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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

This article of mine was a contribution to the Educational Technology Debate (InfoDev and Unesco) and also appeared in the Association for Learning Technology Online Newsletter. Are Google and other websites rewiring our brains? Do the potentially distracting non-linear structures of new media pose a threat to ‘deep’ thought, contemplation and even empathy? This is [...]

Do we feel impersonal distance, a sense of personal contact or intimacy in relation to the people we see in images? Chances are that the scale of the shot (whether a photograph is a close-up or taken at a distance, or somewhere inbetween) has something to do with that feeling. I’m interested in looking at [...]

Online image-sharing sites such as Flickr currently reinforce the digital invisibility of the majority of the world’s population. This is a simple function of the fact that most people have not had access to consumer electronics, digital production and distribution, and even electricity. Recently cameraphones have become accessible to many more people, and digital publication is becoming more feasible, given that many platforms are now adapted or specifically developed for mobile use. For mobile industries eyeing emerging markets, multimedia communication practices can develop new markets for handsets and heavier use of mobile data networks. Academics and activists have spotted the possibilities of using mobile media to document grassroots stories, issues and new forms of journalism. But what possibilities do digital image-sharing platforms suggest for ordinary people? And to what extent will mobile publication platforms shift existing patterns of digital invisibility?

The WTF MEDIA CONFERENCE on social media, mobile media and cloud computing will take place from April 27 – 29, 2010 at CTICC (Cape Town International Convention Centre).
Some of the 40 speakers include Melissa Attree, Matthew Buckland, Dave Duarte, Arthur Goldstuck, Justin Hartman, Shel Istrael, Vincent Maher and Hans Mol.

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.