Liz Losh writes on DMLCentral on an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach to “digital literacy” that is more in keeping with the latest thinking about “digital fluency” in the field

“Although “digital literacy” is often a phrase associated with programs that have utopian pedagogical visions, it also can become a term attached to rigid curricular requirements, standardized testing, and models of education that stigmatize some students as remedial when it comes to their basic programming skills or their abilities to use software productively. Furthermore, the term “digital literacy” can generate conflicts among educators because many different disciplines may claim sole responsibility for providing any needed instruction, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Computer scientists, media scholars, librarians, composition teachers, and digital arts instructors have all made supposedly exclusive claims to design and assess digital literacy programs in both K-12 and higher education environments. In contrast, internationally known mixed reality artist Micha Cárdenas calls for an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach to “digital literacy” that is more in keeping with the latest thinking about “digital fluency” in the field.”

Read article

Online as much as in the real world, people bunch together in mutually suspicious groups—and in both realms, peacemaking is an uphill struggle. The Economist reports in an article that quotes Danah Boyd and Ethan Zuckerman.

“A generation of digital activists had hoped that the web would connect groups separated in the real world. The internet was supposed to transcend colour, social identity and national borders. But research suggests that the internet is not so radical. People are online what they are offline: divided, and slow to build bridges.” [...]

All this argues for a cautious response to claims that e-communications abate conflict by bringing mutually suspicious people together.”

Read article

Martin Kettle thinks the UK has lost sight of next door Europe, trapped as Brits are in their Anglo-centric internet.

“It is hard to recall a time when the national, not just the London, mind was less informed about or engaged with Europe than it is today. Europe may still be this country’s major export market. Millions may still take holidays there. Our football teams may still battle for the glamour of being “in Europe”. In the larger sense, though, being in Europe has never impinged less.” [...]

The online information age, which should, in theory, have been expected to facilitate greater mental and cultural pluralism and thus, among other things, greater familiarity with European languages and cultures, has, in practice, had the reverse effect. The power of the English language, at once our global gift and our great curse, discourages us from engaging with those – the 93% of the world who speak some other first language than English and the 75% who have no English of any kind – outside the all-conquering online Anglosphere.”

Read article

In Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy, Steve Daniels of Brown University illuminates the dynamics of Africa’s informal economy to enhance our understanding of emerging systems of innovation.

“Wandering through winding alleys dotted with makeshift worksheds, one can’t help but feel clouded by the clanging of hammers on metal, grinding of bandsaws on wood, and the shouts of workers making sales. But soon it becomes clear that this cacophony is really a symphony of socioeconomic interactions that form what is known as the informal economy. In Kenya, engineers in the informal economy are known as jua kali, Swahili for “hot sun,” because they toil each day under intense heat and with limited resources. But despite these conditions, or in fact because of them, the jua kali continuously demonstrate creativity and resourcefulness in solving problems.

In Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy, Steve Daniels illuminates the dynamics of the sector to enhance our understanding of African systems of innovation. The result of years of research and months of fieldwork, this study examines how the jua kali design, build, and manage through theoretical discussions, visualizations of data, and stories of successful and struggling entrepreneurs. What can we learn from the creativity and bricolage of these engineers? And how can we as external actors engage with the sector in a way that removes barriers to innovation for the jua kali and leverages their knowledge and networks to improve the lives of those who interact with them?”

Download book

Who do you read and associate with online?

Ethan Zuckerman argues in this Guardian video that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues.

Design consultant Martyn Perks thinks that a UK government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online “threatens to make cyber slaves of us all.”

“Is it not possible that some people simply don’t want to participate in this brave new digital world? After all, wouldn’t it be absurd to coerce people into using mobile phones, TVs or cars – these technologies, too, are beneficial, increasing mobility and interaction with the world. Why all this guilt-tripping about the internet in specific?”

Read article

The 2009 Media Engagement Barometer commissioned by Motorola’s Home & Networks Mobility business has revealed a shift in [US] consumer influence that hasn’t been widely recognized yet: age no longer dictates a consumer’s willingness or ability to use media technology or services.

In fact, all generations – Millennials (75 percent), Gen Xers (74 percent) and Boomers (66 percent) – recognize the role entertainment technologies play in helping them keep their lives in order, which helps explain why Millennials (80 percent), Gen Xers (78 percent) and Boomers (78 percent) are equally likely to desire to be constantly connected.

Read press release

(via FutureLab)

Italy is in the process of switching to digital TV, and the implementation is pretty much a disaster, as far as I can tell from the reactions in the region where I live (Piedmont). Many of the problems are technological, but not all. A volunteer force of ‘angels’ is doing what it can:

Here is quick translation of an article from today’s Repubblica newspaper:

“TRENTO – You can take everything away from them, but not the television. Put yourself in the shoes of Mrs. Livia, 78 years old, who lives in the middle of the mountains of the splendid Trentino region, doesn’t come out of the house from November to April, and has her television on all day long. When she was no longer able to watch the TV programs, she picked up the phone and called the ‘decoder angels’. “Help, my television doesn’t work anymore”. She soon became one of 6,000 elderly in the Trentino region who received personal assistance in setting up a digital TV decoder at their home. These are people who cannot (or do not want to) count on the help of children or other family and are already getting into trouble with wiring or the new remote control, let alone the now required channel tuning, which they sometimes have to do several times due to the various repetitor stations in the Trentino valleys.

This is the other side of the digital revolution – the one that after Sardinia and the Aosta Valley has now reached Piedmont and Trentino Alto Adige, with a slew of problems, complaints, doubts, protests, and threats not to pay the television tax any longer. Even when everything is fine on a technical level, the work inside the homes is just starting. The elderly are the most vulnerable, as shown by a research done by the Department of Sociology of the University of Trento. The study is based on the work done by the ‘decoder angels’, young people who have been installing decoders for free at the homes of those over 75, on a program subsidised by the local government.

Anxiety, anger, impatience: that’s what you get when you take away the television of an elderly person who is used to have that voice always in the background. It is a trauma for them. And then there are the technical problems: unable to adjust themselves to the double remote control, some elderly get confused, use the tv remote control to change the decoder settings, and vice versa, and then complain because the channel doesn’t change or the volume doesn’t go up. Elderly men, who tend to be more proud than women, try to make do. But it is not easy to connect a television set from the 70′s (yes, the angels also found those) to a decoder from 2009. And that’s if the antenna on the roof is fine and there is a free electrical outlet behind the television.

Panic strikes when an interactive menu appears during channel surfing: better then to turn everything off. Probably those in charge of the switch to digital didn’t think of the fact that those in charge of the implementation would often be the immigrant caretakers of the Italian elderly, who are not always able to read manuals in Italian. “It’s easy to say ‘digital’, but the real challenge is to bring the digital into the real lives of people,” explains Pierfrancesco Fedrizzi, who is in charge of communication for the project. The sociologist Carlo Buzzi, who authored the study, is more critical: he speaks about a revolution that is misunderstood, at least by the elderly users: “They are only interested in watching their usual channels. They don’t know nor understand the digital world, let alone anything interactive. “

The Design for All Institute India has published a special issue of its newsletter together with IDZ International Design Centre, Berlin. Guest Editor is Prof Birgit Weller.

Design for All Institute Of India is a self financed, non-profit voluntary organization, located in Delhi, India, which seeks corporate and public partnership in order to carry forward its very ambitious agenda of pro-actively building bridges of social inclusion between the design community and all other groups whose activities can be positively influenced by a coherent application of design methodology. Design for All means creating products, services and systems to cater to the widest possible range of users’ requirements. We initiated the concept and have received enormous encouragement from domestic as well as International communities.

Download newsletter (125 pages)

80% of the transactions of the UK Government are done with the bottom 25% of society and migrating services online offers great cost savings. Yet, 17 million Britons have never been online and many of those are poor.

Now the UK has a ‘Digital Champion’ in the person of Martha Lane Fox, erstwhile co-founder of Lastminute.com, who is developing a strategy n changing that.

But does bringing government services online improve people’s lives?

Read full story

The digitally deprived have rights too, says BBC News columnist Bill Thompson, who is quite upset about a new French law:

“If it is unacceptable to cut people off from the network because their actions are commercially damaging to the record companies, why is it acceptable to offer them poor or no access to broadband and mobile internet just because providing the service is commercially unattractive to ISPs or network operators?

