Tag Archives: Internet

Hustler literature sheds light on the world of internet fraud in Nigeria

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Internet crime has become attractive as a form of ‘hustle’ to many young Nigerians.
Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images)

Daniel Chukwuemeka, University of Bristol

Hustler narratives have emerged as a genre in world literature since the mid 1960s. It is an expansive genre, but deals broadly with the shortcomings of any given political economy as seen from the perspective of characters who position themselves as both victims and villains.

There have been groundbreaking hustler narratives from the US – like The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) written by Malcolm X and Alex Haley, and Donald Goines’s Dopefiend (1971). In recent times, critics have described the work of African American writers in this field as a type of crime fiction. They carry the expressions of people’s response to inner city problems such as de-industrialisation and police repression. The books represent individuals who operate outside the bounds of what American society might consider acceptable, just to survive.

Nigeria has made its own contribution to this field with its stories of political and religious hustle, sex worker narratives and many others about roadside hawkers, destitution, petty theft, and internet fraud. Notable examples include Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo’s Trafficked (2008) and Igoni Barrett’s Blackass (2016). Other African entries include South African novelist Niq Mhlongo’s Dog Eat Dog (2004) and Congolese author Alain Mabanckou’s Black Moses (2017).

African hustler narratives represent the way people survive at the margins of postcolonial African economies. A distinct kind of African hustler narrative is the Nigerian e-fraud story, portraying characters who engage in cybercrime trying to make scam e-mail recipients part with their money – locally called “Yahoo Boys”. The narratives show how people attempt to overcome geographic and economic disadvantages by creating alternative networks.

In a recent paper, I analysed some of these e-fraud novels – and one in particular, I Do Not Come To You By Chance by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani – to show that they fit the literary canon of hustler novels and to find out what they have to say as a critique of the Nigerian state and its economy.

Between Afropolitans and hustlers

In my study I looked at Nigerian hustler narratives in relation to another common trend in African literature today: Afropolitanism.

Afropolitanism describes the experience of African subjects who attain the status of global citizenship. They do this by connecting to other non-African expressions of identity, community and sense of belonging.

Both hustler and Afropolitan narratives highlight the possibility of migration as a way to move socially. But whereas the privileged Afropolitan has a real chance of migration, the African hustler can only access it through a backdoor channel.

For example, In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, Ifemelu’s migration to the US is through a legally documented process. In contrast, the female hustlers in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street pay a pimp to smuggle them from Lagos to Antwerp.


Hachette Books (2009)

However, instead of physical migration, the hustlers (e-scammers) in Nwaubani’s I Do Not Come to You by Chance resist poor economic conditions by creating an alternate digital universe. This they navigate by e-mail, for access to global locations of capital.

Nigerian hustler narratives establish e-fraud practice as an alternative economy and show how and why such economies emerge. They can also be a potent critique of young Nigerians’ exclusion from the postcolonial economy.

I Do Not Come to You by Chance

The protagonist of Nwaubani’s book, Kingsley, turns to e-fraud as a way out of poverty.

After independence in 1960, Nigeria continued to adopt the colonial model of an extractive economy, with its dependence on crude oil. Following the fall in global oil prices in the 1980s, Nigeria adopted a neoliberal economic policy called the Structural Adjustment Programme. But this failed to improve the lives of ordinary citizens and encouraged them to engage in capitalist pursuits.



Read more:
Meet the ‘Yahoo boys’ – Nigeria’s undergraduate conmen

Kingsley yearns to perform the traditional duties of a family’s opara (firstborn son), which include taking care of his siblings and widowed mother. He applies for work at Nigerian oil companies but none employs him. So he joins his uncle, Cash Daddy, in the informal economy of online fraud. He declares:

I was not a criminal. I had gone into [internet fraud] so that my mother could live in comfort and my siblings have a good education.

E-fraud and the Nigerian state

But in embracing e-fraud as an alternative to his economic exclusion, Kingsley recreates the same exploitative economic landscape that he seeks to avoid.

