Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 5, Issue 2, 2013

Social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are growing in popularity in South Africa. With the increasing affordability of mobile handsets, users are able to access the mobile Internet and connect via mobile social networking applications. This article explores how Facebook is used by South African youth, with particular reference to their political participation and involvement. Research has shown the declining involvement of young people in political processes, particularly since democratic elections in 1994. This is an international trend, with a general global rise of political apathy and decreased news consumption among youth. However, Facebook and other new media applications widely used by young people have been seen as a potential vehicle to re-engage youth in political debate. The potential usefulness of such applications for creating networked publics and mobilizing political action was highlighted recently during the Arab Spring; and conversely, Facebook and Twitter have been used (e.g. in the United States) to target potential youth voters. The notion of e-democracy has raised the potential of the Internet to enhance political action and activism. The article draws on a national quantitative survey and Cape Town-based focus groups with South African youth in order to explore the links between Facebook use and political participation. The article argues that youth are engaging with alternative forms of political subactivism that work at the margins of the dominant public sphere.

The purpose of this article is to introduce and assess the effectiveness of Facebook as an informal learning tool in a postgraduate Communication Studies course, and whether it may be used to facilitate greater public debate around the role of the media and democracy in South Africa. A group of postgraduate students at the University of Johannesburg were encouraged to engage in online discussions using Media Works, a Facebook group designed by Media Monitoring Africa. The duration of the assignment was six weeks and was run from 13 August to 21 September 2012. Each week new topics related to the role of the media in society were identified for discussion. Although all were familiar with Facebook, students adopted a more academic approach and thereby unintentionally worked contrary to the more informal conversational mechanisms associated with this social network site. This article considers the comments posted during this period and the students’ perceptions of the experience, and thus explores the potential offered and challenges posed by using Facebook as an informal learning tool to encourage public debate at the postgraduate level.

Broad adoption of social network sites and mobile messaging in South Africa has made many-to-many communication increasingly accessible. This article tackles ongoing issues of differentiated access to and use of mobile communication, and particularly the specific digital materialities involved in mobile-centric access to the Internet. Specific local patterns of adoption and participation are sketched, in particular the influence of differential commodification of mobile communication, the tiered functionality of phones and cost saving through avoidance of high prepaid data tariffs. We present three distinctive case studies of mobile political discourse during The Spear controversy in May 2012 – activists’ MXit profiles, a popular Facebook group, the New Political Forum, and Facebook status updates posted from mobile applications. Both community dynamics in the Facebook group and the limited use of mobile link-sharing in the status updates suggest that commodified communication can stifle certain kinds of mobile participation in public discourse. While mobile use has expanded access to online political discourse, computer and smartphone users occupy a strategic position in a broader social media ecology, where Facebook updates connect with instant messaging, everyday talk and Google and Facebook rankings, where increasingly the question is not only ‘who speaks’, but also ‘who gets heard’.

Focusing on the Facebook presence of the African National Congress Youth League, Democratic Alliance Youth and Congress of the People Youth Movement as a collective case study, this article explores the following questions: is the Facebook presence created by youth leagues of the largest political parties an extension of South Africa’s public sphere? Can a citizen whose views are circumscribed by ideological auspices of a particular political party enhance the quality of the public sphere? What is the discourse of youth’s political deliberations in these forums? In answering the questions, the article argues that Facebook pages and groups are an extension of the public sphere as they attempt to get youth involved in politics in a technologically and socially transforming society; that as much as political party communication is propaganda and people tend to gravitate towards ideologies that conform to their world-view, party supporters on Facebook do challenge their political parties’ views; and that some arguments on Facebook enrich the public sphere discourse.

The objective of this work is approaching the political crisis occurred in Côte d´Ivoire after the contested elections of 2010, through the perspective of the Ivorian media and media professionals. This study draws theoretically on the media political economy and critical understanding of the relationship between democracy and the media. After a brief description of Côte d´Ivoire political history, as well as its media political economy, perceptions from foreign correspondents and Ivoirian journalist were gathered. Conclusions show the sheer complexity of the role played by the media, which goes beyond its information provider responsibility to turn into platforms for the political struggle in a highly political polarized environment. At the same time, it is demonstrated how foreign perceptions of Ivorian media performance are built against ideal representations of media that often fail to grasp particular contexts.

While the effects of negative election campaigns is a well-researched topic in mature democracies, it remains largely unexplored in transitional and nascent democracies such as those in Africa. This article addresses concerns that an insidious culture of intolerance, hate and insults in Ghanaian politics and electoral contests could undermine the efficacy of the country’s neo-democracy. The article draws on pre-election interviews with the two main contenders in Ghana’s 2012 elections to sound out their positions on the propriety and prudence of expressing a negative campaign platform. The interview responses are analysed in the context of past ads run by their parties, which reveal that the candidates’ disclaimers and public professions to run issue-oriented campaigns contradicted the practice of their party’s resort to negative campaigns. The article concludes that candidates and their parties are unlikely to abide by ethical injunctions and accordingly proposes the passage of a legal code to regulate broadcasting (including political advertising) in Ghana.

The transformation of the media landscape, facilitated by advances in communications technologies, has changed the dynamics of media-audience relationship and posed new challenges to reception research. Perhaps nowhere is this as profound as it is in transnational audience studies, for cross-cultural interactions have never been wider. This article attempts to highlight a new perspective on African audiences’ engagement with global media and point to new postulates in audience research. It briefly reviews key reception theories, ranging from the effects tradition to active audience paradigm and encoding-decoding model. It then offers a case study on Northern Nigerians’ interactions with international media, particularly the BBC World Service, to unveil the patterns and consequences of such interactions. The mainly Muslim Northern Nigerians were found to be high consumers of western media products, especially the BBC’s, but with high level of selectivity. Although they regard BBC as the most credible broadcaster that aids their understanding of international affairs and influences their everyday lives, they still see it as a western ideological instrument that portrays the West positively and depicts the Islamic world and Africa negatively. The findings reveal patterns and particularities of postcolonial audiences’ consumption of transnational media that suggest new theoretical postulates in reception research. They indicate the audiences’ tendency to exhibit a phenomenon of ‘selective believability’ in their interactions with international media. They also highlight the mediating roles of religion, culture, ideology and other extra-communication factors in such interactions, and identify the dynamics of credibility and believability. Credibility appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for believability in audiences’ consumption of dissonant messages.

Nigeria’s greatest obstacle in this twenty-first century is entrenched in the low level of sustainability in most areas of human endeavour, resulting in damaged economy and looming shallow development despite the nation’s vast and abundant resources, both human and natural. Nigeria has the enormous capability of moving from a developing country to a developed state; however, the lack of some basic elements together with the vices termed ‘Nigerian factors’ have eaten deep into the nation’s institutional fabrics and denied her the opportunity of transforming her dreams. As academia, development experts and policy-makers have continued to search for the right mix of technology, methodology, easy-to-use and understandable scientific elements and infrastructure that would suit the nation’s peculiar circumstances towards meeting her developmental needs. This situation, no doubt, calls for adaptation of social media’s unique opportunities and adjustment of its weaknesses to aptly blend with the forces of innovation and ability of cultural and behavioural changes. Concerted efforts are required of the Nigerian government and its agencies in awakening the consciousness of the citizenry to integrate social media culture into the mainstream of Nigerian culture so as to produce positive changes that are evidences of sustainability.