Highway Africa: Give me Samoa, please Sir!

Those bunking the Digital Citizen Indaba which started Saturday in Grahamstown were to be found watching the rugby Sunday at the Bat and Carrot… er… Cat and Garrot… er Rat and some bird. Anyway the hot balmy day, coral trees in flower and winning rugby on the big screen contributed to the holiday feeling for the 500 plus arrivals for the Highway Africa conference which started today, Monday 10 September 2007. Intense debate about geography (where Samoa is), journalism ethics (should the sponsor buy the drinks and pizza), and statistics (the score pub poll) took up the ad breaks between the game.

Highway Africa seems to me to be more about what happens in the corridors outside the event than some of the mediocre speeches that characterised the first day of Highway Africa. Only a government official can speak for an hour and say absolutely nothing!

The networking is also key – meeting up with colleagues from years gone by and from other African countries is really awesome. There’s such wonderfully interesting people down here grappling against all odds on a continent which faces severe media repression and limited bandwidth.

Blogging has dominated many of the debates from DCI to Highway Africa among journalists from the continent. It still seems to be more about ethics and press freedom than the wider construct of social media, which blogging is only a component of, particularly for media workers from other African countries who seem to be at the start of the blogging revolution.

Interesting perspectives from Zimbabwean journos in particular who, out of work in Zim, are finding work blogging for sites mainly in South Africa, earning a few hundred rand a story.

Must say I expected a lot more from the debate. Seems to me that we’re still debating why we should blog and what blogs mean than analysing the impact of social media on our media world and the 3D communication opportunities that abound.

Social media revolutionary-in-training,
Louise Marsland