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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 156

Thematic Session (Papers belonging to this Thematic Session)

Mobile Literacies in Late-modern Cape Town

Authors: Dyers, Charlyn; Deumert, Ana; Bock, Zannie; Klein, Yolandi; Coetzee, Freda
Submitted by: Dyers, Charlyn (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)

If modern cities are indeed both ‘attractive and terrifying’, they provide spaces in which people are forced to maintain existing social networks while building new ones in creative, multimodal ways. For most people, the mobile telephone is the central component of such networks – allowing mothers to manage their households, families and friends to stay in touch, places of worship to distribute notices, students to make up on lost work and employers and employees to stay connected. According to Deumert (2010:1) South Africa has the highest user rate in sub-Saharan Africa. “Among the youth in particular, mobile phones have opened up new spaces for creative and playful leisure literacies…The linguistic practices associated with these media are transient and in flux: new forms and variants occur regularly, and norms are continuously changing”. This thematic session looks at practices of mobile socializing among adults as well as cyber-socializing genres developing in younger users in Cape Town, a “multilingual habitus” (Coetzee, 2010) affected by a rapidly developing superdiversity as a result of intense translocal as well as transnational migration. The session includes the impact of moblile messaging on the literacy practices of families, together with a closer examination of the notion of community of practice; the language of intimacy as part of an appropriate register and genre of social media chatting, and finally social networking applications as a space for the performance of the (modern) ludic self and the carnivalesque (Bakhtin) in the genre of ‘flirtation’ among university students.

 

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