Futures of Learning

Mobile phones owned by 1. Fisherman, 2. Student, 3. Carpenter. Photos by Araba Sey, 2006.

“Taxing mobile phone usage will kill romance stone dead!” (Cameron Duodu, New Times Online, November 27, 2007).

In a November 2007 newspaper column, Cameron Duodu lambasts the government of Ghana for proposing an excise duty on every minute of airtime use, thereby increasing the cost of mobile phone communication.
“Forget about warm greetings. Forget about endearments. If it’s a lady you’re calling, just demand to know whether she’s coming tonight or not. Forget about the difficulty she said she was experiencing about getting an appointment fixed with her hair-dresser and the emotional support you can offer her by sympathising with her plight. That’s none of your business. Don’t ask her whether the seamstress finished her dress or whether she was again told to go and come. Don’t ask her whether the fitters charged her car battery very well this time. Go straight to the point and forget the telephone-lovie business. No more telephonic foreplay for you, you hear?!” In other words, Kwadwo Baah-Wiredu, what you have done is that you’ve killed romance stone dead in Ghana with your airtime tax! You will go down in history as the Finance Minister who reintroduced lack of communication between Ghanaian men and their female paramours” he continues.

Although the controversial law was eventually passed in March 2008, Duodu warns, “make no mistake about it, mobile phones have made a great deal of difference to the lives of our ordinary folks and anyone who attempts to discourage their blossoming will be severely punished by them, come an election.” Whether these predictions materialize remains to be seen – the next national elections will be in 2012, and mobile phone subscriptions show no sign of declining – but Duodu’s lament points to the growing centrality of mobile phone communication in Ghana. 

There has been an astounding increase in mobile phone subscriber numbers since 2005 (see chart below), even taking into account the distortion in statistics resulting from multiple SIM card ownership (James & Versteeg, 2007; Sutherland, 2009). No longer the purview of the wealthy, high and low-end mobile phones are being accessed and used by people from all walks of life, and are increasingly being considered indispensable. An interview respondent describing to me how it felt to lose her mobile phone stated that until she got a replacement, she felt like a part of herself was missing.[ii]

Sources: Ghana National Communications Authority, International Telecommunications Union.

Journalistic commentary, news reports and anecdotes make up the bulk of the litereature on the social side of mobile phone use in Ghana. The academic literature has focused mainly on issues surrounding telecommunications policy and regulation, which have been instrumental in opening up the mobile phone market, an important precursor to social appropriation of the technology. We can also find a few studies examining types and levels of usage in a general way (Bertolini, 2002; Fremppong, 2004; McKemey et al, 2003) and mobile phone uses in commercial activities (Boadi & Shaik, 2006; Boadi et al, 2007; Overå, 2006). A few have attempted to delve into the social dynamics of usage trends (Sey, 2008; Slater & Kwami, 2005).

The push for ICT-facilitated national development has manifested in a number of deliberate and emergent systems designed to capitalize on the mobile communication platform. Entrepreneurial mobile phone subscribers have turned their phones into payphone access points (Boadi & Shaik, 2006; Sey 2008), not just for non-subscribers, but also for opportunistic users, a development that became an eye-opener for network service providers and arguably drove a period of industry innovations to reduce the cost of mobile phone airtime (particularly the introduction of electronic micro airtime transfers). More deliberate attempts can be seen in ventures such as Tradenet, an SMS-based price information service introduced by Busy Internet cafe to facilitate linkages between sellers and potential trading partners.

Mobile payphone, Tema, by Araba Sey, 2006.

In general, the results from studies of commercial uses of mobile phones show that cost reduction and the benefits derived from convenient communication channels are the primary drivers of mobile phone adoption amongst groups such as farmers and fishermen (Abbisath, 2005; Boadi et al, 2007) and traders (Overå, 2006). This is strongly tied to the informal business economy in which the demands of an uncertain economic environment, high transaction costs and building relationships of trust are paramount. The commercial benefits are somewhat constrained, especially by inadequate transportation infrastructure and poor wireless network coverage in some areas. And as others such as Donner (2006) have found elsewhere on the continent, the primary utility of this type of communication seems to be more for the strengthening/maintenance of existing networks than for the creation of new associations.

