I am obsessed with cell phones right now. Mostly I bloody *hate* them. I haven’t had one for six months, but work made me get one last week. So since they made me get one I am lobbying to get into some cell-phone-type research, partly to figure out my personal issues with cellular voice communication, most mostly because, clearly, undoubtedly, they are the most important technology in the world: they are the network of the developing world. As a BBC article put it a couple weeks ago: “”it’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer, and it will be the portal to the internet, and the communications tool, and the schoolbook, and the vaccination record, and the family album …”
“It’s time that we recognised that for the majority of the world’s population, and for the foreseeable future, the cell phone is the computer.The Invisible Computer Revolution
My question is: where the hell are the tools for people who use cellphones in this way? (In particular, where are the banking tools and educational tools?) In the first world we’ve got $600 iphones that can read your freaking mind. But a simple flashcard application for learning a few of the 62 languages spoken in Kenya? It’s not quite as sexy.
So this is the part that I am really obsessing over, as a developer. It just seems to me that there is huge opportunity to really do some huge good by, essentially, hacking on SMS. Or, sure, wait a few years and use cell phones as a proper thin client. (But im more interested in the ultra ultra thin approach, something that would work with one of the classic Nokias, which are used everywhere in Africa . Design for maximum constraints, right?)
Anyway, new content. Here’s a fantastic video from Jan Chipchase at TED, a hero of cellphone ethnography. My favorite line: “”if you want a big idea you need to embrace everyone on the planet…. With another three billion people connected, they want to be part of the conversation. Our [rich people] relevance is about being able to listen.”
Today’s New York Times carries a front-page article about the growth of the cell phone industry in Africa.
The article is as well-written a summary of the communications crisis in Africa as I have ever read — though it is an undeniably, perhaps inexplicably, upbeat assessment of the curent growth trend in cell phone use.
The article begins by describing the difficulties faced by a rural farmer in Johnanesburg:
On this dry mountaintop, 36-year-old Bekowe Skhakhane does even the simplest tasks the hard way.
Fetching water from the river takes four hours a day. To cook, she gathers sticks and musters a fire. Light comes from candles.
But when Ms. Skhakhane wants to talk to her husband, who works in a steel factory 250 miles away in Johannesburg, she does what many in more developed regions do: she takes out her mobile phone.
Author Shanon LaFranierie did a great job of putting this together, I think, but again the upbeat assessment tends to make the issue more of a spectacle than an outrage. Which it is. Take, for example, the fact that the woman described in the lead actually has the money for only five minutes of calls per month — a pretty slim communication system indeed.
There is also the fact that while Africa now has the highest percentage of cell phone users relative to land lines, that doesn’t mean much when only one in 30 people has a land line. And the fact that less than 60% of Africa can get any cellphone signal at all is rather sobering.
And yet, there is an undeniable fact of real growth — economic, social, educational — that is occuring because of the powerful effect that even a slight improvement in communication can bring. At least when the context is dire poverty, the impact of just a few cellphones can be dramatically disproportinate.
No doubt, mobile phones will be near the top of the list [of development technologies] — but that list also includes $100 laptops, wind-up electricity generators, low-cost community radio transmitters, and the timeless ham radio. So let’s not make policy decisions under the assumption that mobile phones are the only tool necessary for bridging the digital divide.
A technology conference yesterday in England was host to a speaker Iqbal Quadir, who has sold about 100,000 cell phones to poor folks in Bangladesh. These are people who otherwise would have no digital communications, and Quadir feels that their new phones are empowering them more than the development strategies of the last 60 years.
The approach is eloquently summed up on Ethan Zuckerman’s blog as a bottom-up approach to economic development. Here’s a bit from his recent post:
Iqbal points to a top-down approach favored by the World Bank and others and notes that it puts power into the hands of authority, not into the hands of people. The US didn’t develop this way - technological empowerment from below led to success in developed nations. Technology can amplify voices, make it possible for individuals to have a voice that gets heard by central authorities.
I love it.
But I always find it disturbing that his bottom line is productivity — the extent to which their communication means that they are participating in the market.
I write this in spite of the obvious fact that the real goal of progressive ICT is the empowerment of people, ie, the elimination of poverty. So there is always an element of market-think undergirding the need for communication.
But by understanding people’s lives in terms of an economic equation, there’s some unquantifiable (romantic, perhaps) aspect of communications-based development that is lost. Because, after all, of we were all well fed and clothed, we’d still be suffering without the ability to communicate.
Author Shanon LaFranierie did a great job of putting this together, I think, but again the upbeat assessment tends to make the issue more of a spectacle than an outrage. Which it is. Take, for example, the fact that the woman described in the lead actually has the money for only five minutes of calls per month — a pretty slim communication system indeed.