Most mobiles…

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.

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.  

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 Stéphane Boyera 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! 

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.

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. 

The next set of details concerning the programme for ICTD2009 is now available:

Speakers Bill Gates and Carlos Braga keynote the confirmed programme for the forthcoming ICTD2009 conference, to be held 17-19 April 2009 at Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar: http://ictd2009.org/program.html

The 3rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development brings together the latest ideas on ICTs-for-development from both technical and social science perspectives.  Alongside academic paper presentations, we have poster sessions, workshops, panels and application demonstrations.

Marcela Escobari and I submitted “A review of the research on mobile use by micro and small enterprises (MSEs)”. I’ll try to post a temporary pre-camera draft once we finish up a few last edits.

Molly Steenson and I wrote an article on handset sharing, based on her fieldwork in Bangalore.  The chapter is now available in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell.  In the chapter we describe different forms of handset sharing we observed, and their relationship to the physical spaces in which we observed them. 

We saw lots of instances of basic, conspicuous sharing (X borrows Y’s phone with ’s permission). We also saw stealthy sharing (X borrows Y’s phone, and hides his tracks doesn’t make that clear).  In business settings, we observed mobiles imitating landlines, so that incoming callers were ‘place seeking’, expecting to call a partiuclar business, even if they did not know whom would pick up the line. 

Most quirky of the four modes we saw is ‘person seeking’ or ‘approxi-calling’. If X wants to find Y, but Y does not own a mobile (common among teens in Bangalore in 2006), then X might call Z if he/she thinks it is likely that Y and Z are nearby to each other. The better X knows the social habits of Y, the better chance X has of calling a mobile which will be proximate to Y at the right time of day. Y and Z are thus sharing a handset, but the sharing behavior is initiated by an external and non-proximate third party, X.  

There are many interesting papers in the volume, including “Migrant Workers and Mobile Phones“ by Fernando Paragas, which examines how mobile use provides increased opportunities for temporal and spatial simultanaeity with lives back at home.  

Last month, Kathleen Diga at IDRC pointed out a very interesting paper by Megumi Muto and T. Yamano at the Japan International Cooperation Agency Research Institute, called “The impact of mobile phone coverage expansion on market participation: panel data evidence from Uganda”. The paper joins earlier work by Jensen and Aker in examining the mobile’s role in transforming agricultural marketplaces via quantitative analysis.  Abstract here:

Uganda has recently experienced a rapid increase in the areas covered by mobile phone networks. As the information flow increases due to the mobile phone coverage expansion, the cost of crop marketing is expected to decrease, particularly more so for perishable crops, such as banana, in remote areas because the increased information allows traders to collect perishable products more efficiently. We use panel data of 856 households in 94 communities, where the number of communities covered by mobile phone networks increased from 41 to 87 over a two-year period between the first and second surveys in 2003 and 2005, respectively. We find that the proportion of banana farmers who sold banana increased from 50 to 69 percent in the communities more than 20 miles away from district centers after the expansion of the mobile phone coverage. For maize, which is another staple but less perishable crop, we find that the increased mobile phone coverage did not affect market participation. These results suggest that mobile phone coverage expansion induces market participation of farmers who are located in remote areas and produce perishable crops.

Although, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m not a sufficiently skilled econometrician to assess the quality of the statistical models employed in the paper, I found both the paper’s underlying rationale and findings interesting for a number of reasons.

1. They “explicitly consider pathways in which better access to information increases income” (p50), distinguishing between changes to prices and market participation. In this case of bananas (plantains I think), they find no clear effects of mobile use on prices, but rather on market participation (the proportion of agricultural households in a given region who sell part of their crops in the market. They suggest that in the absence of competition between traders, households were more likely to participate in the markets (marketing the availability of ripe bananas for sale to traders), but that traders were able to keep prices paid to these homes relatively low.

2. They back up their model with field surveys, learning how, for example, “traders use mobile phones to set up a time and place to trade banana”, whereas in the absence of mobiles they just arrive unannounced and buy what’s available, waiting until their trucks are full (See Overa). 

3. By accounting for distance, they tackle the complex interaction between mobiles, transport costs, and the availability of alternate face-to-face channels for information exchange — indeed they find clearer effects on market participation levels among households situated at least 12 miles away, and even more so at 20 miles away

4. by running the model for different products, and finding different results, Muto and Yamano illustrate the degree to which the mobile’s impact on agriculture, and on enterprise in general, remains quite context-specific.  They find the participation model predictive in the case of perishable bananas, but not for less-perishable maize. Reconsidering the Jensen results in light of the Muto&Yamano study illustrates how the presence of multiple (competitive) markets and the pressure of a highly perishable product may have made the Keralan fish market particularly receptive to  improvement via mediated communication. Thus the Uganda paper is a helpful cautionary note to those who might be tempted to make generalizable claims about the impact of mobiles in agriculture based on a handful of undeniably excellent studies.

