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Chronotopes of Media in Sub-Saharan Africa

Like globalisation in general, electronic globalisation is not a unified, or homogeneous, process. Rather, in different spaces, people engage with the possibilities and limitations of electronic goods and with the images, sounds and values that circulate with them, in different ways. Anthropologists are in a unique position to study the vernaculars of electronic globalisation because of their focus on the ways in which electronic goods are embedded in people’s everyday lives. The subfield of anthropology of media has recently begun to move away from ‘reception studies’ – that is, from the study of the ways in which people interpret, or ‘decode’, media ‘messages’ – to focus instead upon the ways in which people interact with the physical and sensory objects of media as part of their everyday lived experience. In anthropology, many of the key ethnographic contributions to this burgeoning field have been from Africa (e.g. Hirschkind 2006; Larkin 2008; Meyer and Moors 2006; Schulz 2012; Spitulnik 2002; De Bruijn et al. 2012), although these studies have resonated with work done elsewhere as well (e.g. Ginsburg et al. 2002; Hobart 2010; Moores 2012; Morris 2009; Pink 2013; Pinney 2008). Across all of these ethnographies, a key concern has been to trace how people’s engagement with media technologies invariably changes over time: either as people move through their daily routines, or as they traverse between social contexts (from public to private, from formal to informal, etc.), or as the media objects themselves also travel through time and space (something which is ever more common, of course, in our current age of increasinglymobilemedia). As a result, human biographies may be defined by interactions with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in different ways at different times, yet so too ICT objects can be said to develop ‘social biographies’ of their own. In other words – and as Kopytoff and Spitulnik, in particular, have highlighted (1986 and 2002, respectively) – over the course of their ‘lifetime’, all media objects may pass through distinct ‘phases’, in which they may be alternatively positioned as, for example: ‘objects of desire’, purchased goods, donated gifts, stolen items, ‘status symbols’, mundane objects, obsolete artifacts, ‘e-waste’ or other things besides. Moreover, as ICTs pass between these different phases they invariably reorganise social worlds as they go. In these ways, this new ethnographic literature has offered new perspectives on some of the most fundamental questions for the study of media, including: What part do