Archive for conferences
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”
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.
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.
Mobile papers at ICTD2007
December 18th, 2007 Africa, India, conferences, text messaging
MSR was one of the Platinum sponsors for ICTD2007—the 2nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development— which wrapped up this weekend (Dec 15-16) in Bangalore. It was a great program, and it was a treat to welcome so many researchers from around the world to Bangalore.
Veeraraghavan, R., Yasodhar, N., & Toyama, K. (2007). Warana Unwired: Mobile Phones replacing PCs in a rural sugarcane cooperative. This is a project by some of my MSRI colleagues, in which an existing (and successful) agricultural information system was updated, streamlined, and extended via mobile phones. The upshot has been greater convenience at lower cost to farmers in the cooperative. While we’re waiting for the papers to go live, some details on Warana Unwired are available here.
Mpoeleng, D., Anderson, G., Asare, S., Ayalew, Y., Garg, D., Gopolang, B., et al. (2007). Towards a Bilingual SMS Parser for HIV/AIDS Information Retrieval in Botswana. This poster is an example of the kind of detailed, patient work that, in the long run, helps make mobile systems flexible and powerful, without sacrificing the appearance (to users) of intelligence, awareness, and magic. Can an SMS database ‘understand’ both English and Setswana? If it is going to be helpful in Botswana, it had better do so.
Other researchers tackled broader issues of wirelesses and/or mobility (e.g., store and forward, mesh networks interactive radio), or mentioned mobiles as part of a discussion of user centered design. I’ll update these links when the papers go live. I expect we’ll see more mobile-related papers in future conferences.
HOIT2007
September 6th, 2007 India, conferences, m-banking
Recently, I attended HOIT 2007—Home/Community Oriented ICT for the Next Billion. Hosted at IIT-Madras, this was the first time the conference has been held outside the US or Europe. The “next billion” theme of this year’s version provided an umbrella for ICT4D discussions, and included a keynote by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala.
I presented an updated version of my thoughts on m-banking—although the basic paper is unchanged—as part of a panel called “Living and Livelihoods: ICTs and the Blurring Domestic and Economic Spheres in Emerging Economies”. The panel’s other presenters were my MSR colleague Nimmi Rangaswamy (ICTs in middle class Indian families, with an emphasis on mobile phone sharing), Jan Blum from Nokia Design (street-smart businesses in China and Brazil), and Vinod Gopinath of Novatium Solutions (an overview of Novatium’s netPC).
There were only a few presentations which directly addressed mobiles-in-the-developing-world. Of those, the keynote by David Frohlich of the Digital World Research Centre about the Storybank Project was particularly interesting, Storybank is exploring the use of simple, affordable ICTs to capture to stuff of everyday life in villages in the developing world (David called it community centered design). As the Storybank website explains:
Cameraphones and digital library software will be used to support the capture and sharing of this information in the form of a short audiovisual story. We use the word story to refer to a spoken language report, illustrated with still or moving images. By focusing on audiovisual information of this kind, we hope to give a stronger voice and role to people who cannot read and write, or use the internet to record and access textual information
This general approach has a long history (e.g., Through Navajo Eyes), but mobile technologies open up new possibilities for these initiatives to capitalize on the handset’s affordances for simultaneity, customization, and ubiquity. New projects like Storybank can help us explore the boundaries of mobile appropriation and community use.
Speaking of digital libraries, some of concepts highlighted by Storybank remind me of similar efforts in the Digital Green project, led by my colleagues Rikin Gandhi and Rajesh Veeraraghavan at MSRI. Digital green is focused specifically on agricultural productivity, but also relies on content generated by members of the community rather than on content created outside.
The logic of blurring the user/producer dichotomy, so central to recent developments in new media and social software, is currently finding its way into all sorts of interesting projects in the developing world; Storybank, Digital Green, and MobilED are just a few.
Discussion: Mobiles and Development in Latin America and the Carribean
August 7th, 2007 Latin America / LAC, conferences
DIRSI–Diálogo Regional sobre Sociedad de la Infomación–posted what looks like the entire set of presentations and comments from a July 4 discussion in Lima on “Understanding the Contribution of Mobile Telephony to Development in LAC” (Latin America and the Carribean).
More research and background papers from DIRSI are available on their homepages (English) (en Español).
Mobile Media 2007
July 7th, 2007 beeping/miss calls, conferences
Kudos to Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth for arranging a great conference in Sydney last week. Mobile Media 2007 welcomed attendees from around the world, and did a great job pushing new themes within the mobile research community.
There were more than a few papers dealing with mobiles in the developing world, although they were interspersed throughout the conference panels. Thus, I missed a few good papers, including Thomas Apperley’s talk on mobile gaming inVenezuela, and most of the papers about SMS/MMS in China.
I did however, get to see Jack Qiu’s presentation on the ‘Information Have-Less’ and their use of ‘Working-Class ICTs’, a topic he continues to explicate with a great mix of ethnographic/micro observations and macro-level summary data from the rapidly changing telecommunications environment in China. (earlier presentation here)
Genevieve Bell also touched on issues relevant to mobiles in the developing world, during her keynote. She mentioned the phenomenal success of handsets and services to support the needs of Muslim users (example), and mentioned beeping/miss call behavior. In general, Genevieve emphasized the importance of exploring the regulatory and infrastructural factors which both support and complicate the ways people use mobiles in different locations. Indeed, she questioned whether there is really a single device called a ‘mobile’, asking us to consider instead the whole range of mobile devices and functions, notably GPS.
I presented a small paper on differences in perspectives towards mobile phones vs. PCs, among small businesses in urban India. This is based on a Q sort I put together a few months ago, but only with the assistance of Gaana Nair, Gautam Prakash, and Arundathi Vishwanath, all students (past or current) at Christ College in Bangalore. Thanks again!
The 57th Annual Conference of the International Communication Association
May 31st, 2007 conferences
San Francisco last week for another conference; the annual meeting of ICA. It is a huge event with at least a dozen parallel sessions from all facets of communication research, but nevertheless, one can find a path through the crowds to reconnect with colleagues from around the world, and listen to some excellent papers, to boot.
My main focus was a Preconference on Mobile Communication, which I helped organize along with Richard Ling, Concetta Stewart, and Michael Traugott. We had a very nice mix of papers on mobiles and on community WiFi, and a relatively luxurious day-and-a-half to run through them. Carolyn Wei presented some of the results from her fieldwork in Bangalore last summer, focusing on questions of mobile hybridity (.pdf). Dr. Wei described the use of mobiles (in love and life) by young IT/business services workers in Bangalore. Many are new to the city, and use their mobiles to build local manage family ties at a distance. I presented a paper on mobile banking, which I’ll describe later.
On Saturday I chaired a session at ICA called ‘Networking the poor for development’, with papers by Araba Sey, Amelia Arsenault, Seungyoon Lee, and Arul Chib. All four are Ph.D. students at USC. The papers did a great job reflecting the range of topics and perspectives confronting ICTD, ranging from Arul’s assessment of a mobiles-for-midwifes project in Aceh, to Amelia’s analysis of some of the unanticipated impacts of internet browsing, with a focus on the net-driven conspiracy theories about HIV/AIDS circulating among some decision makers in South Africa.
