Internet platform for an African Renaissance
Background Analysis
The Information Age & Northern Discourse Ownership
The modern world is undergoing a fundamental transformation as the industrial society that marked the 20th century rapidly gives way to the information society of the 21st century. ICTs and particularly the Internet have created unprecedented possibilities to process, store, refine and disseminate data, information and knowledge in a variety of ways across borders. By diminishing the impact of space, time and distance, the ICT revolution has significantly changed the ways in which governments, and also the public and private sectors operate world-wide and thus led to dramatic social, economic, political, technical and cultural transformations and restructuring processes.
Contrary to many promises and expectations however, the information age does not automatically usher a new era of ‘true’ globalisation, of reduced marginality, poverty and domination through the equal access to information and knowledge. Instead of a totally new society, we are witnessing the emergence of a new and more sophisticated form of capitalism: global in its character, hardened in its goals and much more flexible than any of its predecessors. This new form of capitalist economy is distinct from previous forms of internationalisation in that it builds on a myriad of networks and operates as a unit in real time on a planetary scale.
While information and knowledge have always been essential ingredients of economic growth, they now become the guarantor of productivity and competitiveness. The use of new technologies in enterprises now provides them with the opportunity to diffuse their knowledge-based information throughout their entire network instantly and at low costs. Simultaneously it allows for the concentration of decision-making and the decentralisation of execution.
The Internet as an Imperialistic Instrument of Domination
In the Information Age, real domination is not characterised by the mere deprivation of information, but rather by the deprivation of the control over the production of meaning and the unreflected reception of the ‘names’ which frame human experiences, consumption and interpersonal relationships.
In this sense, the Internet has become a major Western instrument of domination. This is particularly true in Africa, where the current spread of the Internet is overwhelmingly commercialised, which means that the way the Internet spreads (Internet Café Culture) emphasises communication with the outside world and extraction of information and knowledge produced in other parts of the world. Rare are the opportunities for Africans to really invest the Internet with their own content, even civil society organisation have no or bad access to Internet. Hence the Internet, ideally a ‘de-centralized, bi-directional, ubiquitous and interactive’ form of information and communication, in other words a post-modern media, in Africa is reduced to one more unidirectional ‘modern mass media’ (and moreover an influential one since it informs all other mass media).
By thus extending the reach of Western hegemonic discourses and further centralising knowledge production, collection and validation in the North, the Internet adds another dimension to the already extensive Western discursive power and is more and more able to massively influence the direction of African development while more and more disengaging from direct intervention. The ‘West’ is dominating Africa, so to say, at ‘arms length’.
The Internet as Instrument of Liberation
On the other hand however, by (ideally) allowing for the active participation in the ‘process of naming the world’, the Internet also affords unprecedented means of transcending dependency and exploitation. In this sense, ICTs and particularly the Internet – Western instruments of globalising capitalism – can be utilised in a variety of ways to underpin today’s African renaissance strategies (e.g. Creating an African Discursive Space, Education and Conscientisation, Wider Integration, Domestication, Counterpenetration, Indigenisation).
Hence, if effectively appropriated, the Internet can underpin the long-standing counter-discursive project of the African renaissance. For the sake of a more self-reliant African future, the African renaissance ‘movement’ has no choice but to appropriate, invest and conquer cyberspace.