The group from LIRNEasia (http://lirneasia.net/) has done a great job of organizing the mobile communication pre-conference at the ICA. They have taken a broad group of papers and brought them together into a good program. Congratulations with this work.
Tim Kelly from the World Bank was the keynote speaker. Most mobile phones are now in the developing world. There are 4 billion subscriptions as of 2009. He noted that mobile communication has an impact on the growth of GDP. In this way, the future of mobile broadband will have a big impact. The areas that the World Bank is looking into include: 1) Spectrum allocation 2) Evolving business models 3) Base of the pyramid usage patterns 4) Policy issues 5) Appropriate applications (location-based services?) 6) Mobile communication and climate change There were two presentations on the use of advanced services among impoverished persons in South Africa. Jonathan Donner discussed the transition to IP based interaction in South Africa using a system called MIXit (http://www.mxit.com/web/). This system allows one-to-one interaction between people on the system. It is IP based but it is far cheaper to use this system than traditional SMS. It has 11 million subscribers and so there is a critical mass. Timo Kreutzer (http://tinokreutzer.org/mobile/) has done a closer analysis of youth in the South African townships and he notes that there are a lot of users. According to his analysis it is over 60% of the teens use mobile internet on a typical day. This is a number far higher than is seen in other parts of the world. Since MIXit is a system that facilitates interpersonal interaction (and not access to third party content) this seems to be another confirmation that mobile communication is interpersonal. In the next session Tom Julsrud presented material on phone use among small Malaysian retailers and Harsha de Dilva did a very nice analysis of the effect of friends on an individual's consumption of mobile phones. Basically for these "bottom of the pyramid" people, the more persons who have a phone among their intimate sphere, the more likely they are to have one. There is clearly the issue of causality to be investigated, but the fact that de Silva and his colleagues at LIRNEasia are doing this work is extremely important and it is very useful for the broader research community. There were presentations by many others. These included Yi-Fan Chen, Grace Roldan, Corinne Martin, Jeffrey Boase and Lee Humphreys. Scott Campbell presented some interesting data that examines the role of mobile communication in increasing insularity of social groups. He found that forms of broader participation and openness decline in small like-minded groups as the use of communication technology increases. There is a more nuanced picture to be found here however. If all of the elements are not in place, then there is not the increase in insularity. This finding is one of the missing parts of the strong tie/weak tie discussions that has been carried out recently. There is a lot of evidence that the mobile phone increases cohesion with the intimate group, but there has not been the corresponding analysis of the weak ties. This finding is important since it brings some of that material into focus. Oscar Westlund presented material on the mobile phone as a source of news and Arul Chib presented very interesting material on mobile communication in relation health services in Aceh province of Indonesia. We had presentations from Rohan Samarajiva describing CellBazaar. This is a system of using the mobile phone to facilitate a type of "want ads" interaction in Bangladesh. Francois Bar, Melissa Brough, Sasha Costanza-Chock Carmen Gonzalez, Cara Wallis and Amanda Garces described their work with the Latino Community in Los Angeles. There was an interesting session on mobile TV. It included policy, user and also the producer perspectives on the development of this service. Finally there was a session on concerns that are arising from all this. Among other things, Keith Hampton presented his material on wireless use in public places. All the papers are available at http://lirneasia.net/2009/05/mobile20beyond-voice-ica-pre-conference-papers-for-download/ Again, congratulations to LIRNasia for their good work and thanks to all the participants for sharing their insights. We look forward to the session in Singapore next year. Rich L. The link to the Ning site is: http://mobilesociety.ning.com/profiles/blogs/notes-from-the-ica --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mobile-society" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mobile-society?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
