Mobile Technology and Social Transformations

Access to Knowledge in Global Contexts

Stefanie Felsberger, Ramesh Subramanian, Stefanie Felsberger, Ramesh Subramanian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000375213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Gestion de l'information

This book investigates the ways in which the mobile telephone has transformed societies around the world, bringing both opportunities and challenges. At a time when knowledge and truth are increasingly contested, the book asks how mobile technology has changed the ways in which people create, disseminate, and access knowledge.

Worldwide, mobile internet access has surpassed desktop access, and it is estimated that by 2022 there will be AN excess of 6 billion mobile phone users in the world. This widespread proliferation raises all sorts of questions around who creates knowledge, how is that knowledge shared and proliferated, and what are the structural political, economic, and legal conditions in which knowledge is accessed. The practices and power dynamics around mobile technologies are location specific. They look different depending on whether one chooses to highlight the legal, social, political, or economic context. Bringing together scholars, journalists, activists and practitioners from around the world, this book embraces this complexity, providing a multifaceted picture that acknowledges the tensions and contradictions surrounding accessing knowledge through mobile technologies.

With case studies from Hong Kong, South Korea, India, Syria, Egypt, Botswana, Brazil, and the US, this book provides an important account of the changing nature of our access to knowledge, and is key reading for students, researchers, activists and policy makers with an interest in technology and access to knowledge, communication, social transformation, and global development.

1

Introduction

Mobile Technologies and Access to Knowledge

Ramesh Subramanian and Stefanie Felsberger

Mobile phones have become nearly ubiquitous both at the margins and the centers of capitalism. Today they are essential means of communicating, accessing and sharing information, navigation, participating in society, organizing social movements, spreading information (and disinformation), and of participating in the digital economy. Mobile phones are used for disparate purposes such as accessing information, downloading movies and music, performing financial transactions, conducting business, education, art, and other creative endeavors. They play a part in rendering humanitarian assistance in disasters, circumventing censorship and information blockades, and in organizing popular revolutions and protests. The use of multifarious applications of mobile phones has contributed to development, democratization, human rights, and financial inclusion. At the same time, this technology has provided many new avenues for tracking and controlling people’s communication and movements. Often tracking is even part of the solution to problems these technologies offer. A prominent example is the tracking of the spread of a disease. Mobile technologies have led to the commodification of people’s everyday activities and an erosion of privacy rights, the consequences of which are still unfolding. Yet phones have also provided more privacy to people whose life takes place in close quarters which do not allow for privacy in the home. Mobile phones have helped to provide access to information to many people but have also enabled the spread of misinformation and propaganda. Mobile phones have contributed to the empowerment of women yet have also enabled new avenues for control and surveillance of women’s activities. In short, mobile phones can be a lifeline but at the same time the information on your phone can put your life at risk.

The Internet revolution that began in the 1990s, and the virtual public spheres that emerged from that, gave a major impetus to the global Access to Knowledge (A2K) movement. With global Internet working, knowledge and information that was until then difficult to access or simply kept away from peoples’ reach was suddenly accessible to infinitely more people who had a connection to the Internet. The Internet became a primary carrier for global information exchange. Initially restricted to fixed-line communications networks, within a short time the Internet was extended to wireless networks—a development that vastly improved accessibility, especially in those in countries that did not have mature fixed-line communications infrastructures. Many countries catapulted themselves to the Internet age by leapfrogging over wired onto wireless communications technologies. Some countries, such as India, explored new wireless technologies that were more adaptable to local conditions (Subramanian 2011). These moves, along with an ever-increasing computing power of mobile devices, reductions in costs, as well as innovations in mobile applications development, heralded the mobile communications revolution starting in the late 1990s. Knowledge was accessible through a device that fit into a person’s back-pocket or handbag.

Indeed, a case can be made that access to the Internet has only reached such high levels primarily due to Web-enabled mobile phones. Mobile phones with Internet access arrived in 1996 in Finland through the Nokia 9000 Communicator phone (Microsoft Devices Team 2009). This was followed by the Web-enabled i-mode from Japan in 1999 (Mallon 2013). And since 2007, when the first “smartphones” arrived, the world has seen an accelerated shift from fixed-line Internet access to mobile web access. In January 2014, mobile Internet access exceeded desktop Internet access in the United States (McCullough 2014). The 2017 Virtual Network Index (VNI) Report from Cisco forecast that there will be 5.7 billion global mobile users (71 percent of the population) by 2023 (Cisco 2017).

