ktravula – a travelogue!

A Digital Prophet Revisited

A number of years ago, shortly after I left high school, or maybe in my first year of uni, I came across this book called Being Digital, written by Nicholas Negroponte, then a columnist at Wired, in 1995. I lived then in Ìbàdàn, Southwest Nigeria, and was still undecided about what I wanted to do with myself. I don’t know whether I saw a copy of the book first, or came across the media frenzy about it. But being at the time already interested in digital technology, I took some interest. In any case, the book was everywhere. I didn’t get far with that first attempt at reading it, though I realized it held something fascinating about the future of technology.

I’d seen a desktop computer perhaps just once before, back then, in the house of a neighbour who ran the private nursery school I had attended. Cable TV was something we’d seen only in the house of another rich neighbour down the street, provided via the huge satellite dish parked in their garden. Mobile phones were not yet a thing in Nigeria, except in the hands of the very rich or the very fraudulent—big, clunky, bulky-looking things, but glamorous all the same. James Bond films showed fascinating new technologies, like self-driving cars and teleconferencing.

I got my first email address in 1998—this I remember. It was a Yahoo email, but in time I also got one on coolmail.com, and another from Hotmail, which seemed like a fancy thing to do. There were others, with names like Eudoramail and Pegasus. In Ìbàdàn in the late 1990s, the only place with public access to the internet was the “Business Centre,” later to be renamed “Cybercafe.” Email at the Business Center was a complicated affair. You wrote your “email” out by hand and handed it to the business center assistant, who typed it for you into the computer, and then sent it on for you via their email server. Almost like a telex system, connecting via “modems” that hooked up to the internet with a whirring tone that sounded like an intubated hospital patient trying to speak. You then went home and returned in a few days to check for a reply to your email. If it had arrived you’d pay for the message, the BC assistant printed it out, stapled it for privacy, and handed it to you.

Within the following year or so it became possible to register a personal email address and send one’s own private emails. But to use the “net,” you paid by the hour for access to one of several computers in the center, which was separated from the one beside you by a wooden bar. The same scene was playing out in Internet cafés from San Diego to Taipei to Mumbai.

For a child of 17, this was a really interesting time. Having access to the computer at all, even if I had to pay for it, was a delight, and it soon consumed all my free time. Eventually, after my admission to the university was delayed by a few months because of a general strike of the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities, I took a job in one of those business centres, as the assistant who typed out other people’s emails and printed their returned replies. I supervised the users who came to “browse” the internet and either renewed their time when it was up or kicked them out. With the job came unlimited access to the exploding new world of the internet. I registered my first website, learnt what cpanel, http, ftp, server, and other mysterious code words meant. I entered the university some months later and had an encounter with one of the earliest of the “Nigerian Prince” scams. But that’s another story.

The influence of Negroponte and his book followed me through my university days almost unconsciously, as I wrestled with linguistics and language technology, and eventually figured myself out as an adult fully invested in the digital life. What was it about the book that had made it such a flavour of the season on its publication?

For one thing, its novelty; Google would not be founded until September of 1998, three years after the publication of Being Digital. I remember the launch of Google as an upstart competitor to the dominant search engines, AskJeeves, Altavista, and Babelfish. If anyone had told me that I would eventually work at Google myself, or that it would become a company that would change the world of maps or the entire field of language technology, I would not have believed it. Even my work in the linguistics degree as an undergraduate touched only briefly on the possibility of “speech synthesis” and “artificial intelligence” and all the coming innovations that, in early 2000s Nigeria, sounded like the tech from the James Bond thrillers.

When the memory of those times came back to me a few weeks ago, I ordered the book, and today, these many years later, I finally finished reading it. I was curious to know how it would seem at this remove, but even more to compare it to the life I’ve lived in the digital technology space over the last three decades.

Being Digital did not disappoint. It made sense that a work of such keen and informed foresight was celebrated at the time, when many of the tools and frameworks we now take for granted, from fiber to deeply archived news sites, were only far-fetched ideas in the minds of the scientists and theorists then envisioning and working toward this new world.

