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Digital Inequalities in the Global South pp 347–362Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Afro-Creole Nationalism and the Maintenance of the Digital Divide: The Case of Jamaica

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Abstract

The English-speaking Caribbean is nearly saturated with access to mobile telephony, and internet access is dramatically increasing, but the promised economic and social transformations are not yet in evidence. Calls for regional policy makers to implement informed and appropriate processes of technology transfer, acquisition and deployment continue to challenge conventional perspectives that unproblematically link development to acquisition of technological innovations from the North. Without policies that take into account global economic and political systems and local arrangements that work in tandem with these systems, the transfer of digital technologies to developing societies exacerbates inequality and dispossession. This chapter concludes that decolonization of scholarship in the region is central to countering that which Sankatsing describes as envelopment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

    Nova Gordon-Bell

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  1. Nova Gordon-Bell
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Correspondence to Nova Gordon-Bell .

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  1. Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

    Massimo Ragnedda

  2. Faculty of Journalism, Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    Anna Gladkova

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Gordon-Bell, N. (2020). Afro-Creole Nationalism and the Maintenance of the Digital Divide: The Case of Jamaica. In: Ragnedda, M., Gladkova, A. (eds) Digital Inequalities in the Global South. Global Transformations in Media and Communication Research - A Palgrave and IAMCR Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32706-4_16

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