期刊名称：Culture Unbound : Journal of Current Cultural Research
电子版ISSN：2000-1525
出版年度：2010
卷号：2
页码：153-175
DOI：10.3384/cu.2000.1525.10210153
出版社：Linköping University
摘要：This paper focuses on the case of the SuperNet, an infrastructure project designed and sponsored by the provincial government of Alberta, Canada with the objective of providing broadband connectivity to public facilities, businesses and residences in rural communities. The data were collected through individual interviews, focus groups, and town hall meetings in the course of a collaborative research initiative (The SuperNet Research Alliance) that investigated the social construction of the broadband network from multiple perspectives. The objective of the paper is to examine in parallel the discourses in which the concept of broadband connectivity acquired meaning and substance at the levels of 1) provincial government and industry policy planners and 2) the residents of the rural communities who were the intended beneficiaries of the SuperNet. Using actor-network theory as a departure point, this analysis takes stock of the framing devices employed in the two sets of discourses and of the distinctive worldviews that generated them. It looks for the meeting points and the disjunctions between the grand visions and the grounded projections underlying the positions taken by the two respective categories of actors. Differences in the interpretation and appropriation of broadband among rural Albertans themselves are discerned and related to social factors characterizing different situations within rural areas. Rural broadband connectivity thus emerges not so much as a one-dimensional access equalizer for rural people, but as a complex mediator of opportunity, participation and identity.
