The Forgetfulness of Social Media In Zimbabwe.

 By Takura Zhangazha*

I am writing this because you will forget it. You may notice it.  It may trigger some emotions or emoticons.  But essentially you will forget it.  Unless you quite literally undertake some investigative research on my assumed digital footprint because you intend to employ or troll me. But even that too will be temporary and in your own digitally motivated moment. 

And these are essentially a series of moments of information as it relates to how you want to feel, think and where it is directly personal, act. 

But there has been a lot of important work on the true impact of social media over the years.  Including its ability to be a catalyst for progressive and also regressive political, economic and social change.   Even more important has been studies on the psycho-social impact of social media.  Though largely focused on its expansion in the Global North and issues such as the right to individual privacy, the various studies on social media remain important to our African and in particular our Zimbabwean national context.

What has been a very interesting aspect of studies of social media and its ownership is its structured approach to the modification of human behaviour. This includes the relatively established fact that social media owners are in it for the profit and we voluntarily share our personal information about lives with them.  All within a framework that has been defined by Shoshana Zuboff as ‘surveillance capitalism’. 

But there was always an abstract statement that we encountered in these new nodes of our own behavioural modification.  Even here in Africa we were told that the “internet does not forget.” Social media and the internet are generally now not considered to be one and the same thing though a decent number of us conflate the two. 

The complexity that has appeared to emerge is that it is not the internet or social media that does not forget.  Instead it is us that forget what the medium has presented to us. 

This is a relatively complex point to make.   How we have come to view for example our social media accounts and presence is essentially consumerist.   And not just in the sense of quite literally consuming information but how we also give it out with the assumption that we are in control of it . And also with limited knowledge of algorithms and their neo-colonial preferences.  Let alone their priority audiences.  Hence what trends is always what is preferable.  Both in relation to language but also specific images.

In our African and Zimbabwean context to be a bit more specific, while we may not value as much as we should rights to individual privacy, we have to contend with the fact that the impact of social media and mobile telephony is as ephemeral as it is a reflection of our shortened attention spans. 

This is likely because our interaction with the technology that brings social media to our fingertips is also a ‘status symbol’.  Not just materially (what type of mobile phone do you own/control”) but also in relation to a preferred algorithmic consciousness (does it trend?)  And with the latter question being about again the priority target audiences of the algorithm(s).

It however remains in vogue that social media and our other interactions with the internet are here to stay with us in Africa and in Zimbabwe.  What is increasingly striking is our ability to move on from what it purveys to us.  Both by way of actual information and also by way of our individual preferences, which are also referred to as echo chambers.  Not necessarily by the day or hour but by way of our own emotions and what we prefer to read, listen or watch based on our own preferences.  Except for the fact that these preferences need to be fed with the relevant content in our social media newsfeeds. Where this content begins to contradict itself, based on facts or reality, we turn to other content that feeds into the mill of our personal preferences. But if only we would also remember what was said, posted and shared in relation to our own beliefs and same said preferences.

Our contextualised social media, even though we do not own it, because of our voracious appetites for its real time content, makes us forget more than we should remember.

You may ask so what would be the way forward.  I would suggest that we begin to rethink our own true representation on these various platforms beyond an abstract mimicry of how they are used in the Global North. While holding true to the democratic principles of freedom of expression, access to information and that little considered right to individual privacy.  Within our own context.

But again we are faced with the fact of the speed of information and the modification of our human behaviour.   In this regard, it remains more important, still, to be more organizationally organically (including literarily/physically) focused than on a social media we do not and will likely never control.  That meeting, those minutes to it, that constitution, that ideology and its democratic ethos remain the foundation of any assumptions of progressive consciousness. Everything else, while it helps, is ephemeral. Because you will forget it. 

*Takura Zhangazha writes here in his personal capacity ( takura-zhangazha.blogspot.com)