Social media and the demotic turn in Africa's media ecology
Corresponding Author
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication and Media, Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
Correspondence
Farooq A. Kperogi, School of Communication and Media, Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, 402 Bartow Avenue, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA 30144, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorCorresponding Author
Farooq A. Kperogi
School of Communication and Media, Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia, USA
Correspondence
Farooq A. Kperogi, School of Communication and Media, Radow College of Humanities and Social Sciences, 402 Bartow Avenue, Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, GA 30144, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Search for more papers by this authorAbstract
Social media platforms have exploded in the last decade and have emerged as the arenas for discursive democracy, sociality, and digital dissidence across Africa. This article historicizes and genealogizes the exponential, if slightly imperceptible but nonetheless phenomenal, growth, maturation, and spread of social media on a continent that had been described in the scholarly literature as the blackhole of informational capitalism. It argues that the progressive centrality of social media in the quotidian lives of Africans, which has invited consternation and censorship from many African governments and inspired precarity in the traditional media sphere, instantiates the materialization of the demotic turn in communication, which situates the ordinary person as the fulcrum of the communicative process.
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