“Pre-Modern” Online: Converging Discourses of Globalization and Development

Abstract

This study seeks to understand the ways in which global capitalist control and local empowerment in the context of development are acted out on the Internet, involving a venture based in the United States, and rural communities in developing regions. It entails analysis of the web site of the company Greenstar, which promotes environmentally conscious, sustainable development through new information and solar energy technologies in return for local cultural products (many in digital form) from these regions that are then sold on the Net by Greenstar. Its corporate approach to sustainable development and its ecommerce in cultural artifacts produced by rural communities have made the company a constituent of a new global cultural economy. Drawing from theories of development and globalization, and incorporating Giddens's idea of the third way, I constructed a conceptual framework within which to locate the Greenstar phenomenon. To understand the persuasive discourses in which Greenstar engages to inform its audience and influence its donors, I examined the Greenstar web site, its principal presence as a virtual company, using two modes of analyses. First, drawing from Jackson's recently proposed network analysis for web texts, I conducted a qualitative, critical analysis of the architecture of Greenstar's web site. I then employed frame analysis to examine the site's content. The structural analysis indicated the corporation's domination over the site, though some suggestions of a more dispersed, satellite structure in the architecture of the web site were apparent. Mainly, a radial, branching structure positions the company at the center of gravity. Frame analysis yielded five competing frames - the commodity frame, the activist frame, the empowering frame, the developmentalist frame, and the culture-as-nature frame. It is evident from the company's self-representation on the web site that it is seeking a third way of doing development by connecting global capitalism to the grassroots, trying to mobilize it for the empowerment of rural communities in developing regions. The findings reveal a novel and persuasive approach to social change in developing societies. Simultaneously, they also suggest that such a path may not be able to avoid privileging and hierarchizing key aspects of global capitalist over local indigenous cultures.