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 Ngu˜gı˜ 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.
