Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung/ Journal for Discourse Studies

Discursive Representation of Cyber Scam in Selected Nigerian Hip Hop Songs

Zusammenfassung

This study examines the representation of cyber scam in Nigerian hip hop songs. Forty-five singles of twelve Nigerian hip hop artistes constituted the study population. Purposively selected cyber scam-related lyrics of seven artistes constitute the study population. Relevant aspects of Scollon’s »Mediated Discourse Analysis Theory« (MDAT) were used to engage the data. The Nigerian government, scammers, victims and religious clerics were identified as participants in cyber scam discourse. With re-course to context, Nigerian hip hop artistes articulate specific discourse acts such as glamorisation of cyber scam, assertion of identity, appeal to scammers’ cognitive abilities and justification of cyber scam. These acts are discursively projected through metaphorical expressions, repetition, pronominal references, lexical choices and rhetorical questions. This study has contributed to scholarship on cyber fraud by identifying and describing how context functions in articulating the roles, attitudes and orientations of social actors involved in cyber scam.