BBC Focus on Africa – Scaling, Algorithmisation and Transformation

With the technology boom that began in the early 1980s, the narration of using technologies and surveying people’s behaviour on the basis of reporting events in Africa advanced. The production and distribution of the programme were significantly aided by the introduction of the Internet in 1983. Since that time until the present, the development of intelligent communication devices has improved the skill and capacity of the corporation’s staff in the areas of conducting interviews, recording, and broadcasting the programme using a hybrid approach. The programme is now being distributed using new media, such as social networking sites, podcasts, websites, and other digital media, rather than the redistribution services of the chosen radio channels.

Exhibit 1: Knowledge and power relationship in the context of programme content

Beyond the distribution approach, the programme’s producer, the British Broadcasting Corporation, includes content that is relevant to Africans’ daily socioeconomic and political lives. Specifically, in line with Annette Markham’s position on invention as an apparatus, the BBC captures and secures African gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses as content and redistributes them through converged mass communication channels.

Shoshanna Zuboff previously proposed this viewpoint in her work on the age of surveillance capitalism, indicating that doing so requires a contract with ordinary Africans who believe that their continent has never been well managed by political elites and some business leaders. Meanwhile, the contract has not been written or negotiated because the BBC has only performed her expected surveillance and correlational roles in society.

While the contract with ordinary Africans may be driven by the aforementioned factors, the BBC’s use of concrete and emotional language that makes ordinary Africans cringe about their conditions demonstrates that the BBC does not have a contract with powerful Africans, particularly the political elites. When this occurs, ordinary Africans are more likely to trust the programme as well as the Corporation than publicly-owned media organizations. 

Essentially, in my opinion, using concrete and emotional words, as well as reinforcing existing socioeconomic and political issues on the continent, align with Annette Markham’s conditions of possibility and instrumentality for understanding how using an invention can establish knowledge and power relationships.

Zuboff’s contract and uncontract concepts with capitalists help in interrogating knowledge and power relationships that exist after the programme has been broadcast. Foucault helps to historicise the programme and how it is being used as an object to subjectify powerful African political elites, business leaders, and construct daily life experiences of ordinary people. Overall, both scholars’ arguments support the idea that neither humans nor machines have absolute authority. Where one authority ends, another authority begins there, and vice versa for where one authority begins.

Despite the identified issues in the programme production and dissemination. I believe that the producers merely need to tweak or modify the processes of producing and disseminating the programme’s content. It is critical that distribution channels or partners are not solely comprised of private organisations. Public media should also be examined and considered. This will go a long way toward lowering some African governments’ strong opinion of the programme as a natural object of the British government in making Africans perceive them as preventers of sustainable socioeconomic and political progress. 

However, the African governments’ sanction instrument remains unnecessary because having a programme that draws their attention to strategic needs and challenges of people is one of the sacrifices leaders must accept because of the importance of making various locations better for everyone to live and survive.

Historicization of BBC Focus on Africa Transformation

Understanding BBC Focus on Africa requires knowledge of the history of the British Broadcasting Corporation, which produces and distributes the programme to African audiences and others around the world. In 1923, the British Broadcasting Corporation was established as a public organisation with the word “company” in its name. In accordance with the new rules and regulations that governed its operations, it was renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1927. The External Broadcasting Service was established in 1932 with the goal of reaching audiences outside of the United Kingdom. In 1939 and 1947, the service was renamed BBC Overseas Service and General Overseas Service, respectively. It was renamed the BBC World Service in 1965 and still goes by that name today.

Exhibit 1: Historicisation of BBC World Service Evolution

Between 1932 and 1982, the show was primarily produced using less advanced technologies such as tape recorders, fax machines, telex machines, and receiving letters from correspondents in various locations. During the use of these technologies, corporation personnel performed supportive activities aimed at improving the functionality of the technologies. The concept of listening to recorded voices in a tape recorder and transcribing them, for example, is better understood in the context of man’s motive power to machine power. This also applies to the use of faxes, telexes, and letters delivered by postmasters to the producers or the station.

As shown in Exhibit 2, during the early years of the programme, it was also clear that correspondents and presenters had to wait for the producers, who stood in for British Empire authority, before reporting on events under the guise of assisting Africans in holding their leaders responsible for socioeconomic and political difficulties. This, in my opinion, exemplifies surveillance socialism, which is comparable to Shoshanna Zuboff’s conception of the age of surveillance capitalism. When African correspondents and presenters had to wait for final approval before reporting on the events or activities they covered, surveillance socialism specifically emerged.

This indicates that the final means for creating the programme’s content belonged to the British producers. Zuboff explains how individuals and organisations with technological know-how can collect, aggregate, and market the digital traces or footprints of others. In addition, in my opinion, the British Empire and the journalists who covered and presented socioeconomic and political events from various regions defrauded Africans of their control and authority by capitalising on surveillance and correlation roles of the media.

Exhibit 2: Technological place in producing and distributing the programme in the age of surveillance sociocapitalism