Individual Paper

1. Uneven Geographies, Ecologies, Technologies and Human Futures

Session Name: Digital Divides across Asia: Censorship, Disinformation and Fake News

Digital Divide or Digital Imperialism?

Thursday, August 1, 2024

11:15 – 13:00 (GMT+7)

Paper Abstract: Digitalization has become the new inescapable reality of contemporary life. Indeed, daily life in the last thirty years has become decidedly entangled in the artifacts, infrastructure, and networks of information communication technology. The recent COVID-19 pandemic provides the most recent empirical, incontrovertibly global, and demonstrable snapshot of this reality given how technology assumed a critical role for the maintenance of a semblance of normal life. I am interested via this this paper in discussing what this digitalized life writ large globally-and mediated through social media, platforms, cryptocurrencies, algorithmic regulation among other digital realities- means for Africa’s place in the scheme of global power. To be more specific I challenge the idea of a Digital Divide (DD) and argue it that is conceptually inadequate at best and misleading at worst for describing and capturing the status and place of Africa in the contemporary global technology scheme. I argue (drawing from Amoah [2024], forthcoming) for its abandonment or better still replacement with the idea of Digital Imperialism (DI).

My argument is empirically grounded in Ghana’s attempt at scientific and technological advance under President Kwame Nkrumah and its digitalization experience in the era of neoliberal capitalism and draws insights and data from the fields of techno-politics, Science and Technology Studies (STS), development studies, international relations and the historical and contemporary records of the building of the internet.

Presenter(s)

LA

Lloyd A. Amoah
University of Ghana, Ghana