content analysis

Americans live in a state of abject cell phone poverty.  Of course, there are much worse kinds of poverty: economic, moral, spiritual.   However, I think that this state of affairs speaks volumes about the kind of society we live and the risks it faces in the future.

As I noted in “cell phone meets world, pt. 1″ yesterday, the developing world is embracing the cell phone and quickly adopting and developing a wide variety of new ways to use them.  In nearly all parts of the post-industrial world other than the U.S. (most particularly Europe and Japan), the mobile phone is (and has been for years) essentially a mini-computer.  It is capable of advanced word-processing, playing video and images, surfing the internet, and nearly everything else a real computer does.  Text messaging is normal part of everyday professional and personal life.  They can be linked to one’s bank account and swiped at stores (like a debit card).  They have built-in camera as good as some single function cameras.  They travel between countries with no problem.  And the look cool, really cool.  Whereas Americans use mobile phones essentially as phone with a few bonuses, people in other countries carry around multi-purpose, tiny computers.  Probably most irritating to your average American locked into a 75 year Verizon contract costing $100 a month, is that cell phones aren’t costing anybody else nearly as much.

There are many reasons for this disparity.  First, American cell phone companies use antiquated network technology and lock consumers into using one phone on one service (for more on the technical issues, read here).  Second, though the U.S. cell phone market is highly competitive, the fact that companies lock consumers into monthly plans and multi-year contracts essentially gives one company a monopoly over the individual.  By contrast, in Europe, consumers pay the actual cost of a phone, buy pay-as-you-go cards at fairly affordable rates, and can switch between companies at anytime.  This results in far more competitive pay-as-you-go rates.  (Additionally, Europeans don’t pay for incoming calls, unlike us stateside dopes).

Because the cell service companies have such a stranglehold on marketplace and even the models of the phones, they have kept many new technologies from coming out on the U.S. market.  Cell phone makers like Nokia, LG, Samsung, and others are currently producing a wide variety of cool phone technologies that Americans don’t have because Verizon, At&T, and Cingular require very specific specs for their network-specific models of each phone.

This free market disaster — in which Americans don’t have access to the best available technologies because of the capacity of companies to control the availability in an unregulated fashion — is typical of the kind of society we have today.  Because of the unwillingness of political elites to intervene, regulate, and encourage good behavior among corporations, we see American slipping behind the rest of the developed world.  The same is true of environmental technologies like wind power.  Unlike so many European nations, the U.S. government has done very, very little to encourage the development of such technologies or to help companies make environmental options (like residential solar products) consumer-friendly.

Our free market dogmatism — a resistance to regulating in pro-consumer ways — has undoubtedly left us in the dust of Europe and Japan in the realm of cell phone technology.  The same pigheadedness could have far more serious repercussions in other domains.

One of the most informative articles I’ve read recently appeared in the New York Times magazine and focused on the work of Jan Chipchase. Chipchase is a sort of applied anthropologist for cell phone maker Nokia (he calls himself a “human-behavior researcher” or “user anthropologist”). He travels the world studying cell phone usage in an effort to give designers better information on how to improve the product. However, unlike most market researchers, Chipchase’s findings can tell us a lot about global inequalities and how the world is changing.Below, I will give three examples of his findings:

1. A cell phone is the first phone many people will use. As people in a society where the telephone (landline and otherwise) is such an importance part of commerce, personal relationships, and nearly every aspect of everyday life, it seems like a stunning revelation that until very recently, much of the world could not communicate instantaneously.  In the rest of the world, there has been little way (and often little reason) to quickly communicate over great distances. The introduction of cell phone, which requires much less infrastructure than landlines and which offers affordable modes of communicating like the text message, now allows people in undeveloped nations to communicate in new ways.  Doctors can send reminders to patients to take medications.  Or as the article says, “farmers would bring their vegetables to a local person with a mobile phone, who then acted as a commissioned sales agent, using the phone to check market prices and arranging for the most profitable sale.” The potential to advance commerce, health, and relief efforts after natural disasters are tremendous.  At the same time, the great potential for drug cartels, gun-runners, and warlords to exploit the technology for destructive ends is quite troubling.

2. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people keep their cell phones in plastic bags to protect from “pummeling rains.” People who do not have the basics of modern life as we know it – electricity, shelter protected from the weather, running water – now own cell phones (Chipchase uses this information to suggest remedies such as water-proof features). What astonishes me about this is the capacity for change if westerners are motivated. Because there is a commercial incentive for western cell phone makers to sell to people in developing nations, we see 3.3 billion cell phone users worldwide. At the same time, since there is little incentive to improve housing for these people, the people with cell phones in the Dharavi slum have pools of water in their homes.

3. In Bangladesh, people have found informal ways to transfer money using phones. In many small towns, a “phone lady” will have a cell phone which she lets people use for the cost of the minutes plus a small fee. If someone working in the city wants to transfer money to his mother in a small village, s/he would buy cell minutes give the “phone lady” the access code and then the “phone lady” would give the mother cash (minus a small fee). We are living through a moment when our technologies have greater potential than our minds can currently envision. For quite some time to come, we will sudden bursts of creativity as people discover ways to change facets of society using existing technology. These “backdoor” money transfers will almost certainly give way to official, regulated money transfers. More automated text messaging will become available. Soon farmers will not call or text grocers to give prices, but will simply maintain live data (on something like a cell phone web page) that a variety of grocers can check.

These advancements will come from developing nations and be refined and institutionalized in western nations. And on all these advancements, Americans will be the last to know (see part 2 tomorrow). That’s because only in places with no alternatives will people find ways to make do. In a country gluttonous with landlines, cell phones, radios, satellite radio, BlackBerrys, WiFi, television, a trillion web sites, we can choose to ignore the potential of each technology. In places without this communicative wealth, they need to get the most of out what they have.