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).
A recent piece in the Economist highlights the increasing importance of information technologies, particularly mobile communication technologies, to international aid and disaster relief efforts. Most of the piece details the nuts-and-bolts of logistics, for which mobile ICTs are clearly a helpful new arrival. Responders can stay in touch and better coordinate their efforts. So too can displaced or fragmented families, who can find each other via electronic databases.
The article contains two other elements which make more sweeping claims about the “shifting balance” or reconfiguration of relationships between the aid community and those they are trying to help. The more grounded example is that of the role of large remittance flows via m-payments systems and shop-at-a-distance sites like Makuru.com. I think this raises an important point: as families with overseas members become increasingly connected via mobiles and other ICTs, there are real opportunities for micro-level, family-centric responses to macro-level events like floods and famines.
The second point is less clear-cut. The article leads with a quote from the Horn of Africa, in the form of an SMS delivered to UN officials in London and Nairobi.
“MY NAME is Mohammed Sokor, writing to you from Dagahaley refugee camp in Dadaab. Dear Sir, there is an alarming issue here. People are given too few kilograms of food. You must help.”
It’s a great anecdote–though perhaps still more aspirational than descriptive–which the author(s) use to assert that “a familiar flow of authority, from rich donor to grateful recipient, had been reversed.” It will be interesting to watch how, over time, donors and other actors in the humanitarian space integrate mediated feedback and participitory input from ‘recipients’ into relief response.
In the meantime, we can draw a different theme from the anecdote: the author of the SMS found the contact numbers at an internet café. And, conversely, you and I are reading the quote via the internet again. This hybridity of media—an intermingling of SMS messages and internet content—is something I expect we’ll see more of in the developing world.
Shareideas.org and the ICT4D section of the World Bank’s Development Gateway both recently highlighted an application called MobilED. It is a mobile-learning application, piloted in South Africa, which allows students to (a) query Wikipedia via SMS messages (b) hear the results of the query played back to them as audio text and (c) post new entries to their own class’s wiki by recording audio off their handsets.
I haven’t seen the system first hand, but I think it is interesting for two reasons:
1) It is a hybrid media form, which complicates all the theorizing some of us like to do about text messages, mobile calls, internet sites, etc. What is it? A web application? A mobile application? A mobile web application? My bet is the kids don’t care as long as it helps them learn and is easy to use.
2) Its hybridity accomplishes something still relatively rare: it breaks down the walls between web content and SMS content. In doing so, it demonstrates a way in which some rich, dynamic internet content can be made accessible to (and can be created by) communities using relatively affordable & common basic mobile handsets. Since the worldwide ratio of mobile users to internet users is roughly 2:1, this is a good thing for both groups.
Vodafone, Nokia, and Nokia-Siemens Networks have released a new collection of papers on m-banking in the developing world, called “The transformational potential of m-transactions”. As was the case with Vodafone’s earlier collection on mobile phones in Africa, the report has attracted a fair amount of attention (e.g., Economist, NYT, blog1, blog2). The word “transformational” makes a few more appearances than some might prefer, but all and all, it is a great addition to a small but growing literature on m-banking.
Three of the six core papers deal with regulatory and business model issues. One contrasts some of the leading systems (m-Pesa, Wizzit, and Globe) in more detail. The remaining two describe user-level experiences with systems in Kenya and Egypt.
The more granular user data is found in the piece by Walia and Goodman on Airtime Services in Egypt. Airtime transfer is sort of a cousin/antecedent to currency-based m-banking; it allows users to share load between accounts, which opens up all kinds of opportunities to share, barter and transact in real time. I am unaware of any other detailed surveys of airtime transfer behavior, so I was happy to see their segmentation of airtime sharers into “heavy users”, “sharers”, “receivers”, and “light users”. Their paper points to some of differences in norms and expectations at play between, say, proximate families sharing minutes, émigrés sending minutes back home to their families, and business partners using airtime as a proxy for currency (which the authors point out is the exception, not the norm). One of Walia and Goodman’s propositions is that “balance transfer use supports social networks”. Probably so, although as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’d like to see more attention paid to how social networks support and structure balance transfer use.
The parody site mutiny.in has released ’secret details’ of Apple’s plans for the iPhone India Edition. Among them is MMS — in this case, Miss Call Management Service, which “allows you to make calls to friends without giving them a mill-second to pick up your call”. Might be useful…particularly if your friends are quick to answer their mobiles.
The spoof requires a kernel of truth; missed calls are indeed pervasive in India.
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!
I’m coining a new term today. The condition of not knowing your own mobile number should be called SIMnesia. I saw it happen to a couple of world travelers yesterday, and was remained of how frequently I see variants of this scenario:
Say Joe, an American, flies to Sydney for a week or two. Being thrifty and not thrilled about roaming charges, Joe buys a prepay SIM card to make inexpensive local calls while he is visiting. But Joe has thrown-away the box with his temporary mobile number on it, and can’t (or can’t be bothered to) learn how to call up his number on the handset’s OS. So, when his new pal Jennifer in Sydney asks Joe for his mobile number, he hasn’t the foggiest idea. Joe suffers from SIMnesia.
If anyone has heard of another term for this unfortunate condition, please let me know.
Actually, yesterday I also saw how the effects of SIMnesia can be treated using a variant of missed call/beeping/flashing behavior:
While they are standing right next to each other, Jennifer says her number out loud to Joe, who dials Jennifer’s mobile, quickly hanging up to leave a missed call. Now, not only does Jennifer have Joe’s number–and the chance to make an address book entry with it–but she can then tell Joe.
This ‘number exchange’ is different than other common forms of beeping: call back beeps, pre-negotiated instrumental beeps, and relational beeps. In this case the message in the beep is the number itself…like the tiniest of vCards. I’m not sure whether I will place a footnote into the next version of my paper on beeping, or actually elevate this to a class of beeping onto itself.
When/if/how Joe commits his temporary number to memory is another question entirely.
At the ICA mobile communication preconference, I presented some (preliminary) thoughts on the links between mobile banking and social networks/social capital. There is a great deal of enthusiasm about mobile banking in the developing world right now, and I don’t think it is misplaced; the technology can have a real impact in reducing the costs and increasing the reliability of moving and storing money for people who otherwise have little access to financial services.
The paper argues that social science research can be applied to improve the design, pricing, and marketing of m-banking services. In particular, I suggest that it would be helpful to use social network approaches to assess the impact of mobile banking for the poor and unbanked. In a sense, the mobile banking channel overlays/blurs communication and financial networks, which leads us back to one of the core questions in the technology-and-society debate — do communication technologies help people create new network ties, or improve/amplify the ones the ones they already have?
Two great resources for m-banking research are CGAP (the Consultative group to Assist the Poor) and infoDEV.
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.
