Exploring Social Media as Channels for Sustaining African Culture

Social media are becoming significant channels for information dissemination and communication around the world today. Internet and social media users run into hundred thousands daily; with young people constituting a large percentage. With the internet technology, social media, which consists of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, MySpace, have made the communication process faster, interactive, user friendly and enabling user generated contents. All these make the influence of social media far reaching; with good sides and bad sides to it. In its wake, Africans have lamented that social media are filled with western-based ideas, values and culture which is deepening the eroding of African culture, even to the point of threatening their extinction. This paper aims at examining how the technologically framed social media can be put to use in sustaining the rich cultures spread across the African continent.