JAMS 5 (2) pp.

119–130 Intellect Limited 2013

Journal of African Media Studies

Volume 5 Number 2
© 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.5.2.119_1

Tanja Bosch
University of Cape Town

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Youth, Facebook and politics
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in south africa
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aBsTracT KeYwords
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Social networking sites, Facebook in particular, are growing in popularity in South youth and social media
Africa. With the increasing affordability of mobile handsets, users are able to access Facebook
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the mobile Internet and connect via mobile social networking applications. The political participation
proposed article explores how Facebook is used by South African youth, with partic- subactivism
ular reference to their political participation and involvement. Research has shown
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the declining involvement of young people in political processes, particularly since

democratic elections in 1994. This is an international trend, with a general global
rise of political apathy and decreased news consumption among youth. However,
Facebook and other new media applications widely used by young people have
been seen as a potential vehicle to re-engage youth in political debate. The poten-
tial usefulness of such applications for creating networked publics and mobilizing
political action was highlighted recently during the Arab Spring; and conversely,
Facebook and Twitter have been used (e.g. in the United States) to target potential
youth voters. The notion of e-democracy has raised the potential of the Internet to
enhance political action and activism. The article draws on a national quantitative
survey and Cape Town-based focus groups with South African youth in order to
explore the links between Facebook use and political participation. The article argues
that youth are engaging with alternative forms of political subactivism that work at
the margins of the dominant public sphere.

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 Tanja Bosch

InTroducTIon
Academics and policy makers have become increasingly concerned by a
so-called crisis of citizenship across Western democracies – arguing that the
three central pillars of citizenship – rights, identity and participation (Bellamy
2008) are being undermined by low voter turnout and declining membership
of political organizations (Sloam 2012). During the 1970s and 1980s, South
African youth played an active role in the anti-apartheid struggle. Schools and
universities were sites of political action and mobilization, and it was often
highly politicized youth, through youth wings or campus branches of political
organizations, that led protests and marches against the repressive state. In
1976, for example, the introduction of Afrikaans as a compulsory medium
of instruction led to mass demonstration by black schoolchildren in Soweto,
during which hundreds of protesting children were shot and killed by police.
In post-apartheid South Africa, this date, 16 June , is commemorated as Youth
Day, a national public holiday.
In the post-apartheid era, the status of youth political participation is
very different, with a general perception that youth are generally politically

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apathetic and driven more by consumerism than a desire for activism or
citizenship (Deegan 2002). The majority of the large number of unemployed

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South Africans are youth, and the growing numbers of disaffected youth –
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i.e. young people not in formal education programmes or employed – are
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rising. In 2003 30.5% or 4.8 million South Africans were unemployed, with
3.4 million of them (70.8%) between the ages of 15 and 34 (South Africa’s
definition of youth); and 31.2% or 1.5 million between 15 and 24 (the inter-
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nationally defined category of youth) (du Toit 2003). A large number of black
youth in particular drop out of formal schooling and remain unemployed for
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a number of years (Lam et al 2008), with 50% of black youth unemployed in

2008, compared to 4% of white youth. Internationally, youth have become
increasingly disenchanted with formal political institutions and practices, and
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have ceased formal or informal engagement with and participation in these

organizations (Harris et al. 2010). This global decline in formal political partic-
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ipation can be attributed to a combination of complex factors which might

include socio-economic circumstances, failure of political parties to target
youth and their perceived needs, declining political literacy and changes in
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socialization patterns (MacKinnon 2008). Several international studies have

explored the growing disregard for civic engagement or political responsibility,
and a consequent belief that higher education should play an important role
in reversing this trend. In South Africa specifically, a lack of public interest
in civic and political affairs and a lack of trust in and respect for democratic
processes have increased in the last decade. In particular, political discussion
on campuses has declined, with demographic data showing youth to be
particularly apathetic (Deegan 2002).
Drawing on a large scale quantitative national survey of youth, based
on a quota sample and conducted in the four major provinces of Gauteng,
Eastern Cape, Kwazulu Natal and Western Cape; together with qualitative
interviews and focus groups with undergraduate students at the University of
Cape Town; and a qualitative content analysis of Facebook pages, this article
explores the political participation of ‘youth’ between 15 and 30, with a specific
focus on the social network site Facebook. The research was conducted during
2012. The growth of social network sites (SNS) has been rapid, with Facebook
only second to Google as the world’s most popular website; and the average

