Crafting lifestyles in Urban Africa: Young Ghanaians in the world of online friendship

Africa Today

Volumn 55, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 29-49

  Fair, Jo Ellen ^a   Tully, Melissa ^a   Ekdale, Brian ^a   Asante, Rabiu K B ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF GHANA   (Ghana)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNICATION NETWORK; CULTURAL IDENTITY; INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY; INTERNET; SOCIAL NETWORK; URBAN AREA;

AFRICA; GHANA; SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA; WEST AFRICA;

EID: 70350057766     PISSN: 00019887     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2979/aft.2009.55.4.28     Document Type: Article

References (96)

1. Accra Women Online. 2008. Accra Daily Mail, 27 January, p. 8.
2. Adomi, Eshaenana. 2007. Overnight Internet Browsing among Cybercafé Users in Abraka, Nigerial. Retrieved 18 May 2009 from the World Wide Web: http://ci-journal.net/index.php/ciej/article/viewArticle/322/391.
3. Alao, Isiaka, and Abubakar Folorunsho. 2008. The Use of Cybercafés in Ilorin, Nigeria. The Electronic Library 3(2):238-248.
4. Akyeampong, Emmanuel. 2000. "Wo Pe Tam Won Pe Ba" (You Like Cloth But You Don't Want Children): Urbanization, Individualism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Ghana, c. 1900-39. In Africa's Urban Past, edited by David Anderson and Richard Rathbone. Oxford: James Currey.
5. Algan, Ece. 2003. The Problem of Textuality in Ethnographic Audience Research: Lessons Learned in Southeast Turkey. In Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives, edited by Patrick Murphy and Marwan Kraidy. New York: Routledge.
6. Allman, Jean. 1991. Of "spinsters," "Concubines," and "Wicked Women": Reflections on Render and Social Change in Asante. Gender and History 3(2):176-189.
7. -, ed. 2004. Fashioning Africa: Power and the Politics of Dress. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
8. Ansu-Kyeremeh, Kwasi. 2005. indigenous Communication in the Age of the Internet: From the Village Conversational Spot to the Internet Website. In Indigenous Communication in Africa: Concept, Application, and Prospects, edited by Kwasi Ansu-Kyeremeh. Accra: Ghana Universities Press.
9. Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
10. Ardèvol, Elisenda. 2005. Dream Gallery: Online Dating as a Commodity. Retrieved 29 February 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.media-anthropology.net/ardevol-dreamgallery.pdf.
11. Arnafi, John. 2006. Talking and Deciding about Sex and Contraception in Ashanti Towns. In Sex and Gender in an Era of AIDS: Ghana at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Christine Oppong, M. Ya Oppong, and Irene Odotei. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers.
12. Arnoldi, Mary Jo, Christraud Geary, and Kris Hardin, eds. 1996. African Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
13. Arvidsson, Adam. 2006. "Quality Singles": Internet Dating and the Work of Fantasy. New Media and Society 8(4):671-690.
14. Ayiku, Charles Nii. 2006. Love Brewed in an Internet Pot. 1 May. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/ GhanaHomePage//features/artikel.php?id=103494.
15. Barber, Karin, ed. 1997. Readings in African Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
16. Bonjawo, Jacques. 2002. Internet: Une Chance pour l'Afrique. Paris: Editions Karthala.
17. Burke, Charlanne. 2000. They Cut Segametsi into Parts: Ritual Murder, Youth, and the Politics of Knowledge in Botswana. Anthropological Quaterly 73(4):204-214.
18. Burrell, Jenna. 2005. Telling Stories of Internet Fraud: How Word-of-Mouth Shapes Internet Use in Accra, Ghana. Retrieved 29 February 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://people.ischool .berkeley.edu/~jenna/.
19. -. 2008. Problematic Empowerment: West African Internet Scams as Grassroots Media Production. Information Technology and International Development 4(4):15-30.
20. -, and Ken Anderson. 2008. "I Have Great Desires to Look Beyond My World": Trajectories of Information and Communication Technology Use among Ghanaians Living Abroad. New Media and Society 10(2):203-224.
