African Digital Cultures

This book explores the ways in which digital Africans are using restricted access to the digital to produce, distribute, circulate, and monetize cultural content. It highlights how Africans are harnessing the potential of the digital in preserving, showcasing, performing, monetizing and platforming their own cultures.

Drawing from Kenya to South Africa, Namibia to Nigeria, Malawi to Zimbabwe, this edited collection explores how digital platforms (text, audio, image and video-oriented) have reconfigured cultural production, distribution, consumption, and monetization in Africa. The book foregrounds contemporary African perspectives on how ordinary people and social media influencers are implicated in the platformization of cultural production. It calls attention to the myriad ways in which digital Africans are using restricted access to the digital to produce, distribute, circulate, and monetize cultural content at the margins of surveillance capitalism. This volume highlights how Africans are harnessing the potential of the digital in preserving, showcasing, performing, monetizing and platforming their own cultures. The major highlight of this book is the innovative and creative ways in which the young and old Africans are using popular digital technologies for a wide range of cultural productions.

Autorentext

Admire Mare is a Full Professor and Head of Department: Communication and Media Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests include analyzing the complex and messy intersections between technology and society, specifically focusing on global digital journalism studies, and global digital platform studies.

Oswelled Ureke is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. His research interests lie in screen media, cultural studies and political economy of the media. He holds a PhD in Cultural and Media Studies from University of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa.

Inhalt
Admire Mare and Oswelled Ureke: African Digital Cultures, (De)Platformization and Cultural Production - John Ndavula: Tiktok and the Platformization of the Maragoli Culture in Kenya - Johannes Tukondjeni: Content Creation and Tiktok Influencers in Namibia - Gifty Appiah-Adjei; Elizabeth Owusu Asiamah; Rainbow Sackey and Belinda Osei- Mensah: The Commodification of Popularity on Social Media: Mega Influencers and Content Monetization on Tiktok in Ghana - Oswelled Ureke: 'Chilling with the Big Boys': Self-Identity, Microcelebritism and the 'Bigger Picture' in Zimbabwean Tiktok Culture - Chikezie E. Uzuegbunam; Job Mwaura and Richard Chinedu Ononiwu: Digital Self-Representation, African Youth and the Question of Performative Authenticity in a Globalized World - Maud Blose: Black Women's Self-Representation on Social Media: A Discourse Analysis of the Ladies House Facebook Group - Sihle Nyathi: Acting with Algorithms: Feminists' Daily Encounters with Algorithmic Cultures - Job Allan Wefwafwa: Dominance, Resistance, Affect: Whatsapp use in Bungoma County, Kenya - Mbongeni Jonny Msimanga and Constance Kasiyamhuru: Political Satire and Performance Activism on Social Media Platforms in Zimbabwe: The Case of Magamba TV And Bustop TV - Dércio Tsandzana: Humor and Digital Media as a Tool for Social Intervention in Mozambique - Wambui Wamunyu: "I had to Speak Truth to Power!": How Kenyan Active Digital Citizens Tag, Crowdsource, Name and Shame their Way Past Structural Governance Hierarchies - Henok Ashagrey Kremte: Digital Repression and National Dialogue: Understanding the Elephant in Ethiopia's Dialogue Room - Admire Mare and Oswelled Ureke: Africanizing Digital Cultures, Digitalizing African Cultures.