The instrumentality of social media in the representation of gender in Nigerian literature.

Abstract

The paper valorises how social media has depicted various evolutions of the representations of gender in Nigerian literature. This has affected people’s cognition, behaviours and emotions in diverse ways. Social media has employed different perspectives or dimensions in depicting a divergent representation of women in contemporary Nigerian literatures and space ostensibly crystallizing some gender polarities and how they sometimes enhance mere demystificatory remarks and exegeses in their interpretations. These literatures which were either written by men or women have entrenched the bipolar representations of women showcasing different cultural, philosophical and biological classifications that sometimes support or negate the polarity of human existence in Nigerian cosmology. Some of these representations in the social media have directly or indirectly portrayed different ‘genderizations’ arising from the depicting of artistically and artificially created motifs for women. However, these realizations could be found in major social media platforms which incorporate the technology of blogs that typify the contents of Youtube, podcast, Wordpress etc. The study also illuminates how other social media networks like Facebook, Wikipedia, Linux, Firefox have showcased the overarching representations of gender feelings and motifs in the re-creation, re-presentations and re-configurations of women and gender identity in Nigerian literature. Other fora of reviews and commentaries which also follow the same tradition of women representations in art include: Amazon, IMDB, Trip Advisor and other ‘people creating’, ‘people reacting’ and ‘people reacting to each other’ have contributed to ‘media convergence, participatory culture and collective intelligence’ (Jenkins, 2006 as quoted by Gancho, SPM 2017). This research applies the Media Triangular theory of Mckee, (2010) and explains the rhetoric of communication to delineate the trajectory of gender representations in Nigerian literature to encapsulate the trinity of ‘networking’, ‘conversation’ and ‘community’ in avidly expressing different women portrayal in literature, advancing it beyond the ordinary traditional communication which had been in vogue for centuries. This phenomenon articulates the fact that social media is a product of globalisation which has contributed tremendously to the constant changing scenario of human communication and dynamism in society.