ECAS 2013

The textualisation of space by the Internet has led to advantages and disadvantages in researching Africa. While time and space have clearly been compressed for the benefit of an often poorly equipped researcher, there are still major ethical and philosophical questions that need to be addressed especially in relation to online ethnographies of conflict. Using the case of Zimbabwe's most violent election in 2008 and what has been widely referred to as the Arab Spring; this paper explores the inherent dangers of what I see as a rise in the dependence on virtual realities. In exploring the ethical concern, the paper problematizes the relationship between the online virtuality realities and offline physical realities in conflict. The running commentary mainly addresses the question what happens to space when text becomes text? The paper therefore unravels the ontological and epistemological issues of reality in researching conflict. However, its aim is not to dismiss the validity of virtual ethnographies, but to call for reflexivity in its deployment not only in relation to ethics, but philosophical perceptions of the 'real'.

In several African countries, radio stations communicate with their audiences online or through mobile phones during talk shows or for audience research. These technologies can also be used to gather audiences' opinions on social and governance issues using polls. In this context, SMS offer an easy and accessible way to collect opinions in a short period of time. Large numbers of SMS can be stored and managed using software (e.g., FrontlineSMS) installed in stations computers connected to a modem. The potential of these technical innovations to create spaces for public consultation and debate between journalists, citizens and other political actors is explored in "Africa's Voices". This one year pilot is guided by a quasi-experimental approach to develop a tailored methodology for opinion polling in radio stations in Africa. The first insights of the project lead to fundamental questions related to perceptions and effects of ICT based polls on stations and communties. How stations interact with new M4D tools to create spaces for community participation? In which formats audiences tend to express their opinions using SMS and why? How important is confidentiality and anonymity to African audiences? What kind of topics generate more engagement from the audiences and journalists? Are existing social cleaveages being reinforced by "Africa's Voices"? The project offers a basis to discuss these questions and reflect on how debates generated by "Africa's Voices" can shape social representations and identities and empower citizens by giving them a "voice" that may spread to other forms of political participation.

South Central Somalia has been engaged in conflict since 1991 and ICTs, both old and new, have been variously perceived as a component of the war or a tool that could bring peace and reconciliation in the region. The absence of a government has led to a proliferation of media outlets, mostly radio stations, acting as mouthpieces for warring factions, supporting partisan agenda and playing a role in protracting violence. On the other hand, actors such as the United Nations and Somali journalists in the diaspora have heavily invested in communication, establishing and founding radio, TV stations and other media initiatives with the aim of creating a common ground for Somali to discuss a path for peace or of helping "legitimate" voices gaining trust among the population.

By focusing on Star FM, a radio initially targeting the Somali population in Kenya and which has progressively extended its reach and opened branches in South-Central Somalia, this paper analyses the challenges and opportunities of doing in-depth research on and through ICTs in a highly politicized conflict area. In such a politicized environment, where accusations of serious crimes on the part of journalists themselves are rife, the paper stresses how corroborating data can be a challenge but it is also a priority. It also discusses ways to cope with sensitive information about journalists and the audience in a context when journalists are actively targeted by militia groups such as al Shabaab but similarly accused to be part of the conflict.

An eParticipation ecology is composed of five elements: actors, contents, traditional culture of participation, existing media skills and practices, discourses in conflicts (establishment vs. antagonists) and three macro-dimensions: cultural/traditional, political and socio-technological, in which the five elements are interacting with each other (Cavallo, 2010).

The term eParticipation is used to define a specific field of study that attempts to investigate how ICTs can be applied to improve citizen/community participation and consequently their capacity to influence government decision-making processes. In this respect, eParticipation projects are considered strategies to influence power in a specific direction.

It is important to specify that in the context of this article, eParticipation is not considered a neutral space in which different actors communicate amongst themselves.

In this article we will explore the possible applications of the eParticipation Ecology framework to the analysis of the most relevant Kenyan Techno-Discourses emerged in the last five years at local and international level.

Furthermore, in this article we will investigate eParticipation in relation to international development and the history of "North-South" relations in Sub-Saharan Africa from colonialism up to now.

We use a field experiment to study the effects of access to channels of political communication on the efforts voters take to influence their representatives. We presented randomly sampled constituents in Uganda with an opportunity to send a text-message to their MP at one of three randomly assigned price levels. In assessing who chose to contact their representatives and what they chose to communicate, we seek to determine whether ICTs can flatten interest articulation and whether strategic considerations result in price-induced changes in the types of communication sent to politicians. Take-up rates of the new technology are about 5% which represents a moderate level of engagement relative to traditional forms of contact. Critically, contrary to concerns that new technology privileges the already privileged, this engagement corresponds to a statistically significant though substantively small, flattening effect, with a greater share of marginalized populations using this channel compared to traditional channels. Nevertheless these new users do not differ on our measures of preferences from the general population or the traditionally engaged population. Price matters too, but we find that the effect of price is more quantitative than qualitative. Making messaging free to voters yields a a 50% increase in messaging but this increase does not substantially alter the representation of marginalized populations or the types of messages that are sent. From an MP's perspective new technology changes the volume but not the information.