Communication, développement et appropriation des médias émergents en Afrique francophone subsaharienne : approche critique

This thesis addresses the appropriation of the Internet and of multimedia in the university population of French-speaking Africa, in the year 2001. It deals with six sub-Saharan countries: Benin and Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Mali and Togo. The research is specifically interested in the inventory of demographic research centers in sub-Saharan French-speaking Africa and the investigation with the universities of Yaoundé II and Douala in Cameroon.  The question of access and use is central to our approach. Articulated as a research question, the focus is as follows: "In a context dominated by the representations of the ICTs as symbols of modernity and ways of integrating the world economy, what are the modalities of appropriation of these technologies by academics within postsecondary institutions of teaching and research in Africa considered in this study?" Two theoretical approaches were adopted to deal with the empirical data : theories of development tied to the (new) media and the sociology of technological innovations.   Rooted in the thought of the Enlightenment, completed and refined by the evolutionist approaches inspired by Spencer, Parsonian functionalism and the political economy centered on the thought of W.W. Rostow, theories of development have made much use of theories of the communication in order to achieve their objectives. Even as the crisis of Western modernity threatens to delegitimize these paradigms, the emergent technologies give them a new lease on life: in continuity of the thought of Auguste Comte, development is henceforth thought in terms of integration within a new social structure, the information society. This new eschatological promise and this faith in technology as the factor of integration within society and the network economy animate all the projects undertaken on the continent, whether it is the NEPAD, the Digital Solidarity Fund, the $100 Computer Project for Deprived Children or the Pan-African project of satellite sideboard, the RASCOM.  The second part of our theoretical framework is centered on the sociology of technical innovations. We make use of the socio-political approach to usage developed by Vedel and Vitalis to re-introduce critical reason into the debate on the development of the African continent, with a view to showing how political prerogatives at the State-level still have their place, if we want to develop digital resources that satisfy social demands and respond not only to demands deemed solvent and essentially arising out of urban areas. By refusing the technical determinism so current in thinking about development, we would like to show that the future of technology is not inscribed in its essence, like a shadowy presence, but that human action, notably political action, can reorient the trajectory of technological innovation in the direction of responding to the aspirations of citizens.  Methodologically, our approach combines quantitative methods and qualitative methods. The former will allow us to measure the presence of the Internet and multimedia in the environment of those concerned. The latter will help us to grasp the representations developed by the users in contact with these tools. Within a socio-constructivist perspective, these discourses are constitutive of these technologies, inasmuch as they are so many modalities of appropriation, of the social construction of usage. Ultimately, the integration of the technical language specific to these multimedia tools into the every day language of the users signals the last stage of this appropriation. Through this research, it became evident that few users utilize audiovisual technologies in a professional context. As for the Internet and multimedia tools, their presence and their use remain limited, physical access not yet being guaranteed to all the respondents of the study. The Internet, while creating large expectations, also remains largely inaccessible in a professional context, the majority of the users making use of public spaces such as cyber-cafes to mitigate the lack of resources within their own institutions. As far as representations go, they remain still widely dependent on the dominant political and institutional discourses, according to which the future will be digital or will not be. The thesis, however, goes beyond this data in order to draw up the current digital map of the continent, by integrating within the technological landscape the phenomenal rise of mobile cellular technology.  It appeared to us that the Internet, the availability of which on the continent has been modest at best, could widely take advantage of the emergence on the continent of the mobile culture, which facilitates in particular the convergence between netbooks and mobile telephones (smartphones).

Keyphrases: Communication, Appropriation, Africa, New Information and Communication technology, Development, Representation, Teaching, Research, Demography, Appropriation