From the newspaper to Facebook: New media, intermediality and political participation in Africa

The fall of dictators across the Arab world and the continued challenge to the hold of others, like Assad of Syria, will no doubt go down in history as one of the most remarkable and perhaps even unexpected events of the first two decades of the twenty-first century. As unprecedented, at least in the Arab world, as these events are however, their most peculiar feature is not so much the challenge of decades old dictatorships, but the role played by new media. It is difficult to imagine the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East as possible without the critical contributions of new media technologies. Apart from providing important validation of the immense potentials of new media as a tool for social mobilisation, they present fresh evidence of the imperative of studying its dynamics, particularly its implications for the framing of the public sphere and, ultimately, the interactions of power within that sphere. The ability of civil society formations to use new media is obviously growing within Africa. It appears the implication of this is not lost on states as efforts aimed at confronting resistance within virtual space are also intensifying.