Techno-optimism and I.T. Talk
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communities in terms of education, poverty and health, and d) cultural prescriptions about the
desirability of the communication medium itself (Rogers & Kincaid, 1981).
Third, in many ways, the development of DVLINK can be read in terms of external
pressures to conform to techno-optimism. The inevitability that DV members accord to the usage
of DVLINK clearly reflects the overall direction of discourses on new information technology
discussed earlier. The relationship is complicated, however, by the fact that while the emphasis
on inevitability at the macrolevel carries over into the microlevel, the context for it changes. At a
macrolevel, the theme of inevitability is also accompanied by claims about centrality and
efficiency. The context for such claims is the overall move toward privatization in the
telecommunications sector in India. At a microlevel, the theme of inevitability is visible with
reference to the supportive rather than the central nature of information technology. Moreover,
problems involved in the use of information technology accompany are much more clearly
articulated at the microlevel than at the macrolevel. This last fact has several implications for
both institutional theories of organizations as well as for organizational communication theorists
who are concerned with the study of hegemony in organizations. First, it points to the importance
of studying the context for conformity between organizational practices and institutional
imperatives. Second, it highlights the importance of viewing hegemony as a process that
inherently involves multiple contexts, tensions and negotiation, between sets of discourses rather
than a straightforward state of consensus.
In concluding, I would like to offer some comments by a speaker on information
technology who I listened to on my last visit to a western state of India, during the summer of
2002. The gentleman, who founded and ran an NGO for thirty years, was speaking about the
computers that kept arriving at his office. “We literally have no more room for computers
Convention