Within a year, much of the world has adopted the norm of wearing masks to protect against the Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the political jostling that such face coverings have come to represent, it has become a social norm driven by circumstance.
Scholars have undertaken extensive work on the life cycle of norms to demonstrate how they cascade into society and eventually become internalised.
Advertisement
But to what extent does technology have a normative function – the power to shape human behaviour and deliver real-world consequences? In the absence of robust safeguards and in states with fragile democracies, could Africa become a testing ground for tech-enabled social engineering? Shaping norms or beliefs, governing how we vote, who we love and stirring up existing ethnic or religious cleavages?
Within a year, much of the world has adopted the norm of wearing masks to protect against the Covid-19 pandemic. Notwithstanding the political jostling that such face coverings have come to represent, it has become a social norm driven by circumstance.
Scholars have undertaken extensive work on the life cycle of norms to demonstrate how they cascade into society and eventually become internalised.
But to what extent does technology have a normative function – the power to shape human behaviour and deliver real-world consequences? In the absence of robust safeguards and in states with fragile democracies, could Africa become a testing ground for tech-enabled social engineering? Shaping norms or beliefs, governing how we vote, who we love and stirring up existing ethnic or religious cleavages?