The Globalization of the Pavement: A Tanzanian Case Study

This 14-page article, published in the Glocal Times, discusses examples of citizen media production and communication (blogs and social media sites in Tanzania and its diasporas) in the immediate aftermath of the Gongo la Mboto explosions in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in February 2011. The authors argue that Tanzanian engagement in "new media" can be seen as an extension and amplification of traditional modes of information sharing and news production, with traditional oral and collaborative processes of news production adapting towards the digital.

The article explains how on the evening of February 16 2011, Tanzanians around the world were posting worried and upset status updates on Facebook and Twitter, searching for information about the whereabouts of their families and friends after what seemed to have been a bomb blast somewhere in Dar es Salaam. In the absence of news from established media institutions, Tanzanians began browsing online communities and blogs where pictures, videos, and bits and pieces of information about the explosions were being posted. Using the internet, and with input through text message and phone calls from those not able to get online themselves, people in the diaspora could engage in a form of user-generated news production together with those on location in Dar es Salaam.

By the morning of February 17, it had become clear that the series of explosions had started in an ammunition depot in a military base. The author states that while the follow-up in the global mediascape was brief, and the national media seemed unwilling, or at least slow to ask the critical questions, the discussions in a variety of online forums (closely interconnected with offline discussions on the streets of Dar es Salaam) grew intense in the days following the explosions. The authors propose that this can be seen as a process of citizen media production – social in character and transnational in scope – that was filling an information void.

The article explains that experience and research show that the Tanzanian experience in February 2011 is a process of information gathering and sharing that is nothing new in the Tanzanian – or African – context. It is argued that the emerging engagement in various digital media forms could serve to contribute to the globalisation of what in the African post-colonial urban context has been termed "pavement radio", or radio trattoir in French, which is defined as "the circulation of lively news through unofficial oral channels of interpersonal communication which penetrate African cities. The stories which circulate typically treat topics of interest that the official press ignores or covers scantily in coded language. Thus, radio trottoir is underground news, an alternative to the official press, which is tedious, censored, uninformative, and often unintelligible." The case study suggests that social media may supplement and enhance street corner communication, expanding everyday private and public spaces, "opening street corners abuzz with rumour and gossip to global audiences and other media producers."

The article adds that while social media with its multitude of reporters and its consumers/producers is the radio of the pavement, conventional international public service radio looks increasingly like "spaceship radio," distant and removed; in the case of the BBC's African Service, beaming its programmes to Africa from London while receiving reports on the Dar es Salaam explosions via a crackly phone line. An initial impression might be that the rumour and speculation that make up much of social media's "globalised pavement" is diametrically opposed to the values of accuracy, impartiality, and fairness that are core to a traditional international public service broadcaster like the BBC World Service. However, to see only the differences between these two modes of news production would be to ignore the many threads that bind together the "spaceship" and the "globalized pavement."

The article concludes that the February 2011 experience showed how complexly intertwined glocal networks of communication were quickly activated involving people from the streets of Dar es Salaam to Tanzanians in Birmingham, Uppsala, and Copenhagen, developing content much faster and with more nuances than any government or major news Internet site. In order for media researchers, media practitioners, and institutions (such as the BBC) to fully comprehend the particularities of contemporary mediascapes and the ways in which news, information, and rumour travel between urban Africa and its diasporas, future research needs to investigate these complexly intertwined glocal networks of communication critically and in depth.