Digital Possibilities: Testing the Concept through an Ethnography of Youth Mobile Phone use in mid-2000s rural South Africa

• In Event: Possibility Development: A Model for Theorizing and Catalyzing Youth Development

Proposal

Author 2 will follow some of these themes with an exploration of how social media use shapes youth horizons of possibility. Author will draw upon the most up to date research on social media use, as well as his own ethnographic and survey fieldwork in South Africa with upwardly mobile Black youth participants, in the setting of a semi-rural township, also home to a historically Black university, from 2005-2008. At the time, mobile phone use alone was an exercise in social agency, due to the scarcity of the devices and crucially, air-time. I discuss the South African-made mobile phone software Mxit, which for the first time allowed users to chat in real time for a very small amount of money, the equivalent of two cents per minute. Being the "pre-smartphone" era, Mxit was an example of text-centered real-time communication which opened up digital possibilities for youth. A key research finding from the time was Mxit gave youth the power to experiment with language use, especially English, which offered both symbolic and practical semiotic benefits. What would a similar study today demonstrate? Newer technologies like smartphones and social media may be further closing "digital divides" (but not necessarily economic or class divides). What does recent research suggest about how the contemporary problem of "captology" (Author) run amok might be playing out in South Africa?

Author

• Andrew Babson, Graduate School of Education, University of Pennsylvania