Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana

2. Youth and the Indeterminate Space of the Internet Café

2 Youth and the Indeterminate Space of the Internet Café Immobility in a Mobile Age This ethnography begins in earnest in this chapter with an introduction to the people and places that comprise the field. A small number of Internet cafés served as the starting point for my observations but this quickly expanded into various other sites and the broader urban environment the cafés were situated within. The regular inhabitants of these Internet cafés were for the most part male youth (ages sixteen or so to about thirty). Speaking with Internet café operators and owners, people in the neighborhood , and the families of some of these youth filled out the picture of the Internet café scene. The purpose of this chapter is to establish not only that certain Ghanaian youth desired and used the Internet, but also to begin to consider what specific capabilities of the technology appealed to them in the context of their broader life worlds. We may ask, if the Internet was the answer, what was the question?1 Furthermore, what made the Internet café as a particular kind of space appealing in the context of the dilemmas and desires of the urban youth who spent their time and money there? Among the young inhabitants of Accra’s Internet cafés there was a widely shared fixation on making foreign connections and specifically on possibilities for travel overseas. International mobility, as they recognized, was a privilege very unevenly distributed among the world’s populations. I was reminded of this again and again when conversations with youth in Accra turned toward the aspiration to travel, denied applications for travel visas to the United States or Europe, and money lost to “connection men” who claimed to have back-door contacts at the embassies. The reality of such enduring immobility in this part of the world seems to exist in the 30 Chapter 2 shadow of the more widely remarked-on global trend toward deterritorialization , “the loosening of bonds between people, wealth and territories.”2 This is often depicted by scholars as an uncontrollable process resisted or coped with through reformulations of locality (Appadurai 1996) or identity (Castells 1997). Yet, the other side of this equation, that of the selective blockages enforced by repressive states or imposed by foreign governments, remains little considered. Although the global view may highlight an overall acceleration, from a situated perspective this “loosening” is instead often experienced as dramatically asymmetrical. It may register first and most powerfully in certain domains (often media or commodity flows) whereas others remain stunted (especially labor flows). For young Ghanaians , exposed to an increasingly varied and global sense of possibilities (courtesy of the radio, television, and other mass media), their inability to reach those possibilities became all the more intolerable. Such an asymmetry threw into high relief their state of stagnation and exclusion. Following from this, the activities of youth in the Internet café and beyond were often oriented toward freeing up and routing around these barriers and blockages. The consequent sense of marginalization felt among young Ghanaians in this state of “involuntary immobility” (Carling 2002, 5; Lubkemann 2008, 454) was registered spatially. It can thus be distinguished from the temporal notion of abjection that Ferguson proposes (with reference to post-independence Zambia) as a circumstance whereby access, privilege, and promise has been withdrawn, leaving behind only lingering, agonizing memories of what once was (Ferguson 1999). Youth in Ghana, too young to have experienced firsthand Ghana’s decline after independence in 1957 to the famine and state bankruptcy of the early 1980s (Brydon and Legge 1996) are instead exposed to alternative lifestyles of distant and inaccessible sites mediated by mass media and return migrants. Yet, whether temporal or spatial, the agony remains. Brad Weiss, in his examination of how fantasy is woven into everyday spaces by youth in urban Tanzania, refers to a “widening breach between the actual and the possible” (Weiss 2002, 100). I would suggest additionally a similarly widening breach between the possible (or perhaps probable) and the imaginable. Weiss links such a gap to evaporating formal employment opportunities in the wake of structural adjustment programs and the growth of an increasingly overcrowded informal sector. Although youth in Youth and the Indeterminate Space of the Internet Café 31 Accra similarly perceived a narrowing of options, they often related this to increasingly restrictive migration policies in the wake of 9/11. Muslim...