Wired for change: the links between ICTs and development discourses

Abstract The ICT revolution's promises and threats for developing countries can be brought into clearer perspective if we pay attention to the underlying discourses on development and knowledge employed in this debate. This paper suggests that those who enthusiastically embrace ICTs tend to operate within a modernization discourse, while sceptics are influenced by dependency and post‐colonial discourses of development. Both perspectives operate with a liberal notion of knowledge as separate from power. The paper argues that a more fruitful approach is to analyse the role ICTs play in the power–knowledge nexus. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.