Digital Africa: How smartphones are changing a continent

Thinking of the NT...

....There needs to be a move by game-makers to embed literacy, numeracy and logic skills into games pre-installed on mobiles: a kind of mass education by stealth. YouTube will take off. “We are a social species. We spark off each other,” says Chris Anderson, the curator of the ted conferences. He expects video to spread virally through Africa in the course of this year. That will produce dance crazes and superstar Pentecostal mobi-evangelists, but also circulate knowledge.

Finally, digital Africa will become a spoken tradition. African cultures are among the most oral in the world. Storytelling under the tree is still commonplace. Speaking is still preferred to writing and Africa happens to have timed its digital age to coincide with new voice-activated technologies. The generation gap between those who were trained to guide a fountain pen with their fingers, those whose kinetic memory is dominated by their thumbs, and those even younger who are used to the sweeping movements of the touchscreen, will give way to the return of voice—Africa’s voice.

DIGITAL AFRICA | More Intelligent Life