Digital sharing forums shape social values as leaders engage in ‘Twiplomacy’

On a warm Saturday afternoon recently, Peter Mbilo packed his Samsung Galaxy Tab and made his way into the sleepy Acacia Resort in Wote, Makueni County.

He had looked forward to this day, as had many others who joined him on the green lawns of the imposing address off the Wote-Machakos road.

They all seemed happy to be here, their smartphones, laptops and tablets at the ready. A number of them kept punching into the keypads of their little, shiny gizmos, their attention interrupted by the electronic whirls and buzzes that have come to define human existence of late.

Mbilo moved around, surveying the men and women gathered here from a distance, exchanging a few pleasantries here and there, and generally trying to make acquaintances of the friends gathered here.

We italicise the word “friends” because, even though on the Facebook page of the Makueni County Sharing Forum (MCSF) all these people were “friends”, few actually knew each other personally. This, therefore, was a chance to put a face to the name.

The MCSF group is premised on sharing information on county and national development issues, and their trip here was marketed as an opportunity to meet a wheel-chair bound man named Dominic Maweu, founder of the Facebook group, as well as get to meet each other.

Maweu was ecstatic. This was more than he had imagined would come out of his little digital adventure when he formed the group to, he says, “listen to people” because he has always been “passionate” about social interactions.

Now confined to a wheelchair after a road accident in 2000, he can no longer go out to village barazas to listen to the mood of his people, and so he follows their conversations on Facebook.

And there is a lot happening on his digital baraza. The MCSF Facebook page boasts over 22,000 members drawn from Makueni, Machakos, Kitui, Kajiado, and Nairobi counties. The vibrancy in the conversations hosted on this group is informed by its stated mission to “chat, discuss, give advice, and joke together as friends”.

Maweu’s is an interesting case, not only because of the passion of its members, but also because it deviates from studies — like a recent one by University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross — that claim that joining Facebook and other social networking sites “makes one lonely and sad”.

Instead, Maweu chooses to view Facebook as what American behavioural scientist Matthew Lieberman calls an excellent platform for interaction. In the book Social: Why our Brains are Wired to Connect, Lieberman writes that such networks increase social interaction and trust among participants while creating new platforms of sharing content and experiences.

SOMETHING TANGIBLE

Maweu’s story, therefore, seems to rebuke studies that have argued that social media platforms are less capable of facilitating meaningful relationships. But he has a long way to go if he is to convince researchers that causes propagated on these sites, branded as “Hashtag Activism”, can really translate into something tangible on the ground.

This, though, will not be a lone battle for him as many more prominent people around the world are harnessing the immense power of the Internet to advance their causes. Twitter, particularly, is finding expanding usage as a communication tool of choice in politics and diplomatic networking.

President Barack Obama commands 43.7 million followers on Twitter, topping the world-leader list, according to Twiplomacy, a leading global study on world leaders on Twitter. Coming at a far second is Pope Francis, whose 14 million followers are spread on his nine different language accounts.

Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono comes a distant third with upwards of five million followers, just a heartbeat from India’s PM Narendra Modi. President Uhuru Kenyatta, on the other hand, is the most popular African president, with 457,307 followers as at June 2014.

However, it is not the level of following that matters, but that of interactivity. In this light, then, the most influential world leader is Pope Francis, whose English and Spanish accounts attract over 16,000 retweets, according to Twiplomacy.

Although controversy surrounds the appropriate metric for the efficacy of campaigns on social media — Maweu’s Makueni group claims to have cut short attempted globe-trotting by Members of the County Assembly and influenced the facelifting of Yikisemei Primary School in Kibwezi West — there is a general concurrence from pundits that social media presence for individuals, corporations and causes is rewarding.

In 2013, theguardian.com reported that Facebook boasted upwards of 1.23 billion users worldwide, with over half of the users having over 200 friends. It is these individual accounts that burgeon to vibrant communities in the league of MCSF.

But, what keeps certain online communities growing while others stagnate? To remain relevant, social media account holders have to find ways of keeping their members coming for more.

Kis Mbondo, one of the administrators at MCSF, owns that keeping the group alive is a tall order, and that “one of the greatest challenges is to ensure that members interact in a respectable manner”.

For Mbondo to make this happen, he identifies and weeds out members using vulgar language and trading vitriol, as well as those determined to broadcast indecent photos. Administration entails keeping vigil on members who want to host advertisements on the page and blocking them, for they risk having Facebook Inc disable the account.

The engine of social networking sites is Web 2.0, a combination of web tools enabling unidirectional user interaction. Touted as being highly dynamic, these tools have revolutionised the online experience. The popularity of Web 2.0 rides on its ability to make both parties to a communication situation creators and consumers of content.

But the elimination of gatekeeping on social media is celebrated and dreaded in equal measure. While the elimination of editors in information processing allows a variety of perspectives to a phenomenon, critics say it is an enabling environment for the perpetration of falsehoods, propaganda, hate speech, alarming and unethical photos, text and video.

Nevertheless, this technology is acclaimed for its capacity to promote democracy in the world.

“In MCSF, we occasionally differ on one or two issues,” Maweu says, “but that does not mean we cannot find common ground on the other matters. Democracy is founded on accommodating diversity.”