Slater and Kwami (2005) have noted that mobile phones appear to play a very particular social role in Ghanaian society – they provide the means for users to manage local embedded relationships.[iii] Whether examining social, economic or political uses of mobile phones (in as much as they are seperable), this finding by Slater and Kwami shows some validity – the evidence, though limited, suggests that managing relationships, near and afar, is a high priority (McKemey et al, 2003; Overå, 2006). Contrary to global (and national) expectations that mobile phones would be used explicitly for business activities, social networking tends to be the dominant use, in particular for making rather than receiving calls, and for maintaining links with family and friends (Bertolini, 2002; McKemey et al, 2003). On the other hand, through these same processes, mobile phones play a role in facilitating the remittance economy (e.g., McKemey et al, 2003; Slater & Kwami, 2005), a significant element of poverty reduction in developing countries. Both Slater and Kwami (2005) and McKemey et al (2003) have also found a prevalence of mobile phone use for coordinating funeral activity. My own research in Ghana during 2006 and 2007 supports this view of largely social uses. Coupled with the relatively high cost of communicating for people living close to or below the poverty line, this leads to particular configurations of mobile phone use to manage, control and share the cost of maintaining social relationships (often with economic underpinnings). This consists of strategic use of personal mobile phones to only receive calls, and supplementing a combination of other practices – e.g., flashing (generating missed calls), text messaging, using payphones - to meet ongoing communication needs. These are not unusual findings, though; even the wealthy adopt measures to control cost when necessary. Nevertheless, users have demonstrated innovativeness in adapting mobile telephony to their needs through “smart consumption” (Alhassan, 2004).

One practice that has generated significant attention is generating missed calls or “flashing.” As in other developing countries where this practice is common, Ghanaians flash for a variety of reasons – to get a return call, send a pre-coded message, or just for fun. This is such a popular practice that the term “flashing units” (the minimum amount of airtime required to generate a voice call) has made its way into the lexicon of mobile telephony in Ghana. Flashing definitely has a light side, but it also reflects and reproduces power relationships where flashing is based on perceptions of the recipient’s economic superiority and therefore greater capacity to bear the cost of a phone call (Donner, 2007; Pelckmans, 2009). Another less obvious dimension of power here is the struggle between network providers and users, as flashing is employed to essentially use network capacity free of charge (Sey, 2008), an example of hostile user behavior as framed by Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) - users try to make maximum use of this opportunity, while networks seek ways to make users place actual calls.

Since cost plays so high in usage levels, I have also found limited use of advanced mobile phone features, partly due to cost, partly due to lack of bandwidth. Younger users do favor downloading and sharing ringtones, wallpaper, and music – there is a growing local production industry for this material. Due to low literacy levels, text messaging is less prevalent than voice calls, however, those who do use this feature tend to be high intensity users. The recent introduction of 3.5 services by Zain and MTN Ghana in late 2008/early 2009 (Struthers-Watson, 2008; Wireless Federation, 2009) points to an expectation of increasing demand for platforms that can support higher levels of multimedia activity. As happened with the initial introduction of mobile phones, active use of 3.G services is likely to first become evident in the business and high-income populations; with local appropriations following if/when lower-income populations find ways around the high usage costs. Indeed one Ghanaian scholar, Amos Anyimadu has suggested that in a low literacy environment such as Ghana’s, multimedia mobile communication may be the most efficacious way to facilitate communication with and by the general populace.[iv]

There is some evidence that mobile phone acquisition and use fuels certain gender stereotypes. Women are considered notorious for requiring the newest mobile phone models from their romantic partners, and rightly or wrongly, this belief usually tags young unemployed women who own mobile phones as disreputable (Sey, 2008; Slater & Kwami, 2005). On the other hand, anecdotes circulate about young men who pretend to be speaking on a fake (toy) mobile phone, or who carry mobile phones that are inoperable (Alhassan (2004) or that they cannot afford to load with airtime, all in efforts to impress both female and male counterparts. Or, as Alhassan (2004) concludes, this type of behavior represents attempts to participate by simulation in digital consumption. These dynamics are also played out in expectations of flashing behavior involving opposite sexes. Alhassan (2004) notes a gender dimension to flashing with males being more likely to be the recipients of flashes. Flashing may indeed be “women’s work,” especially in romantic situations where males who flash females may be considered “cheap” and unworthy suitors, but there are other factors such as friendship that moderate gendered flashing (Sey, 2008).

