Social media has redefined the thinking around the capacity and intensity of interaction among individuals and groups of people across national and international borders. Messages on social media are instantaneous, unhinged to interpretation and inherently dialogic. Through app designs that encourage near addiction to use in various platforms, it is becoming more probable that public debates and social protests start, are fanned and may even be resolved online in these platforms. Many state actors including politicians, religious leaders and social commentators (...) have exploited social media to drive their agenda; personal or otherwise. The anonymity and direct accessibility granted by social media to these actors have given them a brazen green light to promote hate online and a platform for divisive and anarchist agenda. In this paper, I explore the dynamics of hate in social media; how the “Other” is created and used as the target for hate online using the case of electioneering in Kenya. I will attempt to provide a structure profile of social media communication in Kenya during the electioneering period while correlating this to the functional features that facilitated hate on social media. I will deconstruct how the “Other” is created by examining discourse arguments and the underlying subjective benefits in the creation of the “Other”. I will then show how anonymity and publicity interact to promote the process of hate online. This paper employs a phenomenological approach, first propounded by Edmund Husserl, to illustrate how misinformation creates the “Other” and to profile how hate that is spread online is a by-product of this misinformation. The research validity in this paper is premised on the currency of social media as a new dynamic in communication requiring rigorous academic inquiry. (shrink)

The growing influence of the visual media in contemporary society is quite alarming; hence, learning to explicate them is inevitable. This is a paradigm shift from verbal argumentation to visual argumentation. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of visual analysis and visual literacy, a part of discourse analysis. Visuals employ a number of rhetorical devices; however, understanding the effectiveness of these devices is still a challenge. Adopting Visual Argumentation Theory, the article analyzes argumentation in cartoons (...) on the post-election violence that rocked Kenya in 2007/2008. From the analyses, it is concluded that visuals can argue as simply and forcefully as their verbal counterparts. The blending of caricature and portraiture makes them even more explicit as portraiture denotes the characters so that we can recognize who they are; caricature ridicules them, analogy attributes actions to them in a satirical or sarcastic way, and cultural memory is needed to access the reference to the analogies. Visuals are designed to make the reader think not only about the event or the people being portrayed but also about the message being communicated. This means visuals have the ability to stretch the truth beyond caricature or mere amusement. (shrink)