JAMS 7 (1) pp. 11–23 Intellect Limited 2015 Journal of African Media Studies Volume 7 Number 1 © 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jams.7.1.11_1 Duncan Omanga Moi University ‘Peeling back the mask’: Remediation and remix of Kenya’s news into popular culture abstRact KeywORDs This article probes how two ‘ordinary news’ events were remediated and remixed remediation by ordinary users, journalists and professional musicians, and were circulated hypermediacy as popular music in Kenya. Specifically, using TV news clips and music videos remix uploaded on YouTube, the article reveals how the digital media allow news events Kenya to be emptied of their ‘hard news’ and to be circulated as either entirely new, or viral as modified artefacts of popular culture. To achieve its aims, the article borrows immediacy and modifies Bolter and Grusin’s logic of remediation to show the conflations and distinctions between news and its digital derivatives, and also their metamorphosis from hard news to popular music. In particular, the article concludes that the process of the remediation of news into remix is a factor of technology, content and context, whose interplay ambiguously interrogates the notion of erasure/invisibility (imme- diacy) and construction/visibility (hypermediacy). 11 JAMS_7.1_Omanga_11-23.indd 11 1/28/15 4:50:47 PM Duncan Omanga 1. In 2011, Portland IntRODuctIOn Communication analysed more than Increasingly, the general complexion of the Africa media is going through 11.5m geo-located a massive change. In Kenya, this change is not merely manifest in the Tweets. In their study, Twitter was dominated exponential growth of media outlets, but also in the content of the news by South Africa, which that is being purveyed to the public. In Kenya, recent developments in the sent twice as many Tweets (5,030,226) as production and consumption of media content, coupled with a dynamic the next most active, media economy, have dramatically altered the nature of Kenyan media space. Kenya (2,476,800). A conspicuous outworking of this change is the increasing consumption and Nigeria (1,646,212), 1 Egypt (1,214,062) and sharing of news through social media platforms and digital technologies Morocco (745,620) make (Portland Communication 2014). As in several other places, there is a grow- up the remainder of ing tendency among former audiences to move beyond the merely passive the top five most active countries. As evidence consumption of news towards active production and the circulation of news of the convergence content (Shirky 2008). Thanks to digital technologies and mobile telephones, of the old and the new media platforms, the domain of and monopoly in producing and disseminating news no longer 68 per cent of those rests in large, profit-minded institutions, but is increasingly being ‘devolved’ polled said that they to ordinary people. In Kenya, a notable change has been in the way digital use Twitter to monitor news. The use of social technologies shape how television news is being consumed and refashioned media to consume by ordinary users into a completely new genre: popular music. news is also driven by The idea of refashioning is borrowed from Bolter and Grusin (2002), who demographic dynamics that show that it is were trying to come to grips with ways in which digital media technologies mostly a youthful are effecting and shaping modern culture. According to Bolter and Grusin population that forms the basis of the (2002: 45), remediation is the ‘defining character of the new digital media’. interaction between Taking cues from McLuhan’s oft-cited claim that ‘the content of any medium the old and the new is always another medium’ (1964), the authors argue that remediation is not media. simply a matter of repurposing, but is a more delicate kind of borrowing in which one medium is incorporated or represented in another medium. To begin, they deny the existence of a pure ‘new media’ category, arguing that ‘what is new about new media comes from the particular ways in which they refashion older media and the ways in which older media refashion them- selves to answer the challenges of new media’ (2002: 15). New media is thus conceived as a way to refer to older media and revise them. They further argue that remediation practices preceded digital technologies and such traces of remediation can be seen in mediaeval paintings, where painters included maps, globes, inscriptions and letters in their works. In the present digital age, the new media achieves cultural significance by reference, displacement or refashioning of the old media. This can be seen in the way cinema is being remediated as online streaming, using the infrastructure of the Internet and computers. Other examples include cases where particular websites remediate photography by offering options for gallery views, or to download these photos, or where popular novels are transformed and adopted into successful films. This is the essence of remediation. Evidently, their inordinate technological focus becomes a source of weakness in understanding remediation practices. While the impact of technology on the media is enormous, this article argues that it is vitally important to broaden our concept of new media to include media content. In this sense, we might conceive of remediation as not merely a refashioning of older media, but also as a refashioning of the content of old media. In this way, new media can also be conceived to be how one genre is built onto another to create something entirely new, or how new content refers to older content or even more, how one genre represents another genre through either a total or partial eclipsing of the original. In other words, new media need to be broadly conceived to subsume both form and content. 12 JAMS_7.1_Omanga_11-23.indd 12 1/28/15 4:50:47 PM ‘Peeling back the mask’ As such, news remix that is produced and circulated by new media technolo- 2. ‘Hard news’ is a general term that gies can be conceived as being part of the genus of new media. is used to refer to To add ballast to their idea of remediation, Bolter and Grusin (2002) up-to-the-minute news argue that the process of remediation works through two principal strate- and events that are reported immediately, gies: immediacy and hypermediacy. In the former, remediation works through while ‘soft news’ erasure and invisibility. In this sense, immediacy works by effacing the medium is background through an illusion of transparency. For instance, it assumes that works of art, information, or human-interest or video productions, video games, music video and so on, are attempts to stories. Politics, war, achieve transparent immediacy by erasing traces of media. The logic of imme- economics and crime are usually considered diacy works on the promise and expectation of an authentic experience that hard news, while attempts, as much as possible, to deny the reality of its own mediation. As arts, entertainment such, the medium becomes an erasive medium. New media technologies and and lifestyles are considered to be soft structures have only made immediacy all the more possible through the effec- news. Sometimes it is tive manipulation of image, text, audio and animation. Still, remediation is not the tone that marks the simply about the media being self-effacing, but may also call attention to its difference. state of being mediated. This occurs through hypermediacy. Although the two strategies appear contradictory, they are a necessary feature of remediation in the digital age. Hypermediacy constructs and calls attention to the interplay, convergence and co-mingling of image, text and audio in a mediated product. Unlike immediacy, hypermediacy is not self-effacing, but instead announces its constructed nature. It does not promise an authentic experience, but revels in arranging disparate elements, whose arrangement is visible, to produce a product whose contours and points of intersection are celebrated and made visible. It naturally leads to a fascination with the media themselves. The interconnectedness of immediacy and hypermediacy is a reflection of the digital culture that seeks both to multiply its media and to erase the traces of mediation. Ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiply- ing them (2002: 5). For instance, hypermediacy is evident in many websites that combine diverse media forms, such as video, graphics, hyperlinks or in modern day news broadcast that combine text ribbons, pictures and live foot- age. These efforts constitute attempts to produce an ‘authentic’ experience, immediacy, through hypermediacy. While the logics of remediation are suitable for understanding the tech- nological structures that support the transformation of news into popular cultural products in Kenya, they still privilege form over content. Similarly, it is equally possible to broaden the two logics of remediation to subsume the realities of the ways that users refashion news content in Kenya by using new media technologies. In this sense, probing remix and news content as possibilities for both transparency and opacity opens up wider possibilities of understanding remediation beyond its limiting focus on the technical aspects. Since this study is interested in discovering how news is refashioned, or, to be more precise, how it is remediated into popular cultural products, this article aims to trace the process of erasure and hypermediacy on the refash- ioning of news into popular music in Kenya. The focus is not on the physical material