21st-century Digital Techno-cultural Trends in Nigeria and the Pseudoism of Globalization in Africa

Abstract

In prevalent scholarship, the words ‘Africa’ and ‘globalization’ have always been depicted as sharing a tenuous relationship that reveals several problems underlying the Eurocentric belief in the synchronicity of the world’s supposed progressive globality. The skepticism extended towards the concept of globalization in Africa is foregrounded against the fact that the continent’s socio-economic and political developments run at an uneven pace, different from the rest of the world. However, while it is easy to dismiss globalization as a western concept that does not holistically concern Africa, it is impossible to ignore the far-reaching significance of global attitudes and attributes in countries like Nigeria. In Nigeria, one such seemingly global hallmark is the popularization of digital technological trends such as social media, artistic internationalism, pop-cultural co modification, celebrityhood, and the embrace of digital economies such as cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. This proposed paper aims to expand on this techno-cultural strand of ‘globalization’ in Nigeria by referring to current experiential realities obtained from an observational study of Nigerian millennials and Gen-Zers, while arguing that the asymmetrical rise of culturally symbolic digital trends in Nigeria does, in fact, reveal the facadism and pseudoism of the concept of globalization.