Tag: mobile phones

Bones for mobile phones

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What on earth are anthropologists doing playing with mobile phones? The answer may be a little more obvious than you think

Anthropology is an age-old, at times complex discipline, and like many others it suffers from its fair share of in-fighting and disagreement. It’s also a discipline shrouded in a certain mystery. Few people seem to know what anthropology really is, or what anthropologists really do, and a general unwillingness to ask simply fuels the mystery further. Few people ever question, for example, what a discipline better (but often incorrectly) ‘known’ for poking around with dinosaur bones is doing playing with mobile phones and other electronic gadgets.

Indiana Jones, image courtesy Daily Mail Online

In today’s high tech world, anthropologists are as visible as engineers and software developers. In some projects, they’re all that’s visible. The public face of anthropology likely sits somewhere close to an Indiana Jones-type character, a dashing figure in khaki dress poking around with ancient relics while they try to unpick ancient puzzles and mysteries, or a bearded old man working with a leather-bound notepad in a dusty, dimly lit inaccessible room at the back of a museum building. If people were to be believed, anthropologists would be studying everything from human remains to dinosaur bones, old pots and pans, ants and roads. Yes, some people even think anthropologists study roads. Is there even such a discipline?

Despite the mystery, in recent years anthropology has witnessed something of a mini renaissance. As our lives become exposed to more and more technology, and companies become more and more interested in how technology affects us and how we interface with it, anthropologists have found themselves in increasing demand. When Genevieve Bell turned her back on academia and started working with Intel in the late 1990’s, she was accused of “selling out”. Today, anthropologists jump at the chance to help influence future innovation and, for many, working in industry has become the thing to do.

So, if anthropology isn’t the study of ants or roads, what is it? Generally described as the scientific study of the origin, the behaviour, and the physical, social, and cultural development of humans, anthropology is distinguished from other social sciences – such as sociology – by its emphasis on what’s called “cultural relativity“, the principle that an individuals’ beliefs and activities should be interpreted in terms of their own culture, not that of the anthropologist. Anthropology also offers an in-depth examination of context – the social and physical conditions under which different people live – and a focus on cross-cultural comparison. To you and me, that’s comparing one culture to another. In short, where a sociologist might put together a questionnaire to try and understand what people think of an object, an anthropologist would immerse themselves in the subject and try to understand it from ‘within’.

Anthropology has a number of sub-fields and, yes, one of those does involve poking round with old bones and relics. But for me, development anthropology has always been the most interesting sub-field because of the role it plays in the third world development arena. As a discipline it was borne out of severe criticism of the general development effort, with anthropologists regularly pointing out the failure of many agencies to analyse the consequences of their projects on a wider, human scale. Sadly, not a huge amount has changed since the 1970’s, making development anthropology as relevant today as it has ever been. Many academics – and practitioners, come to that – argue that anthropology should be a key component of the development process. In reality, in some projects it is, and in others it isn’t.

It’s widely recognised that projects can succeed or fail on the realisation of their relative impacts on target communities, and development anthropology is seen as an increasingly important element in determining these positive and negative impacts. In the ICT sector – particularly within emerging market divisions – it is now not uncommon to find anthropologists working within the corridors of hi-tech companies. Intel, Nokia and Microsoft are three such examples. Just as large development projects can fail if agencies fail to understand their target communities, commercial products can fail if companies fail to understand the very same people. In this case, these people go by a different name – customers.

Image from kiwanja.net Mobile Gallery

The explosive growth of mobile ownership in the developing world is largely down to a vibrant recycling market and the arrival of cheap $20 phones, but is also down in part to the efforts of forward-thinking mobile manufacturers. Anthropologists working for companies such as Nokia spend increasing amounts of time trying to understand what people living at the so-called “bottom of the pyramid” might want from a phone. Mobiles with flashlights are just one example of a product that can emerge from this brand of user-centric design. Others include mobiles with multiple phone books, which allow more than one person to share a single phone, a practice largely unheard of in many developed markets.

