Netizens as action citizens: the case of Female in Nigeria (FIN) facebook FINsters, their stories and their actions

Abstract

Online citizen action has been quite popular in recent times. Nonetheless, the way the online community has also become a means of gender mainstreaming and gender empowerment has not been focused. This paper thus looks at the online community called Female in Nigeria, a Facebook group, serving as an online platform that has greatly empowered many Nigerian women and those women married to Nigerian men. The paper does a profile review in terms of looking at the systematic way the online platform has helped to change the defeatist psychology of many Nigerian women, empowering and encouraging them to fight against injustices, even if it is against other women who are perceived to be doing things anti-women. The researcher harvested several posts by the women and saved them on her Facebook page. Out of these, 25 posts were used for analysis. A critical analysis of the content was done through the profiling of the contents of the women’s Facebook posts based on Daniel's (2008) proposal of self-determinism. This is to determine their linguistic choices of before and now and how they demonstrate a self-deterministic attitude through their linguistic choices and self-expression. The analysis of the women’s stories demonstrates that the women changed. The secret seems to be in the women’s ability to bond and encourage one another. In addition, the women were quite open as shown by some of the personal things they shared on the platform. This group seemed to have helped to shatter not just the glass ceiling concerning women’s psychological predispositions but also the idea of women being the enemies of women. This negative concept about women's cooperation appears to have been finally put to rest as shown by these women’s ability to support one another.