African Digital Cultures

PREFACE Africans Here and Now and the Digital Magical

NHAMO ANTHONY MHIRIPIRI

Content creation for all types of topics and themes on digital has taken the African continent by storm. The content creators are largely ordinary people who would not ordinarily fit into the classification of traditional journalists and mass communicators. These are ordinary people who are experimenting with genres for different platforms, while carving out discursive spaces and a market niche that suits Africa’s contemporary demands for alternative content on information and entertainment separate from what is produced for ‘mainstream media’. In a way, digital platforms are mainstreaming themselves in various digital platforms, repositioning and reforming their presumed alternativism. Hence, the edited book ‘African Digital Cultures: Platforms, Performances and Perspectives’ is a timely and most welcome addition to the growing corpus of research literature on the surging phenomenon of Africans on the continent and in the diaspora’s production of content for digital platforms.

Digital technologies are now an intricate part of the lived experiences of most peoples of the world. Africans are no exception. Statistics show that more and more Africans, especially the young, are showing remarkable preference for production, distribution and consumption on digital platforms for all types of content. According to the statistical portal for market data Statistica, social media penetration in Africa across all user platforms in 2024 stands as follows: 40.4% in North Africa, 41.6% in Southern Africa, 15.8% in West Africa, 10.1% in East Africa, and 9.6% in Central Africa. Digital spaces, also interchangeably referred to as the internet or social media, host digital cultures with different intentions and objectives. These spaces or platforms include but are not limited to WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), Snapchat and TikTok. These have different communication and information potentialities, most dependent on the type or nature of digital technologies and their functions. Such technologies and functions often determine the different genres of content production, distribution, presentations, and consumption. For instance, WhatsApp generally allows smaller publics space for more intimate conversations, although leading news organizations also use the channel’s broadcast tools to send text, photos, videos, stickers, and polls. Audiences pick up these posts and resend them to their friends and acquaintances as individual and group chats. Levels of user “intimacy” may vary on platforms, with more “public” news posted on sites regarded as appropriate for purpose.

The Chinese social media app – TikTok – is more attuned for short-form videos stretching from 15 to 60 seconds in length. Amateur and professional creators use the app and platform whose format is popular for entertainment and comedy, although it is frequently used for infotainment. Sometimes audio-visual art and activism are combined as artivism that presents for a mass audience appealing texts that are catchy, light and less serious.

Sociality is a vital part of digital media cultures, and there is a level at which both intimate communications and public communication of a political nature are underpinned with an inevitable publicness. The highly private issues around representations of the self using selfies (cellphilms), travelogues, food diaries, quirky stuff, dating, and other personal exertions are not far much different from communications that direct their focus on governance and questions of public political power. Both are being played out in the public domain with various pretentions about publicness or privateness. The expressions of issues traditionally reserved for the private sphere on the democratized media spaces has imploded the liminal spaces of public and private. The Habermasian public sphere that presupposes rationality and discussion or debate on issues of public interest is turned on its head and the body of its epistemic and ontological purpose contorted in a grotesque manner that however represents the logic and ambiguity of contemporary communication cultural systems. Ordinary people are now mass communicators and they have burst the seams of normative standards, communicative etiquettes’ and conservative formalities of the old Fourth Estate of ‘professional’ journalism. This is a dilemma but also an inevitable reality that makes Mare and Ureke ruefully note that “private affairs and spaces find expression in public and constitute what we may term “public privacy”. This is not said with a nostalgia for the past communication structures and strictures.

The main objective of the book is to foreground African digital cultures in order to understand how Africans at home on the continent and in the diaspora interact with digital technologies while making sense of their everyday lives. The book makes bold assertions about the innovations and agency of Africans in the production of content for digital platforms, whether these are the seemingly innocuous mediatized ‘soft content’ of publicized private issues, or the political content that imbues itself with the decorum of serious hard news and whose publicness is often not questioned. On either extreme of “soft” content and “hard content” African producers and consumer of content, use digital communication technologies for the signification of a repertoire of content and genres representational of the local or diasporic African conditions. The seemingly frivolous and trial contain ultimately a ‘serious’ import that responds to and is expressive of the serious and important especially when notions of commodification and democracy in the local and global content are counterpoised to explain politics and power dynamics. Nothing is as innocent as it appears on the surface. Whether it is engaging with “trivia” such as selfies, or the publicly discursive materials on democracy and human rights, the book locates all its content within a neo-liberal capitalist system, whose main objectives are the realization of profit and exploitation of socio-economic relations (Fuchs, 2014). The point here is that digital technologies are connected to already existing local traditions and are shaped and transformed by them.

There is also a plurality of African cultures that depend on spatial conditions where people have traits, values and sensibilities in common but with distinct differences, notwithstanding their Africannness. The book is clear that there is no homogenous African culture. That does not mean there is no such thing as a transcendental African condition or personality. The scholarship in the book is commendable in how it is confident and assertive in championing for a new ontology and epistemic tradition predicated on emancipatory decoloniality. Stories are now told from the perspective of the Africans. Nothing is “trashy”, to use Kenneth Harrow’s appreciation of African cultural productions that exist at the margins of the dominant elitist neoliberal capitalist cultural production processes. Again, such alternative narratives outside the dominance of African elitism as represented and controlled by the African state, civil society organizations or the market on the one hand, or the global socio-economic, political and cultural centers provide a new hope for democratic communicative spaces. For example, even if the online content producers were to construct texts on the so-called superstitious paranormal – which for too long is a stereotypical architype of Africa – the truth is that such content is not easily dismissible as primordial fetishes seen as the antithesis of rationality and development – but a new understanding of Africans’ existential realities. The acceptance of a diversity of content that signifies Africanness rejects such condescension but thinks out its reason. Kenneth Harrow (2007) and Achille Mbembe (2001) have celebrated such experiences and practices and explained their significance. The Euro-American-centric conceptualization of development tended to undervalue and belittle African imaginaries, condemning everything to superstition and backwardness. Now African cosmologies and imaginaries are showing their transiency and how transcendental they are.

