Geography of digital hope: An optimistic perspective on digital labor and infrastructure from the Global South

Abstract

This article frames digital infrastructures as “geographies of digital hope,” to propose new epistemologies rooted in everyday digital practices of the marginalized majority in the Global South. We critically examine the prevailing pessimistic bias in contemporary media scholarship, with an overemphasis on the extractive and exploitative dimensions of digital labor and infrastructures, and the underemphasis of the enablement and empowering aspects of these digital terrains. This commentary calls for reassessing the value of infrastructures from the everyday digital negotiations and lived realities with media of communities in the Global South. We propose a conceptual counterforce to dominant pessimistic and deterministic narratives—surveillance capitalism and algorithms of oppression—with alternative framings of surveillance of care and algorithms of aspiration, to uncover how marginalized users leverage emergent and existing digital spaces, despite the harms and risks, to create new forms of livelihoods, solidarities, care-giving, and agencies to carve their everyday futures.