Week 4 - Digital Media Landscape and Ethical Influencing in Africa

This week’s lecture will first analyse briefly the African digital landscape to illustrate how African communities are not only being remodelled by the innovativeness and diversity of the digital media but also are entirely enveloped by it.  

-Second, the lecture will provide a critique of digital media inspired by and as revealed in selected African songs, particularly Zimdancehall songs from Zimbabwe that illustrate the problems that are occasioned by social media in our society and how it might be reimagined to reflect Gospel values. 

-To get an idea of what an application of ethical influencing might resemble, the lecture will discuss Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action and Pope Benedict XVI’s perspective on media and digital culture. 

-Lastly, the lecture will further illuminate ethical influencing in Africa by highlighting the several distinctive features of Ubuntu (the homogenous concept of African humanism) which make the concept ‘a go to’ normative paradigm for African Digital Missionaries.