This photo essay explores a repeated visual trope of images in the space of technology-for-social-good that are centered on brown hands and a digital artifact.
This image, on the home page of the Free Basics/ Internet.org project by Facebook, is typical of the visual tropes that are expressed by the technologists involved in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICTD) and related technology-for-social-good projects. The image is centered on a digital artifact, in this case a mobile phone, held by brown hands. The smiling face is blurry and mostly out of the frame. It would seem that the hands being brown and the background being a blurry beige are enough to signal that this is a context where free internet is needed.
This is the cover of the first dedicated textbook to the topic of Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D). The cover repeats the visual trope we saw in the Facebook Free Basics website image: the image centers on a digital artifact, held in a brown hand. This time there are beaded bracelets on the hands and a colorful scarf in the background. Again, these appear to be what indexes the image as being technology for a context that needs development.
Here we see another image that repeats the centrality of brown hands. This time instead of a mobile phone, the image is centered on the hand pointing at what appears to be a colorful printout of a digitally-created artifact. The background is a woven straw mat and the woman wears a print garment that does not appear Western. The research group is highly successful in publications and in projects that have produced desired impacts. Members of the lab have also produced critiques of ICTD and its attendant problems.
Lucy Pei. 3 December 2019, "Technology For Social Good: Visual Tropes", Center for Ethnography, Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography, last modified 3 December 2019, accessed 19 April 2024. http://www.centerforethnography.org/content/technology-social-good-visual-tropes