And if we are to be encouraged to think of access to the internet as a fundamental human right, a prerequisite of having freedom of expression, should we not be prosecuting ISPs over the ‘notspots’ in their mobile or wi-fi coverage, the communities with no access to ADSL because of the telephone network was repaired with aluminium instead of copper, or the areas bypassed by the cable providers? “

Read full story

danah boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society, got incensed at an Italian conference and bites back:

“I’m 31 years old. I’ve been online since I was a teen. I’ve grown up with this medium and I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now and always. There’s no doubt that I’m not mainstream. But I also feel really badly for the info-driven teens and college students out there being told that learning can only happen when they pay attention to an audio-driven lecture in a classroom setting. I read books during my classroom (blatantly not paying attention). Imagine what would’ve happened had I been welcome to let my mind run wild on the topic at hand?

What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions and thoughts? How I long for being connected to be an acceptable part of engagement. “

Read full story

(via The FASTForward Blog)

Nokia’s Ideas Project published two feature stories today:

Digital We: A (Multiple) Identity Crisis
We create new digital identities almost without limit – at the same time new technologies urge us to blur them. Is it a new digital arms race?

“Intentionally or not, the world of bits offers so many opportunities to create information related to ourselves, and for that information to coalesce into something like an identity, that even the most transparent and consistent Net denizens appears in multiple forms in multiple locations. You might say that we’re all suffering from a form of digital schizophrenia.

Yet according to a number of our ideators, the ways in which we coordinate our digital personae is about to change.”

Global Vision, Local Impact
Technology innovations in the developing world generate lasting results

“The developing world has begun to experience a dramatic transformation not only in the adoption of new technologies but in the innovative ways they are being used. Mobile devices in particular have offered unprecedented opportunities to individuals without access many other basic amenities.”

Also on Ideas Project a video interview with Ann Winblad, a well-known and respected software industry entrepreneur and technology leader, who argues that by moving technology from location-based servers to a virtual environment, with expanded if not universal access, the opportunities for innovation increase exponentially.

A US federal program providing subsidized phone service now offers cellphones, showing how much society values them, reports The New York Times.

“The users are not the only ones receiving government assistance. Telecommunications industry analysts said the program, while in its infancy, could benefit mobile phone carriers, who face a steep challenge of their own: most Americans already own a cellphone, so the poor represent a last untapped market.”

Read full story

The Economist this week comes with a new edition of its 24-page Technology Quarterly supplement, which contains four articles that are related to the theme of this blog:

Taken your medicine?
Health care: Mobile phones provide a cheap and simple way to ensure that patients have popped their pills.
Very nice and simple service design project in emerging markets

Mapping a better world
Software: Interest groups around the world are using mapping tools and internet-based information sources to campaign for change.
Great article on how mapping technologies are creating real social change

The connected car
Cars are becoming more connected, both to remote systems for navigation and information, and to each other.
The internet of things, in and around your car

Sensors and sensitivity
Data collection: Mobile phones provide new ways to gather information, both manually and automatically, over wide areas.
What would be the advantages of turning the world’s 4 billion mobile phones into sensors on a global data-collection network?

You can download a PDF of the entire supplement, courtesy of SAP.

The Financial Times has published a special report on connectivity, analysing the implications of a connected planet.

My preferred pieces:

Skills: Business must learn from the new tribe
So-called ‘digital natives’ are bringing down the barriers to collaborative working, finds Jessica Twentyman
(If you read one article only, this is the one.)

Mobility: Flexibility is driven from the bottom up
But organisations must ensure employees are not slaves to mobile devices, notes Stephen Pritchard

Overcoming the fear of connectivity
Some organisations, fearful of untoward consequences such as reputational damage, ban social networking websites. Others embrace them enthusiastically and try to persuade others to do likewise.

Developing world: ‘Have-nots’ no closer to catching the ‘haves
Cellphones are nearly ubiquitous but internet access is still very patchy, says Paul Taylor

Case study: Text messages give shopkeepers the power to bulk buy
Stroll through South Africa’s villages – as steeped in ancestral tradition as they are deprived of basic services – and you will come across the convenience store, writes Tom Burgis.

Opinion: IT makes poverty a ‘curable affliction’
Olav Kjorven of the UNDP argues that innovative programmes in developing nations have helped people increase their choices and opportunities

Donor programmes: Sponsors can now view benefits online
Non-governmental organisations and government bodies can see exactly how their money is being spent, writes Danny Bradbury

Developed world: Those with no access miss out on opportunities
Jessica Twentyman examines the evidence that digital exclusion and social disadvantage go hand in hand

Connecting the world: Ubiquity will be a hard state to reach
Network access for all requires money but there are also significant technical hurdles, writes Stephen Pritchard

(Note that without subscription you can read only 10 FT articles a month. But you can double or triple that by installing more than one browser.)

The Wall Street Journal reports on the use of the internet by homeless people in San Francisco.

“A few years ago, some people were worrying that a “digital divide” would separate technology haves and have-nots. The poorest lack the means to buy computers and Web access. Still, in America today, even people without street addresses feel compelled to have Internet addresses.”

The photos are great, and so are some of the quotes:

“When he realized he would be homeless, Mr. Livingston bought a sturdy backpack to store his gear, a padlock for his footlocker at the shelter and a $25 annual premium Flickr account to display the digital photos he takes.”

But it also shows to what extent the internet in the developed world is still a computer-based phenomenon, in contrast to emerging markets where it is largely mobile.

Read full story

Today I spent some time looking through the CHI 2009 papers. Here is a personal selection (and you need an ACM membership to access them):

A comparative study of speech and dialed input voice interfaces in rural India
Neil Patel, Sheetal Agarwal, Nitendra Rajput, Amit Nanavati, Paresh Dave, Tapan S. Parikh
In this paper we present a study comparing speech and dialed input voice user interfaces for farmers in Gujarat, India. We ran a controlled, between-subjects experiment with 45 participants. We found that the task completion rates were significantly higher with dialed input, particularly for subjects under age 30 and those with less than an eighth grade education. Additionally, participants using dialed input demonstrated a significantly greater performance improvement from the first to final task, and reported less difficulty providing input to the system.

Sacred imagery in techno-spiritual design
Susan P. Wyche, Kelly E. Caine, Benjamin K. Davison, Shwetak N. Patel, Michael Arteaga, Rebecca E. Grinter
Despite increased knowledge about how Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) are used to support religious and spiritual practices, designers know little about how to design technologies for faith-related purposes. Our research suggests incorporating sacred imagery into techno-spiritual applications can be useful in guiding development. We illustrate this through the design and evaluation of a mobile phone application developed to support Islamic prayer practices. Our contribution is to show how religious imagery can be used in the design of applications that go beyond the provision of functionality to connect people to the experience of religion.

A comparison of mobile money-transfer UIs for non-literate and semi-literate users
Indrani Medhi, S.N. Nagasena Gautama, Kentaro Toyama
Due to the increasing penetration of mobile phones even into poor communities, mobile payment schemes could bring formal financial services to the “unbanked”. However, because poverty for the most part also correlates with low levels of formal education, there are questions as to whether electronic access to complex financial services is enough to bridge the gap, and if so, what sort of UI is best.
In this paper, we present two studies that provide preliminary answers to these questions. We first investigated the usability of existing mobile payment services, through an ethnographic study involving 90 subjects in India, Kenya, the Philippines and South Africa. This was followed by a usability study with another 58 subjects in India, in which we compared non-literate and semi-literate subjects on three systems: text-based, spoken dialog (without text), and rich multimedia (also without text). Results confirm that non-text designs are strongly preferred over text-based designs and that while task-completion rates are better for the rich multimedia UI, speed is faster and less assistance is required on the spoken-dialog system.

Comparing semiliterate and illiterate users’ ability to transition from audio+text to text-only interaction
Leah Findlater, Ravin Balakrishnan, Kentaro Toyama
Multimodal interfaces with little or no text have been shown to be useful for users with low literacy. However, this research has not differentiated between the needs of the fully illiterate and semiliterate – those who have basic literacy but cannot read and write fluently. Text offers a fast and unambiguous mode of interaction for literate users and the exposure to text may allow for incidental improvement of reading skills. We conducted two studies that explore how semiliterate users with very little education might benefit from a combination of text and audio as compared to illiterate and literate users. Results show that semiliterate users reduced their use of audio support even during the first hour of use and over several hours this reduction was accompanied by a gain in visual word recognition; illiterate users showed no similar improvement. Semiliterate users should thus be treated differently from illiterate users in interface design.

