By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

IN the last installment for July 17 2015, I pointed out that some ‘experts’ were saying that Zimbabwe could happily and indefinitely use the US-dollar as its national currency because El-Salvador, Ecuador, Panama, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands and other ‘countries’ had also done the same.
I demonstrated how harmful the relations had been between those countries and the US and that Madzimbahwe would not knowingly want to risk the same harmful relations just in order that a small elite in this country may continue to enjoy their privileged access to and use of the US-dollar.
In this installment, I want to start a new series concerning a similar risk involving similarly naïve advice from similarly persuasive ‘experts’; Madzimbahwe must look beyond the technicist and salesman understanding of digitalisation and convergence.
Many Zimbabweans must have come across the following public information:
Countless calls by politicians and educators to ‘embrace technology’ which calls are in fact not about technology but about digital technology (computers and smart phones especially).
The campaign by the Minister of Primary and Secondary Education Cde Lazarus Dokora to allow school-going children to bring digital gadgets to school.
A jingle on digital broadcasting migration running on both television and radio and selling digitalisation as ‘upfumi kuvanhu’ and the digital broadcasting migration project as an integral part of the Zimbabwe Agenda for Sustainable Socio-Economic Transformation (Zim-ASSET).
What is disturbing about this public information on digital technology is that it fits the frame and follows the path set by the North Americans in the 1990s.
The same Americans have been forced to abandon this frame in the wake of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, in the wake of Edward Snowden and Bradley Manning, in the wake of the global mass surveillance scandal involving the US National Security Agency and in the wake of the Islamic State for Syria, Iraq and the Levant (ISL).
According to Mark Slouka (1994), the digital revolution was launched at the White House in Washington DC by the former Vice-President of the United States of America, Al Gore, who is one of the leading digirati of the world:
“(The Vice-President) traded his politician’s shovel for a modem and symbolically broke ground on the new data highway: He held the first interactive computer news conference. The glitches were minor, the VP was able to ‘preach the techno gospel’ to ‘the electronic supplicants trooping into the White House,” as Peter Lewis of the New York Times put it.
But what is even more significant is Slouka’s paraphrase of Al Gore’s speech which echoed the mood of the cyberati at the time (1994):
“That universal access to information would empower the weak and hamstring the tyrants of the world; that, thanks to the wonders of digital communication, the meek would finally inherit the earth. The data highway, we were told, marked the dawn of a new day for humankind; it was a wonder, (a miracle,) sure to “elevate the human spirit and lead to the solution of the world’s social problems”.
After the January speech in Washington DC, the US Vice-President took his message to Buenos Aires, Argentina, in March 1994, where he repeated a similar theme, saying:
“We now have at hand the technological breakthroughs and economic means to bring all the communities of the world together.
“We now can at last create a planetary information network that transmits messages and images with the speed of light from the largest city to the smallest village and every continent.”
But there are examples of papers that point to the need to look beyond the technicist salesman’s frame and these include, The Twitter Terrorist: The Islamic State and the Age of the Digital Terrorist and Digital Terrorist Financing by Christine Duhaime of Duhaime Duhaime Law and Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Rethinking the Society of the (Digital) Image, by Henry A. Giroux.
The Duhaime paper announces the complete and needed departure from Al Gore’s neoliberal digital utopia:
“If there is one thing the Islamic State (ISIS) has made clear, it is that we are in the midst of something we haven’t faced before, namely, a war against digital terrorists where the most important battles are fought not on the battlefield but online.”
We could not tell this from what Al Gore and the digirati told the world at the turn of the millennium
The digital war is fought by creating spectacles which compete on the digital screen. Several powerful forces are competing for use of that digital screen and the result is what Giroux calls ‘the cinematic politics of the visceral’ generated from all directions as follows:
l Big corporations employ spectacular images and messages on the screen to fight for clients and customers whom they often must terrorise into seeking their purported remedies;
l Big advertisers also employ spectacular images and messages on the same screen to sell dubious products on behalf of other big clients;
l Terrorists, especially since September 11 2001, also use spectacular terror scenes to cow entire populations and governments into giving in to their demands;
l The state is also forced to resort to the digital screen to dramatise to citizens and to its terrorist enemies that it is more powerful than the terrorists; more responsible than the giant corporations; more honest than the advertisers; more moral than the sellers of digital pornography; and a better custodian of public education than the parent and the NGO;
l This endless bombardment is what we face with digitalisation.
How is the responsible nationalist, the responsible patriot, the responsible educator to respond to this war for the digital screen?
Can he or she rely on the assurance of the jingle, saying: “Chawada, chawadandiwe!”
Christine Duhaime says:
“ISIS’ key weaponry against the West in digital warfare is not guns, swords and bombs — it is computers, cell phones, the Internet and social media.”
All the major forces using spectacular images to overwhelm audiences are using exactly the same weaponry, competing for the same ‘screen’.
“Chawadandiwe” is NOT the way to be ready.