South Africans seem fearful of creating independent online political opinion

Share This October 13th, 2009 Antowan

When you compare global blogging trends both in the writing and consuming of blog content with the South African blogosphere, we seem to be completely the opposite in all but one aspect, namely technology.

Globally political blogs are massive hit magnets but in South Africa we seem to shy away from independent and private political opinion online. We seem to leave political opinion to the commercial news industry, especially newspapers and their online variants. There is only one political blog in the top ten blogs of South Africa and that is the Mail & Guardian’s “Thought leader” blog, which features the views of professional journalists anyway. We do not seem to have a local political criticism culture in South Africa. People tend to keep political opinion restricted to the braai area of their homes and maybe the golf course and perhaps discussions amongst friends at a pub or some such place.

Is there a fear in South Africa of political comment in the public domain by those who might have such an opinion? Journalistic opinion tends to be bland and sterile in the mainstream media. There always seems to be a lot of holding back and a whole lot of politically correct statements. I am of the personal opinion that we need to start taking debates public as private citizens but we might be so overpowered by the fear of being politically incorrect that we just never get to a point where we can logically discuss politics online in South Africa. Hence we stick to sports, cars and technology.

The Internet is the perfect soap box to stand on and scream out your desires and opinions. In Europe and America there seems to be a well entrenched freedom of mind to speak it. It is not rare to see people from the right and left having solid debates on political issues of the day. Perhaps race just runs too close to the core issues of current South African politics for Joe Soap to get onto his keyboard and share them without fear of being seen as racist or politically incorrect.

If you add a level of anonymity there doesn’t seem to be a problem (just look at MyBroadband’s Current Affairs section) but there is a distinct lack of structured and well presented independent political opinion in South Africa in my opinion. We all know where to find our fix when it comes to sports, technology and so forth, but we just don’t have any well known public opinion source for political opinion that is not part of the mainstay of commercial media in South Africa.

Entry Filed under: Broadband, General, World Wide Web