Paper Info
Title
Networked Authoritarianism at the Edge: The Digital and Political Transitions of Cambodian Village Officials.
Abstract
This paper describes how village-level officials, relatively new to the Internet, use popular digital platforms on smartphones to supplement and extend long-standing patterns of information control and authoritarian power in rural Cambodia. They use these tools to monitor local affairs, report to the central government, and promote local government activities, practices which intimidate villagers and encourage their political withdrawal and self-censorship. This paper makes three contributions to the literature on networked authoritarianism and rural governance. First, technological changes currently underway in the Cambodian rural bureaucracy reflect a generational transition, as long-standing officials struggle to use new media easily or effectively, leading to new anxieties and breakdowns for these traditional holders of power. Second, bureaucratic information practices in these villages rely on material practices ranging from paper, face to face meetings, and loudspeakers, to new tools such as Facebook and smartphones - underlining significant continuities in mechanisms of bureaucratic power and control. Third, networked authoritarian practices conjure for villagers the historical links between information control and violence, and the effectiveness of these tactics on chilling speech is often rooted in villagers' memories of fear.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3449124
Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact.
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Authoritarianism,Central government,New media,Bureaucracy,Local government,Politics,Corporate governance,Public relations,The Internet,Political science
Conference
5
Issue
Citations 
PageRank 
CSCW1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Margaret Jack172.17
Sopheak Chann200.34
Steven J. Jackson338027.24
Nicola Lee Dell427030.15