Mobile love videos make me feel healthy: rethinking ICTs in development

Abstract

In the ICTs for Development discourse, ICTs are positioned as tools and processes to fight poverty and facilitate empowerment; I argue that this view of development ignores the diverse ways in which the poor and the marginalized use media technologies in their everyday lives for social networking, entertainment, to produce and participate in intimate and erotic economies, express and experience their sexuality, relationships, pleasure and intimacy in ways that could be considered as empowering. However, media technologies are also a site for the enactment of violence and abuse. This necessarily complicates the aim of health, rights and activism efforts, and there is a need for sexuality programs and studies to be aware of the potential risks and pleasures of these spaces and the political economies in which they play out. Media use (like development) is an area where theories of sexuality cannot merely be applied, but is where sexualities are actively made and remade. Therefore, I also suggest that ethnographic studies of media consumption and use provide a deeper understanding of sexuality in a way that contributes to applications in a development context.