article: Blurring livelihoods and lives
July 13th, 2009
publications
1 Comment
An article I wrote for the MIT journal Innovations is now available. Here’s a link to my article. The rest of the issue also looks great, with a focus on mobilizing markets (role of mobile telephony in improving markets).
Donner, Jonathan. (2009). Blurring livelihoods and lives: The social uses of mobile phones and socioeconomic development. Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization, 4(1), 91-101.
This paper focuses on how an intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It argues for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists interested in the application of Mobiles for Development (M4D) should not ignore the way mobiles blur livelihoods and lives; the developmental and ‘non-developmental’ uses of the mobile are not in competition, nor are they always distinguishable. Instead, the uses of mobiles for developmental and ‘non-developmental’ purposes are often interrelated and sometimes mutually reinforcing. The social functions of the mobile (in matters of connection and self-expression) are helping drive its widespread adoption, and these same functions inform the very behaviors that make the mobile a tool for economic development.
new book: Mobile Communication
July 7th, 2009
Uncategorized
No Comments
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.
Counselling via mobile social software
July 6th, 2009
Africa, conferences, hybrid media, m-health, m-internet, mobile social software
1 Comment
Drug counselling via MXit, a popular mobile chat program in South Africa.
From a longer article outlining Marlon Parker’s project, on mybroadband.co.za
MXIT, the cellphone instant messaging service best known for chatting teenagers, is now being used to help drug users on the Cape Flats kick their habit.
In the service, based in Bridgetown in Athlone, former drug users who counsel tik addicts use the messaging service as a primary method of support.
The article suggests that they are now counselling 6500 members of the community. I saw Marlon present an overview of this fascinating project at a recent UCT workshop on Researching Mobile Media in South Africa. Marlon’s blog is here.
CFP from the Institute of Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion.
July 4th, 2009
m-banking
No Comments
The Institute of Money, Technology, and Financial Inclusion at UC Irvine has announced a Call for Proposals for another round of projects. Check out the projects already underway.
student M4D projects at MIT
July 4th, 2009
Agriculture, m-health, m-learning
No Comments
MIT’s NextLab and Legatum center host student M4D projects, ranging from transport to m-health to agriculture. There’s a nice summary of some of the projects here.
Mobiles in the developing world – 2008 literature review (re)posted
June 18th, 2009
conferences
1 Comment
I have created an ”author post” version of the literature review published last year in the Information Society. The authoritative version (for citation, redistribution and archive purposes) is still here, but for your personal perusal you might want to use this version instead.
Donner, Jonathan. (2008). Research Approaches to Mobile Use in the Developing World: A Review of the Literature. The Information Society 24(3), 140-159. (alternate link to author post version)
Abstract: The 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 sub-set of studies with a strong economic development perspective. The discussion considers the implications of the resulting review and typology for future research.
#iranelection
June 15th, 2009
hybrid media
1 Comment
I have been trying to follow the events in Iran as best I can, toggling between the mainstream media—mostly the New York Times via their wonderful website—blogs, and, of course, Twitter (#iranelection). The main story, about the stolen election itself, is deadly serious for all of us, from the personal risks courageous individual protesters are taking, to the future political landscape of the Middle East.
The 2nd-order story, about new media’s role in all of this, is also fascinating. (See Smart Mobs). Twitter is center stage here, and its power is winning over some influential participant-observers, like Andrew Sullivan.
There is also another twist in the story, that of the users of a ‘new’ medium consciouslyasserting themselves, in aggregate, against the practices of an older medium. I’m struck by how a reasonably large proportion of the twitter traffic is around issues like raising trendshare, and #cnnfail. That’s a lot of meta-positioning to accomplish <140 characters at a time, but it seems to have reached a self-sustaining crescendo with this geopolitical event. The Economist’s Democracy in America had another take on these 2nd and 3rd twists:
It’s worth noting, though, that in this networked era, the “American response” need no longer be a crude synecdoche for the American government’s response, for good or ill. Those who truly want to know what’s happening on the ground in Iran as it transpires will eschew American papers—let alone the truly pathetic coverage coming in from the cable-news channels—and look to the Twitter stream, which Anglophone Iranians are using to communicate both with each other and the rest of the world. At the same time, technophiles here have been doing their best to get information back into the country—passing on the internet protocol addresses of proxy servers that can be used to circumvent state filtering, for example.
More controversial is an online effort led by new media strategist Josh Koster to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting site via a distributed denial-of-service attack. That site does indeed appear to have been down since last night—though whether as a result of the efforts of Twitter activists is unclear. While at first blush this is a fine case of crowd-sourced table turning, giving a censorious regime a taste of its own medicine, it also risks handing that regime ammunition—just as a too-strong statement from Mr Obama might—by buoying the narrative of an opposition influenced, aided, or even directed by hostile foreigners.
