ABSTRACT
Social media have become among the most popular technologies in Africa in recent times. As foreign technologies, their current widespread acceptance in the continent is largely attributable to the intriguing process of domestication at play in the host cultures. Domestication has been framed as the taming of the wildness of technologies to better suit the “home” environment and the daily routines of people’s lives with the intention of making them one’s own. However, this interesting theoretical framework could do with a more decisive focus on the cultural ecology of the user as a crucial variable in the successful adoption of new technologies especially in the African context. Indeed, the dominant Anglo-American orientation of previous research on the domestication of social media has been labelled “media-centric”. This kind of approach runs the heavy risk of failing to appreciate the reality that varieties of practices of social media use largely differ across social and cultural contexts. In Africa, social media technologies often find themselves immersed in long-standing local socio-cultural dynamics whose comprehension is indispensable for a scholar concerned with domestication. The understanding of the concept of “cultural affordances” adopted in this chapter enables the foregrounding of the dispensations, beliefs, and actions of the users that effectively lay ground for the nuanced domestication of imported technologies. This draws attention to the user cultures as opposed to technologies that are given prominence by the ordinary notion of affordance in technological adoption. This chapter acknowledges the critical acceptance and situated use of social media in Kenya in a manner that deconstructs the supposed stable architecture and logic of the new technologies.
