ICTs, mobile telephony and politics in Africa: the end of the “communication for development” paradigm?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mobile telephone has become an established research subject in many regions of the world. Government officials and business leaders work equally to devise the best way to take advantage of what mobile telephony has to offer in Africa. The growing interest in mobile telephony in this part of the world inspires us to reflect upon the manner in which theory can contribute to better understanding the growth, use and impact of mobile telephony in Africa according to its relationship with politics.[1] In this sense, our goal here is two-fold: identify the social and theoretical context in which issues related to mobile telephony and politics in Africa insert themselves; and to analyze the traditional theories regarding information and communication technologies (ICTs) in Africa in relation to politics. New theoreticalapproaches for thinking about mobile telephony in Africa are also proposed in order to understand the new paradigms that are at stake in the continent’s development.Keywords: ICTs – Mobile telephony – Politics – Africa – Development - Communication [1] The Global Media Journal “Call for Papers”asked that authors engage with the notion of collective action in Africa. From our perspective, politics is the concern of collective action in the sense that Chantal Mouffe, in 1993's The Return of the Political, insists that politics cannot be limited to a certain type of institution but is instead conceived of as an inherent dimension of human societies, thus determining our ontological condition (1993, p. 3). Politics is marked by power and antagonism and is rooted in a form of political participation. “By political participation we refer to those legal acts by private citizens that are more or less directly aimed at influencing the selection of government personnel and/or the actions that they take”(Verba, 1978, p. 46). Whereas for Mouffe (1993, p. 6), “(w)hen there is a lack of democratic political struggles with which to identify, their place is taken by other forms of identification, of ethnic, nationalist or religious nature.”In our analysis, political participation may occur in an illegal manner, in the sense that no official authorization has been granted to the actions and that politics is not limited to the democratic or non-democratic character of a given country.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".