{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","id":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","uuid":"1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title":"Time, Consumption and Everyday Life Practice, Materiality and Culture","normalized_title":"timeconsumptionandeverydaylifepracticematerialityandculture","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":null,"isbns":[],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":236,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Time%2C%20Consumption%20and%20Everyday%20Life%20Practice%2C%20Materiality%20and%20Culture","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/1dc0854c-957b-4fb1-af9a-bb4fdb76b77e/search"},"page":{"printed_page":227,"pdf_page":226,"physical_index":226,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"dd10ff6ce6c6b3455d44ea4475493af245f1af34470359b608bdd9968955e4fb"},"chapter":"List of Tables and Figures","content":"Secondly, the new technologies were obviously black-boxed via very complex processes of production and transmission through global circulations and framings by organizations from Microsoft to the World Bank and the US government. But the very idea of routine itself played a part: the supposed superiority of the official version of new technology over local media definitions was often demonstrated by the fact that it represented uses of the technology that were ‘routine’ in the North or amongst the educated elite. Idealized uses – e.g. the locally odd media-use model of one computer per person that structured the space of internet cafés – were legitimated precisely on the grounds that they were unthinking everyday technology use in the North. The communicative assemblages of local people, by contrast, were not considered to be ‘routines’, but rather the senseless, retrograde and obstructive chaos of village life. ‘Routine’ thus marked out a classic denial of the rationality of the other.\n\nHence, in my rural research I worked alongside a computer centre that was set up in the district capital, using UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) money, HIPC (Heavily Indebted Poor Countries) money and Ghanaian government money, and under the aegis of a quite visionary chief executive officer of the district. This was a high-spec internet centre, run by a very bright and innovative young man, but entirely defined within official discourses of ICT and development: it was a centre to which people were meant to come in order to become computer literate and to use the internet for ‘information access’. All these terms were black-boxed – computer, internet, information – in that they were treated as given, complete and stable objects with already known and universal properties; these properties were expected to unfold automatically, anywhere, if implemented properly. The centre was almost always empty, largely because it did not connect to any of the surrounding communicative assemblages: no larger assemblages were formed.\n\nI interviewed the regional director of the education department in her office, a computer proudly displayed on her desk surrounded by piles of bureaucratic rationality in paper form and by subordinates assembled around her to perform hierarchy. The first half hour of the ‘interview’ comprised her amusing anecdotes about the stupidity and backwardness of villagers and village life. In judging village life, forms of action could only be perceived by her either as irrational (literally, these people are ignorant and stupid) or as stabilized in traditional forms that were intrinsically retrograde (rational in my terms, but not in hers).\n\nThe Ethics of Routine\n\n227","previous_page":226,"next_page":228}