Social Media in Our Environment

 

Social Media in Our Environment

By

Abubakar Sulaiman Muhd

24/03/2013

After a long-haul period of transformation from age to age and from generation to generation and from century to century, modern scientific innovation and technological advancement have now catapulted us into the world of information age. The existence of social networking sites such as You Tube, My Space, Blog, Yahoo, Twitter, and Facebook etcetera, is playing a vital role in the act of collecting and disseminating information around the world.

          The decorum and decoration of events, the memory and memorization of occurrences, the growth and development   of economy, the history and literature of a society are all now within the spectrum of capturing events, through writing ordinarily or in journalistic form or rather in collecting them and sharing them with others in whatever form  through mass medium, and in this case social media since it is the easiest means that we have greater access to interact with others in distant places from our environment.

          The existence of modern means of communication devices capable of working multimedia application such as smart phones allows us chance much more than using only social media to interact with others but also making media houses to redirect to adaptation of participatory media system via creation of some special programmes that accommodate call-in from the people at home, receiving instant messages and eye-witness account of event to ease collecting and disseminating news around the universe.

          Audience participatory media or street journalism such as user’s comment attached to news, personal blog, photo or video footage from mobile phone or camera or local news written by a local resident of a particular community is all the integral part of the imperative factors that play in shrinking the world to a global village in terms of sharing information in a great velocity from different angles of the world. A person can snap a photo of newsworthy event happening in local area or videotape or missiving it and post it in online sites for others to read them and form their views about them.

          In 2004 when the 9.1 magnitude underwater earthquake caused a huge tsunami in Indonesia, news and footages of the event came from street journalists. During 9/11 attack, eye-witness account of the event was gathered from social media. During the recent and going-on Arab spring that ousted some rulers, the heavy crackdown and brutality against humanity and other war crimes committed were widely broadcast through social media. Likewise the coverage of the shameful irregularities committed during 2011 Nigerian election was culled from social media. A study conducted in the UK and the USA explored that by the year 2021 50% of news will be coming from social media.

           Not only news sharing, social media safeguards the rights of the citizens since miscreant security agents are afraid of  publicity, even though the persons working in the field might not necessarily be professional practitioners. But still being them not professional is not a ground to condemn them for they are helpful and principle of human right protection welcomes them. Here are some instances that I will raise later to auger right my argument.

          State enacts labyrinth of laws to suit the interest of specific people, like law of sedition which tends to restrict the right of a journalist to talk about some issues pertaining public affairs capable of generating protest or hatred against the government.  No matter how officials mismanage the affairs; the law prevents any person from questioning the reason why the public matters appear to be wrongly treated. For instance, here in Nigeria the law prohibits any person to tell the citizens that officials stole money from the state Foreign Reserved Account during 2011 election, and to enlighten people to protect their vote during election. Because it happened that government officials accused Buhari and his associates like Buba Galadima of being rubble-rousers - of their statements that say ‘cast your votes, protect it and fight for it when it is denied’; which according to the officials’ misconception, their words calculated to be sedition in humbug and dirty political language of ignorant politicians; caused the post election violence in some states in northern part of the country.

           To neutralize this self-protecting law that immunes the national rats to continue with impunity stealing the countries’ resources silently or in what Sam Nda-Isaiah calls as turn-to-turn stealing of the state’s resources, social media limits the scope of the law itself. Its strength is invincible, it protests against such laws that aim at curtailing freedom of expression against the undoings of kleptomaniac public office holders. Users of social media express whatever opinion they have about the public affairs of their society no matter how it would turn out to be to the officials. Backing them is the identity protection they enjoy guaranteed by the cyberspace. In fact social journalism tends to provide a flow of news and stories that are crude and unedited, unlike in formal media organizations where news has to undergo a series of editing. In case of any news that might appear to be bitter to the government, it has to be edited to sugar the bitterness or be penalbeat to suit the government bidding, or at worst if this proves abortive, deliberate omissioning of the story. Editing story in social media is subject to the user’s discretion.

          Some people show high interest in unedited news and live-on-the-spot reports, which is why when we hear stories on media we immediately refer back to social media to contact our friends who are acting as our reporters in their locales to confirm what we heard. Though news coming from social media is usually exaggerated, inaccurate, imbalanced and unascertained. But the belief is that ‘just tell us the story we the readers or audience will use our sensibility to separate the wheat from the chaff. Not only social media is value-laden for there are many of a formal media organizations that play the same game as social journalism does, they report only what pleases them and tallies with the mission and interest of the owners. An instance to prove this is during Fuel Subsidy Removal struggle in Nigeria. Western international media could hardly broadcast the protest incidence on media so frequently than they did, and do, to the protest in the then Libya and now Syria. Train of thanks to the technology the mother of social media, for we the international social journalists reporting our local happenings to our distant friends gave to the incidence full coverage and wide broadcast. We also used a lot of propaganda and exaggeration as many media organizations do to achieve their goals through the process of disseminating information.

