mediadev library

Wendy Willems, Winston Mano (eds.)

London: Routledge (2017), 260 pp.

"This volume examines the lived experiences of Africans and their interaction with different kinds of media: old and new, state and private, elite and popular, global and national, material and virtual. By offering a comparative, critical and largely qualitative account of audiences and users across ... a range of national contexts in different regions of Africa, the book examines media through the voices and perspectives of those engaging with it rather than reducing audiences and users to numbers and statistics, ready to be exploited as potential target markets or as political constituencies. The critical, qualitative research perspective adopted in this book enables us to gain a better understanding of how African viewers, listeners and users make sense of a range of media forms; what role these play in their everyday lives and what audience and user engagement can tell us about how citizens perceive the state, how they imagine themselves in the wider world and how they relate to each other. The book argues that the experiences of audiences and engagements of users with a range of media—newspapers, radio, television, magazines, internet, mobile phones, social media—are always grounded in particular contexts, worldviews and knowledge systems of life and wisdom: ‘It is akin to the tortoise. The tortoise never leaves its shell behind. It carries it wherever it goes’ (Chivaura 2006: 221). African media audiences and users carry their contexts and cultural repertoires in the same way a tortoise carries its shell. Thus far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has addressed the policy and regulatory aspects as well as the relation between media institutions and the state (Willems 2014a). While studies on media, democratization and press freedom are invaluable, the ways in which ordinary people make sense of, and relate to, media in their everyday lives are largely left beyond consideration. As Barber (1997: 357) has pointed out, ‘[w]hat has not yet been sufficiently explored is the possibility that specific African audiences have distinctive, conventional modes and styles of making meaning, just as performers/speakers do. We need to ask how audiences do their work of interpretation’." (Page 4) more

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Framing Famine: An Analysis of Media Coverage of the 2011 Famine in Somalia

Richard Stupart, Larry Strelitz

African Journalism Studies, volume 37, issue 1 (2016), pp. 100-119

"This study examines media coverage of the 2011–2012 famine in Somalia by the websites of BBC News, CNN and Al-Jazeera. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analyses, it explores why coverage of the famine began as late as it did, despite ample evidence of its inevitable unf ... more

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The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture

Kirsten Drotner, Sonia Livingstone (eds.)

London et al.: Sage (2008), xxi, 537 pp.

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Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives

Patrick D. Murphy, Marwan M. Kraidy (eds.)

New York: Routledge (2003), xiii, 313 pp.

"Global Media Studies explores the theoretical and methodological threats that are defining global media studies as a discipline. Emphasizing the connection of globalization to local culture, this collection considers the diversity of modes of reception, reception contexts, uses of media content, an ... more

Everyday Media Culture in Africa: Audiences and Users

Framing Famine: An Analysis of Media Coverage of the 2011 Famine in Somalia

The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture

Global Media Studies: Ethnographic Perspectives