The International Journal of Internet Trolling and Online Participation 1(1)

Foreword for the special issue on Africa and

social media
Piet Kommers1
Abstract: If social media are crucial in western communities
they are even more vital for developing countries like in Africa.
This preface preludes on the coming decades when economies
become subservient to societal needs instead of market
economies again. This editorial is worth reading as it helps you
to see the next generation of social media. It is no longer
sufficient to see social networking as mirroring the actual social
presence; social media will take over sensitive parts of
socialisation as we now see happening in the classroom.
Trolling as we see it now just shows that more media-based
communication will go beyond news, critics and visionary
genres. It will be the natural rhetoric for citizens to express
societal needs.
Keywords: Trolling, social media, social networking, network
society.

Introduction
Trolling can be seen as a new genre to narrow-casted news that proliferates
through active citizens. In this sense it goes beyond the journalistic
mechanisms where authority legitimates the articulation of the news.
Already in the late seventies, in the line of Jean-Paul Sartre, Levinas and
Gabriel Marcuse, Alain Finkielkraut argued that national governance gets
less and less impact on the actual guidance of societal and economical
processes. Instead of that we have seen that NGOs but also networks of
ideologically-bound groups take over social innovation. The question indeed
is whether trolling should be regarded as journalism or anti-journalistic? In
case of sub-Saharan countries it is likely that journalism is primarily
associated with post-colonial practices where schooling, care and economic
ethos are directly inherited from European suppression and patronisation.

University of Twente, the Netherlands

As meta-research we might question if and in how far the new media

opportunities make a difference in societal/political awareness and social
democratic power? The examples in the coming articles show that at least a
new platform for expressing critical opinions is there. At the same time we
know that because of machine-analysis (big data and data mining) the
national authorities have increasing power on the sources and the
momentum of blogging. It is likely that trolling gets a more prominent
position in triggering political movements.
This special issue opens a long range of coming explorations on how the
web may keep revolutionary initiatives safe from national authorities and
untrusted commercial entities.