1 Decolonizing and provincializing audience and internet studies: contextual approaches from African vantage points Wendy Willems Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom Department of Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa Winston Mano Communication and Media Research Institute, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom Original citation: Willems, W. and Mano, W. (forthcoming 2016). Decolonizing and provincializing audience and internet studies: contextual approaches from African vantage points. In: W. Willems and W. Mano (eds.), Everyday media culture in Africa: audiences and users. London: Routledge, https://www.routledge.com/Everyday-Media-Culture-in-Africa-Audiences-and- Users/Willems-Mano/p/book/9781138202849 THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICAN AUDIENCES AND USERS Researching African media audiences and users is urgent more than ever because of the rapidly changing media landscape on the continent in the last few decades. In recent years, media content on the continent has become more diversified as a result of the liberalization of broadcasting, the emergence of private radio and television stations and the growing availability of foreign channels via satellite television. Most African countries have also experienced a rather spectacular growth in access and availability of both ‘mass media devices’ and digital technologies. In the late 1990s, access to television sets and radio receivers was limited, with 22 per cent of Africans having access to a radio in 1997, and only 6 per cent reporting to own a television set. 1 Although no recent comprehensive statistics are available for the continent, country surveys suggest sharp increases in access to mass media devices. For example, in 2013, 76 per cent of Ghanaians reported to have access to a television while 84 per cent had access to a radio. 2 Access is likely to be significantly lower in rural as compared to urban areas, and newspapers continue to have fairly modest circulation rates and are often only affordable to a minority of urban readers. Radio, television and newspaper content is also increasingly being accessed through mobile devices such as laptops (frequently via USB modems due to limited broadband access at home), tablets and mobile phones. In the past decade, mobile phone subscriptions in Africa have grown exponentially, from 87 million in 2005 to 685 million in 2015. 3 While only 1 per cent of Africans have access to a fixed landline, nearly 74 percent now have a mobile phone subscription. 4 Internet access has similarly grown significantly, primarily because of the rise of internet-enabled mobile phones. While in 2010, only 14 million Africans had access to mobile internet, this increased within five years to 162 million or 17 per cent of the population. 5 The rise in mobile internet has also enabled a growing number of users to engage on social media such. In November 2015, nearly 11 per cent of the continent’s inhabitants subscribed to Facebook, equal to nearly 125 million people. 6 So far, the bulk of academic research on media and communication in Africa has examined the policy and regulatory context of media, or has analysed relations between media institutions and the state, often adopting a normative framework informed by the Western model of liberal democracy (Willems 2014a). This macro-analytical focus — which has been informed by political