The gadget in our hands: Mobility, utility and agency in the deployment of mobile journalism in Kenyan media practice -a look at the case of general elections in Kenya

Abstract

Communication occurs within a context; and in Africa today, mobile phones can be seen as the new talking drums that create new social spaces in the society. Just like the ancient drumming culture used by the dwellers of the continent to relay messages across vast distances, the mobile phone technology is changing the African society while concurrently, Africans are giving meaning to the mobile phone technology resulting in the reshaping of social realities. As Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh and Inge Brinkman (2009, 11) observe, both the mobile communication technology and the society are in a context of interdependence: “technologies are not seen as determining society as such, and there is no one-way direction in the relationship between technology and society. On the contrary, society and technology are interdependent and are evolving in a dialectic process of cultural and social appropriation.” Kenya is one of the African countries with a huge size of young population (under 35 years) and staggering levels of mobile and Internet penetration. The objective of this paper is to look at mobile journalism through reflections of mainstream media journalists and citizen journalists who covered the 2017 and 2022 general elections in Kenya. Qualitative research approach is adopted with a triangulation of semi-structured interviews and focus groups discussions. A purposively sampled group of journalists who covered the 2017 and 2022 general elections in Kenya was selected to respond to the research question. Preliminary findings of this study have been grouped into broad themes including embedding of the mobile phone in everyday life; reimagining the communal nature of African society through WhatsaApp and Facebook groups; and normative impact.