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Social Media as an Indigenized Information World For Environmental Stewardship

Published: 21 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

The Mbeere people of Kenya are an 'Information World' (IW). Within this IW is a Facebook Group named UVA: Universal Voice for All-The Chance for Mbeere! (UVA). We describe how UVA, as a people-led social media space is being indigenized through the online activity of sharing information to meet environmental stewardship needs. By indigenized we refer to the process of rendering meaning intuitive to a place or people. Our ethnographic research methods include field observations; content analysis of social media; and semi-structured interviews with individuals and talking circles. We suggest tools and processes to further foster indigeneity on sites like UVA, and conclude that through such indigenization, UVA and other people-led social media spaces represent a new frontier in the application of African Sage wisdom for HCI design of indigenous environmental platforms.

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Cited By

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  • (2022)Winds of Change: Seeking, Preserving, and Retelling Indigenous Knowledge Through Self-Organized Online CommunitiesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502094(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Trail as Heritage: Safeguarding Location-Specific and Transient Indigenous KnowledgeProceedings of the 3rd African Human-Computer Interaction Conference: Inclusiveness and Empowerment10.1145/3448696.3448702(94-102)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2021
  • (2017)How two billion smartphone users can save species!Interactions10.1145/304370224:2(26-33)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2017
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Other conferences
AfriCHI '16: Proceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction
November 2016
279 pages
ISBN:9781450348300
DOI:10.1145/2998581
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 21 November 2016

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Author Tags

  1. African sage philosophy
  2. Information Worlds Theory
  3. Mbeere
  4. environmental stewardship
  5. indigeneity and social media
  6. indigenization
  7. youth activism

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Cited By

View all
  • (2022)Winds of Change: Seeking, Preserving, and Retelling Indigenous Knowledge Through Self-Organized Online CommunitiesProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502094(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Trail as Heritage: Safeguarding Location-Specific and Transient Indigenous KnowledgeProceedings of the 3rd African Human-Computer Interaction Conference: Inclusiveness and Empowerment10.1145/3448696.3448702(94-102)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2021
  • (2017)How two billion smartphone users can save species!Interactions10.1145/304370224:2(26-33)Online publication date: 21-Feb-2017
  • (2016)African Identity and HCI Methods that Inform Technology DesignProceedings of the First African Conference on Human Computer Interaction10.1145/2998581.2998619(242-246)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2016
  • (2016)Citizen Science: New Research Challenges for Human–Computer InteractionInternational Journal of Human-Computer Interaction10.1080/10447318.2016.119415332:8(585-612)Online publication date: 16-Jun-2016

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