research-article

Designing Social Media for Community Information Sharing in Rural South Africa

Authors:

Nicola J. Bidwell,

Simon Robinson,

Elina Vartiainen,

Masbulele Jay Siya,

Thomas Reitmaier,

Mounia LalmasAuthors Info & Claims

SAICSIT '14: Proceedings of the Southern African Institute for Computer Scientist and Information Technologists Annual Conference 2014 on SAICSIT 2014 Empowered by Technology

Pages 104 - 114

https://doi.org/10.1145/2664591.2664615

Published: 29 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We reflect on long trials of two prototype social media systems in rural South Africa and their biases towards certain communication practices on information sharing. We designed the systems to assist people in low-income communities to share locally relevant information. Both involve communal displays, to record, store and share media, and users can transfer media between the display and their cell-phones. MXShare, which we report for the first time, also enables real-time, text-based chat but AR enables sharing only audio files asynchronously. Both systems were located at the same sites for community communication and co-present oral practices effected media recording and sharing. Their use reinforced differentiations in sharing information between older and younger people. We argue that designing social media systems to widen information access must respond to complex interactions between social structures and genres of communication.

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Index Terms

Designing Social Media for Community Information Sharing in Rural South Africa
1. Human-centered computing

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SAICSIT '14: Proceedings of the Southern African Institute for Computer Scientist and Information Technologists Annual Conference 2014 on SAICSIT 2014 Empowered by Technology

September 2014

359 pages

ISBN:9781450332460

DOI:10.1145/2664591

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 September 2014

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SAICSIT '14

SAICSIT '14: Southern African Institute for Computer Scientist and Information Technologists Annual Conference 2014

September 29 - October 1, 2014

Centurion, South Africa

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Seunarine KKalarikalayil Raju DThomas GThomas SPockett AReitmaier TSteer COwen TMeena YRobinson SPearson JCarnie MSahoo DJones M(2022)Light-In-Light-Out (Li-Lo) Displays: Harvesting and Manipulating Light to Provide Novel Forms of CommunicationProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517730(1-15)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517730
Reitmaier TWallington EKalarikalayil Raju DKlejch OPearson JJones MBell PRobinson S(2022)Opportunities and Challenges of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Low-Resource Language SpeakersProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3517639(1-17)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3491102.3517639
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