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 Youth, Facebook and politics in South Africa

global daily time spent on Facebook is 25 minutes compared to five minutes

for news sites (Fenton 2012). This article argues that we are increasingly,
through interaction on SNS such as Facebook, seeing the emergence of a
form of subactivism, or activism in the private sphere, which has the potential
to be mobilized by trigger events and transformed into overt public activism
(Bakardjieva 2010). Internationally young people have been critiqued for being
politically apathetic and disengaged, although one might argue that there are
new ways young people are participating that fall outside of formal party poli-
tics. R. Farthing (2010: 182) argues that these two dichotomous paradigms are
unhelpful, that engagement and disengagement are simultaneously occurring,
and that instead the youth are ‘radically unpolitical’.
While the youth are not overtly politically active in the mainstream sense
of participation in political organizations; nor do we see a pattern of partici-
pation in traditional forms of citizenship through Facebook and social media
interaction, in South Africa we see youth engagement and disengagement
occurring simultaneously. ‘The internet is at the heart of radical politics in the
digital age: it has galvanized local campaigning and facilitated transnational

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political movements’ (Fenton 2012). This growing notion of the link between
the Internet, social media and political participation and activism, together

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with the rise of youth participation in SNS, reveals the topic of youth political
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engagement via Facebook to be of particular significance. With the rise of the

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mobile Internet in South Africa opening up the possibilities for groups previ-
ously denied Internet access via issues related to the so-called digital divide,
the focus in this project is both on Facebook generally, as well as access to
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SNS via mobile phones by youth.

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BacKground: new medIa For polITIcal acTIon

There are several examples of how the new media, the cell/mobile phone
in particular, has been used for political action. (New media also has inter-
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play with old media.) The most notable example comes from the Philippines
where text messaging played a key role in the major political upheaval in
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the country, leading to the resignation of President Estrada (Gordon 2006).

Similarly, researchers and analysts (e.g. Lotan et al. 2011) have argued that the
2010/2011 uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt were largely organized and driven
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through the use of mobile phones and social media, Facebook and Twitter
in particular. A series of protests, said to have been coordinated through
the youth’s sophisticated use of social media, resulted in the dismantling of
Mubarak’s 30-year regime (Theocharis 2012). The online Facebook ‘event’ in
support of the Egyptian revolution was joined by over 80,000 people (Bohler-
Muller and Van der Merwe 2011).
Twitter also played a large role and as a result the Arab Spring is also
often, perhaps mistakenly, referred to as the ‘Twitter Revolution’, though it
is clear the social uprisings were facilitated by social media, even if not the
primary source of the activism. Journalists also used Twitter on the ground in
Egypt, posting observations and links to stories, photographs and blogs. And
in turn social media facilitated the rise of citizen journalism, with Egyptians
themselves tweeting breaking news items, which were re-tweeted by blog-
gers and journalists (Bohler-Muller and Van der Merwe 2011). Similarly,
people used their mobile phones to record audio and video of the uprisings
and to post these to Facebook or Twitter. Increasingly, ordinary citizens are
also using cellphones as citizen journalists to report breaking news events,

