-
8. Becoming Visible
- The MIT Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
8 Becoming Visible Ghana, a small country on the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, is the size of the US state of Oregon. Its entire population is only double that of New York City. Yet what is unfolding there, I argue, matters to the future of the Internet. By exploring the social world of youth who inhabit Accra’s Internet cafés, on their turf and in their words, I have sought to contribute to a richer understanding of how digital technologies might be desirable and useful in the world’s peripheries. Much of the early conversation about the Internet centered on its liberatory possibilities. Its material properties were linked with certain social ideals—equality, openness, and freedom. The increasingly diverse user populations now online—as represented, for example, in the cross-section of humanity present in Yahoo! chat rooms— offer a more rigorous check on whether these ideals have actually come into being, whether the material terms of online participation indeed communicate and support such ideals, and whether such ideals are shared or ultimately adopted by these newcomers. When young Ghanaians went online, they did not join the digital age unproblematically. Instead they occupied an unaccounted for in-between space, neither simply connected (and conforming to a Castellian network logic) nor disconnected and wholly excluded. The old dichotomies, it is clear, no longer suffice to frame issues of inequality and inclusion in global networks as the network expands to encompass more and more users from diverse geographies. Scholarship must begin to contend with this new marginality, one shaped by connectivity under various asymmetries of material connection and differences in representational power online. The fate of culture in an era of networks has long been of interest to scholars. The thinking that closely identifies culture with tradition and locality typically has pointed with concern to processes of cultural 184 Chapter 8 homogenization as the likely outcome of the bleeding boundaries of global interconnection (Ebo 2001; Herman and McChesney 1997; Mattelart 1985). The suggestion here is that cultural contact generally yields to one culture over another, yet how aspects of culture come into being in the first place or by what processes culture is changed is unclear. Manuel Castells ’s claims about the cultural dimensions of the digital age, though more nuanced, nonetheless similarly rest on a notion of culture that in light of the present case now appears too neatly apportioned and bounded. He partitions a global culture that is constituted in and through the network from the multiplicity of enduring, revitalized, or radicalized regional cultures (Castells 1997). Of this global culture, he argues that founding communities (of entrepreneurs, hackers, and idealists particularly concentrated in the United States) have shaped an ethos of online spaces, their configurations and possibilities, producing something Castells calls “a culture of real virtuality” (Castells 1996, 355). Castells describes resistance and the promotion of cultural alternatives in regionally anchored social movements . The Zapatista movement of Chiapas State in Mexico is one of his recurring examples. At times these reactive movements manage to employ the network itself toward their cause, yet in Castells’s formulation they do so without apparently deforming either the network or their causes. An absolute differentiation of global and local is in this way retained. Castells depicts an oppositional cultural response as something orderly and intentional. In his examples it is an explicit articulation of alternate values and a willful attempt to preserve them. Yet the way Ghanaian youth interpreted the new material possibilities of the Internet could not be characterized as conscious resistance (with the exception of certain strategies among scammers) nor could it be adequately characterized as a kind of social movement. These youth operated in part through inculcated dispositions and desires (their habitus), which came to shape their engagements online (Bourdieu 1977). The unconscious ways that members, once fully socialized, inhabit a cultural position is what is notably omitted from Castells’s consideration. Yet this is what was especially apparent in the confused cross-cultural encounters online between young Ghanaians and foreigners as a result of the unforeseen differences in baseline expectations they held about social roles and interactional norms. Writing early in the Internet’s history, Castells saw a trend toward uniformity in global systems that were “increasingly speaking a universal [54.234.6.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 06:51 GMT) Becoming Visible 185 digital language” (Castells 1996, 2). However, with the more global makeup of the Internet’s population of users the...