Abstract:
In developing countries, digital media have created uneven nexuses of literacy, power and
societal adjustment. Whilst literacy and power have been the subject of much research in
South Africa, often supporting a conception of digital media as a resource (the access to and
advantages of specific devices or applications), this study also sought to reflect on personal
and societal change as bodily and ontological experience. The aim was to contribute to
redefining what the digital media represents in education, and to do so through an
exploration of the journey of a tertiary education student who used digital media to
negotiate his academic and interpersonal environment. This constituted a local,
ethnographic investigation into digital media through the narrative analysis of a series of
accounts told by the participant over 2 years. The accounts were firstly examined in terms
of the three axes of gesture, gaze and audition, and instrumentalisation. These three axes
had resulting implications for conceptions of digital media as resource or as bodily and
ontological experience. The agentive implications of the accounts were then discussed in
terms of the same three axes in order to question orality and community, gestural
experimentation, embedding and the co-constitution of the human and the technical. The
findings were that digital media engage the body and that aspects of one’s being in the
world, such as culture, community and disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity
disorder (ADHD), can fundamentally inform and transform what digital media mean and
how we interact with them.
