Thinking about Africa

Virtual Communities: Africa Rising
"About a decade ago, I migrated directly from a frontier Wyoming cattle ranch to the frontier of cyberspace. I began to focus on concepts rather than cows. It was a surprisingly easy transformation.

But there is a surface tension on this new world that some folks find difficult to penetrate. It appears to me that common perceptions of the potential of virtual commerce, digital society, and intangible work are limited by the habits of mind one develops in an industrial society.
I believe that my background of working in agriculture, avoiding television, and living in a small town rather than a 'burb spared me some crippling assumptions about this emerging world. And it therefore seemed likely that others in the so-called developing world - Africans, for instance - might have been spared these illusions as well. "