GlobalMobileSocial

My friend Bre was telling me about some of the cool talks he heard at CCC in Berlin last month, and somehow we got on the topic of dect phones at the conference, and since I’m writing a paper at the moment about mobile social software that addresses event-based social coordination, I got really interested.

So, DECT is Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications, and basically it’s a phone that looks like one of the cordless walkaround phones we used to have in our homes before we all cancelled our land lines and started relying on mobiles (though, in my typical luddite fashion, I actually still have a land line.)

For about EUR$25 you could buy a DECT phone at the conference, get a number (Bre’s was BREX) which got published on a wiki, and make free calls to anyone else who had signed up for the service. You had to be close enough to a base station to make it work, but Voip international calls were also free from the phones.

At the moment I’m writing up some of the results from a study I did at Microsoft Research last spring on SLAM and SMS-based social networking that basically showed that MoSoSo was great for group-based social coordination, but that for other kinds of everyday life activities, the application had limited value for most groups. The group in our study that found the most utility for SLAM used it during a music festival — a short-term event when they wanted to collectively organize with relative strangers, folks with whom they might not want to have shared their actual cell number. DECT phones seem like a total analogue, a technology-centric (rather than software centric) solution to short-term social coordination.

I imagining all the places I’d want this kind of a system.

I was in India just before the holidays, invited by IDRC to participate in a workshop on ICT4D research within Asia. Well-planned timing put the workshop just before and after the 2nd annual ICTD conference which we all attended as well. There were a terrific bunch of folks there, both from institutions and NGOs throughout Asia as well as a variety of researchers from the US and Europe. It was great to spend time with Richard Heeks, Arul Chib, Jack Qiu, Rich Ling, Gina Hechanova, Chaitali Sinha, Jonathan Donner, John Traxler, Padma Rani, Ang Peng Hwa and many others.

The ICTD conference was a great opportunity to run into the far flung and multi-disciplinary group of folks who do work in this area. And in somewhat shameless fashion, I invited myself along on an afternoon of site visits to telecenters that some folks from the Microsoft Unlimited Potential program had arranged. The afternoon was, to say the least, enlightening.

I’ve visited telecenters in many countries: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kenya, Cambodia, Philippines, Hong Kong, and, well, lots of others. I’ve always been somewhat puzzled by how people talked about telecenters in India. I knew there was a strong instrumental focus and often an emphasis on e-government initiatives and telecenters, and also often a lack of discussion of the public gathering space function telecenters can serve, or the open-ended exploration with technology that can happen within them.

But once I’d piled into a couple cars with a handful of folks and driven a few hours outside of Bangalore, all became much clearer.

The first center we visited was in a small town outside of Bangalore. Lots of commerce surrounded the area, and government offices were located close by.

The inside of the center is a little sparse. At the front desk there is a computer and printer where the operator does her work. She provides government documents for clients in a one-stop shop format which eliminates the need for citizens to visit multiple offices and, perhaps, pay multiple fees.

Then we drove to a second center, this one in a village. Driving along the highway is a typical mix of tradition and technology.

We pulled up to the center

and parked, looking across the street we see the telecenter which is a room rented from a largish house in town.

This telecenter had a solar panel that was designed to provide electricity in case the grid went down, although it wasn’t the main source of electricity.

But as public space, the telecenter wasn’t a community gathering place, nor are any in this network that is run by a company that focuses on providing government services to people in a one-stop-shop situation. There are other kinds of telecenters in India, but this network is a large one with hundreds of centers, and seeing these sites first hand made clear many of the assumptions embedded in how people talk about technology initiatives in rural communities.

More than a few months ago I was wandering around Patpong with some colleagues, exploring the infamous sex club and street bazaar district of Bangkok. There were five of us threading through the streets, one of whom used to live and work in Bangkok serving as our guide. The street hawkers were thick and determined, and it quickly became clear that it was important to travel in a pack, pulling each other along. When one person would lag behind, they were quickly snared by an enthusiastic vendor, gently tugged by the arm to the side of the alley, out of the fast-moving current of people. Another of the group would eventually notice the missing member and halt the group, turn around and fetch the straggler.

After an hour or so of this it occurred to me that walking through Patpong resembled nothing so much as wandering into a new area of World of Warcraft with friends who were a few levels below the level of the beasties inhabiting the realm. It’s crucial — and only seems like proper etiquette — to keep an eye out for the level 18 rogue when the crocs crowding the path are level 20 and above. Turn your back for too long and the stragglers get snared, pulled down and chomped, and then you’ve got to wait while they run all the way from the graveyard back to their body.

I can’t say as I ever expected to consider the question ‘How is Patpong like Azeroth?’. But I do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the ecology of technical artifacts within which people live — mobile phones and games and internets — and how that ecology evolves from pre-existing patterns of how people communicate, get information, navigate their world.

So this is a blog about technical artifacts, their social meaning within people’s lives, and how these objects, usage patterns, and relationships play out in a variety of global contexts. Oh, and pictures.

It seems like there should be an introductory post before I leap in.

Or maybe at least a picture.

I’m on sabbatical this year, and a Fellow at the Berkman Center. This seems as a good a reason as any to finally blog regularly.

So, a blog. About global uses of technology, with an emphasis on mobiles and social elements.

Ready, set. go.