Although I’ve only been writing about the social mobile long tail for a couple of years, the thinking behind it has developed over a fifteen year period where, working on and off in a number of African countries, I’ve witnessed at first hand the incredible contribution that some of the smallest and under-resourced NGOs make … Continue reading A glimpse into social mobile’s long tail
Category: Anthropology
Ken Banks on anthropology and technology: how an anthropologist’s lens shapes mobile innovation, tech for good and mindful social change.
Dispelling the myth?
I spent the best part of spring and summer ’99 working on my anthropology dissertation, passionately arguing that anthropologists had been wrongly excluded from much of the earlier global conservation process. The rationale behind my several-thousand word essay was that the view of indigenous peoples as ‘outside of nature’, or ‘a blot on the landscape’, … Continue reading Dispelling the myth?
Mobile applications development: Observations
Technology and democracy: both great in theory, a little harder in practice. One of the key challenges is that one successful model doesn’t – by default – work somewhere else. For mobile techies, if we can’t easily ‘transplant’ a solution from one place to another, where does our “figure out what works” mantra leave us? … Continue reading Mobile applications development: Observations
Mobile telephony and the entrepreneur
This article – “Mobile telephony and the entrepreneur: An African perspective” – was originally written for the autumn edition of Microfinance Insights magazine. A copy of the original article is available as a PDF here Whenever the words “Africa” and “economic development” meet – which is often – it’s usually in the context of external, … Continue reading Mobile telephony and the entrepreneur
Anthropologists! Anthropologists!
Found this today on Facebook – by the “Far Side” creator, Gary Larson – a day after posting my latest PC World column on the application of anthropology in ICT. Very funny – and no doubt just how it is… =)
The charging challenge and the entrepreneur
In “Mobile Telephony: Leveraging Strengths and Opportunities for Socio-Economic Transformation in Nigeria” (a book which I blogged about last year), Christiana Charles-Iyoha sheds some fascinating light on the barriers to mobile ownership among Nigerian market traders. Erratic power supply, and difficulty charging, came top with a staggering 87%. Users in many African countries – and … Continue reading The charging challenge and the entrepreneur
Stranger in their midst
From a handwritten note – quite literally on the back of an envelope – from my university anthropology days. It reads: The reader must imagine to himself the privilege of making contact with primitive societies which were more or less intact and had never been studied seriously. Just how recently – as luck would have … Continue reading Stranger in their midst
Skyping: An anthropology…
How intrusive do you feel when you ring someone up on Skype? Or, like me, do you fire up a chat screen and tentatively say ‘hi’ instead? What is it about actually phoning someone on their computer? I mean, how is it different to calling them on their landline, or mobile? Is a Skype chat, … Continue reading Skyping: An anthropology…