"Kiss before you open" were the words sometimes found on letters written 10 years ago in Zimbabwe, says Admire Mare, who is working on a thesis entitled "Facebooking, Reclaiming or Reinventing the Public Sphere: The case of Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora."
"Kiss before you open" were the words sometimes found on letters written 10 years ago in Zimbabwe, says Admire Mare, who is working on a thesis entitled "Facebooking, Reclaiming or Reinventing the Public Sphere: The case of Zimbabweans living in the Diaspora."
Recent technological advances have meant that snail mail is quickly giving way to faster ways of communication such as email, Facebook, Twitter and the like, and this fact forms the basis of Mare’s thesis, which he presented at Randall House on Wednesday evening at the first of a series of seminars organised by students at the Faculty of Humanities.
Mare’s thesis focuses on Zimbabwean people that live outside of their country but are still able to engage in political debates relating to their country with other Zimbabweans, despite their location, through the use of Facebook. Mare says that Facebook plays a very important role in allowing the people of Zimbabwe to engage in information exchange and comment on the political situation without fear of intimidation.This is important for the political situation in the country because as Mare notes, "News is like fish, it goes bad quickly." But in a crisis situation such as in Zimbabwe, alternative media can be used to "resist state propaganda churned out through the mainstream media".
Mare says that Facebook allows Zimbabwean people to become ‘citizen journalists’. One respondent to his research said: "Facebook is a one stop-shop for my favourite newspapers”. Mare adds that Facebook is especially popular for exactly this because it is a "deprofessionalised, decapitalised and deinstitutionalised" environment for newsgathering and dissemination. He notes that unlike traditional journalism in Zimbabwe at the moment, citizen journalism on Facebook "thrives on gossip, critical social commentary and mockery of those in authority".
Facebook seems to provide the kind of news that the Zimbabwean people in Mare’s research seem to trust more than the news produced in mainstream, propaganda-ridden Zimbabwean media. Prof Chris de Wet from Rhodes’ Department of Anthropology asked Mare during the feedback session whether the fact that Facebook is so many things detracts from it’s potential to stimulate political activism. Mare acknowledged that although Zimbabwean people such as the ones that feature in his research are able to comment on policy, this has not led to any policy changes as yet.