In one of his scam letters, he exploits the decadent image of Nigeria’s political economy and positions himself within it as a victim. He pretends to be the widow of former Nigerian head of state, General Sani Abacha, describing the persecution of the widow’s household following his death:

I have been thrown into a state of utter confusion, frustration and hopelessness by the current civilian administration. I have been subjected to physical and psychological torture by security agents in the country…

What Kingsley has done above is to weave his personal experience of economic deprivation into a scam e-mail. Terms like “hopelessness” and “psychological torture” serve to appeal to the scam target’s pity and earn their trust. But they simultaneously hold true about Nigeria’s economic uncertainties and Kingsley’s economic vulnerability. In this way, readers are introduced to the degenerate world of Nigeria’s postcolonial economy, one that emasculates the postcolonial subject.

In another scam e-mail he writes:

There is a lot of corruption in Nigeria and people get up to all sorts of devious things.

Kingsley’s class-climbing manoeuvres are therefore a by-product of a failing Nigerian economic system in which a parasitic state exploits the masses. It does so by privatising government assets and converting the common wealth to its advantage, excluding most citizens.

Kingsley’s story forms a critique of the Nigerian economic culture in which he is allowed first to starve and then to prosper.The Conversation

Daniel Chukwuemeka, PhD Candidate in African Postcolonial Writing, University of Bristol

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rare Texts from Islamic World to Go Online

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The link below is to an article reporting on a large number of texts from the Islamic world being placed online in Israel.

For more visit:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/08/2500-rare-islamic-texts-go-online-free

The Internet and Book Culture

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The link below is to an article that takes a look at how the Internet has changed ‘book culture.’

For more visit:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/trade-shows-events/article/80434-how-has-the-internet-changed-book-culture.html

Books: why the Internet hasn’t killed them off

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The thousand and one lives of the paper book.
Pixabay

Dominique Boullier, Sciences Po – USPC; Mariannig Le Béchec, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and Maxime Crépel, Sciences Po – USPC

We stand amazed by the vitality of printed books, a more than 500-year-old technique, both on and offline. We have observed over the years all of the dialogue which books have created around themselves, through 150 interviews with readers, bookshops, publishers, bloggers, library assistants, 25 participant observations, 750 responses to an online questionnaire and 5,000 mapped sites in France and the francophone world. An impressive collective activity. So, yes, your book carries on living just by staying on your shelf because you talk about it, remember it, and refer to it in conversation. Even better still, you might have lent it to a friend so that she can read it, perhaps you have spent time with people who have spoken about it before buying it, or after having read it. You will have encountered official reviews, of course, and also blogs about it. The conversation goes on even when the book is no longer in circulation.

Paper books circulate better than their digital versions

What first struck us was the very active circulation of books in print, compared with digital versions which do not spread so well. Once a book has been sold either in a bookshop or through an online platform, it has multiple lives. It can be loaned, given as a present, but also sold on second-hand, online or in specialist shops. And it can go full circle and be resold, such journeys made in a book’s life are rarely taken into account by the overall evaluation of the publication.

The application Bookcrossing allows you to follow books that we “abandon” or “set free” by chance in public places so that strangers take possession of and, then, you hope, get in touch to keep track of the book’s journey. Elsewhere, the book will be left in an open-access “book box” which have popped up across France and other countries. Some websites have become experts in selling second-hand books like Recyclivre, which uses Amazon to gain visibility.

Yard sales, antiques fairs, book markets give a new lease of life to countless books which remained forgotten because they were a quick one-time read. The book as a material object, regardless of its age, retains an unequalled sensorial pleasure, and brings with it special memories, bygone times, a sacred piece of craftsmanship with its fragile bindings, or, the nostalgia offered by children’s books or fairy tales.

Whole professions are dedicated to the web, and increasingly so, since it first came into existence. This has turned the second life of books and the recycling of them into a money-making machine for online retailers, and as a result books are kept alive. Some people have become eBay sellers, experts only thanks to the books they sell on this platform. Sometimes even, these books’ lives are extended by charity shops, such as Oxfam. At some stage however, there is only the paper left to give a book its value, once it has been battered and recycled.

One would have thought that faced with the weight, volume, and physical space occupied by books in print, that the digital book ought to have wiped the floor with its print counterpart. This has been the case with online music, for example, which practically handed a death sentence to the CD, or for films on demand which have greatly shrunk the DVD market. However, for books, this simply has not happened. In the United States like in France, the market for online books never surpasses the 20% mark of the sales revenues of books in print. And that is without including the sales revenue of the second-hand book market as we previously mentioned. The digital book seldom goes anywhere once purchased, due to controls imposed on the files by digital-rights management (DRM) and the incompatibility of their formats on other digital devices (Kindle and others).

