AFRICAN FAMILY IN ECOLOGY OF MEDIA: FROM FACE-TO-FACE TO FACEBOOK
Whereas many scholarly works tend to view social changes being witnessed by tribal family in Africa through the lens of slavery and colonialism which are the most violent social experiences ever encountered by African institutions, this article casts suspicious eyes on the media technology in its hardware and software as subtle but powerful agents of social change whose introduction and adoption by the tribal family has been a matter of great consequences. Through a hermeneutical rereading of an African family side by side with media ecology, this piece tracks changes in the family with a systematic theory along authority, power and control structures, learning pattern, knowledge dynamics, record-keeping, relationships, and communication forms from orality, literacy, electronic to interactive media. True to its hermeneutical preoccupation, the article reserves ethical judgements on its findings for further research.
Keywords: african, ecology, face-to-face, facebook, family, media