‘I wanna go in the phone’: literacy acquisition, informal learning processes, ‘voice’ and mobile phone appropriation in a South African township

Abstract

The uptake of mobile phones has been especially remarkable in the developing world. For the first time in history, people at the bottom of the income pyramid can also take part in the telecommunication society. Mobile phones can play a unique role in reaching those who are outside the scope of formal or institutionalised schooling and open doors to out-of-school learning practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Wesbank, an impoverished community in Cape Town, we look at the (informal) learning practices ‘illiterate’ and ‘low literate’ women engage in, in an attempt to gain ‘voice’ in new communicative realities by learning how to be(come) cell phone literate and at the different levels of competence this informal learning generates. The mobile phone has become a learning tool, nourishing learning practices in emerging ‘communities of practice’ in which learning is a social activity in which anyone with any knowledge on mobile phones and mobile phone literacies becomes a potential teacher.