By Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Published in: Cecilia von Feilitzen and Ulla Carlsson (eds), Yearbook 2002: Children, Young People and Media Globalisation, The Unesco International Clearinghouse on Children, Youth and Media: Nordicom Goteborg University, pp.43-52).
If globalisation is a process of accelerated flow of media content, to most African cultures and children it is also a process of accelerated exclusion. While African cultures are marginalized by the streamlined information and entertainment menu served by global media conglomerates, the bulk of African children are only spared by the fact that global availability is not synonymous with global affordability.
Given Africa’s marginality in global economics, given the limited resources of most African states, and given the enormous costs of cultural production and dissemination, even elite African children who can afford access to national and global media content, are often reduced to consuming media burgers conceived and produced without their particular interests in mind, as even their national media are forced to rely on cheap imports as alternatives to local production. The children are often victims of second-hand consumption even as first-hand consumers, since the media content at their disposal seldom reflects their immediate cultural contexts. They may have qualified as global consumer citizens thanks to the purchasing power of their parents and guardians, but culturally, they remain consumer subjects, and must attune their palates to the diktats of undomesticated foreign media dishes. This is generally the case, despite national and regional broadcasting charters that stress the need for African children to ‘hear, see and express themselves, their culture, their language and their life experiences, through the electronic media which affirm their sense of self, community and place’ (cf. SADC 1996).
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Your statement "the bulk of African children are only spared by the fact that global availability is not synonymous with global affordability'" is what caught my interest.
Are they really spared as you assert?
In a research i undertook recently on children's(from three socio-economic groups) access to a certain campaign message in Ghana, one of the issues that came up was that children's access to a medium, especially television, is not directly linked to its affordability by their parents.
The reasons that could partly explain this is the spirit of communal ownership of telvision sets in some rural and poor communities, and children's ability to seek out homes with TV sets to watch programmes.
It was interesting to realise that children from the lower socio-economic group had higher exposure levels to the message than did those in the higher income group, even though in the former group not all of them had television sets at home.
I agree totally with you on the point that, most of these children are consumers of media products designed outside African and thus very unrelated to their everyday experience.
How that affects the their sense of self, community and place is another issue.
Posted by: Solace Asafo (Ms) | September 21, 2006 at 08:41 AM