The Social Media as tool of Western Cultural Imperialism
Uji, Wilfred Terlumun Ph.D
(Associate Professor of History)
ujiter@gmail.com
07031870998 (sms only)
Since the invasion of the internet by the turn of the 20th century, the social media has come to be an effective tool in the hands of the western nation to sustain the hegemonic information control of underdeveloped nations or the developing nations like Nigeria. Since the age of western colonization of Africa, the aim of the west has been that of how to effectively dominate and control Africa’s cultural values, distort the value systems in Africa and open up Africa to copy the vices and the wastages of the cultural system of the west. In the post-independence era which has ushered in the new colonial era, since the 1960s, multinational information media organizations such as the Voice of America (VOA), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and Cable Network News (CNN) have come to dominate and to control the values and the thinking of Africans, not to believe in themselves as Africans but to rather cast aspersions and negativity towards the Africans. These multinational media organizations including the social media has among its central goals to distort the African perspective, provide ready tools for Africans to feed the west with the negative aspects of Africa’s development challenge.
The fundamental question is at two levels namely; what is the cultural development in the western world that has come to affect negatively the cultural behaviour of the Tiv person towards development? and on the other hand, what has led to the collapse of the value system in Tiv society, the internal dynamics that is responsible for the kind of the cultural shame Tiv society have come to display on the internet in recent times.
Gramskill an Italian scholar has done much research into the information cultural life ways of the west and how that has come to impact on the value system of third world nations. He pointed out that the design and intent of the west is to control and regulate how the rest of the world thinks, what they believe in and even how they perceived themselves. There are three critical issues involved in the cultural imperialism of the west.
How we think, to control the top process and the mind set of third world nations using multinational organizations.
What we believe in, these include the values and the cherished traditions we hold as a people in the third world.
How we perceived and mirror ourselves, these is to promote a sense of inferiority complex, a loss of confidence in our identity in ourselves as Africans, to project that which is negation in our human and material environment, to promote a general sense of despair and helplessness in our world, most especially a sense of despair towards social and political development in our society.
It is therefore not strange that from CNN to BBC, all of the major news and highlights on political and social development in Africa are often in the negative than an objective constructive positive image. The idea is to run down whatever that is positive and constructive in the human and material development in Africa. This has been the age long objective of the western culture of imperialism dating as far back as the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade between Africa, Europe, and the new world. Basically, there have been three main stages in the cultural imperialism of the west that has progressively resulted to the black African losing confidence in his roots.
The era of trans-Atlantic slave trade where the information order of the west regarded the black African as a piece of object or a “chattel”. In simple terms black Africans were defined as sub-human beings not entitled to certain basic human and fundamental rights. The age of trans-Atlantic slave trade marked the stigmatization and racial stereotyping of the black African as being lazy, immoral, superstitious, idolatrous, stealing, murderous, rebellious, and stubborn.
The era of the colonization of Africa marked the second stage where all of the racial stereotypes of the black African in the new world were exported to Africa; the colonial system in Africa viewed and mirrored the black Africa from the racial prejudice of the west. To enable the black Africa achieve some states of human dignity that would qualify him as a human being, two basic institutions where established by the colonial state to help civilized the “black Africa”. These institutions were the church and the western schools which became power tools or instrument of western cultural imperialism to disarticulate the Africa mentally and psychologically to think and act like the west. The resultant consequences was or has been the sub-question of indigenous languages, the near destruction of traditional value systems and the exposure of black Africans to the cultural vices of the west. Akiga Sai writing about the Tiv people during the colonial period pointed out that the big challenge of the Tiv nation was how to stop the Tiv man from copying the cultural vices of western civilization such as extreme individualism, commercial sex prostitution, the monetization of social relations, the collapse of respect for elders, the extreme worship of money or monetization of social status etc. these social vices occasion by the colonial conquest of Tiv society became widespread across Tiv society thereby leading to the collapse of the cultural system of the Tiv people. The Tiv people hitherto to British colonialism upheld these values:
A just and free society.
A communal and egalitarian society.
A practice of gerontocracy where elders have supreme authority in society.
The non-commercialization of marriage and sex relations.
A spirit of hard work and industry by every young person thus creating a sense of self-support and self-employment.
A spirit of brotherhood and the willingness to defend his Tiv brother in the spirit of fraternity.
Chinua Achebe in Things Fall Apart describe the British colonial system as a system that led to the collapse of the values that held Africa’s society together in a common defensive shield and a common solidarity. Achebe did say we were amused by the foolishness of the white man and allowed him to stay. The white man has put a knife on the things that united us, now the centre cannot hold and things have fallen apart.
The third stage of western cultural imperialism is that of the neo-colonial era where the interest has come to play a critical role in defining both the values and the vices of Africans as to how we think, reason, how we select our value systems, what we believe in as individuals and what we think about ourselves. The internet age through the social media and multinational media system have provided an Easy-Window for black Africans, particularly Tiv youths to expose their shame and disgrace to the global world. The social media is a deliberate design information system to help monitor black Africans by collection of sensitive information of the inner happenings of the social and political lives of black Africans. It is a tool that enables the west to still mirror the cultural life ways of the Africans. It helps the western world to evaluate social development in Africa and to ascertain a validity of Africans if truly can be regarded as human beings with the ability to think and reason in a positive and constructive way towards social and political happenings in Africa.
We must accept the challenge that both the colonial and neo-colonial system control the information order of the world dominated by the west, there is a design primarily to promote the dignity as well as the healthy image of black Africans in the world politics. It is design to make a caricature of the Africans or to help the Africa make a caricature of himself. We have a choice in our hands to decide how we project ourselves on the global stage. The realization of this fact depends on our consciousness and awareness, how we are mobilized to achieve that within the context of global politics. Development is not all about the economy but how people are effectively mobilized to project their collective consciousness and identify in word politics.