Similar to the situation described by Heather in her posts on Brazil, the high value attached to mobile phones in Ghana has resulted in related crimes - mobile phone theft (labeled “mobile phone snatching” because they are usually stolen by simply snatching them from a user’s hand), some involving murder; and a thriving black market in handsets stolen locally or abroad. According to the deputy director of police public affairs in Accra, the number of mobile phone snatching cases reported increased from 209 in 2004 to 417 in 2005 (BBC, 2006). Fear of personal loss and physical injury has constrained most people from making public displays of their mobile phones.

Endnotes

i. This strategy was designed to overcome the problems associated with collecting duties on mobile phone imports. Instead, the import duty and value-added-tax would be abolished in favor of a tax on users. The law was passed in March 2008 despite protests from users and network service providers.
ii. Fieldwork, Ghana, 2006.
iii.  They contrast this with the use of the Internet for “the realization of the ideal (foreign) relationship (p.12).
iv. Personal communication – comments made at a conference on mobile telephony in Accra, 2006.

References

Abissath, M. K. (2005). Mobile phone: A tool for modern fishermen in Ghana. Available at http://www.nextbillion.net/news/mobile-phone-a-tool-for-modern-fishermen-in-ghana.

Alhassan, A. (2004). Development communication policy and economic fundamentalism in Ghana. Unpublished dissertation, Univeristy of Tampere.

Bar, F., Pisani, F. & Weber, M. (2007). Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism. Prepared for discussion at Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina. Convened by Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, April 20-21, 2007. http://arnic.info/Papers/Bar_Pisani_Weber_appropriation-April07.pdf.

BBC. (May 7, 2006). Following Ghana’s mobile thieves. Accessed May 30, 2006 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4977898.stm.

Bertolini, R. (2002). Telecommunication services in sub-Saharan Africa. An analysis of access and use in the Southern Volta Region in Ghana. Development Economics and Policy, 26. Stuttgart: Peter Lang Verlag.

Boadi, R. A., Boateng, R., Hinson, R., & Opoku, R. A. (2007). Preliminary insights into m-commerce adoption in Ghana. Information Development, 23(4), 253-265

Boadi R. A., & Shaik, A. G. (2006). Mcommerce breakthrough in developing countries. The role of m-commerce in wealth creation and economic growth in developing countries. Unpublished Masters thesis, Luleå University of Technology.

Donner, J. (2006). The use of mobile phones by microentrepreneurs in Kigali, Rwanda: Changes to social and business networks. Information Technologies and International Development, 3(2), 3-19.

Donner, J. (2007). The rules of beeping: Exchanging messages via intentional “missed calls” on mobile phones. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 13(1), article 1. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/donner.html.

Duodu, C. (November 27, 2007). Taxing mobile phone usage will kill romance stone dead! New Times Online. Accessed at http://www.newtimesonline.com/content/view/12637/267/.

Frempong, G. (2004). Restructuring of the telecommunication sector in Ghana: Experiences and policy implications. Unpublished Ph.D dissertation, University of Ghana.

James, J., & Versteeg, M.  (2007). Mobile phones in Africa. How much do we really know? Social Indicators Research, 84, 117-126.

Overå, R. (2005). Networks, distance, and trust: Telecommunications development and changing trading practices in Ghana. World Development, 34(7), 1301-1315.

Pelckmans, L. (2009). Phoning anthropologists: the mobile phone’s (re)shaping of anthropological research. In M. de Bruijn, F. Nyamnjoh, & I. Brinkman (Eds.), Mobile phones: The new talking drums of everyday Africa, (pp. 23-49). Langaa RPCIG.

Sey, A. (2008). Mobile communication and development: A study of mobile phone appropriation in Ghana. Unpublished dissertation. University of Southern California.

Slater, D. & Kwami, J. (2005). Embeddedness and escape: Internet and mobile use as poverty reduction strategies in Ghana. ISRG Working Paper, 4. http://civilsociety.developmentgateway.org/uploads/media/civilsociety/internet.pdf.

Struthers-Watson, K. (December 30, 2008). Zain launches 3.5G network in Ghana. Available at http://www.telecommagazine.com/article.asp?HH_ID=AR_4680.

