Suchergebnisse

Scholars of media and politics mostly recognise that audiences and publics are constructed, but fall short of explaining precisely how their indeterminate and imagined nature can be the basis of their political significance. Interactive broadcast media provides a valuable empirical lens for inquiring into why this may be case. The convergence of newer digital communication technologies with more established radio and television broadcasts is shifting opportunities for news media to affect citizen-state relations. These possibilities are pronounced on the African continent, where mobile telephony and increasingly plural media landscapes have given rise to popular and widespread interactive talk shows. The involvement of audience voices alters the nature of the media space where political communication happens. Through a comparative study of interactive shows in Zambia and Kenya, this article interrogates what audience participation means for the political nature and possibilities of the interactive radio and TV broadcast. Ict shows how the indeterminate audience is the basis for competing ideas about power, authority, and citizenship among the different participants in the show, including politicians, media professionals, and audience members. The power of the "audience-public," brought into being through the interactive broadcast, it is argued, arises from in-between these participants in public discussion, who each invest in multiple and competing imaginaries of the elusive audience in pursuit of diverse ends.

This study investigates government quality determinants of ICT adoption using Generalised Method of Moments on a panel of 49 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries for the period 2000-2012. ICT is measured with mobile phone penetration, internet penetration and telephone penetration rates while all governance dimensions from the World Bank Governance Indicators are considered, namely: political governance (consisting of political stability and "voice & accountability"); economic governance (entailing government effectiveness and regulation quality) and institutional governance (encompassing the rule of law and corruption-control). The following findings are established. First, political stability and the rule of law have positive short run and negative long term effects on mobile phone penetration. Second, the rule of law has a positive (negative) short run (long term) effect on internet penetration. Third, government effectiveness and corruption-control have positive short run and long term effects on telephone penetration. Institutional governance appears to be most significant in determining ICT adoption in SSA.