In Nigeria, Twitter has been used for political mobilization, electioneering and citizen engagement (Ifukor, 2010) as well as for electoral judicial correspondence (Ifukor, 2011c). Microblogging was a vital component of social media usage in the Nigerian 2011 elections and this paper is conceived to discursively characterize Nigerian netizens' pragmatic acts of political or civic microblogging in the Nigerian 2007 - 2011 democratization process. The theoretical motivation for the study is an attempt to find out the interplay between microblogging and deliberation vis-à-vis deliberative democracy (Chambers 2003; Elster, 1998). The data for the study is culled from an expanded corpus of Informal Nigerian Electronic Communication (INEC) (cf. Ifukor, 2011b) with emphasis on the Twitter subset. Moreover, I intend to present the results of a questionnaire survey I carried out in 2010 on the use of social media by Nigerians and to use this as a basis for measuring civic engagement among Nigerians.
Selected References Chambers, Simone (2003). Deliberative Democratic Theory. Annual Review of Political Science 6: 307 – 326. Dahlgreen, Peter (2005). The Internet, Public Spheres and Political Communication: Dispersion and Deliberation. Political Communication 22: 147 – 162. Elster, Jon (Ed) (1998). Deliberative Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ifukor, Presley. 2010. “Elections” or “Selections”? Blogging and Twittering the Nigerian 2007 General Elections. Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 30(6): 398-414. Ifukor, Presley. 2011a. Linguistic and Socio-cultural Dynamics in Computer-Mediated Communication: Identity, Intertextuality and Politics in Nigerian Internet and SMS Discourse. PhD Dissertation, University of Osnabrueck, Germany. Ifukor, Presley. 2011b. Linguistic Marketing in “... a marketplace of ideas”: Language Choice and Intertextuality in a Nigerian Virtual Community. Pragmatics and Society 2(1):110-147. Ifukor, Presley. 2011c. #EkitiElection: The Acts and Facts of Twittering the Final Judicial Proceedings in Nigeria (on October 15, 2010). Paper presented at General Online Research 11, Heinrich-Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany, March 14-16.
