Rob Ackland, a professor at the Australian National University, was able to visit the Quello Center in early May. In addition to kicking off a valuable roundtable discussion of digital social science, he also gave a very useful talk on social media and development at a Quello Seminar on 5 May 2016. His talk, which you can view here, was based on a background paper he co-authored (with Kyosuke Tanaka) for the World Bank. The key contribution of the talk by Rob was his offering a number of competing and complementary theoretical perspectives on how social media might link to social and economic development objectives. While there have been many case studies of the Internet and other new media such as mobile phones in development processes, there is a relative absence of theoretical reasoning about the links between social media and development. Rob is an economist, but his theoretical arguments move beyond economics and merit careful examination by researchers on ICT4D (information and communication technologies for development).
Rob Ackland – Social Media and Development from Quello Center on Vimeo.
