Technology, Innovation and Digital Cultures

Hashtags compress political claims into a few words. Analysing 50,000 posts from three Nigerian protest movements, this study describes the grammar of protest hashtags: their imperatives, their pronouns and their code-mixing. It shows how hashtags build collective identity and argues that their brevity is a resource for mobilisation rather than a limit on argument.

Most Nigerian undergraduates now read set texts on their phones. A survey of 410 students and reading diaries kept by 30 of them reveal how mobile reading shapes attention, annotation and recall. Students read more often but in shorter sessions, and rarely annotate. The study proposes reading tasks designed for mobile readers and argues that libraries should license texts for phone use.