2009
Amartya Sen on ICTs and human freedom
What is the iconic example of how ICT may make a difference in the life of the poor in the South? I bet you are immediately thinking of a poor farmer that - thanks to his mobile phone - is now able to make more money on his crops by using his mobile phone to inquire after crop prices and in doing so cutting out the middlemen. It is a simple picture of how ICT has the power to change human lives and one that has been used well by NGO and development agencies in communicating about what ‘ICT4D’ (ICT for Development) could do. It was indeed mentioned in the panel discussion “Communication and Human Development: The Freedom Connection?” (video and audio available here), which took place at Harvard University on September 23rd (only this time the farmer was a fisherman inquiring after the latest fish prices).
Otherwise the event was nothing like the euphoric success stories that normally dominate talk about ICT4D. Panel members expressed very nuanced views, so much that one might be disappointed that there seemed to be so much agreement and so little fire in this debate. Yet as Moderator Michael Best noticed halfway the event: all the very nuanced responses (“Yes, but…” and “Relative to…”), are “delightfully refreshing” for anybody working in or interested in the the field.
One of the four participants in this public discussion was economist and philosopher Amartya Sen, one of the founding parents of the ‘capability approach’, which has become a dominant paradigm in development thinking. Since our research project investigates the implications of the capability approach for technology and design in the context of human development, I was eager to hear what Sen had to say about ICTs. “Do mobile phones expand real, substantive freedoms [i.e. capabilities] that people enjoy?”, so moderator Michael Best asked Sen in order to kick off the debate. Sen expressed to have no doubts that it does, that seemed “pretty straightforward” to him (indeed, it is hard to disagree with that).
But he quickly added that in many cases, the expansion of the freedoms of some people comes at the expense of the freedoms of other people. And in some cases, he said, this may pose a complex challenge to us. It seems clear to me that where freedoms clash, those are partly ethical challenges. Ethical challenges that we cannot tackle without thorough empirical investigations of what happens when we introduce mobile phones in a certain place and time. Because as Sen mentioned later on in the debate, there is a large degree of unpredictability in the usages and impacts of technologies like mobile phones. So lots of work to do in this area - it would be nice to be able to add detailed and concrete cases, to gain a more in-depth understanding of the things that can - of course - only be brought up in a relatively superficial way during such a public forum.
on January 04, 2010
My first reactions would be:
__There is indeed no need to limit ourselves to ‘freedoms’ in our evaluations. Even Sen makes room for other dimensions, although he obviously takes capabilities to be of special normative importance.
__Equate “the good life” with “expanding capabilities”? Not exactly ‘equate’, I would say. One of the reasons why Sen and others propose a policy focus on capabilties is because people have very different ideas of the good life and governments should stay largely neutral towards those ideas. Making sure that a person has a sufficiently large capability set gives her plenty of options to choose a certain kind of life or another. But looking not from a policy perspective, but through the eyes from an individual: I guess that an individual often equates the good life with specific ways of ‘doing and being’, and not with the ‘capabilities’ to do and be those things. Or values especially those capabilities that correspond to her favoured functionings. If, as an individual, I have the capabilities to lead the life of my choice, I may not necessarily think that my life gets better by gaining more capabilities.
__But even this policy link between ‘expanding capabilities’ and ‘staying neutral towards the good life’ is not unproblematic, I suspect. Because technology, although able to expand capabilities, is often not (value) neutral. So you are right that system designers cannot get around value questions and those are hard. They should be discussed in the public arena and Sen’s freedom perspective provides a vocabulary that is helpful, not one that will stop the need for discussion.
on December 16, 2009
Ah, it is getting more interesting. Yes we need a more inclusive analysis of the impact of (in this case) the mobile phone. But should it ‘only’ be within the concept of ‘expanding freedom’?
Do you/we equate “the good life” with “expanding freedom”? If so your ‘train of thought’might be an interesting one: let’s try to balance expansions of freedom against restrictions. I think I know the outcome in the verdict about mobile phones. But aren’t there different ‘hierarchies of value’ to make, with possible different verdicts? And is not exactly that the difficulty of the system designer: who is he/she to decide which hierarchy of values to take as a framework?
on December 16, 2009
Thanks for your comment Ton. It may seem obvious that ICTs expand people’s freedoms, but the degree to which they do so may also depend on the ‘system level’ at which your evaluation takes place. I think many people have a too simplistic view of an idividual interacting with technical artefacts, like mobile phones. Then mobile phones obviously expand the individual’s freedom: I may call someone at any time and irrespective of my location, or decide to call him later, not to call at all, or call somebody else instead. This is what philosophers of technology would label an ‘instrumentalist’ view of technology. But as you mention, technology does much more. It builds social systems and practices. I agree that we should look into these effects (indeed not easy). However, I think such analyses can also be accomodated as part of the ‘expanding freedoms’ perspective - I would even encourage it. If you look at such a social system level, you will probably find that mobile phones have also lead to new (stressfull) social pactices and matching expectations, such as checking your work messages in the weekends and during holidays. Would we say that the freedom of people is curtailed by this? If so, would at this more inclusive level of analysis the overall balance of freedoms expanded and freedoms curtailed be positive or negative?
on December 16, 2009
Is it as straightforward as you (or Sen and the moderator) seem to think? If you view it from the perspective of ‘expanding freedom’ it might be (if we define what it means in terms of more frredom). But at the same time mobile phones change the ways we communicate with each other. And communication is the ‘building block’ of social systems, according to Niklas Luhmann ( Soziale Systeme). So the queston might be how the changes in (communication) technology affect the social systems in (developing) countries for the better and the worse. That is not an easy question to answer.
Ton van Rheenen