Links to Mobileactive08 presentations

October 14th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise

Greetings from day 2 of the fantastic Mobileactive08 conference. It is a rare treat to have so many people interested in mobiles and social change under one roof.  For details on the conference, check the live blog coverage here.  

I’ll post some additional thoughts soon.  In the meantime, here are links to the slides from the three sessions in which I participated –  Mobile Use by Small and Informal Businesses; Innovations in Social Marketing (miss calls); and M-Banking/M-payments for Social Impact.   Let me know if you have any questions.

There are a few glitches in the .prf files, but I will try to sort these out in the next few days and will refresh with cleaner files. 

headed to Mobileactive 2008

October 10th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, microenterprise, travel

I’m travelling this week to Johannesburg for the Mobileactive 2008 conference.  It promises to be a great gathering of people and organizations doing innovative things with mobile technologies.  I’ll certainly try to get some reactions up during the week, but don’t count on any liveblogging…..

4S panel on mobiles in Africa

August 26th, 2008 Africa, Uncategorized, beeping/miss calls, conferences, microenterprise, sharing behavior

Thanks to Jenna Burrell of UC Berkeley for putting together a great panel “On the Ground Accounts of the Mobile Phone Revolution in Africa” at the 4S/ESST meeting in Rotterdam last week.  

Jenna spoke about her current fieldwork (with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing) in Rural Uganda. Wesley Shrum of LSU shared some initial findings about increased sociability among mobile users in Nairobi.  Tom Molony of the University of Edinburgh spoke about mobile use on the streets of Dar es Salaam, with an emphasis on how some small enterprises took advantage of the ‘mobility’ as opposed to simply the connectivity functions of the device.

I did a bit of a re-synthesis of my Africa studies, combining the small enterprises surveys with the open-ended interviews to illustrate how varied (and incomplete) our understanding of mobile’s role in development remains.   I contrasted the kinds of high-clarity results available from narrowly focused papers like Jenson’s Digital Provide (which focuses narrowly but so effectively on one independent variable (mobile Use) and one depended variable (price of fish) with broader explorations. These broader approaches so far either place mobile use in context of other communication behaviors like face to face interactions and internet use,  or expand the range of behaviors under examination to include both instrumental (enterprise/developmental) uses and intrinsic and/or social uses.  This broadening comes with a cost, of course, as the ‘impact’ of mobile use is harder to isolate.  Initial slides are here.

Unfortunately, a few others Mohammed Mohammed from Intel, Hsain Ilahiane from  Iowa State University and our discussant Don Slater were unable to attend the panel and were each missed, both during the session and during the lively chats occurring afterward, over coffee.

Congrats to Jenna, by the way, for winning the Nicholas C. Mullins Award,  given by the Society for the Social Studies of Science for “an outstanding piece of scholarship by a graduate student in the field of Science and Technology Studies.”  Her paper explored “West African Internet Scams as Grassroots Media Production”

just give a missed call

July 19th, 2008 India, beeping/miss calls

Why bother with a toll-free number?  Just tell prospective customers to “give a missed call”. Everyone knows that means you will call them back (and thus pay for the phone call).

Thanks to Rikin Gandhi for spotting this sign –a bit of evidence of the ubiquity of missed calls as part of the accepted communications repertoire in India.

If any readers have seen similar signs elsewhere, please let me know.

Ken Banks on CBC Radio One

June 18th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls, m-banking, microenterprise, sharing behavior

I’ve written about Ken Banks’ work with kiwanja.net from time to time.  Ken just completed a lengthy interview with the technology program Spark on CBC Radio One.  It’s a very good overview of some of the most interesting implications of the spread of mobiles in Africa. The short form touches on m-banking, microenterprises and livelihoods.  The longer form adds Ken’s comments on shared phones, low-cost handsets, and beeping/flashing/missed calls/’please call me’. 

Daniel Beltz: “I decided to buy a cell phone for God and to invite people to beep him.”

May 25th, 2008 Africa, beeping/miss calls

The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco is wrapping up what seems to be a fascinating exposition, AFRICA.Dot.COM: From Drums to Digital.   (if you are in the area – rush down this week!). The exhibit

explores the changing landscape of communication and connectivity in Africa today…It begins with drums and other varied instruments and masked performances that African cultures have utilized for centuries in dynamic, multisensory forms of coded communication executed to transmit sonant salutations, local history, beliefs and social values. Today, mobile phones, computers, and information and communication technologies (ICTS) provide increasingly enhanced and altered networks and connections in African villages and cities. As with drumming, coded signals are used in cell phone text messages and computer instant messaging. Themes of technology appear on fabrics used for clothing. E-mail marketing and cyber cafes are becoming a part of everyday life in urban areas. Artists are sharing ideas across cultural borders, developing creative partnerships, and reaching audiences thousands of miles away…Africa.Dot.Com searches out these uses of technology in the art and social life of the first digital generation in Africa.

Among the pieces on display is Beepez-le! by Daniel Peltz.  It is a wonderful exploration of the beeping/flashing phenomenon, as experienced in Cameroon.  Do watch the lengthy video, touching on everything from the reappropriation of a western technology, to the implications of mediated communication with the divine.  Peltz says:

I built a simple live feed installation that used a camera, a video projector and cell phone to project God’s cell phone screen onto a wall in the city when he was beeped.  I installed it on the street next to two luan and chalk signs, similar to those I’d found in the market.  They read:

Voici en exclusivite   [here it is]
le numero de Dieu     [God’s private number]
597-20-24
Beepez-le!   [Beep him!]

