mobile republic: visual approaches to discourse in south african mobile social networks

Visual approaches to discourse in South African mobile social networks.

MOBILE REPUBLIC

[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.

.  

2 million

5 million

14million

46 million

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

DIGITAL VISIBILITYLinkingIndexingArchivingRankingRecommendationBookmarking

DIGITALLY INVISIBLEMobile-centric internet users and online political activism in SA election 2009.

Read-write-erase mode, no public record.

LMAO CDES

DIGITALLY INVISIBLERead-write-erase mode, no public record.

PUBLIC SPHERE

NETWORKINGExtending social networksFacebook vs. MXit – second class carriage?

ASLR LOV

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

SOCIAL FABRIC

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

MOBILE RECORD

Mashups of geo-tagged imagesGuguletu, South Africa

visualCulturesprocessing.org

Landscape

Social distance

Impersonal

Social distance

Social

Social distance

Personal

Social distance

Social distance

Intimate

CONCLUSIONWeb2.0’s panopticism is an illusion.Low-status mobile-centric participation is erased, distanced, and subject to gate-keeping.Tactical appropriations anyone?