A Hive - Riling up a dormant generation

In order to improve individually, it is imperative that a collective mindset is reached. Often times, we think that changing oneself then influencing one person after the next is the only way to go, in reality though, the ability to reach many more people is the bedrock of every thriving initiative. Most often, the negative efforts take advantage of this life hack as it is easy to appeal to the darker recesses of humans wether they consciously subscribe to it or not. However you look at it though, getting narratives across seamlessly and to huge masses of people is the easiest way to change narratives and create movements. Creating a hive mind back in the day elicited a huge amount of work; from oratory outings, to newspaper columns and radio communication which at the time was a tedious and strenuous process. Nowadays though, with the developement of technologies that link us even more, it is way easier to craft, in the comfort of your home and with little to no finances, ideologies and concepts that could be disseminated into huge sections of the society drawing “viral” reactions to them and creating a hive mind in the target population. Taking a deeper dive into the intricacies of today’s approach to reaching consensus on everyday issues, a huge portion of our ethos is borne out of social media which was made to bring us together but the flaw in modern mans uniting technology isn’t the technology itself, but has more to do with the flaw in human behavior which we touched on in “Truth”.

In Cameroon like most of Africa though, we haven’t touched the kryptonite yet, we are only scratching the surface when it comes to social media and it’s adverse effects seeing that the standards of living is still low and access to and regularity in the use of this medium has only just taken root. We lack the infrastructure as well as personal capability due to the amount of pressure (to survive imposed on us by where we are born) that it is virtually impossible for us to reach that hive mind and get to the point where we have the tendency to conflate facts from fiction, inducing us into disparaging ideas about the same phenomenon. In simpler terms, it is still very difficult to misinform a huge portion of African communities because you can’t effectively reach them through social media. Where you can be effective still is traditional media - but it is weird that we are caught in an impasse when it comes to the transition between the two eras; the truth is that traditional media is dying quicker than expected, while modern media is taking longer than expected to establish itself on the continent for the reasons mentioned above. Testament to this is the low number of Africans active on social media platforms with those that are focusing mainly on the trends of beauty, financial survival or entertainment. In numbers purely, Northern Africa and South Africa are the areas of the continent where modern media has taken a foothold on the continent with a 65% and 55% use rate in 2022 being the highest per population in the continent. Meanwhile the use rate for large swaths of  the continent that is eastern, western and central Africa combined is at a measly 34% of the population divided into 10%, 16%, and 8% of their respective populations. This giving an indication of how much work is needed to be done on the continent to rejuvenate it, but also shows the stark contrast on the continent with regards to wealth distribution in a vast majority of countries on the continent.

To reach a majority of Africans all at once takes work and in more precisely reaching out to them for positive change entails even more work. Cameroon for example has a modern day media use of 16.5% of the total population which when corrected for users with multiple devices gives us a ratio of 1:6 or one in every six Cameroonians having access to the medium that could help change drivers reach them effectively in the modern world. We could also factor in the fact that the over 4.6 million people who account for the media use earn so little that they have to double their efforts to survive in the modern world leaving them little time to bond with their families talk-less of people and media outlets on a consistent basis to form any sort of narratives or pathway. They have therefore been spoon fed narratives and propaganda that suited those who have control of these systems as outlined in “Turmoil”

How then can we overcome this conundrum and reach as many people as we can in order to shape public opinion? Here’s the formula that we found - being consistent in the space and getting as much funds as possible channeled into the information policy of change drivers. Taking a page out of the Russian playbook could help drive positive propaganda throughout the continent. In order to succeed, it is imperative that news agencies who exist on the continent make it a priority to target modern day media with as much finances and fervency as they are doing with traditional media - forging a non sterilized version of events from the source to most of the population on a daily basis instilling a barrage of accurate news to the people, giving them opinions that could help shape their thought processes and instill a sense of responsibility for every action or inaction they take as it’ll make them realize that their lives and those of their future generations greatly rely on them at the individual level and by extension the collective level - at least that’s how Hitler did it!!! It is way harder to kill and ideology when it is distributed through a medium that is accessible and available to all people of a particular demographic - the question now is, how do you reach the rest of the population without access to these facilities, the simple answer is you can’t, but you have to trust the hive mindset that is instinctive in every one of us, the same one that has created so much doom and chaos over the generations.

It is with this mindset that we can transform the terraces of todays generation, by bombarding them with the information that is needed, shaping their thought patterns with the questions that will enlighten them, giving them facts that will rile them up and make them take their own destinies and those of their children into more consideration. Then and only then can the narrative be changed; and once narratives begin to change, patterns begin to emerge, as patterns emerge, societies thrive, and in every thriving society, success and stability become a natural outcome. No one wants to be fighting wars, no one wants to be hungry, or be unable to dream about the future and have hopes of reaching them, no one wants to be a terrorist or bandit, we are all driven to these extremes because of the narratives that have been given to us as well as the society that we live in. Therefore in order to get to where we want to be, it is primordial that we begin to rile up ourselves for what is coming by developing a hive mind through the leveraging of modern media on a consistent and sustainable manner.

• © Copyright ABNC January 2023