Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana

6. Linking the Internet to Development at a World Summit

6 Linking the Internet to Development at a World Summit In recent years, the international aid sector has seized on digital and network technologies reframing them as tools of contemporary development practice. This chapter makes a brief diversion from the main thread of this book to consider this process. In an effort to ground such consideration ethnographically, I consider one particular event—the Africa regional conference of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS)—sponsored by the United Nations, which was held from February 2 to February 4, 2005, at the Accra International Conference Centre. This event took place midway through my initial nine-month period of fieldwork in Accra. It unfolded contemporaneously and in close proximity to the Internet cafés documented in preceding chapters. Juxtaposing these two social worlds, that of Accra’s Internet cafés and of the WSIS proceedings , shows clearly the divergent ways their members came to understand the Internet, its capabilities, and its particular relevance in an African context. At the WSIS regional conference, processes of document production, speech performance, and the choreography of conference events centered on information as an important social good. Information and its unencumbered circulation was depicted as critical to human and societal advancement. The WSIS championed universal connectivity as an imperative for the progress of developing countries. By contrast, in Accra’s Internet cafés, participants came to understand the Internet through informal, small media circulations, in settings as diverse as churches, street corners, and school yards. The technology was not employed in this context for the purposes of neutral and impersonal information circulation. It was first and foremost a space of person-to-person communication where one’s progress was facilitated or hindered by human gatekeepers. The Internet 134 Chapter 6 was perceived by these nonelite users in Accra’s Internet cafés as a domain of contested representations and, at times, of what seemed to be exclusions motivated by race, geography, and nationality. The absence of overlap between the terms and categories that frame ideas about technology in these two milieus potently illustrates the profound disconnect between these social worlds. Given the vocal claims by WSIS organizers about the inclusiveness of the conference proceedings, one could expect some number of Accra’s Internet café owners, operators, and users to find their way into the conference hall. Yet this was not the case. I found that among the Internet café– going youth there was little to no awareness of the event, no sense that its inclusiveness was inclusive of them. The organized youth clubs of Mamobi considered in chapter 2 and especially the active and Internetsavvy Avert Youth Foundation would seem ideal candidates to prove claims of the conference’s inclusiveness and yet they were not present. Only a small cadre from the elite entrepreneurial and managerial crowd affiliated with BusyInternet were on hand at WSIS events. The absence of these local, nonelite populations from the conference in spite of the convenient proximity and their apparent investment in the issue of ICT engagement thus demands further explanation. For long-time observers of development institutional processes such a disconnect likely comes as no surprise.1 The extensive international travel undertaken by officials of the large international aid organizations (particularly the UN and the international financial institutions [IFIs]) and their apparent effort to consult with experts, governments, and local groups belies an essentially inward orientation and self-referentiality in the way such organizations tend to operate. This is facilitated, in part, by practices of physical cloistering: to the air-conditioned conference centers, four-star hotels, and chauffeured private transport, practices that were very much in evidence at the WSIS regional conference in Accra. This cloistering clearly preserves the prestige of such work and protects its uninterrupted efficiency and claims of universality. In light of such practices, the decision to locate the WSIS regional conference in Accra had far more symbolic resonance than practical consequences. The event unfolded in a kind of placeless space marked by a standardized environment that bolstered the standardized procedures.2 There was also the cloistering of authority to the confines of certain disciplines, discourses, and professional roles.3 This has Linking the Internet to Development at a World Summit 135 consequences for the way these bodies forward the possibilities of information and of information technologies through their routine practices of expert consultation.4 Opportunities to incorporate ground-level realities...