This book places television in Africa in the digital context. It address the onslaught of multimedia platforms, digital migration and implication of this technology for society. The discussions in the chapters contained in this book encompass a wide range of issues such as digital disruption of television news, internet television and video on demand platforms, adaptations, digital migration, business strategies and management approaches, PBS, consumption patterns, scheduling and programming, evangelical television, and many others. The book is an important reading for academics, students and television practitioners. It offers an insightful view of television in Africa.

Who owns the media and communications in Africa today and with what implications? The book elegantly answers this urgent question by unpacking multiple dimensions of media ownership through rare and authoritative perspectives, including both historical and contemporary digital developments. It traces the evolving forms of ownership of media and communications in specific African contexts, showing how they interact with broader changes in and outside the continent. The book also shows how Big Techs, such as Meta (formerly known as Facebook), are involved in a scramble for Africa’s digital ecosystem and how their advance brings both opportunities and concerns about ownership and control. The chapters analyse evolving forms of ownership and their implications on media concentration and democracy across Africa. The book offers a nuanced account of how media ownership structures are in some instances captured with an ever-growing and complex ecosystem that also has new opportunities for public interest media. Offering a significant representation of the trends and diversity of existing media systems, the book goes beyond the postcolonial geographical divisions of North and Sub-Saharan Africa to highlight common patterns and significant similarities and differences of communications ownerships between and within African countries. The contributors expose media and communications ownership patterns in Africa that are centralised and yet decentralising and in some cases, battling, resurging and globalising.

Across Africa, digital media are providing scholars with a reason and opportunity for revisiting the question, and the analytical lens, of publics with new vigour and less normative baggage. This book brings together a rich set of empirically grounded analyses of the diverse digital spaces and networks of communication springing up across the Eastern African region. The contributions offer a plural set of reflections on whether and how we can usefully think about these spaces and networks as convening publics, where citizens come together to discuss matters of common interest. The authors make clear the need to unshackle such studies from slavish acceptance of outsiders’ prescriptions on what constitutes desirable publics. They highlight the importance of being attentive to rapidly changing everyday realities across Africa in which people are coming together around the circulation of ideas in ways that include digital means of communications. In so doing, the contributions bring forward new ways of thinking about, through and with publics, alongside other heritages in Africanist scholarship that have continued salience. Looking outwards from the region, such different perspectives on our digitally mediated world offer theoretical novelty that advances how we think about the notion of publics and their political significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Eastern African Studies.

This book explores how television in the global South is ‘future-proofing’ its continued relevance, addressing its commercial, social and political viability in a constantly changing information ecosystem. The chapter contributions in the book are drawn from countries in East, South and West Africa, the Middle East and Latin America, specially selected for their illustrative potential of the key issues addressed in the book. Scholarly attention on television in the global South has largely been limited to studying evolving television formats with broader structural issues covered almost entirely by industry reports. Major gaps remain in terms of understanding how television in the global South is changing within the context of the significant technological developments and what this means for television’s future(s). The chapters reflect on these futures, not in the sense of predicting what these might be, but rather anticipating important areas of intellection. The contributors contend that much of the scholarship on the global South, by scholars from the South, is often stilted by a reluctance to anticipate. This failure leads to a largely reactionary scholarship, constantly oppositional, and unable to recentre conversations on the South. This volume finds intellectual incentive in this urgent need to anticipate, hence its particular focus on television futures. Taking television in the global South as an important cultural and political barometer, the book seeks to explore how television in the global South is adapting to the rampant technological changes and processes of globalisation.

The first book-length study on the relationship between African literature and new media.

The growing presence of digital technologies has caused significant changes in the protection of digital rights. With the ubiquity of these modern technologies, there is an increasing need for advanced media and rights protection. Media Law, Ethics, and Policy in the Digital Age is a key resource on the challenges, opportunities, issues, controversies, and contradictions of digital technologies in relation to media law and ethics and examines occurrences in different socio-political and economic realities. Highlighting multidisciplinary studies on cybercrime, invasion of privacy, and muckraking, this publication is an ideal reference source for policymakers, academicians, researchers, advanced-level students, government officials, and active media practitioners.

This volume presents case studies of news media employing and integrating social media into their news production practices. It links social media use to journalistic practices and news production processes in the digital age of the Global South. Critically, the chapters look at seminal cases of start-up news media whose content is informed by trends in social media, ethical considerations and participatory cultures spurred by the wide use of social media. There has been considerable research looking at the potential of new media technologies, traditional journalism and citizen reporting. The extent to which these new media technologies and ‘citizen journalism’ have morphed or reconfigured traditional journalism practice remains debatable. Currently, there are questions around the limits of social media in journalism practice as the ethical lines continue to become blurred. It is this conundrum of the role of social media in the reconfiguration of the media, news making, production and participatory cultures that requires more investigation. Social media has also turned the logic of the political economy of media production on its head as citizens can now produce, package and distribute news and information with shoestring budgets and in authoritarian regimes with no license of practice. This new political economy means the power that special interest groups used to enjoy is increasingly slipping from their hands as citizens take back the power to appropriate social media journalism to counter hegemonic narratives. Citizens can also perform journalistic roles of investigating and whistleblowing but with a lack off, or limited, regulation. This volume seeks to explore and untangle these issues, and provides an invaluable resource for researchers across the field of journalism, mass media, and communication studies.

The new research presented in this volume suggests that general perceptions (cultural, psychological, geographical), allied to the customs and values of journalism, and underpinned by the uses of technology, significantly shape international news. This gives rise to a blend of the old and the new; traditions of cultural centredness and innovative practices; anchorages of place and the rootlessness of globalization. Technology per se has not swept all before it. On the other hand, its uses have altered the means and methods of international news sourcing, construction and dissemination. Consequently, the uptake of technology has contributed to fundamental changes in style and form, and has greatly facilitated cross-cultural exchanges. The category ‘international news’ is now more of a hybrid, as recognized by the BBC and others. The chapters in this book demonstrate that this hybridity is unevenly distributed across geo-political domains, and often across time. Nevertheless, as the contributors to this volume show, the concept of ‘international news’ relies on tightly interwoven elements of orthodox journalism, social media, civic expression and public assembly.

Featuring scholarly perspectives from around the globe and drawing on a legacy of television studies, but with an eye toward the future, this authoritative collection examines both the thoroughly global nature of television and the multiple and varied experiences that constitute television in the twenty-first century. Companion chapters include original essays by some of the leading scholars of television studies as well as emerging voices engaging television on six continents, offering readers a truly global range of perspectives. The volume features multidisciplinary analyses that offer models and guides for the study of global television, with approaches focused on the theories, audiences, content, culture, and institutions of television. A wide array of examples and case studies engage the transforming practices, technologies, systems, and texts constituing television around the world today, providing readers with a contemporary and multi-faceted perspective. In this volume, editor Shawn Shimpach has brought together an essential guide to understanding television in the world today, how it works and what it means – perfect for students, scholars, and anyone else interested in television, global media studies, and beyond.

With increasing numbers of computers and diffusion of the internet around the world, localisation of the technology, and the content it carries, into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localisation, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as the creation and translation of internet content in diverse languages. It is essential in making information and communication technology more accessible to the populations of the poorer countries, increasing its relevance to their lives, needs, and aspirations, and ultimately in bridging the 'digital divide'.