Blogging down a dictatorship: human rights, citizen journalists and the right to communicate in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article examines the use of blogs to mediate the experiences of citizens during a violent
election in Zimbabwe. It focuses specifically on how people disseminated and shared information
about their tribulations under a regime that used coercive measures in the face of its crumbling
hegemonic edifice. The article frames these practices within theories of alternative media and
citizen journalism and argues that digitisation has occasioned new counter-hegemonic spaces
and new forms of journalism that are deinstitutionalised and deprofessionalised, and whose
radicalism is reflected in both form and content. I argue that this radicalism in part articulates a
postmodern philosophy and style as seen in its rejection of the elaborate codes and conventions
of mainstream journalism. The Internet is seen as certainly enhancing the people’s right to
communicate, but only to a limited extent because of access disparities, on the one hand, and its
appropriation by liberal social movements whose configuration is elitist, on the other. I conclude
by arguing that the alternative media in Zimbabwe, as reflected by Kubatana’s bloggers, lack the
capacity to envision alternative social and political orders outside the neo-liberal framework. This,
I contend, is partly because of the political economy of both blogging as a social practice and
alternative media as subaltern spaces. Just as the bloggers are embedded to Kubatana’s virtual
space to self-publish, Kubatana is likewise embedded to a neo-liberal discourse that is traceable
to its funding and financing systems.