Some time ago I wrote a piece on Shoshana Zuboff‘s recently published The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and already other signs are beginning to appear that this invidious phenomenon is spreading in the workplace too, as surveillance of workers to ensure optimal productivity. In a recent edition of TIME magazine (‘When humans become robots‘; July […]
publishing
Posted inEquality, General
Silence is golden, nobody likes an angry black
Six years ago I was awarded an Open Society Foundation media fellowship. My assignment was to spend three months in the old Transkei, interviewing the rural South Africans of Pondoland and Thembuland about what democracy had – and had not – brought to their lives. I set myself up as an objective reporter on an […]
Posted inGeneral
Why Africans cannot tell their own stories
African writing and publishing has been systematised to be an extension of Western or European thinking and imagination about the continent and its people. An African writer is not encouraged to come up with a new variation or interpretation of what happens in Africa. Over-simplistic as it may seem, I will tell you what kind […]
Posted inBusiness, Media
Crunch time for educational publishers
It’s rare that a national industry is confronted with a single threat to its future. That just happened to South African publishing. A few days ago, the South African department of basic education (DBE) released a policy document, for public comment, that explains how the DBE would like to handle textbooks going forward. (If you’re […]
Posted inMedia
Everyone has a story…so write a book
Not too long ago I attended the first Jozi Book Fair held at MuseuMAfrica in Newtown. It was the initiative of Khanya College to create a space for small independent publishing houses to display their books, newspapers, highlight opportunities, share resources, reconnect and, hopefully, create an information-exchange forum and networking platform. I was impressed by […]