Mobile republic: Visual approaches to discourse in South African mobile social networks

MOBILE REPUBLIC Visual approaches to discourse in South African mobile social networks.

[C]onsider a relatively new platform for media production and consumption: the mobile phone … (Manovich, 2008:34-5). Mobile-centric user-generated content in South Africa.

FONE Feature phones, Mxit IM, cost-saving, privacy.

46 million 2 million 14 million 5 million

MEDIATED PUBLICS Social networks are ‘mediated publics’ and play an increasingly important agenda-setting role.

DIGITAL VISIBILITY Linking Indexing Archiving Ranking Recommendation Bookmarking

DIGITALLY INVISIBLE Mobile-centric internet users and online political activism in SA election 2009. Read-write-erase mode, no public record.

LMAO CDES

DIGITALLY INVISIBLE Read-write-erase mode, no public record.

PUBLIC SPHERE

NETWORKING Extending social networks Facebook vs. MXit – second class carriage?

ASLR LOV

ASLR – age, sex, location, race. Gate-keeping Social convergence.

SOCIAL FABRIC

SOCIAL DISTANCE Tourist images of marginal regions dominate social aggregators such as Flickr. Impersonal and distant shots of local residents predominate.

MOBILE RECORD

Mashups of geo-tagged images Guguletu, South Africa visualCultures processing.org

Social distance Landscape

Social distance Impersonal

Social distance Social

Social distance Personal

Social distance Intimate

CONCLUSION Web2.0’s panopticism is an illusion. Low-status mobile-centric participation is erased, distanced, and subject to gate- keeping. Tactical appropriations anyone?

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Mobile republic: Visual approaches to discourse in South African mobile social networks

by Marion Walton on Aug 25, 2010

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Mobile republic: Visual approaches to discourse in South African mobile social networks — Presentation Transcript