Gaëlle Krikorian

Available for free download. A long collection with a mix of practical and theoretical perspectives, including pieces on Nollywood, medicines and patents, open source journals, and similar topics on the theme of access to various kinds of knowledge, especially in the developing world. I was most interested in the pieces by Lawrence Liang, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Book and Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate. The former links the concept of property in books with property in wife and children, as has long been linked in Western theory, but draws some rather different conclusions: mistaking your wife for a book, or either for something you can own, is a delusion that has done and is still doing great damage. The latter argues that access to knowledge advocates have, often strategically, neglected to defend practices in which poor people actually engage, which is related to the absence of a politics of pleasure. Here’s his best anecdote:
An NGO in Bangalore that works in the field of information and communication technologies for development was conducting a workshop on accessing the Internet for the information needs of rural women working to empower other poor rural women in India. The facilitator guided the women through the basics of the Internet, including how to access information relevant to their work, which ranges from providing access to credit to promoting women’s health. The training was highly appreciated, and all the women volunteers seemed to be enjoying themselves while fiddling with the computers and exploring the Internet. At the end of the training, when the NGO started cleaning up the computers, including the browsing histories and the cached copies of the sites accessed, they were a little aghast to find that most of the women volunteers had been surfing pornography—and a range of pornography, at that. So while the trainers were holding forth eloquently about the real information needs of the poor, the poor were quite happy to access their real information needs.… (mer)