The musical treatment of the cell phone technology in Zimbabwe: analysing selected songs

The emergence of cell phone technology and the developments that followed this technological invention triggered musical compositions that grapple with a multiplicity of issues. Against a generally lethargic approach to harnessing the technology, early musicians prop up the technology, endorse it and help society embrace it because it is essentially value-laden because of its life-affirming and life-transforming nature. Later, musicians who sang from the 2000s tended to focus more on social media applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter. The rallying point in this article is that, on one hand, musicians are in a transformative struggle to help society harness the cell phone technology and social media applications that bring a lot of convenience and value to the user while on the other, they are dedicated to responsible use of the cell phone and the social media applications that go with it. In fact, musical voices are in a search mode and seek to strike a balance between harnessing cell phone technology and guaranteeing the survival and flourishing of the family institution and other social institutions and relations. Mindful of the debilitating and deleterious impact of cell phones, music is deployed to build a society that safeguards its social institutions.