Sutherland, E. (2009). Counting customers, subscribers and mobile phone numbers. info, 11(2), 6-23.

Wireless Federation. (January 29, 2009). MTN Ghana instigates 3.5G technology. Available at http://wirelessfederation.com/news/14217-mtn-ghana-instigates-35g-technology/.

The Economist. (January 25, 2007). Buy, cell, hold. Available at http://www.markdavies.net/press/economist/jan25_07.htm.

In the introduction to this blog series on new media practices in Brazil, I discussed how particular forms of new media embody the ethos of carnival, becoming a space where the norms of everyday life are suspended, reversed and reordered and people have a space to “forget” and reframe traditional boundaries and hierarchies. Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) have made a similar case in their working paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism”. Drawing upon the Latin American context, the authors argue that the three forms of appropriation in the region can be applied to our conceptualization of innovation and appropriation of technology. As they describe,

“At one extreme, we find cannibalism, a radical physical reaction later transformed in a cultural program. Cannibalism is appropriation trough dismembering, absorption, and chemical transformation. It appears as a reference in a Brazil’s Ministry of Culture program conceived to encourage multimedia creativity and open source tweaking. At the opposite end, baroque is a reaction of the mind. It is the appropriation of spaces through filling and layering, and generally does not imply direct confrontation. An infiltration strategy, it begins by occupying the edges, continuing to fill-in the available spaces until it makes the center marginal. In-between, creolization is appropriation through miscegenation, and detour (roundabout), through unpredictable mixing. A process, more than a condition, it does not need to be confrontational but generally leads to new power arrangements.” (Bar, Pisani and Weber 2007:15)

Drawing upon recent scholarship by Brazilian scholars as well as the work by Bar, Pisani and Weber (2007) and McCann (2008), throughout this blog series I have demonstrated how Brazilian’s new media practices reflect a commitment to the value of mixture, resistance and reversal. Examples of this include the Brazilian government’s receptivity to the integration of open source software use in the nations telecenters, the relatively laissez-faire attitude of the state towards piracy in relation to the video game industry as well as blogs, videos and sites such as Orkut and Overmundo to re-route traditional centers for the circulation and redistribution of new media. While this culture of resistance and rebellion may characterize many of the ways in which new media practices and discourse emerge, it is also evident that there are other media spaces where the freedom to experiment, explore and play in a carnival-esque fashion continues to be restricted, the barriers to participation reflecting long-standing hierarchies and inequalities. For example, the creative appropriation of the mobile phone whereby low income Brazilians return calls through the use of the local phone booth reflects as much of the forced creativity that undergirds everyday strategies to survive economically as it does the telecommunications industry to penalize Brazil’s poorest citizens through the extensive tariffs on calls for users of pre-paid plans. Similarly, Recuero (personal communication) notes that sites like Orkut are as much about the display of status and popularity as they are about sociality; upper class Brazilians rarely interact in a meaningful way with residents living in favelas even when they join in the same activity. In other words, and much like studies of the practice of carnaval in Brazil reveals (see Scheper-Hughes 1993, daMatta 1991, Lewis and Pile 1996), new media practices – even of the same media – are diverse and people in different social and economic locations throughout Brazil modes of engagement often reflect these inequalities, locations and dispositions which, in turn, engenders different meaning and interpretations of these practices.

In future research, the challenge will be to understand these practices within the particular social and historical conditions of Brazil as well as their significance in relation to other media practices throughout the world. There is much about about the Brazil case that reflects innovative, if not forward-looking, policies. For example the Brazilian government’s support of open source and Creative Commons, a distinct difference from the Indian government’s recent attempt to copyright traditional yoga poses. Yet, the efficacy of Brazil’s policies are also tied to a strong state that with prominent personalities, such as Gilberto Gil, driving these efforts. Now that Gil has stepped down and President Lula is facing the end of his term in the next few years, it is unclear the extent to which these policies will continue. At the level of research, there are definite ‘gaps’ in our knowledge of new media practices. My training as an anthropologist leads me to wonder more about the informal economy that has emerged around software, video games, mobile phones and new media production. I also want to know more about the practices that are connected to and supportive of people’s participation in Orkut, blogs, LAN houses, the remix of videos and other practices that are often rendered invisible, or partial, in these online milieu. Studies – ethnographic, qualitative and otherwise—of gaming are particularly absent despite Brazil’s rich gaming culture. It is clear that theoretically-driven empirical work needs to be done to extend and challenge existing understandings of new media participation.

