Afeez Olawoyin
The new media provides a platform and mechanisms for the masses to express their opinions whilst exerting influence with respect to political, economic, or other social decisions.
Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, political participation has increased tremendously in Nigeria.
This study examines youth, new media, and participatory politics in Nigeria.
The study is hinged on Procedural Democratic Theory, while the survey research design was utilized with a questionnaire as an instrument for data collection.
The data collected is analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics.
The study found that there is a significant relationship between the new media and the rise of participatory politics amongst the youths in Nigeria.
Based on the findings, the study recommends that Nigerians youths should use new media positively to enhance participatory politics in Nigeria, creation of digital spaces where political studies and in-depth arguments can take place with aim to increasing the awareness of the average youth in democracy and politics.
This will, effect, also influence the general public and development of internship placements in political parties and legislature, which would also lead to a smooth transitioning of leadership from the old to the youths because they would have groomed them in the ways of the Nigerian political system.
The study thus concludes that the Nigerian youth are willing and desirous of playing active roles in political engagement and democracy in Nigeria
Introduction
The internet has changed the world in many ways, and one major change is the revolutionized process of political communication through a system which has come to be regarded as “New Media”.
The evolution of new media has improved the process of political communication and expanded the boundaries of political participation in Nigeria.
According to McQuail (2005) “The new media has been widely hailed as a potential way of escape from the top-down politics of mass democracies in which tightly organized political parties make policies unilaterally and mobilize support behind them with minimal negotiation and grassroots input”
In principle, new media provides a mechanism for people to receive differentiated political ideas and information with practically unrestricted access, allowing for greater negotiation between leaders and followers.
According to Suntai and Targema (2015), the process of governance in democracy entails public participation, and it therefore benefits greatly from new media.
With the differing ways of sharing information in today’s world, one key potential of new media is that it has raised the magnitude of information available to the people, with the freedom to create and share information with others with just a touch of a button.
According to (Okoro and Nwafor (2013), participatory politics can be referred to as the platform and/or mechanisms for the masses to express their opinions whilst exerting influence with respect to political, economic, or other social decisions.
Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, political participation has increased tremendously in Nigeria.
Political participation builds public support for governmental activities and enables individuals and groups to influence governmental decisions.
Political participation may also lead to an evolutionary change in government, as witnessed in the 2015 general elections when an incumbent president from the biggest political party in Africa was beaten at the polls.
Another significant event was the wave of the #EndSARS protests in 2020 that erupted in most parts of the country, which started due to agitations on social media.
In all of the occasions mentioned, the youths took the center stage in bringing the change.
In a 2018 demographic statistics report by the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the Nigerian population was projected as “a youthful population”.
It can therefore be deduced that a large proportion of the Nigerian population is made up of youths.
In Nigeria, youths can participate in politics at the minimum age of 18 years. Research has shown that the emergence of new media has increased the participation of youths in Nigerian politics.
This is because the new media is a veritable platform of political socialization that attracts young citizens to the processes of politics.
In the words of Yamamoto (2015), “the new media has become an important source of political participation for youths who are normally not attracted to politics as these platforms have become the best tools to assess the popularity of a political candidate among youths”
In recent times, there have been concerns about the low participatory tendencies amongst the youths in politics, both in Europe and beyond (Theocharis & Quintelier, 2014).
Current concerns indicate that youths are becoming more disappointed with the conventional ways of representative government, (Milner, 2011) which have been generated by several trends such as youth denial to participate in the electoral processes, low rates of electoral turnout, and even hatred of politics (Wattenberg, 2012).
This trend suggests that the youth are not well represented or considered as influential in the national and international level of the democratic system; thus, they become victims instead of becoming stakeholders in political affairs because their priorities are often under-addressed (Diemer & Li, 2011).
Consequently, this paper seeks to interrogate the following issues;
1. Is there a problem of inactive youth participation in Nigerian politics?
2. Has the new media encouraged Nigerian youths to become active in politics?
Objectives of the Study
Broadly speaking, this paper aims to examine the relationship between new media and the rise of participatory politics amongst the youths in Nigeria.
