The Social Media, New Voices and Poetry of Social Commitment in Eyoh Etim's Virtual Chants

The advancement in information and communications technology is one of the remarkable gains of the twenty-first century. The social media, which is one of the sub categories of this avant-garde development, has brought humanity closer than ever and affords people the world over ample opportunity to share information, ideas, experiences, passions, philosophies as well as copious academic resources on globally-linked platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tiktok, and Pinterest. Scholars in the humanities have aptly keyed into this occasion to share scholarly texts and materials for the benefit of millions of people on the virtual space. As one of the sub-disciplines in the humanities, literature has been amply deployed to fulfil the objectives of educating, informing and entertaining users of the internet at little or no cost. This paper examines VirtualChants, a collection of postmodern poems with postcolonial undertones first posted on Facebook by Eyoh Etim (the author) and later collated and published in hard copy. The paper notes that the numerous social media platforms provide immense opportunity for artists to bring to the global space, not only their resourcefulness, but also germane issues of contemporary relevance.