I convene a Production Programme in Interactive Media at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. The second semester of the course centres around an Introduction to Programming unit. This is definitely the most difficult part of the programme for the students, as it is where the course shifts from a design course to one which emphasizes the need for students to grapple more seriously with the development, systems and coding of online media.

When I started teaching this course, I taught ActionScript. This was easy for students in certain ways, but I never felt it really produced the kind of technical learning that I aimed to facilitate. Apart from the cost of the software, the fact that Flash was a closed proprietary system did not assist the students with learning from other programmers’ code. The visual interface also meant many code-shy students were able to avoid really engaging with scripting, and the distributed code could be extremely confusing. Finally, the programme is built for industry workflows, and thus also assumes that the user is a skilled scripter who is familiar with concepts such as object orientation. Last year, with the assistance of Lyndon Daniels, who put together some open content learning materials I ditched Flash and shifted the curriculum to the Processing language.

Robot mini game by Paige Aupiais

This alien game by Paige Aupiais is an example of the kind of mini game which students are able to develop after four weeks (16 hours) of classes in Processing. While it is not a playable game just yet, it does show how Processing makes it possible to master basic concepts such as variables and operators, functions, controlling program flow with loops and conditional statements, and even objects and classes  (You’ll need to have Java installed on your machine if you want to try out Paige’s game.)

So where did this wonderful little language and ecosystem originate?  Processing is a language that was developed by Ben Fry and Casy Reas, initially as part of an award-winning project intended to introduce programming to visually trained artists and designers.

Processing works as a kind of wrapper for the Java language  which simplifies students’ first experience of programming and also makes it (relatively) easy to program visual output. This makes it an excellent introduction to programming for artists and designers since it immediately gives complete novices the ability to generate graphical effects and interactions. (In Processing, Hello World is a one-line sketch which draws a shape such as a line, ellipse, or rectangle.) Unlike other beginner environments though, when the training wheels are ready to come off, students have access to the massive resource of libraries developed for the Java language, such as for example the OpenGL libraries, and to the physical computing possible with the Arduino micro-processor.

Another key advantage is the active and helpful community centred around the processing.org site, the detailed reference materials, demos, and downloads. This community is particularly helpful to beginner programmers because many other users are novices who are likely to be asking beginner questions.

Basic programming concepts do not change very much between languages and so the course provides a foundation of ‘procedural literacy’ for keen students who want to launch into an exploration of other languages or of scripting in object-oriented languages.

The Return of Pacman by Robin Combrink

That said, Processing has several disadvantages in comparison to Adobe’s Flash, another environment where non-technical beginners often first dip their toes in the water as scripters. The absence of a visual interface or timeline for Processing means it is more suitable for producing procedural images than for conventional drawing or animation workflows. Another is the disappointments and difficulties associated with publishing Processing sketches. The need for a Java plugin (less common than the Flash player), the slow loading times and relatively processor-intensive Java applets are all additional hurdles for beginners and their users.

Here the Processing.js project (a sister project to Processing.org) is a response to the widespread support for Javascript by most browsers. Processing.js conforms to web standards, and is immediately viewable in modern browsers without the need to install any plugins. The example above is a mini game created by my son Robin (twelve). He has recently taken an interest in programming (mostly by looking over my shoulder as I prepare for class) and wrote this little game. I published it for him as a Processing.js sketch, using the HTML5 canvas element.

Source code: here

Built with Processing

“]

GTA meets ZA in the imaginations of SA's young suburbanites [With apologies to Zapiro and Rockstar Games

Here’s the abstract of a paper Nicci Pallitt and I just had accepted by the journal Language & Education:

‘Grand Theft South Africa’: Games, literacy and inequality in consumer childhoods

By Marion Walton and Nicola Pallitt

Discussions of ‘game literacy’ focus on the informal learning and literacies associated with games but seldom address  the diversity in young people’s gaming practices, and the highly differentiated technologies of digital gaming in use.  We use available survey data to show how, in South Africa, income inequalities influence consumption patterns, shaping experiences of digital games. Two case studies of young people’s play practices involving digital games in Cape Town suggest the fragmentation and inequalities of contemporary play practices and the need for a more inclusive understanding of digital gaming. Mobile phones offer more accessibility than other digital gaming platforms and local appropriations include display of micro-commodities, concealment of outdated technology, control strategies and deletion of functionality. Digital games articulate between multiple overlapping communicative spaces and hence complex cultural articulations arise when global game narratives are appropriated to make sense of racial otherness, crime and politics in South Africa. Since educational curricula cater for highly fractured publics, we ask whether it is advisable to speak of ‘game literacy’. We suggest the need to validate less strongly mediatised forms of play, and to address diverse identification practices in consumer culture, including prestige and status as well as othering and shame.

