Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Digital Imperialism: An Idea whose Time has come?
Lloyd Amoah
(University of Ghana)
Using Ghana’s attempt at technological advance under Nkrumah and its contemporary digitalization efforts as a case study, the idea of digital imperialism is canvassed as a starting point for theorizing about Africa and the power dynamics of the digitalization turn in the global political economy.
Paper long abstract:
Cyberization(used interchangeably with digitalization in this paper) has become the new inescapable reality of contemporary life. Cyberization points to the ways in which daily living in the last thirty years has become decidedly entangled in digital artifacts, infrastructure and networks. The recent COVID-19 pandemic provides the most recent empirical, incontrovertibly global and demonstrable snapshot of this reality. This paper concerns itself with what all this means for Africa’s place in the scheme of global power mediated by the era of digitalization. Using Ghana’s attempt at scientific and technological advance under President Kwame Nkrumah and its cyberization experience in the era of neoliberal capitalism as a case study, and drawing insights from the fields of techno-politics, Science and Technology Studies(STS), development studies and international relations, the chapter offers some conceptual building blocks wound around the idea of digital imperialism as a starting point for catalyzing theorizing about Africa and the power dynamics of the cyberization turn in the global political economy.