South Africa Online: The New South Africa

by Damian Burke

Just over two years ago I was living and working on the other side of the country - writing copy, doing layouts, taking photographs and videos, making coffee and running the company website. It was an easy job, and in between creating newsletters and making changes to the website I used to spend my free time conversing with my three or four other online friends on MySpace.

There were a few hundred South African MySpace profiles, and I was one of the handful from my hometown. I had three or four actual friends who thought being online wasn’t ‘nerdy or uncool’, the rest of my contacts were either overseas friends or family, musicians, friends of friends or new like-minded acquaintances.

I remember sitting behind the van of a local advertising agency and the branding on the back of the van featured a telephone and fax number. No website or email address? Was I living in the future, or was South Africa still reeling from the divine intervention that is fax technology? Why was I on MySpace while everyone else was on MXit? Even the small old local mIRC fraternity had seemed to opt for the ‘IRL’ option and dispersed over the past 3 or 4 years.
South Africa has always had a problem with slow and expensive bandwidth, but the year was 2006 and was not going to wait around for anyone to catch up.

South Africa 2.0
Then something happened; Facebook. I'll never forget how I first heard about Facebook, it was from a friend of mine who didn't know how to adjust her hair straightener temperature let alone find her pictures on Thunda.com. All of a sudden my entire high school rugby team, my first girlfriend and my (then) boss were all trying to befriend me. Awkward.

According to Internet World Stats, there has been little significant change in South African Internet usage. In fact, there has only been a 112.5% increase from 2000-2008, which shows that South Africans have had access to the Internet in some form or another; either at work, or at schools and universities and even out and about at places such as gyms, banks and libraries - they’d been on the Internet, but they’d never been ‘online’.

It may be simply my opinion, but Facebook made the Internet cool in South Africa. Like owning a TV in the early ‘70s or a cell phone in the late ‘90s, if you weren’t connected you weren’t ‘in’.

Just over two years on, and almost everyone I know is connected, and local businesses are now advertising their Facebook pages along with their website addresses.
Merely having an email address does not classify being online anymore. These days, South Africans are online, conversing, interacting, blogging, creating their own memes, using the Internet for socio-political leverage and have replaced MXit with Facebook mobile.

Facebook brought online South Africans together, and showed them the benefit of using the Internet constructively. Now, even if the massive social network is replaced by another major player, the South African crowd will stick together and migrate.

After all, now we’re all ‘connected’.

2008/07/04 | permalink | comments (0) | trackbacks (0)

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