Perhaps not uncoincidentally, US-Iran relationships have a particularly tumultuous history in the mediated area. A long time ago I wrote an undergraduate paper on the role of TV news in the Iranian Hostage Crisis. I watched a lot of tape from the networks, and read good books by Gary Sick and Jeff Greenfield, among others. TV news was not a mere chronicler of the Iranian Hostage Crisis – the crisis itself was intertwined with TV. Ted Koppel started Nightline as special coverage of the crisis. With no direct diplomatic links between the governments, leaked trial-balloons and pseudo-event stagecraft, offered nightly on the news, become an important channel of communication between the US government, the students, and the government in Iran. Meanwhile the relentless media coverage helped set the terms of debate for the 1980 presidetial election.
I’m not saying that 1979 TV = 2009 Twitter. The circumstances are quite different, and the level of global, grassroots, real-time participation in this story, via Twitter and the blogosphere, is something that was unimaginable in 1979. I am, however, saying that the media, old or new, has been an actor in, rather than observer of, the US’s relationship with Iran for a long time. ’Coverage’ and ’attention’ have blurred into ‘action’ before.
ICTD2009, Doha
April 21st, 2009
conferences, microenterprise
1 Comment
The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development is in the books. Congratulations and thanks to the conference organizers, hosts, and sponsors for giving the community such a comprehensive event. It was wonderful to see so many colleagues and friends from around the world. In particular, I want to thank for inviting me to speak on a panel on the mobile web.
A lot of the usual dichotomous themes in ICTD appeared during the event: qualitative/quantitative, practitioner/researcher, pilot/evaluation, ICTD/ICT4D, income/choice, etc. If anything, discussion of these themes were more diverse and orthogonal than in earlier events. As a whole, I think these tensions are fantastic. They certainly make the conference lively, but more importantly, they reflect the essence of a growing interdisciplinary field.
I presented a literature review paper, written with Marcela Escobari, on mobile use by MSEs.
Donner, J., & Escobari, M. (2009, 17-19 April). A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Paper presented at ICTD2009, the Third IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies and Development, Qatar. (prepublication paper) (slides)
The paper offers a systematic review of 14 studies of the use of mobile telephony by micro and small enterprises (MSEs) in the developing world, detailing findings about changes to enterprises’ internal processes and external relationships, and findings about mobile use vs. traditional landline use. Results suggest that there is currently more evidence for the benefits of mobile use accruing mostly (but not exclusively) to existing MSEs rather than new MSEs, in ways that amplify existing material and informational flows rather than transform them. The review presents a more complete picture of mobile use by MSEs than was previously available to ICTD researchers, and indentifies priorities for future research, including comparisons of the impact of mobile use across subsectors of MSEs and assessments of use of advanced services such as mobile banking and mobile commerce.
Feedback from the audience suggested that this might become a living document, with new citations added to this framework via a wiki-style interface. I will explore this and see if I can get it rolling. In the meantime if there are citations you might suggest be incorporated into future drafts, let me know.
Speaking of collaborative content and rolling updates, please check out and contribute to http://africansignals.com/ for a great comparative resource on telco costs and options in Africa. Thanks Erik!
(palpably) absent presence
April 7th, 2009
conferences, hybrid media
No Comments
I haven’t been travelling very much over the past few months–the Maputo W3C workshop was my first professional trip since December–so it ended up as the first conference I’ve attended with this kind of tag scrawled on the flipchart.
Tweets emerging out of a conference don’t function all that differently than the more established practice of liveblogging, but it’s a bit odd to be aware, in almost real time, of (for example) who else is not at the conference, but following it.
There are some great advantages to these dispatches–the week before, the tables were turned and had I learned a lot following tweets at a conference I could not attend–however it does seem that the temptation to tweet, or to follow other’s tweets, may draw people’s attention further from the community in the room towards the imagined, virtual, overlapping communities to which they each belong.
Kenneth Gergen considered the implications of Absent Presence long before Twitter was a glimmer in anyone’s eye. However, as I think John Traxler mentions, Gergen’s chapter may worth another look; it seems to apply very, very well to this newest of tools/disruptions.
At the W3C workshop in Maputo
April 2nd, 2009
Africa, conferences, m-internet
1 Comment
I’m very happy to be back in Mozambique, attending the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development. Highlights so far have included presentations by kiwanja, Ushahidi, Freedom Fone, FARA (agriculture, also slides) and John Nesbit (SMSmedic). Keynotes from Steve Bratt, (head of the new WWW foundation) and Sean Krepp (describing Nokia’s life tools) helped kick us off well. Congratulations and thanks to Stephane Boyera of the W3C for convening this great event. For more, see the agenda and links to papers.
I presented an early report (slides) of work I’m doing with Shikoh Gitau, a graduate student at the ICT4D lab at the University of Cape Town. For the past few months, Shikoh has been interviewing mobile-only (and mobile primary) internet users in low-income neighborhoods in Cape Town. We’ve been finding that a combination of factors, some social/expressive, some instrumental, are linked to the adoption and use of the mobile internet by a broad and growing community of users – some estimates suggest there are upwards of 9 million mobile internet users in a country of just over 40 million.
We will be revising and expanding this analysis in time for the ICA preconference on mobile communication in May in Chicago. In the meantime, our initial paper can be found here
Donner, J., & Gitau, Shikoh. (2009, 1-2 May). New paths: exploring mobile-only and mobile primary internet use in South Africa. Paper presented at the W3C Workshop on the Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development, Maputo.