My first taste of anthropology came a little by accident, primarily down to Sussex University‘s policy of students having to select a second degree subject to go with their Development Studies option (this was my key interest back in 1996). Social anthropology was one choice, and one which looked slightly more interesting than geography, Spanish or French (not that there’s anything wrong with those subjects). During the course of my degree I formed many key ideas and opinions around central pieces of work on the appropriate technology movement and the practical role of anthropology, particularly in global conservation and development work.

Today, handset giants such as Nokia and Motorola believe that mobile devices will “close the digital divide in a way the PC never could”. Industry bodies such as the GSM Association run their own “Bridging the Digital Divide” initiative, and international development agencies pump hundreds of millions dollars into economic, health and educational initiatives based around mobiles and mobile technology.

In order for the mobile phone to reach its full potential we’re going to need to understand what people in developing countries need from their mobile devices, and how they can be applied in a way which positively impacts on their lives. Sounds like the perfect job for an anthropologist to me.

Let’s not write it off quite yet

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A couple of months ago a member of the Social Mobile Group on Facebook asked an interesting, and pertinent, question. Commenting on a picture of a payphone attached to a bicycle from the kiwanja Mobile Gallery (this bike is taken around the streets of Kampala for members of the public to use to make calls), they wondered what was going to happen to these kinds of entrepreneurs as more and more people began owning their own phones.

A recent article in Fast Company magazine has set out to answer just that. Looking specifically at decreasing income levels among Grameen’s Village Phone Operators, it points the finger of blame squarely at the proliferation of mobile phones (the same finger can be pointed by the fixed payphone network, another victim). On the surface, blaming mobile proliferation seems like a safe bet. After all, if you have your own phone then why pay to use someone elses?

The increase in mobile ownership has certainly had an impact, but any time you mix economics, technology and human behaviour together, some pretty surprising things can happen. And this is where my love for anthropology comes in handy.

I was fortunate to have spent four weeks in Uganda last month, working with Grameen on their Village Phone Program at the same time that Business Week researched their own article on mobiles and economic development in Africa. Nothing beats being on the ground, and I’m very lucky to regularly get the chance to spend time in developing countries where I’m able to get a really good sense of what does and doesn’t work.

Many of the blog entries circulating the web in the last week or so – citing the Fast Company magazine and touting the ‘end of the Village Phone’ – fail to appreciate some of the subtler issues at play. The assumption that people will stop using a Village Phone the minute they own their own is not the open and shut case you might think. During my month in Uganda, I would regularly see people walking up to a Village Phone Operator, mobile in hand, look up a number and read it out to the phone lady to key into her own handset. From my own observations, this seems to happen for a number of reasons.

Firstly, for many owners, mobiles double-up as glorified contact managers, clocks, alarms, torches and, finally, a device which enables them to be contacted any time of day or night for work, or to stay connected with family or friends. Few maintain enough credit to make calls. Many taxi drivers, for example, hold just enough credit to enable them to ‘flash’ a phone (ring and hang up) to indicate that they are outside and waiting.

The reason for the lack of credit leads onto the second point. Few mobile owners want to spend a dollar or more topping up their phone – the amount needed to get enough credit for about 5 minutes of calling – when all they want to do is quickly touch base with a business contact or family member. Instead, a couple of hundred shillings gets them a 40-second call with a Village Phone operator, a smaller amount of money for a small amount of time which is utilised to the full with amazing skill.

And thirdly, call rates are actually cheaper through the Village Phones. Whether the caller has a mobile or not, and whether that phone has credit or not, many people still seek out a Village Phone to make their call because it saves them money. That’s the bottom line.

Try telling these people that the Village Phone is dead.

Mobile ownership may be increasing at a phenomenal rate in the developing world, but more people still don’t own phones than do, and most people earning a dollar-a-day are still a long way off affording one. The Village Phone has been a huge success – there is little dispute about that – but, as with any business, market changes force a period of re-evaluation and adjustment, and the mobile market has moved quicker than most.