Here’s a prepublication version of the full article.

People often ask me about levels of Internet access in South Africa. I must confess that I watch these stats like other people watch football scores. It’s fascinating to lift the lid off the studies and see how the researchers have arrived at their deceptively simple numbers.

Anyhow, (and because some of you have asked!) here are some starting points for understanding internet access and usage in South Africa:

Mobile subscribers and internet adoption in SA: 1996-2009 : ITU

A good source for annual cross-country comparisons of desktop internet access (and mobile subscription data ) is the ITU( International Telecommunication Union).  They currently put SA at  12.3%  fixed line internet access (2010) . Although access is growing, it’s shown nothing like the massive expansion of mobile subscriptions which the ITU’s data also reveals. (CAVEAT – the impressive S-shaped curve in the graph reveals growth in the number of SIM cards rather than users).

For more specifics about access in South Africa there’s AMPS (All Media Products Survey) conducted by the South African Audience Research Foundation. This survey provides overwhelming levels of detail about media use (15+), particularly about that of higher income groups (or higher ‘living standards’, to use their parlance). It comes out twice annually. Largely informed by the preoccupations of market researchers, it is thus not the best source for understanding use in lower income brackets. Although it’s expensive to subscribe to the full AMPS database you can get quite a bit of info from the free queries they allow to registered users via their eighty20 online interface.

At the moment, according to the  AMPS 2011 Individual survey (Jul’10 – Jun ’11),  these are their numbers:

• 18%  (accessed internet in last 4 weeks)
• 20% (accessed internet in last year)

Other surveys (notably ResearchICTAfrica) aim to provide information about internet access and usage, and to identify those who are currently excluded. These surveys are more informative about the challenges of access to internet and phones for South Africans in lower income brackets and in rural areas. The ResearchICT Africa survey allows comparisons with other African countries, but is conducted less frequently, and so unfortunately the numbers are quickly out of date.

AMPS now allows us to piece together a great deal of info about mobile internet. It tells us, for example, that although 22.88% of South Africans use mobile instant messengers such as MXit daily (which shows how many people are using data/internet on their phones), only 7,4%  said that their primary means of internet access was a cellphone and only 6.03% said they accessed the web or internet daily from their phones. AMPS

This discrepancy shows the importance of mobile messaging rather than web-style information access, but also raises questions about how mobile internet access is defined. These questions were originally raised in Tino Kreutzer’s research, which I’ve mentioned in a previous post. Many people have phones which are data-enabled, but they are not all internet users. It’s also likely that many people who do use the internet aren’t telling interviewers that they use the internet, when in fact they do. If we include all use of the TCP/IP protocol as ‘internet’, then use of MXit and other mobile apps should be counted along with desktop-style ‘web’ use (http protocol) as mobile internet use.
The diversity of mobile internet use makes things particularly tricky. In  Arthur Goldstuck’s terms, we should be thinking about the different ‘tiers’ of the mobile internet: (i) WAP, (ii) mobile apps such as MXit and (iii) web browsing.  I think survey questions are better when they ask specifically about particular online brands – Google, MXit, Facebook etc  – people don’t know the term ‘instant messaging’  but they do know whether they use MXit.

More nuanced figures are available from Goldstuck’s 2011 World Wide Worx study, which details Facebook and MXit use, and shows the gap between rural and urban areas. This captures some of the dramatic growth happening at the moment. World Wide Worx put the figures for mobile internet at urban (39%) and rural (27%). According to a large potential client, MXit currently reports 11 million active users (which is a good match for the AMPS figures cited above). A large live activity map photographed on 1 April 2012 shows how MXit use is spread around the country, but concentrated in urban areas (as is the population!):

Activity map of MXit use - posted by Arthur Goldstuck @art2gee

The latest World Wide Worx study shows Facebook growing rapidly and starting to trump MXit in urban areas. Twitter is also on the rise, no doubt driven by its popularity with journalists, celebs and the mass media. MXit is likely to hold onto its early advantage,  particularly among low income users because of the high cost/bit in South Africa and Facebook Zero is not available on the SA networks. In some new research, Jonathan Donner and I have also found that many people pay more than they should for data because very few buy data bundles. Also, many people don’t like to buy more than R5 or R10 airtime at a time, but I’m sure Facebook in particular will get a boost from some of the cheaper current data offerings by MTN and Cell C.   Again it’s important to consider these numbers in relation to the fact that the World Wide Worx survey doesn’t include informal settlements or ‘deep’ (less accessible) rural areas. There’s also a big gap in relation to under 16s, who are big early adopters but are not included in any of the big surveys. As the landscape changes so fast it’s also worth trying to ask about forms of communication which are growing in popularity. My own research suggests that mobile internet is rarely used in the same way as desktop internet, and that we should rather conceptualise mobile internet as configuring a range of socio-technical contexts.

