Miskin calls and Beeping in Africa
September 26th, 2007It was a pleasure to compare notes with Andrew Heavens at Reuters about beeping and missed calls in Africa. Andrew, based in Khartoum, has just completed an article: Phone credit low? Africans go for “beeping”
I had not heard the Ethiopian term for the practice – “Miskin” (Pitiful) — until now. It’s perfect. Also good to hear another datapoint on the proportion of calls on the network which are beeps/missed calls:
“We have about 355 million calls across the whole network every day,” said Faisal Ijaz Khan, chief marketing officer for the Sudanese arm of Kuwaiti mobile phone operator Zain (formerly MTC). “And then there are another 130 million missed calls every day. There are a lot of missed calls in Africa.”
I’m sure it varies from network to network, but this instance of 25% of the total dialed calls per day is in line with other estimates I’ve found.
The article mentions an upcoming paper in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. It is not live yet, but tThe paper is a significantly revised version of my ICA paper from a couple of years ago. I’ll keep the ICA paper on this site until the JCMC paper is available.
October 5th, 2007 at 11:18 am
I don’t know if you’re interested in this, but I’ve know about something like pranking or flashing for a long time. Back in the 1970’s I remember a system like that where you could call someone from a payphone and hang up after the first ring in order to tell them that you’re at a pre-arranged location and they should pick you up. There was no caller ID in those days, so this would have to be pre-arranged in advance.
October 7th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Thanks Liron,
You are quite correct…beeping/pranking is possible on landlines, and people have been doing it for a while. But, as you point out, without the caller ID, the practice is a little more limiting. It is only with the combination of calling-party-pays and the common functions on almost all handsets (call log+address book) that things have really picked up.
Now, people can ‘beep’ (and be beeped) by multiple people during the course of the day, and will generally have no problem sorting out who-is-beeping-for-what. This has helped the practice evolve from an isolated/occasional thing to a widespread phenomenon. I’d argue that for some people, the beep has become as much a core part of the communications options on a mobile as is a voice call or a text message.
December 9th, 2007 at 7:56 am
very interesting point of view, has never been conceived of this
helipterum