Written over three decades, Africa 2.0: Inside a Continent’s Communications Revolution by Russell Southwood could well be an ethnographic book. Southwood takes us through the journey of Africa since 1986 when all of sub-Saharan Africa had fewer phone lines than Manhattan in New York. If someone in Africa wanted a fixed-line telephone connection in 1986, it used to take a minimum of two years.
A new report by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA), an association representing the mobile industry and its operators, on the state of mobile internet indicates an increasingly connected, if still woefully unequal, world.The report reveals that as of the end of 2021, 55% of the world’s population, or 4.3 billion people, were using mobile internet.
In the book The Modem World, Driscoll tells a coming-of-age story of the internet—he uses a crisp yet vivid narrative voice that has the potential to hook a techie and non-techie alike. The book fills an important gap in the cultural memory and theoretical literature of the internet by paying close attention to the Dial-Up Bulletin Board Systems (BBS).
As a child of the 80s the concept of how we consider and view privacy, I am increasingly realizing, is outdated and ‘so very last century’. As of this year I have lived more than half my life in this century and yet as technology consumes and propels most aspects of our lives I still think the right to privacy, intimate or otherwise, cannot and should not change.
For some time now, Silicon Valley has been obsessing over the next billion users. As mobile telephony becomes accessible along with cheap data—Jio, for instance, offers the cheapest data in the world—what kind of new markets will emerge in the global south, and how to parse the tech-consumption of the world’s poor to both enable them and profit off them.
The title How to Break up with Your Phone reminded me of an essay I had read many decades ago while in school. On ‘Not Answering the Telephone’ was a witty essay by William Plomer in which he expresses his dislike of owning a phone and discusses the inconveniences in having a telephone of one’s own. But the likeness ends there.