Modelling modernity and how it plays in the market: Commercialising ICTs in Nairobi

• In Event: STS Africa: Information Technology

Abstract

Digital technologies were expected by their advocates to flatten global asymmetries of knowledge, information and economic development. ICTs can be re-engineered, repaired, designed and used by a diversity of actors who hold a variety of knowledges and skill sets, derived from formal and informal sources. This attribute provides a broad opportunity for locales to generate situated modalities of use and innovation. Despite this potential, the persistent framing of some places as non-modern and their aspiration to modernity means that in Nairobi, and elsewhere, the language of the digital economy is best spoken by 'cosmopolitans' well-versed in supposedly 'universal', but mostly Western modalities. The identities, narratives, practices, institutions that replicate the 'tech start up' imaginary thus reproduce age-old asymmetries. Local arenas however, resist mischaracterisation, represented in outcomes such as 'low uptake', 'no markets' and other indicators that technologies are not locally apt. This paper analyses how actors reinforce the validity of 'tech start-up ecosystem' tropes through the knowledges and practices to which they attribute success, versus those that they need to commercialise technologies locally. This contributes to STS scholarship interested in analysing African technoscience in situ, "between…locally generated and inbound ideas, instruments, and practices." (Mavhunga, 2017: 9).

Authors

• Michel Wahome, University of Edinburgh

• Matthew Harsh, Cal Poly

• G. Pascal Zachary, Arizona State University