Abstract
Research on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Africa has often explored their relationships with politics—be it for their ability to affect participation, offer new tools for representation and accountability, or innovate reporting on politically relevant events. There is, however, another, deeper sense in which new media and politics interact, which depends on the ability of technologies—including ICTs—to incorporate ideas and ideologies and subtly act in the pursuit of specific political objectives. This chapter focuses on this form of technopolitics and offers an empirically grounded framework to study how political projects become embedded into artefacts, and to comparatively analyse whether and how the visions of national and international actors shape and are shaped by technological possibilities and constraints.
The text presented here is based on a chapter that previously appeared in the book The Politics of Technology in Africa (Gagliardone, 2016). It has been adapted to offer conceptual and methodological tools to students and scholars in order to analyse the relationship between technology and politics in Africa.
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Notes
- 1.
Another way of looking at large technical systems/techno-political regimes has been to consider them as mega-projects, which can be considered as large-scale investments attracting significant public attention because of substantial impacts on communities, environment, and budgets. For the literature on mega-projects see for example Bruzelius, Flyvbjerg, and Rothengatter (2002) and Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, and Rothengatter (2003).
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Gagliardone, I. (2018). The Technopolitics of Communication Technologies in Africa. In: Mutsvairo, B. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Media and Communication Research in Africa. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70443-2_15
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