The different chapters explore how digital technologies are (re)shaping African societies. They are analytic about how African content producers and their audiences perform mediated citizenship in the cocoons of formal and informal politics, how they (re)produce and consummate intimate and public sociality online, how they entertain themselves online, express their individual and group identities, and how they resist external constructions of the continent, on the continent and abroad. African digital spaces are accommodating for instance what is deemed ludicrous and incredible, especially in the expression of spirituality and religion. New wave pastors and imams are online performing miracles before the full gaze of local and foreign audiences, marketing their metaphysical skills. Whilst they can be dismissed as charlatans, they still have lots of followers and believers. Africans have long infused ‘life’ into that which was viewed in a Cartesian sense as inanimate and ‘lifeless’. Symbolic significance was a long held perspective in African culture-rocks talk, birds and animals have a life and presence beyond their mere existence. This is a world of ‘magic’ that was reduced to fetish and blind unthinking ritual. Human and Nature were intricately bound together and there was no clear demarcation of one from the other. Dehumanization is in part a denial of naturalization, that is why the new post-human movement is trying to reconnect to the essence and simplicity of life especially now when Western development has led to the dangerous road of possible human extinction due to climate change and widespread pollution of the soils, air and water bodies.

As Africans immerse themselves in digital technologies in order to create digital cultures what is particularly important is that the immersion entails a merging of the African agent with what is supposed to be the consumed experience or technology. They become one. There is nearly a constant merging (blending), emerging and re-emerging of technologies, self and community in much more complex forms that simulate closely the acts of engagement and reformation of Being. What is important is to ascertain that the new forms of Being are not harmful to both the Human and his or her environment. Do they rehumanize the being or they are (re)creations of a complex cyber-ogre without norms or values? The ethics of embracing the new technologies thus remain critical to the preservation and continuation of the Human spirit.

The new popular mass communicators are no longer just the conventional professionals that produce content in regular news and entertainment organizational bureaucratic structures, but ordinary citizens. These content creators come in different guises using difference social media platforms for content production and dissemination. They are mass communicators due to their reach of mass audiences via digital platforms that are often outside the ownership and control of governments or the corporate sectors. Such online content producers are known as “Influencers” and they are a vital part of the global media ecosystem. Governments, civil society organizations and the corporate sector do interact with their content willy-nilly. Africans are consuming online content and information on a regular basis. They have an impact on the forming of audiences or users’ personal views, behavior, social engagement and identity and psychosocial development. Individuals constantly discover online community with diverse influencers, thereby solidifying their own senses of belonging. It is not always the case that online content imbues a positive impact on their audience. There is always lingering the misuse and abuse of content and the online behavior of content creators and influencers. Major risks are cyberbullying, misinformation, disinformation and imitation of psychopathic or unruly influencers.

A common facet is the commodification of African digital cultures that are quickly sprouting on various platforms. The personalities and new celebrities appearing on platforms exhibit a performativity of self and content that is intricately conscious of how texts and genres are both materials and commodities open to both social and financial transactioning. Most texts are monetized and distributed in innovative ways that rely on downloads, shares, livestreaming and cumulative audience ‘likes’. In short, digital cultures and the texts in which they are packaged are part of an aggressive and assertive market economy.

In modern African democracies influencers are now implicated in the commodification of political discourses to the detriment of the formation of informed public opinion. South Africa’s investigative newspaper Daily Maverick, for instance, bemoans the “the buying and selling of influence on the social media platform X”. Timse et al. (2024) note that trusting content users unknowingly consume political content that is “part of carefully crafted, paid campaigns”. Political parties and interest groups secretly invest substantial amounts of money “to manipulate public discourse, distorting the democratic process and shaping voter perceptions with endorsements that are anything but authentic” (Timse et.al., 2024). A growing culture industry of the “commodification of influence” deliberately manipulates public opinion through paid endorsements by “anonymous mega influencers”. Such anonymous influencers are difficult to track as compared to accounts held by celebrities, politicians and popular content creators. Bots that are a facet of artificial intelligence are also worthy of consideration as they carve their spaces in the production of both soft and hard news/information, again with varying degrees of facticity.

The book brings a cohort of leading scholars from across Africa, presenting a menu of counter-narratives to the methodological and theoretical approaches often adopted from the global North in describing and analyzing the African context, thereby over-turning some of the widely held notions and stereotypes about media and communication research in Africa. As Africans perform their identities and express their displeasures, entertainment and aspirations on social media, they prove that cultural production is both an experience and process where they assert themselves in contradistinction to other global cultures, including the dominant cultures from the Global North. The discourse of decoloniality thus threads through the narratives on different topics about how Africans are active contemporary members of modern society. They are here and now and not leapfrogging the technological divide as has been presented in paradigms that thrust them on a linearity of development processes manufactured in the epistemic traditions of the Global North.

On the whole, this is a book that is insightful and a must have for serious academics, researchers, policy makers, graduate and post graduate students, and ordinary readers who just want to understand the multifaceted presence and use of social media content.