Dragging young people down the drain: the mobile phone, gossip mobile website Outoilet and the creation of a mobile ghetto
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147858 , vital:38679 , DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.744723
- Description: This qualitative study uses the domestication model to describe how a geographically based gossip mobile website, Outoilet (old toilet), helped to shape the meanings of everyday life for young adults in Hooggenoeg, a poor black low-income urban settlement in Grahamstown, South Africa. All the residents here know one another and there is very little privacy, and the mobile phone, during the period of this research, reinforced the lack of privacy through gossip. Such gossip promoted an inward-looking collective sociability. As this article demonstrates, subjects of gossip avoided the streets to escape collective surveillance. Outoilet's explicit sexual language seemed to target those who attempted social mobility by replicating local discourses of respectability and shame. Contrary to findings from other contexts, the mobile phone here thus promoted a collective sociability and may have discouraged mobility as well as economic development.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147858 , vital:38679 , DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.744723
- Description: This qualitative study uses the domestication model to describe how a geographically based gossip mobile website, Outoilet (old toilet), helped to shape the meanings of everyday life for young adults in Hooggenoeg, a poor black low-income urban settlement in Grahamstown, South Africa. All the residents here know one another and there is very little privacy, and the mobile phone, during the period of this research, reinforced the lack of privacy through gossip. Such gossip promoted an inward-looking collective sociability. As this article demonstrates, subjects of gossip avoided the streets to escape collective surveillance. Outoilet's explicit sexual language seemed to target those who attempted social mobility by replicating local discourses of respectability and shame. Contrary to findings from other contexts, the mobile phone here thus promoted a collective sociability and may have discouraged mobility as well as economic development.
- Full Text:
Having a phone, having style:
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/159506 , vital:40303 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC135828
- Description: It was dusk, and a group of young men with a dog trailing behind them, were walking past on a dusty township road in Hooggenoeg, an RDP village on the rim of the Grahamstown bowl. While they ambled along, one was holding up a mobile phone on which music was playing, dancing while he walked. This was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to observe in my new identity as researcher and participant observer, and was why I had agreed to judge the Hooggenoeg fashion show which turned out to be more of a beauty competition. While I'm not generally fond of these kind of shows and the way they essentialise beauty, I agreed because I wanted to get more of a sense of how mobile phones are integrated into the everyday lives of these young adults.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/159506 , vital:40303 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC135828
- Description: It was dusk, and a group of young men with a dog trailing behind them, were walking past on a dusty township road in Hooggenoeg, an RDP village on the rim of the Grahamstown bowl. While they ambled along, one was holding up a mobile phone on which music was playing, dancing while he walked. This was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping to observe in my new identity as researcher and participant observer, and was why I had agreed to judge the Hooggenoeg fashion show which turned out to be more of a beauty competition. While I'm not generally fond of these kind of shows and the way they essentialise beauty, I agreed because I wanted to get more of a sense of how mobile phones are integrated into the everyday lives of these young adults.
- Full Text:
Vulindela!: opening the gates of journalism
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/159528 , vital:40305 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC134094
- Description: A group of teenagers crowd together in a hall in Fingo Village, Grahamstown. They listen with rapt attention as one of them shares his anger at being short-changed in terms of his own future - teachers are absent for two out of every six school periods, compromising his chances of education.
- Full Text:
- Authors: Schoon, Alette
- Date: 2012
- Language: English
- Type: text , article
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10962/159528 , vital:40305 , https://hdl.handle.net/10520/EJC134094
- Description: A group of teenagers crowd together in a hall in Fingo Village, Grahamstown. They listen with rapt attention as one of them shares his anger at being short-changed in terms of his own future - teachers are absent for two out of every six school periods, compromising his chances of education.
- Full Text:
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