‘Democratic unfreedom’ on Facebook in Zimbabwe

Facebook, like many other new media phenomena, has been touted as an emancipatory and revolutionary medium, especially in ‘blocked democracies’. Such characterisations fail to acknowledge that Facebook is not disarticulated from the overarching social configurations and attendant power dynamics in modern society. Marcuse's notion of ‘democratic unfreedom’ was deployed to examine the dynamics of freedom and control (structured agency) on Facebook. To do this, Goffman's conception of identity and interaction as dramaturgical was used to explicate the mechanics of ‘democratic unfreedom’ on Facebook. The above was achieved via a quasi-empirical qualitative investigation using purposively sampled university students and lecturers in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. Data from unstructured questionnaires were subjected to a thematic analysis. From our observations, we argue that Facebook's networking features, participant identity projections and its seemingly freed economy, are the very means by which democratised communication is circumscribed on the platform.