Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

Abstract

Efforts to design voice-based, social media platforms for low-literacy communities in developing countries have not widened access to information in the ways intended. This article links this to who describes the relations that constitute personhood and how these relations are expressed in designing and deploying systems. I make these links oriented by critique in human-computer interaction that design continues a history of colonialism and embeds meanings in media that disrupt existing communication practices. I explore how we translated 'logics' about sociality through logics located outside of the rural South African community that we targeted for design and deployment. The system aimed to enable inhabitants to record, store and share voice files using a portable, communally owned display. I describe how we engaged with inhabitants, to understand needs, and represented and abstracted from encounters to articulate requirements, which we translated into statements about technology. Use of the system was not as predicted. My analysis suggests that certain writing cultures, embedded in translations, reify knowledge, disembody voices and neglect the rhythms of life. This biases social media towards individualist logics and limits affordances for forms, genres and other elements of communication that contribute to sociality. Thus, I propose oral practices offer oppositional power in designing digital bubbles to support human togetherness and that we can enrich design by moving the centre-a phrase taken from Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o (Moving the centre: the struggle for cultural freedoms, James Currey, London, 1993) who insists that liberation from colonialism requires plural sites of creativity. To realize this potential, we need radically different approaches that enable symmetrical translation.

Misrepresentation of Health Research in Exertion Games Literature

“…As an example of good critical practice in HCI, the field of HCI4D has engaged strongly with "post-colonial" design, arguing that many assumptions in mainstream HCI reflect the nature and norms of western society [7] and do not necessarily apply in other cultures. However, as the example of exertion games and obesity demonstrates, it is important to be aware that HCI work may in fact also reflect incorrect assumptions about our own society.…”

Designing Social Media for Community Information Sharing in Rural South Africa

“…MXShare, which we describe here for the first time, permits users to contextualise media uploaded to the display in real-time, text-based chat. AR, which we have already reported [2,4,7], does not support remote communication and enables sharing audio files only. via a public display [19].…”

“…We have already reported many of these [2,3,4,7,8]. Inhabitants have a rich oral isiXhosa-speaking culture and phone use is increasingly part of this.…”

A Noticeboard in "Both Worlds" Unsurprising Interfaces Supporting Easy Bi-Cultural Content Publication

“…On the other hand, designs that exploited and empowered the existing social communication framework have experienced a greater success. Bidwell and colleagues report on their experience of using audio and photos on mobile phones to support storytelling in the African context [3], but also warn about the risk of proposing culturally biased Figure 1 Sketches of the noticeboard created by users design concepts [1]. Bidwell and Jay Siya further discuss that by understanding local ways of saying, design could enrich the potential use of asynchronous voice recording [2], Hence, understanding the particularity of voice use within local cultures can inform the innovative and effective design of interfaces to support and enhance the local culture.…”