A final note. In our early discussions of writing for this blog series, we expressed an explicit commitment to reading the research literature of local academics in the countries we wanted to explore in greater depth. Indeed, and with a few notable exceptions, much of what we know about new media practices in Brazil emerges from Brazilian scholars. The ability to engage in these literatures the span of days and months reflects the fact that many of the scholars involved study and participate in sites such as Flickr, Twitter and Orkut. Many scholars involved in internet and new media research also make a concerted effort to publish drafts of their work online on their blogs, personal websites and other sites in Portuguese and English. Although there are sites like Babelfish and other translation services to ease this burden, access to this material rests upon the good will, generosity and (importantly) the trust of “local” scholars to translate, share and even provide feedback on the interpretation of the innovative work that has not made its way through the lengthy peer review process and into journals and books. Over the next three weeks, Mimi Ito and Daisuke Okabe will continue to follow this commitment to understanding the national and transnational perspectives of new media practices in their co-authored blog series on the new media landscape in Japan.

References:
Bar, Francois, Francis Pisani and Matthew Weber. 2007. paper “Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: baroque infiltration, creolization and cannibalism” May 15, 2007. Prepared for discussion at Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina. Convened by Fundación Telefónica in Buenos Aires, April 20-21, 2007. http://arnic.info/Papers/Bar_Pisani_Weber_appropriation-April07.pdf, Accessed May 18, 2008.

DaMatta, Roberto. 1991. Carnivals, rogues and heroes. An interpretation of the Brazilian dilemma. Notre Dame/London: University of Notre Dame Press.

Lewis, C and S. Pile. 1996. Woman, Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance. Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Volume 3, Number 1(1):23-42.

Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1993. Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.

“… te amo sms” By JGil Published Under a Creative Commons License, November 8, 2008.

Brazil possesses the largest mobile phone industry in the Latin American region and the sixth largest mobile phone market in the world (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006; Barrantes and Halperin 2008, Tigre 2008).  As I discussed in the introduction to Brazil, there are 140.79 million mobile phone subscribers spread among 9 operators who receive licenses on a national and regional basis, the most popular being Vivo, a company owned by Telefónica and Portugal Telecom, with 45 million subscribers as of December 2008. 86.6 per cent of subscribers use GSM. ITU numbers suggest that as early as 2003 there were more mobile phones in Brazil than landlines (see also Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006:16-17). Although penetration rates in Brazil have historically been lower than other countries in Latin America – according to Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey (2006:10) in 2004 penetration rates were around 36 per cent compared with 62 per cent penetration rate in the smaller nation of Chile – in September 2008 the mobile phone penetration rate was 73.2 per cent, a number that signals significant growth in a four to five year time span. 81.1 per cent of the entire mobile phone market is prepaid. Within this context, the youth market represents an important and potentially powerful segment of the current subscribers. According to De Chiara (2004), 40 per cent of new mobile phone subscribers were under the age of 25 and, given the relatively youthful age of Brazil’s population, this number is expected to grow. In today’s blog post, I will be focusing upon mobile phone practices in Brazil as they are shaped by a variety of factors, including class, income, geography and other forms of social location. In addition, I explore the economic dimensions of the mobile phone, with particular attention to the ways in which the integration of mobile phones throughout Brazilian may be contributing to issues of economic development.

Modernity, Distinction and the Mobile Phone

Reflecting what are seen as the two extremes of Brazilian society, academic and popular research on mobile phones in Brazil tends to focus upon the differences between the two segments of Brazilian society—wealthy elite whose consumer tastes tend to reflect interests, tastes and lifestyles of their North American, European and Japanese counterparts (Wilska and Pedrozo 2007) and the lower income areas of Brazil. de Souza e Silva notes that among the highest income populations (primarily located in Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo), features such as video, cameras and internet access are increasingly popular, but there remain limitations in the types of phones available and the ability to use these features given that mobile phones are expensive and high cell phone tariffs have made the use of cell phones in Brazil one of the most expensive in Latin America (Barrantes and Halperin 2008). As de Souza e Silva characterizes the situation:,

“All these examples show that although high-end services are available, or at least in developmental phase, they still target a very small portion of the population, providing evidence that even within the high-income population, cell phones are still mostly used for voice communication. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that when we look at usage of these high-end services, we are talking about less than 1% of the population.”

