Most mobiles…

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.

On Wednesday March 16, I was at the University of Manchester, at a workshop on mobiles and economic development, sponsored by the Development Informatics Group of the Institute for Development Policy and Management, and the Brooks World Poverty Institute. Most of the presentations highlighted case studies, projects, or interventions designed to use the mobile platform in interesting ways. A brief report from the workshop is available here.

I presented an updated version of a literature review on Mobiles in the Developing World; it was originally presented as part of a conference in Hong Kong in 2005, but the scope and volume of research on the topic has, of course, increased since then. Here are the new slides and the revised paper. old paper. Ask me if you want an updated draft of the review.