“The future is new media,” Rebecca Wanjiku asserts without the briefest hesitation, as if it wasn't a controversial issue. For a new media writer who realises that many people she encounters “think I'm not a real journalist”, the blogger and Nairobi correspondent for IDG News Service is remarkably self-assured.
“The future is new media,” Rebecca Wanjiku asserts without the briefest hesitation, as if it wasn't a controversial issue. For a new media writer who realises that many people she encounters “think I'm not a real journalist”, the blogger and Nairobi correspondent for IDG News Service is remarkably self-assured.
But while she may have some pretty hefty allies on Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter or YouTube, the particular innovation she uses to illustrate her point is of peculiar interest to Africans. Why? Because it's ours.
Ushahidi, from the Swahili for “testimony”, is software first developed to track reports of ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008.
It is now being deployed to map the fallout of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The software works by allowing text messages to be mapped by time and location, creating a picture using Google Maps that's so compelling that it has drawn the attention of the New York Times, Forbes Magazine and the BBC.
Ushahidi's “crowd-source” news-gathering talents were not overlooked by South Africa, where they were implemented to help gather stories of the xenophobic attacks in May 2008.
Wanjiku says that its celebrity has added to the misconception that Kenya has embraced new media innovations with more vigour than South Africa, which suggests that the availability and cost of bandwidth permit a more widespread embrace of these technologies in South Africa.
While South Africa may have a “stronger social media scene,” according to Wanjiku, both countries (and indeed the world) may benefit from the “anything you want, anything you feel” abilities of new media like Ushahidi.
New media is just so difficult to control. “You can never be gagged,” says Wanjiku approvingly. In her native Kenya for example, killings in Isiolo were unreported by the partisan media but were exposed through an anonymous blogger whose efforts drew attention that would otherwise have been muffled.
It's now much harder for governments to muzzle the press. In June 2010 Rwandan newspaper Umuvugizi responded to their banning by publishing online, despite and even when their acting editor Jean Leonard Rugambage was killed by two gunmen.
Wanjiku argues that new media can function as a way to democratise media, breeding new experts on sites like South Africa's Reporter.co.za, whose slogan “for the people, by the people,” succinctly sums up the point. What the crowd has gathered is that, like Wanjiku, every African can be a “real journalist”.
