During the closing ceremony of the 3rd Intra-African Trade Fair, IATF 2023, in Cairo, Egypt, Nobel laureate Professor Wole Soyinka spoke about the impact of technology on cultural norms. He expressed concern that technology is creating a new generation of illiterates who lack an understanding of their country’s cultural heritage. Soyinka acknowledged the positive impact of the internet culture, citing the success of movements like the Arab Spring that utilized the power of instant communication. However, he emphasized the need to be cautious and mindful of the new culture taking place....Click Here To Continue Reading>>
“However, as a new, tyrannical, insolent, and abusive culture, the culture of submental humanity in our midst, which you can give the rough name of the new Internet culture, in which real creativity is being downgraded, even despised for cheap, populist, nasty, subversive, humanly subversive culture.”
Soyinka further said, “It’s creating new generations of the illiterate, who believe it’s up to them that it’s sort of noble, progressive, and populist to despise what I call the real meaningful culture that improves the mind of humanity, expands our horizons, offers numerous alternatives or interpretations of phenomena, et cetera, and leads to a new construct of a genuine new being.
“Now we have to watch this network-facilitated abuse of culture. I speak very specifically to my society, especially the Nigerian society, the greatest abusers of that kind of culture, where you have the real degradation of the real meaning of culture, facilitated by Internet technology.
“So that’s why I said it’s a large subject, which we must not trivialize. We shouldn’t take the easy way out. We shouldn’t go on the axial, black and white, and so on. It’s a work in progress, but we must not let the barbarians get away with this new project,” he added.