21. Castells, Manuel. 2001. The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
22. Castells, Manuel, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Araba Sey. 2007. Mobile Communication and Society: A Global Perspective. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
23. Chaney, David. 1996. Lifestyles. London: Routledge.
24. -. 2001. From Ways of Life to Lifestyles: Rethinking Culture as Ideology and Sensibility. In Culture in the Communication Age, edited by James Lull. London: Routledge.
25. -. 2002. Cultural Change and Everyday Life: London: Palgrave MacMillan.
26. Clark, Gracia. 1994. Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
27. -. 1999. Negotiating Asante Family Survival in Kumasi, Ghana. Africa 69(1):66-86.
28. Close, Angeline, and George Zinkhan. 2003. Romance and the Internet: The E-mergence of E-dating. Advances in Consumer Research 31:153-157.
29. Cole, Catherine. 2001. Ghana's Concert Party. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
30. Cole, Jennifer. 2004. Fresh Contact in Tamative, Madagascar: Sex, Money, and Intergenerational Transformation. American Ethnologist 31:573-588.
31. Constable, Nicole. 2003. Romance on a Global Stage: Pen Pals, Virtual Ethnography, and "Mail-Order" Marriage. Berkeley: University of California Press.
32. Cooper, Al, and Eric Griffin-Shelley. 2002. A Quick Tour of Online Sexuality, Part 1. Annals of the American Psychotherapy Association 5:11-13.
33. Darkwah, Akosua, and Akosua Adomako Ampofo. 2008. Race, Gender, and Global Love: Non-Ghanaian Wives, Insiders and Outsiders in Ghana? International Journal of the Family 34(2):187-208.
34. Dolby, Nadine. 2006. Popular Culture and Public Space in Africa: The Possibilities of Cultural Citizenship. African Studies Review 49(3):31-47.
35. Du, Bowei, Michael Demmer, and Eric Brewer. 2006. Analysis of WWW Traffic in Cambodia and Ghana. Retrieved 2 June 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~demmer/papers/traffic-analysis-www-06.pdf.
36. Durham, Deborah. 2000. Youth and the Social Imagination in Africa: Introduction to Parts 1 and 2. Anthropological Quarterly 73(3):113-120.
37. Evans, Leslie. 2004. UCLA World Internet Project Finds Gaps between Rich and Poor, Young and Old, Men and Women. Retrieved 2 June 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://international.ucla.edu/research/article.asp?parentid=7488.
38. Fair, Jo Ellen. 2003. Francophonie and the National Airwaves: A History of Television in Senegal. In Planet TV, edited by Shanti Kumar and Lisa Parks. New York: New York University Press.
39. -. 2004. "Me Do Wu," My Val: The Creation of Valentine's Day in Accra, Ghana. African Studies Review 47(3):23-49.
40. Farivar, Cyrus. 2004. "The Powerful Force": An Examination of the Internet in Senegal. Retrieved 12 December 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.osiris.sn/ING/pdf/These-Farivar.pdf.
41. Foster, William, Seymour Goodman, Eric Osiakwan, and Adam Bernstein. 2004. Global Diffusion of the Internet IV: The Internet in Ghana. Communications of the Association for Information Systems 13:654-681.
42. 419 Romance Scams Bite Lustful Foreigner. 2007. 29 January. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.modernghana.com/news2/122773/1/419- romance-scams-bite-lustfulforeigners-.html.
43. Furuholt, Bjorn, and Stein Kristiansen. 2007. A Rural-Urban Digital Divide? Regional Aspects of Internet Use in Tanzania. Retrieved 2 March 2009 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ifipwg94.org .br/fullpapers/R0090-1.pdf.
44. Geschiere, Peter and Joseph Gugler. 1998. The Urban-Rural Connection: Changing Issues of Belonging and Identification. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 68(3):309-319.
45. Gifford, Paul. 2002. Ghana's New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalizing African Economy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
46. Griswold, Wendy, Erin Mcdonnell, and Terence Mcdonnell. 2006. Glamour and Honor: Going Online and Reading in West Africa. Information Technologies and International Development 3(4):37-52.
47. Gunkel, David. 2001. Hacking Cyberspace. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press.
