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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 411

Part of Session 156: Mobile Literacies in Late-modern Cape Town (Other abstracts in this session)

Literacy as a portable resource: the role of mobile messaging among a group of township women in Cape Town.

Authors: Dyers, Charlyn
Submitted by: Dyers, Charlyn (University of the Western Cape, South Africa)

While many studies on mobile messaging have tended to focus on the communicative practices of the urban young (Kurniawan, Mahmud, & Nugroho, 2006; Thurlow, 2003; Bolin & Westlund, 2009; Rafi, 2009), this paper considers the role of mobile messaging both as a communicative resource as well as a form of literacy enhancement among a group of middle-aged working class women in a South African township in Cape Town. The paper examines the purposes for which these women use mobile messaging and what these messages reveal about their literacy levels as well as how they mix and blend the different communicative codes present in their environment. In addition, the paper explores how this form of late-modern communication is adding to four of their existing literacies – text, numeracy, visual and personal. The paper therefore adopts a multiliteracies approach (Mills, 2011:96) within the context of portable literacies (Dyers and Slemming 2011) - literacies which have been learned and developed in other areas, but have been successfully transferred to new spaces and taken up by others, providing the women with particular strategies for managing their lives.