StoryBank: mobile digital storytelling in a development context
David M. Frohlich, Dorothy Rachovides, Kiriaki Riga, Ramnath Bhat, Maxine Frank, Eran Edirisinghe, Dhammike Wickramanayaka, Matt Jones, Will Harwood
Mobile imaging and digital storytelling currently support a growing practice of multimedia communication in the West. In this paper we describe a project which explores their benefit in the East, to support non-textual information sharing in an Indian village. Local audiovisual story creation and sharing activities were carried out in a one month trial, using 10 customized cameraphones and a digital library of stories represented on a village display. The findings show that the system was usable by a cross-section of the community and valued for its ability to express a mixture of development and community information in an accessible form. Lessons for the role of HCI in this context are also discussed.

Designable visual markers
Enrico Costanza, Jeffrey Huang
Visual markers are graphic symbols designed to be easily recognised by machines. They are traditionally used to track goods, but there is increasing interest in their application to mobile HCI. By scanning a visual marker through a camera phone users can retrieve localised information and access mobile services.
One missed opportunity in current visual marker systems is that the markers themselves cannot be visually designed, they are not expressive to humans, and thus fail to convey information before being scanned. This paper provides an overview of d-touch, an open source system that allows users to create their own markers, controlling their aesthetic qualities. The system runs in real-time on mobile phones and desktop computers. To increase computational efficiency d-touch imposes constraints on the design of the markers in terms of the relationship of dark and light regions in the symbols. We report a user study in which pairs of novice users generated between 3 and 27 valid and expressive markers within one hour of being introduced to the system, demonstrating its flexibility and ease of use.

“When I am on Wi-Fi, I am fearless”: privacy concerns & practices in everyday Wi-Fi use
Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Jaeyeon Jung, Benjamin M. Greenstein, Louis LeGrand, Pauline Powledge, David Wetherall
Increasingly, users access online services such as email, e-commerce, and social networking sites via 802.11-based wireless networks. As they do so, they expose a range of personal information such as their names, email addresses, and ZIP codes to anyone within broadcast range of the network. This paper presents results from an exploratory study that examined how users from the general public understand Wi-Fi, what their concerns are related to Wi-Fi use, and which practices they follow to counter perceived threats. Our results reveal that while users understand the practical details of Wi-Fi use reasonably well, they lack understanding of important privacy risks. In addition, users employ incomplete protective practices which results in a false sense of security and lack of concern while on Wi-Fi. Based on our results, we outline opportunities for technology to help address these problems.
Predrag Klasnja, Sunny Consolvo, Jaeyeon Jung, Benjamin M. Greenstein, Louis LeGrand, Pauline Powledge, David Wetherall

Sharing empty moments: design for remote couples
Danielle Lottridge, Nicolas Masson, Wendy Mackay
Many couples are forced to live apart, for work, school or other reasons. This paper describes our study of 13 such couples and what they lack from existing communication technologies. We explored what they wanted to share (presence, mood, environment, daily events and activities), how they wanted to share (simple, lightweight, playful, pleasant interaction), and when they wanted to share (‘empty moments’ such as waiting, walking, taking a break, waking up, eating, and going to sleep). ‘Empty moments’ provide a compelling new opportunity for design, requiring subtlety and flexibility to enable participants to share connection without explicit messages. We designed MissU as a technology probe to study empty moments in situ. Similar to a private radio station, MissU shares music and background sounds. Field studies produced results relevant to social science, technology and design: couples with established routines were comforted; characteristics such as ambiguity and ‘movable’ technology (situated in the home yet portable) provide support. These insights suggest a design space for supporting the sharing of empty moments.

Virginia Heffernan writes in the New York Times Magazine on why Twitter is a trap.

“These worries started to surface for me last month, when Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on “connections” like the Internet, Skype and texting. “Poor folk love their cellphones!” he said. [...]

“Connectivity is poverty” was how a friend of mine summarized Sterling’s bold theme. Only the poor — defined broadly as those without better options — are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens that keep the hectic Web far away. The man of leisure, Sterling suggested, savors solitude, or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl — original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.”

Read full story

Last week, the W3C Mobile Web Initiative organised a workshop on the “Africa Perspective on the Role of Mobile Technologies in Fostering Social Development” in Maputo, Mozambique.

The workshop set out to understand the specific challenges of using mobile phones and Web technologies to deliver services to underprivileged populations of developing countries, and to capture the specificities of the African context.

“There are today more than half of the population living with less than 3$ a day, and lacking all kind of services (health, education, government…). The incredible growth of the mobile penetration rate last few years is providing a new hope. The potential of simple ICT services on mobiles to improve people’s income has indeed been largely demonstrated. The aim of this workshop is to explore how to leverage these success stories and create an enabling environment that would drive the appearance of numerous services all over the Developing World.”

There were sessions on m-health, technology, mobile activism, enabling environments, m-govenment, m-banking and agriculture.

Presentations and papers are now available online (though some presentations are very concise). Here is a short selection:

Technology

• New paths: exploring mobile-only internet use in South Africa (slides) – Jonathan Donner (Microsoft), Shikoh Gitau (UCT)
• Freedom Fone: Mobile information service for social development, Brenda Burrell (Kubatana.net)

Enabling Environment

• Need for richer features in addition to affordability in entry mobile phone devices (slides) – Jussi Impio & all (Nokia)
• Integrating mobile data services into an existing information ecology (slides) – Andrew Dearden
• Making a case for spoken Web as the mobile Web for developing countries – Arun Kumar (IBM)

M-Banking

• Mobile phone banking: Usage experiences in Kenya – Adrian D Kamotho Njenga
• A Taste of Virtual Currency: Air4Cash and Cash4Air – Ali Ndiwalana, Oliver Popov

Rich Ling is a sociologist at the Telenor research institute and a visiting professor at the IT University of Copenhagen, who is particularly interested in understanding the social implications of mobile telephony.

He just posted a short paper on the rise of mobile divides, that discusses the differences between the power users in advanced countries that use a lot of IP stuff, the user in the third world and the sort of soccer mom/dad user that is somewhere in the middle.

A lot of attention goes to the first group but the real base of use is often among the other two.

“[The advanced and technically sophisticated super user] is a legitimate object of study. However, it is very important to note that this type of user is a relatively small portion of the total user base. It seems to be very exciting to focus design and development work around this type of person. This is, however, a fallacy. This type of user is very atypical and, as we will see below, does not represent the broader form of mobile use.”

Download paper

(via Jody Ranck)

Information Technologies and International Development, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with economic and social development, is a gem.

And the entire contents are available for free online.

Here are some of the recent contributions:
- Digital Green: participatory video and mediated instruction for agricultural extension [in India]
- Constructing Class Boundaries: gender, aspirations, and shared computing [based on research in India and Chile]
- A Peer-to-Peer Internet for the Developing World
- The Case of the Occasionally Cheap Computer: low-cost devices and classrooms in the developing regions
- Why Don’t People Use Nepali Language Software?
- Warana Unwired: replacing PCs with mobile phones in a rural sugar cane cooperative
- Problematic Empowerment: West African internet scams as strategic misrepresentation
- Sustainability Failures of Rural Telecentres: challenges from the sustainable sccess in rural India (SARI) project
- The Impact of Mobile Telephony on Developing Country Micro-Enterprise: a Nigerian case study
- ICT in Education Reform in Cambodia: problems, politics, and policies impacting implementation

The Nigerian case study got a lot of feedback recently, as it underlines how in effect mobile phones are excluding millions in the developing world.

The Independent today introduced SustainIT, the first in a series of three monthly supplements on ICT and globalisation. Some of the articles in the supplement (especially those not written by sponsor BT staff) are a treat:

Corporate social responsibility is vital for business survival
Corporate social responsibility used to be seen as a luxury. No longer. In today’s climate, looking beyond short-term profit is increasingly important – and ICT can help. Roger Trapp explains.

Diane Coyle: For new networking technologies, there are boom times ahead
The whole world should feel the benefit.

Closing the digital divide
How the spread of ICT is improving quality of life for millions in the Third World.

Dreaming up a connected world
Adrian Turpin on the ‘imagineers’ whose visualisations will determine the nature of future communications technologies.

Modern networker: using ICT to change Kenyan life for the better
Ory Okolloh, 32, could be seen as a face of Africa’s connected future.

As part of the World Usability Day 2008, the Department of Information Technology at Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology (V.I.I.T.), Pune (India) hosted on 27-28 November the Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, a platform that brought together the professionals, academia and students to discuss and share their experiences in the emerging field of usability.

