This article draws on Castells’ concept of space of flows to explore the role of mobile communication in mediating the flows of ideas, people and resources concerning Dwesa, a rural community in South Africa. While it is the site of an ICT-for-development project fifteen years in the making, Dwesa is representative of many contemporary South African rural realities in terms of lack of infrastructure, endemic poverty and urban migration. Mobile network coverage is almost universal, sustaining a bidirectional flow of people, resources and information between Dwesa and urban areas such as Cape Town. A critical review of the substantial body of research conducted in the area, as well as thematic analysis of social media texts and semi-structured interviews with community members, reveal that mobile phones play an important and nuanced role in arranging physical or virtual rendezvous, facilitating transfers of monetary and other resources, and enabling timeless communication and exchange of information across distance.

本文借鉴 Castells 的流动空间概念，探讨移动通信在调解关于南非农村社区 Dwesa 的思想、人员和资源流动中的作用。虽然这是一个 ICT 促发展项目的实施地，但 Dwesa 代表了许多当代南非农村在缺乏基础设施、地方性贫困和城市迁移方面的现实。移动网络覆盖几乎是普遍的，维持了德韦萨和开普敦等城市地区之间的人员、资源和信息的双向流动。对该领域进行的大量研究进行批判性审查，以及对社交媒体文本的主题分析和对社区成员的半结构化访谈，