To illustrate some of the difficulties in answering the question ‘how many Internet users in SA’, here are some survey questions from past surveys:

Survey A: Research Internet Africa

1.      Do you know what the internet is?

a.       Yes

b.      No

2.      Do you ever use the internet?

a.       Yes

b.      No

Survey B: All Media Products Survey

D2. Have you PERSONALLY accessed the Internet/World Wide Web in the PAST 12 MONTHS?

Record one answer:

Yes

No

If  the participant answers ‘Yes’ in question D2, continue with question D3, otherwise skip to question D10

The key difference between Survey A (RIA) and Survey B (AMPS) is the use of the skip question in Survey B – this means that anyone who doesn’t understand the words Internet or World Wide Web will not be given the opportunity to answer any of the subsequent questions (about email use for example) and so the structure will likely generate false negatives. This problem is compounded by the fact that, unlike Survey A, Survey B makes no attempt to identify the respondent’s existing awareness of the Internet.

In both surveys the closed structure  inevitably disguises a lot of variation. For example, respondents who want to answer ‘I don’t know what the internet is’ or ‘I’m Not sure if MXit/Facebook/gmail counts’ ‘my friend helped me, does that count?’ or ‘I don’t remember’ might all answer ‘No’ in Survey B. Also notice that the question requires recall (‘ever’ in survey A and 12 months in survey B).

There are thus serious issues of validity for both surveys – you can use the internet without knowing that you are doing so. The question strategy in both surveys requires the participant to understand the word ‘internet’, which is pretty jargonistic. On the one hand there’s a lack of popular understanding of the term ‘internet’ (only 50.8% of SA respondents in the Research Internet Africa survey said that they knew what the word meant). On the other hand those who do know the term may associate it with computers rather than phones or other devices. Not only participants but fieldworkers who administer the survey may also have this association .

Here’s the press release for the best project by my third year production students this year, which developed from my work with matriculants at Ikamva Youth. Many young people I met at Ikamva struggle to conceptualise the possibility that they might be able to study at UCT. When they do allow themselves to dream that they just might be able to make it happen they struggle to access information which would help them choose suitable courses, or help them get a realistic sense of what the university’s criteria for admission are and how hard they need to work at school to get a place. I think this mobile web app is definitely a step in the right direction for UCT to demystify the admission process for prospective students. I’m very happy with the great work produced this year by the interactive media production class of 2011 and their excellent tutors, Fabio Longano, Afsana Kahn, and Travis Noakes.

Exploring options in Humanities

By Rebecca Johnson and Lee-Ann Lipman

31/10/2011 CAPE TOWN

Ever had trouble trying to figure out which degrees your favourite matriculant might be eligible to study? Two UCT students, Lee-Ann Lipman and Rebecca Johnson, have built a site which allows would-be UCT students to calculate their scores according to UCT’s points system and work out their eligibility for admission to study various courses within the Humanities Faculty. The pair explained their concept as follows: “We realise that admissions systems can be really confusing for matriculants who are overwhelmed with information about the various options for further study, so we decided to build an online calculator which does the work on their behalf. The best part is that it’s simple and quick to use. There’s also a mobile interface which brings the information within reach of matriculants who don’t have easy access to computers’.

The UCT admission table can be confusing and has mystified applicants for the past decade. Lipman and Johnson created a mobile web app which allows matriculants to calculate their points scores and match them to available degrees and programmes in the Humanities Faculty. They submitted the site as their final project in the Production Programme in Interactive Media Production.

The major advantage of their time-saving calculator is that it helps matriculants to compile a list of the courses they qualify to study in the Humanities Faculty. Applicants can now focus on deciding where their interests lie and make sure they understand special criteria for admission (such as portfolios) rather than trying to figure out whether they even meet the criteria in the first place. If potential students use this app early enough, it may also serve as a reality check to them, and inspire them to make the most of their time in matric to improve their results. This is an idea which certainly has potential to go beyond the Humanities Faculty and even beyond UCT, as potential students need to establish their eligibility for courses at more than one institution.

The site is still undergoing testing and is not official yet, but why not open http://eyo.mendilab.co.za/m/ in your browser to try it out for yourself.

