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If everyday life, (world) politics, and (popular) culture are indeed inseparable from one another in practice, if not in theory, then there is clearly a rich vein to be tapped in international studies; a discipline where theory and practice are increasing ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political-economic architectures and associated cultures of use that constitute overlapping generations of information and communications technologies (ICTs) have been grist to many a critical mill for some time now. All manner of exclusions and obfuscations, around axes of race/ethnicity, sex/gender, class/status, access/education, are used in triumphant and pessimistic accounts of how ICTs subvert or exacerbate age-old “divides.” At the same time, multilateral institutions have been working hard at disseminating the Millennium Goals project of “ICTs for Development” both downstream (in the field) and upstream (as media policy, governance and financial institutions). Whether it is technophile or technophobe, a certain blind faith in the determining power of digital technologies per se permeates respective renderings of the “Global Information Society” thesis. This paper takes a critical look at the terms of reference that fall under the rubric of the Global Information Society thesis (e.g. cyberspace, virtual realities, online-offline, digital divide, time-space compression) as ideas/ideals in their own right; imaginings and phenomena that are now part of the globalization meta-narrative. Rather than arguing for or against their empirical validity or moral status, the paper posits that this idea-set needs unpacking, its constituent concepts critically delineated if they are to be understood and then fruitfully incorporated into Human Development and Capability projects. Wholesale dismissal of all-things-digital is the flipside of uncritical adoption of the same, I shall argue. The reason for this approach is to better apprehend and thereby countermand instrumentalist and commercial practices and imaginaries that are currently encoding, surveying, disciplining and controlling other, and others’ uses and experiences with ICTs. A brief genealogy of this idea-set and its material dimensions are juxtaposed to a rough guide to counter-intuitive uses and applications of ICTs from “atypical” (non-western, disenfranchised) internet practitioners. These provide the conceptual and empirical foundations for positing some alternative premises-cum-recommendations for thinking past and through the digital ambivalence that governs critical takes on this thesis to date. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]