The Mobile Phone as Alien ObjectPublic discourses about (mis-)uses of mobiles in West Africa

Hans Peter Hahn, Goethe-University, Frankfurt/M.Feb., 15th 2013, „Mobile Africa Revisited“, Leiden

Content1. Introduction

2. The range of uses of mobiles

3. Why people acquire mobiles

4. Shortcomings of ethnographic research

5. Mobiles and Criminality

6. Public talks about mobiles

7. Conclusion1

Introduction

• Need to expand our understanding of mobiles.

• What is the specific “embedding” of this innovation?

• Overemphasis on functions and particular expected impacts. No evidence yet for economic impact.

• “ICT4D” is a fashionable slogan, but also a heavily biased assumption about needs and deficits of people and societies in Africa.

2

Manifesting the euphoric attitude

• Maps are established in order to indicate assumed growth effects.

• Is “underdevelopment” really a question of lack of information?

• After all: These assumptions are blinkering an extended understanding of mobiles.

3

About the range of uses of mobiles in West Africa

The motives to use a mobile phone:

• maintaining and strengthening social and family networks,

• calling one’s parents or children in town to ask them about their well-being,

• informing friends about social events,

• mobilizing members of the larger family in case of a death,

• asking for remittances,

• organizing funeral and similar events

4

Why do people acquire mobiles?

• Very often an obligation imposed by other members of the family

• Many mobiles arrive as a gift. Economic restrictions apply: Having less than one Dollar per day turns the mobile into a challenge. The rural population follows a strategy to appropriate the mobile without spending a penny for it (Hahn & Kibora 2008).

• People avoid spending money on calling. Preference for flashing. Exceptions only in cases of a death, in emergency and in need of money.

• In summary, the rule “you have to have a mobile” imposes itself on Individuals. Otherwise, people without a mobile are marked as “being backward”.

5

Problematizing the “device-character” of mobiles

The arguments I presented so far dealt with:

1. The question, why do people engage in mobile connectivity. Are the purposes related to “information plus economic benefit”, or rather to the interest of confirming social networks and mutual wellbeing?

2. The motives of acquisition are much more related to expectations of relatives and the emerging norms of keeping up with modernity or globalization.

3. The restrictions of usage in the context of extreme poverty, which require specific tactics of the owners, like reducing airtime costs by flashing, limiting calls to emergencies etc..

6

Deficits of ethnographic research

A major reason that prevents a proper reflection on the mobile is the limited consideration of its roles and functions. Reasons:

• The priority given to the individual as the user of the mobile constitutes serious problems for the appropriate understanding of the mobile.

• The scope of the research, limited to the micro level, does not sufficiently integrate findings from the level of public images of mobile phones.

7Rokia Konaté administering a questionaire during the Point Sud-Summer School in Ouagadougou (Oct. 2012)

Mobiles and Criminality

• Cars are stopped, and the passengers’ money is seized. This form of criminality happens especially on secondary roads.

• The police was not able to defeat these crimes. People suspect that former policemen are the authors of these crimes.

• The mobile has a particular place in these stories. The gangsters are believed to use information obtained by mobiles in order to select the cars worth to be stopped.

• Newspapers in Burkina Faso have reported about politicians, military officers and businessmen, who became victim of this kind of attacks.

8

Public ways of talking mobile phone related criminality

• There is no information about mobiles found in the possession of highway robbers who had been caught. Public opinion, however, believes that mobile phones are the key to this crime.

• Newspaper articles suggest that mobile phones are a prerequisite for the increasing efficiency of these acts.

• The proficiency of the gangsters is indicated by the fact, that they preferably commit their highway hold-ups at countryside “blind spots”, where the GSM network signal is not available.

• Newspapers report on successful businessmen, politicians, and even high rank military officers, who have become victims of these attacks. In the eyes of the public, the powerlessness of the state becomes visible through the cold blooded selection of the victims.

9

More (popular) misuses of mobiles (= urban legends)

• In 2011 “death call” rumors spread in Nigeria, alarming people not the accept calls from specific numbers. A phone call from 09141 might be deadly.

• The urban legend leads to the interpretation, that at least some people are prone to a supposed harmfulness of the mobile.

• Consider Parallels: In many European countries peoples are obsessed with the fear that electromagnetic waves emitted through antennas and mobiles may lead to cancer.

10

Conclusion: Persisting ambivalences

• I consider these two aspects as arguments for my hypothesis about the ambivalence of the mobile more in general.

• Currently, as cheap mobile headsets are available and airtime tariffs are falling, access to telecommunication is not a challenge any more

• But the ambivalence has not gone. Even if it not a “challenge” any more, other concerns about the power of people over the mobile, or the power of the mobile over people emerge.

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Conclusion: Mobile phones ≠ “devices for communication”

• ...because mobile phones are more than this.

• They are political and social statements about the relation of societies (in Africa) towards “how the world is going on”.

• The Ambivalence of the phone makes people hesitate. It may lead to a more skeptical approach to the new technology.

• My criticism is against the simplifying assumption of the “ICT4D”-discourse which holds that people appreciate mobile in cause of the economic benefit.

• We need a broader understanding of mobile phones transgressing the equation of the phone as a device.

12

Thank you for your attention!

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