Given these statistics and the many uses of phones, it is not surprising that the mobile phone is so widely accepted and has become indispensable to many—but not all—people. The phone’s phenomenal growth is matched only by the growth of global broadband Internet applications. Today’s mobile phones have become veritable extensions to the human body. Mobile phones with even minimal broadband capabilities have become a key access points to information for all people around the globe. Especially in the Global South, the mobile phone has become the most important gateway to the Internet for many people. In Sub-Saharan Africa mobile phone penetration rates fluctuate around 75 percent and the African continent shows the fastest growing rate of mobile phone adoption (Archambault 2017, 1). Despite these numbers, large parts of the global population do not have access to mobile technology or the Internet and significant gaps in mobile penetration rates within countries and between different regions remain. These divides between who has access to technology run along gender, class, and race divisions.

The undisputable success story of the spread of mobile phones can also be understood within the context of the promises and hopes for change that are attributed to this technology. The origin of these hopes lies in the “putative link between ICT and socioeconomic development” (Archambault 2017, 2): the phone is believed to be more than a means to vastly improve communication infrastructures. In addition, the mobile technologies are believed to allow developing countries to catapult themselves to the Internet age by leapfrogging over wired onto wireless communications technologies (Muchie and Baskaran 2006, Nielinger 2006, Subramanian 2011). Especially in developmentalist imaginaries but also in Tech4Good narratives situated in the Global North, mobile technologies are imbued with the potential to drive socio-economic development. Mobile technology was cast as panacea to the many problems in developing and developed countries: access to healthcare, economic inequality, tracing diseases, gender inequality, climate change, and lack of democracy. In recent years, more emphasis has been placed on the transformative potential of information rather than mobile phones themselves (Archambault 2017, Robins and Webster 1999). Within this framework, socio-economic development can be fostered through the provision of access to “useful information” which can range from information related to education, health, different markets, or governance (Archambault 2017, Burell 2008, Slater and Kwami 2005). For example, access to health-related information can improve health care provision (Breslauer et al. 2009, Crentsil 2013), and information related to civil rights can support democratization. Better access to market information is said to boost entrepreneurship (Jensen 2007). The latter is part of a larger shift where “entrepreneurship and innovation [are seen] as engines of development” (Irani 2019, 5). Mobile phones here play the key role of the infrastructure through which this information and knowledge is accessed.

As has already been pointed to earlier, mobile phones do not just have the potential to drive socio-economic development but the consequences of their use and adoption are much more complex. Araba Sey (2011) in her study on the adoption of mobile payphones in Ghana shows that the introduction of mobile payphones did not benefit small entrepreneurs and led to an overall decline of the industry. Mobile technologies also allow for tighter controls during elections according to Aker, Collier, and Vicente (2011) and provide means to spread ethnically motivated hatred (Osborn 2008). Governments across the globe have repeatedly shut down entire communication networks in an attempt to undermine people’s use of mobile phones to organize protests. What becomes clear from these dichotomies is that mobile technologies and access to information can be invested with all the transformative potential but, in the end, daily practices and encounters of people with this technology as well as the socio-political and economic context ends up shaping use of information and adoption of technology (Archambault 2017, 4). Don Slater and Janet Kwami’s study (2005) on the use of mobile phones in Accra, Ghana, provides an important reminder that despite phones’ potential to provide useful information, they found that phones were mainly used for everyday mundane conversations.

This leads us to why this book is important: both access to technologies and access to knowledge are imbued with promises for positive social change, but it is important to see how stories in concrete contexts actually unfold. In addition, mobile technologies and the politics of accessing information are part and parcel of many current debates in Internet governance and global debates about economic development, democracy, and inequality. From questions about free speech to debates about the end of privacy, from celebrations of the power of machine learning to warnings about its dangers, from Google, Uber and Facebook’s meteoric rise to the erosion of workers’ rights, from the Arab Spring to the Snowden revelations and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, mobile phones and Access to Knowledge have played a crucial role. Yet the specifics of the role they play have not been systematically and specifically addressed. Given the powerful and ubiquitous role that mobile telephony plays in today’s world, there is an imperative to document its varied roles in multiple contexts. That is our primary aim for bringing out this volume.

