Leadership and Digital Gap in Post-Colonial Societies

Abstract

Digital technology has altogether transformed the ways people communicate, socialize and disseminate knowledge. Traditional communication tools and outlets have been replaced by digital devices which represent a clear paradigm shift in the conception of society or more accurately, networked society. Building up virtual communities, online identities and digital cultures has become a normative practice that has been fostered by new technologies. This digital infrastructure is supposed to metaphorically eradicate geographical borders to facilitate the free flow of capital, values and technologies. From a cyberculture studies perspective, cyberspace is presumably an open, borderless and transformative space sustained by electronic interconnectedness between social networks. The ubiquity of digital devices progressively contributes to increasing the internet population and, consequently, raising questions of access, equity, infrastructure and digital leadership in post-colonial societies. The latter are experiencing a new form of colonialism and cultural imperialism, referred to as neo-colonialism and nurtured by Western-centric technological hegemony. Viewed from this lens, cyberspace is also a ‘contact zone’, a space of power relations, dominance, cultural supremacy and digital gap. It is a space where subaltern voices and narratives are deprived of digital leadership and equitable access to new technologies. We argue that digital leadership does not only depend on individual and professional skills, but also on the availability of and accessibility to digital infrastructure to challenge the prejudicial assumptions of geography, race and culture. As long as the technological cleavage between developed and developing nations, centre and periphery, persists, the path to digital leadership will definitely remain thwarted. Based on a cultural studies perspective, this paper seeks to problematize the issue of digital leadership in post-colonial societies by drawing on the field of digital humanities and the postcolonial concept of digital gap/divide to support the argument that digital leadership must also be examined within the context of power relations.