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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Dragging young people down the drain: the mobile phone, gossip mobile website 'Outoilet' and the creation of a mobile ghetto
Author:Schoon, AletteISNI
Year:2012
Periodical:Critical Arts: A Journal of Media Studies (ISSN 0256-0046)
Volume:26
Issue:5
Pages:690-706
Language:English
Geographic term:South Africa
Subjects:websites
mobile telephone
gossip
social networks
suburban areas
External link:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2012.744723
Abstract:This qualitative study uses the domestication model to describe how a geographically based gossip mobile website, Outoilet (old toilet), helped to shape the meanings of everyday life for young adults in Hooggenoeg, a poor black low-income urban settlement in Grahamstown, South Africa. All the residents here know one another and there is very little privacy, and the mobile phone, during the period of this research, reinforced the lack of privacy through gossip. Such gossip promoted an inward-looking collective sociability. As this article demonstrates, subjects of gossip avoided the streets to escape collective surveillance. Outoilet's explicit sexual language seemed to target those who attempted social mobility by replicating local discourses of respectability and shame. Contrary to findings from other contexts, the mobile phone here thus promoted a collective sociability and may have discouraged mobility as well as economic development. Bibliogr., notes, sum. [Journal abstract]
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