The idea for this project was born at the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP) and the Access to Knowledge for Development Center (A2K4D) at the American University in Cairo, both members of Access to Knowledge Global Academy, a network of scholars at institutions in Brazil, China, Egypt, India, South Africa, and the United States dedicated to promoting academic scholarship, research, and policy analysis on access to knowledge issues for information-poor communities. The book explores mobile telephony as the source of opportunities and challenges, especially with respect to access and control. How have the ways in which people access knowledge changed when this access is mediated through mobile technology? What are the consequences for either socio-economic development or democracy as they play out in each context and for each case study?

Framework: access to knowledge

Access to knowledge is essentially the right of an individual to participate in the creation, distribution, and acquisition of raw information, secondary analyses of data, and knowledge-embedded tools and services (ISP, Yale Law School n.d.). A2K focuses on the value of openness—open access to all types of information and hence knowledge. This focus has important ramifications on a variety of policy issues, such as freedom of expression, development, democratization, access to government information, access to education and scholarship, access to products that directly affect the health and well-being of peoples across the world, access to traditional knowledge, open communications standards, as well as issues that pertain to intellectual property, such as patents and copyrights.

Previous books published by the A2K Global Academy have focused on country-specific analyses, i.e. of Brazil (2008), Egypt (2010), and India (2011). These volumes were followed in 2015 by a more global-focused book on global censorship. The current volume continues in this vein by addressing mobile technologies and A2K on a global scale. As explained by Lea Shaver (Shaver 2011, 3), the A2K perspective asks some simple questions, which are: As innovation progresses, who is able to benefit from it and who is not? Who gets in the door and who is left outside? And will barriers to access, and control, actually have a negative impact, not only on those individuals who cannot access such knowledge, but also on economic growth and future innovation? From this perspective, the A2K perspective and its policies fall within the framework of the right to science and culture—a right that is recognized in Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (United Nations 1948).

Nevertheless, this book’s framework is not human rights or development, but Access to Knowledge. In our understanding, while not separate, they are different lenses through which different questions come to the fore. For us, A2K speaks to but also goes beyond a strictly rights-based approach, because the framework allows us to analyze who has the material abilities to participate in knowledge creation and the knowledge economy. The question also becomes who can produce knowledge, who has the abilities to use the new technologies--such as mobile phones--to access and produce knowledge that is valuable to their context. This opens our analysis to the structural political, economic, and legal conditions in which knowledge is accessed as well as questions of infrastructures, such as mobile technologies. A2K (and its relationship with development or socio-economic opportunities) brings to the fore questions about power and participation. This book, therefore, explores mobile telephony as a source of opportunities and challenges, especially with respect to access and control: who is allowed to participate, whose access is curtailed for the benefit of whom, does access to knowledge and technology lead to more participation in society?

Practices and power dynamics around mobile technologies and A2K are particular to each location and look different whether one chooses to highlight the legal, social, political, or economic context. The application, regulation, and use of mobile technologies are multi-faceted and this book hopes to shine a light on as many of these aspects as possible. Therefore, this book brings together scholars, journalists, activists, and other subject-matter experts, in a wide-ranging set of chapters that collectively explore Access to Knowledge on the world’s mobile phone networks. This book is situated at the intersection of several academic disciplines. Scholars studying development, communications, technology or media, as well as journalists, practitioners in development, and members of civil society fill find this book useful. The authors who have contributed to this book also come from such a diverse background and work from within different assumptions and frameworks: while some focus on the potential for positive socio-economic change, others focus on the potential dangers for control and loss of privacy. But they are all bound together by their focus on access to knowledge. It was important to us as editors to bring together this diversity in approaches to studying mobile technologies in order to reflect the also very different experiences and consequences that unfold across the globe through the use of mobile phones. In this sense, this book is unique in that it provides a very multifaceted picture of mobile technologies that aims to present the contradicting consequences of accessing knowledge through mobile technologies. These tensions and contradictions are explored in more detail in the conclusion of this volume.

Book structure

While soliciting authors, we we...