Senegalese Web 2.0 activity, Niane criticized the country’s media industry in a post entitled, “Senegal Media Zaps World Blogger’s Day and Talks About Traditional Medicine.” Niane chided the local media establishment and journalists for ignoring this event and instead choosing only to write about Traditional Medicine Day which was being celebrated on the same date.
“For the press to choose between the blog and traditional medicine,” he wrote, was no oversight but instead a willful demonstration of what he called “an open industry secret” that traditional media pretty much dismissed blogging. Journalists were mistaken to ignore this, too, he said, when in reality this was “a social platform that deserved attention from the media because it is indispensible in the 21st Century.”
For a myriad of reasons having to do with such things as technology, infrastructure, literacy, and costs, much of Africa was late in arriving to the new media connect party, but it is now quickly catching up at an astounding pace. Across the Web, African voices are being manifested in a variety of formats. The Web and digital technologies have opened up the communication and information space so that Africa and Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora are no longer just objects of the conversation but are indeed initiating and leading the debates, talking among themselves and engaging with the world. When you consider some of the very real obstacles and challenges this development entails, it’s really nothing short of amazing.
“Since the connection of South Africa to the Internet nearly a quarter of a century ago, in 1990, little by little, more and more African countries have gotten connected to the point that the entire continent is completely integrated in the “network of networks,” wrote Amadou Top, Secretary General for OSIRIS in its January 2013 newsletter. OSIRIS, (www.osiris.sn) is a private, non-governmental association created in 1998 that keeps track on all things having to do with information and communication technology. The acronym stands for “Observatory on Information Systems, Networks and Info-routes in Senegal.
“What first appeared as a instrument that was reserved for an elite, a select few,” wrote Top, “has become a commonplace tool for millions of Africans, notably and in particular young people who use it daily at their places of work, at home, in the cyber cafés, or even while on the move whether professionally or at school, academically or purely privately.”
“The web, electronic messaging, telephone by Internet via Skype or Viber, and more recently the social networks (Facebook Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Viadéo, etc.) are increasingly being used by businesses, administrations, institutions, associations, and others to inform and communicate on local, national, regional even global level,” he said.
For African journalists, call it a convergence of coincidences. This arrival in the marketplace of the Internet and pretty much simultaneously the mobile telephone coincided with another phenomenon that was taking place starting in the early 1990s and that was the push by journalists for greater press freedoms and a call for governments to loosen their monopoly on media ownership which led to the opening up of the media marketplace, in particular in the area of newspapers and FM-radio, to private media in countries that had previously only known state-owned media.
This was certainly true in Senegal. Independent from colonial rule since 1960, it was only in 1994 that the government issued the first license for a private newspaper to Sud Quotidien the first-ever private rival to Le Soleil, the government-owned daily. In 1992 the business entrepreneur the late Ibrahima Ben Basse Diagne, Senegal’s Ted Turner, introduced cable television to the market.
It wasn’t until 2000 that the first private television license was approved. Since that time, there has been an explosion of private media in particular FM radio but also newspapers and recently, private local TV. Today, nearly all these media have a web presence.
In addition, in Senegal and across the continent, the Internet has also provided an outlet for myriad individuals whether inside a particular country or outside, in the case of the various Diasporas, to create alternative information sources which at times often serve as a voice of opposition in places where the local press faces political constraint.
Across the continent African journalists working in vastly different environments are using new media technologies to do their work.
For journalists in Guinea their cell phone is one of their most important tools, said Mame Fatoumata Diallo. “With the cell phone we can conduct interviews with important people without having to make least move physically,” she said. This is something that’s really crucial in a country where reliable and timely transportation access is a major concern.
“I’m using the new media technologies everyday in my work,” said Aboubacar Demba “Cisko” Cissokho, 38, a journalist for the national news agency Senegalese Press
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