David Kaiza
29 June 2008
column
Nairobi — THE TAPPING OF KEYBOARDS in the Internet café in Kampala is interrupted only by the noise from the street. Then the electricity suddenly goes off. The computer screens wink out and there is a collective sigh as people lean back in their seats.
It is only now that they come alive to the presence of others in the café. They stare bleary-eyed at each other.
The silence that follows represents the temporary disconnection from a world of words and sounds so huge it would explode the room were the pages printed on paper. The people in this Kampala Internet café are part of the "cyberculture," the phenomenon that, unlike previous cultural trends, has refused to go away more than a decade later.
A questionnaire on Cyborgia.net dramatises this by asking if instead of going online, you would rather "hunt, gather or grow your own food?" and whether you "receive most of your knowledge about the world through artificial symbolic language, rather than natural sensory experience."
The Internet today is not what we encountered 10 years ago. In the past two years, it has crossed a line, becoming not the place to view the world, but one in which to lose sight of it too.
Cultural trends tend not to last beyond the decade that gave rise to them. In the 1980s, video and audio cassettes gave us Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson. In the previous decade, the disco had held sway along with the Afro hair cut and "platform shoes," but all these gave way to new trends.
In the 1990s, we started e-mailing and reading online. Rather than looking macho and dressing "smart," the in-thing was to have "computer-skills."
Before long, the end of that trend seemed imminent. The Y2K bug was going to bring an abrupt end to the Information Age. The new millennium was coming; would we go back to palm reading and line-fishing?
As we enter another decade, the Internet goes from strength to strength. As tools for self-expression and sources of information, nothing like YouTube, Myspace, Facebook and Secondlife have ever been available to mankind.
The paradox with the Internet, and with the age of plenty in general is that once you start using it, the positive impact expands to a point where it actually turns negative.
TOO MUCH INFORMATION translates into a fear of information. Rather than cultural expansion, you start to experience cultural inflation. You "participate" rather than think: thinking is hard, the age seems to advise. Why struggle to create something tangible and substantial in the real world when you can spend your life online?
After spending four consecutive days on the Internet for this article, trying to find what boundaries, etiquette and norms define cyber culture, there was in the place of these reassuring values, an immense emptiness.
It starts with the innocent "googling" of such big topics as Imperialism, Loss, Memory and Art. Soon you are on Rudyard Kipling and Blues music, then to Jungle Book and animation. You are attracted by the personality of Sher Khan, the tiger, but rather than reading the link on Wikipedia, you are seduced by that drawing of Mowgli and the Tiger done by Rudyard's father, John Lockwood Kipling. Really, was Rudyard's dad that good an artist? You open a window on him, then recall that Emily Bronte's novel, Heathcliff, has a Lockwood in it.
On the other strand, Blues music has led to Jazz and Louis Armstrong. It is beyond belief to find you can actually watch a video of him singing It's a Wonderful World on YouTube. Soon all his videos are a click away.
By now you have more than half a dozen windows open. Meanwhile, you have saved up the PDF article on Loss, Memory and Art - all four of them on the flash disk to read at home (assuming you resisted the temptation to install Internet at home).
If you are lucky, by now you have run out of money and walked out. But you may have made the mistake of checking up on the bloggers. You do this and you are trapped in cyberculture. As the Ugandan Insomniac's tag line says, you "Want to sleep, can't sleep."
You enter a contest of wits. Someone makes a move - in Uganda, it is most likely to be the Insomniac (Rachel Tumwijuke who is a very good online journalist) with an article on a collapsed building a grave was dug up.
A reader from the US, a @tracy1314 says of the story that it shows hope for Ugandans who are not "complacent or immune to the horror." The tone is condescending. 27th Comrade, a rather feisty Ugandan blogger, picks up this belittling tone and strikes back. "Why is it shocking that we are not animal-like? For me, it is shocking that the Americans are immune and complacent about Guantanamo Bay and the plight of the blacks in the ghettos. And I'm not shocked, and I don't see any hope for America."
It moves beyond collapsed buildings; the "cyborgians" are an interlinked army of opinionated scribblers writing under such names as Inktus, Iwaya, baz, Blogumentary, dimensionzx, The Sundanese Thinker.
Each is an erudite, witty scribbler. Also known as "Netizens," they are an Easter choir doing the night rounds. Or like a pack of marauding hyenas when there is meat to tear into.
Emboldened by anonymity, they will write what they would otherwise think twice about saying were they using their own names.
The culture puffs out like a hot air balloon; directionless and pointless. Rather than a mind-changing experience from reading an old fashioned book made of paper and hence not site-linked, you emerge aware only of attitude; a little groggy, you don't know what you paid money for.
After four days, you have a backlog of topics to read up on that in four years, can become a waste-disposal site rotting at the back of your mind. Or by the way, that box of papers is from 10 years ago when you started printing every article fearing they would disappear.
You can't stop. It is when you have to make a choice between listening to the Pointers Sisters and reading John Updike that you know this is not right.
"We only talk to people when we are in a bar," says Michael, who adds he chats online for only two hours a day. He agrees to talk because the electricity is gone.
"You intend to sit here for an hour, it becomes three hours. These days, you talk to people only in the bars at night."
PETER, WHO runs the café, estimates that he sells more than 1,500 minutes of Internet time every hour. He says Internet usage is heaviest on Mondays and the majority of users are in their 20s and early 30s.
"About 80 per cent of my customers come to check e-mail," he says.
He has noticed a pattern: the majority of users are men.
"But it is mostly women who are addicted. They are looking for personal-relational issues. They start chatting and stay hooked. We get more money from them because once they start, they find it hard to stop."
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