The age of globalisation has been defined in terms of access to modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) by some scholars (Hutton and Giddens 2001; Castells 2000; Rantanen 2001). Scholarly debate about the role of ICTs as an agent of social organisation and transformation has raged on before and since, from discussions about the networked information society (Bell 1999; Castells 1996) and consideration about the commercial potential of the technology (Gandy 2002; Shapiro and Varian 1999) to critiques of the systemic divides in organisation, access, use, adaptation and impact (Mansell 1999; Norris 2001; Warschauer 2003). Since these initial considerations, we find ourselves living in a world where ICTs have diffused widely to far-flung corners of the globe and are being deployed to confront some of the world’s most complex problems. Scholarly debates in domains such as the global digital divide continue, in which some argue that technologies such as mobile phones have led to the expansion of socio-economic opportunity for the developing world (Donner 2008; Waverman et al. 2005), to those who claim that inequalities remain, with resultant limitations on their societal impact (Carmody 2013; Hilbert 2014).We focus here on notions of the impact of ICTs on international development, going beyond issues of access and use, well documented elsewhere.