Information and Communication Technologies and Development”
the decades, global development has formed an autonomous identity of its own (though it remains strongly influenced by international politics) and involves a growing number of governments, multilateral entities, non-profit organizations, and for-profit corporations.
What makes global development of increasing interest to HCI is that recently, the international development community has begun to seek out electronic technology as a way to further the development agenda.
2.2 The “ICT” in ICT4D
This is not to say that technology has never played a part in global development; in fact, it has from the beginning. The earliest equations of macroeconomic growth hypothesized that more, or newer, technology was the key to a country’s growth, though they tended to conceive of technology as industrial machinery that amplified human labor [35].
Electronic technology was not far behind, however. Televisions, for example, were common in US households by the mid-1950s, and by the 1960s, researchers and development specialists were pushing them for global development. Wilbur Schramm, often considered the founder of communication studies as a field of research, wrote in 1964:
. . . television has never been used to its full capacity in support of economic development. It may be financially impossible to use it in this way. But still the possibility is tantalizing: What is the full power and vividness if television teaching were to be used to help the schools develop a country’s new educational pattern? What if the full persuasive and instructional power of television were to be used in support of community development and the modernization of farming? Where would the break-even point come? Where would the saving in rate of change catch up with the increased cost? [119].
This excitement around commodity analog hardware carried through into the 1970s, but appears to have waned by the 1980s, perhaps because despite the increasing penetration of the radio and TV, evi- dence of impact on poverty was not significant [78].