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Third Industrial Revolution
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Content uploaded by Brian H Roberts
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We present the first analysis of the use and non-use of social media platforms by low-income blind users in rural and peri-urban India. Using a mixed-methods approach of semi-structured interviews and observations, we examine the benefits received by low-income blind people from Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp and investigate constraints that impede their social media participation. We also present a detailed analysis of how low-income blind people used a voice-based social media platform deployed in India that received significant traction from low-income people in rural and peri-urban areas. In eleven-weeks of deployment, fifty-three blind participants in our sample collectively placed 4784 voice calls, contributed 1312 voice messages, cast 33,909 votes and listened to the messages 46,090 times. Using a mixed-methods analysis of call logs, qualitative interviews, and phone surveys, we evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the platform and benefits it offered to low-income blind people.
The main theme of this book is that industrialisation is a highly complex process which has moved through and continues to move through a number of discernible phases. Integral to this theme is the view that these phases can be adequately understood only in the perspective of an ever-changing world economy. Industrialisation refers not simply to the harnessing of new sources of power and new technologies to the production of goods and services. The diffusion of industrialism has had far-reaching consequences for the whole of social life. Industrialisation eventually created a ‘modern’ society, — that is, a society which went beyond providing basic necessities for the bulk of its citizens — to reach a stage where ever higher levels of consumption came to be seen as a reasonable and legitimate expectation.
An equation has often been made, especially but not exclusively by Marxists, between radicalism and the rational understanding of objec- tive interests. I argue that, on the contrary, commitments to tradi- tional cultural values and immediate communal relations are crucial to many radical movements, (a) because these commitments provide populations with the extent of internal social organization necessary to concerted, radical collective action, and (b) because the largely defensive goals of these movements must be radically incompatible with the introduction of modern capitalist-dominated social forma- tions. Reformism is the characteristic stance of the modern working class, for both social and cultural reasons. That revolutions are risky undertakings poses a problem for theorists of popular insurrections. Why, it has often been asked, would reasonable people place their lives and even their loved ones in jeopardy in pursuit of a highly uncertain goal? Neither the success of uprisings nor the desirability of postrevolutionary regimes has appeared likely enough to outweigh the probability of privation and physical harm. A conservative view, as old as Plato but more recently argued by LeBon (1909), Smelser (1962), and others, concludes simply that revolutionaries must not be very reasonable people. Revolutionaries and their defenders have, of course, disagreed. Most famous among them, Marx offered an important argument for the rationality of revolution. This argument combined a notion of necessary historical progress with the assertion that revolution would be in the rational interest of the class of workers created by industrial capital- ism. It turned in part on the expectation that progressive immiseration of the proletariat would eliminate other possibilities for self-improvement and
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