Digital Shadowlands Illicit Media

Anthropology of Media ANTH 2301 Digital Shadowlands: Illicit Media Digital media foster and improve social interaction, strengthening bonds and igniting virtual communities for the sake of social change. These new media platforms do, however, have a negative aspect. Digital media are also used as a means of people trafficking, smuggling, piracy, and illicit pornography. These illegal forms often function across the worldwide inequality divide that divides rich nations from impoverished ones. For example, human trafficking frequently entails the kidnapping of young people from underprivileged rural villages and their transportation into affluent metropolitan regions, where they are coerced into prostitution. Contrarily, piracy frequently entails providing those in underprivileged areas with illicit copies of films and music made in wealthy nations, which they may not otherwise be able to purchase. For people excluded from mainstream, legally available options in the digital economy, there are opportunities in the digital shadowlands. Sakawa is a concerning illustration of this. In Ghana, a new social group appeared about 2010. People started to observe that certain young men in their twenties were leading extraordinarily opulent lives: they were living in big homes, driving pricey automobiles like Range Rovers and Lexuses, dressing in brand clothes and shoes, and sipping champagne. How could they be getting so rich? Ghana was going through an oil boom at the time, but the money was concentrated among the older elites. The riches generated by oil has not done much to help the large number of working-class and impoverished people. Young males with limited education typically have low unemployment rates and little hope of ever rising out of poverty. Though they lacked formal education and social connections, this new class of ostentatiously wealthy young men had figured out a new method to generate money. By merging digital media with spiritual practices, they created a brand-new business model known as sakawa. Sakawa, a Hausa word meaning "putting inside," is a type of magically enhanced online fraud that mostly targets foreigners. These young guys are frequently jobless, homeless, and unsure of where they will get their next meal before they become sakawa practitioners. They frequently describe seeing really fashionable and well-groomed young individuals working at Internet cafés and appearing to be making large sums of money. Scammers may occasionally intentionally seek out these victims and educate them how to use the Internet so they can carry out their complex schemes. Pretending to be a lady who is romantically interested in males from Asia, Europe, or the United States is a common scam. Using fictitious paperwork to convince foreign investors to purchase gold, wood, or oil concessions is another, less frequent scam. The advanced social skills required to establish strategic online personas, build rapport with foreign White males in remote locations, and know when and how to ask for money are even more crucial than technological expertise. After pursuing these methods for a few weeks or months with little to no success, many con artists claim to have discovered the “spiritual side” of sakawa. Sakawa practitioners believe that in order to become extraordinarily wealthy, one must apprentice themselves to a spiritual leader who may promise enormous prosperity in return for regularly executing specific rites. It is common for new apprentices to be taught to anoint their bodies with specific remedies and sleep in coffins. Some are forced to present their pants to the spiritual leader and have intercourse with many women every day. Some people have to chew on live maggots, lizards, or cockroaches. Ghanaians are appalled by stories of human sacrifice and incest, as con artists allegedly carry out increasingly complex spiritual services for their bosses. Many sakawa boys claim that after carrying out these rites, their attempts to obtain money from foreigners suddenly became considerably more effective, albeit many are reluctant to disclose the precise nature of these practices. Sakawa males frequently hold amazing parties and purchase pricey presents for their buddies with their unexpected windfalls from scamming. Ghanaian filmmaker Ben Asamoah portrays the customs and people of sakawa in his documentary Sakawa. Sakawa lads eventually grow weary of this way of life and feel like slaves to the unceasing ritualistic demands of their spiritual leaders. However, a sakawa kid may get a rash, become paralysed, or go deaf or silent if he refuses to carry out his allotted responsibilities. Some people claim that friends have passed away while trying to stop using Sakawa. In Ghanaian society, Sakawa is universally reviled. Religious leaders, government representatives, and media have all denounced it, and some sakawa fraudsters have even been detained and charged by the police. Many Ghanaians bemoan the unchecked celebration of riches as a social status symbol, contending that children need to be raised with traditional values of diligence, integrity, and modesty. Sakawa may appear to be a startling and unique fusion of digital media with supernatural rituals and beliefs, but the underlying assumptions about power and riches that are present in many cultures and historical eras are what are really responsible for this phenomena. Take the German myth of Faust, which originated with a German alchemist in the sixteenth century. The story tells of Faust, a melancholy and bored scholar, who strikes a deal with the devil through Mephistopheles, the devil's messenger. Mephistopheles is supposed to assist Faust in obtaining all material delights, including as power, wisdom, and sex. After a few years, Faust will have to give his soul to the devil in exchange. In many other regions of the world, variations on this Faustian deal have appeared, especially as communities become entangled in new patterns of inequality and wealth within the global economy. Anthropologist Michael Taussig, for example, studied the ideas about the devil held by workers in Bolivian tin mines and Colombian sugar farms in 1980. It was rumoured that certain wage workers on sugar plantations made deals with the devil in order to boost their output and earn quick cash. Most of the time, they spent their newfound fortune on ostentatious clothing and alcohol but were unable to create long-lasting success. According to Taussig, in order to uncover rich tin resources and to assure their safety, Bolivian tin mine workers built a temple to the devil. According to Taussig, there is concern about capitalist patterns of employment, money, and inequality among people in peasant farming cultures. Agrarian peoples rooted in communal values find it unjust that some labourers succeed financially while others put in just as much effort and are unsuccessful. Nevertheless, the powerful attraction of money and the commodities linked to labour in the globalised capitalist system draws in young people. Taussig claims that popular ideas about working for the devil in order to achieve short-term success are a result of this conflicting sense of disquiet. Digital media has opened doors to incredible riches and success for a small number of young people worldwide, frequently through international connections and trade. While some well-educated and well-connected elites may be able to become affluent through new forms of digital trade and technical innovation, the great majority of young people in both wealthy and impoverished nations are generally shut out of the opportunities presented by the digital economy. Sakawa plays up the pervasive sense of injustice and inequity in Ghanaian culture as a whole, even if it may appear to many Ghanaians and outsiders alike to be a troubling sort of digital delinquency. Sakawa phenomenon implies that underprivileged people need to augment their computer and social abilities with otherworldly powers in order to succeed. Hard labour on its own is insufficient. The final fate that many Sakawa scammers face—being unable or unable to meet the demands of their supernatural masters—symbolizes the injustice of this scenario. Anthropologists approach mass media holistically, investigating the ways in which different kinds of media interact with the domains of gender, ethnicity, identity, and the political, economic, and religious spheres. Anthropologists learn about new kinds of sociality and transaction as well as the cultural settings of media creation and reception via studying photography, news media, radio, and digital media. Understanding the significant sociocultural shifts brought about by media developments requires an appreciation of the holistic perspective of anthropology, as media technologies become increasingly integrated into people's lives and crucial to social connections and communities.