Decolonizing the internet starts with looking at media history
Is it possible to decolonize today’s largest global communication platform?
Media ancestors
It is also important to contextualize the decolonization debate in reference to the internet by looking at its ancestors – other institutions of communication. As a researcher in media studies, I have a special interest in thehistory of the mediaand how media institutions arein conversationwith the concept of colonialism or coloniality.I also examinehow decolonization might occur.
In thinking about anything to do with decolonisation, it’s important to understand the history of colonisation. How does it manifest itself in the present moment? How does its afterlife take shape or form in the aftermath of settler or direct extraction by the colonial society?
Next, the internet must be understood as a space that represents the continuities and discontinuities of the colonial legacy. It has the potential to reproduce as well as to change people’s understanding of the world.
Power structures
The philosopher Frantz Fanon was among those who reflected on the colonial nature of an internet ancestor, radio. He spoke about the role radio played in the bigger colonial project in Algeria, and the space that Radio Algiers occupied. Radio Algiers, a then French broadcasting station which functioned in Algeria for decades, was a re-edition of the Paris-based French National Broadcasting System. In 1959,Fanon wrote:
This history teaches societies that platforms of communication are not free from ideological influence. It is on those basis that we need to be vigilant about the contemporary role that is played by communication platforms.
Today the internet is, for many societies, the default distributor of ideas, “facts”, opinions and various knowledge systems. It is also the default gatekeeper of knowledge in modern society.
The internet literally spreads ideas about oneself or one another – particularly about one another, in keeping with the power structures of the global order: global South vs global North, the colonial subject vs the colonizing subject.
The ideas spread by the internet could mean that one is seen to be, for instance, lacking in morals, evil, a savage, and uncivilized. This is the real power of the internet as a communication medium: it buttresses or disrupts knowledge about the world.
Knowledge systems
The internet is also a knowledge carrying platform. It produces and spreads ideas that carefully work their way into one’s mind, thereby wittingly or unwittingly shaping one’s view of the world. The global South and particularly the African continent has not, by and large, technologically leapfrogged.Internet access within the continent is uneven, with the continent’s eastern and central regions lagging most.
Africa, then, has played a limited role on the internet as a carrier of knowledge. So it is reasonable to argue that the knowledge carried by the internet on Africa and Africans needs to be continuously interrogated. What needs to be further probed is whether or not the internet disrupts the narrative on Africa as explained by the West and colonial societies. Or does it entrench those narratives and understandings?
The “coloniality of knowledge” within the context of the internet means that the African subject – with limited representation on the internet – continues to be explained through an imperialistic knowledge outlook. As a result of its limited online representation, the continent and its people largely remain unseen and unheard. They are talked and written about. Their forms of knowledge are packaged by others on the internet. All this, by subjects who largely reside in neo-colonial and imperialistic geographies.
This all entrenches the narratives as described by theorist Edward Said whenhe noted:
A greater understanding
To begin to decolonize the internet, to me, means to recognize the history of colonialism and its omnipresence even within systems and platforms that are meant to be most progressive.
It is to understand “coloniality of knowledge” and come to terms with aspects of the “hidden” or invisible power matrix in the world today. It means recognizing the uneven distribution of access to the internet, and what this means for who contributes most to the internet as a source of knowledge. It is to understand how this undermines those whom the world has traditionally designated as the unseen and the unheard.
This article is an edited version of a talk the author gave atan eventon 1 July 2021 titled “Decolonising the internet: How AI shapes our world”.
Article bySiyasanga M Tyali, Associate Professor and Chair of Department,University of South Africa
This article is republished fromThe Conversationunder a Creative Commons license. Read theoriginal article.
Story byThe Conversation
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