6 african appropriations
own are not necessarily stable entities or neutral technologies, which are
used identically throughout the world. This approach rests on an older line
of thinking in media studies which declared content irrelevant to the so-
c ia l effec ts of med ia; i nstead, it t u r ned to t he phy sica l a nd sensor y proper-
ties of media to explain media’s effects on social life. Marshall McLuhan’s
dictum “the medium is the message” has become shorthand for this line of
thought. Anthropologists, however, while picking up McLuhan’s message
about the capacity of media to impose new social relations through their
formal properties, had considerable difficulty coming to terms with the
inherent technological determinism of this approach. Instead, inspired
by the new material culture studies of the 1980s and the debate about “the
social life of things” (Appadurai 1986), anthropology discovered the “so-
cial life of technology” (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002: 19) and
explored the “cultural concretization” of media, as Tobias Wendl (2004a)
has termed the process undergone by media following their arrival in new
social contexts and previously established media environments. “Tech-
nolog ies a re u nstable t h i ngs,” say s Br ia n L a rk i n (2 008: 3), su m m i ng up t he
findings of this line of research. “The meanings attached to technologies,
their technical functions, and the social uses to which they are put are not
an inevitable consequence but something worked out over time in the con-
te x t of considerable c u lt u ra l debate” (3). The spec tac u la r r ise of t he sma l l-
medium video from a recording technology used in private first-world
households and co-opted in a big way by African film industries is an apt
example of this, and one I discuss in several of the subsequent chapters.
One way to look at African popular media is to explore them as products
of “cottage culture industries” (Peterson 2005: 214–218)—the third strand
of anthropological media studies relevant to this book. These industries,
artisanal as they may be, have been built up around small media, with
v ideo bei ng t he most prol i fic. I n cont ra st to big med ia, such a s fi l m, telev i-
sion, and radio, which depend on large budgets, small media are relatively
affordable and therefore accessible to many. Moreover, such technologies
are difficult to control, a feature that encourages their proliferation as a
primary vehicle of discourse, countering that of state-owned mass me-
dia. African cottage media industries are commercially oriented. Since
they depend on the market, they keep an ear out for popular discourse,
reworking it in their products, which are in turn fed back onto the streets.