Digitization should be a rival of globalization as a reconfigurational force of revolutionary magnitude in recent human society. But digitization is an accomplice, not a rival of globalization. While globalization has prospered under the fixation of historians and analysts, digitization remains in the shadows, quietly drilling the pipelines that convey the lightening spread of the globalizing force. Just as this digital technology has brought societies under the umbrella of the network, these societies have also altered the network to fit their ends, changing the way we live, work and fight our wars in unpredictable ways. Digitization has integrated our global and national communities, but has also proven to be a most appealing apparatus for war and defense strategists, criminals, and religious and social sectarians, and extremists. Manuel Castells’ reputation as one of the theoretical and methodological gurus of the information age rests on his seminal work about the network society, which detailed the configuration of a rising and imminent network and information society that was destined to transform the world’s economy and culture. Unlike preexisting social networks, Castells wrote of one that would consume other networks and become a platform of social and economic convergence on a borderless, seemingly endless globe spanning infrastructure where knowledge is not only a factor of production in its own right but an exceptional input whose output is more knowledge. Castells describes as ‘‘informationalism’’ the improvement of technology to accommodate this proliferation of knowledge, fuelling a virtuous cycle of continuous knowledge production. But even if knowledge is desirable, good knowledge can be put to undesirable ends. Peril accompanies opportunity in the shape of a dizzying pace of changes in ideas and new technologies, which spread and render recent novelties obsolete in no time, but confer capacity and disproportionate abilities to actors, some of whom have sinister ends. A lone hacker can, in theory, shut down power grids, disable airport control towers, and even shut down the internet. This mixture of enterprise and insurgency conveys oblivion and misery for individuals and societies that fail to adapt to both the opportunities and dangers that emerge from the network society. As the network society acquires a necessity that demands participation or demise for the unconnected, the fundamental response should be one of constant adaptation all by stakeholders including policy makers and citizens. So, all humanity is compelled to participate in the cyber life. The network society is a social reality, yet a reality that is virtual in nature. This apparent paradox represents the unpredictable complexity of this new age. The dizzying intersection of cultures, technologies and economies throws up abrupt developments, reactions and responses from states and individuals. Worse, some of the cleavages of actual life are being mimicked for exploitation by some cyber social forces. Beneath the virtual-actual divide is a hidden accord. Perhaps, apart from making breakthroughs in agriculture, medicine and transportation, man’s other unending instinct is to extend the sophistication and impact of warfare, which is a consequence of the basic need for security, which in turn stems from contests over resources. Out of this increasing digitization of life and society has emerged an industrial revolution in warfare. The movement of life into the digital realm has been accompanied by the extension of warfare from an actual preoccupation of battlefield combat to a virtual non-contact activity with massive actual consequences. We may be in an era of the most fundamental change of the arena of warfare since gunpowder, sparking an arms race between major powers for supremacy in the use of the technologies and capabilities to conduct this war. Though cyber warfare does not necessarily represent the end of conventional war, it is an effective alternative and plays an important role in helping to obtain information for conducting conventional war. While there are frequent reports of squads of freelance non-state warriors conducting cyber attacks on the computers of government agencies and transnational corporations, it is interstate cyber war that will dominate the future. Experts strongly speculated that Israel was responsible for inflicting serious damage on Iran’s nuclear program by attacking computer systems with the dreadfully effective stuxnet virus, but recent revelations also claim that the United States was behind it. The distinction between cyber attacks of a non-state origin and interstate cyber war is also blurring as many of these virtual mercenaries are actually state sponsored. A technology hungry China has been known to adopt this approach to evade blame from the west for a series of spectacular attacks on western governments and corporations with the objective to steal industrial and military secrets. Israel is seen by experts as highly active in gathering intelligence on social networks sites, mining and analyzing information which is then used to blackmail Palestinians into becoming informants. On the other hand, crime is another defining human vocation that prospers from advances in technology. Criminals are opportunists by nature who attach a high level of innovation to their work. This is especially true of cyber bandits and con artists whose level of skill and audacity are regarded with respect by law enforcement agencies. The rest of the world views West Africa and the territories of the former Eastern Bloc as the home of this sort of career cyber burglary. But essentially, not all perpetrators of digital deceit and theft are necessarily motivated by malice or criminal intent. Their actions, however, are viewed by most governments as acts of law breaking and consigned to the same category as criminal minded hackers who steal identities, passwords and plunder money from bank accounts. These organizations of what I would describe as exhibiting ‘conscientious intent but non-legal conduct ‘ include ‘hackivist’ outfits like wikileaks who believe in an open society of free access to information and