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 Tanja Bosch

1. http://www.cnbc.com/ especially during disaster or crisis events, demonstrating what H. Rheingold

id/49728455/President_
Obama_Sets_New_
(2002: 157) has referred to as ‘the power of the mobile many’.
Social_Media_Record Similarly, the Libyan Youth Movement used a Facebook group for the
construction of various discourses around the identity of the movement,
during the Libyan revolution in 2011 (Carr et al. 2011). The use of various
types of images on the Facebook group led to the formation of various narra-
tives about the protests, e.g. a victim discourse emerged at times when the
movement felt that its survival was threatened. In the United Kingdom young
people used SNS to mobilize thousands of people against the G20 summit in
April 2009, tens of thousands for the December 2010 demonstrations against
cuts to higher education, hundreds of thousands in the March 2011 rallies and
about a million for the Iraq War protest in 2003 (Theocharis 2012). The higher
numbers of activist involvement for the 2003 event points to the increase
interest in events of global significance.
In the United States, research has shown a link between Facebook use
and civil and political engagement, with features such as ‘groups’ and ‘events’
particularly useful in promoting political discussion and mobilization (Skoric

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and Kwan 2011). President Obama, for instance, used Web 2.0 technologies
extensively in his election campaigns to reach youth voters. Most recently,

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shortly after his re-election in 2013, he sent out a celebratory tweet which
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was retweeted 318,000 times, the most retweets in Twitter’s history.1 Other

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presidential candidates also joined the social media bandwagon, creating a new
generation of ‘transparent’ politicians (Fenton 2012), who are easily and readily
available to engage in discussion with their constituencies via social networks.
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One major critique of the use of the Internet for activism by social move-
ments is that access to Internet-based applications can easily be halted on a
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national scale. Internationally, authoritarian states monitor social media tools

and shut down communications networks when they identify a ‘threat’. But
when Twitter and Facebook were blocked in Egypt, people logged in using
their mobile phones and third-party applications such as TweetDeck to send
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out tweets. A Google-based system called ‘Speak to Tweet’ allowed users to

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dial an international number and have their voice messages of solidarity sent
out as a tweet, with the hashtag #egypt attached (Bohler-Muller and Van der
Merwe 2011).
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Facebook is the most visited website by Internet users on the continent,

with 17 million Facebook users, even though Africa has very low Internet
penetration with only one in ten people connected to the Internet (Bohler-
Muller and Van der Merwe 2011). The mobile Internet has been the most
effective way for people on the continent to access the Internet, given the
widespread adoption of mobile phones. Facebook is widely used by young
South Africans, particularly on campuses of tertiary institutions, a popular site
for the genesis of political action (Bosch 2009). There is already some evidence
for the potential use of Facebook for academic networking and teaching on
university campuses (Bosch 2009), even though Facebook is used primarily for
entertainment. Young people in South Africa primarily use social networking
sites to connect with friends and for social engagements as opposed to logging
on to engage in political action. While many youth ‘Like’ the Facebook pages
of political leaders who are popular within their friendship or community
circles, or follow them on Twitter, the ‘action’ often ends there. Similarly, in
the United States, during the 2008 presidential primary season, Baumgartner
and Morris (2010) showed that while SNS are recognized and often used as
a source of news by youth, the types of news gathered do not involve them

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 Youth, Facebook and politics in South Africa

in democratic discourse, and that users of these sites are no more likely to
participate in politics than users of other media. Facebook in particular has
been shown to be used for the maintenance and extension of existing offline
networks rather than for initiating new relationships, which implies that it
may only play a significant role in the lives of those youth who are already
interested and engaged in political life (Skoric and Kwan 2011).
Despite the widespread adoption of social media by particularly young
people, together with the large number of examples of how social media has
been used for political action, there is thus not necessarily a causal relationship.
While researchers like J. Gordon (2006) have argued that mobile phones
specifically are not just cultural artefacts, but that they also contribute towards
an enhanced public sphere, several critics have argued that technology is not
the panacea, and that social media is not a sufficient tool for the transition to
political democracy (Morozov 2011).

meThodologY

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This study draws on data collected from a widespread national survey during
2012 (Sanpad, 2013), as well as focus groups conducted in Cape Town. Survey

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questionnaires were completed by 956 respondents between 15 and 30 years
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in South Africa’s four most populated provinces: Eastern Cape, Gauteng,

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KwaZulu Natal and the Western Cape. 50.8% of the respondents were female,
49.2% male. The quantitative survey data were collected as part of a broader
study on youth consumption of mainstream news, with particular reference to
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identity and the public sphere. Quota sampling method was used to allow for
representation of the population at each site, with race, gender and location
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(urban or rural) as key variables.