Paper pleasures

Our interviews revealed the pleasure of giving books as presents, but also of lending them. The exchange of the physical item with its cover, size and unique smell bring much more satisfaction than if a well-meaning friend offers you digital book files on a USB stick containing… a thousand files already downloaded! Indeed, the latter will seldom ever be considered a present but rather a simple file transfer, equivalent to what we do several times a day at work. This also gives rights holders reasons to thus decry “not paying is theft”, in this case the gift of files would also become theft.

Bloggers who exchange books as presents (bookswapping) show that goodwill prevails and puts stress on the backburner. This is done on the condition that the book is personalised in some way: a poignant quote, a meaningful object associated in some way with the book (cakes for example!), and the surprise of receiving a completely random gesture of kindness.

A dense and thriving network reliant on the Internet

What travels even better than books are conversations, opinions, critiques, recommendations. Some discussions are created within or around reading groups or in dedicated forums online such as the Orange Network Library, for example. There are recommended reading lists, readers’ ratings, and book signings with authors are organised. These networks are digital, but they existed well before the Internet, and they remain dynamic today.

On Instagram and other sites, books start up fresh conversations.

However, the rise of blogs at the start of the 2000s led to an increase in the number of reviews by ordinary people. This provided visibility, even a reputation for some bloggers. Of course, institutional and newsworthy reviews continue to play their role in guiding the masses, and they are influential prescribers protected by publishers. But websites like Babelio, combine a popular expertise, shared and distributed among many bloggers who are sometimes very specialised themselves. The website was created in 2007 and has over 690,000 reader members.

The proliferation of content and publications can easily disorientate us; the role of these passionate bloggers, who are often experts in given literary fields, becomes important because they are “natural” influencers one might say, as they are the closest to the public. However, some publishers have understood the benefits of working with these bloggers, especially in so far as concerns specialist genres like manga, comics, crime novels or youth fiction. Sometimes a blogger, YouTuber and web writer is published like Nine Gorman.

Some bookshops contribute even more directly in coordinating these bookworms, they “mould” their audience, or at least they support the books both online and in their shops with face-to-face meetings. Conversation is a unifying force for fans who are undoubtedly the best broadcasters across a broad sphere.

Platforms encourage readers to expand their domain, in the guise of fanfictions, which are published online by the author or his readers. The relationship with authors is closer than ever and is much more direct, the same can be said of the music industry. On particular platforms like Wattpad, texts which are made available are linked with collective commentary.

But above all, the dialogue about reading has often been transformed into writing itself. It might be published on a blog and may be likened to authorial work but at the other end of the spectrum, it might be something modest like the annotations one leaves in their own book. These annotations, more common in non-fiction texts, can form a sort of trade. For example if you lend or sell on a book, which is also stocked and shared with the online systems of Hypothes.is, it allows any article found on the web to be annotated, and the comments saved independent to the display format of the article. This makes it easier to organise readers into groups.

Printed books have in fact become digital through the use of digital platforms which allow them to be circulated as an object or as conversations about the book. The collective attention paid creates a permanent and collaborative piece of work, very different to frenetic posts on social media. Readers take their time to read, a different type of engagement altogether to social media’s high frequency, rapid exchanges. The combination of these differently paced interactions can, though, encourage one just to read through alerts from social media posts then followed by a longer form of reading.

Networks formed by books constitute as well a major resource for attracting attention. This is still not a substitute for the effects of “prize season” which guides the mass readership, but which deserves to be considered more critically, given the fact that publishers increasingly take advantage of these active communities.

It would thus be possible to think of the digital book as part of the related book ecosystem, rather than treating it as just a clone. To call it homothetic, is to say that it is an exact recreation of the format and properties of the book in print in a digital format. Let’s imagine multimedia books connected to, and permanently engaged with, the dialogue surrounding the book – this would be something else entirely, affording added value which would justify the current retail price for simple files. This would therefore be an “access book” and which would perhaps attract a brand new audience and above all it would widen this collective creativity already present around books in print.

Dominique Boullier, Mariannig Le Béchec and Maxime Crépel are the authors of “The book exchange: Books’ lives and readers’ practices.”The Conversation

Dominique Boullier, Professeur des universités en sociologie, Sciences Po – USPC; Mariannig Le Béchec, Maître de Conférences en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, and Maxime Crépel, Sociologue, ingénieur de recherche au médialab de Sciences Po, Sciences Po – USPC

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Has the library outlived its usefulness in the age of Internet? You’d be surprised

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Donald A. Barclay, University of California, Merced

U.S. institutions of higher education and U.S. local governments are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and eliminate from institutional or governmental ledgers any expenses whose absence would cause little or no pain.

