I gave a talk based on a new paper reviewing mobile livelihood services in Africa (crop prices, virtual marketplaces, agricultural extension, etc). The paper is in draft form right now – I will be doing revisions in a few weeks before resubmitting for the conference publication. So, any comments, additions, or questions are most welcome.

Donner, J. (2009, 23-24 October). Mobile-based livelihood services in Africa: pilots and early deployments. Paper presented at the Conference on Development and Information Technologies. Mobile Phones and Internet in Latin America and Africa: What benefits for the most disadvantaged? Castelldefels, Barcelona.

The paper describes a collection of initiatives delivering various forms of support functions via mobile phones to small enterprises, small farms, and the self-employed. Using a review of 24 examples of such services currently operational in Africa, the analysis identifies five functions of mobile livelihood services: Mediated Agricultural Extension, Market Information, Virtual Marketplaces, Financial Services, and Direct Livelihood Support. It discusses the current reliance of such systems on the SMS channel, and considers their role in supporting vs. transforming existing market structures.

The conference is at the end of October. So, this is only a pre-publication version and further edits are likely. But we’d welcome any comments or suggestions.  Abstract below:

This study reports results of an ethnographic action research study, exploring mobile-centric internet use. Over the course of 13 weeks, eight women, each a member of a livelihoods collective in urban Cape Town, South Africa, received training to make use of the data (internet) features on the phones they already owned. None of the women had previous exposure to PCs or the internet. Activities focused on social networking, entertainment, information search, and, in particular, job searches. Results of the exercise reveal both the promise of, and barriers to, mobile internet use by a potentially large community of first-time, mobile-centric users. Discussion focuses on the importance of self-expression and identity management in the refinement of online and offline presences, and considers these forces relative to issues of gender and socioeconomic status.

Gitau, S., Donner, J. and G. Marsden. (2009, 28-30 October). “i-Internet? Intle” (beautiful): Exploring first time internet use via mobile phones in a South African women’s collective. Paper to be presented at the 3rd Conference of the International Development Informatics Association, Kruger National Park, South Africa. 

Microsoft OneApp is a new software application that enables feature phones—commonly found in emerging markets—to access mobile apps like Facebook, Twitter, Windows Live Messenger, and other popular apps and games. Now, people around the world who own feature phones will be able to do more and enjoy a better mobile experience with their existing phones. Microsoft OneApp will be offered initially through partners in emerging markets worldwide.

If you have seen or read any of my research in the past (particularly this newer stuff on mobile-centric internet use), you’ll quickly see why I am excited about OneApp. 

Smartphones are fantastic but remain out of reach of most people in the world. Feature phones, on the other hand, are more broadly accessible.  OneApp is small (150KB download), and runs on many of the world’s most popular handsets. It makes it much easier and cheaper, due to lower bandwidth requirements, for partners to offer and individuals to access the kinds of applications and web functionality that a lot of people with PCs take for granted. Furthermore, because it is flexible, I think we’ll see developers building locally-relevant applications, with the confidence that they can be used on the phones that so many people already have. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.