I am new to the list and was wondering if there's anyone working on Nigerian Internet discourse / communication. My paper on "Blogging and Twittering the Nigerian 2007 General Elections" has just been published in the December 2010 issue of Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society: http://bst.sagepub.com/content/30/6/398 This article examines the linguistic construction of textual messages in the use of blogs and Twitter in the Nigerian 2007 electoral cycle comprising the April 2007 general elections and rerun elections in April, May, and August 2009. A qualitative approach of discourse analysis is used to present a variety of discursive acts that blogging and microblogging afford social media users during the electoral cycle. The data are culled from 245 blog posts and 923 tweets. The thesis of the study is that citizens’ access to social media electronically empowers the electorates to be actively involved in democratic governance. Electronic empowerment is a direct result of access to social media (and mobile telephony) by more citizens who constitute the electorates. This encourages more public discussions about politics and makes the democratic process more dynamic than in the pre-social media era. An analysis of the data shows that there is a dialectical relationship between social media discourse and the process of political empowerment. The paper is part of my PhD at the University of Osnabrueck, Germany. The project's synopsis and related publications are here: http://www.ifaa.uni-osnabrueck.de/Sprachwissenschaft/PhdProjects-Ifukor Thank you and best of the season, Presley Ifukor Osnabrueck, Germany