Description
Book Synopsis Deriving from innovative new work by six researchers, this book questions what the new media's role is in contemporary Africa. The chapters are diverse - covering different areas of sociality in different countries - but they unite in their methodological and analytical foundation. The focus is on media-related practices, which require engagement with different perspectives and concerns while situating these in a wider analytical context. The contributions to this collection provide fresh ethnographic descriptions of how new media practices can affect socialities in significant but unpredictable ways.
Trade Review “This is a fascinating set of ethnographic and empirically based studies with an excellently penned Introduction.” • Keyan Tomaselli, University of Johannesburg
Table of Contents Acknowledgements
Introduction: A Social Science Perspective on Media Practices in Africa: Social Mechanisms, Dynamics and Processes
Jo Helle-Valle and Ardis Storm-Mathisen
Part I: Economy
Chapter 1. Digital Development Imaginaries, Informal Business Practices and the Platformisation of Digital Technology in Zambia
Wendy Willems
Chapter 2. Botswana’s Digital Revolution: What’s in it?
Ardis Storm-Mathisen and Jo Helle-Valle
Part II: Gender and Social Relations
Chapter 3. Bolingo ya face: Digital Marriages, Playfulness and the Search for Change in Kinshasa
Katrien Pype
Chapter 4. Texting Like A State: Knowledge and Change in a National mHealth Programme
Nanna Schneidermann
Chapter 5. New Ways of Making Ends Meet? On Batswana Women, Their Uses of the Mobile Phone and Connections through Education
Ardis Storm-Mathisen
Part III: Localities and New Media
Chapter 6. The Public Inside Out: Facebook, Community and Banal Activism in a Cape Town Suburb
Nanna Schneidermann
Chapter 7. From No Media to All Media: Domesticating New Media in a Kalahari Village
Jo Helle-Valle
Afterword: The Electronic Media in Africa, with an Addendum from Mauritius
Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Index
