Comprehending the Digital Disparities in Africa

The digital divide has a significant impact on the ways in which information across Africa is developed, shared, and perceived. This opening chapter seeks to analyse the problems and opportunities associated with the ubiquitous digital revolution, providing a cross-disciplinary examination of digital disparities inhibiting social, political, and economic progress across Africa. It also attempts to conceptualise the digital divide in an African setting. It will introduce some of the main concepts associated with the digital divide and analyse them from an African perspective. The chapter also provides specific examples of how various countries in Africa are dealing with problems associated with the digital exclusion of their citizens. This contribution also provides the justification, aims, and objectives of the book before ending with chapter summaries of the collection

Rethinking the role of the Internet in sustaining democratic participation in Zimbabwe

Political parties have increasingly turned to computer technology since the 1980s both for internal organisational purposes as well as for direct communication with members and voters. In today’s globalised world, the growth of digital media is bringing about fundamental changes in the way people think and act. Similarly, the development of global information and communication infrastructures has briskly transformed the ways in which knowledge and content are created, produced and distributed. This study aims to critically examine the overall role played by the Internet in railroading democratic changes in Zimbabwe. The March 2008 national elections will be used as the primary case study for this research, essentially scrutinising the extent to which Zimbabwean exiles made use of foreign-based news sites run independently by Zimbabwean journalists to channel pro-opposition information into the country, effectively leading to President Robert Mugabe’s unprecedented election loss.A critical analysis of news articles published by the so-called dissident websites will help this research investigate the overall influence of the Internet in shaping the 2008 voting outcome in Zimbabwe. The research is based on an already-developed hypothesis, which claims that Zimbabweans in the Diaspora, facing a gloomy future because of a battered economy back home and equally perturbed by President Mugabe’s decision to deny them what they considered their democratic right to vote, played a fundamental role in the election outcome by relaying anti-Mugabe, equally biased publicity to families and friends back home. This consequently and indirectly played a crucial role in determining the outcome of the elections, effectively enhancing democratic participation. In this context, the research is dedicated to proving or disproving the affirmation that Zimbabwe’s Britain-based community, whether deliberately or not, used its exposure to the Internet to discredit President Mugabe’s government by encouraging relatives back home to vote for the then-opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), consequently leading to President Mugabe’s first ever election defeat in the March 2008 elections

Emerging political narratives on Malawian digital spaces

Social media platforms are being considered new podiums for political transformation as political dictatorships supposedly convert to overnight democracies, and many more people are not only able to gain access to information, but also gather and disseminate news from their own perspective. When looking at the situation in several sub-Saharan African countries, it becomes clear there are various challenges restricting social media and its palpable yet considerably constrained ability to influence political and social changes. Access to the internet, or lack thereof, is a recognised social stratification causing a “digital divide” thanks to existing inequalities within African and several other societies throughout the world. This article reports on a study that analysed a popular Facebook page in Malawi using a discursive online ethnographic examination of interactions among social media participants seeking to determine the level of activism and democratic participation taking shape on the Malawian digital space. The study also examined potential bottlenecks restraining effective digital participation in Malawi. The article argues that while social media's potential to transform societies is palpable, keeping up with the pace of transformation is no easy task for both digital and non-digital citizens. The study demonstrated social media's potential but also highlighted the problems facing online activists in Malawi, including chief among them digital illiteracy. Therefore, the digital sphere is not a political podium for everyone in Malawi as shown by the analysis of digital narratives emerging from the country's online environment, which opens its doors to only a tiny fraction of the population

Is citizen journalism dead? An examination of recent developments in the field

The reliance on untrained reporters with limited or no understanding of journalistic standards has become increasingly widespread particularly in less democratic environments and these practices have impacted news gathering and reporting. There however has been some debate about the conceivability, capacity, reliability and acceptability of citizen journalists due to the lack of the professional standards associated with the profession. Even so, diverse forms of citizen journalism continue to emerge and develop in several countries in the Global South, such as Zimbabwe and Mozambique, examined in-depth in our study of the current frameworks, trends, practices and principles of citizen journalism in Africa. Buoyed by what appears like a slump in global citizen journalism research, we identify specific cases to rethink the concept, seeking to theoretically contribute to new directions on the phenomenon’s role in African societies. Our analysis suggests that a reconceptualization of citizen journalism is imperative thanks to several factors, including improved access to the Internet and changing attitudes toward political dissent and participation, citizen journalism in Africa is taking new directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Does Digital Exclusion Undermine Social Media’s Democratizing Capacity?

