Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana

"This book looks at urban youth accessing internet cafes in Accra, Ghana , and how they “socially interact with other youths from around the world.” In particular, it examines young people’s sense of their wider world changing through the use of internet cafes. It goes back to the hopes behind technologies. The discussion up until that point had tended to assume that if we give people access to technology—such as the internet and mobile phones—people will automatically do things that will help them to climb the development ladder, so to speak. The book investigates that assumption by looking at what people do in these cafes. What did she find? People interact internationally with their friends, family members, strangers, build partnerships, they watch music videos, engage in online dating. But there was also a growth in scamming, people impersonating other people, for the purpose of economic gain. Essentially, the process involves becoming cosmopolitan, or enacting a ‘cosmopolitan self’ as Burrell calls it. In that sense, the internet can actually enhance knowledge among urban youth and help to develop their social skills. For me, this book provides an early assessment of the potential of technology, not taking technology as given, but how it is actually used and made to work by people. One of the key messages that comes out of the book is how technology has this interpretive flexibility. The meanings and the uses of these machines or systems are not predetermined. They should be understood in distinctive ways. Burrell writes that with different users and among different groups they can take on different meanings. To me, that stands out, because subsequent work has built on that understanding, that we can’t presume technology will evolve in a path-dependent manner."