More specifically, the paper seeks to find if there is a significant relationship between social media and the rise of participatory politics amongst youths in Nigeria.
The concept of youth is the period of life coming between childhood and maturity; adolescence.
Youth also refers to the state or quality of being young, especially of being vigorous and lively, or immature, impetuous, etc.
Youth is the time of life when one is young, and often means the time between childhood and adulthood. It is also defined as “the appearance, freshness, vigor, spirit, etc., characteristic of one who is young”.
The concept of youth is best understood as a period of transition from the dependence of childhood to adulthood’s independence.
That is the reason, as a category, youth is more fluid than other fixed age-groups.
Yet, age is the easiest way to define this group, particularly in relation to education and employment, because ‘youth’ is often referred to as a person between the ages of leaving compulsory education and finding their first job.
The United Nations, for statistical purposes, defines ‘youth’ as those persons between the ages of 15 and 24 years, without prejudice to other definitions by Member States.
The Secretary-General first referred to the current definition of youth in 1981 in his report to the General Assembly on International Youth Year (A/36/215, para.8 of the annex) and endorsed it in ensuing reports (A/40/256, para. 19 of the annex).
However, in both reports, the Secretary-General also recognized that, apart from that statistical definition, the meaning of the term ‘youth’ varies in different societies around the world.
When the General Assembly, by its resolution 50/81 in 1995, adopted the World Programme of Action for Youth to the Year 2000 and beyond, it reiterated that the United Nations defined youth as the age cohort of 15-24.
New media can be described as a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of the World Wide Web (WWW) which allows the creation and exchange of user-generated content (Auwal, 2015).
According to Asemah (2011), new media are a disparate set of communication technologies that share certain features apart from being new, made possible by digitalization and being widely available for personal use as a communication device.
The new media are not only or even mainly concerned with the production and distribution of messages, but at least, mainly concerned with processing, exchange, and storage.
Amobi (2011) defines new media as interactive digital media, computerized or networked information and communication technologies such as the internet, as opposed to traditional media such as print and television.
Lister et al (2009) describe new media technologies as all environments that let users search, research, share and configure their media experience will become valuable mediums. Crosbie (2006) posited that new media are uniquely industrialized and information can simultaneously be delivered or displayed to a potentially infinite number of people.
Each of the people involved – whether publisher, broadcast or consumer shares equal and reciprocal control over the content.
Any media a digital content, can be stored as the 1s and 0s of a computer, code, including text, audio, pictures and video.
This digital content can be delivered via different media, such as a compact disk (CD), digital video disk (DVD) or digital radio or television broadcast signal.
New media refers to digital media platforms that are interactive, incorporate two-way communication and involve some form of computing.
According to Manovich (2001), these elements may be present in older media forms as well.
The new element that points to a significant change in the media is that they are the result of a convergence between the computational logic characteristic of the computers and the communicative logic characteristic of the media.
Manovich (2003) defines the new media as interactive forms of communication that uses the internet including podcasts, social network, text messages, blogs, wikis, virtual words or more.
The implication is that new media tools can help one connect people with information and services, collaborate with people including those within ones organization or community and create new content, services, communities and channels of communication that help one deliver information and services.
New media is a term meant to encompass the emergence of digital, computerized, or networked information and communication technologies in the later part of the 20th century.
New Media refers to a wide range of changes in media production, distribution and use.
Examples of new media include: Websites, virtual worlds and virtual reality, multimedia and computer games etc.
Review of Related Literature
The rapid increase of new media platforms in Nigeria has attracted the attention of scholars, and these scholars have been involved in investigating the ripple effects of these new media platforms on different disciplines.
Research has demonstrated that new media have proved highly significant in increasing access to key information that assists the masses to make better decisions (Alexander, Ifeanyi, and Martin, 2016).
