Panel 150: Information and Communication Technologies: Meanings, Uses, Imagination in Africa

Despite the early interest in new media and an emerging anthropological literature, there have been relatively few ethnographic studies on computing and internet technologies within anthropology. As a result, a great deal of anthropologists’ understanding of new information and communication technology comes from other disciplines (Wilson and Leighton 2002)1. Yet technologies comprising the Internet, and all the text and media which exist within it are in themselves cultural products. They have enabled the emergence of new sorts of communities and communicative practices-phenomena worthy of the attention of researchers in anthropology.

This panel will address issues related to the appropriation and uses of ICTs.
First seen as producing a kind of homogenization and general acculturation, science and Western technology are now viewed in terms of a real or potential contribution to the formation of hybrid cultures and processes of selfaffirmation in their partial or selective appropriation (Escobar, 19942; Castells, 2001). Each technology represents a cultural invention in the sense that it emerges from a specific context (Escobar, 1994). Technologies acquire different meanings in different social contexts (De Bruijn, Nyamnjoh, et al. 2009; Brinkman, De Bruijn et al. 2009). What are the discourses, representations and practices generated by these technologies? How are they diffused? What role do African Diasporas play in the diffusion, appropriation and use of these technologies? In which ways individuals’ ideologies interact with those inscribed in technology, and how do they combine to create new ways of viewing and talking about the world?