Dovetailing Desires for Democracy with New ICTs’ Potentiality as Platform for Activism

Mobile communication is increasingly playing a leading role in the mobilization of social and political protests around the world. There seem to be no known geographical boundaries for the digital revolution which the world is currently witnessing. From Chad to Chile, Mali to Myanmar, a new breed of digitally-based social initiatives have been gathering momentum for years, undoubtedly reinventing social activism as activists and ordinary people alike, eager to empower themselves politically and socially, embrace computers, mobile phones, and other web-based devices and technologies. With activists, mobile monitors, citizen journalists and digital story-tellers based in sub-Saharan Africa joining the fray, astutely bypassing hegemonic mass media gatekeepers by navigating through the online sphere to inspire collective political and social involvement across the continent, this highly contested discipline of research has attracted more attention than ever before. In spite of this attention, regionally in sub-Saharan Africa, there has been a shocking lack of empirical accounts detailing who is doing what, why, where, when and with what impact. It is this gap that this book hopes to fill

Newsmaking cultures in Africa: Normative trends in the dynamics of socio-political & economic struggles

This book contributes to a broadened theorisation of journalism by exploring the intricacies of African journalism and its connections with the material realities undergirding the profession on the continent. It carries theoretically driven studies that collectively deploy a wide range of evidence to shed some light on newsmaking cultures in Africa – the everyday routines, defining epistemologies, as well as ethical dilemmas. The volume digs beneath the standardized and universalised veneer of professionalism to unpack routine practices and normative trends spawned by local factors, including the structural conditions of deprivation, entrenched political instability (and interference), pervasive neo-patrimonial governance systems, and the influences of technological developments. It demonstrates that these varied and complex circumstances profoundly shape the foundations of journalism in Africa, resulting in routine practices that are both normatively distinct and equally in tune with (imported) Western journalistic cultures. The book thus broadly points to the dialectical nature of news production and the inconsistent and contradictory relationships that characterise news production cultures in Africa