Abstract
ABSTRACT Social media reconstitutes the idea of ‘abroad’ as a geographical place, shortens the symbolic distance between borders, and renders the local and global into one almost seamless space. This seamlessness is both metaphorical and symbolic, where happenings on the spatial or geographical ‘abroad’ are rendered through context onto both the spatial and virtual ‘local’. Context via social media and other virtual spaces therefore serves to not only demarcate the local from the abroad, but also serves to at once create a seamless, borderless ‘glocal’ where texts are immediately ‘translated’ and ‘transposed’ into different forms. For this paper, I am interested in Twitter/X Spaces, where Kenyans congregate every day to discourse and reinforce certain public scripts. I use the euphemisms of ‘serving hot tea’ and ‘character development’, and how the use of these metaphors become spaces within which news, gossip, ‘gender wars’, and rumour get arbitrated. I am interested in the ways in which these vocabularies flatten, as well as expose, the distances between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, and the multiple layers they espouse. I also end with a postscript on the 2024 political uprisings in Kenya that had their root and nexus on social media spaces.
Published Version
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