Africa's Voices Versus Big Data? The Value of Citizen Engagement through Interactive Radio

Abstract

In this chapter, we reflect on opportunities to expand citizen engagement in developing world contexts using digital technologies and interactive broadcast media. Taking seriously the need for a reality check that gives emphasis to valuing human voice, to actual social realities and to technologies in use, we guard against the latest technological fetishes and the troubling big data bandwagon. Instead, we examine how and why African audiences engage in growing numbers in local radio shows through mobile phones. We draw on insights from a two-year research project, Politics and Interactive Media in Africa (PiMA), and the related applied research pilot, Africa’s Voices, which worked with local radio stations in eight Sub-Saharan African countries. We examine the social and political signifcance of new opportunities for voice, debate and claim-making in the mediated public sphere that interactive broadcast media enables, and how an approach to citizen engagement that values pluralism and inclusivity and is not extractive, might better seize opportunities that interactive broadcast offers. Te chapter critically reappraises what kinds of engagement count in communication for development, what kinds of ‘publics’ audiences in interactive shows constitute and how we should understand the power of these ‘audience-publics’.