Tweet South Africa is one of the most unequal countries in the world, and these inequalities are particularly apparent in educational infrastructure. While some children don’t have toilets, brick classrooms or electricity, others go to schools with broadband, computer labs, laptops or tablets, which they start using before they even go to school. Such technologies [...]

Many urban teens in South Africa are mobile-centric internet users,
whose first and primary way of accessing the internet is via GPRS-
enabled cellphones. The m4Lit project used mobile social networks to
experiment with mobile publishing for teens. The pilot phase of the
project attracted substantial interest – over 28 000 teen subscribers
signed up to read an ‘m-novel’ on their mobile phones. The
project was less successful in encouraging teens’ writing of fiction,
largely owing to constraints of authorship on mobile platforms. The m4Lit
research project documented mobile literacies among teens living in
low-income townships in Cape Town, including the role of indigenous
literacies (isiXhosa) in the project, teens’ interest in the m-
novel, their use of mobile social network MXit (15 million registered
users in South Africa) and the mobile web.

TweetFrom this week, South African teens will encounter the Shuttleworth Foundation’s m4Lit project, which launches today. m4Lit centres around Kontax, a teen m-novel, or a novel designed to be read on a cellphone, in either English or isiXhosa. Readers will be able to access the series from WAP-enabled cellphones (or from computers) and they can [...]

TweetWe know that currently, there are more than 4.6 billion mobile phone users around the world, and in South Africa 90.16 people in every hundred use a mobile phone. But how many of these people are using the mobile Internet? At one stage, there were discrepancies of 9.5 million in estimates of the number of [...]

TweetI’m at the IAMCR conference in Mexico City. There are quite a few papers focusing on mobile media use on the programme, and I’m trying to attend them where possible. If I have time and battery power I’ll post a few reports here in the next few days. Aiko Mukaida from NTT DOCOMO’s Mobile Society [...]

TweetHere’s a transcription of Vincent Maher’s talk on his personal experience of moving from traditional journalistic publishing at the Mail and Guardian Online to working in mobile media for South Africa’s mobile network, Vodacom, where his key project is The Grid, a locative social media application. (Talk presented to the Media and Writing third year [...]

TweetA A rough history of the web industry in South Africa by Jarred CinmanThis article made me remember: Sitting in a dark office as a grad student late at night, staring at green text on a black screen, amazed at the generosity of the anonymous guides who helped lead the way through the labyrinths of [...]

TweetI hate shopping. For example, if I find a t-shirt that I like, I usually buy three or four, just in case I don’t go shopping again next year. So it’s pretty hilarious that I’ve indulged in a quiet binge of virtual consumerism over the last few weeks. Andrew Burn and Diane Carr from the [...]