Tag: craze

What we are an information-hungry people is not in doubt.  We consume information from abroad as much as we import physical goods and services.  The average internet user visits the Google search engine looking for all kinds of information.  During the salt-can-cure-Ebola hype, a friend said her mother told her she believed salt and hot water bath worked because she got the piece of news from Google.

I am a regular consumer of Google goods.  I use it to search for news items, websites, past articles, photographs, definitions, scholarly articles, in fact, anything new.  However, in my years of consuming internet goods, I get frustrated about not finding enough local content.

When expecting a baby two years ago, I supplemented any information I got from my doctors and the pregnancy books I read with what was said about the topic online.  I subscribed to a foreign website (www.babycenter.com) which sent me weekly newsletters about my developing baby.  I got my baby layette list, tips on nutrition, pregnancy complications, and even labour online.  I joined the online forum for mothers with the same birth month as my baby but could not contribute because all the experiences were foreign.  I only read posts by others to learn what I could.

While most of the information I get online help (note: I search for credible sources and crosscheck whatever information I get), it does not always meet my needs because most of the sites are foreign.  I find myself wishing there could be Nigerian versions of the websites prescribing authentic local solutions to our problems.  Just like there are not enough textbooks at the tertiary level written by Nigerians, we do not have enough content covering all areas of endeavours in our country online.  Many times, sadly, the sources of what should be local information are foreign.  It seems the only area that Nigerians are active online is on the social media.

While many Nigerian websites exist, they are either shallow or never up to date – except for few corporate websites.  You visit some sites and still find news that was relevant two to three years ago.  Recently, I sought information about a particular local government online.  I found the web page of the local government and got a phone number I could call for further enquiries.  When I called, the lady on the other end of the line said she had left the local government for over a year.  But her phone number is still online.

I get seriously irked by downloads reproduced by our national dailies, particularly when they deal with health and nutrition or recipes.  When I read recipes that list such ingredients as broccoli, kale, and others that the average Nigerian cannot get in the market, or when a writer advises that some not readily available fruits like strawberries are rich in some nutrients, I wonder why we have to be such copycats.

In academic circles, the issue of foreign/local content imbalance is also a big problem.  Many of our tertiary institutions have websites with outdated news or links that lead nowhere.  How else do they want to progress on the ranking table of the best universities in the world when they cannot maintain up-to-date websites?  Part of the criterion used to rank institutions is web visibility.  The amount of research work placed online, published in reputable journals and cited by others give institutions visibility.  If the research works are not available online, how would they be visible?  It is so bad that when conducting academic research, many times students do not find very good local researchers to cite in their research work because our academics do not post their research work online.  This lack of local content affects us much more than we can comprehend.  It is not very good that many of the good textbooks used to teach are by foreign authors.  No matter how good they may be, they lack the local perspective, which is what we need to understand topics clearly.

I am looking forward to when the Nigerian versions of useful websites such as babycenter.com; when books by Nigerian authors, robust websites maintained by federal government agencies that provide rich and timely information, and all kinds of authentic local content on our culture, heritage, languages, technology, food, clothes, whatever, would be common place so that Nigerians can access genuine and timely information to meet various needs.  More importantly, we would be contributing to world knowledge and move from being an information-consumer nation to information creators.