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In May 2017, countless South African women took to Twitter and Facebook to share their harrowing experiences of abuse under the hashtag #MenAreTrash. The outpour of tweets and Facebook posts was sparked by the murder of Karabo Mokoena, a 22-year-old woman who was allegedly killed and burned by her boyfriend. Although the wording of #MenAreTrash has caused controversy, that will not be the focal point of this column. Instead, I want to focus on how social network sites (SNS) have provided wome...
The emergence of the internet is touted as an opportunity for women in Africa to "play catch up" after years of being "left out" in the mainstream media. It is said that the internet is a platform of democracy and freedom where women can amplify their voices on and access critical information relating to their well being and empowerment nationally and globally. But what are African women’s realities and to what extent can the internet be made accessible to them and have meaningful impact in...
The top-end of the computer industry is still seen as a sexy place to be. The culture may be designed to wed you to the job, but its a pairing that many professionals envy. And of course, as this week’s protest is designed to highlight, this side of the industry is not where the women are. The women are often in a darker side of the valley, the side that makes the toys that the (pre...
Do you remember why you went online for the first time in your life? This is my favourite question that you may not have yet thought about – but it reflects the starting point in becoming a netizen. This is the second in the series of columns on Access and Beyond that chronicles the research conducted by Research ICT Africa in Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa and Nigeria. In this column ...
There were countless reasons for a young, Malaysian feminist, internet rights activist, to be excited about RightsCon Brussels. Not least because Belgian waffle is the bomb, but I craved the adrenaline rush of compelling, inquisitorial and powerful discourse on human rights, gender and technology; the sort of interactions that would inspire and spark new perspectives, new ideas, and new friends...
If an object has a chip, it becomes smart, and by extension our houses become smarter – and so do our cities, hospitals, toys, phones. But what about the inventors, the creators, the owners, the users of all these smart and tiny things – are we becoming smarter? I am fascinated by the ubiquitous ability of internet technologies to animate things, transform them into hubs, bypass walls and d...
Twitter provides people with a platform to share their opinions, to interact with like-minded people (not always), and to communicate in real-time and on a global scale. Although Twitter has its downsides (trolls, for example), in this article I’m going to focus on the positives and identify 10 ways I believe feminist activists can make the most out of Twitter to achieve their goals. Read the...
In 2011 a study by GroupLens revealed the gender imbalance on Wikipedia, and there was an outpouring of articles in the global media about the notorious absence of women in the world’s largest virtual encyclopedia. At that point the Wikimedia Foundation set in motion an ambitious plan to try to incorporate more women. Above all, user groups appeared, making it their business to get more women...
Affordability is one of the primary barriers to internet access, and particularly to optimal use. Knowing this fully from our previous research, Research ICT Africa (RIA) conducted focus groups in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda in November 2016. The task at hand for this Mozilla-funded research, part of the Equal Rating project, was to obtain qualitative information that refl...
I am AkiConterR and my companion is a “Pidgeotto” who I call “Pid”. I belong to Team Mystic; I am on level 7 and I have 53 Pokémons (72, actually, but some of them I transferred). Together we roam through Aguascalientes to fulfil my aim of becoming a Pokémon master. Pokémon the anime series arrived on Mexican television 20 years ago, on what was then “Canal 5” (Channel 5), and I ...
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