Glamour and honor: going online and reading in West African culture (Wendy Griswold, Erin Metz McDonnell and Terence Emmett McDonnell)

In the fragile reading cultures of the developing world, will people abandon print as they embrace the Internet? Whether the media will compete or collaborate depends on place-specific factors. West Africans insert online practices into a local context of material circumstances, social roles and cultural values. In Nigeria and Ghana, these include (1) unreliable electricity and execrable telephone service; (2) overworked women, jobless young men, scammers and ambitious teenagers; and (3) a reading culture of limited penetration but enor­mous prestige. Internet access via cybercafés has intensified personal commu­nications, reinforced gender inequality and enabled petty crooks to go global. It has not, however, encroached on reading’s all-but-sacred status. Both net­savvy youth and the adult “reading class” protect reading practices through spatial and temporal separation, time management and functional differentia­tion. These preserve the honored position of reading despite West Africans’ enthusiasm for the glamour of going online.