Multiple Meanings of Data-Driven Governance: Facebook and Civil Service in Southern Cambodia

• In Event: Becoming “Data-Driven”: Burgeoning Data Cultures and Liminality in Civil Service - II

Abstract

Contributing to discourse on data-driven governance (Crawford and Schultz, 2014; Barocas and Selbst, 2016), bureaucracy and documents (Hull, 2012), we offer an ethnographic study of technologically-mediated civil service through the case of low level government workers and their families using Facebook for governance in rural southern Cambodia. These local authorities (6 male veterans aged 54-72) are new to the Internet but now use Facebook in their jobs as a tool for reporting and promotion of local government activities. They often use the tool with the help of their children, and in conjunction with older communication technologies (such as loud speakers, walkie talkies, and feature phones). Scholars have begun to demonstrate the ways that non-Western states strike power balances with transnational technology corporations (Bulut, 2016) and how a state’s ability to encourage digital innovation is often an indicator of their self-perceived global power (Lindtner & Avle, 2017). In contrast, we describe the mundane digital workings of the non-Western state and the multiple ways that government workers and their families make meaning out of new transnational tools (working off of Welker, 2014, and Mol, 2002). Some of the group members are drawn to promises of (local and transnational) power and intimacy embedded in these tools, but simultaneoulsy feel that they alienate and endanger them. This paper uses as an empirical foundation three observational research trips and media literacy workshops in a village in southern Cambodia as part of a larger multi-year ethnographic project on digitization and social change across Cambodia.

Authors

• Margaret Jack, Cornell University

• Nicola Dell, Cornell Tech