Nascimento (2004) also notes that both ownership and ownership of phones with the latest features serves as a means of social distinction among wealthier high school students, possession being the display of status (cited in Silva 2006, see also Nicolaci-da-Costa 2006).  However, parents of wealthy teens also note that provisioning a mobile phone can also be done for safety; among the wealthiest Brazilians, the fear of kidnapping children and holding them for ransom is common and the mobile phone is viewed as a way to keep connected to their children (and other family members), although indications that mobiles are also an incentive for petty theft (BBC2 2006, Osava 2009).

While their phones may lack the latest features, concerns about status also underpin many lower income Brazilians motivation to obtain a mobile phone. For example, Silva (2008), who is conducting research in Florianopolis, Bar (personal communication) and de Souza e Silva (2007) note that the acquisition of a mobile is particularly significant in according a sense of being modern. Because living without a mobile or with an older model mobile is a source of embarrassment and shame, many low income Brazilians will make significant sacrifices to obtain a phone. Some individuals in Silva’s ongoing study in southern Brazil have been so driven to keep up-to-date with the latest phones and fashions that they exchange their mobiles on an annual basis, despite the fact they often never use it.  Many of the participants in her study keep very little credit on their phone and only use it to receive phone calls. According to Osava (2009), “Nearly 81 percent of cell phones in Brazil use the pre-paid calls systems, and a large proportion are used only to receive incoming calls, because their owners never, or hardly ever, purchase phone cards. Therefore the cost of these cell phones was limited to the initial outlay when they were bought. Market researchers Frost and Sullivan (2006) estimate that pre-paid subscribers talk four times less than post-paid subscribers and many Brazilians use the phone to make a call, but drop the connection akin to what Donner (2007) has described as “flashing” or “beeping” in Ghana, Uganda and other contexts. Often when low income Brazilians receive a call, they look at the recorded number and use a public phone to return the call in order to avoid the cost of purchasing a new phone card (Silva 2008, Frost and Sullivan 2006). In some cases, sharing phones has also been noted (de Souza e Silva 2007).

One of the significant differences in the use of mobile phones in Brazil is the difference between mobility and connectivity. In many parts of the United States, East Asia and Europe, mobile phones have been celebrated for the mobility they enable (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda 2005, Ling 2004, Jain 2002). Because fixed line telephony has always been expensive and, for the lowest income populations, almost inaccessible without the use of illegal electrical and telephone connections (see de Souza e Silva 2007), few individuals articulate the value of the mobile phone to the functionality of mobility. Rather, and as we have seen elsewhere in the global south (Donner 2008, Horst and Miller 2006), the mobile telephone is critical for the connectivity it enables. In other words, while the mobile phone complements and extends ones connectivity among high income Brazilians, the mobile phone is the sole form of communication among low income Brazilians (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006). What does appear to be unique about the Brazilian case is the extent to which people still rely upon the existing public infrastructure, particularly pay phones, as an important mode of communication. As Bar (personal communication), Silva (2007) and others have noted, this reflects the mobile telecommunications continued commitment to encouraging subscriptions via phone plans and high-end services.

Economic Benefits of the Mobile Phone

“carregadores e baterias” Photo by fbar March 17, 2007. Published under a Creative Commons License.
Throughout the world mobile phones have had important implications for work and the management of time between home and workspaces. Indeed, Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey ’s (2006) recent volume on mobile communication throughout the world devotes an entire chapter to examining how the mobile phone has changed the relationship between these two dominant spheres of life. Within the global south, a significant amount of attention continues to be directed towards the implications of the mobile phones to contribute to income generation (e.g. Donner 2006, Hammond and Prahalad 2004, Horst and Miller 2006, Jenson 2007).  Francois Bar [fn 1] is conducting research in Brazil on motorbike couriers in Sao Paulo. Bar (personal communication) estimates that there are anywhere from 160,000 to 500, 000 large and small-scale couriers in the city who use their mobile phones to coordinate work in the congested streets of Brazil’s business capital. Primarily young and male, the majority of motorbike couriers work for a range of small and large companies. One of the issues that Bar’s ongoing work explores is the extent to which phone plans reflect and/or shape the economic benefits of being a motorbike courier. As Bar describes, young male motorbike couriers own mobile phones on a pre-paid basis and spend their days waiting for a call from a potential employer. This means that they remain completely dependent on a potential employer to facilitate contact and maintain communication. Notably, those with post-paid phone plans are usually more successful economically than their pre-paid counterparts because they can initiate contact and, in some instance, begin to develop relationships with other couriers who they trust to complete a particular job that is not convenient due to time or distance.

