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Illustrates how blogging is an important feature of 'netizenship' in Tanzania
'Technology in itself does not bring social change ' - Sokari Ekine on 'SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa'
Introduction
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are increasingly opening new spaces for citizen engagement in Africa. Tanzania, which tends to be a latecomer in technological innovations, is not left very far behind in this regard. With over 14 million cellphone subscribers and potential internet users, the country is fast becoming a contested cyberspace for information exchange associated with economic, political, cultural, technological, social and other change.1
I look below at the concept of netizenship with respect to citizenship before moving to a description of development of blogging in Tanzania and its current state in relation to the sociological concept of social change. I am interested in the prospects and pitfalls of bridging the 'online and offline' worlds of citizen-cum-netizen social agency as blog users crisscross the two spaces.
The idea of netizenship vis-à-vis citizenship
I first encountered the term netizen in the late 1990s when I took a first year course on Information Systems at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. As my lecturer explained, it was one of those internet jargons - such as emoticons and netiquettes - that were increasingly being coined as the World Wide Web burst into the global scene. Netizen is a portmanteau, that is, a creative combination, of two terms, 'internet' and 'citizen'. Thus the term 'netizenship' follows logically from such a combination. There is some sort of polity in cyberspace that renders the idea of netizenship plausible as citizens from various countries move beyond the boundaries of the nation-state and meet, as cybercitizens or netizens, through spaces provided in the internet, exchange ideas and attempt to transform the 'offline' world. Of course, as the case of Tanzania illustrates, even these online engagement are primarily focused on a geographical area of the world that these online citizens aim to transform and, no doubt, that place is normally the area they commonly identify with. And this tends to be a nation-state.
As the leading blogger in Tanzania, Muhidin Issa Michuzi (2010) recently noted at the Tanzania's Diaspora 2 Conference in London, UK that social media are...