With every rollout of a new communications technology comes handwringing. How do we use it? Should we? What can it do for us? How might it change others and us? In the United Sates, popular discourses about the Internet are often myopic and determinist, boiled down to unhelpful binaries: The Internet makes us smarter and more productive or, as one wag said, “stoopid” and lazy. The Internet makes us passive or aggressive, sociable or alienated. In Africa, popular discourses about the Internet acclaim it as an engine of development and democracy or a portent of cultural imperialism and local disconnection. Thankfully, Jenna Burrell’s smart and engaging Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafés of Urban Ghana sidesteps these numbing binaries. Instead, she asks us to consider what happens when digital or networked communications technology travels the world, in this case to Ghana, to new users, to otherwise marginalized young people for whom the technology was not initially designed or intended. How are the experiences that young, urban Ghanaians have with computers and the Internet shaped by the historical, political, and economic inequities that have shaped so much else in their lives?

A first glance at the book’s table of contents might lead the reader to think that Invisible Users is a series of interesting, discrete case studies of various aspects of computers and the Internet in Ghana. In fact, it is a rich ethnography of the interface and interaction of Ghanaian youth with networked technology told at three levels: first, in Internet cafes and in the online encounters negotiated there; second, in the understandings, interpretations, and meanings that youth in Ghana attach to the Internet and what they do with these understandings; and third, in the shifting economic and political landscape of globally networked Ghana.

Burrell has a strongly stated theoretical purpose, which is woven through her book but does not mar her narrative flow or spoil its empirical value for readers whose interests may not necessarily extend far into theory. This theoretical purpose, as I understand it, is to reconcile studies of new technology use that privilege the social contexts and agency of technology’s users with approaches that privilege the socially transformative properties of technologies themselves. She admires both approaches, and she calls the first (e.g., making this or that new technology “uniquely African” or “uniquely Ghanaian,” or “uniquely boys of the Mamobi neighborhood in 2007”) “weak materiality,” while she calls the second (e.g., inherent qualities of the automobile, or of radio waves, or of digital information) “strong materiality.” While she is careful to show that humanities and social science research on new technologies in postcolonial Africa draws on both perspectives, the reader comes away with a sense that she is especially eager for more Africanists to take “strong materiality” seriously. Accepting the transformative power and even the universality of the internal logic of new technologies does not, ipso facto, according to Burrell, call into question the creativity of users, whether in Africa or anywhere else.

In a fascinating introduction that manages to weave together, among other works, Marshall McLuhan’s speculations about the force of the directionality of televised light waves with work that Brian Larkin and others have done on breakdowns and repairs in Africa, Burrell shows that strong materiality has every bit the “analytical purchase” in cultural studies of technology use that weak materiality does, even though many Africanists are content to demonstrate Africans’ responsive ingenuity without delving into the channeling properties of the technologies themselves. I count myself among the guilty, and I thank Burrell for clearly explicating a difficult and important theoretical point.

Thinking about materiality—both “weak” and “strong”—means connecting technologies to their social contexts and consequences, to what people are doing, and what they say they are doing in the world or worlds in which they live. The marginalized position of youth in the political economy of Ghana as a nation-state, and the marginalized position of Ghana in the world, renders Burrell’s youthful subjects obscure, even “invisible.” Burrell argues that marginality conditions what they make of the Internet, shapes their online engagements, and even in some cases helps account for language (sense-making) that justifies scamming, accommodates a melding of the supernatural and of religion with the Internet, excuses exclusionary tactics, and promotes a view of Ghana as a ripe ground for technology dumping. In sum, this book is a fine, Africa-based contribution to theory in technology studies as well as an empirical achievement that should be of strong interest to the cultural studies community in general. Those of us who work on Africa, youth, new communications technology, or Ghana will be far from its only readers.