The purpose of this issue of Media Culture and Society is to discuss the possible role of social media in the struggle for democracy, against authoritarianism, and over hidden power structures. The articles included in this volume are meant to offer empirical interventions to beliefs, some of them unproven, on whether the emergence of new media technologies has driven Africa towards democratic change. Papers in this Special Issue cover a wide variety of African countries delving deep into comparative studies of participatory citizens’ media on the continent. This introduction is an attempt to offer an explanation on African democratisation and authoritarianism before conceptualising the role of social media in political processes with the backing of current case study dispatches in Africa, demonstrating the dilemmas of digital disparities in promoting or denting democratisation in Africa.
The domain of intellectual property rights, along with the regulations that govern them, has a steadily, almost visibly incremental bearing these days upon the ordinary lives of people across the globe, in the rich world and the poor and in the North and the South. Its influence has escalated to the point where for some it may mean the difference between life and death; on it are now founded industries in the first rank of corporate power and thrust. As a modus for wealth creation it is being transferred onto other previously unthought-of sectors outside the familiar orbit of the market: indigenous cultural forms, music, fabric and other designs, symbols, artefacts, knowledge of natural resources, dance steps, motifs, advertising catch phrases, logos and brand names … Once this was disregarded as no more than a rather obscure and quite boring part of general commercial law, left to a few specialists. Not so today. Intellectual property right law and regulations are a focal concern, not only for lawyers and businesspeople, but also in pivotal debates about development and political economy. Yet despite this pervasive impact, few people, lawyers included, have much knowledge or understanding of the real implications of intellectual property rights. Very few seem to take these implications seriously and, indeed, intellectual property rights issues are far more likely to be regarded either as being of no real significance or simply as signalling regulations that exist merely to be broken. Misconceptions abound about how it often affects central, crucially important developmental issues and the debate that does ensue is often full of misinterpretations and ideological preconceptions. A measure of the poverty of general public comprehension here is
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