Mechanisms of impact / Mécanismes d’impact

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    Public access, private mobile : the interplay of shared access and the mobile Internet for teenagers in Cape Town
    (University of Cape Town, 2012-10) Walton, Marion; Donner, Jonathan
    The study assesses and describes the interplay between public PC-based Internet access and private mobile-based access for urban teenaged public access venue (PAV) users in Cape Town. South Africa is a particularly fruitful “leading edge” environment to do this work since not only mobile use, but specifically mobile Internet use, is increasingly common even among resource-constrained young people. We combine quantitative surveys with open-ended interviews of users and PAV operators. Discussion is structured around five claims: 1) Public access and private mobiles offer different affordances, and teenage users have developed complex, fine-grained practices which help them to negotiate the respective strengths and weaknesses of the affordances. 2) The PAV provides non-substitutable impact to resource-constrained users, even those with “the Internet in their pocket.” 3) Public access supports the development of digital literacies associated with hyperlinked media and largeformat documents, while mobile access supports everyday social literacies and messaging. 4) Teens can use a combination of mobile and public access Internet resources to participate in networked media production and grassroots economic mobilization. 5) PAV operators can improve venue rules and skills to encourage the complementary use of the mobile Internet.
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    Connecting in real space : how people share knowledge and technologies in cybercafés
    (Sam Nunn School of International Affairs & School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, US, 2010) Best, Michael L.
    We examine how the internet brings people together not virtually over digital networks but physically while co-located in public spaces. In particular we are interested in how people in cybercafés share and collaborate with others who are physically present in the facility at the same time. We hypothesize that both explicit and implicit collaboration occurs among co-present internet users – at times intentional and purposeful while in other cases accidental, fleeting or voyeuristic. Public shared internet facilities are particularly important in low-come settings such as found in Africa. To examine this hypothesis in an African context we conducted a survey of 75 computer users at a major cybercafé, Busy Internet, in Accra, Ghana. We found that more than one-third of respondents reported some significant form of collaboration and computer sharing with friends, family members, business associates, and even strangers while in the café. Of those respondents reporting computer sharing one-half reported gaining knowledge and learning from the other user as their primary reason for sharing while only a small minority sited purely economic reasons for sharing. Those respondents who shared computers typically came to the cybercafé with more friends or associates, and generally had a better view towards collaborative group work and broader forms of interaction while in the café compared to the nonsharing respondents.