Journal of African Media Studies - Volume 6, Issue 3, 2014

New media technologies – Internet and mobile phones – have transformed the face of radio broadcasting. Research in this area has shown that these technologies are reconfiguring both radio’s institutional structures and its practices. Radio, now accessed on multiple digital platforms, is allowing diverse forms of utilization and engagement. In this article, I analyse the changing nature and meaning of ‘community’ in community radio in the digital age using insights from literature on imagined communities, translocality and liminality. I argue that new media technologies are opening up new spaces for community radio that go beyond the geographical and community of interest to embrace translocal and diasporic communities. There is thus need to interrogate the meaning of community radio in terms of audiences and programming in such new configurations. I use two community radio stations in South Africa to make my arguments. I conclude by pointing to the need for new research avenues on community radio in the digital age.

The Kenyan media landscape has transformed considerably in the period starting in the early part of the 1990s. This change is largely attributed to liberalization of the social economic and political context. This period of expansion has at the same time seen various efforts by the government and its agencies to control and regulate the media landscape. The electronic media sector has been the most affected, with laws being proposed and passed by parliament to enable greater control by government of the expanding communication sector. However, these efforts have always been met with opposition from owners of media institutions in the country, academics and civil society. It is against this backdrop of change and transformation that this article seeks to argue the role of normative media theory in shaping and guiding the policy debate in Kenya. This is done against the background of acknowledging the general flux that characterizes normative media theory in a postmodern, globalized and new media landscape such as Kenya’s.

There is a growing concern about the decline and possible extinction of the Igbo language. The Igbo are primarily located in the south-eastern part of Nigeria. This study analysed four interviews on Igbo Radio, an Igbo Internet radio station, to ascertain how Internet radio is being utilized in discussing the decline of the Igbo language. Drawing on ethnolinguistic vitality theory, this qualitative study triangulates four selected interviews on Igbo Radio, the website, and personal observations for the analysis. Three salient themes emerged: (1) decline and challenges of the Igbo language, (2) second-generation immigrants and the Igbo language, and (3) sustaining the Igbo language. The findings suggest that Igbo parents appear to have less vitality; as a result, they tend not to teach their children Igbo.

The use of social media, mainly Twitter, in the Johannesburg newsroom presents an opportunity for the opening up of media spaces to public engagement, thereby deepening democracy. This article, framed through radical democratic theory, is a scrutiny of journalists’ use of Twitter. The article deploys multidimensional methods against a theoretical conceptual approach. It uses a content analysis of Twitter feeds, discourse analysis, as well as interviews with journalists and editors to reach some reflective insights. The issues include the following: there is much ‘noise’ about, and within, Twitter in the newsroom but does this robust public engagement engage more voices, and therefore diversity, into the public sphere of journalism? Or could the world of Twitter in the newsroom, at this present moment, exist as a mainly consensus seeking one – that of the like-minded merely re-affirming each other’s views? The argument here, which is open for debate, is that Twitter presents an opportunity to deepen democracy, but at this moment it is limited, as the data gathered from newsrooms in Johannesburg show.

The medical drama series is uniquely positioned to draw together a technology of care as well as a technology of representation. It becomes the nexus where the series’ plot with its dramatic elements and the medium – namely, television, used to represent the narrative – converge. The human body forms the foundation of all television’s narrative. In relation to this, the nature of healing as something that concerns the body as a corporeal and social entity recuperating within a given time frame and within a particular space emerges. The continuity that television lends to the movement and flow of bodies further provides authenticity to the representation of the (healing) human body – a constituent part of the larger body politic itself. This article provides a theoretical and practical exploration by exploring the credits sequence of a South African Canadian medical drama series, Jozi H (2007), set in metropolitan Johannesburg.

This article analyses internal dynamics within the groups of people constituted on the state radio station, Radio Zimbabwe, as ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’ between March and April 2011. While it appears as if these groups were made up of a homogeneous people, a closer look at the broadcasts using critical discourse analysis suggests that each group was internally fraught with inequalities. President Mugabe along with a group labelled as ‘national heroes’ was constructed as superior to other comrades (‘Provincial heroes’ and ‘Liberation war heroes’). This setting apart of some people as better than others worked to justify why some people within the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party would forever be frontrunners in the party and in the country. Although all opposition groups have generally been depicted in state media as ‘traitors’, this article argues that former Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai and the faction that he led, the Movement for Democratic Change-Tsvangirai (MDC-T), were framed as the ‘worst of the traitors’. The then Deputy Prime Minister, Professor Arthur Mutambara, and his faction, the Movement for Democratic Change-Mutambara (MDC-M), escaped the vitriolic attack on the station. Ridiculing Tsvangirai and the MDC-T exclusively served to further delegitimize him and his faction as serious political contenders. It also worked to nurture the divisions that already existed within the opposition camp.

Cinema and Development in West Africa, James E. Genova (2013) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 206 pp., ISBN: 9780253010087, £15.99