When I problematized commodification within the global context of telecom privatization in chapters six and seven, I argued along the Marxist perspective that the process of extending the rules of exchange value to previously excluded arenas of the nation-state suggests an undoing of the project of building the imagined community. That argument was premised on the fact that rules of exchange value have a logic of exclusion, which is counter to the project of nation building. The discussion considered the national community against the possible articulation of a common national imagining. Both at the theoretical and the policy level, especially in the area of broadcasting policy, the thinking and practice have been framed within the old paradigm of universal accessibility for a wider national constituent as part of the construction of the civic community. Such a task positioned the state as the primary bearer of the mandate of nation building called development, making market articulations of development a contestable scenario.
But as I have demonstrated and argued out in my discussion of broadcasting and telecom policy practices in Ghana, the conjuncture that defines the process of nation formation in the postcolony gives us a picture that does not fit into the normative framework that informs most of the articulations in the literature on development communication. The conjuncture, to recap, is characterized by the following elements among others: a weak communication regulatory agency, a vulnerable state at the mercy of international capital and a burgeoning regime of unregulated NGO activity within the postcolony and above all, a global environment of market hegemony. All these elements work in concert to overdetermine the trajectory of the postcolony; a trajectory that does not seem to promise the normative nation-state. Far from concluding that the nation state project is an unachievable one, I want to argue that it is the old normative thinking of a state with an exclusive mandate of development that is untenable because of the contemporary developments in the postcolony. We have to shift our gaze from the state to the market. And I will be making my argument under this chapter by
switching from the critical perspectives of political economy to a cultural studies approach.
I will do that by focusing on the practice of digital consumption within the limits of urban life in Accra.
By digital consumption I mean the newly found culture of Internet cafes and mobile telephony that has emerged in recent times with the liberalization and privatization of the telecom sector in Ghana. It is a rather recent development, for as already indicated, the liberalization of the telecom sector started in 1996. And between then and 2002, the change has been dramatic if not revolutionary. Small scale actors in the private sector, who have no humanist responsibility of the type the state claims, have been able to democratize access to telecom services beyond the imagination of the state, but only within the urban economy of the nation. These small scale investors with a few who have multinational leanings, have been able to open up phone and Internet access through their phone shops/telecenters and Internet cafes in the Ghanaian urban landscape, with Accra being the location of most of them.
Such a shift in the appreciation of the process of commodification requires a less antagonistic approach to market and the very process of commodification. It will allow us to look at market from a different perspective. Apart from the processes of alienation and exclusion that market does to the national community, are there alternative arenas where we can appreciate it? Does the unleashing of market forces in the domestic economy engender new avenues of participation in the nation beyond the civic engagements with the state, which the traditional public sphere allows? Re-stated, does the alien rationality that commodification introduces into the community of citizens, transposing them into pockets of consumers have some qualities to be appreciated? Answering these questions requires that we take a new look at consumption, the commodity form and its symbolizing codes and how these relate to participation within the state, or as I will argue, within the urban spaces of the nation-state.
Conceptually, “consumption” comes with an extra baggage; that is if one refuses to be
“liberal” in the political economy of communication. The one, who practices consumption,
“the consumer” has not had an appreciable career in the literature of traditional political economy. He has either been demonized or slighted as theoretically irrelevant until rescued by cultural studies as a self-affirming practice of participation. The apprehension that is registered against the consumer and the practice of consumption in materialist writings is justified sometimes against the backdrop of discourses about the consumer instead of the public. For instance, mark the language in the following key portion of Ghana’s NCA act, which spells out the primary responsibility of the national regulator:
The Objects of the Authority are as follows:
a). to ensure there are provided throughout Ghana as far as practicable such communications services as are reasonably necessary to satisfy demand for the services;
b). to ensure that communications systems achieve the highest level of efficiency in the provision of communications services and are responsive to customer and community needs;
c). to promote fair competition among persons engaged in the provision of communication services;
d). to protect operators and consumers from unfair conduct of other operators with regard to quality of communication services and payment of tariffs in respect of the service;
e). to protect the interest of the consumers;
f). to facilitate the availability of quality equipment to consumers and operators… (NCA Act of 1996, page 4).
Nowhere does the law mention public or public interest as something that the regulator should ensure is respected. The public does not exist in the letter of the law. Thus invariably the NCA has no responsibility to ensure the public interest, for here, the public is presumed to be the consumer. Where the NCA is tasked to ensure a nationwide coverage as in (a) above, it ties it to the market requirements of demand and not on public need terms. Consumer interest therefore becomes the primary concern of the NCA and not public interest. Such a re-conceptualization of national constituents in a country such as Ghana is troubling. For, here, the minority enjoys telecom or can afford to enjoy telecom facilities as consumers. The majority, who still lacks access, can by no means be classified as consumers. You have to be a consumer to have rights of consumption. That means being placed within the circuits of capital, and not bracketed out before one can qualify as a consumer. In an economy, where the cost of an hour long local phone call is higher than the hourly minimum wage, or the cost of an hour long session of Internet surfing is about ten times higher than the hourly minimum wage, a large chunk of the population is cut out of the circuit of capital. They are better still retained as the publics, whose members have rights and interests to be taken care of by public institutions such as the NCA. Thus, the public interest is not the same as consumer interest, especially in countries with low-teledensity (Samarajiva 2001, 8).
It is such troubling forms of articulating the consumer and consumption at the policy level as shown in the NCA law that make materialist grounded theorists wary of celebrating consumption as an act of self affirmation. For instance Nicholas Garnham (1990 and 2001, 132-136) has consistently resisted such a theoretical overindulgence in the consumer as an independent actor and the object of his consumption as emanating from outside the system of commodity production and consumption itself. But in taking this turn towards an appreciation of consumption, I do not suggest a rejection of the relevance of public over the consumer interest. But rather, within the confines of urban life in Accra, consumption or more precisely, digital consumption is the new crave and is exhibited as a major practice of everyday life. It is significant to point out that the residents of Accra have a disproportionately large share of the nation’s facilities on offer. In view of this, I am inclined towards looking at the ways digital consumption empowers within the context of urban life. I will use observational evidence and information gathered from interviews conducted during my research visit to Ghana from March 27to July 31, 2002 to discuss the practice of digital consumption in the city of Accra. Specifically, I will look at the private sector initiative of telecenters or communication center outlets, and the popularization of mobile phone use.