Measuring ICT

Starting from the assumption that any technology embeds the ideology, politics and culture of the society where it was created, this chapter reconstructs the specific historical and political link between the affirmation of neo-liberal paradigm, which has occurred since the 1970s in Western industrialized capitalist countries, and the dissemination of ICT. More in particular, it analyses the problem of measurement of ICT, emerged functionally to the need to identify new tools to legitimize the hierarchy of development, giving some countries the label of “most advanced” and the others of “developing” or “underdeveloped”. Indeed, the measurement, acting as a scientific justification for the Western superiority, is a part of those structures of knowledge which constitute an essential element in the functioning and legitimacy of the political, economic and social structures of the existing world-system. This contribution reconstructs this methods of knowledge deployed first at the international level, within and through the work of those actors who have taken the leading role in defining the interpretative lines of the measurement of ICT: the OECD, ITU, the World Bank.