A million conversations now

Wednesday, May 7, 2014
by L.P.

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IT IS thought that Twitter’s co-founder, Evan Williams, sent the first ever tweet in Kenya from the lounge of the Mount Kenya Safari Club in August 2007. Today, there are more than 250,000 active Twitter accounts in Nairobi, or six Twitter accounts for every 100 residents. An estimated 80 of them have a mobile phone.

But what do Nairobians’ tweets tell us about them and their city? Seeking to better understand social, economic and state activity in Nairobi, researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, including a former Economist writer, Jonathan Ledgard, have looked for answers.

By mapping trends in Twitter usage, they found Nairobians tweet more often from the golf course than from areas of industrial production. Word clouds also show that most of the politically conscious tweets come out of the UN complex. Tweets from the Westgate Mall, targetted by terrorists last year, and the slums of Wajere Town to the east and Ongata Rongai in the south are mainly idle chit- chat. Still some used the hashtags “terrorists” and “westgateattacks”.

Twitter mapping suggests young Kenyans working in the private sector are more up-to-date with their information than the state. According to the research, members of the police, army and the air force barely use Twitter. Virtually no tweets are posted from Kenya’s army barracks on Langata Road, home to several thousand of the country's infantry and elite commandos. But on Langata Road itself Twitter traffic is heavy, as it is within the new housing estate opposite the barracks’ entrance. No one tweets from Kenya’s air force base in Eastleigh. But the predominantly ethnic Somali community who live along the edge of the base tweets actively.

The nature of young Kenyans’ tweets indicates a possible shift in the use of language within this generation. English is widespread, even in Wajere and Rongai, making up 81% of recorded tweets, according to an automatic language detection system. Only 5% of tweets were made in Kiswahili. Other languages used included Hindi, Kikuyu, Somali, Luo and the Sheng dialect, many of which were combined with English. When Kenyans post on Facebook or write text messages to one another, tribal languages are more common.

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