1 Introduction to social media and everyday life in South Africa
The personal lives of researchers play a key role in the choice of research topics and their approaches to data, and many of the chapters that follow begin with a degree of self-reflexivity and an anecdote about what sparked an academic interest in each particular platform or app. My journey as a media studies academic began in the field of radio studies, coming into academia from a postgraduate degree in communication for development, with a primary research focus on community radio; and my first monograph Broadcasting Identity explored how various types of radio stations in South Africa play a role in constructing different types of identities in post-apartheid South Africa. Observing young family members around me interact with various types of digital media led to an initial foray into researching the use of the messaging app MXit (Bosch, 2008); and then several years later, observing my then pre-teen son use Instagram, I developed a strong interest in social media and the potential for apps to play a role in identity construction through curated self-representations. To a large extent this sums up the primary focus of this book, which stems from a curiosity about how people use social media to navigate everyday life. Later, observing the use of social media on the campus of the University of Cape Town, in the protest campaigns of Rhodes Must Fall and Fees Must Fall, I shifted my attention to activism, exploring the South African specific use of social media in political campaigns.
This book explores how South Africans use social media platforms and apps in their everyday lives, based on the premise that digital platforms have become part of the production and performance of contemporary sociality. It argues that South Africans use social media apps to document life, preserve memories and as a curated stream of self-reflection and self-creation. The central argument of this book is that everyday social media use can be a site of democracy, and that citizenship can be practiced in spaces of leisure and popular culture, outside traditional politics.
The book is concerned with the ways in which social media technologies shape (or perhaps even leave unchanged) key aspects of social life, and how the online sometimes reflects offline realities. The appropriation of technologies into peopleâs everyday routines and the consequent digital mediation of the everyday lives of South Africans is the primary focus of this book, which attempts over the chapters that follow, to study the digital traces left by social media users. The book also attempts to show how social media platforms impact the dynamics of offline public space. The global trend towards the datafication of social and cultural life has reached South Africa, and this book is about how these apps embed themselves into our everyday routines, communications, and how, in turn, these mundane technologies shape everyday life.
Social media research is a new and emerging field, particularly in the African context where the social movements of the Arab Spring gave rise to what was sometimes referred to as Twitter uprisings or Facebook revolutions. Barring a few edited volumes broadly spanning activity on the continent, there is limited academic literature focusing specifically on the South African context. See Mutsvairo (2016), for an edited volume which contains contemporary case studies and emerging trends in sub-Saharan Africa, with contributions on Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Uganda and range of other African countries, while Nyabolaâs (2018) Digital democracy, analogue politics explores how digital platforms are vital spaces for Kenyans to build new communities across old ethnic divides. More recently, Social media and politics in Africa (Dwyer and Molony, 2019) contains case studies from across the region to show how social media is transforming political engagement, and in some cases, also reinforcing existing power dynamics. Social media and elections in Africa (Mano & Ndlela, 2020) explores the use of social media in political campaigns and electoral processes across the continent. However, there are no books that focus specifically on South Africa; and little work on social media apps and everyday life; particularly with respect to the notion of everyday culture and what Burgess, Foth, and Klaebe (2006) have referred to as vernacular creativity, referring to the democratic potential of popular culture. This approach takes a broader view of the public sphere to focus also on entertainment, leisure and consumption activities, and argues that citizenship is practiced through everyday life and social media leisure apps.
The term âsocial mediaâ is broad, and has come to be understood, in the most general sense, as internet-based websites and applications that allow users to create and share content, and that connect them and allow them to interact with each other. The term social media was first used in 1994 but became widespread about a decade later with the rise of Web 2.0, and by the mid-2000s social media had become mainstream and an integrated part of daily life (Bosch, 2017). Social media websites can vary widely, but what they have in common is a profile (including photograph/s) of the user, and a list of friends or followers who can view a userâs profile and connect to and communicate with them via the site or app (these are not always bidirectional ties). There are many types of social media with frequently overlapping boundaries, and the term âprosumerâ has been coined to indicate users as both producers and consumers, highlighting user agency in terms of content creation via participatory engagement (Bosch, 2017).
This book focuses on websites as well as apps â in some cases it turns the attention to platforms that can be accessed online via desktop and mobile apps (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) and in other instances the book focuses on mobile apps that can be accessed on desktop but are designed primarily for mobile use (e.g. Strava, Instagram), and then it also looks at those that are available only as a mobile app and cannot be accessed on a desktop computer (e.g. Tinder). Application software for mobile devices, commonly referred to as apps, have been designed specifically âto compensate for the various shortcomings of mobile-based web access relative to PC-based web accessâ, but they represent a less open internet ecosystem than the web, playing a powerful gatekeeping role (Napoli & Obar, 2014). In all these case studies though, these are social media sites that tend to be mostly accessed via mobile phones, particularly with the growth of the mobile internet in South Africa in the absence of widespread broadband access.
