Technologies of Choice?: ICTs, Development, and the Capabilities Approach (Hardcover)

Information and communication technologies (ICTs)--especially the Internet and the mobile phone--have changed the lives of people all over the world. These changes affect not just the affluent populations of income-rich countries but also disadvantaged people in both global North and South, who may use free Internet access in telecenters and public libraries, chat in cybercafes with distant family members, and receive information by text message or email on their mobile phones. Drawing on Amartya Sen's capabilities approach to development--which shifts the focus from economic growth to a more holistic, freedom-based idea of human development--Dorothea Kleine in Technologies of Choice? examines the relationship between ICTs, choice, and development.

Kleine proposes a conceptual framework, the Choice Framework, that can be used to analyze the role of technologies in development processes. She applies the Choice Framework to a case study of microentrepreneurs in a rural community in Chile. Kleine combines ethnographic research at the local level with interviews with national policy makers, to contrast the high ambitions of Chile's pioneering ICT policies with the country's complex social and economic realities. She examines three key policies of Chile's groundbreaking Agenda Digital: public access, digital literacy, and an online procurement system. The policy lesson we can learn from Chile's experience, Kleine concludes, is the necessity of measuring ICT policies against a people-centered understanding of development that has individual and collective choice at its heart.

資訊和通訊技術（ICT）-尤其是互聯網和手機-已經改變了全球人民的生活。這些變化不僅影響到收入豐富國家的富裕人口，也影響到全球南北兩極的弱勢人群，他們可能在電信中心和公共圖書館使用免費的互聯網接入，與遠方的家人在網吧聊天，並通過短信或電子郵件在手機上接收信息。Dorothea Kleine在《選擇的技術？》一書中借鑒了阿馬蒂亞·森（Amartya Sen）的能力發展方法，將焦點從經濟增長轉向更全面、基於自由的人類發展理念，探討了ICT、選擇和發展之間的關係。

Kleine提出了一個概念框架，即選擇框架，可用於分析技術在發展過程中的作用。她將選擇框架應用於智利一個鄉村社區的微型企業家案例研究中。Kleine結合了當地層面的民族志研究和對國家政策制定者的訪談，將智利開創性的ICT政策的高度抱負與該國複雜的社會經濟現實進行對比。她檢視了智利開創性的數字議程的三項關鍵政策：公共接入、數字素養和網上採購系統。Kleine得出的政策教訓是，我們可以從智利的經驗中學到，必須將ICT政策與以人為本的發展理解相結合，並將個人和集體選擇置於核心位置。