In this political climate, academic and public libraries may be in danger. The existence of vast amounts of information – a lot of it free – on the Internet might suggest that the library has outlived its usefulness.

But has it? The numbers tell a very different story.

In spite of the findings of a survey in which Americans say they are using public libraries less, the usage numbers reported by libraries indicate the opposite.

Some upward trends

In the last two decades, the total number of U.S. public libraries slightly increased – inching up from 8,921 in 1994 to 9,082 in 2012 (a gain of 2.14 percent). Over the same period, the data also show that use of public libraries in the U.S went up as well.

U.S. public library usage statistics: 1993-2012.
Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics, CC BY

Here’s what data on circulation (books and other items checked out to library users) and annual visits to public libraries reveal.

The number of books and other items borrowed from U.S. public libraries increased from 6.5 items per capita in 1993 to 8.0 items per capita in 2012 (up 23 percent). Over the same time span, the number of visits to U.S. public libraries rose 22.5 percent.

The one major public library usage measure that did decrease was the number of times library users asked questions of reference librarians, dropping 18 percent from 1993 to 2012.

The popularity of U.S. public libraries is, it seems, at least as strong as it was before the web became a household word (much less a household necessity).

Rise of the e-book

For academic libraries, the data are more mixed. Circulation of physical items (books, DVDs, etc.) in U.S. academic libraries has been on a steady decline throughout the web era, falling 29 percent from 1997 to 2011.

Total circulations (in 1000s) by U.S. degree-granting post-secondary institution libraries: 1997 through 2011.
Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY

More tellingly, over the same time span and among the same academic libraries, the annual number of circulations (of books, DVDs, etc.) per full-time student dropped from 20 circulations to 10 (down 50 percent).

Number of circulation transactions per full-time student in U.S. degree-granting post-secondary institution libraries: 1997 through 2011.
Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY

That fewer books are circulating is hardly a surprise given the vast amount of scholarly information (the bulk of it purchased with academic library budget dollars) that is now available to students via their electronic device of choice.

Electronic scholarly journals have driven their print-format predecessors to obsolescence, if not quite extinction, while e-books have become increasingly plentiful.

In 2012, U.S. academic libraries collectively held 252,599,161 e-books. This means that over the course of about a decade, U.S. academic libraries have acquired e-books equal to about one-fourth the total number of physical books, bound volumes of old journals, government documents and other paper materials acquired by those same libraries since 1638 – the year Harvard College established the first academic library in what is now the United States.

E-books are not only plentiful, they are popular with academic users (in spite of some shortcomings in usability). For example, data provided to the author show that when the University of California, San Diego made a collection of academic e-books available to students and faculty through the popular JSTOR interface, the usage numbers proved impressive.

In just under a year, UCSD students and faculty used 11,992 JSTOR e-books, racking up 59,120 views and 34,258 downloads. In response to user demand, the UCSD Library outright purchased over 3,100 of the titles offered via JSTOR, making those e-books a permanent part of the UCSD library collection.

Who needs the encyclopedia?

As with circulation numbers, reference questions asked of librarians in U.S. academic libraries have undergone a sharp decline – standing now at 56,000,000 per year, down 28.4 percent from 16 years ago. For the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries, the average number of reference transactions dropped from 6,056 per week in 1994 to 1,294 per week in 2012 (down 79 percent).

Average number of reference transactions per week for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries: 1994-2012.
Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY

There’s not much mystery behind the drop in reference transactions. When I first began working as an academic reference librarian in 1990, hardly a day went by when I didn’t put my hands on such reference works as Places Rated Almanac, The Statistical Abstract of the United States and College Catalogs on Microfiche to answer reference questions.

Today, students access information digitally. The Google app on their smartphones allows students to look up information they once would have found only in analog, library-owned reference sources. And as for that old reference warhorse, the printed encyclopedia – Britannica churned out its final set in 2010.

Further contributing to the decline of in-person reference service is the fact that students are increasingly able to consult with academic librarians via the Internet.

