Nigeria Content Online

I am in awe of the
power of the written word; and my first exposure to the written word
was in books. My father and the Catholic priests of my boarding school
taught me to love books. The school library was a sanctuary. I
travelled the world in books. In places like India and London, I found
boys that behaved like me. I immersed myself in cultures that would
have been alien without the powerful pull of books. I will never forget
my first visit to London. I kept seeing places that had appeared to me
before in books. As a precocious boy, the only way to keep me still was
to hand me a book.

The world has
changed from my childhood days. These days when I am reading a book, I
resist the urge to click on a word; I see the Internet anywhere.
Technology has radically redefined how I access ideas. I am not a fan
of electronic readers like the spindle. I view them as inchoate and
primitive. However, I believe that the iPad and its subsequent
reincarnations are going to spell the end of the book. In the West, the
library as we know it is preparing to go on life support; actually it
is already dead and now they call the reincarnation a media centre. My
daughter does not understand why we built a library in our community.
She says the books should all fit in a laptop. Think about how children
now live and it will give you digital pause. It is true that the book
is not going away anytime soon but it is dying. There are opportunities
for writers and thinkers to sell their ideas on the new formats
especially in the ubiquitous smartphones of Africa. People might just
read us if we put our thoughts on a Nokia. Now, that’s a brilliant
thought.

Newspapers and
magazines like The Washington Post and Newsweek are literally on their
last legs. The other day, someone bought Newsweek for one dollar. I
would have bought it, but I was broke. I subscribe to the Washington
Post but I find myself more and more these days picking the paper off
my driveway and dumping it in the recycling bin. This new technology is
the mother of all tornadoes, forcing her way into our lives and
changing things in mystifying and counter-intuitive ways. The new
technology is inquisitive and invasive. There are no boundaries that it
will not breach. It is relentless even as we proclaim the sanctity of
our present values and assumptions about the way things should be.
There are legitimate concerns about the implications for addressing the
economic divide between the haves and the have-nots in and between
countries

In Nigeria, the
divide is being perpetrated by her thieving leaders, aided and abetted
by their partners-in-crime, us intellectuals. If you ask my mother,
technology has actually freed her from the tyranny of Nigerian leaders’
greed, corruption, ineptitude and general foolishness. My mother now
has her own cell phone. I can reach her at the first ring, no drama.
You don’t want to know what it used to take to reach her before the
coming of the cell phones. On most nights, in her house, there is no
power; she is resourceful enough to use her Nokia cell as a flashlight
if she has to find the bathroom. Our black leaders should be shot. What
they are doing is black-on-black crime. My mother is sure that the
white man will soon discover a widget that you will wave around her
hut, and, there is light. She has spent a lifetime trying to trust the
rubbish ensuing from the mouths of Nigeria’s thieving leaders. Now, she
does not want to see them. They have lost credibility. My mother says
that soon, astral travel will be a reality and we won’t have to use
Nigeria’s “roads” and be ambushed by policemen and armed robbers. My
mother is a genius.

Yes, print media are dying, hanging themselves out to die on
decaying physical boundaries. Soon there will be children born who will
read about a time when the newspaper made a joyful thud on someone’s
porch. In the West, the newspaper boy is going the way of the milkman.
By the time my newspaper comes I have read most of the news on my
laptop. Traditional publishing is on the ropes. It won’t be for long.
Even as we speak, in the West, publishing houses are remaking
themselves, trying hard with some success to reclaim the space that is
being threatened by the democratisation that has taken place with the
advent of the Internet. They are competing with new tools of self
expression. People are voting with their feet in the millions and going
to the new medium as their primary source of information, education and
entertainment. Traditional publishing houses have a lot to be worried
about. They have historically depended on the book for their survival.
But the book is dying a long slow death.