Review: Andreas Eckert, Ingeborg Grau and Arno Sonderegger (eds.), Afrika 1500–1900: Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2011); Arno Sonderegger, Ingeborg Grau and Birgit Englert (eds.), Afrika im 20. Jahrhundert: Geschichte und Gesellschaft (2011)

Jamie Miller ()

Africa Spectrum, 2012, vol. 47, issue 1, 99

Abstract: This paper takes a critical look at the view that the Internet can serve as a laboratory of political experimentation for reconfiguring the repertories of political actions. The overall discourses on information and communications technology (ICT) are too often focused on technology and infrastructure, when the question of its use should be central. In order to comprehend how ICT can serve as a democratic enhancer, this paper critically examines the African anthropology of the state and of the public sphere. It captures the African endogenous productions of political modernity and the subsequent way ICT is appropriated and indigenized by African local instances. African states and civil societies do not fit into prescriptive Western paradigms. In order to encourage the effective use of new technologies, this paper has developed the so-called “African model of ICT practice”, which proposes a set of hypotheses that aim to enable the effective usage and integration of ICT within the democratic process in the context of an African self-defined political reality.

Keywords: ssssssssssss (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/giga/afsp/article/view/524/522 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gig:afjour:v:46:y:2012:i:1:p:99

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.giga-hamburg.de/afrika-spectrum

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Africa Spectrum from Institute of African Affairs, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, Hamburg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Andreas Mehler ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).