Presider: Jillet Sarah Sam (@JilletSarahSam)

Hashmod: Alice Samson (@theclubinternet)

This is one post in a series of Panel Previews for the upcoming Theorizing the Web conference (#TtW14) in NYC. The panel under review is titled World Wide Web(s): Theorizing the Non-Western Web

Far too often in popular and academic contexts, the Western experience of the Web is taken to be the universal experience. While some of the largest web presences on the globe have their ideological and cultural roots in the United States, there are entire practices, technologies, and services that have never graced an American IP address. This panel isn’t so much about those practices, technologies, and services so much as it is a prerequisite effort at de-centering the West in the Web. As a whole, this panel thoroughly breaks down the deficit model of technological development: and instead shows the  iterative, mutually-shaping relationships between nation-states, capital, culture, and networked technologies. David Peter Simon examines how Silicon Valley’s work “possibly subjugates the same people they aim to help” by way of applying a Gramscian analysis to his own work in Nairobi and Kampala. Jason Q. Ng not only reminds us that Wikipedia is not the primary reference site for the entire globe (perhaps not even a majority of it), but that the Western conception of what censorship looks like and how it acts should be similarly contextualized.

The invited presentations by Tolu Odumosu and Dalia Othman both offer glimpses into different social and technical (infra)structures that compose and influence each other and individual users. Odumosu’s focus on the development of Nigerian telecommunications infrastructure demonstrates the historical contingencies that make the Web many Americans are familiar with, and the primarily mobile phone-based web that has taken hold in Nigeria. By learning about the configuration of the Nigerian web, we come to understand just how easily the Western experience could have been radically different. Othman’s work in the Arab Spring is equally attuned to the particularities of geographies and local sociotechnical histories. By studying the ways in which activists use social media to organize and resist, Othman reveals networks’ social topography in a range of countries where civil societies’ relationships to their governments differ.

David Peter Simon (@davidpetersimon) The Do-Gooder Industrial Complex?
Valley-grown media pieces often position the expansion of the Internet across Africa as revolutionary, forgetting to cite that, throughout history, every Western-led information industry has ended up in the hands of a few, greedy monopolies. I’m beginning to wonder how this tried-and-true narrative weaves against the backdrop of technologists getting involved in markets such as sub-Saharan Africa.

In this paper, I follow the course of privilege amongst Western technologists now residing in places like Silicon Savannah, in order to better grasp the changing landscape of technology in relation to social impact. I investigate whether the fact that Africa has transformed into a ‘darling of the tech sector’ resurfaces paternalistic and/or neocolonial relationships. Specifically, I explore how the presence of major players like Google and Facebook may colonise knowledge.

As Valley culture attempts to redefine what “social” means (both explicitly and implicitly), I’m curious to dig into how increasing participation in local communities by global participants confuses the championship of economic justice. To begin with, I present my own experiences of working and living in Nairobi and Kampala as a consultant, acknowledging the inherent conflict of being a white privileged male sprung from California seeking to understand and analyse Valley-fostered exploitation. Using Gramsci as a lens, I then take a look at how scenarios like the Western entrepreneurial explosion possibly subjugates the same people they aim to help.

I feel there is an urgent need for self-reflection in the space of technology-oriented social impact work. As Stuart Hall once explained, history tends to have a practice of suppressing members who are not a part of a privileged class. He reminds us, “”what leads in a period of hegemony is no longer described as a ‘ruling class in the traditional language, but a historic bloc.”” Hall’s words ring as a warning that, with continual expansion into “”new frontiers”” emboldened by software development, we could fall into the same shortcomings of industrial days past, albeit more thickly veiled.

Jason Q. Ng (@jasonqng) Fit for Public Display: Rethinking Censorship via a Large-scale Comparison of Chinese Wikipedia with Hudong and Baidu Baike
In 2008, Baidu’s chief scientist said, “There’s, in fact, no reason for China to use Wikipedia . . . It’s very natural for China to make its own products.” Today Hudong and Baidu Baike greatly eclipse the Chinese-language version of Wikipedia in China despite (or because of) the censorship known to take place on the sites. However, identifying outright instances or patterns in censorship can be difficult due to the (mostly) user-generated nature and oversight of the content. This paper seeks to address these challenges, and among the methods employed is a large-scale comparison of the three services, matching thousands of Chinese-language Wikipedia articles with their in-China counterparts, in order to identify the “content gaps” in the two baike. However, by looking not only at which articles don’t exist on Hudong and Baidu Baike, but also at the content that does for potentially sensitive topics, this paper investigates what knowledge and information is fit for public display and consumption. If articles are shorter on Hudong and Baidu, what information do they carry? Does this information reveal anything about the authors’ intentions? By examining the topics and articles that are left visible in these baike and considering the motivations behind those who seek out, view, edit, and approve of these articles, this project hopes to offer a more nuanced view of the typical narratives about censorship in China. Trying to understand what sorts of expressions netizens are making via these online encyclopedias, despite whatever censorship might be taking place, is as interesting as the potential censorship itself. This project will hopefully push us to once again consider the many complexities when discussing information control in environments where oversight of content has been decentralized to companies and users—an environment which makes it increasingly harder to identify traditional instances of censorship.

Tolu Odumosu (@todumosu) Phoning the Web: A Critical Examination of Web Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa
Do people everywhere experience the “web” the same way? If no, what factors drive the different evolutionary paths of the web(s)? This paper attempts to contextualize the evolution and experience of the web Internet in Nigeria as a study in sociotechnical evolution of mundane infrastructure. How can we understand the Nigerian web in opposition to the American web? How do users of the web shape its form and structure? What is the importance of mundane infrastructure in the development of the web, and what are possible ways forward?

Dalia Othman (@daliaothman) Social Media, Activism and the Middle East
Since the Arab uprisings in 2011 a lot of focus has been placed on the role played by Social Media in these uprisings. From the Youtube video of the immolation Mohamed BouAzizi that went viral across Tunisia and inspired the revolution, to the “We Are All Khaled Said” Facebook page that called for a demonstration on January 25th, 2011 in Tahrir and many more. Activists across the region had recognized the significance of social networks as a communication and organizational tool and used it to compliment their efforts on the ground. Today we see protests happening across the planet that are using social networks to organize, coordinate and disseminate information to mainstream media. Studying both the tools chosen by the activists is key to understand how activists are using them to create change. It is even more significant to study the connection between these activists that will allow academics to receive a better insight into the conversations that are happening and the information flows that offer an alternative perspective that emerges from events happening on the ground.
Taking a social networked analysis approach, I will go through the initial findings of the ongoing research being conducted on the Arab Blogosphere and Twitter maps from various countries in the region. This analysis will help identify key actors in the region (and in some cases the absence of certain actors) in addition to the links between these different actors. It is a fundamental step and a foundational one that will support building a knowledge base to help understand the flow of information and conversations -if any- between different activists in the region, in addition to the tactics used by activists to generate attention towards their cause.