BY MULUGETA GUDETA
The nature of the media in Africa is defined by many factors. The first is the fact that Africa’s media are controlled by global media organizations or multinational media and communication corporations that control and shape both the technology and content of media activities in Africa. Western media corporations define or shape the agendas of African media organizations and their global counterparts. Western media date back from the late 19 th and 20 th centuries while African media came into existence in the post-colonial period. Social media in Africa is even a more recent phenomenon.
As such, the media in Africa is underdeveloped, and their functions distorted by the long history of post-colonial relationships between the developed centers and the peripheries of the global economy. The rise of social media at the dawn of the 21 st century, have further deepened the contradictions between the genuine aspirations of the people of Africa and the objectives of multinational domination of the global media which can be summed as making more profits out of their new gadgets while maintaining the uneven development of the media in the center and periphery of the world economies.
By the same token, the role of social media is shaped by the above contradictions that both undermine and at the same time promote Africa’s aspirations for genuine freedom and the need to make its own voice heard in the global arena. It is by now clear that social media have both constructive and destructive functions in Africa. They are both functional and dysfunctional, assets and liabilities weapons for acquiring knowledge and as instruments of neocolonial domination.
The constructive functions of media in general and social media in particular are described as follows: “as offering bigger opportunities for African content creators and for its increasing population. This is supported by government policies supporting the open internet. For a long time, Africa has been narrated as a pessimistic continent calling it a dark continent.” This is a reflection of the process of media ownership by Africans that has just started and is proceeding faster than anyone was expecting. “ With tools and equipment, Africans have started creating their own narratives emphasizing stories and content that celebrate the normal African lifestyle making a positive impact on its future.” as one observer of the African social media scene recently commented.
The characterization of Africa in the Western media has added to the negative image of the continent although the growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is disproving the false claims of Africa being a “dark continent”. According to another observer of the African media scene, “The characterization of Africa in the Western media is mostly caused by the effects of colonialism, which gives a false impression that Africa is isolated from the rest of the world.”
As the ICT revolution is sweeping through the world, Africa cannot remain isolated. On the contrary are joining the global communities of mobile phones and social media users en masse. As one commentator recently wrote, “In the mid-1990s, as the use of mobile phones started its rapid spread in much of the developed world, few thought of Africa as potential market. Now, with more than 400 million subscribers, its market is larger than North America’s” The growth of the internet, mobile phones and social media platforms in Africa was not effected without a price. The Western social media platforms are still dominating and shaping African’s social media contents, sometimes proving they are rather liabilities more than assets. The absence of strong legal safeguards against the spread of fake news and negative contents as far as Africa is concerned, has led to the use of the internet not as a weapon for acquiring new knowledge but for spreading false rumors that often lead to violence and all kinds of real or imaginary conflicts.
However, this is not to say that Africa was as peaceful as the Garden of Eden before the advent of the internet and social media. The truth is that the new technological weapons have further exacerbated the volatility of African political and social problems by giving them prominence in global media reporting. Lack of adequate knowledge on the part of the end users of social media has also contributed to violent contents that play on the passion rather than on rationalization of many African social media users. It is however important to observe that any new technology usually comes with drawbacks but improves as it grows through time. The negative effects of social media are also bound to diminish in the long run and the problems they are creating at present are also bound to disappear with greater knowledge in their utilization as well as with the growing literacy or education of African social media users.
The dual and contradictory implications social media on African culture can be seen from different perspectives. For some, social media is Africa plays a positive role by integrating the people of the continent into global culture, thereby making the journey towards Africa’s reinvention a lot shorter and easier. The onus also rests on Africans themselves as they are the ones entitled to use social media content critically, working hard to produce their own contents in the process. Africa is a continent where tradition and modernity are fighting to shape the destinies of more than one billion people or one eighth of the global population. Tradition in Africa is not something that can die or transcended easily because it is embedded in the lives of hundreds of millions of Africans. Tradition or culture in Africa can be improved, modernized and transformed if you like but it cannot be overlooked because culture and tradition is Africa is synonymous with identity.
The right vision for Africans may be to shape their own destinies while remaining an integral part of the global community of cultures and traditions.
What can be done to overcome the dysfunctional role of social media in Africa?
The answer to this question may be long and difficult but the role of social media in Africa cannot be reshaped by government control however benevolent or by multinational corporations however rich they may be. Instead of this, Africans should be allowed to own social media platforms and contents in one way or another as part and parcel of their vision of owning their destinies because the media is a key component of the process.
The distortions of Africa’s global media image are due, as we saw above, to the ownership or domination of social media platforms by Western multinational corporations that care little about Africa’s narratives or the conflicts that are going on across the length and breadth of the vast continent.
In a blog page entitled, Social Media Futures: How to change the African Narrative, the author Bridget Boskeye writes that social media is providing a tremendous opportunity for African content creators and their rapidly growing audiences to tell a different story about the African continent, cautioning that, “This powerful celebration and reimagining is fragile and should be supported by internet-literate government policies that support the open internet.”
African is indeed building a functional social media culture that would lead the continent towards the process of reinventing the African reality by preserving and modernizing its cultures and traditions. However, since social media ownership is located outside Africa and denominated by powerful multinational media corporations, the road to Africa’s autonomous social media creation is bound to be bumpy if not long.
The struggle to stem neocolonial perceptions that are still proving tenable despite technological progress is also bound to be complex. Africa’s growth and development in the media sector may not be measured by the number of mobile owners or users of social media platforms but by the new contents about African lives as they are lived by ordinary Africans with all their challenges and hopes.
Africa’s genuine freedom will only start when Africa creates its own social media platforms to tell the world the whole truth about its identity and rich culture and traditions. In this sense Africa’s true freedom can only be inseparable from its media freedom and the transition from a dysfunctional to a functional social media can only be effected when Africans take possession of both the social media technologies and their contents and platforms.
The subversive nature of Western social media platforms as vehicles of Western national interests is something that can be overcome when Africans will have a determining role in shaping or influencing social media contents. As the above-quoted author of the blog page says, “Negative stories, along with other existing media narratives, around “the dark continent” have continued to negatively define Africa to outsiders while being internalized by many Africans. Now armed with tools to create their own stories…African people and governments have begun to create their own stories to celebrate the normalcy of African lives and contributions, working towards an African-optimistic future.”
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 16 NOVEMBER 2022
