Children's digital literacy practices in unequal South African settings

Abstract

Contemporary movements of people and resources across rural and urban settings, city locales and national and regional borders produce challenges for familiar ways of studying languages as located and stable systems and of literacies as standardised ways of reading and writing texts. This study contrasts children's digital communicative literacy practices in two homes in Cape Town, South Africa, showing major differences between how suburban middle-class children, on one hand, and urban township children encounter and engage with digital resources at home. Drawing on an understanding of new media as placed resources which operate in specific ways in particular contexts, this study shows these children as material, social and cognitive ‘sites’ where linguistic and sociopolitical norms are engaged with, absorbed and enacted. Rather than democratising resources, this research shows digital media as at least partially complicit in a ‘widening of the gap’ to the extent that the differential uses and availability of resources across social classes produce different imaginings of self, social ambitions and investments, and differing ways with social semiotics. Such differences translate into and contribute to the maintenance of social inequalities in school settings that coincide with language and social class divides.

Keywords:

• literacy practices
• digital media
• gaming
• multimodal semiotics
• language diversity
• social inequality

Notes

1. Mamdani (2012, 22) asks:

Did tribes exist before colonialism? If by ‘tribe’ we understand an ethnic group with a common language, the answer is yes. But tribe as an administrative entity, which discriminates in favour of ‘natives’ against ‘non-natives’, most certainly did not exist before colonialism. One might equally well ask: did race exist before racism?

2. ‘The Black Middle Class’ in South Africa, as an identifiable demographic for marketing purposes, had grown from 1.7 million in 2003 to 4.5 million individuals early in 2013, according to the University of Cape Town's Unilever Institute of Strategic Marketing (http://www.unileverinstitute.co.za).