In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

5 Practical Metaphysics and the Efficacy of the Internet Religious practice and belief were a frequent point of reference for Ghanaian Internet users when they spoke about their social relationships, aspirations , and their use of technologies including the Internet. The way they talked about this belief was marked by a sense of the presence of spiritual forces (good and evil) and the operation of these forces in one’s day-to-day existence. This chapter delves into the complicated and dynamic terrain of religious practice in urban Ghana. To refer to this as a matter of “religion ,” however, is in certain ways misleading. Sociological approaches to the study of religion since Durkheim (1995 [1912]) have generally focused on religious institutions as a form of social organizing. The central concern of this chapter is rather with a foundational metaphysics, a particular shared body of knowledge about how natural, manufactured, and supernatural forces operate in the world. This cuts across various religious affiliations in Ghana but often finds its concrete form in particular religious practices and in spaces of religious ritual. Chapter 4 was concerned with how issues of the morality of Internet use were managed in the construction of a social imaginary in rumor. The question of morality, perhaps surprisingly, was not how the religious practices of Internet users functioned in relation to the technology in Ghana.1 Rather the concern among users was principally with efficacy and how this was tied to the management of spiritual forces. The complex interplay of supernatural, material, and specifically technological forces (including those of the digital realm) was a de facto reality that many Internet users attempted to intervene in and to delegate between. This meant that what sometimes appeared to be rigid persistence in certain, so far, ineffective ways of engaging with the technology (such as in strategies to seek financial gain or opportunity through online contacts) were explained by 106 Chapter 5 adjustments that users were actively making in other parts of the system. This included efforts to undertake rituals of spiritual alignment and enrollment by visiting a fetish priest or mallam or by attending church services. As with chapter 4, this analysis builds on the larger point about the incompleteness of an analysis circumscribed too closely around the machine interface. In this case I argue that to understand how the Internet was distinctively materialized in Accra required going to church.2 In a material-semiotic approach, how the supernatural realm may be accommodated analytically is largely uncharted terrain. Prior case studies of actor-network theory have generally been set in a disenchanted West and often at sites of technoscientific production, where there are certain rigid a priori commitments to empiricism and to certain prevailing notions of what is real and unreal. However, a belief in supernatural force as it is translated into observable material consequences is clearly under the umbrella of the “practical metaphysics” of actors that Latour indicates is the concern of a properly materialist approach (Latour 2005, 50). As a pragmatic methodological matter, to pursue the supernatural in this way is to trace out what users consider to be its material evidence, the signs of supernatural intervention in this world, and consequent actions that are undertaken in response. The question of whether such forces really, truly exist or are illusory is not the concern of this analysis. To those living within this metaphysics, I found, the question was rarely one of whether such forces exist, but of how to distinguish good and evil forces, the tradeoffs between them, how to enroll these forces, and whether or not it was necessary toward one’s aims.3 There is a particular significance in the matter-of-fact way that religion and the supernatural were accommodated by users in engaging with the Internet in Accra in relation to the book’s larger concern with scholarly work on the global transformations of the digital age. In particular, what was unfolding in Accra refutes one line of thinking that suggests network technologies have become a secularizing force among the populations that embrace them. A related discussion considers processes of democratization to be (under the right conditions) the expected effect when such capabilities are introduced in regions of the Global South (e.g., Ott 2001; Ott and Rosser 2000). On the issue of democratization, researchers who study the Internet as a space of political engagement have frequently turned to [18.119.139.50] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 14...

Share