As a Pretoria correspondent for Eyewitness News, Barry Bateman was had been one of the first reporters at the scene of the crime. News had broken in the early hours of Valentine’s Day that South African’s star athlete, Oscar Pistorius, had just been arrested for the shooting of his girlfriend. Not only was this shocking news, but it was a story far bigger than the usual small crime felonies than Bateman normally covered in the region. If he wanted to keep up with events, Bateman knew he had to get into the Magistrate’s court to attend the hearing the next day. By that time, however, hundreds of journalists had congregated in front of the court. As Bateman recalls, “It was real struggle to get in, but I made sure that I was going to get my bum on a seat in the courtroom”. Once inside, Bateman heard the judge make it quite clear that there would no live broadcasting of the proceedings. This meant that Bateman and the handful of other journalists present were now a select audience to what was going to turn into a real drama. Prosecutors were demanding that the paralympic athlete be accused of pre-meditated murder and refused bail. In a fashion almost resembling that of a court stenographer, Bateman began knocking out tweets on the proceedings with a maximum of 140 characters each. “There were so many questions being asked. I just tried to be factual and not speculate”, as Bateman described his approach. He also began to answer questions coming in on his Twitter account. As a result his twitter account exploded, going from 17,429 followers on the 15th of February to 122,743 on the 21st of February, earning him the title “King of Twitter” in South Africa. (1. Infobox)
Of course there was a lot of international interest in the case, admits Indra de Lanerolle, an international communications advisor and research associate at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. Even the famous English football correspondent Gary Lineker, who has a twitter following of over a million, recommended to those interested in the case to follow Bateman’s Twitter account. Nevertheless, emphasizes Indra de Lanerolle, the statistics show clearly that the most dramatic growth in social networking in South Africans is taking place among Twitter users. By 2011 there were 1.1 million twitters, which is a 20-fold increase within a little more than a year. One reason for this explosion in Twitter use has to do with mass radio and television personalities mounting large publicity campaigns to build a following among their listeners or viewers. It also has to do with the fact that a Twitter account is easier to access than Facebook, which means less costs for mobile phone users. Of the total amount of Twitter users, only 40% are actually tweeting. The rest are following and using it as a breaking news service. In that respect, Indra de Lanerolle concludes, tweeter was the ideal social media choice for South Africans wanting to follow the Oscar Pistorius case.
The new community of internet users:
These changes in how South Africans are using social media are part of a bigger study published recently by Indra de Lanerolle on internet usage in South Africa. What his statistics reveal is that in 2008, one in seven South Africans were using the internet. In 2012 this number had grown to one in three in 2012, which is 12.3 million people. It is an increase that Indra de Lanerolle is calling the The New Wave. He adds that what is so radical about this community of users is that they are predominately black, meaning those that are hardest hit by unemployment and poverty in South Africa. Indra de Lanerolle’s figures speak for themselves: Two out of ten internet users live below the official poverty line, while four out of ten on incomes below R1,500 (120 euros) per month. (2. Infobox)
Driving out of Cape Town on the motorway, the landscape becomes arrid, the vegetation sparse. These are the Cape Flats, where the black and coloured population were forced to move to under apartheid. When the squatter camps and settlements became too expansive, the apartheid regime sought to solve the problem by establishing new black towns. One of these is Khayelitsha, which now has over half a million inhabitants. It is here that in 2004, Luvuyo Rani started selling refurbished computers from out of his car boot. He was a teacher at the time, and the Department of Education had just introduced Outcomes Based Education, which meant teachers were feeling the pressure to gain computer and internet skills. Rani soon noticed however that the computers sold were not being used. “They were gathering dust and the teachers lacked the skills to use them”. (3. Photo) This is what sparked Rani to set up a service and a venue to help train teachers to use the internet. It quickly became apparent, however, that there was a massive demand for internet access among all township inhabitants. As a result, Rani set up his first internet cafe in 2004. He smiles proudly as he points to the room he initially used to house a few computers. “Every time it rained we’d have to come in and throw plastic tarps over the computers to protect them.” Since then, he has trained over more than 10,000 students and established 18 internet cafes. As Rani puts it, “People are hungry to learn, and are hungry to access the internet”. For just R6 (0.5 euro) Rani’s customers can use the internet for an hour, whereas other cafes charge as much as R30 an hour. On this point Rani remains utterly clear about his approach: “What is central to my business model is affordability”. According to Indra de Lanerolle’s The New Wave report, the primary reason for C@feConnected (4. Infobox) users to go on the internet is to gain information about or from government or public services, search for educational content or look up a dictionary definition of a word. This last point cannot be underestimated; 66% of internet users speak one of the 11 official African languages at home. In Khayelitsha this figure is most certainly higher, making internet access even more of a challenge because of the low content in Xhosa and Afrikaans –the predominant African languages in the Cape region. Furthermore, one in five of these C@feConnected users do not have a phone at all, meaning that without Rani’s internet cafes they would simply be excluded from many of their basic rights as a citizen in post-apartheid society.
