Talking, Shouting, or Listening? An Assessment of the Role of Social Media in South Africa’s Student Protests in 2016

• In Event: Global Media and Student Protests

Abstract

The positive potential for social media to effect social change in Africa has been widely noted and often celebrated. The growth of participatory web technologies has been accompanied by a rise in online activism, raising new possibilities for online political discussion and debate between politicians and citizens. Several examples of such participatory political participation have been noted in scholarship, where the ability of online media to not only enable citizens to participate more directly in political debate and processes, but to also build stronger horizontal ties among citizens. The rise of mobile telephony in Africa in particular has been noted as holding such potential to connect citizens to the Internet and facilitate digital activism. An example of such use of social media can be found in the recent student protests in South Africa, which started in 2015 as a movement aimed at ‘decolonizing’ universities and demanding free university education. United under the Twitter hashtag #feesmustfall, students embarked on nationwide protests in 2015, eventually managing to achieve a 0% increase in fees for 2016. When a rise in fees was announced in 2016, students again embarked on nationwide protests, forcing universities countrywide to shut down. This time, the movement was however much more fragmented, and race, gender and class divisions among students came to the forefront. While social media played a unifying role in the 2015 movement, in 2016 it mirrored these divisions by opposing and polarizing hashtags such as #uctopen and #uctshutdown and created communities that undermined the shutdown (such as the #iwillstudywithyou hashtag helping students to find support during university closures). It would therefore seem that social media not only facilitated communication and mobilization of activism, but also contributed to fragmentation and communication at cross-purposes. Using social network analysis methods and tools, this paper will pay attention to strategic narratives, citizens’ participatory repertoires, and the role of social media in the construction of various architectures of citizenship. Theoretically the chapter draws on theories of listening (e.g. Bickford, Couldry, Dreher and Donaldson) to explore the role of social media in processes of speaking and listening, voice and hearing, and community building.

Authors

• Herman Wasserman, U of Cape Town

• Tanja E Bosch, U of Cape Town