The ethnography is about young Internet users in Ghananian internet cafes. The author tries to understand and explain how the spread of the internet through globalizations materialized in this African country. Young Ghananians wanted to counteract the structural inequalities, imobility, and marginalization that they faced by turning to the supposingly "free" internet. However, they continued to encounter marginalization due to their identity.
Like most monographs, the introductory chapter of the book reviews the relevant theories. The other chapters move from physical context and digital context to rumors and religion, and then to Development conferences and computer importing. It is an inside-out approach. Stories of people were told in great details.Visual materials are included as assisstance: including tables and diagrams, images of documents, and field site photos. Endnotes include some further sources of information and additional anecdotes.
The cover is a drawn picture showing young African men and women using computers together. I guess this illustrates the general situation of the studied internet cafes. One monitor of the computers shows the global earth. It probabaly denotes the process of globalization discussed in the book.
The sketch describes that technology is the central theme of the book. I seldom study science and technology, not to mention an ethnographic study of it. I am therefore interested in knowing more how the book parse out the relations between technological use and human experiences, structural conditions, and cutlural implications.
The sketch proposes to make an interactive digital conversation piece. The general public will then be able to chat online with a bot designed to represent the experiences described in the book, or with artists/ the author/ interested participants. This idea seems interesting. As the book itself is about the use of internet, using internet itself to illustrate the arguments can be inspiring.
One possible way is to produce a documentary and post it on Youtube. This helps remind internet users worldwide that the internet is not equal to everyone.
Burrell argues for looking at multiple scales in a “spiral” when “accounting for the materialization of technologies in global peripheries”(20): starting with the human-machine interface (micro), then expanding to second-order sensemaking (meso), then finally considering the political economy (macro). The chapters are organized starting at the center of the spiral and moving up and out in scale.