The sense of awe I felt while reading it was matched by the wonder that so many more works of this nature are being written today—some of them, perhaps, equally prescient, and others destined to be wrongly ignored.

***

“Early in the next millennium… your telephone won’t ring indiscriminately; it will receive, sort, and perhaps respond to your incoming calls like a well-trained English butler. Mass media will be defined by systems for transmitting and receiving personalized information and entertainment. Schools will… become more like museums and playgrounds for children to assemble ideas and socialize with other children all over the world… We will socialize in digital neighborhoods in which physical space will be irrelevant and time will play a different role… When you watch an hour of television, it may have been delivered to your home in less than a second.” — Page 6.

“I am more convinced that by the year 2005, Americans will spend more hours on the internet (or whatever it’s called) than watching network television… Computer programs, not just people, will be reading material such as this book and making, for example, automatic summaries. Copyright law says that if you summarize material, that summary is your intellectual property. I doubt that lawmakers ever considered the idea of abstracting being done by an inanimate entry or robo-pirates” — page 58-60

“The information industry will become more of a boutique business. Its marketplace is the global information highway. The customers will be people and their computer agents. Is the digital marketplace real? Yes, but only if the interface between people and their computers improves to the point where talking to your computer is as easy as talking to another human being.” — 85

“The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages. A computer should know the difference between your saying “Kissinger” and “kissing her”, not because it can find the small acoustic difference, but because it can understand the meaning.” — Page 92

“…Personal computers almost never have your finger meet the display, which is quite startling when you consider that the human finger is a pointing device you don’t have to pick up, and you have ten of them. You can move gracefully from typing to pointing, from horizontal plane to vertical. Yet it hasn’t caught on…” Page 132

“For most people, typing is not an ideal interface. If we could speak to our computers, even the most confirmed Luddite would use them more enthusiastically. Nonetheless, computers remain more and less deaf and mute. Why? The primary reason for so few advances in speech recognition is lack of perspective, not lack of technology… We don’t want to talk to a computer like a tourist addressing a foreign child, deliberately mouthing each word and pausing after it.” 137-141.

“A future agent is often seen as some centralized and omniscient machine of Orwellian character. A much more likely outcome is a collection of computer programs and personal appliances, each of which is pretty good at one thing and very good at communicating with the others. The image is fashioned after Minsky’s The Society of Mind (1987), in which he proposes that intelligence is not found in some central processor but in the collective behavior of a large group of more special-purpose, highly interconnected machines.” — 157

“In future digital media there will be more pay-per-view, not just on an all-or-nothing basis, but more like newspapers and magazines, where you share the cost with advertisers. In some cases, the consumer may have an option to receive material without advertising but at a higher cost. In other cases, the advertising will be so personalized that it is indistinguishable from news. It is news.” — page 170

“I don’t know about you, but I would throw away my VCR tomorrow for a better scheme… With all due respect to Blockbuster and its new owner, Viacom, I think videocassette-rental stores will go out of business in less than ten years.” — Page 173

“The next decade will see cases of intellectual property abuse and invasion of our privacy. We will experience digital vandalism, software piracy, and data thievery. Worst of all, we will witness the loss of many jobs to wholly automated systems, which will soon change the white-collar workplace to the same degree that it has already transformed the factory floor. The notion of lifetime employment at one job has already started to disappear…” — page 227

I’ll stop here, because I want you to read it, and wonder with me how much of this book may have influenced the countless visionaries, famous or obscure, whose innovations we now depend on for basic navigation of everyday life, from Netflix to Zoom, and how many more of his predictions—like a home service robot that barks like a dog when it senses an intruder—have yet to come to pass. The book, almost surprisingly, didn’t envisage crypto.