The elaborate conference proceedings (277 pages) contain sections on Usability to Bridge the Digital Divide, Usability Engineering, User Experience Design for New Media, User Experience Research and Offshore Usability.

Download proceedings

(thanks Anxo Cereijo-Roibas)

If you are interested in bottom-up innovation within emerging markets using mobile phones, the recent MobileActive08 conference (more here) in Johannesburg, South Africa generated a wealth of materials. Below are some videos:

Mobiles and news gathering at Al Jazeera
Safdar Mustafa, head of Al Jazeera’s mobile media unit, describes some trials where mobile phones were used for news gathering in Chad and the Sahara.

Money, mobiles, micro-business
Jonathan Donner, from Microsoft, talks about the transformation that has been brought upon the way small/informal businesses function using mobile devices (specifically mobile phones). He provides an anecdote on one businessman he knows – a baker, whose business flourished due to the use of a mobile phone he acquired. Included in this video are examples of how this technology enhances the efficiency of product/service delivery by informal businesses.

No difference in how Zambian men and women use mobile phones
Here Kutoma Wakunuma discusses whether women how women are using mobile technology including what are the barriers and social implications. Dr Kutoma revealed that there is no difference in how men and women use cellular phones and also no difference in the socio-economic potential of mobile usage. She unveiled that mobiles phones decrease isolation among women in society and provide easy and fast communication, especially as the price of mobile phones is becoming cheaper by the day. She added that cellular phones encourage job creation for women who sell airtime and those who run public phone stations. They help in emergencies and danger and have made a major impact in health information as some people access counselling through mobile phones on an anonymous basis.

Measuring social impact of mobiles
Dr Peter Benjamin, the General Manager at Cell-Life, together with Patricia Mechal, the Millenium Villages Project advisor hosted a workshop at the MobileActive08 conference. The workshop, on Mobile Metrics and Evaluation explored the importance of investigating the social impact of initiatives that introduce mobiles into societies expecting the impact to be an inherently positive one. The workshop also dealt with how such initiatives tend to be ignorant of the negative repercussions such projects may have.

Microsoft launches ‘Midas’
Microsoft representatives Fredrik Winsnes and Ian Puttergill talk on the MIDAS prototype, a mobile survey application for developing contexts.
MIDAS is based on a Microsoft driven research initiative based in India, to develop an SMS application for improving the farmer’s access to timely and critical information.
The MIDAS prototype allows farmers to send an SMS query pertaining to details about the local crop market, and an almost immediate response is sent back with the appropriate details.
The project is about making farming efficient, and increasing availability.

Mobiles and citizen media
David Sasaki and Juliana Rotich discuss the role of Global Voices online and Ushahidi.com in leveraging citizen media during the post-election violence in Kenya.

Banking the unbankables
Jesse Moore of GSMA development fund facilitated a workshop at mobileactive08 which evaluated mbanking and mpayment and the evolution of these services within the market. The social impact these services could have on people who are not banking, how mobile banking and payments would work and the future of this service were topics addressed in the workshop.

Mymsta – a loveLife conception
Trina DasGupta, loveLife Mobile Marketing Specialist shares the process that went into creating mymsta.com. A youth website geared at guiding the youth towards making their move. Mymsta is about mobilising young people towards positive change. Its about giving them a forum to share their views, on everything from relationships to employment.

Gary Marsden, mobile interaction designer
Interview filmed at MobileActive08 in Johannesburg, featuring Gary Marsden from the University of Cape Town.

Social SMS gets message across
Activists are boosting their social campaigns by piggy backing on “please call me’s”, flashes and beeps.
Please call me’s are free messages that cellphone users send to get friends and loved ones to call them back.
Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) and Robin Miller (Praekelt Foundation) tell how to use please call me’s to maximise social campaigns and call-centre traffic.

Erik Hersman of whiteafrican.com
Interview with Erik Hersman from whiteafrican.com, shot at MobilActive08 in Johannesburg.

Freedomfone’s fresh look at radio
Mobile’s answer to radio is the Freedomfone. Freedomfone gives users access to dial-up information and services over their mobile. Dubbed ‘dial-up radio’, the service will be invaluable in societies where many people own cellphones but draconian governments have restricted access to newspapers and the airwaves.

Save sea-life with your cell
eMobile phones are becoming the latest gadget used for environmental activism. iVeri payment technology has developed a mobile system for the Southern Africa Sustainable Seafood Institute (sassi)where the public can text a query. The system then sends back a prompt short message reply informing the consumer who is about to make a seafood purchase about the sustainability of the sea life product and other health parameters.

Burma’s GenX activists
Digital Democracy 2.0′s Emily Jacobs and Marc Belinsky show how Burmese (Myanmar) youth use cellphones to communicate with the outside world on political issues that are suppressed by the government.

Mobile’s ‘Dark Side’
“What are the real risks of mobile surveillance?” Al Alegre, executive director of the Foundation for media alternatives has conducted research in 5 Asian countries to investigate the dark side and vulnerabilities in digital interactions and discovered there are threats both internal and external.

Mobile use in low income areas
The use of mobiles in South Africa has increased over the years in low income areas. Tino Kreutzer a masters student at UCT conducted a pilot study into how the youth in low income areas are using mobiles, what this data means and where can researchers go now that they have this data available.

Mobile phones in rural development and agriculture
Ugo Vallauri, David Newman and Jonathan Campaigne discuss small farm productivity issues which are key to economic growth and poverty reduction. They discuss how farmers are not effectively linked to the larger industry and therefore how mobiles phones can be used to help with this area. Farmers use these phones which allow people to enter markets and improve access to partners thereby improving their likelihoods and food security.

Here is the full list of videos

A three part series of special reports on Radio France International explored the impact of mobile technology around the world. The transcripts are all online and – if you read French – it is highly recommended reading.

The first programme (alternate site) introduces the essential nature of the mobile phone in Africa.

The high cost of using a mobile phone in Africa is the focus of second programme (alternate site). Africans spend between 6 to 10% of their monthly income on mobile phone use. What do they do to afford this?

The last programme (alternate site) looks at Africa as a highly innovative environment for mobile phone use, with many mobile services — banking, micro-finance, market information, political activism, journalism — that are still marginal in more developed economies.

The series was produced in collaboration with Atelier des Médias, RFI’s participative web community.

(via kiwanja.net)

The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money.

The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural, psychological, legal, artistic, technological, and industrial perspectives, in order to identify key topics for future research within and across disciplines; such as:

• M-banking, m-payment, and electronic remittance systems
• Design tradeoffs; e.g., security/accountability vs. accessibility/empowerment
• Financial literacies and numeracies
• Regulatory conflicts and opportunities
• Formal and informal experimentation with new electronic moneys
• Connections to physical and virtual mobilities

The workshop blog contains a lot of materials, including the presentation abstracts of each of the sessions:

• Opening keynote: Money in the Digital Revolution by Professor Keith Hart (Goldsmith’s College and author of the book “The Memory Bank: Money in an Unequal World” – make sure to check out his very rich informational blog)
• Session 1: Alternative monies – contributors: Hugo Godschalk (PaySys Consultancy), Peter Etherden (CESC.net), and Michael Linton (Open Money)
• Session 2: Credit and debit cards – contributors: Hélène Ducourant (University of Lille I), Timothy de Waal Malefyt (BBDO & Parsons, The New School for Design), and Allison Truitt (Tulane University)
• Session 3: Innovation design and adoption – contributors: Jan Ondrus (ESSEC Business School), Tapan S. Parikh, Jenna Burrell, and Coye Cheshire (UC Berkeley), and Kazi Huque and Narayan Sundararajan (Grameen-Intel)
• Panel discussion with Julia Elyachar (Professor of Anthropology, UC Irvine), Amolo Ng’weno (Senior Program Officer, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and Paul Thomas (Chief Economist, Intel)
• Session 4: Online money – contributors: Prashant Dewan and David Durham (Intel), Subhashini Ganapathy, Delbert Marsh, and Glen J. Anderson (Intel), and Bruce Davis (Freemarket)
• Session 5: Designing new experiences – contributors: Daisy Ginsberg (Royal College of Art) and Wendy March (Intel), and Scott Mainwaring (Intel) and Camellia George (California College of the Arts)
• Session 6: Mobile payments and transfers – contributors: Charles Bassey (Central Bank of Nigeria), Jenna Burrell (UC Berkeley), Olga Morawczynski (University of Edinburgh), and David Pedersen (UC San Diego)
• Closing keynote: Re-examining M-banking: Linking Adoption, Impact, and Use by Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India)

