Wendy Willems - Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users

In Everyday Media Culture in Africa, we finally have a gem of an exploration into African media functioning as an integral part of Africans lived realities whether it is the legacy media of newspapers, radio and television or the newer forms of social communication powered by the Internet and the rapid increase in the uptake of mobile telephony across the continent.

How does one study an African audience nimble-footed in diversity and exposure to a myriad of media fodder in an increasingly sophisticated media landscape? This book addresses this question by taking a closer look at everyday media cultures in Africa in an age of proliferation of dazzling media options for Africans to push the boundaries of creative agency and innovation.

African audiences and users are rapidly gaining in importance and increasingly targeted by global media companies, social media platforms and mobile phone operators. This is the first edited volume that addresses the everyday lived experiences of Africans in their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has studied media through the lens of media-state relations, thereby adopting liberal democracy as the normative ideal and examining the potential contribution of African media to development and democratization. Focusing instead on everyday media culture in a range of African countries, this volume contributes to the broader project of provincializing and decolonizing audience and internet studies.

Wendy Willems is Assistant Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is co-editor of Civic Agency in Africa: Arts of Resistance in the 21st Century.

Winston Mano is Director of the Africa Media Centre, Reader in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Westminster in London, UK and a Senior Research Associate in the School of Communication at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. He is Editor of the Journal of African Media Studies and Racism, Ethnicity and the Media in Africa (IB Tauris, 2015), and Co-Editor of Chinas Media and Soft Power in Africa: Promotion and Perceptions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Edited by Daya Thussu, University of Westminster
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com.

10 The Global News Challenge
Marketing Strategies of International Broadcasting Organizations in Developing Countries
Anne Geniets

11 Al Jazeera and the Global Media Landscape
The South is Talking Back
Tine Ustad Figenschou

12 Online Journalism in Africa
Trends, Practices and Emerging Cultures
Edited by Hayes Mawindi Mabweazara, Okoth Fred Mudhai and Jason Whittaker

14 Media Across Borders
Localizing TV, Film and Video Games
Edited by Andrea Esser, Miguel . Bernal-Merino and Iain Robert Smith

15 Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture
Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts
Edited by Sun Sun Lim and Cheryll Ruth R. Soriano

16 Digital Politics and Culture in Contemporary India
The Making of an Info-Nation
Biswarup Sen

17 European Media Policy for the Twenty-First Century
Assessing the Past, Setting Agendas for the Future
Edited by Seamus Simpson, Manuel Puppis, and Hilde Van den Bulck

18 Everyday Media Culture in Africa
Audiences and Users
Edited by Wendy Willems and Winston Mano

First published 2017
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The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Names: Willems, Wendy, editor. | Mano, Winston, editor.
Title: Everyday media culture in Africa: audiences and users / edited by Wendy Willems and Winston Mano. Other titles: Routledge advances in internationalizing media studies; 18.
Description: New York: Routledge, 2016. | Series: Routledge advances in internationalizing media studies; 18 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016035003
Subjects: LCSH: Mass mediaAudiences. | Mass mediaSocial aspectsAfrica, Sub-Saharan. | Mass media and cultureAfrica, Sub-Saharan. | TelecommunicationAfrica, Sub-Saharan.
Classification: LCC P96.A832 .A354 2016 | DDC 302.230967dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016035003

ISBN: 978-1-138-20284-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-47277-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by codeMantra

The wellspring from which this book is sourced was a conference held in Johannesburg in February 2012. The idea for this event came from Susan Douglas and myself, and was made possible through the enthusiasm of Wendy Willemsthen a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of the Witwatersrandwho was key in hosting and organizing the event. Winston Mano, my friend and colleague from the University of Westminster and founding editor of the African Journal of Media Studies, was a co-organizer of the event and worked closely with Wendy on its development. Susan Douglas and I both worked in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. The university was in the process of establishing collaborative partnerships with leading universities outside the global North. South Africa and the University of the Witwatersrand were part of this outreach. An international conference on media in Africa seemed a felicitous contribution to the partnership of the two universities. The upshot of the conference is this pioneering collection of chapters on African media studies today, and I am delighted to offer a brief account of how it came about.

Beyond Normative Approaches: Everyday Media Culture in Africathat was the title of the conference, whose key aim was to open up new ways of engaging with the impact of the plural use of mass media on the everyday lives of ordinary Africans. This meant letting go of Western rather top-down normative theories of the politics of national media which had influenced the rather sporadic study of African media (almost always the press and broadcasting systemsboth products of the colonial era). We had a strong sense of how much things had changed since the beginning of media studies in the late twentieth century. In postcolonial Africa economic liberalization in the 1990s put an end to state monopolies of radio and television in country after country. A new generation of young entrepreneurs began to engage in old and new media, radio, mobile phones, telecommunications and the internet. The mobile phone especially had a very rapid and profound impact throughout the continent. We hoped that the conference would somehow capture all this but, like all conveners of such occasions, we could only wait and see.