***

Personal computers, like the internet, have become commonplace in Nigeria. To my pre-teenage son living in America today, descriptions of the internet of my youth will sound like a fairytale. But many of the issues we grapple with today in Nigeria and on the African continent still have to do with whether our best technologies will ultimately succeed in improving society, or preventing underdevelopment.

My job, as it has evolved over the years, has been to find ways to make the new digital world recognise peculiar characteristics of that society, especially from the language angle. We have Google Maps now in Nigerian English—a project I led; I’ve also participated in many other projects to make language technologies function well in African languages. This includes the foundational work of digital lexicography, including building platforms like YorubaName.com and ttsyoruba.com, curating data for machine learning, and improving support for diacritics. None of this is happening as quickly as needed, but it is way better than what used to be. Digital globalisation, the dream of Negroponte’s generation, has in many ways come to pass, but it came with deep cracks that still prevent global equitable access.

I have since learnt that the Being Digital came from the the author’s regular columns in Wired magazine, and that it has now been translated into over forty languages. It must delight him to know that his words still comprise a relevant collection of data that can be bought online, as he imagined, through a digital shopping cart, and read on exactly the kinds of devices he dreamed of more than thirty years ago.

[First published on June 11, 2026 on FlamingHydra.]

Of Tabs and Texts

I realized since a few months ago that I have a habit of opening too many tabs on my Google Chrome internet explorer. Everyone who peeped onto my computer screen while I work always wondered how I managed to concentrate on current tasks. My fiancée suggested that I most likely have attention deficit. In return, I argue that I have read enough reports that suggest that distracting oneself with stuff online actually led to efficiency. She has now asked that I limit my open tabs to ten. I have tried, and failed. Now I use Evernote to mark down some of the links I intend to read much later.

Today however, I recalled something that may be responsible for my interest in many things at once (much of them about politics, education, humour, literature, and news). Two words: my father. Thinking back now, I remember how there was always a room in every house we’ve lived in that has stacks of every current publication in Nigeria at the moment. Today, I remembered Prime People, Vintage People, Fun Times, Ikebe Super, Super Story, Vanguard, The Sketch, Newswatch, Daily Times, among very many others. Name it, we had every issue published, and they were always delivered by father’s vendor early in the day. Soon enough, the stack filled up a whole room. Literally.

It was impossible to be bored in an environment like that, and cartoon strips in the newspapers and magazines, and the continuing stories in legitimately fun publications like Ikebe Super, Fun Times, and Super Story sustained a literary interest for a very long time, long before it was eventually replaced with real literature, also from his bookshelves. So now, whenever I’m chided for opening too many webpages at once, I point back to the memory of a time when pleasure and work walked hand-in-hand while sitting on the floor of a living room with dozens of news and feature publications spread all around.

Sometime last year when an academic mentor in Ibadan asked if I had access to past issues of any Nigerian publications which used pidgin as the main language of communication, I immediately thought of Fun Times, Dauda the Sexy Guy, and Ikebe Super. He was working on a compilation of a comprehensive Nigerian Pidgin English dictionary. I have not asked father what he did with all his stack of past issues, but I assume that it will be a trip to return into the margins of those oldies at some point in the future, if they still exist. For now, new tabs and texts.

Me Plus

Here is a riddle: what is the best way to take over the world? Need a minute? The answer is this: make something that everybody uses. This was my first thought on encountering the now almost inevitable internet destination that is Google Plus. What it is is an aggregation of Google’s top services and much of what we use on the internet, in one place.

It has got everyone talking. Even my grammar professor want to know how it can be used to teach an online class (hint: it can’t without the glitches of privacy and copyright concerns). It can, however be used to manage a social existence without worries to privacy the kind that Facebook brought. What exactly is Google Plus? I’d say it’s Facebook, Twitter, Blogger combined with some of other services we use everyday. Who would have thought that a day will come when everything we search for on Google can now be indexed publicly for our friends to see if we want. Who needs twitter? Who needs Facebook? Who needs a blog even? With Google Plus, everything comes together, and you still get to keep your gmail address.