The scope of new media in this study encapsulates platforms such as websites, online streams, emailing,social media platforms, online forums and communities, blogs and vlogs, internet telephony, online ads, and so on. In all of these cases, social media platforms play a key role in closing the information gap because they house the other new media platforms through their various routes.
Social media are web-based communication platforms that allow users to download, post, connect, and cooperate with one another regardless of geography or time.
“Social media as a concept is the use of technology combined with social interaction to create and co-create value” (Olise 2014). It is thus a shift from how people discover, read and share news, information and content which may be text, audio, video or graphics.
Media scholars argue that social media involves a fusion of sociology and technology to transform the process of communication from monologue to dialogue or better still, to an interactive process.
Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Tik-Tok, YouTube, Instagram, and Google+ are just a few of the popular social media services.
Despite Nigeria’s technological inadequacies, these relatively new mediums are gaining appeal in the country and assisting in the completion of complex political duties.
According to Nwabueze (2014), “Nigeria has registered some level of presence on the internet-based community”.
There are various Nigerian-run weblogs, many of which provide a platform for young people to express themselves and contribute meaningfully to themes being debated by a group of people.
Some of the most popular blogs in Nigeria include Klinreports.com, Chidiopara reports, Nairaland, Naijapost, Naija.com, Pulse Nigeria, Topic.net, and Amana online, among many others.
In fact, as of July 2009, there were about 475 Nigerian blogs, with Nigeria having an online population of 42 million people (Nwabueze 2014).
This tendency must have greatly improved over time. As one would rightly expect, the heavy online presence has widened the scope of citizen journalism practice in the country, a form of journalism where members of the public play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing, and disseminating news and information.
“With citizens becoming reporters of issues and events happening around them, freedom of information is enhanced, empowering them to be actively involved in the democratic process” (Suntai and Targema 2015).
Democracy puts an emphasis on people’s participation.
Everyone involved should be carried along, and this is where the role of the new media becomes necessary.
Thus, an environment of dialogue is sine qua non for the sustenance of democracy. Social media and citizen journalism, which, among other things, allow for involvement and open access to all, are thus critical to the survival of modern democracies.
Nonetheless, the amount of information available to youngsters to make informed judgments during the voting process is critical to their civic obligation, and that is why Gambo (2013) stresses that “liberal democracies rest purely on the capacity of the mass media to gather and disseminate information that can guide citizens in making better informed choices”.
While democracy needs adequate information to filter through its various levels, social media provides the best platform for the circulation of such information.
Through its various platforms, the youth get exposed to information about the activities of the principal actors in the process of governance.
Thus, social media has become a formidable force that drives today’s contemporary Nigerian democracy.
Theoretical Framework
This study is anchored on The Procedural Democratic Theory (PDT) of governance. The position that citizenship engagement with political issues ought to be limited to voting participation or representation of the electorate”(McCaffrie & Akram, 2014).
After choosing their delegates, citizens should refrain from meddling with their duties as policymakers.
“Traditionally, elections are seen as a means of control for corrupt and greedy political representatives” (Thiery, 2011).
However, from the 1980s, there were calls for a more dynamic and active citizenship participation in democratic governance (Ebeling, 2015).
The procedural perspective of the democratic system implicitly acknowledged that normal citizens are unable to engage properly with political issues, while ‘supporters of participatory democracy promote more active engagement and democratic responsibility or accountability” (Ebeling, 2015).
Honneth (1998) argued that “dynamic or active citizenship engagement can be a very useful guarantee against poor democratic systems,” as advocated by McCaffrie and Akram (2014).
The procedural view, on the other hand, is not intended to prohibit genuine democracy, and neither is participatory democracy without flaws.
There are genuine democratic reasons in favor of procedural governance whereby “resolutions or decisions reached and made because of political discussions and thought may support the relations between citizenship and elected delegates, and thus contribute to civil awareness” (Doldor, 2014).
