"Dans les démocraties africaines encore fragiles et à citoyenneté postulée, ce livre, en prenant l’exemple du Sénégal, pose la question des mass média sénégalais dans la perspective historique de leur émergence, dans leurs tiraillements ontologiques (tradition ou modernité) et dans leur ... s orientations parfois contradictoires; le tout sous-tendu par la question prospective de leur devenir. Les mass média sénégalais, malgré leur foisonnement, sont encore en quête de leur identité. Des spécialistes se sont penchés avec intérêt sur les contradictions qui traversent cette presse, dont le rôle considérable joué dans les avancées démocratiques du pays, avec en point culminant, l’alternance politique survenue en 2000, est unanimement reconnu. Cependant, ce foisonnement exceptionnel et ce rôle incontestable ne sont pas forcément signe de maturité; dans une certaine mesure, les mass média sénégalais s’inscrivent dans un processus de maturation encore non abouti, malgré la croissance exponentielle des titres. Les medias sénégalais sont, en effet, tributaires d’un environnement social, économique et juridique qu’il est nécessaire de pénétrer pour comprendre leur dynamique propre et leurs difficultés, comme la contradiction entre oralité et nouvelles technologies qui n’est pas la moindre." (Préface, page 9-10) more

"In this essay I have tried to show how, by taking as point of departure an understanding of religion as a practice of mediation, Pentecostalism has increasingly ‘taken place’, so to speak, in the public sphere as a result of Ghana’s turn to democracy and the liberalization and commercializati ... on of the media. Relatively undisturbed by the state, but all the more indebted to the emerging image-economy, Pentecostalism has spread in space, disseminating signs and adopting formats not entirely of its own making, and been taken up by popular culture. In the entanglement of religion and entertainment new horizons of social experience emerged, thriving on fantasy and vision and popularizing a certain pentecostally oriented mood. This movement of spatial extension, as I tried to show, is at times criticized from within, as pastors and believers fear to loose control. Yet, the fact that, on the level of experience, distraction and devotion are kept apart cannot be summoned in defense of an ontological difference between cinema and church, entertainment and religion. At the same time it would be too easy to simply write off the public appearance of Pentecostal-derived images as mere entertainment, as if the format of entertainment would completely absorb the religious and, in a sense, put an end to religion. The point is that in Ghana, Pentecostalism is alive and kicking exactly because it casts religion in a new (postmodern?) form, which is geared to mass spectatorship and part and parcel of Zerstreuung. Zerstreuung is meant here in the sense of ‘the dispersed, centrifugal structure of mass phenomena’ (Weber 1996: 94) which, as Benjamin showed, is condensed in the technology of film as it blows apart the prison of metropolitan space by ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’ and offers adventurous travelling among the ruins (1978:236), and puts together its imaged elements under new laws, which require new ways of reception that parallel the process of recording." (Conclusion) more