specialize in stealing and publishing the secret files of powerful countries and organizations. Whether or not this arbitrary categorization is legitimate depends on one’s philosophical perspective and ethical standpoint. Our socio-cultural plurality in Africa should give us a superior virtual experience over more homogeneous societies. Social diversity provides a favourable environment for the digitization of life into a lavish cyber fuelled socio-economic vibrancy. It is undeniable that the advent of digitization and new media has transformed significant areas of African life and society and led to new outgrowths of innovation and applications to overcome crippling infrastructural deficits and limited access to information and services. African online communities continue to increase with businesses, social groups and cultural organizations acquiring virtual addresses. There have been home grown new media innovations of world-class brilliance such as Mpedigree and Mpensa that have solved urgent life changing social needs. Inventions such as devices that alert Kenyan fishermen by text message to the arrival of fish in coastal waters and innovation in Uganda that allows isolated banana farmers to send photographs of diseased plants to experts in the capital for advice by text message point to the underlying capacity for innovation on our continent. Communities have even built improvised windmills to power mobile phones and generated energy for the same purpose by the activity of riding a bicycle. Some governments are providing services on mobile platforms. Take the sending of meteorological information to famers’ mobile phones to help them time their planting, for example. The mobile phone sits at the center of an explosion in ingenuity and adaptation that can potentially transform landscapes of economic dependency into zones of economic self- sufficiency. But there is a thin line between social plurality and a highly charged political background in which sectarianism and ethnicity lurks beneath the surface. Digitization has intrigued the sinister imaginations of sectarians and ethnocentrists, who have been pleased with the opportunities granted by the network society. The ongoing movement of ethnic and religious factions to the cyber world per say does not raise alarm. It is the emergence of the online ethnic conflict entrepreneur brand of sectarian that must viewed with concern. If a preexisting environment of sectional animosity is already there, the ability to instantly publish to millions using cheap handheld devices presents risk of a volatile situation that must be anticipated and averted. If radio was a vehicle for the incitement that created a fertile environment for the Rwandan genocide, new media’s capacity for hatemongering could be more profound. The feasibility of this hellish scenario has already been proven in Kenya, where incitement through text messages and emails helped to fuel the 2007 post election violence. The Al-shabab in Somalia has also been known to recruit new militants, spread ideology and intimidate the populace via text messages. Sectarians distributed threats and spread hatred by text messages in Jos, Nigeria. There is evidence that last year’s devastating London riots were coordinated via twitter and blackberry, showing that even more policed Western societies are not immune from the phenomenon of online facilitation and orchestration for offline violence. A close examination of the Ghanaian cyber space will reveal shadowy figures projecting loyalty to some factions in the country. Using pseudonyms on very popular Ghanaian sites like Ghanaweb and Mordern Ghana, they foment tribally charged exchanges and are rapidly increasing the traffic of hate speech on the web and social media sites. Some notorious mini bloggers and commentators on facebook even claim responsibility and celebrate the murder of notable figures from rival factions. On a platform with thousands of followers of numerous cultural groups, ancient myths are resurrected and ethnic epithets thrown around with impunity amidst shocking ethnic attacks, insults, taunting and the peddling of false rumours and misconceptions. Because technology provides an unprecedented platform for ethnicities far and near to overcome the challenges of geography, ethnic actors can mislead, incite and manipulate to orchestrate a devastating social impact. As more sects and ethnic groups assume cyber residences, the consequences of any dissemination of harmful propaganda and hatred are unlimited. Though only a very tiny group of irresponsible people are engaged in this misuse of new media, it is time for the security infrastructure to erect a deterrence to this irresponsibility at this early stage. It is important for the Police to prevent potential conflict by being able to negotiate the balance between censorship and online law enforcement. Digitization is here to stay and the ongoing migration of actual communities to the virtual realm will continue. The internet has become such an indispensible economic, social and political resource that we can only speed up the digitization of our societies. The time for adaptation to safeguard public safety is however here. While conflict prevention actors must carry the fight to these online ethnic agitators by challenging them on the same online forums, policy makers must start devising an evolving online strategy. Indeed, the online platform represents a rich treasure trove of intelligence gathering for our security agencies. Recently the US government contracted a private firm to scour social networks for intelligence. Ethnic agitators operate anonymously but the same irresponsibility that motivates them makes them vulnerable. It is possible for the police to gather enough online clues to trace these delinquents who represent nothing but destruction in this time of opportunity. They will only succeed if cyber space is surrendered by governments and the overwhelming responsible majority to these backward merchants of hate. The author is a grants and M&E specialist of WillWay Africa, an Accra based NGO. He can be contacted at kudugoayoka@gmail.com

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