By Rogers Wanambwa 

KIU, Main Campus - Social media has become a major factor in our lives. From a daily tweet about one's life to more complex and serious conversations about the future and present state of our nations, we find our talking space on social media. 

But this was not always so and Nanjala Nyabola, a Kenyan political analyst delves into how social media is defining the political space, especially in an African context and whether what happens on these digital spaces really reflect on the ground (in real life) in this book, “Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics.”

“Social media has allowed people to publicly grieve for the ongoing military sieges in Syria, Yemen and other countries, with images of starving children arguably shaming the international community into intervening,” the books says about how people use social media to express their feelings about the goings-on in other lands. 

But more so when it comes to freedom of speech, the book adds, “Digital technology is allowing relative freedom of speech in societies where such freedoms are resisted. Furthermore, it is allowing people to be angry – vocally, visibly and virulently – in a way which traditional media is unable to capture or articulate. Some of the most powerful moments of the last ten years – from the Black Lives Matter movement, to the cataloguing of deaths of migrants and refugees on the high seas of the Mediterranean and the South China Sea – start on these platforms.”

A good read when you want to know the correlation between what's happening on social media and what's really going on on the ground and in the political arena, especially since we are just a few months away from a national election ourselves.