While democratic participatory theories suggest that “citizens inherently yearn to engage” (Jackson, 2015), Vite (2018) claimed that “some citizens might decline to engage effectively in political issues and would rather actualize a “furtive” democratic system in which they attempt to avoid the procedural view”. On the other hand, it is not meant to preclude actual democracy, and participatory democracy is not without defects.
Procedures-based governance has genuine democratic justifications.
While elected delegates set policy ontheir behalf, they are free to follow their own interests. In an era where formal political engagement in acceptable democratic government is low, the idea appears to be more accurate than participatory democratic governance (De Minico, 2013).
Furthermore, earlier theories of procedural and furtive democracy neglect to address the question of how to ensure that elected delegates will not mishandle whatever authority is granted to them, therefore this study is reinforced by evidence that people are uninterested and uncaring about political matters.
“If citizenship is only engaged in elections, there may be long time periods before the activities of elected delegates will be checked” (Dzur, 2016).
Conversely, McCaffrie and Akram (2014) made a compelling case for the fragile need for a participatory society, since it does not convincingly question the supporting rationale for enabling active or dynamic political activity (Froissart, 2014).
The deliberative democratic government (which improves collective decision- making) is a metamorphosis of the ideas presented by proponents of participatory democratic government in the 1970s (Vite, 2019a).
It is a conceptual paradigm that has been molded for years, especially in response to what appears to be flaws in modern liberal democratic governance (Vite, 2018). The political elite’s remoteness from ordinary citizens, as well as the participation of celebrities in party political problems, might discourage voters from participating in political debate (Kosterina, 2016).
The need for a new sort of political participation to deal with these issues is critical to the democratic system’s deliberative (improved collective decision-making) nature.
These rely on citizens being encouraged to have informal discussions and debates about political issues (Emery, 2016).
This structure’s importance is in improving the quality of interaction rather than the quantity, which is a substantial change from previous experiences with participatory democracy systems (Kosterina, 2016).
However, proponents of the deliberative democratic system hold wildly divergent views on how to carry out, implement, and evaluate the outcomes of debates (Theis, 2016).
Furthermore, these problems back up the widespread criticism of democratic deliberation.
According to Hauptmann (2004), the demands for equality and logical agreement are unrealistic (Crick, 2014). For example, according to Crick (2014), discussion within citizenship can be beneficial for improving the quality of democratic administration and policymaking because it emphasizes formal processes, which can exclude many potential members.
As a result, rather than increasing access to engagement, it may promote systemic inequality.
The procedural democratic theory is relevant to the study because it aids in conceptualizing new media as a platform for informal democratic participation, allowing ordinary people who are excluded from the bureaucracy-infested traditional media to contribute to governance.
Thus, there is a significant relationship between social media and rise of participatory politics in Nigeria.
Recommendations
Based on the findings, the study recommends that:
1. Nigerians youths should use new media positively to enhance participatory politics in Nigeria.
2. Creation of digital spaces where political studies and in-depth arguments can take place with aim to increasing the awareness of the average youth in democracy and politics and this will also influence the general public.
3. Development of internship placements in political parties and legislature, this would also lead to a smooth transitioning of leadership from the old to the youths because they would have groomed them in the ways of the Nigerian political system
Conclusion
Going by the wanton display of commitment and passion for human rights development demonstrated by the youth during the #EndSARS protest, it is safe to conclude that the Nigerian youth are willing and desirous of playing active roles in political engagement and democracy in Nigeria.
The popularity and deep penetration of the new media and the way it influences peoples’ lives cannot be overemphasized in today’s world. New media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp are formidable forces in the consolidation of democracy.
The information gap they help bridge, highly benefits democracy and reinforces the principles of transparency and accountability in the process of governance.
Nigerian democracy is gradually moving towards an enviable destination courtesy of the new media. In the same light, the new media platforms have expanded the boundaries of political participation and interaction between the ruled and the rulers.
“Being paper presented at the Annual Convocation of OOU, February 2024.”
Department of Mass Communication, Faculty of Arts, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State, Nigeria.
