Global travellers on the digital dirt road: international mobility, networks and ICT diffusion in Ghana

This thesis focuses on the intersection of human mobility and technology diffusion in Africa. With Ghana as a case study, it looks at how the diffusion of internet access and use are influenced by international mobility. The research is based in the literature on the diffusion of innovations, international knowledge transmission, migration and development, and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D). It begins from the hypothesis that international mobility may contribute to lowering barriers to internet penetration in developing countries by facilitating flows of resources, including equipment, finance, skills and knowledge. The research is based on four different datasets: a survey of the internet cafes in the North of Ghana and in Accra; an online survey of users in northern internet cafes; a network study incorporating internet cafe owners and managers in higher-value-added areas of the IT sector, and in-depth interviews with policymakers and donor organisations involved in ICT4D interventions. The data was analysed using a combination of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and network analytic techniques including visualisation, statistical analysis and qualitative analysis. The findings show that international mobility makes an important contribution to the base of adoption capacity for new technologies in poor and remote regions. It enables entrepreneurs and IT workers to address market gaps that restrict access to material and financial resources; by providing access to international circuits of knowledge and ideas which help individuals gain a foothold in the IT sector, and by facilitating local private-sector provision of the internet through internet cafes which serve the hardest-to-reach populations. The thesis concludes by suggesting potential entry points for ICT4D and migration policy in developing countries regarding the efficiency and effectiveness of ICT4D interventions, the role of the private sector in promoting internet usership, and the role of mobility in building adoption capacity in low-income areas

There’s an app for that:Technological solutionism as COVID-19 policy in the global north

Higher-income countries’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been characterised by technological solutionism—the claim that technology on its own can solve problems that are in reality complex and multidimensional. This essay explores the mutual shaping that has occurred between technological solutions and public health policy in the Global North, where governments have allowed capacity to drive policy rather than vice versa. This has led to a situation where contact-tracing and other surveillance technology has become centered in policy, at the expense of the human capacity and material resources that were, and are, necessary to combat the pandemic effectively. This contribution charts how the subsitution of just-in-time technology for human inputs took a toll in terms of mortality by delaying an appropriate public health response

Exploitation as innovation:Research ethics and the governance of experimentation in the urban living lab

As data technologies become the medium of experiment for living labs, they become less a collaboration between citizen and researcher and more a test of how commercial actors can influence the public. Two new practices suggest we should apply research ethics rules: first, that the experimentation taking place does not aim to test technology using people, but to test people using technology; and second, that such experimentation is explicitly designed to understand how the population outside the lab can be influenced and manipulated, and therefore has a political character that research ethics can give us some leverage over

The price of certainty:How the politics of pandemic data demand an ethics of care

The Covid-19 pandemic broke on a world whose grip on epistemic trust was already in disarray. The first months of the pandemic saw many governments publicly performing reliance on epidemiological and modelling expertise in order to signal that data would be the basis for justifying whatever population-level measures of control were judged necessary. But comprehensive data has not become available, and instead scientists, policymakers and the public find themselves in a situation where policy inputs determine the data available and vice versa. This essay asks how we can live with what Amoore has termed ‘post-Cartesian doubt’ in situations of existential risk, and what kind of approach to science and data can answer the moral and human demands of a situation such as the Covid-19 pandemic. I suggest that science and policy could be able to control the pandemic better by addressing the sources of uncertainty and missing data not as gaps in the information landscape, but as individuals who are likely to be members of less-visible and less powerful groups including low-wage workers, the elderly, migrants, prisoners and others. This would shift both data use and policy toward an ethics of care, an embodied approach which asks what people need and how they behave in relation to each other, rather than how to manage population-level behaviour. This approach, I argue, is more appropriate for pandemic response than a utilitarian calculation of how many people each country should expect to lose as a result of the disease

Public actors without public values:Legitimacy, domination and the regulation of the technology sector

The scale and asymmetry of commercial technology firms’ power over people through data, combined with the increasing involvement of the private sector in public governance, means that increasingly people do not have the ability to opt out of engaging with technology firms. At the same time, those firms are increasingly intervening on the population level in ways that have implications for social and political life. This creates the potential for power relations of domination, and demands that we decide what constitutes the legitimacy to act on the public. Business ethics and private law are not designed to answer these questions, which are primarily political. If people have lost the right to disengage with commercial technologies, we may need to hold the companies that offer them to the same standards to which we hold the public sector. This paper first defines the problem and demonstrates that it is significant and widespread, and then argues for the development of an overarching normative framework for what constitutes non-domination with regard to digital technologies. Such a framework must involve a nuanced idea of political power and accountability that can respond not only to the legality of corporate behaviour, but to its legitimacy

Constructing commercial data ethics

The ethics of big data and AI have become the object of much public debate. Technology firms around the world have set up ethics committees and review processes, which differ widely in their organisation and practice. In this paper we interrogate these processes and the rhetoric of firm-level data ethics. Using inter-views with industry, activists and scholars and observation of public discussions, we ask how firms conceptualise the purposes and functions of data ethics, and how this relates to core business priorities. We find considerable variation between firms in the way they use ethics. We compare strategies and rhetoric to understand how commercial data ethics is constructed, its political and strategic dimensions, and its relationship to data ethics more broadly

Constructing commercial data ethics

The ethics of big data and AI have become the object of much public debate. Technology firms around the world have set up ethics committees and review processes, which differ widely in their organisation and practice. In this paper we interrogate these processes and the rhetoric of firm-level data ethics. Using inter-views with industry, activists and scholars and observation of public discussions, we ask how firms conceptualise the purposes and functions of data ethics, and how this relates to core business priorities. We find considerable variation between firms in the way they use ethics. We compare strategies and rhetoric to understand how commercial data ethics is constructed, its political and strategic dimensions, and its relationship to data ethics more broadly