Ten focus group discussions with ten to fifteen participants were conducted
with youth in the same age group, including both school-going youth and
those attending tertiary institutions. As the sample for focus groups was
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primarily a convenience and snowball sample dependent on access via educa-

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tional institutions, unemployed youth were not included. The focus group
discussions provided qualitative information and further discussion on issues
raised in the quantitative survey.
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FIndIngs: YouTh InTeresT In news

Despite assertions that youth show little interest in mainstream news since
they do not consume news publications, respondents in the study showed
high levels of trust in mainstream print, television and radio news. 79.5% of
youth indicated high levels of trust in television news, 78.3% in radio news
and 71.9% indicated that they trusted newspapers. Surprisingly, there was
little consumption of mainstream news media, despite the high levels of
trust reported. Instead, respondents reported higher levels of engagement
with SNS, with the majority of respondents indicating that they accessed
the Internet using smartphones, with more active on Facebook (68.7%) than
Twitter (44.6%) or YouTube and Flickr (39.3%). Respondents also indicated
high levels of trust in magazines (59.2%) and social media (57.7%). Six out of
ten or 61.3% of youth in tertiary institutions indicated that they rely on social
media as a source of news.
In the focus group discussions, youth revealed that they would never
purchase a newspaper, though they might browse through one if a roommate

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 Tanja Bosch

or family member brought it into the house. The main reasons youth gave
for their disinterest in mainstream news was that they did not feel that it was
relevant to them in any way, that they felt youth were largely excluded from
media coverage, and that they did not enjoy the overwhelmingly negative
narratives omnipresent in the news.
However, in contradiction to this, more than half of the survey respondents
indicated that they received their information about politics from main-
stream newspapers (51.2%) and television (51.2%) versus tabloids (22.8%),
community newspapers (24.7%) or local online news sites (27.1%). Moreover,
they also expressed high levels of interest in international, national and local
news items; and most indicated that they were ‘very concerned’ about social
issues such as crime, education, housing and the economy. It is noteworthy
that they claim to be very interested in these social issues, yet admit that
they do not seek out mainstream news sources or consume news products.
This probably reveals that respondents are prone to giving socially desirable
responses – they believe that news is important and thus indicate that they
are interested in it because they believe that they should be. Their interest

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in social issues most probably reveals the concerns of their parents and older
family members in their households, which they are mirroring.

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YouTh and ‘TrusT’ In maInsTream polITIcs
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The quantitative national survey showed a high level of interest in topics
related to entertainment and popular culture (86.3%), with very low levels
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of interest in matters pertaining to politics or government (37.9%). In addi-

tion, the survey revealed that youth have very low levels of trust of traditional
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institutions such as government, parliament, the police, political parties and

electoral processes. When asked how much trust they placed in these organi-
zations, the majority of respondents answered ‘not very much’ or ‘none at
all’. With regard to government specifically, only 40.9% indicated that they
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trust government ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a lot’, with only 30.7% saying that
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they trust political parties. In general, the survey data reveals that youth are
generally disinterested in and mistrustful of political institutions, political
parties; and that there are low levels of trust in the legal system, the police
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and the parliament, which could have implications for their participation in
mainstream political activities.
While there were low levels of trust for traditional political organizations,
focus group discussions revealed that youth had little understanding of these
organizations and how they functioned. Respondents who indicated that they
had little trust in government or parliament could not, for example, name
specific government ministers or distinguish between the roles of government
vis-à-vis parliament. Many youth held strong views on issues of corruption,
but could not always list specific instances of the corrupt activities in which
government officials were involved. A surprisingly large number of youth
indicated that they wished to leave South Africa and live abroad because of
corruption in the country, but most of those expressing this view had never
been beyond the borders of South Africa – in fact, many had not even left
the Western Cape. This may require further qualitative research on a broader
national scale, as previous research has shown that young people’s aliena-
tion and cynicism towards politics is not due to ignorance but rather their
exclusion from political activities and the political agenda (Loader 2007 in
Olssen and Dahlgren 2010).