Some papers and presentation slides are available on various websites, including

• Money 2.0 by Michael Linton (Open Money)
• Why mobile payments fail? An analysis of the Swiss case by Jan Ondrus (ESSEC Business School)
• Facilitating richer exchanges using mobile technologies by Tapan S. Parikh, Jenna Burrell, and Coye Cheshire (UC Berkeley)
• Why alternative monies? by Paul Thomas (Chief Economist, Intel)
• Social life of money by Bruce Davis (Freemarket)
• Digital money in a digitally divided world: nature, challenges and prospects of ePayment systems in Africa by Charles Bassey (Central Bank of Nigeria)
• Examining the Adoption and Usage of m-banking: The Case of M-PESA in Kenya by Olga Morawczynski (University of Edinburgh) – related paper
• Re-examining M-banking: Linking Adoption, Impact, and Use by Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) – related paper

Further browsing unearthed additional resources such as:

• Book: Money – Ethnographic encounters edited by Stefan Senders and Allison Truitt
• Exhibition: The Anthropology of Money in Southern California
• Presentation: Getting the Numbers Straight: Mobile Phone Usage Explained, a presentation by Tino Kreutzer on patterns of mobile/mobile internet use among low-income teens in urban Cape Town
• Presentations: Mobile use by micro and small enterprises; Bending ‘the rules of beeping’ for social marketing (miss calls); and M-banking/M-payments for social impact by Jonathan Donner (make sure to check out his excellent blog)
• Project: SeeShell
• Resources: Links and Glossary on Everyday Digital Money blog

CNN reports on how Donald Norman wants designers to be more inclusive:

The future of design could see the divide between able-bodied and disabled people vanish.

Don Norman , design Professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, and the author of ”The Design of Future Things,” is issuing a challenge to designers and engineers across the world: Create things that work for everyone.

“It is about time we designed things that can be used by ALL people — which is the notion behind accessible design. Designing for people with disabilities almost always leads to products that work better for everyone.”

Once the champion of human-centered design — where wants and needs of individuals are the primary consideration in the design process, Norman now believes accessible activity-centered design is a better approach.

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Interesting article by Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu.net on understanding non-users (my translation):

The French Marsouin research lab just published an interesting study on people who do not use the internet. The study starts off with the various existing typologies to characterise non-users, such as those developed by the Walloon Telecommunications Agency or the ones from the Aquitaine region in France (pdf). When one starts to map out these profile characteristics (particularly those that are socio-demographic or economical), the limitations of this exercise become apparent. The researchers Annabelle Boutet and Jocelyne Trémembert stress that in order to understand the profiles of non-users, we have to start off with inversing the well-known statistics: 7% of those between 12 and 17, 91% of those above 70, and 4 out 5 of those who didn’t finish high school… don’t use the internet.

Their study was based on participative research in the sensitive urban zone of Kérourien in Brest, in order to maximise the involvement of the 125 non-users. As in previous studies, also this study stresses the importance of people’s social circle in the diffusion and the actual appropriation of use; “one makes the step towards technology or towards shared environments, when accompagnied by a close one”. In fact, a decisive factor with non-user is the absence of internet usage in their social circle. However, the role of close family members remains unclear, say the researchers, because we need to better understand each of their roles in the home: they could play a facilitating role (e.g. teenagers helping their parents using web tools), but also a censoring one (by excluding family members through discriminating behaviours and practices), or even a “proxy” one, i.e. as a usage mediator where the value is not so easy to determine: e.g. the teenager who sends mails on behalf of his mother, or helps her setting up internet webcam or chat connections).

In any case, non-users are not necessarily living within a non-technological environnment: 59% of the respondents had a computer at home and 49% had an internet connection. The authors insist strongly on the limitations of the definition of the non-user itself (users through third parties? those who gave up? those who refuse?) which covers a wide range of non-use (frequency, duration, level of knowledge, autonomy…).

Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, states that ethnic minority groups are the prime early adopters in Europe, thereby confirming ethnographic user research at Swisscom.

“Ethnic minority groups are at the forefront of digital communications in the UK, with high levels of mobile phone, internet and multichannel television take-up. But, despite this, many people from ethnic minority groups lack confidence finding content online and are concerned about content delivered on digital communications, new research from Ofcom reveals.

Ofcom’s media literacy audit of UK adults from ethnic minority groups draws on quantitative research from the four largest ethnic minority groups in the UK : Indians, Pakistanis, Black Caribbeans and Black Africans. The audit provides a rich picture of the different elements of media literacy across television, radio, the internet and mobile phones amongst ethnic minority groups.”

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While hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital inclusion projects in Latin America, many of the programs start and end with the technology, writes CNET News (as part of its ongoing series exploring computing in Latin America).

[Cafe] Aprendiz [in Sao Paulo, Brazil] is not your typical digital inclusion center, but it does embrace most important characteristics of the successful ones. It has at least three key elements beyond the technology itself: a clear curriculum, community support, and a model of sustainability.

While these elements sound straightforward, they are often missing in programs that attempt to close the digital divide, whether here in Latin America or in the U.S. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital inclusion projects in Latin America, however critics say that too many of the programs start and end with the technology.

“The computer is just 10 percent of the cost of ensuring lower income people or schools use these tools and have access to the Internet” said Maria Eugenia Estenssoro, an Argentine senator from the country’s Coalicion Civica, an opposition party. [...]

Among the most successful inclusion centers [in Brazil] are the ones that have a purpose–whether it is helping students with homework, providing job training for the unemployed, or helping the disabled to communicate.

The article includes some interesting insights on the emerging market strategies of Intel and Microsoft.

Read full story

Ken Banks writes in PC World on the capacity of the mobile phone to bridge the digital divide.

While developed markets get excited by the iPhone, N95, BlackBerry, 3G, WiMax and Android, in developing countries, most excitement centers around the proliferation of mobile phones — any phones — into poorer rural, communication-starved areas and their potential to help 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 of dollars into economic, health and educational initiatives based around mobile technology. With so many big names involved, what could possibly go wrong? [...]

So, if we’re serious about using mobile to help some of the poorest members of society, how about diverting international development funding toward providing a subsidized, fully Internet-ready handset for developing markets? (It’s been tried before but lacked coordination.) Aid donors are already providing funds to the network operators, after all. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, Madagascar, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Uganda, for example, the International Finance Corporation (an arm of the World Bank) provided US$320 to Celtel to help expand and upgrade its mobile networks. 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 other than companies responding to market forces (which I’ve already argued are often more fixed on price)?

Ken Banks devotes himself to the application of mobile technology for positive social and environmental change in the developing world, and has spent the last 15 years working on projects in Africa. Recently, his research resulted in the development of FrontlineSMS, a field communication system designed to empower grassroots nonprofit organizations.

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MobileActive reports on two studies that explore how low-income people use mobile technology in Brazil and South Africa.

This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called ‘base-of-the-pyramid’ users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile technology in different ways than their higher-income counterparts? How can mobile phones be designed and used in ways that are useful to these populations? Two new studies–one of favelas in Brazil and the other of a low-income township in South Africa–seek to answer these questions.

Read full story

The great people at the splendid French blog InternetActu have conducted an interview with the Japanese sociologist, Mito Akiyoshi. Since InternetActu is published in French, and I have been pushing them time and again to make the rich contents of their blog also available in English, they have offered us to co-publish this interview in English — the language it was conducted in. It was not difficult to accept the offer and I thank Hubert Guillaud in particular for this opportunity. If you read French, go read it here.
 

Mito Akiyoshi (blog) is a Japanese sociologist at Senshu University. She also collaborates with sociologist Izumi Aizu on a NTT research programme on privacy and identity. The interview provides us with an opportunity to take a unique look at what is happening in Japan: it allows us to not focus on the technology, as is so often the case, but on how this technology is used, which is often more varied and complex than one might think.
 

DIGITAL DIVIDE IN JAPAN?

InternetActu.net: You have worked on the digital divide in Japan. We in the West often have the impression that the digital divide does not exist in your country where the mobile phone is so pervasive. But is that really so? Do all people really have equal access?

Mito Akiyoshi: There is a growing consensus among researchers in Japan as well as abroad that the digital divide is not just about having Internet access or not. It is also about the type of use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT’s) and the goals of that use. In order to understand the implications of the mobile phone on the digital divide, we have to start with a broader definition of the digital divide itself, which needs to encompass all activities mediated by technologies. Due to the mobile phone we are now facing a mixed reality: it is a glass that is both half-full and half-empty.