Thanks so much to the reader who was familiar with the exposition in San Francisco and alerted me to it – sorry it took me so long to post this.

Mobiles preconference at 58th annual meeting of the International Communication Association

May 24th, 2008 beeping/miss calls, conferences, microenterprise

Time flies!  Apparently I’ve been making occasional dispatches to this blog for a whole year now.  One of my very first posts was on last year’s ICA.

I want to thank Rich Ling, Scott Campbell and Jan Fernback for organizing a very successful pre-conference workshop on globalization and development issues surrounding  mobile telephony. Though a big conference like ICA has its own rewards, it is great to have a full day-and-a-half dedicated to contiguous sessions on mobile society/mobile theory.  After a great keynote by Jim Katz, the conversations built on each other as the sessions progressed.

The agenda is here, including some links to full papers.   Notable papers in the mobiles and development genre included Harsha de Silva from LIRNEasia on perceptions of the impacts of mobile on livelihoods among BOP users, from Hana Cecelie Geirbo of Telenor on missed calls in Bangadesh, from Araba Sey on the decline of the informal mobile payphone in Ghana, and from Patricia Mechael on her work on mobiles and health in Egypt.

I presented a work-in-progress—A typology of mobile uses among small and informal businesses. By re-surveying the existing literature on the issue, I argue that:

Current evidence suggests that within the small and informal business (MSE) sector, benefits of mobile use accrue mostly (but not exclusively) to existing enterprises, in ways which amplify and accelerate material and informational flows, rather than fundamentally transforming them.

This is not to say that I think the mobile is not a huge boon to small enterprise. Rather, I just emphasize that it is (mostly) a boon in the same way that a landline would be, were it more affordable.  The research literature available (so far) suggests that the majority of small and informal businesses use mobiles to serve existing customers, coordinate with existing partners and supplies, and check prices amongst existing alternatives and sources, rather than to replace middlemen, recruit new customers, or start new enterprises.  

Extended abstract  //  slides

My review of mobile research, appearing in The Information Society

May 6th, 2008 Africa, India, Latin America / LAC, beeping/miss calls, conferences, m-banking, m-learning, microenterprise, sharing behavior, text messaging

Over the years, I’ve been keeping an eye on the research literature about mobile use in the developing world.   I first presented a version of this review at a conference in Hong Kong in 2005.  Now, thanks to Leopoldina Fortunati’s efforts to pull together a special issue of The Information Society, the review has finally been published.  Thanks also to the editors at the Information Society, and to the reviewers who provided such valuable feedback at various stages.

There’s a lot more of the literature to cover than there was when I started this back in 2005.  And, since it is an interdisciplinary review, I’m sure to have missed some citations.  Nevertheless, it has been a great exercise for me to get a sense of what’s out there, and to become familiar with the diverse work of an amazing set of researchers along the way.

I hope some of you find this review a useful input to your own work. 

Thanks everyone! 

Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature.  The Information Society 24(3), 140-159.

Abstract
This paper reviews roughly 200 recent studies of mobile (cellular) phone use in the developing world, and identifies major concentrations of research. It categorizes studies along two dimensions. One dimension distinguishes studies of the determinants of mobile adoption from those that assess the impacts of mobile use, and from those focused on the interrelationships between mobile technologies and users. A secondary dimension identifies a subset of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research. 

Don’t return that missed call

December 13th, 2007 beeping/miss calls

Warner Brothers is releasing a re-make of the 2003 Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” (Chakushin ari) in early January.  I haven’t seen either version of the film, but I gather that the mobile occupies a central spot in the plot, allowing unfortunate folks to hear voicemail messages left by their future selves.   The messages are not good news.

On the missed call theme, the film draws from a form of the practice called Wangiri or “one and cut”. At the time of the 2003 film, Wangiri was frequently used to deliver random solicitations for pay-per-call telephone sex line services.  The use of missed calls to drive people to recorded messages (sexy or otherwise) is not so common in India, since it seems that relatively few people use voicemail. 

As for the phantasmal, there are scholarly assessments of the mobile handset as magic device or portal to the afterlife by Jim Katz (see chapter 2) Bart Barendregt, and Jane Francis Agbu, among others. Bart’s paper, The Ghost in the Phone and other Tales of Indonesian Modernity, was originally presented at a conference on Mobiles and Asian Modernities in 2005, and will appear in an upcoming special issue of the Information Society. 

By the way, my literature review on mobiles in the developing world will appears in the same issue; in the meantime, an updated/temporary/working version of the review is available here.

A few more beeping discussions

November 2nd, 2007 Africa, India, beeping/miss calls

Apologies for the lengthy absence – it’s been an unusually busy stretch. 

My paper on “The Rules of Beeping” is now available as part of the October 2007 issue of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1). 

I’ve had lots of fun this month speaking to the broader community about beeping and missed calls, and I’m grateful to many of you for your interest. A piece from Andrew Havens at Reuters kicked off this round of discussion, which has carried into German, Swiss, and Indonesian venues (at least), plus to the Scientific American Blog. 

I also had a chance to do a podcast interview with Kamla Bhatt on beeping/missed calls this week; part one of the interview is here.  I cover a lot of the same ground in the interview as in as the paper…in case some of you prefer just an occasional ‘um’ or ‘ahh’ mixed in with your communication theory.