48. Gyamfi, Alexander. 2005. Closing the Digital Divide in Sub-Saharan Africa: Meeting the Challenges of the Information Age. Information Development 21(1):22-30.
49. Gyekye, Kwame. 2002. African Cultural Values: An Introduction. Accra: University of Ghana, Legon Press.
50. Hahn, Hans Peter, and Ludovic Kibora. 2008. The Domestication of the Mobile Phone: Oral Society and the new ICT in Burkina Faso. Journal of Modern African Studies 46(1):87-109.
51. Hamilton, Jacqueline. 2003. Are Main Lines and Mobile Phones Substitutes or Complements? Evidence from Africa. Telecommunications Policy 27:109-133.
52. Hancock, Jeffrey, Catalina Toma, and Nicole Ellison. 2007. The Truth about Lying in Online Dating Profiles. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 449-452. New York: ACM. Retrieved 2 June 2008 from the World Wide Web: https://www.msu .edu/~nellison/hancock-et-al- 2007.pdf.
53. Humphreys, Lee. 2006. Images and Online Romance. In Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication, edited by Paul Messaris and Lee Humphreys. New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
54. "Internet Love" Cost American $150,000. 2007. 10 February. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb. com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?id=118866.
55. Internet World Statistics: Usage and Population Statistics. 2008. Retrieved 31 July 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.internetworldstats. com/stats14.htm.
56. Jeffrey, Craig. 2008. "Generation Nowhere": Rethinking Youth through the Lens of Unemployed Young Men. Progress in Human Geography 32(6):739-758.
57. Jegede, Dele. 1995. Popular Culture in Urban Africa. In Africa, 3rd edition, edited by Phyllis Martin and Patrick O'Meara. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
58. Jenkins, Henry. 2006. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press.
59. Kiyindou, Alain. 2004. The Millions without a Voice in the Worldwide Information Society. Information Technologies and International Development 1(3-4):90-91.
60. Kojok, Justin. 2006. Distance Relationships and Broken-Heart Phenomenon. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/ GhanaHomePage//features/artikel.php?id=108114.
61. Lydon, Christopher. 2002. Parachute Radio in Ghana: The Talk of Accra. The Transom Review 2(3):2-11.
62. Male Student Poses as Woman to Defraud American. 2006. 1 July. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.newtimesonline.com/index.php? option=com-content&task= view&id=3470&itemid=227.
63. Manuh, Takyiwaa. 1995. Changes in Marriage and Funeral Exchanges among the Asante: A Case Study from Kona, Arigya-Kwabre. In Money Matters: Instability, Values, and Social Payments in the Modern History of West African Communities, edited by Jane Guyer. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann.
64. Mbarika, Victor, Mike Jensen, and Peter Meso. 2002. International Perspectives. Communications of the ASM 45(12):17-21.
65. Mbarika, Victor, Kah Muhammadou, Samake Kibily, and Jeffrey Sumrall. 2007. Information Technology Access: Cybercafé Diffusion in Sub-Saharan Africa. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine Fall:49-56.
66. McKenna, Katelyn, Amie Green, and Marci Gleason. 2002. Relationship Formation on the Internet: What's the Big Attraction? Journal of Social Issues 58(1):9-31. (Pubitemid 34268216)
67. McKenna, Katelyn, and John Bargh. 1999. Causes and Consequences of Social Interaction on the Internet: A Conceptual Framework. Media Psychology 1:249-269.
68. Meyer, Birgit. 2006. Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana. In Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, edited by Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
69. Miescher, Stephan. 2005. Making Men in Ghana. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
70. Mileham, Beatriz. 2007. Online Infidelity in Internet Chat Rooms: An Ethnographic Exploration. Computers in Human Behavior 23:11-31.
71. Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2002. Relationships. in The Anthropology of Media: A Reader, edited by Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell.