          Here are some instances regarding the argument I mentioned to raise earlier on, the issue of social media aptly safeguarding the rights of individuals. I could remember during the onset of the protest in Kano, my friend and I publicized the demonstration and the venue where it took place on Facebook. On the evening of the very first day the turns out that showed off doubled the number of the people in the morning threefold at least. People converged on the square from all direction, and most of them heard the news through the publicity we made on facebook. The account of a friend on that same very day of the protest, which in the course of covering the event videotaped footage of a person sleeping on the ground. He used the picture of the sleeping man to propagate that it was a dead body shot by the security. The speculation, on the first day of the protest, which circulated that Yoruba, Igbo and other tribes attending the square gave protection to Muslims during time for prayer against security harassment while Muslims did the same in turn to the fellow Christians to also perform their service, was just a propaganda, a purported claim orchestrated by the masterminded people among us to use it in achieving our aims. And of course it functioned well because I even heard it on media, and most important of all was that it fetched some semblance of unity and integrity, sense of belonging to one mother country among Nigerians and feeling of solidarity to fight a common enemy. The oppressors. I could also remember the event of the other day at Silver Jubilee square when security started shooting in the air after they left from Government House where they shot people with live ammunition who attempted to force their way straight into the House. When people dispersed away from the square following an attack by the security, I happened to be among the few who remained amidst of soldiers. To protect myself, I quickly brought out my phone as a bulwark against any possible security harassment and pretended making phone call to somebody likely to be outside the country, as my manner indicated, that the security were shooting and killing people indiscriminately. Quickly a soldier drew my attention, ‘please my friend show where we kill anybody, show me a dead body here that we killed. Please tell truth my friend.’ He exhorted. Without social media the security men might kill persons at the scene in addition to the ones they killed in the vicinity of Government House. They might likely have feared seeing people carrying phones and other quick service system devices of disseminating information. Another issue is when I called in on a radio programme hosting lawyers to discuss legal matters. I told them that a working committee was set with the responsible for preparing evidences of snaps and footages of crackdown and other war crimes  committed against humanity by the state security, and the committee had already liaised with other international  human right societies to assist us file the case before the ICC. These I believed had instilled fear in the mind of state officials. That would be the most likely reason why the government ran headlong in perspiration to pay the damages of a bus that belonged to BUK students and agreed without hesitation to pay compensation of any loss or damages of lives and property wrought by the state security and free medical treatment for the injured. You see ba, street journalists are gadflies and upholders of right protection. Thank you social journalism, the desired result was achieved.

Back to the Track

         

          The problem with social media particularly in the north is that people that will be contributing inputs to the media especially the youths concentrate with their phones much on listening music and watching obscene videos, and pictures   and other lewd materials. While there are many programmes nationally and internationally that people from the region don’t bother to listen and therefore to contribute. People from the north are usually excluded for we only listen without feeding the media with our feedback. Listening is fortunate to the very few who could endure it for there are those that could never do so. 

          When listening to an international programme, the BBC’s Focus on Africa or the VOA’s Day Break Africa, the messages and opinions that come from Nigeria emanate from the southern part of the country. To cap it all, even the text messages and opinions about public issues that are published in national dailies, Hausa dailies exclusive, you can hardly find a very substantial number presented from the north, only a very paltry. Why are such inputs not from the north? It might be because we lack training and skills on how to operate modern sophisticated devices and the human resources to guide us working such equipments. Or in other words our aversion to knowing things about the world, or in a simple language our laziness to engage our brain functioning. This aspect of producing news and stories is not a surgery task for we can share with the world our literary production, our culture, and our Durbar festival.

           

          In the national level when scouring for a particular piece or an article about the life history of the country, governmental information or academic sources; the larger percentage of the result will appear to be coming from the posts made by the southerners. Here I have a strong concern about our exclusion in mingling ourselves with others for we will either end up degraded or falsely projected by others who engaged themselves in sharing things with the world. For I was one day browsing information about Nigeria just then I encountered an article claiming that Lagos state is the most populated state in Nigeria which is wrong. According to information from the National Bureau de Statistics confirms that Kano is the most populated state in the country. Accounts of the 2006 national census conducted by the National Census Commission also confirm this. We will also lack representation in the world platform for expressing our views. The consequence with our remiss is that we will end up docile and the icy reality of our life culminating domicile, unknown. As one adage says ‘goods locked in the store are hardly sold quickly.’

          John Campbell a former US ambassador to Nigeria in his article Mapping Violence in Nigeria says, “of course its analytical value is equally limited. Dependence on published reports means that incidents will be missed or reported inaccurately. This is particularly relevance in Nigeria where media is often concentrated in the south and important events in the north may not receive the coverage they should.” Considering his wordings it means that there is need of our engagement in media and the world affairs.

          We shouldn’t be reticent to the world about ourselves while the world is awaiting with insatiable curiosity to know things about us since we are in the midst vortex of  happenings, occurrences,  events about our culture and our environment, in politics , economy, security, disaster, justice and injustice, insecurity, crimes, and solidarity of great men and heroes. To make ourselves known to the world we must change from the taciturn manner and the sole aim of carrying devices for fashion, impression and materialistic ostentation. We must enfold the norms of contributing inputs to the media by expressing our opinion and concern so that we will not continue to be lagging behind, and start to compete with our fellow contemporaries anywhere in the world.

          To arrest the disheartening turn of event we must infest in media participation, sending our comments, posting our literary productions, sharing our views, expressing our feeling and concern as well as local happenings in our environment in an effort to make ourselves known to the world in the international stardom in order to build social civilization and collective globalization which in every now and then continues to turn the world in to a small village or a hamlet even.