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 Youth, Facebook and politics in South Africa

While less than half had been involved in either community events or
mainstream political activities, more than half of the respondents indicated
their intention to vote in upcoming local and national elections. The national
survey revealed that the majority of respondents intended to vote in the next
national (82 per cent) and municipal (78.3 per cent) elections, though it revealed
low participation in political activities, even those specifically targeting youth,
such as involvement in a youth movement or student council. Interestingly,
the responses from focus group participants strongly contradict these survey
findings. In focus group discussions the vast majority of respondents indicated
reluctance to vote or participate in mainstream political structures. Participants
indicated uncertainty around which party to vote for and questioned whether
their vote made any difference. The anonymity of the survey when it comes to
this particular item is probably a better representation of sentiment, and more
research may be needed in this area.

medIa conTenT and sns as a source oF news

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While there were high levels of trust in mainstream news institutions, respond-
ents said that there was little or no content that served their needs, and that they

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rarely consumed these media, despite indicating high levels of trust. While the
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survey showed that few respondents had engaged politically in online blogs or

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discussion groups, focus group respondents indicated that they received most
of their political news from Facebook or Twitter status updates. They indicated
that Facebook served a gatekeeping role, where they would search for further
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information on online news sites once a status update alerted them to the
importance of a specific news item. Certain key individuals in their networks thus
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play an informal role as gatekeepers and opinion leaders, alerting others to their
perceived importance of selected news items through their posts. Respondents
did not always follow the posts from specific groups or pages, but relied mostly
on individuals or opinion leaders in their networks as a source of news.
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sns as sources oF ‘news’

The Internet has been appropriated by social practice (Castells 2001), and
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youth in particular have used the space to explore their personal and group
identities. It was H. Rheingold (1993) who first argued for the Internet as a
space for a new form of community, bringing together people with shared
interests and creating ties of support that could also extend into face-to-face
interactions. In fact, as M. Castells (2001) argues, online interaction is usually
an additional component to existing face-to-face relationships. Similarly,
R. Putnam (2000) showed that in the United States, Internet users were no
more or less civically engaged than others.
Similarly, in this study, there was not much evidence for the use of SNS in
the engagement of traditional political action from focus groups or the survey,
though some students did use it to campaign and to follow student elections
for the Students’ Representative Council (SRC); or to follow or engage with
campus-based activist groups. These were usually environmental groups such
as Earthlife Africa, or groups opposed to rhino poaching, and not traditional
political organizations. A few respondents indicated engagement with political
organizations on Facebook, but this usually took the form of simply ‘liking’ a
page or group, or a politician’s profile page; as opposed to engaging in online
discussions with others about political issues.

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 Tanja Bosch

Some youth indicated mainstream online political activity such as ‘liking’ a

Facebook page of a political party, but the action often ended there – i.e. they
did not engage further with the party, often forgetting that they had even orig-
inally clicked on it. In most of these cases, those respondents who indicated
that they ‘liked’ a political party’s Facebook page or that they followed them
on Twitter, were rarely involved with that political party in any other way in
the offline world, and often knew very little about the party’s political stand-
points. Associating with a political party via an SNS was usually linked to an
older family member’s political affiliations, and not to the respondent’s own
independently acquired political views or activities. The Facebook pages of the
two main political parties in South Africa reveal that the ANC Youth League
Facebook page has 17,517 ‘likes’ while the DA Youth has 6,791 ‘likes’. In most
cases, youth, even those who were bona fide members of political parties, did
not wish to express their allegiance to a political party via Facebook because
of how they would subsequently be perceived by their online friends. An
element of race often came in here, with the DA seen by respondents to be
a ‘white’ party and the ANC as a ‘black’ party. As a result, respondents were

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often hesitant to engage in mainstream politics via SNS by engaging directly
with political parties’ online social media presences.

