ABSTRACT
Lanet Umoja is on the outskirts of Nakuru town in the Central Rift region, one of the most politically volatile regions in Kenya. The local administrative chiefs often use the micro blogging platform Twitter in transforming the interaction between themselves and members of their locations. In particular, this paper reveals how specific register constitutes the online interaction between chiefs and villagers, and how this interaction modulates community policing in Lanet Umoja.
Using data obtained from Lanet, we argue that the use of Twitter and the accompanying informal local language use enable a reimagining of the age-old baraza – a precolonial meeting place or, sometimes, the meeting itself, held for the purpose of interaction between the ruled and the rulers – which still exists in Kenya, albeit with diminished influence.
In addition, and drawing from Manuel Castells’ idea of the network society and John Postill’s concept of how agencies and agents engage with a society that is networked, the authors argue that social media have expanded both the spatial and temporal aspects of the baraza, thus producing a very effective site not only for community policing, but for novel experimentation by the chief at a local level.