Japan is indeed a global leader in mobile telephony: the mobile phone has brought ICT to those who would otherwise not have used technology. Yet the mobile phone has not eliminated the digital divide at all. My research shows that existing patterns of inequality strongly influence the type of technology and technology use certain kinds of people exhibit. Generally speaking, there are three types of ICT users in terms of access to hardware: “Literati” are those people who use both computers and mobile phones. A second group consists of a fairly large number of people who use mobile phones but rarely use PC’s. The third group are those who use neither. The last group is obviously decreasing now because of the pervasiveness of the internet, but even the second group could be considered on the wrong side of the digital divide — unable to make the most of ICT.
 

UNIVORES AND OMNIVORES

All of that would be OK if the choice was just that: a matter of choice. But often it isn’t. Web contents accessed on a computer are quite different from those accessed on a mobile device. For example, my research shows that respondents use a PC for professional reasons and to access government services. The use of a mobile phone however is mainly limited to entertainment related activities. Those who use mobile phones and not the PC tend to be less educated, less wealthy, and/or female. So, their reliance on their mobile phone and their non-use of the PC could also be interpreted as perpetuating a less privileged status.

I am still looking for good labels to identify these different types of users, and in particular those who use the mobile but not the PC. The distinction between “univore” and “omnivore” as used in cultural sociology could be useful. The “univores” refer to people with limited cultural resources who consume just one type of genre, e.g. hip-hop. The “omnivores” on the other hand are endowed with rich resources: they enjoy multiple genres. According to this view, the distinction between middle class and working class is not based on their preference for particular genres, but rather on their ability to consume a wide range of cultural products. So based on this logic, I could probably use the term “mobile univore”.

InternetActu.net: What does the mobile phone prevent that the combination of internet and mobile enables?

Mito Akiyoshi: Studies have shown that PC Internet users acquire new ICT skills as they become more familiar with the web. It is a virtuous circle. Initially you go online to address a particular need, but then you discover other services and applications and you do a lot of “learning by doing”. The PC Internet encourages people to explore. The mobile Internet on the other hand provides only basic internet related services, which are often limited to entertainment and leisure activities. The mobile internet is rarely a channel for serious, productive activities. Even the content and service quality differs. Although you can read news on both the computer and the mobile phone, news items on the mobile tend to be brief and sketchy, because of space limitations. If you read news and opinion stories in the newspaper or on a PC, you can learn a lot. But if you read news summaries on the mobile phone, you miss out on this learning opportunity.
 

A POLICY ISSUE

InternetActu.net: How to promote passing from mobile tools to internet tools, when uses are not really the same?

Mito Akiyoshi: First of all, I think we should acknowledge both quality and quantity of contents and services are of the utmost significance. Access to them are legitimate global, national and local policy issues, but are hardly recognised as such. For example if you know that mobile users do not get information of equivalent quality to those on PC internet, you could modify the way you present the information. If you would like to mobile phone use for productive activities, you can improve the design, the interface, and the services. Mobile Internet has been entertainment-driven because mobile internet service providers saw entertainment related services as the most lucrative business. But policy makers can intervene and encourage technology development that contributes to wider social inclusion and participation.
 

THE JAPANESE FASCINATION WITH THE MOBILE

InternetActu.net: The West has a certain image of the use of technology in Japan: omnipresent, very focused on the mobile, with a population fond of everything innovative. Does this picture correspond to reality?

Mito Akiyoshi: Well, the Japanese are fond of certain innovations. But one should also note that Japan lagged behind other industrialised countries with respect to basic Internet connectivity during the 1990s. So my short answer to this question is yes and no. The explosion of mobile telephony must be put into perspective, rather than being taken as a sign of general enthusiasm for all innovations. Some innovations take root at a phenomenal speed while others are sadly abandoned.

But Japan’s fascination with mobility may be peculiar to them. The obsession with mobility, cuteness, and miniaturisation are repeatedly brought up in popular discourse as part of the essence of Japanese culture. But as a social scientist, I want to explain them. The fascination with mobility is a consequence of our lifestyle. Tokyoites spend long hours commuting by train with plenty of time to play around with their mobile phones. Unlike people in Europe and the U.S., the majority of Japanese have not experienced a smooth transition from the typewriter to the computer. Some users actually prefer the mobile phone simply because they are not comfortable working with a keyboard. Those people use their mobile phones for reasons that have little to do with their portability. The popularity of the mobile phone in Japan is actually quite a complex phenomenon.

That said, their quirky tastes might help discover and popularise certain innovations in an unexpected manner. The camera/video mobile phone is one example that comes to my mind. At first, the idea appeared strange. But the Japanese loved camera phones for whatever reasons and have made them popular in other parts of the world.
 

THE FUTURE OF MOBILE

InternetActu.net: Japan seems ahead because consumers already use the mobile to access online contents, and this will become the future everywhere. But you seem more sceptical.

Mito Akiyoshi: Japan is indeed one of the leaders in mobile Internet services. Although I raised some issues about the causes and current use of mobile Internet, there are lots of reasons to believe that a wider use of mobile and ubiquitous technology will create better communicative environments in Japan and elsewhere. But it is simplistic to assume that the mobile phone in and of itself can solve the deep-rooted problem of digital inequality. But it does help people to get online and to maintain their social networks. The Japanese have enthusiastically taken up the mobile Internet when it first became available in the late 1990s, because they thought it would fulfill their needs.

Now we have to redefine those “needs” or “demands” in the light of the future society we intend to create. Up until now there has been little discussion about the basic values ICT should focus on. Mobile technology holds a key to the realisation of fundamental social values, such as human captial development, equality, sustainable development, democracy, etc., but it does not automatically make it happen.

I am not sceptical, but rather cautiously optimistic because we need a better understanding of the existing problems and a better vision for the future to fully realise the communicative possibilities offered by mobile technology.
 

OUR UBIQUITOUS BUT LOCALLY EMBEDDED LIVES

InternetActu.net: There is a lot of talk these days about geolocation as the future of the mobile, allowing a synthesis of social networks and mobility. Did geolocation use explode in Japan and why?

Mito Akiyoshi: There are some interesting uses of mobile geolocation technology in Japan, such as the otetsudai network which is basically a job search service accessed via a mobile phone, allows people to find a job or an employee “on the spot”. Geolocation services enable micromanagement of time, space, a job slot, and even a worker. Even in the age of globalization, our day-to-day life is locally embedded and mobile technology serves locally embedded needs quite well.

InternetActu.net: In terms of government action, the focus seems to have evolved from e-Japan (a fairly classic approach to Internet access and use) to u-Japan, seen as a more futuristic plan focussed on ubiquitous information availability. What is the reality of this programme now?

Mito Akiyoshi: To answer such a question, the first thing one might want to do is to go to a government website to do some research on the u-Japan project. But if you do that, you realise that the search functionality on government websites is a real mess. Search information on any specific issue on a Japanese government website and you will share my frustration. One cannot get the information one is looking for. This very fact affects my evaluation of the u-Japan project.

U-Japan was successful in providing the nation fast Internet connection and improving government services. In areas such as tax preparation and business filings, great progress was made and the u-Japan project should be given due credit.

But there are some goals still to be accomplished as illustrated by the mediocre search functionality.

Let me give you another example: When I consult government statistics, I often get a lot of Excel tables. I rather need a decent query system so that I can combine variables and create the tabled results I need.

Ubiquity is all fine, but ubiquitous solutions must be user-friendly solutions as well.
 

THE DIFFICULTY OF COMPREHENDING THE PRIVACY AND IDENTITY CHALLENGES

InternetActu.net: You work with Izumi Aizu on a NTT research programme on privacy and identity. Can you tell us more about the objectives of this programme and its first results?

Mito Akiyoshi: NTT is a very interesting organisation. They do not ask us to do research to maximize their profit on a short-term basis. They came to us with no specific agenda and asked us tell them “something interesting about privacy and identity.” So we devised our research objectives on the fly.

We investigated national identity projects as well as business identity management projects. I like to think that the fact that we didn’t find strong trends is one of our major findings. Not that we came back empty-handed: there is a huge information asymmetry between the various parties involved. For example, I contacted a recruiting company for my research, but they could not come up with good interviewees because the issue is too technical. Only one interviewee I talked with said he was interested in the issue of identity management.