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However, students’ Facebook profiles revealed that they linked to a
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variety of social causes and movements – and so political and civic bodies and

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concerns become part of the everyday world of the youth, largely driven by
interpersonal influence (Bakardjieva 2010). Politically active youth tend to turn
towards non-mainstream political arenas, populated by non-governmental
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organizations and new social movements – ‘alternative forms of political

activism that work at the margins of the dominant public sphere’ (Fenton
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2012: 151).

alTernaTe Forms oF acTIvIsm

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It is of interest that while the respondents in this study did not appear to be
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engaging in mainstream political activities on or offline, there was evidence of

other forms of activity, which might be interpreted as activism. For example,
a number of students indicated political action around sexual identity politics,
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joining specific Facebook groups or participating in online discussions on the

walls of these groups in order to either show support for or express their own
alternate sexual identities. One example of this type of group is ‘HOLAAfrica!’
(306 members), which also has an online presence at http://holaafrica.org/ and on
the Twitter handle @HOLAAfricaBlog, and which a few focus group participants
mentioned. Other similar Facebook groups include ‘Vaal LGBT’ (658 members),
‘Rainbow UCT’ (682 members) and ‘Lesbotainment Africa’ (560 members). A
number of the young women interviewed, for example, talked about their self-
identification as feminists, and about how they used Facebook to engage others
on their feminist activist stance. Many of them had active discussions on their
walls or status updates, in which they engaged others about their views on, for
example, the role of women in society. Other respondents indicated that they
used Facebook to ‘like’ causes or to sign petitions. All these show that youth
may be interested in politics, even if they are not interested in political processes.
While Facebook and other SNS do open up spaces for performing marginal
identities, they can often in turn be regulated by prevailing social norms.
Racial identity and discussions about race also emerged as a key theme
for youth. Many respondents indicated that they circulated jokes and

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 Youth, Facebook and politics in South Africa

memes with racial themes in offline and online contexts, but that in the
latter they often felt less need to be politically correct. This may be because
of the often-homogenous nature of their online social networks. There is an
increased trend of blurring the boundaries between politics and entertain-
ment. Young South Africans in democratic South Africa are more aware of
race than ever before, despite the demise of apartheid more than a decade
ago, and list it as a key factor in their self-identification, as well as a key vari-
able in their discussions and views on mainstream politics. As Hall (1996)
argues, identification ‘is not lodged in stable commonalities and solidarities
shared by members of “natural” groups. It is a signifying process marked by
contingency, involving ‘discursive work”, operating through the “binding and
marking of symbolic boundaries”’ (in Bakardjieva 2010: 132). Respondents’
notions of personal racialized or ethnic identities were constructed by politi-
cal and social discourse, reflecting a lived, everyday experience of citizenship.
P. Dahlgren (2006) has argued that ‘doing citizenship’ is closely connected to
people’s perception of their identities.
For many respondents, Facebook was an important informal space in which

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they allied themselves with particular concerns ranging from human rights
such as violence against women, to animal rights activism, and environmental

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concerns such as rhino poaching, recycling or fracking, though many of these
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online causes were international issues with global significance. Respondents

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mentioned interest and engagement with issues around anti-globalization
campaigns, anti-branding and consumerism, and music subcultures such
as Afrikaans rap music and trance as alternate forms of social expression. A
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number of focus group participants revealed that they also used Facebook to
engage with religious interest groups, and it seemed as though religion often
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became a proxy for a sense of community and civic identity. It was interesting
that despite the HIV/AIDS pandemic and its association with youth, this was
not raised as issue of concern by any of the focus group participants, though
perhaps it points towards the lack of Facebook groups around health issues.
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Here we see how youth use Facebook to engage with issues of concern to
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them, creating and shaping new forms of political participation. Young people
are mobilizing politically, but outside of the system (Sloam 2012). These forms
of activism are a form of what Bakardjieva (2010: 134) refers to as subactivism,
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‘not about political power in the strict sense, but about personal empowerment
seen as the power of the subject to be the person that they want to be in
accordance with [their] reflexively chosen moral and political standards’. The
strong focus on identity politics in online spaces is one example of this, as is
youth desire to connect to particular causes on SNS. Participatory practices
might not necessarily be oriented towards mainstream politics, but instead
take the form of individual and personalized activities. There might thus not
necessarily be a full-scale disengagement with politics, but instead youth are
disenchanted with traditional political systems that are unresponsive to a
youth constituency. This also raises the possibility that youth might change
the ways they engage with mainstream political institutions, if they were
engaged via SNS, where they are already active in a variety of ways.

