Matthew Durington

Suburban Fear, Media and Gated Communities in Durban, South Africa

ABSTRACT A disjuncture between the reality of crime and its perception has created a culture of fear within South Africa that bolsters gated community development and an accompanying fear industry that supports media, private security companies, and a number of other industries that provide security apparatuses. Is the establishment of gated communities an irrational response to perceptions of crime in South Africa in the twenty-first century? Or, are they deemed necessary in a perceived culture of violence that exists in the country? The article explores these questions through ethnographic research with residents of a gated community and the security company hired to provide security for the estate reflecting on the reality and perceptions of crime in the “New” South Africa.

Ethnographic Apps/Apps as Ethnography

Today, people nearly everywhere are experiencing multiple events through the medium of mobile apps: Social networking platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, are now accessed through smartphones by most users; popular service apps like Yelp are used for finding restaurants and services; geolocation apps for way finding, such as Google Maps, plot drives, commutes by public transportation and even walks around the block; and there are tons of personal health and fitness trackers that count everything from steps to calorie intake. For anthropologists, mobile apps provide the opportunity for an enhanced methodological approach that provides new possibilities to engage with the people they study, heighten their reflexive capacities and link to new forms of data. While many approach these possibilities with trepidation, our collective sentiment is that these new forms of communication provide more promise than pitfalls for anthropology. The use of apps is transforming human experience. Mobile apps are part of everyday life around the world, including the lives and livelihoods of anthropologists. Anthropologists aren’t just “using” apps; they’re also being “used” by them, in that the structures of app platforms affect what anthropologists know and how they know it. Just as the individuals that anthropologists study are producing the digital labor and content that drives apps, anthropologists, in turn, are supplying the same amount of material and utilization. In this sense, when it comes to mobile apps, we are part of the same public sphere as the populations with whom we work. Apps can also provide many anthropological insights. Each mobile app platform tells researchers not only what people who use them think is important, but also the way different media and different functions are expected to link together in user practice. In other words, apps can tell users and developers how they should be moving around in the world and what they should pay attention to and capture as media, and simultaneously provide conduits for sharing all of this information and collective experience. Increasingly, anthropologists are returning from field research with diverse media: recordings, notes, photos, digital records and all sorts of cultural items. Mobile apps suggest ways of integrating the work anthropologists do to communicate with other anthropologists with this material from field research. They also provide a possible way for anthropological research to become increasingly relevant and accessible to wider publics. Anthropologists can and should use their knowledge,

A KONY 2012 Post-Mortem?

What was your reaction to KONY 2012? Do you remember it? Did you have a reaction? Did it serve as fodder for an anthropologically grounded treatise in one of your classes or a conversation in the spring of 2012 during its viral time? Did it launch you into instant empathy and social action as the filmmakers intended? Or, did you create a condescending Willy Wonka or Skeptical African Kid meme to mock it? To recap briefly: The group Invisible Children and filmmaker Jason Russell launched a video on March 5, 2012, to bring awareness about the Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony. As the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, Kony is sought for war crimes including the use of child soldiers. As of early August 2012 the KONY video has been viewed over 104 million times with the majority of that number coming within 24 hours of its initial posting, making it the most successful launch of a social media campaign in the history of these movements. The premiere of the video preceded a planned “Cover the Night” campaign that encouraged individuals, mostly college-age youth, to cover cities globally with Shepard Fairey–like posters of KONY 2012. The failure of the postering campaign, the very public mental breakdown of the filmmaker, and questions about the organization and its intentions on numerous blog posts led to an almost simultaneous dismissal of the movement. As The Atlantic’s Megan Garber noted, “The end game of the KONY 2012 video—the most successful viral video campaign of all time—was supposed to be a physical world awash with the graffiti of digital empathy. The consensus, though? The thing was a flop. Hardly anyone came out” (Garber 2012). The video, and unfortunately, the good intentions of the organization and filmmaker were dismissed as quickly as an unknowing undergraduate dropping an anthropological theory course. There are a number of obvious reasons for the rapid decline of the KONY movement, including the supposed nonexistent attention span of the target age demographic, the unfortunate linkage of the film to the travails of the filmmaker, and the problematic narrative within the video itself. Many saw the viral video’s attempt to be relatable by linking Joseph Kony to one of his victims and the filmmaker himself as the latest embodiment of