- Title
- Dragging young people down the drain: the mobile phone, gossip mobile website Outoilet and the creation of a mobile ghetto
- Creator
- Schoon, Alette
- Date Issued
- 2012
- Date
- 2012
- Type
- text
- Type
- article
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/10962/147858
- Identifier
- vital:38679
- Identifier
- DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.744723
- Description
- 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.
- Format
- 17 pages
- Format
- Language
- English
- Relation
- Critical Arts
- Relation
- Alette Schoon (2012) Dragging young people down the drain: the mobile phone, gossip mobile website Outoilet and the creation of a mobile ghetto, Critical Arts, 26:5, 690-706, DOI: 10.1080/02560046.2012.744723
- Relation
- Critical Arts volume 26 number 5 690 706 November 2012 1992-6049
- Rights
- Publisher
- Rights
- Use of this resource is governed by the terms and conditions of the Taylor and Francis Online Terms and Conditions Statement (https://www.tandfonline.com/terms-and-conditions)
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Schoon, Alette (Dr)
RU School of Journalism and Media Studies
| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | SOURCE1 | Dragging young people down the drain.pdf | 632 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |