New Optics on Digital Media Cultures in Africa

Abstract

The increasing centrality of digital media as an area of concern in media and communication scholarship globally is shaping the field in important ways. Underpinned by a developmentalist orientation with its roots in Western modernity, research into African digital cultures has often centred around ways in which the continent could ‘catch up’ with the North or ‘leapfrog’ stages on a presumed universal technological trajectory. This chapter calls on a new generation of researchers to resist the uncritical adoption of scholarly agendas and frameworks from elsewhere, and to engage in more critical reflections that extend beyond the machinic, while avoiding a lapse into ‘a nativist romanticism’. The study suggests three alternative theoretical lenses suited for analysing communication and culture in Africa and the wider Global South: culture, identity and sociality.