new book: Mobile Communication

July 7th, 2009 Uncategorized

I’m very happy to report that Rich Ling and I have written a book, Mobile Communication, as part of Polity’s Digital Media and Society Series. 

It was great to work with Rich and the team at Polity on this project.  As fitting for a book with a global scope, we were on four continents (at least) while writing it. Rich and the Polity team are in Europe. I started in Bangalore, moved on to Austin and did my last few edits from my new home in Cape Town.

Here are links to the book’s pages on Polity and to Amazon (US),  and below, the blurb from the back cover:

With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile subscriptions. Prosperous nations boast of having more subscriptions than people. In the developing world, hundreds of millions of people who could never afford a landline telephone now have a mobile number of their own. With a mobile in our hand many of us feel safer, more productive, and more connected to loved ones, but perhaps also more distracted and less involved with things happening immediately around us.

Written by two leading researchers in the field, this volume presents an overview of the mobile telephone as a social and cultural phenomenon. Research is summarized and made accessible though detailed descriptions of ten mobile users from around the world. These illustrate popular debates, as well as deeper social forces at work. The book concludes by considering three themes: 1) the tighter interlacing of daily activities 2) a revolution of control in the social sphere, and 3) the arrival of a world where the majority of its inhabitants are reachable, anytime, anywhere.

cell phones and the US elections

November 3rd, 2008 Uncategorized

I can’t resist breaking-frame for a minute and pointing to ongoing discussions of the role of cell-phone-onlys (CPOs) in the US elections.   Pollster and the great fivethirtyeight.com both have recent posts on the topic.   Are ‘missing’; CPOs worth a couple of points to Obama in the tracking polls? Writing on the eve of the election, Brian Schaffner at pollster.com thinks the CPO effect could push Indiana and Montana into Obama’s column.  We’ll see how it pans out.    

And yes, I used ‘cell phone’ instead of ‘mobile phones’ for this post.  

Use of mobiles by South African youth

October 22nd, 2008 Africa, Uncategorized, hybrid media, m-internet

While at MobileActive 2008, I met Tino Kreutzer, an MA student in the Centre for Film and Media Studies at the University of Cape Town.  He is in the midst of gathering some really interesting data on patterns of mobile/mobile internet use among low-income teens in urban Cape Town.  Preliminary results are up on his website.

The pilot suggests that the majority of urban South Africans in this age group can and do access the Internet via their phones (83% were found to so on a typical day). The popularity of instant messaging and other Internet applications within this group suggests that their use of the Internet differs from those whose access is primarily via desktop devices. This finding has significant implications for mobile media and learning applications, as does the fact that a majority of students also reported gaming on their phones on a typical day (53%).

Slides from Everyday Digital Money workshop

October 22nd, 2008 Uncategorized, conferences, m-banking

At the recent ‘Everyday Digital Money’ workshop, I presented my thoughts on the importance of linking research on adoption, impact, design, and use of M-Banking applications.  The slides are here.  This is a longer deck, and reflects the arguments from my paper with Camilo Tellez on the same topic, upcoming in the Asian Journal of Communication.

Congratulations and thanks to Bill Maurer, Department of Anthropology at UC Irvine and Scott Mainwaring from Intel’s People and Practices Group for putting together such a timely and informative event. 

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”

“Most” = 58%

February 8th, 2008 Uncategorized

Most mobiles, indeed.   A recent BBC news story cites fresh statistics from the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), and suggests that 58% of the world’s mobiles are in the developing world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the brief piece describes how Keralan fishermen are using mobiles to check prices, thus leapfrogging the digital divide.