What is it about?

The internet looks very different when you're a hip-hop artist living in the low-resource township spaces of post-apartheid South Africa. It's the story of young people desperate to share the music they have created but struggle to do so with only feature phones and low-bandwidth mobile internet. This means they are locked out from using popular graphic intensive music sharing platforms like SoundCloud or ReverbNation . Instead they use no frills mobile WAP sites from other places in the Global South and "grey" cyberlocker platforms like DataFileHost that uses minimal data. The article celebrates the innovative "can-do" technical innovation of these young people as they appropriate platforms designed for other purposes.

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Why is it important?

It suggests that there is a huge needs for data-lite music archiving sites in the Global South. Media piracy platforms can provide cues for developers to understand how to create platforms with appropriate specs to be suitable for people in the Global South. The "grey" cyberlocker spaces these young people use, such as DataFileHost that are also popular for media piracy, have become one of the few music sharing online spaces that are accessible . The problem is that these platforms regularly flush data after a few months so many people lose their music forever.

Perspectives

I was so surprised to see platforms developed in Russia and Pakistan were popular with young people in South Africa. This really showed the importance of digital platforms developed for less-connected users in the Global South. I was also surprised that there was no scholarship about the wen.ru wapsites in Russia or the wapka.mobi platform popular in the East. This shows the need for more of a focus on the digital technology used by less-connected users in the Global South.

Alette Schoon
Rhodes University

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This page is a summary of: Distributing Hip-hop in a South African town, November 2016, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/2998581.2998592.
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