Claims have been made that the advent of social media and its assumed ability to fuel social strife and organize anti-government protests has empowered people around the world to successfully challenge repressive authorities. However, in an era in which several issues ranging from digital colonialism to digital exclusion among other challenges, have become so dominant, it is our role as researchers to question some of these claims especially when they seem unsubstantiated. Sharing or finding solidarity is something that can be done on social media platforms but nothing is as critical as being part of the digital community. In that regard, questions surrounding digital exclusion are critical especially when discussing the extent to which social media influences democracy, questions that several scholars from every corner of the world are currently seized with. In this article, we not only identify social media’s potential but we also probe problems associated with beliefs that digital networks have the capacity to support democratization. Contemporary societies should be asking what the real gains of the fall of the Berlin Wall are in the work of these fundamental digital shifts, which have left both negative and positive outcomes on all countries including established Western democracies

Journalism and the Global South: Shaping Journalistic Practices and Identity Post “Arab Spring”: Special Issue: Remembering the Arab Spring: Pursuing Possibilities and Impediments in Journalistic Professional Practice across the Global South

It has since been eleven years since the rise of the “Arab Spring”: a series of anti-government uprisings that spread across the Arab world, ultimately leading to regime changes in several countries including Tunisia, Egypt and Libya. Using social media and other digital platforms to communicate and strategize, pro-democracy activists demanded increased transparency and freedom from their long-serving leaders. This special issue has sought to probe ways through which journalism is evolving in non-Western societies over a decade since the protests began. Articles accepted in this issue adopted several methodological and theoretical approaches to appraise the current state of journalism in the “developing” world questioning what influences, if any, the protests had. We sought to contribute to knowledge on ways through which the “Arab Spring” was impacting journalism practices in the Arab world and beyond. It’s our hope that findings presented in this issue will enlighten new insights and inspire new research endeavors on the transformation of journalism in the Arab World and indeed other “Southern” nations particularly as it relates to digital realms

‘Our old pastor thinks the mobile phone is a source of evil.’ Capturing contested and conflicting insights on digital wellbeing and digital detoxing in an age of rapid mobile connectivity

While Africa has largely been considered a digitally-disconnected country, recent studies have shown that connectivity figures are on a rise. In this paper, we theorize digital wellbeing in a context characterized by a fast-growing number of mobile data users despite a historically low Internet penetration. It is focused on an ongoing ethnographic research on mobile users and digital inequalities in Africa, zooming in on results from an explorative study featuring 10 in-depth interviews with young adult heavy users (more than 4–5 hours a day) and seeking to understand strategies they use in attaining digital wellbeing. The findings show how the sampled young adults (18–30 years old) struggle with the daily realities of digital participation including addiction and generational conflict in technology use. Results also reveal ways through which electronic connectivity is perceived both be a tool of freedom as well as a subtle form of potential digital enslavering

Putting forward sustainability as a model for journalism education and training

African journalism practice presents unique opportunities and challenges that require journalists to be equipped with the necessary skills, knowledge, and values to engage in sustainable journalism. Training institutions play a critical role in ensuring that journalists are not only professionally-ready to execute their mandate but also that they can safeguard and promote ethical values in their everyday work. Some of these values include “truth telling, independence, objectivity, fairness, inclusivity and social justice” (Gade, Nduka, and Dastger 2017, 10). Africa, like other regions of the Global South, has several journalism training institutions that provide an opportunity to challenge “hegemonic epistemologies and ontologies of Western-centric journalism studies” (Mutsvairo et al. 2021, 993). In the context of this submission, the present study investigates the current state of sustainable journalism in Africa. We examined data based on a syllabi analysis of journalism programs in Kenya, South Africa and Ghana to appraise what role sustainable journalism education and training could play in Africa. Findings show that efforts are already in place across select learning and training institutions but also point to profound gaps in the curriculum, pedagogy and resources needed to prepare journalists for sustainable journalism

Social media in the Global South: A Network Dataset of the Malian Twittersphere

With the expansion of mobile communications infrastructure, social media usage in the Global South is surging. Compared to the Global North, populations of the Global South have had less prior experience with social media from stationary computers and wired Internet. Many countries are experiencing violent conflicts that have a profound effect on their societies. As a result, social networks develop under different conditions than elsewhere, and our goal is to provide data for studying this phenomenon. In this dataset paper, we present a data collection of a national Twittersphere in a West African country of conflict. While not the largest social network in terms of users, Twitter is an important platform where people engage in public discussion. The focus is on Mali, a country beset by conflict since 2012 that has recently had a relatively precarious media ecology. The dataset consists of tweets and Twitter users in Mali and was collected in June 2022, when the Malian conflict became more violent internally both towards external and international actors. In a preliminary analysis, we assume that the conflictual context influences how people access social media and, therefore, the shape of the Twittersphere and its characteristics. The aim of this paper is to primarily invite researchers from various disciplines including complex networks and social sciences scholars to explore the data at hand further. We collected the dataset using a scraping strategy of the follower network and the identification of characteristics of a Malian Twitter user. The given snapshot of the Malian Twitter follower network contains around seven million accounts, of which 56,000 are clearly identifiable as Malian. In addition, we present the tweets. The dataset is available at: https://osf.io/mj2q/?view_only=460f5daef1024f05a0d45e082d26059f (peer review version).Comment: 17 pages, 6 figure