Keywords: Social media, big data, sentiment analysis, and emerging technologies

North Africa is marked with an unmatched phenomena of increase in IT (Adeiza, 2013), though IT users are not homogenous groups, but rather heterogeneous communities with diverse interests and motivations. As explained by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) that technology itself cannot solely make a difference in the practice of the sociopolitical and economic progress, but rather the other way around where indicators of development behind the technology drives the change. IT is thus an instrument, not a goal (Sarrazin, 2011).
The synergy between politics and IT is exemplified through many hybrid formations and phases since its initial preparation phase, where activists used digital media over several years to build social networks and identified collective identities. The second launching phase is marked with unprecedented ignition moments, where movement leaders activated these digital networks toward offline protests. And thirdly, profound channeling and programming of information warfare are in place to compete for control, as well as enhance international pressure, economic sanctions, and lobbying efforts (MacKinnon, 2012).
But there are a number of concerns and limitations to what we know, expect and do with IT and digital democratization which coincides with the words of Schraeder (2003), when he described Africa's diversities and complexities as "mosaic in transformation.” Such complex and inconclusive crossing roads are further interoperated to serve commercial and political interests in what is called the “Rashmon Effects”(Davenport, 2010).
The legitimacy in using power and establishing identity is the main prevailing trend in Africa, which exploits the social function of media as a driving force for national ideology (Movius, 2010). Social power in many African societies constructs meanings in the human mind through communication that utilizes internet and other horizontal digital communication networks (Castelle, 2011). Such perfect coupling is motivated by the history of colonization, poverty and socio-political and economic forces to explain, and justify, the role of media as instruments of political power (Movius, 2010).
The social volatility and political upheavals in the African nations reiterates an acute state of the “canons” of intellectual, social, political and economic life. This makes any expectations of IT, democratization and liberation hampered by hegemony, power relations and the primordial identities that are still dominating the African societies (Soyinka-Airewele, 2010).
In addition, inequalities in Africa is so prevalent that involves a complex process of inclusion/exclusion, which is also related to xenophobia, hate, religious prejudice, class, ethnic and racial discrimination. Each of these elements had its strong effects between the dominant discourses that achieve authoritative status and subordinate discourses that are marginalized, or even silenced (‘extreme’), which is almost the case in all African nations.
In such perplexity and fluidity, African scholarship is entrapped in “canonical monologue,” which only recycles models, theories and logic that correspond to sanctification of Eurocentric racial, economic and gendered assumptions that are caught within the crippling structures (Osundare, 2002). Sadly, many African scholars still presume similar outcomes of the "information superhighway" on the progress and empowerment of global north to be replicated