Village Phone might well be a victim of its own success, but let’s not be too hasty in condemning it to the history books quite yet…

The Digital Divider

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People tend to get pretty excited around mobile technology. In developing countries most of this excitement has centred around their proliferation into poorer rural, communication-starved areas, and their new-found potential in helping close the digital divide. Handset giants such as Nokia and Motorola believe that mobile devices will “close the digital divide in a way the PC never could”, industry bodies such as the GSM Association run their own “Bridging the Digital Divide” initiative, and international development agencies such as USAID pump hundreds of millions dollars into economic, health and educational initiatives based around mobiles and mobile technology.

But what do we really mean when we talk about the mobile helping close the digital divide? Clearly, mobiles are a relatively cheap device – when compared to personal or laptop computers, anyway. They are small and portable, have good battery life, provide instant voice communications, have SMS functionality and they have the potential to provide access to the internet.

Even the poorest members of society find ways to own one. But Houston, we have a problem.

I’ve been lucky over the past few years to have spoken at numerous conferences, workshops and companies about the uses of mobile technology in international conservation and development, and it’s something I truly enjoy doing. However, I’ve slowly noticed a knowledge gap, or should we say an awareness gap. In the West, when we talk of mobiles helping close the digital divide, many people make a huge assumption about the technologies available to users in developing countries. We look at the mobile through rose-tinted glasses, from the top of our ivory towers, through a Western prism. Call it what you like. Think about it. Most of us have fancy phones and are gifted with pretty good network coverage to drive them. Not only can we make calls, we can take good quality photos, we can make and edit little movies and upload them to the web, we can surf the web, we can play neat games, and we can download neat bits of software. Our overall experience is generally a pleasant one. Why else would we want a phone? So, with mobiles able to do all of this, their potential in developing countries is clear, right? Well, maybe…

Let’s start by looking at the worlds best selling phone – the Nokia 1100 (pictured). Anyone who’s spent any time in a developing country recently would not have failed to notice the number of these around. The reason? They’re Nokia (and people just seem to love Nokia), they’re sturdy, have good battery life, the user interface is easy and they’re cheap (selling for around $40 new in Uganda, for example). They do everything the user wants – they can make and receive calls, they can send and receive SMS and the built-in alarm is very popular (only last month in Kampala my taxi driver was telling me with great excitement how his alarm still sounds, even when his phone is switched off). These are the kinds of phones in the hands of many people in the very rural areas where we see the mobile as the tool to help close the digital divide.

The problem here is that the Nokia 1100 – as with many of the low-end handsets found in the markets and shops in developing countries – has no browser of any kind, and doesn’t support GPRS (or any other form of data transmission). Accessing the internet? Dream on. But this is not the only problem. Network coverage in many rural areas lacks data support even if the phones did have it, although this is admittedly changing. There are also issues of language and content, but more importantly cost. Someone with little spare income doesn’t want to spend a large chunk of it scratching around the web to find what he or she is looking for. In many countries GPRS pricing models are at best confusing. While an SMS carries a fixed cost, calculating how many kilobytes of data make up a WAP page is anybody’s guess.

The opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid is huge, and handset manufacturers and network providers alike are working hard to fill it with phones. For them, the most important issue is cost because that’s what’s most important to their customer. And if this means providing trimmed-down handsets at the lowest possible prices then so be it. This current reality sees many of these phones with no GPRS, no browser, no Java, no camera, no colour screen – the very technologies which form the lynchpin of our plans to promote the mobile phone as the tool to help close the digital divide.

So, if we’re serious about using mobile to help close the digital divide, how about diverting international development funding towards providing a subsidised, fully-internet ready handset for developing markets? Aid donors are already providing funds to the network operators, after all. In the DRC, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Uganda for example, the IFC (an arm of the World Bank) recently provided US$320 to five operations of Celtel to help expand and upgrade its mobile networks (you can read more about that here). Network coverage, important as it is, is only part of the equation. From the perspective of the digital divide, who’s addressing the handset issue?

During a recent interview with the BBC I commented that “Voice is still the killer app in many developing countries. Data is going to be playing catch-up for a long time to come”. I’ve received many comments of support – and a few in disagreement – since this was published. This is a very important debate, and I hope it is one which finally starts to get some serious discussion.