1,720,997 research outputs found
Alternative Responses to Presidential Tweets on Elections in Africa: A New Counter Power?
No full textTwitter has emerged as an important counter-power to “big men” politics in Africa. Long denied access to mainstream media, which is captured by commercial and political interests, ordinary Africans have had to rely on alternative communication to challenge and counter untruths and lies from political leaders who routinely steal elections and behave in an authoritarian manner. The presidential tweets give the impression that they are delivering on election promises, and yet hide many problems on the grounds, including denial of social, economic and political rights to Africans. The chapter demonstrates how social media has emerged as an important avenue for some citizens to expose such hypocrisy, register dissent and to offer counter-narratives that challenge presidential propaganda in Nigeria, Uganda and Zimbabwe, even though the wider ramifications of these alternate tweets for electoral politics are arguably at an initial stage. What is undeniable is that the relative ease of creating and disseminating social media content is broadening political communication and giving rise to new ways of civic participation and agency in electoral politics across Africa. The distributed intelligence of social media is resulting in new hope for democratisation but has also become a thorn in the flesh for those in power. What is at stake is the increased power of user-consumers, which is resulting from easier access, digital behaviours and freer speech than before. Being in charge will never be the same for those in power in Africa. The voice of the marginalised voters, both individuals and collectives, is growing louder as they tweet back to counter electoral lies and misinformation from their leaders
The Changing Face of Election Campaigning in Africa
No full textThe interplay between media and politics is central to any understanding of political campaigning. Indeed, researchers argue that politics is communication and media are central to the mediation of politics. For many years, African politics suffered through a dearth of mass media, which often was government-controlled and had limited penetration beyond urban centres. Election campaigning was limited to a few media outlets, as well as local rallies and door-to-door canvasing. The media ecology, dominated by state-owned media and broadcasting monopolies, advantaged the incumbent parties. The rise in the penetration of smartphones and mobile internet is fundamentally changing the political communication landscape in much of Africa. This introductory chapter discusses the advent of social media and its implications for election campaigning in Africa. It argues that social media is disrupting well-established forms of elite control over the media. It is creating new methods of election campaigning and transforming how citizens interact with political messages. Social media is a potential game changer to election processes in Africa, bringing with it new opportunities but also new challenges
Afrokology of media and communication studies: theorising from the margins
Full text linkThis chapter constitutes a quarrel from the margins, an explication of Afrokology and an introduction to its counter-hegemonic heuristic approach in media and communication studies. The chapter goes beyond critiques of the marginality of African approaches in media and communication studies to position Afrokology as a decolonial heuristic tool that is collaborative, convivial and transdisciplinary in its conversation with other forms of knowledge. It argues that the marginalisation of African epistemologies from theoretical debates in media and communication studies parallels the routine sociocultural, political and economic disempowerment and exclusion of the continent’s people from global processes. This is similar to how other previously colonised regions such as Asia, the Middle East and Latin America have been epistemologically marginalised in spite of growing evidence of the depth and scope of their scholarly contributions. The discipline of media and communication studies has remained captive to theoretical and methodological approaches from the global North, especially European and American perspectives. The marginalisation of media and communication staff, texts, theories, methods and scholarship from the global South has become routine within top academic institutions in the “powerful” global North and, ironically, also in the global South (cf. Mano and milton 2020). In this use, margin makes evident both the position and place of being constrained, but importantly, it also kindles potential for resistance, relexicalising and realignment. Thus, we argue, living on the margins does not entail giving up or surrendering to a powerful unofficial center, as the margin can offer the “possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds” (hooks 1989, 20). This radical reorientation is central to the approach in this chapter as we view marginality as a pivotal location for the production of counter-hegemonic discourse as well as a new location from which to articulate our sense of the world as Africans. In doing so, we propose a way forward that in our view avoids the pitfalls of using marginalisation in ways that might impose a paralysing and false homogeneity upon African epistemes, cultures and people. In fact, the chapter works to wrest the notion of the margin from one whose existence and meaning is only dependent on the construction of a unified, empowered and privileged center
Afrokology as a transdisciplinary approach to media and communication studies
No full textAfrokology is an attempt to re-imagine media and communication studies and to reunite its practice and theory with philosophical roots in Africa. We argue that Afrokology can awaken relational accountability that promotes respectful representation, reciprocity and rights of both the researcher and the researched. Afrokology is presented in this chapter as an innovative heuristic and analytical toolkit that could enhance the academic positioning of media and communication debates and one which is important for connecting critiques of existing and past theories, policies and practices. It is a way of seeing, knowing and doing media and communication that is facilitative. In this sense, Afrokology could be the basis for a deliberate push for more effective epistemological inclusivity
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Media Development and Media Reform: Time for Change
Full text linkActors shape their communicative environment to suit their needs and the needs of their fellow citizens. Yet, in spite of the innovations and agency found on the continent, African media remains strongly influenced by colonial legacies ranging from colonial media infrastructure and operational logic. What’s more, models of journalism, especially those from Britain, Germany and France, are taught and practiced in independent African countries; meanwhile African talk shows, soap operas, and newscasts follow formats developed in the colonial era; and the very messages transmitted by African broadcasts and in African newspapers can frequently be traced back to news sources in Britain, France and Germany. Amid this contradiction, those pursuing media development must remain uniquely focused on ensuring that the media being developed is relevant. This chapter gives some indication of where more relevant forms of media development are likely to emerge in Africa
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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