Whose eye is on social media?

By Owen Chirinda

Zimbabwe has over the past years experienced so much turmoil and distress, trends of domestic violence, hunger and starvation and religious cloud seeding scandals.  This has affected people in the high tower urban towns, in the dusty suburbs and those in the dusty, hot, treeless and dung scented villages in the peripheral towns.

Violence, negligence, embezzlement and even issues that affect women have been widely discussed on Zimbabwean media platforms. This has been necessitated by the advent of new technologies like phones and the web and the rapid and spontaneous creation of content by internet users. Social media has therefore thrived where the national broadcaster has failed or has been overwhelmed to capture the minutest of details and events that have proved important to the audience.

In the post election period of 2008 and recently the referendum, social media in Zimbabwe has played a very crucial role. According to Wikipedia, it has more or less captured events as they occur and some of these can be found on ‘Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, social networks, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking.’ It is on these platforms that pressing socio-political and economic issues have been discussed. It has proved a worthy source of news even though it is not very reliable as information can easily be manipulated owing to personal opinion.

What is depressing about social media in Zimbabwe is that however effective it has been in addressing some problems, the very people who perpetrate the offences that people complain about also access it. Politicians are on tweeter, Facebook and they blog hence it has become easier for them to influence public opinion, to argue in favour of some of their policies and they further manipulate information thereby creating a potential support base. This form of hypocrisy also highlights the very idea that the state can easily monitor information on the net- inasmuch as we would like to deny it; we are being watched and driven in some direction.

While occurrences in the towns have been conceptualized and documented, the rural towns have been neglected. In most instances the relaying of news has been hindered by the technological barrier. As easy as it might seem in the towns to tweet, blog and Facebook those in the rural areas lack the technology hence they have been left behind in the social circle that creates a sphere. As such, decisions have been made in irrelevant power vacuums, ideas have been formulated and those in the rural towns have been sidelined.

 So social media is a new concept that can better people’s lives but needs to be extended to the marginalized areas of the country. Sadly the internet was first commissioned by the US government and like it or not, our content isn’t safe on the so called social ‘sphere,’ where the government is involved, the bloodhounds lurk somewhere near each punctuation mark or link.