"i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective

Donner, Jonathan and Gitau, Shikoh and Marsden, Gary (2009) "i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective, Proceedings of 3rd Annual Conference of the International Development Informatics Association, 28-30 October, 2009, Kruger Park, South Africa.

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Abstract

Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study explores the challenges, practices, and emergent framings of mobile-only Internet use in a resource-constrained setting. We trained eight women in a nongovernmental organization’s collective in South Africa, none of whom had used a personal computer, how to access the Internet on mobile handsets they already owned. Six months after training, most continued to use the mobile Internet for a combination of utility, entertainment, and connection, but they had encountered barriers, including affordability and difficulty of use. Participants’ assessments mingled aspirational and actual utility of the channel with and against a background of socioeconomic constraints. Discussion links the digital literacy perspective to the broader theoretical frameworks of domestication, adaptive structuration, and appropriation.

Item Type:	Conference paper
Additional Information:	The conference papers: Gitau, S., Donner, J., & Marsden, G. (2009, 28-30 October). “i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective Paper presented at the 3rd Annual Conference of the International Development Informatics Association, Kruger National Park, South Africa. and Gitau, S., Donner, J., & Marsden, G. (2010, 11-12 March). A second look at the mobileonly internet: job seekers in Khayelitsha, South Africa describe their first 6 months of mobile internet use. Paper presented at ICTs and Development: An International Workshop for Theory, Practice, & Policy, IIT Delhi. Has been combined into a single journal article. Donner, Jonathan, Gitau, Shikoh, & Marsden, Gary (2011). Exploring mobile-only internet use: results of a training study in urban South Africa. International Journal of Communication, 5, 574–597. The new URL is http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/view/750/543 Please update any links or references accordingly. Thanks!
Subjects:	Human-centered computing
Date Deposited:	13 Apr 2011
Last Modified:	10 Oct 2019 15:34
URI:	http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/685

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