ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the extent to which online and digital communications systems have influenced democratic engagement, institutional consolidation, and political accountability across Africa. It assesses whether the quantitative expansion in the number and diversity of media outlets, platforms, and formats has substantively and qualitatively enabled a progressive transformation of citizen participation in the public sphere and in the structures and processes of democratic governance. The chapter concludes that social media and related networks are enabling political engagement among Africans. They have offered opportunities for citizens to be heard, to challenge the state, and to offer alternative versions of reality. It argues, however, that these networks do not necessarily demonstrate a unilinear, ineluctable pathway to increased participation, progressive politics, empowerment of the grassroots, or a fundamental recalibration of power. The chapter contends that fundamental concepts of power remain central to analyses of digital and networked technologies and their role in democratization, because they remain as malleable to the dynamics of power as has been the case with traditional media.