Here’s how someone put it in a recent shared post:

Instead of saying, “I’m going to write a blog post now,” or “I’m going to send an e-mail” or “I think I’ll tweet something” you simply say what you have to say, then decide who you’re going to say it to.

If you address it to “Public,” it’s a blog post.

If you address it to “Your Circles” it’s a tweet.

If you address it to your “My Customers” Circle it’s a business newsletter.

If you address it to a single person, it can be a letter to your mother.

Why would you pay to keep a blog online when you can have everything a blog gives you for free on such a cool platform? Oh, I know the answer: that little issue of copyright and ownership. Besides that however, Google Plus is a nice new addition. I’ve already begun considering leaving Facebook though I know it might never really happen. It’s already a while since I last logged on to twitter. I think there is something relaxing about not having to open so many windows on my (wait for it: Google) Chrome browser.

I hope to use G+ to share some of my online curiosities and discoveries, particularly those not worth writing a whole blog post about. Join my Google Plus circle here.

Just Wondering, Just Wandering

or Astral Travel in 600 words.

The Nigerian writer and critic Ikhide Ikheloa is disillusioned about many things, and does not shy away from saying them in his frank and often witty essays at the Nigeria Village Square, African Writer.com or in the Nigerian Newspaper, NEXT – the wasted opportunity of Nigerian Pro-Democracy Activists to right the wrongs of the country when it eventually got into their hands after decades of military rule, and the portrayal of Africans by Africans themselves in movies, novels and plays written for the Western market. He has written this guest post about his positive perception of technology as the new reality – the new weapons of navigating the labyrinths of the world.

_________________________

The writer-traveler Kola Tubosun visited me in Washington DC a few months ago. We had a great time. We had never met physically; however our spirits had been communing for several moons through the Internet. I do enjoy the company of African writers even though most of these meetings have been mostly on cyberspace. The Internet is today the world’s number one wonder, offering new opportunities and challenges and taunting our expectations of community. I know now from living on the Internet that the human spirit is superior to the flesh, unless when you are having really good sex. Every now and then I actually meet someone I have known on the Internet for a long time. The meetings are always joyful reunions, flesh pressing flesh in celebration of the indomitable spirit.

Travel and communication are abiding mysteries. Life is energy, restlessness and movement – of the body and spirit. The mind wanders and travels everywhere bearing gifts, burdens, and anxieties. I often reflect on the awesome power of the airplane and the first (foolish) passenger who hoped to return to land after the flight. Today, unmanned drones hit men praying in caves thousands of miles away from the Nevada desert.

In Nigeria, when we were little, we would string together two empty tins of condensed milk and try to communicate with the result. It was awesome hearing your friend’s voice on the other end. Today, my eleven year old son is a digital native. His Smartphone is his flashlight, jukebox, Internet access and remote control. He has built an electronic fence around himself, and only allows access to those who have earned it. If it would just uncork my bottle of Malbec, now, that would be powerful.

In Africa, citizens have been mercifully spared the tyranny of inefficient state-sponsored telecommunications. Cell phones are ubiquitous and have muscled their way into the lexicon of popular African culture. In Nigeria, people are using cell phones for robust commerce. They are also empowering women and children, restoring to them the privacy denied them in a paternalistic analog world.

The Internet offers us amazing new opportunities to reconnect with the best of each other. New and emerging technologies are redefining our traditional notion of exile. It is now the norm to communicate with Africa in real time from anywhere in the world. I sometimes click on Google Earth and visit my childhood haunts. For me, exile doesn’t hurt as much as it did when I left home three decades ago.