Depending on one’s perspective, the economic benefits of the mobile phone is also reflected in the emergence of an informal economy around the theft, refurbishment, resale and circulation of stolen mobile phones. Indeed, many residents of favelas only purchase phones from individuals in the community who traffic in the theft of stolen and cloned mobile phones. This practice became particularly common with the emergence of Global System for Mobile Communication (GSM) that enables users to move SIM cards between devices (de Souza e Silva 2007). In July of 2003, the Brazilian government mandated that all phones should be registered in an effort to prevent cloning of mobile phones (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006) and de Souza e Silva (2007) notes that in 2005 there were efforts to create an “integrated system” whereby phones could not be activated or re-activated in a different state, or by a different operator. A testament to the success of this informal industry, mobile phones made the list of the top items stolen in Brazil in 2007.

Conclusion
While the maintenance of social connections has been highlighted in the foundational work on mobile phones, there are a number of practices in Brazil that have the potential to add new dimensions to the foundational literature on the mobile phones. For example, the continued reliance on voice amongst Brazilians is attributed to cost such as high subscription rates and phone calls. de Souza e Silva (2007) notes that there are difficulties in defining mobile phone culture in Brazil as the formal measures and the division of units of analysis into states or federacions in Brazil often overlook or diminish socioeconomic disparities, such as rural-urban distinctions within states as well as the complex social geography prevalent in Brazil. For example, in some regions mobile phones are actually cheaper and easier to maintain given the cost of maintaining landlines. These distinctions not only reflect geography and population density as well as social and historical variations in different regions of Brazil. For example, in contrast to other regions of Brazil where people tend to make calls to family who live nearby, many mobile phone users living in regions where migration is common more frequently use their phones to call people in other states or regions. For example, Frost and Sullivan (2006) note that in the state of Bahía, “more than half of rural mobile telephony users make calls to other regions of the country; while close to 80% receive calls from other areas” (32). In addition, in the capital Brasilia, mobile phone penetration rates are quite high and recent estimates suggest that there are more mobile phones than people (Castells, Fernandez-Ardevol, Qiu and Sey 2006; Silva 2007), a trend which is likely due to the presence of the Brazilian government as well as the ease with which cell phone towers could be integrated within the planned town which is shaped like an airplane (some describe it as a butterfly). In effect, the existing case studies of mobile phone practices in Brazil are interesting precisely because they push back at our understandings of the nature of mobile phone and mediated communication as well as the relationship between place and mobile phones, challenging our understanding of traditional markers of difference (e.g. rural and urban, suburban, urban as well as upper and lower class) may or may not be relevant categories of distinction within Brazil and in other locations throughout the world.

fn 1: Francois Bar chairs the Research Working Group for Investigating the Social and Economic Impact of Public Access to Information and Communication Technology (IPAI) is a five-year, CAD $7.2-million research project sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.ipairesearch.org. He is also involved in the project Comunicaciones Móviles y Desarrollo en América Latina (CMDAL), with support from Fundación Telefónica. In this project he is working with Manuel Castells, Hernán Galperin and Mireia Fernandez-Ardevol.

References:
Bar, Francois. Personal Communication. Interview Los Angeles, CA October 22, 2008.

Barrantes, Roxana and Hernan Galperin. 2008. Can the poor afford mobile telephony? Evidence from Latin America. Telecommunications Policy 32 (2008) 521–530

BBC2. 2006. Brazil’s Evolving Kidnap Culture. BBC2 Online 13 April 2006. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/this_world/4898554.stm, Accessed February 2, 2009.

De Chiara, Marcia (2004) ‘Pequenos e Poderosos Ditadores do consumo’ (Small and
Powerful Dictators of Consumption), O Estado de São Paulo, 30 May, 2004, B, p. 4.

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