Elisa Oreglia

The Myth of Market Price Information: Mobile Phones and the Application of Economic Knowledge in ICTD

Abstract The notion that farmers use mobile phones to acquire market price information has become a kind of shorthand for the potential of this technology to empower rural, low-income populations in the Global South. We argue that the envisioned consequences of ‘market price information’ for market efficiency with benefits at all income levels is a kind of myth, one frequently promulgated in the publications of aid agencies like the World Bank, in the project reports of NGOs and by mass media outlets such as The Economist, but is also the subject of serious discussion among scholars. We show that ‘market price information’ has become a kind of boundary object recast across the expert cultures of economics, computer science, policy work and development expertise. We draw from our ethnographic work (among rural agriculturalists in China and Uganda) to offer four alternatives to this myth.

Learning from marginalized users: reciprocity in HCI4D

Users in the developing world continue to appropriate information and communication technologies (ICTs) in pioneering ways resulting in innovations such as M-Pesa, the popular mobile money transfer system developed in Kenya. M-Pesas success demonstrates the emergence of user-centered innovative applications in resource-constrained settings. The goals of our workshop are twofold: 1) to uncover more of these examples and 2) to discuss how they can influence design in developed countries.

ICT, Intermediaries, and the Transformation of Gendered Power Structures

Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are believed to hold much potential to empower women, both socially and economically, in low-income and rural communities. In this paper, we focus on rural women who mediate ICT use as telecenter operators in India and as helpers and enablers for family members in rural China. We explore under what circumstances they may be able to renegotiate existing gendered power structures. We argue that acts of reconciling or confronting these different spaces they inhabit can allow intermediaries to remake their own identities and positions in their community. This process, rather than the potential associated with ICTs, is where spaces for empowerment often lie.

Studying the Sent-Down Internet: roundtable on research methods

WB: Rural people make sense of things in their own contexts, which researchers from urban areas usually do not understand in the first place. Back in 2002, when I was doing fieldwork in Renshou County, Sichuan Province, I was shocked to see the local cable TV channel “broadcast” online news. They cut and pasted pure text from Internet news sites such as Sina, and then showed it on a special channel 24 hours a day. Information from Sina thus entered the contexts of ordinary rural families, now all equipped with TV sets. This was something urban people wouldn’t understand without being in the field. A second challenge is, who sets the standard? Researchers often bring a rigid set of standards from cities, from their own experiences, about what’s “advanced technology” and what’s “backward.” They apply these standards with little respect for rural experiences, become judgmental, and miss important things. Rural people may also fabricate answers to please the researchers, telling them that they go online often when it is not true. A third challenge is gender sensitivity. The tremendous gender inequality that characterizes rural areas (in addition to other forms of inequality) is also beyond imagining for inexperienced urban researchers. All of these challenges boil down to one point: how can we recognize, in a way that remains true to its (rural) context, new modes of what I call “media convergence from below”?

The “Sent-Down” Internet: using information and communication technologies in rural China

A common view of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) use in rural China is that it is sporadic, entertainment-driven, and scarcely proficient – when it exists at all. Despite the State’s successful efforts to build infrastructure, and despite a large number of policies, subsidies, and other types of support to bring connectivity and devices to rural areas, rural residents are still lagging behind their urban counterparts, and even more so when they happen to be older and female. They lack technical skills, they consider themselves too old or too young to use the Internet, they do not find content and applications that are of interest for their (rural) lives, or they say they do not have the time to be online (as an example, see the answers to the “reasons for non-use” question in The 33rd Statistical Report on Internet Development in China, 2014). This is a view that is popular in the press and among the public, and not unusual in academic discourses surrounding the digital divide in China. However, it downplays two important facts. The first is that the parameters of what it means to “go online” and “use ICTs” are set by urban users (and researchers), who have their own understanding of what constitutes legitimate and appropriate use. This becomes the normative way of going online, and behaviors that deviate from it are not accounted for, and sometimes not even recognized as instances of using ICTs. The second is the scarcity of actual research on rural areas, whether qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Broad conclusions, which usually fit existing stereotypes of the countryside as a backward counterpart of the developed city, are drawn from small samples, from localized and partial findings, or from surveys that omit important questions or simply fail to ask appropriate ones. This Special Issue comes in response to such views. It does not focus on what is not happening, nor only on the obstacles to access and use ICTs that do exist in rural areas. Instead, it sets out to show the multitude of ICT uses that are happening in rural areas, the different ways rural residents define, understand, and act out going online, and the bridges that are being created by ICTs between urban and rural areas. The papers focus on issues that are critical in contemporary rural China: migration and the role of ICT in bridging (or not) the urban-rural gap; efforts to use ICT and education to develop the countryside; projects by urban-based NGOs that seek to unite rural and urban residents in common causes; and in general the role that ICTs should play in the government’s efforts, and do play in people’s actual lives. Even though the focus is mostly on today’s China, these themes have long historical