This year for the first time I taught an MA level Mobile Media and Communication course to University of Cape Town postgraduates. It was a great privilege to work with such an bright group of students and spend a semester discussing the relationship between mobile technology and society, and exploring methodologies and theories for studying networked individualism, mobile social networks, mobile media and games. We also considered the place of gender, class and consumer culture in adoption, appropriation and domestication of mobile technologies in South Africa.

Gary Marsden from UCT’s Centre for ICT4D also made a guest appearance. I’m hoping that next year we will find a way for Gary’s mobile interaction design students to work together with us to think through some of the implications of our research for local phone, app and website designers. Here are some of the highlights of the excellent research the CFMS students produced this year.

Desperately seeking multiplayer bluetooth games

By Anja Venter, MA student, Centre for Film and Media Studies.

Ocean View, Cape Town, 24 October 2011 -Young mobile gamers in South Africa have little local content to choose from – and they badly need games which are designed for them to play together, and which they can access without needing to find a computer. A recent study conducted by University of Cape Town student Anja Venter revealed valuable insights into the cellphone use and gaming preferences of eight kids (11 and 12 year olds) in Ocean View, Cape Town. The study is important reading for mobile game developers, and particularly for developers seeking to use mobile games in ICT4D (Information and communications technologies for development).
Venter found that mobile gaming is still very much an individual activity for this group of kids, although they really want to be playing together. Gaming is fundamentally social and kids miss not being able to challenge other players on their cellphones. Modes of collaborative play such as online games are too expensive for local contexts. Enter the accessible nature of the mobile Java gaming platform in combination with Bluetooth technology that has proven to be inexpensive and sustainable: a potential avenue for ad hoc gaming with the people in your immediate surroundings. A trial of such a game proved to be very successful.

Multiplayer Bluetooth Mobile Games

Although this study is limited in scope and is the result of a pilot Masters student study, it offers insights for potential game developers. Currently we see an explosion of mobile phone games, which were developed by international companies, available for free download directly from ones’ mobile phone. Competition in this arena is fierce and avenues for procurement are already in place, perpetuated through word-of-mouth testimonies amongst peers. There is a massive gap in the market when it
comes to Bluetooth multiplayer games that can be downloaded directly to ones’ phone without access to a desktop PC.

This research found that, in order to be successful, these games should be free and cheap to download (hence small in size), easy to find and access solely from a phone. They should work on a diverse range of mobile phones and cater to the intended audience’s interests. For further information, or a copy of the report, contact Anja Venter.

Men, Mobile Users Dominate Miyeni Facebook Debate

By Marise Haumann, Honours student, Centre for Film and Media Studies.

Cape Town, October 24, 2011 – When controversy erupted in the South African media around columnist Eric Miyeni and City Press editor Ferial Haffajee, many people continued debating the issues with friends on their public Facebook profiles.  Most of them seem to have been using their cell phones while they listened to the debate raging on local radio stations.

A study by University of Cape Town student, Marise Haumann, titled “Gender and the Public Sphere on Mobile-based Facebook”, looked at 203 public Facebook status updates posted on 2 August to investigate the role of gender in the debate that erupted around Eric Miyeni’s controversial column, “Haffajee does it for white masters”. Several public figures and gender rights organisations accused Miyeni of misogyny and hate speech and he was subsequently sacked from the Sowetan.

Facebook seemed swayed by arguments in favour of Miyeni – 22% of the mobile contributors supported Miyeni, and only 10% disagreed with his statements. But that may have been because fewer women were participating. Unsurprisingly, positions in the debate were influenced by the poster’s gender – with men more likely to express support for Miyeni -   27% of all men using mobile devices supported Miyeni while only 6% of women did so. In contrast, only 9% of men using mobile devices disagreed with Miyeni,  while somewhat more female mobile users (13%) disagreed with him.

Support and opposition for Miyeni in Facebook status updates, by Gender

Haumann’s study reveals that while 69% of all the contributors to the debate used mobile devices to access the debate, 30% contributed their opinions through fixed-line internet. A large majority  (79%) of all contributors to the debate were men, while only 21% were women.  English was the most frequently used language in the debate, but mobile phone users seem to be relatively multilingual. Of the mobile contributors, 6% used English in conjunction with other languages, while only 1% of the fixed-line contributors used other languages in conjunction with English.

The study reveals that although more men than women took part in the debate on Facebook, both men and women received similar numbers of replies to their status updates. Haumann argues that this indicates that while fewer women may have been involved in the debate on both the mobile internet and fixed-line internet, they did not ‘receive a cold shoulder’ in the Facebook debate. She also argues that the fact that men and women exhibited such differences in their opinions on Miyeni indicates that the debate was free and unobstructed by sexism or discrimination. She warns, however, that if more women do not make the effort to enter into such debates, they may see that their opinions will become relegated to the side-lines.

