This book does two things, first it celebrates and honors the research, scholarship, and leadership of Comfort Memfin Ekpo, the renowned Nigerian professor of educational technology, who is the second female vice chancellor to head a federal university in Nigeria. This book also explores the profound impact of digital interruptions and disruptions in the broadcast sector in Nigeria, exacerbated by the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). The book underscores the inadequacy of existing discourse to encompass the transformation of traditional educational broadcasting and programming. With Nigeria grappling with the highest number of out-of-school children globally, the book explores the urgent need to re-evaluate educational programs in the digital age, targeting marginalized populations hindered by factors such as electricity shortages and insufficient resources. The book, comprising contributions from senior scholars across Nigeria, aims to dissect the challenges and opportunities presented by AI and digitization in reshaping educational broadcasting. Unprecedented in its interdisciplinary approach, the book explores the intersections of communication, media, education, government policies, and the globalized landscape, offering a comprehensive analysis of the evolving dynamics in the field.

Digital Media and the Preservation of Indigenous Languages in Africa: Toward a Digitalized and Sustainable Society presents cutting-edge epistemological debates, academic case studies, and empirical research from African scholars on the intersection of digital media technologies, artificial intelligence, and the preservation of Indigenous languages in the continent. This edited collection provides a methodology for African researchers, practitioners, and marginalized communities to integrate digital technologies into their lives to foster innovation, advance the documentation and preservation of underrepresented languages, and promote African-centered epistemologies. Contributors to this edited volume argue that African societies should acknowledge and embrace digital media platforms. Despite these platforms’ potential as sites of epistemic colonialism, they are essential for promoting ways of life that reflect the diversity and importance of Indigenous cultures. For Indigenous languages and local epistemologies to flourish in this rapidly evolving technological era, African communities must employ a variety of contemporary practices and strategies to document, protect, and preserve ways of being that have formerly been relegated to the periphery.

Rhetoric about media technology tends to fall into two extreme categories: unequivocal celebration or blanket condemnation. This is particularly true in debate over the clash of values when first world media infiltrate third world audiences. Bringing together the best new work on contemporary media practices, technologies, and policies, the essayists in Global Currents argue that neither of these extreme views accurately represents the role of media technology today. New ways of thinking about film, television, music, and the internet demonstrate that it is not only media technologies that affect the cultures into which they are introduced--it is just as likely that the receiving culture will change the media. Topics covered in the volume include copyright law and surveillance technology, cyber activism in the African Diaspora, transnational monopolies and local television industries, the marketing and consumption of "global music," "click politics" and the war on Afghanistan, the techno-politics of distance education, artificial intelligence and global legal institutions, and traveling and "squatting" in digital space. Balanced between major theoretical positions and original field research, the selections address the political and cultural meanings that surround and configure new technologies.