TweetFascinating mobile stats from +Arthur Goldstuck and World Wide Worx reflect dramatic increases in extent and intensity of mobile internet use in South African cities and towns (in an URBAN >16 sample) with data spend increasing by half to 12% of airtime budget. According to their findings, 41% are browsing the web now, Facebook use [...]

TweetMarion Walton, University of Cape Town Jonathan Donner, Microsoft Research Spatial injustices and mobile communication: Patterns of internet access in urban South Africa Marion Walton, University of Cape Town Jonathan Donner, Microsoft Research Abstract We describe results from interviews, prompts, and observational exercises with resource-constrained teenage visitors to cybercafés and public libraries in Cape Town. [...]

TweetHere’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 [...]

TweetThis 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 [...]

TweetPaper 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 [...]

TweetYesterday 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.

TweetThis 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 [...]

TweetDo 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?