The “Gender and the Public Sphere on Mobile-based Facebook” study was conducted through the  postgraduate course in Mobile Media and Communication (FAM5038S) at the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town. The study used quantitative content analysis to analyse a sample of 203 individual Facebook status updates, which were collected during the span of one day in August 2011. For further information, contact Marise Haumann.

Talking about Sex and Health on MXit.

By Mareike Kramper

Cape Town, November 1, 2011 – The mobile social site MXit signed a contract with The African Pulse a non-profit organisation with worldwide partners and associates. The company launched the health and sexual awareness portal H360º on the social site MXit.

The H360º forum allows young people from all over the world to participate in discussions around HIV/AIDS and sexuality. Teenagers can ask questions that are of burning importance to them, without the embarrassment of having to ask judgemental adults, or revealing secrets to their peers or ignorance to medical professionals. The online platform provides information on health and sexuality and allows users to connect to other H360º members worldwide. University of Cape Town MA student Mareike Kramper studied the requests posted on the site in order to find out more about what questions young people are asking about HIV/AIDS and sexuality. By studying the language used to express questions or to confess fears, Kramper found that H360º should be enagaging with young people’s everyday understanding of sex, health, love, shame and relationships. She said: “H360º needs to be able to answer questions such as, “I wnt 2 knw y ppls hate gays?” or “If u have love and u use a condom can u get it?”. The battle against social injustice and accurate health behaviour options needs to become part of daily conversations in South Africa.”

For further information, contact Mareike Kramper.

South African political activists mobilising Facebook

By Pierrinne Leukes

24 October 2011, Cape Town

South Africans are using mobile phones for political activism on Facebook, says Pierrinne Leukes, a University of Cape Town (UCT) Masters student majoring in Political Communication.

Some studies have been done about mobiles being used in South Africa for political campaigning and engagement during election times, but so far no studies show us how South Africans are talking politics on their phones a daily basis.  South African political parties such as the ANC, DA, COPE and IFP do have Facebook pages but Leukes found that hardly any of the activity on these pages come from mobile phones. Then Leukes found a Facebook group called ‘New Political Forum’, which was started in August 2010 by four South Africans who felt that they could not debate freely on the official Facebook pages belonging to political parties such as the African National Congress and Democratic Alliance. The ‘New Political Forum’ group grew rapidly and now boasts just under 8000 members.

Leukes studied posts and comments over  two days. “The level of engagement is impressive” , said Leukes. “On these two days, 49 messages were posted, and they initiated debates which totalled a whopping 1013 comments, again over just two days”. While the pages belonging to the political parties are dominated by computer users, the New Political Forum users are using phones to have their say and engage with fellow citizens. Approximately 60% of all these debates were initiated, and sustained by people using their mobile phones to access Facebook’s mobile site”.

The BB revolution

By Aziza Banderker

Cape Town, October 27, 2011 – South Africans love BlackBerries, but what in particular influences young middle class students to choose to jump on the bandwagon and adopt the popular smartphone? University of Cape Town Honours student, Aziza Banderker, interviewed a group of her BB-using peers to identifywhat factors had persuaded them adopt a Blackberry. And she decided to do so by chatting to them on BBM, the famous BlackBerry messaging service.

Banderker explained her interviewing strategy as follows: “BlackBerries are relatively expensive, and so I tried to find out when the cost of exclusion from BB starts to exceed the cost of adoption, and when that happens, what is actually the deciding factor which helps students justify the cost of the service?”. She considered individual demographics, socio-economic status, personal factors, social influence, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, facilitating conditions, attitude and behavioural intentions. The interviews were constructed in a way in order to discover which of these factors are the most salient for this group of friends.

She found that the majority of the individuals in her social circle had waited till they felt there was a growing trend to adopt this mobile phone before they bought one themselves. Social influence was the greatest determining factor influencing adoption in this particular group. All had learned about BlackBerry via word of mouth. As a cost-saving feature, BlackBerry’s ‘free’ Internet service was one of the most important determining factors.

Gender played an important role. Banderker’s male contacts claimed that their decision process was based on whether the BlackBerry had the integrated features that they required. Female contacts emphasized that features which enhanced their social life were a deciding factor. Personal factors, such as preference and device capabilities, seemed to be the most important mediating factor.

Gaming women on Gameloft

By Jade van Blerk

24 October 2011, Cape Town

Mobile phones are the most popular gaming platform in South Africa, where downloaded and built-in games played on mobile phones are widely available and appeal to a large target market, including many women and girls. Developers such as top mobile developer Gameloft have realised the potential of the female market. UCT student Jade van Blerk asked what images of women these mobile games are using to sell their products, and whether marketing materials for mobile games are reproducing the adolescent stereotypes  associated with the traditionally  male-dominated world of ‘hard-core’ gaming.

