Facebook: Uganda’s largest disorganised, noisy ‘kafunda’

Facebook: Uganda’s largest disorganised, noisy ‘kafunda’

A look at the worldwide phenomenon called social media and questions about how long the world can continue to put up with oceans of trivia on the Internet.

Since about March 1985, I have read, on and off, Awake and the Watchtower, two publications by the Jehovah’s Witness, a Christian sect founded in the United States in the 1840s.

The Watchtower is, today, the largest-circulating magazine of any kind in the world, with over 30,000,000 copies printed in various language editions by the Witness’ Watchtower and Tract Society of Brooklyn, New York, in the United States.

Their religious doctrines aside, I have been struck for these 27 years by the quality of these two magazines. Every single edition is meticulously printed, trimmed, stitched, edited and written with virtually no single typographical error to be found.
I have not seen many magazines that are as well-produced as Watchtower and Awake.
The art work depicting Biblical characters is always well rendered and the photography is next to perfect in lighting and colour hue.

I mention these magazines up as a backdrop to my discussion on the Internet phenomenon of the last seven years known as “social media”, the websites with names such as MySpace, Twitter, LinedIn, Facebook, StumbleUpon and Google Plus that have attracted huge numbers of users and many of them are now worth billions of dollars. It was exciting at the beginning to feel the impact of these websites. One could accidentally discover long lost friends, neighbours and classmates.

Communication relief
People who had been frustrated for years about sending letters to editors of newspapers but these letters not being published, now had their own platform on which to air their views without hindrance.

Much of this new avenue for public expression was needed, but for a limited time only.
It is now becoming clear that social media as we know it has more or less run its course. At any rate, the novelty is, I sense, starting to wear off.

When I first opened an account on Twitter in March 2010 and Facebook a few weeks later, I had the hope of many people that these two platforms would give me access across international frontiers that many of us who grew up in Uganda’s years of scarcity know only too well.

I decided to concentrate on Twitter and left my Facebook account idle until last week. It was not long, however, before by around May 2010 I started realising, much to my disappointment, that Twitter was not what I had expected it to be.

The vast majority of Twitter users are content to write or comment on trivia and little else but trivia. Light, somewhat shallow comments, replete with grammatical and spelling errors and the most petty of topics dominate this micro-blogging platform.
The best content on Twitter is by far the articles and links to articles from, to and by the traditional, professional news media. Outside of traditional media, 99 per cent of Twitter’s content is, to put it simply, a waste of time.

Uganda’s largest “kafunda”
When I finally got my Facebook account going last week, the first thing that struck me and took me aback was the quality of photography on the website that users upload. From people’s personal profile to galleries of their other activities, it is incredible how poor the quality of photos on Facebook is.

From my estimate, 98.7 per cent of Ugandan Facebook users have no sense of the lighting, angle, framing, mood and resolution basic to good photography. Even the Ugandan Facebook users one would expect to be “exposed” from years of international travel, residency and education have the most amateurish photos on their pages.

Considering that for most people, the first place on the Internet that they are to be found after a search engine check is on their Facebook pages, I was struck by how little conscious most users are of the need for that first impression to be, at the very least, appealing.

Being a rather good photographer myself, and having got used to the editorial, artistic and photographic quality of the Watchtower, Awake and to some extent National Geographic magazine, I came from that point of view. I’m just not used to seeing so many poor quality photographs and such poor editing and published quality.

Of course, it was also not long before I realised from my experience that, just as with Twitter, the vast majority of the comments and feedback on Facebook is dominated by trivia, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.