Full Description
African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume contributes to the broader project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies.
Contents
Foreword
Paddy Scannell
1. Decolonizing and provincializing audience and internet studies: contextual approaches from African vantage points
Wendy Willems and Winston Mano
2. Media culture in Africa? A practice-ethnographic approach
Jo Helle Valle
3. 'The African listener': state-controlled radio, subjectivity, and agency in colonial and post-colonial Zambia
Robert Heinze
4. Popular engagement with tabloid TV: a Zambian case study
Herman Wasserman and Loisa Mbatha
5. 'Our own WikiLeaks': popularity, moral panic and tabloid journalism in Zimbabwe
Admire Mare
6. Audience perceptions of radio stations and journalists in the Great Lakes region
Marie-Soleil Frère
7. Audience participation and BBC's digital quest in Nigeria
Abdullahi Tasiu Abubakar
8. 'Radio locked on @Citi973': Twitter use by FM radio listeners in Ghana
Seyram Avle
9. Mixing with MXit when you're 'mix': mobile phones and identity in a small South African town
Alette Schoon and Larry Strelitz
10. Brokers of belonging: elders and intermediaries in Kinshasa's mobile phone culture
Katrien Pype
11. Agency behind the veil: gender, digital media and being 'ninja' in Zanzibar
Thembi Mutch