Van Blerk wondered how images of women in cellphone games might compare to the stereotypes that are commonly encountered in other popular media directed at women such as magazine advertisements, where research shows that women are often stereotyped as homemakers or sex objects. Van  Blerk explained ‘I was interested in how mobile games might be establishing new images of femininity’. Van Blerk investigated the promotional imagery for a range of 45 mobile phone games selected from the Gameloft website.

Mobile ads from Gameloft

Van Blerk found that traditional gaming stereotypes seemed to have been imported wholesale into mobile games. In the first place, women were underrepresented in comparison to men. If they were depicted they were in the company of men, as sidekicks or symbols used to communicate information about the men in the image. Many images told stories with men carrying out the action, and women being represented in a passive way as the goal,object, or reward of the action. Male game characters confronted the viewer directly, more commonly demanding an emotional response, while women were offered as undemanding eye-candy for the viewer.

In contrast, women were largely depicted as subordinated to men and were often depicted performing what Goffman refers to as ‘appeasement gestures’ such as ‘body canting’ or the ‘bashful knee bend’  In the only case where a woman was the game’s protagonist she still performed appeasement gestures and was posed with a male.

Generalisations about mobile games cannot be made from this small sample of 45 advertisements, but Van Blerk’s research certainly suggests that there would be many opportunities for game developers who make the effort to understand which images  appeal to female players.

This research paper is available for download from www.JadeVanBlerk.blogspot.com or contact the researcher for further information.

Paper presented at Multimodality in Education colloquium held at Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch on 10 August, 2011 by Marion Walton and Silke Hassreiter, Centre for Film and Media Studies. University of Cape Town

The affordances of mobile phones as devices for creating, publishing and distributing images means that they are often seen as a threat to young people’s safety or to public morality. Alternatively, they are celebrated as having immense potential for supporting an individualised and highly networked mode of mobile learning or ‘m-learning’. These issues are particularly significant in the global South, where photographic practices and digital imaging are being adopted rapidly, as mobile networks reach over a billion people and feature phones with cameras become increasingly accessible.

This paper documents the image-sharing and photographic practices of fourteen young people who participated in a mobile video-making project over four months in July-November 2010 in Makhaza, Khayelitsha. We analyse the corpus of images which they shared with us as researchers. We explore distinct communicative genres which, in this context, are associated with (i) personal photographs, (ii) photographic composites (iii) downloaded images from popular culture (iv) multimodal image messaging. In this paper, our focus is specifically on interpersonal meanings and the representation of interpersonal meanings and social distance.

We argue that the social practices of young people and the marginal contexts of this appropriation play key roles in their domestication of mobile photography. Consequently, it is a mistake to assume that new genres and practices can simply be ‘read off’ by listing the features or affordances of the new generations of smart phones. Instead, it is necessary to consider a wider range of contexts and uses before the ‘affordances’ of the new medium can start to be understood. In particular, the differences associated with the specific contextual meanings of artefacts such as mobile phones, local genres of communication and interaction, and broader issues of access to communication infrastructure and mobility need to be considered. We argue that a contextualised study such as this should be conducted before embarking on the development of new curricula for learning or self-expression for young people.

Yesterday at the plenary session of SACOMM 2011  Anton Harber challenged delegates to face up to South Africa’s information inequality. The fact that the media serves primarily the wealthier sectors of our society is both a cause and result of the extreme inequality in our country. Professor Harber’s challenge was that those who cared about freedom of expression should be as serious about ‘empowering citizens and allowing them to express themselves’. I agreed with him whole-heartedly, although the challenge he presented is perhaps more complex than it appears.

Today I presented Silke Hassreiter’s MA research at the SACOMM 2011 conference – what a pity Silke couldn’t be there to present it herself.

Silke worked on one of my projects in Makhaza, Khayelitsha. The research was conducted as part of a Nokia funded project, in collaboration with Gary Marsden from the UCT Centre in ICT4D.

Silke’s research involved working with twenty young students from Ikamva Youth who used Nokia feature phones (Nokia 5530 XpressMusic and Nokia X3) to produce and edit cellphone videos about issues that concerned them.

Her dissertation (which is still work in progress) illustrates some of the complex issues involved when marginalized young citizens are given access to cellphones as tools for media creation and dissemination and how they go about developing a ‘public voice’ through mobile media production and distribution.

