Digital Media in Uganda: Where Regulation and Freedom of Expression Contradictions Are Sharpest

The Digital Media Form

The “digital revolution” is made important by the fact that it uses the web as a centre stage for voice, picture and text media that previously were mutually exclusive (Verweij, 2009, p. 75). That kind of convergence has been hailed for its production capacity that is massive, for its interactivity, for defying distance over time, and for its individualization of producers and consumers (McQuail, 2010). In the pre-digital era, the video described above would have to be through a major state/private TV/film company regulated by government. The new dawn of digital media has ushered in the “convergence of citizenship and journalism” (Berger, 2011, p. 708) and created possibilities for alternative content production such as the ones used to produce the music video that this chapter analyses.The advances in mobile phones are pushing the internet possibilities further by introducing a smartphone (Weiss, 2013) which has lessened the regular visits to internet cafes. Nevertheless, issues of the digital divide cannot be neglected when discussing the digital revolution especially in Africa, a region that remains the world’s under-penetrated with subscriber growth standing at 12% (GSMA, 2015).