Kate Bomdiggity

 Sharing the Other Side of the “Dark Continent” on the Web

Washington, DC/ Lagos  – Audiences looking for other sides to Africa have found the web, and the web, because of its low barrier of entry, has found Africa. More people, institutions and media organizations for personal, long tail, advertising or promotional purposes are now uploading various forms of content and context about the continent on the web – all of which can be accessed for free by anyone with enough interest and bandwidth. Africans on the continent and in the Diaspora, through blogs, citizen reporting sites, Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook are becoming part of a growing New Media ecosystem, through which they share news and information promoting those sides of the continent that barely get mentioned. In other words, the web is a depository of media content and context about Africa, coming from a polyphony of sources. New Media tools enable audiences to find the scattered web content about Africa, then share it.

A few months ago, Bunmi Oloruntoba, an artist and blogger, and Emmanuel Iduma, co-publisher of an online literary magazine, began work on a site/social experiment called 3bute (3bute.com). 3bute seeks to leverage this emerging New Media ecosystem–especially African blogs–as a source for new writing about African modernity. With the writer’s permission, 3bute adapts, or excerpts, the writing into 3 pages of narrative art. The site delivers the 3 pages through a simple mashup of the Comicpress engine and ThingLink’s unobtrusive rich media tagging tool. The mashup allows readers to add their voices to the author’s by adding any material from the web as context for any part of the 3-page story. 3bute, in other words, is a mashup of platforms that, in turn, offers itself as a mashable surface to everyone for embedding YouTube and Vimeo videos, Amazon links for book quotes, Flickr images, Soundcloud music files, Wikipedia pages and so much more into a visual representation of what a writer wrote about Africa and modernity.

Through a sustainable collaboration between writers and artists, 3bute’s wants to promote the act, and art, of the mashup as a form of social consumption and creativity for producing new representations of the continent. 3bute pages, and the context readers add to them, can be embedded all over the web, expanding not only the way audiences are using New Media to paint nuanced depictions of the continent, but also the way they distribute their depictions as well.

source: 3BUTE