Silke’s project was part of an ongoing partnership between the Centre for Film and Media Studies and an NGO called Ikamva Youth. Since 2008, a series of student volunteers from CFMS and myself have assisted with the ‘Media, Image and Expression’ programme run by the organisation.

For five months Silke worked with the Grade 10 students who were all between15 and 18 years old. She offered a course of intensive mobile video production training  and individual coaching, with classes twice a week. Her formal research methods included participant observation, diaries, informal interviews and in-depth interviews. It was an action research project and she was tasked with updating the curriculum for Ikamva’s Image and Expression programme. She also developed a set of creative commons licensed materials for the organisation. These will soon also be published on UCT’s Open Content portal.

The young people’s videos are now published online on the Ikamva Youth Flickr site.

The project report we prepared for Nokia is also available now:

Hassreiter, S., Walton, M. and Marsden, G. (2011). Degrees of sharing. Public voices, impression management and mobile video production in a participatory media project for teens in Makhaza, Khayelitsha. Project report produced for Nokia Research, February 2011.

Our games panel proposal has been accepted for SACOMM 2011

This panel reports ethnographic approaches to play practices and digital gameplay in different sites in Cape Town, in the context of the regulation of the games industry in South Africa. Contributors explore the significance of games as commodities in the local context, identify digital literacies shaped by local socio-technical practices and differential levels of access, and theorize how commercial games produced in the North are being interpreted, reconfigured and appropriated in these South African contexts.

List of participants

Marion Walton, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town, Marion.Walton@uct.ac.za

• Nicola Pallitt, Centre for Film and Media Studies: University of Cape Town, mz.pallitt@gmail.com
• Anja Venter, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town anjaventer@gmail.com
• Muya Koloko, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town muya.koloko@gmail.com

Rationale

Digital games are an increasingly important part of consumer culture and feature particularly prominently in the lives of children and young people around the world. Game studies has only recently begun to address the ways in which gaming is a situated social activity (Buckingham, 2006, Burn, 2007; Pelletier, 2009) and to apply the insights of cultural and gender studies to gaming (e.g. Dovey and Kennedy, 2006; Carr et al., 2005) Nonetheless games studies researchers have not yet explored the significance of global differences in access to digital games, consoles and other consumer electronics, beyond an interest in how gaming in public access venues such as cybercafes can provide a pathway to ICT use in developing countries (Kolko & Putnam, 2009). Existing scholarship does not address the global diversity in gaming and play cultures, neither does it account for local cultural appropriations of games or explore how young people experience substantial inequalities in access to consumer goods, electricity, communicative infrastructure and bandwidth and how this shapes their play with digital games. In South Africa, basic mobile phones or public access computers are the most common digital gaming platform, while more expensive consoles and smartphones remain the preserve of a relatively small middle class. Different regimes govern access to leisure time and to spaces for leisure in these contexts, and this plays a role in shaping distinctive modes of gaming. This panel reports ethnographic approaches to play practices and digital gameplay in different sites in Cape Town, in the context of the regulation of the games industry in South Africa. Contributors explore the significance of games as commodities in the local context, identify digital literacies shaped by local socio-technical practices, and theorize how commercial games produced in the North are interpreted, reconfigured and appropriated in these South African contexts.

Buckingham, D. (2006). Studying computer games. In D. Carr, D. Buckingham, A. Burn, & G. Schott, Computer games: Text, narrative and play (pp. 1-13). Polity.

Burn, A. (2007). The case of rebellion: Researching multimodal texts. In Lankshear, C, Knobel, M, Leu, D & Coiro, J. (Eds.) Handbook of Research on New Literacies. New York: Laurence Erlbaum

Carr, D., Buckingham, D., Burn, A., & Schott, G (2006). Computer games: Text, narrative and play. Cambridge: Polity.

Dovey, Jon and Helen W. Kennedy. (2006) Game cultures: Computer games as new media. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Kolko, B. E., & Putnam, C. (2009). Computer games in the developing world: The value of non-instrumental engagement with ICTs, or taking play seriously. 2009 International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development ICTD, 46-55

Pelletier, Caroline. 2009. Games and Learning: What’s the Connection? International Journal of Learning and Media 2009 1:1, 83-101

Mobiles, games and play in South Africa

Marion Walton, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town

In South Africa, sharply unequal levels of access to consumer goods, the internet and electrification all co-exist in the same country. Studying games in this context is a reminder of the complex ensemble of material and economic resources required for digital gameplay, which are not available to all young people around the world. This paper reports ongoing research with young people in the Makhaza section of Khayelitsha, and explores the significance of mobile games in their media ecologies and orientations to consumer culture. Like the large majority of South African gamers, they play free games, often those preinstalled on basic mobile phones or downloaded from WAP sites and passed around via bluetooth in a peer-to-peer commons or proximate social network. In their mobile gaming, a focus on local and social interactions and shorter bursts of casual gameplay reflects the fact that airtime, phone processors, screen space, memory, and electricity are often scarce resources.

