IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/itintd/v3y2007i4p37-52.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West African Culture

Author

Listed:
  • Wendy Griswold

    (Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois)

  • Erin Metz McDonnell

    (Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois)

  • Terence Emmett McDonnell

    (Department of Sociology, Northwestern University, Chicago, Illinois)

Abstract

In the fragile reading cultures of the developing world, will people abandon print as they embrace the Internet? Whether media 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. (c) 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Suggested Citation

  • Wendy Griswold & Erin Metz McDonnell & Terence Emmett McDonnell, 2007. "Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West African Culture," Information Technologies and International Development, MIT Press, vol. 3(4), pages 37-52, July.
    • Handle: RePEc:tpr:itintd:v:3:y:2007:i:4:p:37-52
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1162/itid.2007.3.4.37
    File Function: link to full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to

    for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:tpr:itintd:v:3:y:2007:i:4:p:37-52. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: The MIT Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://direct.mit.edu/journals .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.