DRAFT PAPER: PLEASE DO NOT CITE WITHOUT AUTHORS PERMISSION User Agency in the Middle Range: Rumors and the Reinvention of the Internet in Accra, Ghana (forthcoming in Science Technology and Human Values)

Among Internet users in Accra, Ghana rumors often supplanted direct human-machine interaction as the privileged mode for understanding how the Internet works. Over the course of 8months of ethnographic fieldwork in this West African, urban capital city, rumor emerged as one of several important processes through which users reinvented the Internet. Rumor amplified rare instances of wildly successful or harmful encounters with the Internet. This was particularly apparent in discussions of Internet fraud and scamming activities which seemed more widespread as a phenomenon of speech and social imagination than as one of Internet use. Significantly, many young Internet users who admitted that they themselves had not yet made any money on the Internet expressed the conviction that it was being widely used by clever, young Ghanaians (and others) to acquire thousands of dollars, the latest fashion, or the newest technologies by duping unsuspecting foreigners. Through the creation and diffusion of meanings in rumors, the Internet was collaboratively produced by Internet users in Accra as a tool for making ‘big gains.’