Tubosun’s travels around America remind us that new and emerging technologies are redefining our traditional notion of exile. I salute the bravery and tenacity of the new writers and travelers. I salute the writers of generations before, warriors like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Flora Nwapa, Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, Dennis Brutus, etc, who traveled to strange places of the heart and this world armed with nothing but their imagination and returned to teach us about the things they had learnt in their restlessness. They were our freedom fighters, teachers, entertainers and Internet access. Theirs was a crushing burden and they bore it with grace. Today the wonders of computer technology and modern travel make it possible for the individual to become a municipality of one and ignore the new criminals in black ravaging the land. We may be losing our best minds to narcissism. These new tools should empower us to help our people. Who are our freedom fighters today? What is the role of the African writer in the emancipation of Africa? Do we have an obligation to use our gifts to fight for much needed change in the land of our ancestry? I strongly and passionately believe so. There is so much to celebrate in the resurgence of African writing; our suffering people deserve some of the dividends. There is hope. It is up to us.

_____________________

Ikhide writes from xokigbo@yahoo.com, and I thank him for this wonderful expose. I don’t know what I’d have done without access to the internet and these new tools of technology, so his perspective resonates strongly with me and the purpose of this blog, which is to explore new ways of interacting with the world and confronting challenges of present generations with the means of information technology. Past guest-posts can be read here.

Blog, Writing and Real Life

I did not grow up with computers around me. I am definitely not a first generation internet user. Much of the first creative things I wrote in my life were in long hand on rough sheets of paper, and later on an abandoned typewriter in my father’s lounge. Today there are kids growing up who probably never spent a day without getting on the computer. Whether they are smarter or more efficient than us is beyond me, but I do know that there is some kind of thrill in my current adaptation to a 24hour electronic cycle. The book is dead, I’ve heard, incredulously, and yesterday when I tried to read the current edition of Time magazine in print, I found a certain kind of lazy resistance, and some unexplainable wonder that they still make paper editions of those in this age of the internet. It must be why I spend so much time trying to to finish reading a book of just 300 pages. There’s definitely a sort of taking over by the internet, and I’m surprised to be on the train, considering that my first email address was just ten years ago.

Right now, I’m going through a phase, a certain self-examination for the purpose of blogging, wondering whether it ever replaces the need for books and publishing. What’s the line between real life and a blog that is known and tied to the writer? In ideal situations, I should send my poems first to journals and literary magazines rather than publish them by myself on the blog, right? However I’ve observed a certain sense of impatience in myself that may have conditioned a different way of behaviour that has me publishing them here first of all before I show them to publishers, asking whether they want them in their journals. Most of them say NO, of course, citing the fact that I’d already published them online in some form. I blame my e-conditioned impulsiveness to have absolute control on the when and the how. There is no other way to explain the fact that I never get the urge to write anything most times until I’ve signed into WordPress, clicked on “New Post”, and having a blank post page staring at me. A few years ago, it was a blank page in Microsoft Word that elicits that kind of mental stimulation. It was the same kind of electronically conditioned inspiration that I used to get while staring at the rusty typewriter on my father’s lounge. The question then is, what will I do with the bubbly impatience that never let go of me as soon as I complete a piece of work that makes me happy but which I can’t show to anyone? It is a morbid fear of losing it, I guess, or having something happen to me before the work makes it to the public that mostly takes my hand to the “publish” button, and I’m satisfied. I found a similar kind of paranoia in a writer William Boyd who I heard admit in a recent Youtube video tour of his writing space to having always kept his manuscripts in the refrigerator because they were safer there, at least from fire in the event of an outbreak.

For my paranoia, I can only hope to write so much more, and (ah-ha!) seek an American publisher. Maybe the blog might help in that ambitious quest. Gone were the days when the pleasure was in jotting on scrap notebooks and book margins. These days, the inspiration comes from an e-blank page and the rasping of my Dell laptop keys. I can’t complain.

PS: My first electronically published short story will be published in an anthology of short stories from Africa entitled “African Roar” and published by Lion Press UK in January 2010. Considering that it will now be in a book form for the first time, I won’t be putting up a link to the full work online here, as much as I wish to do so right now. Ask me for the rationale, and I’ll say it’s the dynamics of the new media. (Or what do you think, Ivor?)

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