"The online digital world is a two-dimensional reflection of our three-dimensional social world. However, in the digital space it is possible to instantaneously access information and engage in communication with people regardless of physical or social barriers. Since at least 2010, information and communication technologies have been seen as key to development through policy projects called Information and Communications Technologies for Development (ICT4D). These projects emphasize the information dimension of the online space and have largely ignored its communication potential to the detriment of those they aim to help. Aarushi Bhandari grew up in Nepal and first experienced the world beyond its borders through an ICT4D program. She went to university, obtained a PhD, and became a sociologist with a specialization on the internet thanks to internet access as a child. She is the rare scholar engaged with ICT4D who understand development from both sides. In Attention and Alienation she brings these experiences to bear and evaluates how the rapid global spread of digital media technologies like mobile phones and the internet in the last three decades have impacted international development, social movements, and social change. She utilizes her own experiences as well as various quantitative methodologies, including cross-national panel data analyses and web-scraping "big-data" analyses, to uncover the specific mechanisms through which digital media technologies influence and shape global society. While she emphasizes long-term historical trends across all countries, she also draws from specific case study examples to demonstrate key ideas, including, the use of digital media technologies for rapid and spontaneous mass mobilizations in the largest anti-systemic efforts in recent years: the 2019 anti Citizenship-Amendment-Act (CAA) protests in India and the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the United States. Bhandari illuminates the positive ways that ICT can create communities for liberation butalso for social control"-- Provided by publisher.
The worldwide spread of the internet has revolutionized communication at a harrowing cost: the relentless commodification of attention. Algorithm-driven capitalism extracts profit from not only physical bodies but also the emotional and creative labor of internet users. This economic system alienates us from our inmost selves and gives us only a gnawing longing that cannot be satiateda spiraling collective mental health crisis. The exchange is deeply unequal: we pay attention and receive alienation.
Aarushi Bhandari offers a new way to understand the political economy of attention, combining quantitative analysis and personal narrative to critique the role of information and communications technologies in global society. Ranging across levels, from international development policy to online social movements through individual internet users, she examines how these technologies have fostered a host of unequal exchanges. Pervasive inequalitiesbetween richer and poorer countries, between progressive social movements and the reactions against them, and between technological elites and the online populationnow reinforce one another, with far-reaching consequences. Along the way, Bhandari shares her own journey as a chronically online millennial woman growing up among the Kathmandu elite in a dominant-caste Hindu family during the Nepali Civil War. A bold and incisive critical analysis, Attention and Alienation also considers how to reclaim the potential of the internet and design new systems that prioritize collective well-being.
Aarushi Bhandari offers a new way to understand the political economy of attention, combining quantitative analysis and personal narrative to critique the role of information and communications technologies in global society.
