Karin Barber (2007:1) defines text as ‘a tissue of words...with the quality of being joined together and given a recognizable existence as a form’. In an earlier work, Barber discusses the linkages and theoretical considerations between text and performance, when she states, ‘even texts usually thought of as belonging purely within the written sphere can have a performative dimension’ (2005:264). Indeed, she contemplates the idea that inversely, performances within oral traditions entail some kind of textual dimension (pp265). Bearing in mind these as the underpinning ideas of my current work, I here contemplate the place of what I see as the performative within socio-political texts that abound within Kenyan cyber-sphere, especially social media spaces. I am interested in the audience/participant binary with regards to popular cultural online spaces, and in particular, the phenomenon of #FakeNews in the Kenyan election of 2017.
As Barber contemplates, I am interested in how audiences/recipients of popular news for example, also become producers of the same popular news and information, at once participating in the production and consumption of information on social media. I draw on the multiplicity of "texts" as Karin Barber has classified them, to analyse the ways in which the written text becomes entwined with the performative that are found in videos, GIFs, selfies, and the live-video, which allows for traditional texts to transcend into the performative where the reader is stimulated into their own ‘acts of creation, stimulated but not constrained by the text’ (Barber 2005:265). The focus on news and fake news (stylised as #fakenews) becomes the focus of these ‘acts of creation’, especially in a socio-political context with the recent Kenyan elections, which have continued to come under the microscope with the recent revelations that the data company Cambridge Analytica may have had a hand in shaping the narrative and final outcome. The presence of such data companies become crucial in analysing the audience as recipient and audience as creator within the fluid spaces that form cyber-sphere, and social media in particular.
Ultimately, my paper, as part of a larger project on the epistemology of researching online spaces as part of (emergent) popular sites of culture, and indeed, of performance, seeks to explore what Karin Barber terms as a wide ‘range of possibilities’ and ‘varying relations of dependency’ (2005:264), and to conceptualise the nature and degree of these possibilities with regards to social media as popular cultural space(s).
Key words: popular culture; online communities; cyber-sphere; epistemology; text; performance; cyber-cultures; audience; Barber.