The issue of privacy and identity is very relevant to everyone but it is difficult to bring home to everyone its relevance when it involves so many technical details. Unfortunately many decisions that have real social implications are removed from the public discourse and are reduced to technical matters. How do you explain the notion of search engine privacy to your grandma or even to your boss for that matter? Or the possible privacy breach with the introduction of IPv6 due to its addressing mechanism? They may not comprehend the issues, although they are relevant to them. We found that there is no common language to start a productive discussion about the way those issues are handled by governments, businesses, researchers, and community leaders.

InternetActu.net: You point the finger at strong concerns about privacy issues, even though we in France tend to believe that these issues do not have the same impact in Japan, because of cultural differences. So are privacy concerns similar in Japan and in the West?

Mito Akiyoshi: This is an interesting question. Of course France and Japan are culturally quite different, but France is also quite different from the UK, the US, Germany, and other countries that supposedly constitute “the West.” I do not want to ignore differences between countries, but I would like to balance “between-country” differences with “within-country” differences. I do not know if it is appropriate to bring privacy concerns back to “cultural differences,” but the issue of privacy does manifest itself differently in different societies. For example, racial profiling is a big issue in societies with diverse minority populations. I do not say that it does not exist in Japan. But it is less central there than in the US, for example.

One way to address cultural differences is to look for social problems that affect a society in particular. If the Japanese have reservations about a national identity card system, it may be because their trust in the government’s handling of personal information is low. The national pension system is mismanaged and its failure is a huge scandal here right now. Those who are entitled to pension money were not given their money because the agency in charge did not handle the records properly.

What kind of attitudes prevail in France regarding the issue of privacy and what kind of factors — cultural, social, political, or economic — may explain those attitudes? I think I have more questions than answers to this question.

Dawn Nafus, an Intel anthropologist and her team have created Intel’s “Technology Metabolism Index,” which shows how citizens of countries’ tech adoption exceeds or lags what one would expect given their levels of wealth.

The map (hi-res pdf) shows fast tech adopters in bright colors and slow adopters in grays.

Nafus hopes that the work will help break the current business paradigms about what countries are ready for which technologies.

Read full story

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is organising a four-part lecture series on “Digital Natives,” referring to the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, especially the young people who are currently in schools and colleges today.

The series seeks to understand the practices and culture of the digital natives, the cultural implications of their phenomenon and the implications for education to schools, universities and libraries.

A Washington Times article today and some Library of Congress press releases provide some more insight:

[The series] began April 7 with child development expert Edith K. Ackermann (site) discussing “The Anthropology of Digital Natives” (video).

The Washington Times writes: “Ms. Ackermann, a visiting scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, spoke almost affectionately of young people’s affinity for sharing, “even before they think,” and their “fascination with freedom,” defined, in part, as having “the ability to do the right thing even when they have not got all the knowledge.” Because of their affinity for texting and borrowing sources available widely on the Internet and social networking sites, she concluded that “the gap between reading and writing is closing down.”

On 12 May, a spirited defense of the digital generation was presented by the writer Steven Berlin Johnson (site) based on his 2005 best-selling book, “Everything Bad is Good for You” (wikipedia). [A video is not yet available].

According to the Library of Congress press release, Johnson discussed the response to his argument that popular culture is growing more complex and cognitively challenging, and is not racing downward towards a lowest common denominator. He also talked about the future of books in this digital age.

Michael Wesch (site), assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State University, is the man behind the viral internet video “The Machine Is Us/ing Us“, which with over 600,000 views has become somewhat of a phenomenon. Welsch will discuss the three-year-old video-sharing Web site in a lecture titled “The Anthropology of YouTube” on 23 June.

“More video material has been uploaded to YouTube in the past six months than has ever been aired on all major networks combined, according to cultural anthropologist Michael Wesch. About 88 percent is new and original content, most of which has been created by people formerly known as “the audience.”

According to Wesch, it took tens of thousands of years for writing to emerge after humans spoke their first words. It took thousands more before the printing press appeared and a few hundred again before the telegraph did. Today a new medium of communication emerges every time somebody creates a new web application. “A Flickr here, a Twitter there, and a new way of relating to others emerges,” Wesch said. “New types of conversation, argumentation and collaborations are realized.”

In his presentation, Wesch will discuss the research of his Digital Ethnography research team at Kansas State University into the cultural aspects of YouTube.”

Douglas Rushkoff (site), a teacher of media theory at New York University who recently wrote a pamphlet for the UK think tank Demos, will close the series with a lecture entitled “Open Source Reality” on 30 June.

The series should eventually be available on video webcasts.

The Washington Times article also refers to a few other resources, including Digital Native, an international online academic research project that explores the “digital media landscape” and its implications. (Check the links at the end of that page).

By the way, check out the gorgeous illustration that Linas Garsys made for the Washington Times. Click on the image on the left so see it in its full size.

The Danish programme for user-driven innovation (English summary) aims to strengthen the diffusion of methods for user-driven innovation, and to contribute to increased growth in the participating companies, and to increased user satisfaction and/or increased efficiency in participating public institutions.

The programme should also result in the development of new products, services, and concepts. Finally, the programme should increase the qualifications of employees to take part in the innovation processes in the participating companies and public institutions.

The programme, which has a yearly budget of DKK 100 million (13.4 million euro or 20.9 million USD) and runs for four years, 2007-2010, is administered by Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority, which is part of the Danish Ministry for Economic and Business Affairs.

The activities are grouped in three areas: strategic, regional, and other important areas.

The strategic effort concerns three broad thematic areas: (1) areas where Denmark has particular business skills (e.g. environment and energy technology, construction, health, design and food); (2) cross-sectoral issues relating to social problems with promising market potential (e.g. healthy and energy saving construction, or fighting obesity); and (3) welfare areas, in particular where the citizen interacts with the public sector (e.g. care for children and elderly citizens and the health sector). Fifteen projects are currently running:

• Indoor climate and quality of life – more in Danish
• Service renewal in practice – user-driven service innovation in small artisanal companies – more in Danish
• Accessible packaging for the elderly and the functionally impaired – more in Danish
• Innofood – employee and user driven innovation in value chains – more in Danish
• User-driven mobile community – more in Danish
• User-driven innovation and communication of textile qualities – more in Danish
• The future’s interactive convenience store – more in Danish
• Future waste systems – more in Danish
• Coherent patient process – more in Danish
• A good life for the elderly – more in Danish
• The healthy way – more in Danish
• Lead user-based entrepreneurship (in collaboration with Lego and MIT) – more in Danish
• New product development with lead users (in collaboration with Grundfos and MIT) – more in Danish
• Intelligent utility – more in Danish
• User-driven innovation and strategic design – more in Danish | English

Desinova is the name of this last project, an historic, systematic, and longitudinal study of strategic design and co-creation innovation in services happening now in Denmark. The project’s outcomes are expected to have global implications for innovation in industry and civil society.

The Desinova project objectives are:

• to generate ten successful service innovation projects;
• to make participating service companies and agencies more capable of service innovation;
• to develop a Service Innovation Model that explains how service company personnel, strategists, marketing people, designers, anthropologists and users successfully co-create;
• to evolve policy recommendations for business, education and research.

The regional effort ensures that knowledge of and experience with methods for user-driven innovation is disseminated throughout the country. Regional actors in each of the country’s six geographic regions organise a yearly project in their region:

• Copenhagen Innovation Center (Capital Region) – more in Danish | English
• Handicaps – a knowledge resource to better aids (Central Jutland Region) – more in Danish
• Tele home care – chronic patients and the collaborating health services (North Jutland Region) – more in Danish
• Healthy meals for hospital patients (South Denmark Region) – more in Danish
• Bornholm’s harbour – the hidden treasures (Bornholm Island) – more in Danish
• User-driven innovation in value chains (Zealand Region) – more in Danish

The third area of effort covers applications from projects that work with any other important issues, businesses and institutions, notd covered by the strategic or regional effort, such as the 180º Academy and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design.

More info:
- Presentation by Dorte Nøhr Andersen, Head of Division, Danish Enterprise and Construction Authority – (pdf)
- Presentation by Lars Bo Jeppesen, Director, Danish User-Centered Innovation Lab, Copenhagen Business School – (pdf)

Last year, The Economist published an article about ethnographic user research at Swisscom. One of the findings it highlighted was that immigrant workers are the most advanced users of communications technology:

“It is migrants, rather than geeks, who have emerged as the “most aggressive” adopters of new communications tools, says [Swisscom anthropologist Stefana] Broadbent. Dispersed families with strong ties and limited resources have taken to voice-over-internet services, IM and webcams, all of which are cheap or free. They also go online to get news or to download music from home.”

