دانلود کتاب رسانه های اجتماعی و اختلاف دیجیتال در زیمبابوه

Social Media Dissidence in Zimbabwe grapples with a specific and complex form—or forms—of contemporary born-digital “dissidence” which expresses itself in the Southern African nation of Zimbabwe largely via social media and how the state responds to such dissidence. This specific form of dissidence that occurs mostly on social media platforms is what this book refers to as social media dissidence. Social media, a relatively recent tool of communication—there was no social media in the norma¬tive sense in the year 2000, for instance—is partly defined by its height¬ened ductility in the hands of users. One such ductile use is the propagation of political dissent and dissidence.
In Zimbabwe, “dissidence” has a very specific social, historical and political association. Writing on earlier forms of dissidentiality and how Africans responded to colonial domination, Chikowero (2015: 4) inti¬mates that Africans “variously mediated, accommodated, appropriated, resisted, and subverted those (colonial) designs. The evaluation of colonial designs therefore simultaneously highlights the dialectical relationship between colonial violence and African ingenuity and innovativeness, and acknowledges the significance of context in shaping the aporic and discur¬sive cross-cultural encounters”. This therefore means in this excavation of earlier forms of dissidence actions, the study attempts to locate both explicit and implicit forms and both introverted and extroverted forms of protest by African peoples. The term first gained salience in Zimbabwean located disruptive acts by individuals and groups that provoked panic responses from the states and state actors. The focus on Zimbabwe is vali¬dated by the observation that while attention has been placed on seminal cases such as the Arab Spring Uprisings or the Hong Kong protests of 2019, less-profiled African cases like Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo and South Africa are salient in their own right and present unique lessons that are context sensitive and context specific. Theory building from the global south is a core aim of this book.
General scholarship about dissidence tends to categorise many intermi¬nably varied actions under the wide spectrum of dissidence, rendering opaque strict identification of what counts and does not count as dissi¬dence. It is this opaqueness that I will partly explore and address in this book. For instance, an act as seemingly mundane as spraying graffiti on walls may be considered dissidence, in the same breath as the intensely complex skill of hacking information technology (IT) systems by a group such as Anonymous. On the other hand, the highly security-sensitive act of leaking classified and top-secret documents and information by Mordechai Vanunu of Israel, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning in the United States, Nima Fatemi in Iran and Baba Jukwa in Zimbabwe may all be counted as dissidence as well. In the same breath, using Tor to anonymously upload photos and news online, the nude protests by Pussy Riot in Russia and whistle-blowing by Christopher Wylie, Hopewell Chin’ono in Zimbabwe or Sindiso Magaqa in South Africa count, too, as dissidence. In this book, I am interested in the specific identification of dissident praxis and dissident communicative acts by actors located outside normative roles, relations and positions of power. This identification and its manifestation on social media, mainly Twitter and Facebook, is what informs this study.