The internet as a tool for democracy:
This in turn raises the highly uncomfortable question of how and where to draw the poverty line in South Africa. Even the OECD’s working paper on Trends in South African Income Distribution and Poverty since the Fall of Apartheid (2010) was torn between a money-metric picture that highlighted racial inequality on a per capita basis and statistics showing the vast improvements in services. Before the fall of Apartheid in 1991, only 51.9% of the population had electricity. By 2011 this figure has risen to 89%. For Indra de Lanerolle there can be no doubt that internet access is a basic service every citizen should have. “Those without access will fall onto the wrong side of the digital divide”, he insists, “and therefore outside the knowledge economy and unable to engage with new forms of work practices and information sharing.” This is also why he is such an adamant proponent of high-speed broadband internet, universally available to the whole population, which would allow quick access to all forms of digital data. As such he disagrees with Cass Sunstein, a legal academic who was head of regulatory affairs in the White House; Sunstein sees the internet as destructive to dialogue and “deliberation” because it tends to bring communities of like-minded together rather than support debate between opposing groups. In Indra de Lanerolle's view the internet can foster a more citizen-centred democracy. He cites the report "2010 Civic Health in America," which showed that residents of "internet households" in America have a 19 percent higher voting rate than that of non-internet households, and those who go online are more likely to be involved in offline community activities. He insists that if the still severely poor majority of South Africa can use the internet as a tool to make democracy work for them, this has to be the way forward. And from the results of The New Wave report, this does seem to be the case.
The view of the city from the 10th floor of the Department of Journalism at Witwatersrand University is impressive, especially in the late afternoon when the sun has mellowed. In one of the large seminar rooms Indra de Lanerolle is speaking to a handful of mid-career journalists enrolled in a masters programme. He is presenting them with the raw facts: 71% of adults watch at least one hour of television per day, 22% use the internet daily, while only 17% of the adult population read a newspaper every day. The students react highly emotionally to the figures, confessing that they feel their profession is endangered. Indra de Lanerolle cannot contradict. The internet is disruptive and does cause a “dis-intermediation” by which certain professions may be simply side-stepped. News no longer needs to pass through the hands of a journalist or newspaper. It can, however, be communicated directly, which is exactly how Indra de Lanerolle perceives the Barry Bateman Twitter phenomenon: “It enriches the experience of the audience and gives them the power to narrate events in their own voice”.
Three examples of Bateman’s tweets
Barry Bateman @barrybateman 19 Feb
#OscarPistorius I sleep with my 9mm under my bed. I woke up to close the sliding door and heard a noise in the bathroom. BB
#OscarPistorius I was scared and didnt switch on the light. I got my gun and moved towards the bathroom. I screamed at the intruder. BB
#OscarPistorius because I did not have my legs on I felt vulnerable. I fired shots through the bathroom door and told Reeva to call police. BB
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