That same trend is also present in the United States, with Latinos depending on their cell phones for more services than other [major] ethnic groups, turning to it for messaging, downloading music, surfing the Web and e-mailing, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle.

“According to [a Pew Internet & American Life Project survey released last month], on a typical day, Latinos were more likely to use their phone to send or receive a text message, play a mobile game, send or receive e-mail, access the Internet, play music, instant message, or get a map or directions. Fifty-six percent of Latinos said they did at least one of these activities, compared with 50 percent for African Americans and 38 percent for whites.

The numbers are supported by a Forrester Research survey last year that found Latinos were more likely than other users to text, instant or picture message, send e-mail, check the weather, get news or sports updates, research entertainment, check financial accounts and receive stock quotes through their phone.”

Interestingly, “the cell phone in some cases is being used as the primary computer for Latinos, serving up e-mail and the Internet, in the process bridging what has been called the digital divide that still exists for some minority and disadvantaged groups.”

The article mentions many reasons for this: economic (lower mean household income, so less broadband access at home), demographic (family and friends are spread out across the United States and across the border), and cultural (a higher value is placed on staying in touch with family and friends).

But even though these ethnic minorities are advanced users, mobile phone marketing companies consider them as only interested in the cheap offers: “Hendrik Schouten, director of marketing for the Hispanic segment at AT&T, said carriers assumed Latino users wanted the cheapest phones and were more likely to use prepaid plans because of limited budgets.” This now seems to be changing.

Microsoft UK is developing a “senior PC”, which will have a simple interface and be aimed at older users, writes Jane Wakefield on BBC News.

The machine will come software that allows users to manage prescriptions as well as simplified tools for everyday use, such as managing photos.

The machine, which it is developing in partnership with charities Age Concern and Help the Aged, is one of several projects the firm is working on.

The plans were unveiled at a Digital Inclusion conference in London.

Read full story

The Times comments on a report on the significant digital divide in the UK, despite widepsread broadband and mobile coverage.

One in five adult Britons is unable to open a word processing document on a computer, and just under 20 per cent still cannot use e-mail, a survey suggests.

Searching the internet using engines like Google, meanwhile, is a problem for 16 per cent of people, and when it comes to using social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, 28 per cent say they are at a loss.

The figures, detailed in an ICM poll, reveal the extent of the digital divide in Britain, where despite broadband penetration of about 65 per cent, one in five people does not yet own a computer, and 7 per cent of adults say that their lack of IT skills “greatly restricts” what they can do.

Read full story

The Washington Post reflects on what it means that there is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth.

“From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6 billion humans in about 26 years. This is the fastest global diffusion of any technology in human history — faster even than the polio vaccine.” [...]

“The mobile phone is the way social cohesion is taking place. It tightens the bonds between us,” says Ling, an American who researches the social consequences of mobile telephony for Telenor, the Oslo-based global phone company. [...]

“The cellphone allows us to create that local sphere” that was the hallmark of pre-industrial villages, says Ling. Cellphone circles tend to be small and full of people who “know what you’re up to, who you are, what’s in your refrigerator. That’s a way of being attached to society. It has a socializing effect.”

Read full story

BT (British Telecommunications plc) is setting up an initiative, called the Crossing the Divide Project, to find out why some people resist using the internet, reports the BBC News website.

The project will employ psychologists to closely study a small group of people to reveal what stops them joining the net-using majority.

The BT project website provides further insight:

For millions in the UK, the online social networking phenomenon, commonly referred to as web 2.0, has really brought the internet to life. People can now go online to access hundreds of services that make their lives easier and help to connect them to friends and family around the world. But 33 per cent of adults are still not online and remain excluded from the increasing number of web-based resources, services and information that many of us take for granted.

The digital divide is not always about a lack of access to the internet. From our work with the charity Citizens Online, we know that some of the biggest barriers are fear and lack of confidence.

To understand these fears and how to overcome them, BT is running a two month trial with participants across the UK. Individuals who have never had access to the internet are being given the technology and support to explore the web for the first time. They are recording their journeys and, at the end of the trial, their experiences will be shared with government, charities and other businesses to see how the process can be scaled-up in future to bring the benefits of the internet to more and more people across the UK.

View project video

For some time now I have been following the French innovation blog Internet Actu, not realising that it was part of a bigger initiative called “Fing“. Fing stands for “Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération”, or the the next generation internet foundation, aimed at stimulating and promoting R&D and innovation in ICT uses and services. Here is how they describe themselves in English:

Founded by 3 leading Internet associations, including the Internet Society, FING is a collective and open research and development project which focuses on tomorrow’s Internet’s uses, applications and services.

FING views the future Internet as not only more reliable, mobile, fast, user-friendly – but as a different Internet: the disappearing Internet, in which broadband, mobile, pervasive, intelligent technologies make it possible to focus on the user’s needs, lifestyles and desires. We believe this technological change will unleash a new innovation cycle in applications and services. We also believe that the Internet’s decentralised design should and can scale to the next generation and is innovation’s and competition’s best chance for the future.

FING intends to help corporations, public agencies, education and research organizations be at the forefront of this new cycle. Through collective and networked intelligence, creativity and experimentation, Fing seeks to improve the efficiency of the innovation process, as well as reduce risks for all involved parties.

FING:

• publishes Internet Actu, a weblog and media which is read by 70,000 professionals;
• supports several workgroups and communities;
• organises visits to research labs and innovative companies throughout the world;
• publishes papers, books and reports;
• moderates or takes part in foresight exercises such as Ci’Num, the Digital Civilizations Forum;
• organises international conferences and industry events such as Mobile Monday France, or the “Crossroads of Possibilities” which showcases very early-stage innovative projects.

FING is networked with other, similar initiatives throughout Europe and the world. FING’s CEO, Daniel Kaplan, is a member of the European Commission’s eEurope Advisory Group.

FING currently has more than 165 members, including: BNP Paribas, EDF, Ericsson, Eutelsat, France Telecom/Orange, Galeries Lafayette, HP, INRIA, Microsoft, the Ministries of Education and Research, Toshiba, etc.

Some browsing around led me to interesting initiatives such as:

• Villes 2.0 (Cities 2.0), which is aimed at helping traditional urban stakeholders (companies, institutions, social entities) and “digital actors” foresee urban and mobile transformations and work together on them. There are four focus areas: the augmented city (related to ubiquitous computing); my own city (which is about personalisation and user-centredness); service innovation (and co-creation); and social sustainability.
   
• Active Identities, which is focused on identifying and stimulating the necessary actions to make the active management of digital identities into a resource, a tool that allows users to control their lives and realise their projects, a factor of confidence, and a source of innovation and value creation.
   
• Innovative Interfaces, a new project which ponders the question how the fact that our direct and indirect interactions with machines and digital services, which keeps on getting better, simpler and easier, can help remove certain barriers for people with “difficulties” (e.g. non-users).
   
• Active and autonomous living until 90

Also of interest are a series of videos including this presentation by Fing CEO Daniel Kaplan at LIFT07, as well as a huge amount of rather unorganised project videos from the Crossroads of Possibilities project.

The UK think tank Demos has just published a new report on culture, participation and the web. Based on UK case studies, it provides insight and lessons learnt on how new and emergent web technology can increase public participation in culture, and on how to organise online engagement.

“The report looks at the convergence of three trends:

• technological change
• the way that people engage with culture
• the policy aim of increasing democratic participation in culture, with particular regard to audiences described as ‘hard to reach’.

What these trends have in common is a movement from passivity to engagement, from uni-directional flows to interactivity, and from the few to the many.

Digitisation has changed everything. It has created public expectations for on-demand, constantly available, individualised access to products. It has also challenged the assumptions of cultural sector professionals that their role is to oversee public access to culture in the sense that they act as gatekeepers to what is produced, what is shown and how it is interpreted. In the analogue world, the public was able to engage with culture on terms set by experts and professionals: content, pricing, format and timing were all decided by the producer. In a world of infinitely replicable and manipulable digital content, this no longer applies. The full implications of this for the cultural sector are not yet clear.

In the brief history of the internet, the cultural sector has followed two related paths: on the one hand, the digitisation of content and provision of information and, on the other, interactivity and opportunities for expression. Some have seen these as in binary opposition.

The truth is that they are inexorably merging. But the big question is where do we go next? How can policy intervention best meet with technology to achieve the aim of bringing about a more democratic culture? What will be the role, opportunities and limitations of online culture in a rapidly changing world?”

Download report (pdf, 719 kb, 93 pages)