72. Morley, David, and Kevin Robins. 1995. Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes and Cultural Boundaries. London: Routledge.
73. Mutula, Stephen. 2003. Cyber Café Industry in Africa. Journal of Information Science 29(6):489-497.
74. Mwesige, Peter. 2003. Cyber Elites: A Survey of Internet Café Users in Uganda. Telematics and Informatics 12:83-101.
75. Newell, Stephanie, ed. 2002. Readings in Popular Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
76. Online Dating Scams from Ghana on the Rise. 2006. 5 November. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/ NewsArchive/artikel.php?id=113372.
77. Oppong, Christine. 1981. Middle Class African Marriage: A Family Study of Ghanaian Senior Civil Servants. London: George Allen and Unwin.
78. -. 2006. Introduction. In Sex and Gender in an Era of AIDS: Ghana at the Turn of the Millennium, edited by Christine Oppong, M. Yaa Oppong, and Irene Odotei. Accra: Sub-Saharan Publishers.
79. Ott, Dana, and Melissa Rosser. 2000. The Electronic Republic? The Role of the Internet in Promoting Democracy in Africa. Democratization 7(1): 137-156.
80. Papacharissi, Zizi. 2005. The Real-Virtual Dichotomy in Online Interaction: New Media Uses and Consequences Revisited. Communication Yearbook 29: 215-238.
81. Police Hunt for "Gay" Fraudster. 2007. 29 January. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/// NewsArchive/artikel.php?id=118104.
82. Pryce, Daniel. 2008. Finding Love Online: "Decoding" Messages in the Classifieds. Retrieved 6 July 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/features/artikel.php?id= 144538&comment=3776045.
83. Rasmussen, Susan. 2000. Between Several Worlds: Images of Youth and Age in Tuareg Popular Performances. Anthropological Quarterly 73(3):133-144.
84. Salm, Steven, and Toyin Falola. 2002. Culture and Customs of Ghana. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press.
85. Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2008. Some Reflections on Making Popular Culture in Urban Africa. African Studies Review 51(3):75-89.
86. Slater, Don, and Janet Kwami. 2005. Embeddedness and Escape: Internet and Mobile Use as Poverty Reduction Strategies in Ghana. Information Society Research Group, report 4. Retrieved May 2, 2008 from http://topics. developmentgateway.org/civilsociety/rc/filedownload.do? itemid=1046450.
87. Smith, Daniel. 2007. A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
88. -. 2009. Love and Risk of HIV: Courtship, Marriage, and Infidelity in Southeastern Nigeria. In Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage, edited by Jennifer Hirsch and Holly Wardlow. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
89. Sonaike, S. Adefemi. 2004. The Internet and the Dilemma of Africa's Development. Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 66(1):41-61.
90. Tawiah, Benjamin. 2007. Internet Dating and Fraud. Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage///features/ artikel.php?id=121005
91. -. 5 February 2008. When Does a Sentiment Become an Epidemic? Retrieved 31 May 2008 from the World Wide Web: http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage// features/artikel.php?id=138690.
92. Turkle, Sherry. 1997. Life on Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon Schuster.
93. Valentine, Gill, and Sarah Holloway. 2002. Cyberkids? Exploring Children's Identities and Social Networks in Online and Offline Worlds. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 92:302-319.
94. van Binsbergen, Wim. 2004. Can ICT Belong in Africa, or is ICT Owned by the North Atlantic Region? In Situating Globality: African Agency in the Appropriation of Global Culture, edited by Wim van Binsbergen and Rijk van Dijk. Leiden: Brill.
95. Wardlow, Holly, and Jennifer Hirsch. 2009. Introduction. in Modern Loves: The Anthropology of Romantic Courtship and Companionate Marriage, edited by Jennifer Hirsch and Holly Wardlow. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
96. Youngstedt, Scott. 2004. Creating Modernities through Conversation Groups: The Everyday Worlds of Hausa Migrants in Niamey, Niger. African Studies Review 47(3):91-118.