Browsing by Author "Chigona, W"

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    South Africa's Socio-Techno Divide: A critical disourse analysis of government speeches
    (2009) Chigona, W; Pollock, M; Roode, J D
    This paper aims at contributing to the debate about the digital divide. We first focus on what to us constitutes the root problem: the typical approaches to the development of people through and by the use of information and communication technologies (ICT). In contrast to governmental, political and technological attempts that focus almost exclusively on providing access to digital communication technologies, and expect "development" naturally to flow from that, we argue for a focus on "development" which is based on our notion of sustainable socio-economic development. We refer to "technocentric approaches" when the approaches propose and pursue technological interventions and show little regard for the actual needs of the people involved. At the other end of the scale, where the focus is on people and their developmental needs, we will speak of "sociocentric approaches". This presents us with a different divide, which we will refer to as the "socio-techno divide". We argue that it is this divide that has to be addressed - not the digital divide - and then present an analysis of the socio-techno divide. This analysis takes the form of two types of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), namely Foucauldian and Habermassian. The analysis of the South African government's rhetoric illuminates the issues that need our attention and indicates an agenda for constructive engagement about the use of ICT for development in the Third and Fourth worlds.
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    Synchronised smart phones: The collision of personal privacy and organisational data security
    (2012) Chigona, W; Robertson, B; Mimbi, L
    The purpose of this study was to explore the organisational and individual motivations for incorporating personallyowned smart phones into the workplace and challenges arising from use; privacy and data security concerns of involved parties in the organisation. This study uses exploratory case study method and investigates privacy and security regarding personally-owned smart-phone usage in workplace. The study found that convenience, ease of use and access to emails were motives behind employees’ use of personal smart phones in the workplace. Further, employees have higher privacy expectation. Sample for this study was small to provide statistically meaningful results, Further research is needed to cover a larger case study spanning multiple organisations in other sectors. Mobile devices are creating challenges to organisational data security and employees’ right to information privacy. This study suggests that organisations need to reconsider data security and employees’ privacy policies to address possible conflict between data security and employees’ privacy.
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    The Uses and Gratifications of Mobile Internet among the South African Students
    (2008) Chigona, W; Kankwenda, G; Manjoo, S
    Mobile Internet is a relatively new innovation. Many see mobile Internet as a way of providing for those who cannot afford the traditional means of accessing the Internet (International Telecommunications Union 2004). Although much research has been conducted on the adoption of related technologies such as mobile phone and m-commerce, little focus has been placed on mobile Internet. This is particularly true for South Africa (SA). There is, therefore, a lack of understanding on how and why people use the technology. The purpose of this research, therefore, was to investigate how and why people use mobile Internet. This study focused on the SA market. The topic for the study required the authors to define the term 'mobile Internet'. Mobile Internet can best be described as a means of 'wireless access to the digitized contents of the Internet via mobile phones' (Chae and Kim 2003). When the Internet is accessed, a request is sent by an Internet browser to a Web server, which responds by sending the information to display on a screen (Beal 2006). Since voice calls and SMSs do not query Web servers, they cannot be classified as mobile Internet. There are four main ways of using mobile Internet : e-mail, access to general information, instant messaging services, voice-over-Internet-protocol. Mobile phones offer a wide variety of functionality, however, this research was only confined to mobile Internet functionality. This included use of the mobile Internet for communication, entertainment and information purposes. It specifically excluded m-commerce as this is a topic on its own. In addition, the focus was on mobile Internet access that is provided by mobile phones and not other mobile devices such as PDAs. This limitation allows for the words 'mobile' and 'cell phone' to be used interchangeably. Uses and gratification (U&G) was used as the underpinning theoretical framework for the study. U&G allows for investigating the motivations for consumption of media products. It is noted that there is a dearth of U&G studies focusing on mobile Internet. The research instrument for the study was therefore based on U&G studies on related technologies such as traditional Internet as well as mobile phones. This allowed an investigation into the gratifications obtained from using mobile Internet and the intersection of motivations for using the traditional Internet and those from using mobile telephony.