Algerian radio adoption bypassed technical stages due to absence of electricity
Evidence
Since 1956 the purchase of a radio in Algeria has meant, not the adoption of a modern technique for getting news, but the obtaining of access to the only means of entering into communication with the Revolution, of living with it. In the special case of the portable battery set, an improved form of the standard receiver operating on current, the specialist in technical changes in underdeveloped countries might see a sign of a radical mutation. The Algerian, in fact, gives the impression of finding short cuts and of achieving the most modern forms of news-communication without passing through the intermediary stages. In reality, we have seen that this “progress” is to be explained by the absence of electric current in the Algerian douars. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 292
Categorization
- XREF: Contrasts with techno-optimist readings of leapfrogging; similar to arguments about mobile-phone leapfrogging in later development literature.
Related
- Before 1954 an Algerian radio marked Europeanization and vulnerability (similarity 0.80)
- Post-1954 Europeans recognized an information network in native society that excluded them (similarity 0.80)
- Native non-adoption reinforced the impression of radio as a closed colonial world (similarity 0.80)
- French colonial rule counteracted Algerian radio access by banning radio sales. (similarity 0.80)
- Before 1945 Europeans owned 95 percent of Algerian radios (similarity 0.80)
- Radios let settlers resist cultural absorption by the native environment (similarity 0.79)
- The colonized relation to radio underwent dialectical mutation, not ambivalence (similarity 0.79)
- Owning a radio before 1954 meant surrendering the home to the colonizer (similarity 0.78)