaches have gradually become more sensitive towards the interplay between globalizing and localizing tendencies. The present chapter investigates this interplay in digitization processes by drawing on an ethnographic study of a “technical development” project that was carried out in Pakistan and aimed at generating digital networking practices from scratch. I argue that the production of these practices may be best understood as the simultaneous and paradoxical generation of global sociality via local culture. I call this the paradox of digital glocalization.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The original German version goes: “Und so kann man sagen, dass sich Digitalisierung und Globalisierung gegenseitig bedingen; beides gehört zusammen.” See http://www.bundesregierung.de/Content/DE/Rede/2015/03/2015-03-16-bk-cebit.html (27/07/15).

  2. 2.

    The contribution at hand is an extract of my multi-sited ethnographic in-depth study presented in Ochs (2013). There readers may find an extended case reconstruction including an analysis of the project network etc.

  3. 3.

    “Localisation involves taking a product and making it linguistically and culturally appropriate to the target locale (country/region and language) where it will be used and sold.” (Esselink 2000, p. 3).

  4. 4.

    When the project started off, there were only seven countries, by the end they were ten: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, Laos, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Autonomous Region of Tibet. Indonesia also joined the project at a later date, but it was not a full project partner from the outset of Phase II.

  5. 5.

    There were also more advanced applications being developed, such as Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech systems.

  6. 6.

    As I granted anonymity to my interviewees when citing from interviews with RCCL staff, I will designate experts simply as “developers”, and thus omit name, status, and actual position. In the following, I will number team members in the order of appearance (D1, D2, etc.). All interviews were conducted in March and April 2008 at the RCCL facilities in Pakistan (for a more detailed description of the project as well as the research process see Ochs 2013).

  7. 7.

    Please note that from the perspective adopted here, the interconnection of nonhuman entities’ operations, too, creates social relations: “[T]here are also relations among things, and social relations at that” (Latour 1992, p. 257).

  8. 8.

    For the sake of completeness I would like to note that there was also a discursive engineering mode, which, however, played the role of an “emergency operation” just in case of RCCL being confronted with counter-programs within the field. Since the analysis of this mode does not add anything new to our understanding but only features the known logic I will skip it here.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fachbereich 05 Soziologische Theorie, Universität Kassel, Nora-Platiel-Str. 5, 34109, Kassel, Deutschland

    Carsten Ochs

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  1. Carsten Ochs
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Correspondence to Carsten Ochs .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Heidrun Friese

  2. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Gala Rebane

  3. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Marcus Nolden

  4. TU Chemnitz, Chemnitz, Germany

    Miriam Schreiter

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Ochs, C. (2016). Local Digital Practices, Worldwide. In: Friese, H., Rebane, G., Nolden, M., Schreiter, M. (eds) Handbuch Soziale Praktiken und Digitale Alltagswelten. Springer Reference Sozialwissenschaften. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08460-8_13-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-08460-8_13-1

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-658-08460-8

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