By 2012, 77 percent of U.S. academic libraries were offering reference services via email or web chat. Currently, over 400 academic libraries provide around-the-clock, chat-based reference service as members of OCLC’s 24/7 Reference Cooperative, a global library cooperative that provides shared technology services.

Given only the above numbers, the hasty conclusion would seem to be that everything is online and nobody uses academic libraries any more.

But not so fast.

Even while circulation and reference transaction numbers were tanking, the data show a steady increase in the number of people actually setting foot in academic libraries.

The cumulative weekly gate count for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries increased nearly 39 percent from 2000 to 2012. Library gate count data for all U.S. institutions of higher education show a similar (38 percent) increase from 1998 to 2012.

Cumulative weekly gate count for the 60 largest U.S. academic libraries: 2000-2012.
Chart created by Donald A. Barclay, using data from the National Center for Education Statistics., CC BY

So if students are not going to the academic library to access print collections or ask reference questions, why are they going at all?

The lure of the academic library

I believe that students are trekking to academic libraries because academic libraries have been actively reinventing themselves to meet the needs of today’s students.

Academic library square footage is increasingly being converted from space to house printed books to space for students to study, collaborate, learn and, yes, socialize.

Libraries are no longer cold, forbidding spaces.
Howard County Library System Follow, CC BY-NC-ND

Besides providing some of the last refuges of quiet in a noisy, distraction-filled world, academic libraries have taken such student-friendly steps as relaxing (or eliminating) longstanding prohibitions on food and drink, providing 24/7 study spaces and generally recreating themselves to be comfortable and friendly rather than cold and forbidding.

Examples of how forward-leaning academic libraries are attracting students include:

The Grand Valley State University Library’s Knowledge Market provides students with peer consultation services for research, writing, public speaking, graphic design, and analyzing quantitative data. Among a number of specialized spaces, the library offers rooms devoted to media preparation, digital collaboration, and presentation practice.

Library space is changing: three girls using a computer at San Jose library.
San José Library, CC BY-SA

The libraries of North Carolina State University (NCSU) offer Makerspace areas where students get hands-on practice with electronics, 3D printing and scanning, cutting and milling, creating wearables, and connecting objects to the Internet of Things. In addition, NCSU students can visit campus libraries to make use of digital media labs, media production studios, music practice rooms, visualization spaces and presentation rooms, among other specialized spaces.

The Ohio State University Library Research Commons offers not only a Writing Center but also consultation services for copyright, data management plans, funding opportunities and human subjects research. Specialized spaces in the library include conference and project rooms, digital visualization and brainstorming rooms, and colloquia and classroom spaces.

Reimagining libraries

By thinking beyond the book as they reimagine libraries, academic librarians are adding onto and broadening a long learning tradition rather than turning their backs on it. In the words of Sam Demas, college librarian emeritus of Carleton College:

For several generations, academic librarians were primarily preoccupied with the role of their library buildings as portals to information, print and later digital. In recent years, we have reawakened to the fact that libraries are fundamentally about people – how they learn, how they use information and how they participate in the life of a learning community. As a result, we are beginning to design libraries that seek to restore parts of the library’s historic role as an institution of learning, culture and intellectual community.

Any library, public or academic, able to live up to so important a role will never outlive its usefulness.

The Conversation

Donald A. Barclay, Deputy University Librarian, University of California, Merced

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Catching Up

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I haven’t been around on my Blogs too much of late, so I have a lot of catching up to do. The reason for my absence has to do with my usual Internet problems – poor connectivity, etc. Finally my wireless modem died and ADSL became available in my area, so I have now upgraded and connectivity issues should now all be a matter of the past. Better and better times ahead I hope.

Posts for the Time Being

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I thought I’d post a quick update on what is currently happening with me and posts to my Blog. It is a short story really. I live in a town which is a massive tourist destination during the holiday season – especially at this time of year. What this means for me – being reliant on wireless access to the Internet – is real difficulty gaining Internet access. There are so many people in the area, using so many gadgets and the like, that the Internet is locked into a constant traffic jam. It is practically impossible to get Internet access most of the time. You do get the odd time where you can get access, but it is so slow that it is pointless to try and use it. For example – it takes minutes and minutes just for one page of the Blog to load.

I’ll keep trying to access the Net every so often, but it is likely I’ll be unable to post much for the next couple of weeks. There is good news – the number of tourists in the shopping centre here have diminished, which probably means we are heading back to some form of normality.