conclusIons
With more people accessing various social networking sites, the Internet
is increasingly becoming a potential space for the creation of a networked
public sphere, facilitating social interactions and information sharing. Our

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 Tanja Bosch

understanding of the concept of citizenship has been expanded by various

scholars who have introduced notions of ‘civic culture’ (Dahlgren 2006), ‘cultural
citizenship’ (Hermes and Dahlgren 2006) and ‘public connection’ (Couldry
et al. 2007) – essentially arguing that personal micro-expression reflects broader
political concerns. The democratic potential of the Internet for youth political
participation may not be fully realized through their interactions on SNS, but
their use of Facebook specifically reflects a degree of subactivism, which is an
important dimension of citizenship and democracy. Young people are critical
of government and mainstream political processes, ‘and many have turned to a
new form of political participation, the “life politics” of self-actualization’ leading
towards micro-political or cause-oriented actions ‘in which young people act not
towards the state but towards specific issues’ (Farthing 2010: 188). Young people
are using Facebook and SNS to develop a new ‘biography of citizenship’ (Vinken
2005: 155) that is characterized by more individualized forms of activism.
Social media, with its emphasis on the self and personhood, is inherently
private – but public and private spheres are overlapping and interlinked in the
online world (Fenton 2012). But these alternative online spaces and forms of

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participation are dominated by the cultural and economic elite – those who have
the cultural and linguistic capital to engage in the English-dominated conver-

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sations of the Internet, and those who have the economic capital to access the
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bandwidth. Usage of social media is very uneven with many users being merely

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‘lurkers’ and only a few individuals responsible for the majority of the content –
a 2009 study showed that 10 per cent of Twitter users generate more than 90 per
cent of the content and most people have only tweeted once (Fenton 2012). As
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Couldry (2003: 47) argues, once the media presents itself as the centre of society
and we organize our lives and orient our daily rituals and practice towards it,
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we run the risk of falling prey to ‘the myth of the mediated centre’. ‘The seductive
power of this mythic centre circulates around social life and serves to obscure the
reproduction of the dominant values of neoliberal society’ (Fenton 2012: 124).
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suggesTed cITaTIon
Bosch, T. (2013), ‘Youth, Facebook and politics in South Africa’, Journal of
African Media Studies, 5: 2, pp. 119–130, doi: 10.1386/jams.5.2.119_1

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conTrIBuTor deTaIls

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Dr Tanja Bosch completed her undergraduate studies in English and History

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(B.A., Hons) at the University of Cape Town, before working in the local film
and community radio sectors. She completed her M.A. in International Affairs
while a Fulbright Scholar at Ohio University, where she also graduated with
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a Ph.D. in Mass Communication. Tanja Bosch is former station manager of

Bush Radio, and has also worked as a trainer for UNESCO community radio
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stations in Jamaica and Trinidad; and for Open Society Foundation stations in
South Africa. Tanja completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department
of Journalism at Stellenbosch University during 2005–2006, where she also
taught radio broadcasting. She conducts research and has published in the
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following areas: community radio, talk radio and citizenship, health commu-
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nication, youth and mobile media, identity and social networking. She is
currently Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the
University of Cape Town.
In

Contact: Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town,
Arts Block, Upper Campus, Rondebosch 7700, South Africa.
E-mail: [email protected]

Tanja Bosch has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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