Internet access and the digital divide
The primary critique levelled against social media researchers in general (not just in Africa) is that the population of social media users may not be demographically representative of the broader population. Besides the fact that access to the internet is not yet at 100% penetration in South Africa (and many countries of the global South), researchers also have to take into account the fact that datasets can be skewed by highly vocal users who post often and dominate online conversation. The research in this book not only takes these critiques into account but also considers the possibility that the rich debates on social media represent a wide range of arguments and divergent views, and therefore represent an opportunity for the formation of public sphere debates. South Africa has 31.18 million active users, representing 54% penetration; 85% use a mobile phone and 60% have smartphones; and there are 23 million active social media users (22 million mobile social media users) and the majority of Facebook and Twitter users access these sites via mobile.1
But accessing social media has become an everyday activity for those who have access. Twitter, for example, is visited by 61% of users and more than two-fifths engage several times a day. Mobile access is driving social media access, with 85% of South Africans using a mobile phone or tablet to access Twitter, with the majority of these users stating that mobile devices are the primary way they access social media. While issues related to the digital divide and disparities in access persist between the North and the global South, and particularly within the global South, the rapid growth of the mobile internet has resulted in large numbers of African citizens being able to access the internet without being dependent on fixed line broadband access. The mobile phone has become the primary tool for South Africans accessing social media, and 82% of South African users access the platform via their mobile phone (Goldstuck, 2017). With respect to Twitter specifically, the global trend in the slowdown of Twitter growth has been mirrored with a 4% increase from 7.4 million users to 8.3 million in 2017,2 but engagement of existing users has increased (Goldstuck, 2017).
While internet penetration is limited and any study of social media is by default a focus on the conversations of a virtual class, Lutz and du Toit (2014) argue that social media can contribute to creating new, durable imagined communities favourable to the re-construction of the social base of democracies; and that Twitter can be seen as a new public sphere in South Africa. They further argue that Twitter, in particular, can be seen as a virtual public sphere, and that examining public sentiment via Twitter data can supplement more traditional survey methods of gauging public opinion. While mainstream media still play a key role in setting public agendas, social media, Twitter in particular, is increasingly part of a hybrid media system and rising in prominence in terms of such agenda setting. Online public discourse that provides a high possibility for greater participation is potentially more diverse and ânon-elite actors increasingly participate in constructing news via online mediaâ (Waldherr, 2018, 293). The interactivity of Twitter opens up new ways for âstarting, engaging and deepening the public debateâ (Verweij & Van Noort, 2014). Far from being neutral platforms, social media has begun to affect the conditions and rules of social interaction (van Dijck & Poell, 2013).
Critical scholars like Fuchs and Sandoval (2014) have critiqued popular social networking sites (SNSs) by arguing that they function in a context of âpower, exploitation, domination, oppression, class, digital labour and ideology, as well as protest and strugglesâ (p. 6). âThe fact that these platforms are social media ⌠is an euphemism that distracts from the circumstance that most âsocial mediaâ are advertising corporations that use targeted advertising as their capital accumulation model and as part of this model exploit usersâ labourâ (Fuchs & Sandoval, 2014, 32). Rising inequality and economic instability are a feature not only of South African society, but also internationally. McManus (2020) has argued that technological advancements have created a hyper-real environment where neo-liberal subjects who feel alienated from economic transformation increasingly inhabit restricted and highly partisan communication bubbles. Rettburg similarly argued that âsocial media in general filters out people who are not effective neoliberal subjectsâ (23).
This book takes into account these critiques and explores social media use without subscribing to either a positivist perspective or a dystopian perspective. Not everyone has access to the internet or social media, but those who do are engaging with these platforms and apps in interesting ways that warrant further exploration; and in some cases, online debates are âleakingâ into the public sphere and even playing an agenda setting role by shaping and directing offline public sphere debates. The section below briefly outlines the methodological and theoretical approaches employed in the book.
Methodological and theoretical bricolage
This book uses a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches and relying on a toolbox of methodological approaches. Each chapter includes a section comprised of notes on methodology, which outlines the specific approach taken in each chapter. The overall approach draws on the idea of bricolage research, which refers to a critical, multi-perspectival, multi-theoretical and multi-methodological approach to inquiry. Its etymological foundation âcomes from a traditional French expression, which denotes craftspeople who creatively use materials left over from other projects to construct new artefacts. To fashion their bricolage projects, bricoleurs use only the tools and materials âat-handâ â (Rogers, 2012, 2). This project aspires to this notion of the methodological bricoleur, drawing on principles of emergent design, flexibility, plurality and use of multiple methods and theories. An interpretive bricoleur is therefore a researcher who âunderstands that research is an interactive process, shaped by his or her own personal history, biography, gender, social class, race and ethnicity, and by those of the people in the settingâ (Denzin & Lincoln, 1999, 6).
Much of the academic work in the field of social media focuses on quantitative big data studies. Academic conferences in the field of media studies have entire sections dedicated to quantitative big data approaches, and increasingly media researchers are drawing on these computational methods to explore the large datasets that social media can yield. The use of computer science techniques in social research has characterised this so-called computational turn, which uses software and programming for exploring large volumes of big data. Big data approaches can highlight patterns and themes across datasets that researchers may not even have known to look for, but these approaches are not well suited to more in-depth contextualised analysis of data. But this book takes a slightly different approach, focusing primarily on qualitative textual content analysis of smaller samples and audience research in the form of online surveys and in-depth interviews. As boyd and Crawford (2012) have argued, big data is not so much about the actual data, but rather about the âcapacity to search, aggregate and cross-reference large data setsâ (663). Social media data is invariably big data â it is possible to generate very large datasets from Facebook and Twitter, and the data is constantly being generated as people post messages every day. Drawing the boundaries around such a dataset can thus pose challenges for researchers, particularly when it comes to issues related to sampling (discussed briefly below). Big data approaches rely on accessing the Application Programming Interface (AP...
