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

2. [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.

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

5. 46 million
2 million
14
million
5 million

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

7. DIGITAL VISIBILITY
Linking
Indexing
Archiving
Ranking
Recommendation
Bookmarking

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

9. LMAO
CDES

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

13. PUBLIC
SPHERE

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

16. ASLR LOV

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

20. SOCIAL
FABRIC

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

23. MOBILE RECORD

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

25. Social distance
Landscape

26. Social distance
Impersonal

27. Social distance
Social

28. Social distance
Personal

29. Social distance
Intimate

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