Emergence of multiplex mobile phone communication networks across rural areas: An Ethiopian experiment (original) (raw)
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When Family Replaced Friendship: Mobile Communication and Network Change in Kenya 1
Mobile devices have spread throughout the developing world at a rate unparalleled by other communications technologies. Yet surprisingly, little is known about their impact on social networks. This study analyzes three waves of pooled survey data in Nairobi (2002, 2007, 2013). We focus on the size, composition, and location of important personal relationships-that is, "core networks." Networks of close ties have nearly doubled for urban Kenyans, as network composition shifted toward kin and away from friends. Indeed, friendship decreased from over one-third to less than a fourth of close ties, while family ties grew from onethird to nearly half. The geographic distribution of networks has become broader, moving away from local ties and toward national (but not international) relationships. Finally, the pace of change declined as mobile devices became embedded in daily life.
When Family Replaced Friendship: Mobile Communication and Network Change in Kenya
Sociological Forum, 2018
Mobile devices have spread throughout the developing world at a rate unparalleled by other communications technologies. Yet surprisingly, little is known about their impact on social networks. This study analyzes three waves of pooled survey data in Nairobi (2002, 2007, 2013). We focus on the size, composition, and location of important personal relationships-that is, "core networks." Networks of close ties have nearly doubled for urban Kenyans, as network composition shifted toward kin and away from friends. Indeed, friendship decreased from over one-third to less than a fourth of close ties, while family ties grew from onethird to nearly half. The geographic distribution of networks has become broader, moving away from local ties and toward national (but not international) relationships. Finally, the pace of change declined as mobile devices became embedded in daily life.
Ecology and Society, 2021
Mobile phones are recognized as important new tools for rural development in the Global South, but few studies have examined how phones can shape social networks. This study documents a new type of social tie, enabled by mobile phones, that to our knowledge has not previously been discussed in academic literature. In 2018, we discovered that Maasai pastoralists in northern Tanzania create new social ties through wrong numbers, a phenomenon with implications for theory on social networks and path dependency. We used a mixed ethnographic and survey-based design to examine the following: (1) the conditions under which wrong number connections (WNCs) are made; (2) the incidence of these connections in the study area; and (3) the association between WNCs and multiple livelihood strategies. Working in 10 rural communities in Tanzania, we conducted 16 group interviews with men about their phone use and found that WNCs are diverse and can provide households with important information, resources, and opportunities from an expansive geographic area. (Nine separate interviews with groups of women revealed that women do not create WNCs.) Based on early qualitative findings, we designed and conducted a standardized survey with 317 household heads. We found that 46% of respondents have had WNCs. Furthermore, multivariate regression models show a significant association between WNCs and the controversial practice of leasing land in one district. Taken together, our findings show that WNCs can be seen as innovations in social networking that reduce path dependency, increase the range of potential outcomes, and hold important implications for rural livelihoods in East Africa.
Network traffic locality in a rural African village
ICTD March 2012, Atlanta, Georgia USA
The Internet is evolving from a system of connections between humans and machines to a new paradigm of social connection. However, it is still dominated by a hub and spoke architecture with inter-connectivity between users typically requiring connections to a common server on the Internet. This creates a large amount of traffic that must traverse an Internet gateway, even when users communicate with each other in a local network. Nowhere is this inefficiency more pronounced than in rural areas with low-bandwidth connectivity to the Internet. Our previous work in a rural village in Macha, Zambia showed that web traffic, and social networking in particular, are dominant services. In this paper we use a recent network trace, from this same village, to explore the degree of local user-to-user interaction in the village. Extraction of a social graph, using instant message interactions on Facebook, reveals that 54% of the messages are between local users. Traffic analysis highlights that the potential spare capacity of the local network is not utilized for direct local communication between users even though indirect communication between local users is routed through services on the Internet. These findings build a strong motivation for a new rural network architecture that places services that enable user-to-user interaction and file sharing in the village.
Journal of Intercultural Communication Research, 2012
Previous research in developed countries has shown that mobile phone users call and text to a relatively small circle of people. Research from the Global South indicates that core network size is often larger than in the developed world since the logistics of daily life require extended informal logistics. This suggests that the core social network, as seen in the use of mobile voice and texting, will be larger in developing countries than in developed countries. This is tested using mobile phone log data from Norway, Malaysia, Thailand and Pakistan. A total of 4000 subscribers and their ''one hop'' social networks (approx. 80,000 links) were examined. The results show that the core mobile phonebased networks are not larger in developing countries. This indicates that cost, literacy and other cultural issues are significant when considering the question of core network size as seen in the use of mobile telephony.
