[Air-L] Blogs & Twitter Research in the Nigerian Context

[Presley Ifukor]

I am new to the list and was wondering if there's anyone working on Nigerian 
Internet discourse / communication.


My paper on "Blogging and Twittering the Nigerian 2007 General Elections" has 
just been published in the December 2010 issue of Bulletin of Science, 
Technology & Society: http://bst.sagepub.com/content/30/6/398


This article examines the linguistic construction of textual messages in the use 
of blogs and Twitter in the Nigerian 2007 electoral cycle comprising the April 
2007 general elections and rerun elections in April, May, and August 2009. A 
qualitative approach of discourse analysis is used to present a variety of 
discursive acts that blogging and microblogging afford social media users during 
the electoral cycle. The data are culled from 245 blog posts and 923 tweets. The 
thesis of the study is that citizens’ access to social media electronically 
empowers the electorates to be actively involved in democratic governance. 
Electronic empowerment is a direct result of access to social media (and mobile 
telephony) by more citizens who constitute the electorates. This encourages more 
public discussions about politics and makes the democratic process more dynamic 
than in the pre-social media era. An analysis of the data shows that there is a 
dialectical relationship between social media discourse and the process of 
political empowerment. 


 
The paper is part of my PhD at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany. The 
project's synopsis and related publications are here:
http://www.ifaa.uni-osnabrueck.de/Sprachwissenschaft/PhdProjects-Ifukor
 
 
Thank you and best of the season,
 
Presley Ifukor
Osnabrueck, Germany