Archive for November, 2009

Two recent pieces have made the case that the future of TV is an isolated experience.

First, Michael Trucano of the World Bank has a post about the role of video in education around the world where he says:

…the trend of television viewing transitioning from a largely communal to an increasingly personal experience.  Indeed, just as tens of millions of families are purchasing their first TV, so too are tens of millions of individuals now starting to view broadcast video (for lack of a better term) on personal mobile devices.  Viewing television on your mobile phone, a phenomenon that began at scale in South Korea in 2005, is starting to be possible in many developing countries as well (like India).  This is not only happening on phones, of course (the video podcasts available through Apple’s iTunes U are just one notable example of opportunities for mobile learning via video on another sort of handheld device ). Re-conceptualizing educational television as a personal, and not communal, experience may challenge some of the fundamental tenets we have about the utility and delivery of video to meet learning objectives.

A week later, Nicholas Carr had a piece in the New York Times about changes to broadcast television. Amongst other concerns, he argued that television viewing was becoming an isolated affair:

As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often apart, peering into our own screens.

I don’t believe the worries about individualization are accurate. There is real truth behind all the hype about social media. Sure, my parents’ family watched Walter Cronkite together, but that was limited to 5-6 people in the same space and time.

Digital video, be it on mobile phones or PCs, is capable of breaking these barriers. Youth and adults alike can coalesce around clips or episodes from Sesame Street or Bill O’Reilly. Traditional broadcast TV, which was communal in a limited sense, is altered to break the limits of space and time (and, if TED Open Translation Project is any indicator, increasingly language).

Even more, efforts like Current.tv show that even video production, not just viewing, can be communal and shared.

There will be differences, I’m sure, but I think those could very well be to the benefit of education because they will certainly be social.

[Image credit: Jan Chipchase]

This past Saturday Mobile Active and Cell-Life organized Mobile Tech for Social Change Cape Town. I did not have any connectivity, so I just jotted down some thoughts that I thought I’d share.

Opening Session

First Session: Fair Mobile

Steve Song organized a session on the fair mobile project that seeks to realign the mobile phone markets to be more equitable and innovative.

• Much of the conversation centered around how to frame the project: is this the age-old question of universal access? Is this about competition? Is there something unique about mobiles?
• The psychology behind ICT user behavior seems to be important to understand. What type of pricing will lead to socially desirable usage? Are more calls or texts necessarily better?
• Telecommunications, arguably by nature, seems to be a sector that requires regulation, but many of the African regulators are ineffective and were ill-prepared for the popularity of mobile phones.
• What levers exist to produce change? Consumer pressure? Is government compelling existing firms enough? Or is the market so skewed that new entrants must be encouraged?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of different sorts of mobile usage? Is SMS “an extension of the Internet” by nature or just happenstance? Are the troubles and expense of SMS/voice so problematic that we should just try to accelerate IP use?

Second Session: Monitoring and Evaluating

Following some tech demos, Jonathan Donner hosted a session on how to measure and evaluate ICT4D projects. Some key takeaways:

• There seemed to be general dissatisfaction with the M&E experience as it is traditionally conceived. Outside audits lack appropriate context, and inside evaluations are inherently biased.
• Whose criteria for success is used? The subjects? The actors? Donors?
• Regardless, evaluation is always more work and expense than you think.
• Perception is powerful, perhaps more powerful than facts; narratives, though not rigorous measurements, help people understand the goals and (potential) outcomes. But are narratives biased towards success?
• Evaluation is a great planning tool; build it into the process and institutional mindset.
• Is openness the key? By living publicly you can attract information and insight from experts you didn’t know existed.

Over all, a very stimulating discussion, and the deeper I dive, the more questions surface.

I recently finished and highly recommend Portfolios of the Poor, a book examining the financial lives of dozens of impoverished families in Bangladesh, India and South Africa. The understanding of how the world’s poor survive on less than $2 per day was captured through an intensive research process that spent a year chronicling their financial activity through “financial diaries.” Researchers visited the surveyed families every two weeks to discuss their uses of money and in doing so came to have intimate insights into how they made and spent money.

The study sought to fill in the gap in between small ethnographic studies and large-scale surveys. The former cannot capture how lives change over time and the latter fail to capture the nuances of individuals. Portfolios is filled with revelations that came about solely due to their method.

While reading Portfolios, I couldn’t help but feel that ICT4D suffers from the same gap as microfinance. On the one hand, there are plenty of small, short-term studies of people’s interaction and relationship with technology (e.g. Chipchase), and on the other are large-scale surveys of national ICT usage (e.g. RIA).

So, what would an ICT diary project look like? Luckily, the authors of Portfolios provided an appendix detailing their methodology and processes. Some key points:

• Conceptualizing as diaries is useful because tracking in (near) real-time avoided memory loss (who really remembers how they used a cell phone two months ago?). It also helps to capture the relationship between money (or ICTs) and time. Looking at the flows was important for the Portfolios project because if they had simply surveyed irregularly they would have thought that large assets, which were the majority of the wealth for the subjects, were important; instead, it was the margin – small loans, daily wages – that provided most of the activity about their welfare.
• Given the deeply personal nature of both finances and communication, a long-term relationship between researcher and subject is necessary to develop trust. The Portfolios researchers were close in socioeconomic characteristics to their subjects to minimize the barriers. Even then, subjects were not always forthcoming and the researchers needed to really probe to discover all the financial instruments used. The trust issue also meant that the bimonthly visits needed to be conversational, not interviews. However, they write that “the strength of the diaries approach is that it can, over time, break down much of this reticence and confusion.”
• The effort wasn’t meant to be statistically representative, but they did choose families in low, middle and high levels of poverty.
• The information they gathered did not match their preconceived categories, so the researchers had to iterate towards perfection.
• There is the possibility that merely observing the financial lives of the subjects changed their behavior (a Heisenberg effect).

For an ICT diary project, there would obviously be differences. I imagine that ICTs are used more frequently and with less thought than major financial transactions, so there will definitely be uses that are forgotten or not mentioned to the interviewer. This problem could be minimized by using software to track usage, but capturing this quantitative data would need to be done very carefully to avoid privacy implications. A solid framework for usage would need to be utilized to make sense of various uses of ICTs and the behavioral evolution that I would expect to see in a year’s time.

Discussing this at Mobile Tech for Social Change Cape Town on Saturday, it was pointed out that the ISPs and telcos have much of this data, but getting them to share it would be next to impossible. Certainly looking at that would be useful, but the ICT diaries would be another way, and perhaps a better one, because the discussions with the participants would provide insights into their relationship (perceived and real) with technology.

If development practitioners are going to build ICT solutions for the poor, they must understand how they use technology. That understanding is certainly aided by the existing studies, but the gap in the middle seems to be where much of the insights will be found. Following ICT usage for a year would allow researchers to explore the evolving behavior that comes from both internal and external changes.

[Image from Kiwanja's mobile gallery.]