Information Society Watch

2004, Amin Alhassan, Tampere University Press

This book focuses on the articulation of development communication policy within the postcolonial nation-state, Ghana. It interrogates policy practices on broadcasting, telecommunications and Internet diffusion. This is done against two policy orientations of commodification as the requirement of globalisation, on the one hand, as against the extension of citizens’ access to communication conduit as a requirement of nation building. The study is based on interviews and observations during research in Ghana in 2002 and an analysis of recent policy documents from the World Bank, the IMF and the Ghanaian state. The book traces the gradual re-articulation of communication as information as part of the logic of digital capitalism and uses this re-articulation of communication to illustrate the violence of economics on the postcolonial nation. The study concludes that a bifurcated nation is in the making, with deep urban-rural divides.The promised national community of citizens based on a principle of inclusion is gradually turning out to be an exclusive economy of digital consumers in the urban centers and a disconnected constituent of non-city dwellers all in an increasingly unimaginable polity (Adapted from author).

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