Mobile Phones, Popular Media, and Everyday African Democracy: Transmissions and Transgressions

Abstract

The effectiveness of new media technologies, including mobile phones, to facilitate political participation and create social change has long been contested. Recent events in countries such as Mozambique, Iran, Tunisia, and Egypt have again raised questions about the role new media technologies can play to create alternative public spheres and mobilize for social action. In the African context, where access to new media technologies is marked by big divides, the widespread uptake of mobile phones has led to renewed optimism about the potential they hold for stimulating political participation and widening democratic debate. This article examines various approaches to the relation between mobile phones and participatory democracy, and argues that mobile phones do not only transmit political information needed for rational deliberation in the public sphere, but also transgress cultural and social borders and hierarchies in the way they refashion identities and create informal economies and communicative networks.

Notes

¹A previous version of this article was presented as a keynote address at the workshop “Mobile phones: The new talking drums of everyday Africa?,” Afrika Studiecentrum, Leiden, Netherlands, in December 2010.

²I owe this insight to my colleague Alette Schoon.