Accuracy, stability and reciprocity in informal conversational networks in rural Kenya
Social Networks, 2000
In this paper, we ask several questions about conversational networks. How accurately do respondents report the characteristics of their network partners? How stable are these networks over time? And if one participant in a conversation reports it, does the other? The data come from a longitudinal survey of ego-centered conversational networks and reproductive behavior in small villages in rural Kenya. Because network partners were also interviewed in one of the four research sites, we are able to compare the respondents' reports of their alters' behavior with these alters' self reports. We find a strong relationship between the reported behavior of egos and their reports of their alters' behavior, as others have done elsewhere. However, discrepancies between the respondents' reports of their network partners contraceptive behavior and their network partners' self reports are substantial. Levels of network stability and reciprocity were also low. The discrepancies between the respondents' reports of their network partners and the partners' own reports are primarily due to incorrect reporting by the respondents, whereas the low levels of stability and reciprocity are related to the difficulties of measuring regular but diffuse social structures. Some of our results are specific to the context of rural Kenya, but other are more likely to be generalizable. The influence of social networks on behavior may be strong or weak, but its measurement has systematic problems.
2018
Mobile phones, social capital and solidarities in the central Moungo region (Cameroon) 1 Jeremy PASINI 2 (Ph.D. Student in geography, Summary. One of the most significant trends in Cameroon over the past two decades has been the rapid diffusion of the cellular telephony. The number of mobile phones' has risen from a few thousands in the early 2000s to more than seventeen million in 2014. How should we explain this unpreceded diffusion of cell phones? Why is it so crucial to be able to make phone calls and send short text messages, especially in coun-trysides and medium towns? This work starts from the hypothesis that Moungo's inhabitants can no longer build a resilient livelihood only from village resources (like the monetary salary arisen from the plantation) and are therefore always on the look-out for external unexplored occasions. Wireless phones are here seen as tools that enables individuals to make the most of diversified and spatially scattered social networks, there...
Inhabitants of the most remote areas tend to have low access to information and resources potentially contributing to well-being. Ongoing expansion of ICTs deeper into rural areas is expected to improve this situation by enabling them to contact geographically distant others. We interviewed 79 women and men in an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Tamil Nadu, India, where explosively expanding mobile phone signal entered prior to other types of infrastructure, and we inductively developed a scale for assessment of the inhabitants’ overall access to valued resources through their personal networks. It was found that the mobiles contributed primarily to the maintenance of existing networks and to speedier mobilization of already accessible resources. However, since the phone owners called only with people whom they already knew well, they did not expand their networks nor increased their overall access resources. Keywords: remote rural areas, mobile phones, personal networks, individual social capital, social capital measurement, India
Autrepart, 2011
Si le concept de communauté demeure largement associé à sa dimension géographique, les études sur le transnationalisme dans les années 1990 ont conduit envisager la communauté comme un réseau plutôt que comme un lieu. C'est dans cette optique que s'inscrit cette contribution, en développant l'idée de « chaînes de personnes » liées entre elles pour former une communauté. Les recherches menées au Cameroun et en Angola/Namibie montrent l'ancienneté d'une telle notion de communauté, dont les membres ont toujours été considérés comme des chaînes d'individus dans des lieux divers. Au fur et à mesure des contacts qu'ils établissent les uns avec les autres, les individus construisent et entretiennent des relations communautaires. Les nouvelles technologies de l'information et de la communication permettent de se focaliser sur la mobilité et les interrelations entre les personnes à travers leurs histoires de vie et la manière dont ils utilisent ces des nouvelles technologies au quotidien. Mots-clés : Communicationmobilitécommune-Angola/Namibie-Cameroun. MIRJAM DE BRUIJN, INGE BRINKMAN, "Communicating Africa", Researching Mobile Communities, Communication Technologies and Social Transformation in Angola and Cameroon Although communities are still often conceptually bound to geographical place, transnational studies in the 1990s have led to viewing a community more as a network than as a place This contribution expands this argument by developing the idea of "strings of people", with connections and communities being intrinsically linked. Based on material from Cameroon and Angola/Namibia, we argue that such notions of community have been in existence for a long time and that people have always viewed their communities as strings of people in various locations. As people contact each other, they construct and/or maintain community ties. Focusing on the life histories of mobility and connections, and on the ways in which people are making new technologies fit into their daily lives, this article discusses relations between new ICTs, community and mobility.