An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship.

In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones.

Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

Networking Peripheries reveals a Peru moving towards a dynamic and diverse future, in terms of both technology and culture. Chan clearly has a high regard, and legitimate concern, for the people and organizations she has engaged with—artisans, teachers, government officials, activists. Anyone who feels that they already understand the full impact of Internet technology on human culture and community may be surprised and intrigued by the first-hand material presented in this important text.—John Gilbey, Nature—