ABSTRACT

This is a qualitative study where purposefully sampled hashtags and memes gathered through virtual ethnography as shared on Twitter during the Local Government Elections 2016 (LGE2016) and the 105th anniversary celebrations of South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) are analysed as political communication. Through the use of qualitative content analysis and the concept of “citizen” and “voter” voice, which neatly links with citizen journalism, I argue that new media in politics suffuses political relationships between citizens and leaders in ways that cannot be ignored. While in some cases social media-assisted citizen activism as a practice has wrought positive influences in society, in others it has been detrimental. However, the concern here is on how Black Twitter negotiated mainly ANC’s political messages and how they used Twitter as an alternative public sphere and counter-hegemonic tool to express their voting patterns, their “political” identities, frustration, and understandings or readings of political ideologies and citizen power in the South African body politic.

摘要

这是一项定性研究，目的是通过在2016年地方政府选举（LGE2016）和南非执政的非洲人国民大会（ANC）成立105周年庆典期间在Twitter上共享的，通过虚拟人种志收集的有目的地的主题标签和模因进行有目的抽样分析，作为政治交流进行分析。通过使用定性内容分析以及与公民新闻整洁地联系在一起的“公民”和“选民”声音概念，我认为政治中的新媒体以不容忽视的方式充实了公民与领导人之间的政治关系。尽管在某些情况下，社交媒体协助的公民行动主义在社会上产生了积极的影响，但在另一些情况下却是有害的。然而，