The Impact of COVID-19 on the Digitalization of the Namibian Media

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Abstract It took a pandemic to fast-track the reorganization of productive forces in the Namibian media industry and to expose their vulnerability in digital capitalism. Predominant to this vulnerability has been the realization among media workers that they are “not conditions of production” but only their labour is. A combination of digitalization and the onset of the novel Coronavirus ‘unsettled” the small but relatively “stable” media industry operating in a neoliberal political and economic environment since the birth of independent Namibia in 1990. This chapter examines how COVID-19 fast-tracked the restructuring process of the Namibian media. It starts by evaluating the impact of neoliberal media restructuring (digitalization) of the Namibian media before scrutinizing how the pandemic has fast-tracked this process. While much of the emerging work on COVID-19 tends to prioritize media discourses, largely confined to COVID-19-related media messages by dominant political and societal sources, this study probes the practical restructuring of the industry itself as the result of the pandemic. The study is grounded in critical perspectives drawing from works of contemporary critical media and communication theorists.

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