Screen Play: Children configuring gender through character customization in The Sims 2TM and Little Big PlanetTM

Nicola Pallitt, Centre for Film and Media Studies: University of Cape Town

Digital games are semiotic domains that offer a variety of options for customization, which in turn allow players to personalize gameplay. It is also a common form of player control, yet little is known about this game feature and even less about how children employ such tools and choices in their gameplay. This paper offers a multimodal analysis of children’s character customizations in two games – The Sims 2TM and Little Big PlanetTM – informed by theories of gendered performance and interaction with configurable media. The children’s choices demonstrate that such avatar transformations are influenced by gender and wider patterns of gendered consumption. This discussion allows for a more nuanced understanding of children’s gameplay and how digital games become a stage for performing social identities. Additionally, it highlights how children engage with games as a form of digital media which challenges outdated ideas of the television as text. This paper describes how television and laptop screens become virtual playgrounds where hegemonic discourses around gendered identities are a site of struggle and play, but often reaffirmed in the process of play.

Games and Learning: a perspective on low-income, resource-constrained youth and PC gaming in a public access venue in Cape Town

Anja Venter, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town

This paper reports on pilot findings from a ethnographic study of PC gaming amongst low-income, resource-constrained, urban, teenage males in a public access venue in Cape Town, South Africa. Framing their activities using the communities of practice model as outlined by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, I explore how the popular definitions of “gamer” and traditional gaming communities of practice are challenged in a resource constrained environment. Findings include evidence of gamers re-appropriating technology and social relationships to create learning communities, exploration of the material and social limitations and challenges for successful collaborative play, and describing the socio-technical ecology currently found in this venue.

Sex, violence and harm in games: An analysis of the guidelines for classification of the Film and Publication Board of South Africa

Marion Walton, Muya Koloko and Nicola Pallitt, Centre for Film and Media Studies, University of Cape Town

Game ratings are intended to protect children from potentially harmful experiences of media by targeting particular categories of disturbing, violent or sexual material. This paper analyses assumptions about video game play as revealed in the policies and practices of South Africa’s Film and Publication Board. We focus specifically on the interpretation of guidelines used to rate games according to the presence of ‘classifiable elements’ such as violence and sexual content, the use of public input, and raters’ interpretation of the guidelines. In particular, we identify how rating practices and policies make particular assumptions about games – what games are, the contexts in which gaming takes place and how they construct a specific narrative of childhood. We compare regulatory policies to some actual gaming practices in South Africa, and situate both in relation to current discussions of children, media, vulnerability and agency.

Visualisations

Many-Eyes

Wordle

Network analysis

NodeXL – this free add-on works with Microsoft Excel.

Discourse analysis

Lawrence Anthony’s free concordancer.

Notepad++ – the Swiss army knife of text editors

IkamvaYouth office in Makhaza was petrol-bombed, on South Africa’s Freedom Day, 27 April.  Read about the details of the petrol-bombing. The Makhaza branch has lost everything , including cameras, computers and some of the phones that were donated for our Nokia mobile video project.

Bombed Makhaza office of Ikamva Youth

Ikamva Youth is a wonderful volunteer-driven youth project that runs on a shoestring. Together with energetic postgrad students like Tino Kreutzer, Nicola Pallitt and Silke Hassreiter I’ve been involved in Ikamva’s media, image and expression program since 2008.

The picture above made me cry because during the last few years I have realized that Ikamva’s impact goes beyond helping individual learners achieve success, but is also felt more broadly as a result of their democratic approach to leadership and developing civic awareness in their area. My own graduate students have benefitted immensely from the opportunity to volunteer and conduct their research in a context which addresses the challenge of urban poverty and continued educational inequality in South Africa. This is a place where young people can help each other and connect with others who can help them to realize their goals, and discover what they might become.

The clear-up has started.  Andrew Barrett, Ikamva’s Gauteng regional co-ordinator, puts it best:

It is, afterall, the ordinary people from all sections of South Africa that are the heartbeat of this country and we join together in a collective resilience and assurance that actions like these, that seek to destroy, will always be self-defeating.

Do you have an old computer, laptop, smartphone or camera gathering dust somewhere? Please let me know and I’ll collect it and deliver it to the Makhaza branch next week. I promise that the Ikamvanites will make it feel loved again!

Here’s how you can help. Follow this link to find out how to donate, volunteer or just post a message of support on Ikamva’s website.