Digital Humanities of the South and GAFAM. For a Geopolitics of Digital Knowledge

Abstract

ABSTRACT Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple e Microsoft (GAFAM) today not only represent the world’s biggest financial empire but exploiting the open architecture of the Web took control of the technologies that guide private consumption and dictate times and methods of the production and access to digital knowledge. Digital Humanities cannot longer ignore the existence of this dispositif and its effects on cultural and epistemic diversity. If DH were born for preserving our cultural heritage and possibly guiding the digital transformation of humanities and social sciences, it is necessary to know the geopolitics of global communication systems, the neo-colonial ambitions of multinational corporations or the pillage of digital data, the new raw material provided by emerging countries. GAFAM plays a central role in this scenario, spearheading the hegemony of the Anglosphere which threatens to make invisible or annihilate cultural diversity. Its dominion is based on an ecosystem of devices, applications and media that on one side allow to create communities gathered around algorithms-driven experiences, and on the other penetrate each space of people’s private life – the real added value of these network giants. In this scenario, would it be possible to build a counter-narrative of the “digital revolution” designed by a monocultural private empire? However, the margins of the Global South are witnessing a number of initiatives and projects focused on the reappropriation of digital technology with the aim of protecting and preserving local territories, languages and traditions. Biocultural multipolarity seems therefore the only possible answer to GAFAM’s global pedagogy. Southern DH need to articulate this response in two urgent steps: developing a critical digital literacy and revaluing the margins as a source of innovation and social change.

Keywords: DH and Global South; Geopolitics of the Internet; Digital Hegemonies; Digital Colonialism; Cultural Diversity.