Abstract
M.A.
This dissertation sought to investigate the role played by mobile phones as facilitators of
participation in local governance for young adults in a township community which falls
under the jurisdiction of the City of Johannesburg. Irrespective of how benign a form of
governance may be, the wielding of power will always be a core concern. The ways in
which power is conceived by Juergen Habermas and Michel Foucault were studied and
contrasted, in order to arrive at a conception which accorded most closely with the
realities of governance as it is practised in the location in which the study was
conducted.
For Habermas, the power of democratic participation is reflected in the collective will of
the majority and captured in the policy-making process, an idealistic conceptualisation
which is dependent upon a political environment in which rational discourse and
participation are encouraged. Foucault, by contrast, maintains that communication is
inevitably altered by the effects of power, self-interest or ignorance and evaluates
relationships pertaining to the dynamics of power in terms of struggle. The lack of will,
on the part of local government, to facilitate the modernising of systems of
communication with citizens to promote increased transparency and to make
governance inclusive for young adults made Foucault’s conception of power dynamics
particularly relevant to the focus of this research study. Actor-network theory (ANT) was
employed as the means of gaining an understanding of the power dynamics which
prevail among the various human and non-human actors in the domain of governance,
through a specific focus on relationships and networks. ANT analyses the relationships
between human and non-human actors by regarding both as actants, to use the
terminology coined by Latour.
The conclusions of the study focus on the transformative capabilities of technology and
its potential result of more meaningful participatory governance, and any observable
shifts in the balance of power between the city and its young adults as citizens. Although
technology has been cited as a means of reducing the tensions between invited and
invented spaces in society, there is still a lack of willingness, ability and capacity on the...