Book review: invisible users: youth in the internet cafés of urban Ghana

The urban youth frequenting the internet cafes of Ghana use the internet largely as a way to orchestrate encounters across distance and to amass foreign ties; activities once limited to the wealthy, university-educated classes. The internet has become for these youths a means of enacting a more cosmopolitan self. In Invisible Users, Jenna Burrell offers a richly observed account of how these internet enthusiasts have adopted, and adapted to their own priorities, a technological system that was not designed with them in mind. Gareth A. Jones finds that the book provides a chance for us to think about lives being constructed in bytes and bits.