STEVEN Friedman, in his chapter in Mbeki and After: Reflections on the legacy of Thabo Mbeki (edited by Daryl Glaser), comments on the propensity of government in the Mbeki era to mimic the standards and practices of Western Europe and North America.
It is rooted in the age- old question: can anything good come out of Africa? In South Africa, it was born out of a particular need to show racists that blacks in leadership of the polity and the economy could perform as well as white counterparts.
It is not a new notion – this gentrification of African consciousness – that to be accepted as citizens of the world, Africans need to subsume our identity, ideology and values. Apparently, if I’m a well-heeled black business person wanting to enjoy social status equal to entrepreneurs around the world, I need to be able to eat sushi off the belly of a beautiful model, because that’s what they do in other countries.
Bizarre, but such is the thinking in a not insignificant sector of our society.
There is, however, no basis for a holus-bolus adoption of all the world offers in terms of development and a hatred of our own endeavours, meagre as they may seem.
Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the movie Social Network, the brilliantly written if slightly fictionalised account of the development of Facebook by Harvard dropout Mark Zuckerberg. A low-key campus network connecting Harvard students before being catapulted on to the planet, Facebook today boasts 500 million global participants and has made billions of dollars for founder Zuckerberg, aged 26!
Neither a dating site nor a conduit to people one did not know, it was initially a virtual version of a network of real, close relationships. Its success today still lies in connecting large groups of people with like interests.
Zuckerman’s preoccupation with growth for the sake of it, as his network reached ever-increasing magical numbers of participants, mimics the behaviour of the Facebook adherents fixated on inviting as many friends as possible.
As a means of re-establishing relationships with long-lost friends, or as a low-intensity exercise in voyeurism, Facebook is without peers. But too often after making the contact, the question must be asked: now what?
Facebook has not made it easier to maintain real, meaningful relationships over the ether. That is only possible in real, face-to-face engagement.
Changing lives or relationships for the better around the world was unlikely to be top of mind for Zuckerberg when he invented Facebook. Ditched by his girlfriend and shunned by the exclusive final clubs at Harvard, the tech boffin fled to his keyboard to write a vicious diatribe about his ex and launch a website slating girls on campus.
Rarely does a focus on securing sex, money and status translate into a noble endeavour. In Social Network, we’re exposed to the dodgy ethics which underpin Zuckerberg’s success – from allegedly stealing ideas from colleagues to betraying his partners and cheating them out of profits. And let’s not ignore the misogynist behaviour with women groupies.
All this perhaps epitomises the values deficit of Generation Y (born in the ’80s and ’90s), certainly as they present in first world societies.
Emerging societies like our own must be willing to use technological platforms like Facebook to drive our agendas, even at times leapfrogging today’s technology to the next version of innovation.
This is best evident with telephony in Africa, where communities opt for cellphone masts ahead of cables for landline telephones. The same will be true in our traditional conceptualisation of desktop computing, banking, delivery of health and social services, and even job creation.
In San Francisco today (Tuesday November 9), a Cape Flats-based non-government organisation, Reconstructed Living Lab, will receive a Bees (Best Use of Mobile) Award, an international social media prize, for its work in using especially MXit to reach youth at risk. Its community outreach interventions, which include counselling of drug addicts and gang members, currently serve some 40000 people across the country using their cellphones.
It’s a fascinating case study waiting to be replicated throughout the country.
One imagines Cape University of Technology academic Marlon Parker – who heads RLabs – and his team will be watching with great interest the next waves of technology coming out of Zuckerberg’s Facebook campus. But one hopes that we can do so while maintaining and affirming our core values of human decency.
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