And a couple of minor points for mobile phone researchers:  

5. Their model actually does not offer much predictive power at the level of  individual households; rather, the results are interpreted at the sub-regional level, comparing places with mobile coverage to those without, rather than homes with mobile coverage to those without.  One could ‘unpack’ this a little more than the authors do in their article– perhaps once the trader is summoned by one household with a mobile, others nearby share the benefit of that call and can also sell ripe bananas.  Or, perhaps there is more explicit sharing of handsets, such that even farmers without phones of their own can access one and use it to call traders to purchase and transport ripe bananas.  We’re making strides on handset sharing but there is room for greater attention to it in our quantitative assessments of impact

5. Finally, despite the attention to mobile telephones and network coverage, this is still a paper about connectivity and the compression of distance, rather than mobility per se. While it is possible that the traders at the other end of the calls from the producers would be unreachable by landlines, the model can’t account for that.  We have to look to Overa for that assessment.

In summary,  Mutu and Yamano  identify greater impacts of the mobile on the marketplace for perishable bananas than for not-so-perishable maize, and find larger effects for distant/remote farmers, for whom information exchange via face-to-face channels is less possible, and for whom the appeal of replacing travel with a phone call would be higher.   Studies like these help the ICTD field develop a better understanding of which marketplaces are  likely to be impacted by a step-change in the accessibility and affordability of telecommunications services, and which ones are not.

The futures of learning team, David Theo Goldberg, Mimi Ito, Heather Horst, Becky Herr, HyeRyoung Ok, Daisuke Okabe, Dan Perkel, Christo Sims, Cara Wallis, Anke Schwittay, is building a great resource:

Futures of Learning is a collective blog dedicated to the topic of new media and learning. The members of the blog are part of a project, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, that is conducting an international survey of research in the field. We are focusing on two areas. One is an international review of research on how people are adopting digital and networked media. The second area is a review of learning institutions that are incorporating new media in innovative ways.

The blog recently kicked off a series on New Media Practices in International Contexts, with a post from Cara on New Media in China

Vodafone has released a new set of studies on mobiles in India as part of their Policy Paper Series. This follows important earlier volumes in the same series on Africa and M-transactions (among others). The document includes four research papers:

Kathuria, Uppal, and Mamta offer an econometric analysis of the impact of mobile.  The background sections of this paper present a clear and remarkable history of the rapid spread of mobile telephony in India.  Their theoretical contribution is a model linking mobile penetration to GNP growth at the state level (similar to what Waverman, Meschi & Fuss did in the 2005 Africa Volume in the same series.  I’m not enough of an econometrician to offer an opinion on the strength of the model, but the attempt is made to control first for the (strong) impacts of gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) on mobile use, thus isolating the impacts of rising mobile penetration on GSDP.  They suggest that “a 10% increase in mobile penetration delivers, on average a 1.2% point annual increase in output”.  They also find a threshold effect, suggesting that the positive benefits of mobiles on growth kick in disproportionately in states with higher-than-the-median penetration of 25%.

Gandhi, Mittal, and Tripathi, explore the impact of mobiles on agricultural productivity. This paper presents the results of interviews and focus groups with the users of Reuters Market Light (RML) and another market information system, IKSL, run by the Indian Farmers Cooperative Limited. It is a helpful paper, describing the priorities farmers and fishermen have for information services.  They also delve into farmers’ basic uses of mobiles for work purposes, breaking out benefits of content, mobility, and connectivity (time and travel savings). This offers a significant improvement over some other papers, which tend to conflate mobility and connectivity.   Finally, I like the way the paper mentions constraints – both that phones do not replace face to face interactions (see also Donner and Molony and Overå), and that for all the connectivity in the world, some farmers and fishermen would still face significant infrastructure barriers to acting on that information, such as the lack of roads to transport goods to market.

Sarin and Jain report the results of a survey of usage of mobile in poor urban areas. This paper has some interesting elements, particularly around observed differences in mobile use by gender (men own the phones in many households), and in the assertion that “users and non-users in some sense inhabit different networks, with users much more likely to be in networks with higher mobile usage”.  However, some methodological choices made by the researchers make it difficult to draw many generalizable insights from the survey. Users and non-users are demographically different (a point they acknowledge), but the report is just a series of comparisons of users and non-user self reports, with no statistical controls to account for demographic differences. In addition, (and unless I’m mistaken in my read of the paper), in many cases, users and non-users were asked distinctly different questions. While nonusers were asked ‘baseline’ questions about changes to productivity, earnings, social networks, etc. over the last year, users were asked specifically how the mobile altered these various elements.  This makes comparison quite difficult, and I would have preferred to see the same baseline wording used in the nonuser and user groups.  That said, there is probably a lot that can be done with the survey data (1700 cases!) 

Uppal, M., & Kathuria, R. (2009) consider the impact of mobiles in the SME sector. They touch on a question near and dear to me, so I’m happy to see other researchers focusing on SMEs and microenterprises.  However, while, there are a few anecdotes on subsectors of the informal economy (such as vegetable vendors) and some good sidebars on the mobile-power success stories of individual entrepreneurs. This is more of a forward-looking commentary than a traditional research paper. Perhaps its most important contributions are the examples of mobile-enabled businesses such as labornet, just dial, and radio cabs. These are larger organizations than MSEs, but mobile connectivity is at their core. The paper is worth a read if only for these examples.