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Foreword For The Special Issue On Africa and Social Media
Foreword For The Special Issue On Africa and Social Media
Introduction
Trolling can be seen as a new genre to narrow-casted news that proliferates
through active citizens. In this sense it goes beyond the journalistic
mechanisms where authority legitimates the articulation of the news.
Already in the late seventies, in the line of Jean-Paul Sartre, Levinas and
Gabriel Marcuse, Alain Finkielkraut argued that national governance gets
less and less impact on the actual guidance of societal and economical
processes. Instead of that we have seen that NGOs but also networks of
ideologically-bound groups take over social innovation. The question indeed
is whether trolling should be regarded as journalism or anti-journalistic? In
case of sub-Saharan countries it is likely that journalism is primarily
associated with post-colonial practices where schooling, care and economic
ethos are directly inherited from European suppression and patronisation.