Abstract
Within contemporary media studies, there appears to be a resurgence of critical interest in audience research, and, in particular, in work that combines a concern for media audiences/users/cultures, everyday life and media multiplicity. This trio of concerns is explored in different ways in a number of recent publications, including Lee Humphreys’ The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life (MIT Press, 2018) and Kjetil Sandvik, Anne Mette Thorhauge and Bjarki Valtysson’s edited collection The Media and the Mundane: Communication across Media in Everyday Life (Nordicom, 2016). Willems and Mano’s Everyday Media Culture in Africa, the focus of this review, is another that takes up and examines these issues in detail.
Everyday Media Culture in Africa begins with two framing chapters. In the opening chapter, Willems and Mano argue that the aforementioned trio of concerns is vitally important in an African context for a number of reasons. First, because it continues, and makes valuable contributions to, ‘the wider project of dewesternizing, internationalizing and decolonizing media and communication studies, and the subfields of audience studies and Internet studies more broadly’ (p. 4). Second, a combined approach is regarded as ‘urgent’ (p. 1) if scholars are to make critical sense of the rapid changes to the media landscape on the African continent over the past few decades. Third, a focus on everyday audiences, users and cultures is regarded as necessary in order to complement and balance out the predominant ‘macro-analytical focus’, which has tended to focus attention on examinations of the policy and regulatory contexts of African media, with more ‘micro-analytical’ accounts of ‘what ordinary people do with old and new media on an everyday basis’ (p. 2).
In the second chapter, Jo Helle-Valle considers the methodological challenges associated with attempts to make sense of media multiplicity in the context of rapid socio-technical change. Helle-Valle’s argument is that, under these conditions, African media research might be productively oriented towards an analysis of everyday life, the role that media plays within it, and examination of ‘what particular media content means for specific individuals in specific situations and how […] technology is used in given settings’ (p. 11), while keeping in mind how these practices and media cultures ‘are always part of wider socialities’ (p. 10).
The nine chapters that follow develop fine-grained, empirically grounded, rich accounts of everyday media use across diverse cultural and national contexts (Burundi, DR Congo, Ghana, Nigeria, Rwanda, Zambia, Zanzibar and Zimbabwe) involving diverse media forms (newspapers, radio, TV, and mobile and social media). The result is an impressive and important collection that develops a detailed portrait – or cross-sectional analysis – of contemporary media audiences, users and uses across Africa, and a compelling argument for the value of critical analysis of everyday media cultures, and for furthering the project of ‘de-essentializing audiences and users and provincializing the dominant academic canon’ (p. 5).