Broadband may be East Africa’s 21st century railway to the world

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa.

by Mark Graham 17/11/2014

Connecting 21st-century Africa takes more than just railways and roads. Steve Song, CC BY-NC-SA

Reposted from The Conversation. The excitement over the potentially transformative effects of the internet in low-income countries is nowhere more evident than in East Africa—the last major populated region of the world to gain a wired connection to the internet. Before 2009, there wasn’t a single fibre-optic cable connecting the region to the rest of the world. After hundreds of millions of dollars of investment, cables were laid to connect the region to the global network. Prices for internet access went down, speeds went up, and the number of internet users in the region skyrocketed. Politicians, journalists and academics all argued that better connectivity would lead to a blossoming of economic, social, and political activity—and a lot of influential people in the region made grand statements. For instance, former Kenyan president Mwai Kibai stated: I am gratified to be with you today at an event of truly historic proportions. The landing of this fibre-optic undersea cable project in Mombasa is one of the landmark projects in Kenya’s national development story. Indeed some have compared this to the completion of the Kenya-Uganda railway more than a century ago. This comparison is not far-fetched, because while the economies of the last century were driven by railway connections, the economies of today are largely driven by internet. The president of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, also spoke about the revolutionary potentials of these changes in connectivity. He claimed: In Africa, we have missed both the agricultural and industrial revolutions and in Rwanda we are determined to take full advantage of the digital revolution. This revolution is summed up by the fact that it no longer is of utmost importance where you are but rather what you can do – this is of great benefit to traditionally marginalised regions and geographically isolated populations. As many who have studied politics have long since noted, proclamations like these can have an important impact: they frame how scarce resources can be…

Development, Economics

Investigating virtual production networks in Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded.

by Mark Graham 03/11/2014

Ed: You are looking at the structures of ‘virtual production networks’ to understand the economic and social implications of online work. How are you doing this? Mark: We are studying online freelancing. In other words this is digital or digitised work for which professional certification or formal training is usually not required. The work is monetised or monetisable, and can be mediated through an online marketplace. Freelancing is a very old format of work. What is new is the fact that we have almost three billion people connected to a global network: many of those people are potential workers in virtual production networks. This mass connectivity has been one crucial ingredient for some significant changes in how work is organised, divided, outsourced, and rewarded. What we plan to do in this project is better map the contours of some of those changes and understand who wins and who doesn’t in this new world of work. Ed: Are you able to define what comprises an individual contribution to a ‘virtual production network’—or to find data on it? How do you define and measure value within these global flows and exchanges? Mark: It is very far from easy. Much of what we are studying is immaterial and digitally-mediated work. We can find workers and we can find clients, but the links between them are often opaque and black-boxed. Some of the workers that we have spoken to operate under non-disclosure agreements, and many actually haven’t been told what their work is being used for. But that is precisely why we felt the need to embark on this project. With a combination of quantitative transaction data from key platforms and qualitative interviews in which we attempt to piece together parts of the network, we want to understand who is (and isn’t) able to capture and create value within these networks. Ed: You note that “within virtual production networks, are we seeing a shift…

Development, Economics

Outside the cities and towns, rural Britain’s internet is firmly stuck in the 20th century

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention.

by Bianca Reisdorf 20/10/2014

Reposted from The Conversation. The quality of rural internet access in the UK, or lack of it, has long been a bone of contention. The government says “fast, reliable broadband” is essential, but the disparity between urban and rural areas is large and growing, with slow and patchy connections common outside towns and cities. The main reason for this is the difficulty and cost of installing the infrastructure necessary to bring broadband to all parts of the countryside—certainly to remote villages, hamlets, homes and farms, but even to areas not classified as “deep rural” too. A countryside unplugged As part of our project Access Denied, we are interviewing people in rural areas, both very remote and less so, to hear their experiences of slow and unreliable internet connections and the effects on their personal and professional lives. What we’ve found so far is that even in areas less than 20 miles away from big cities, the internet connection slows to far below the minimum of 2Mb/s identified by the government as “adequate”. Whether this is fast enough to navigate today’s data-rich Web 2.0 environment is questionable. Yes… but where, exactly? Rept0n1x, CC BY-SA Our interviewees could attain speeds between 0.1Mb/s and 1.2Mb/s, with the latter being a positive outlier among the speed tests we performed. Some interviewees also reported that the internet didn’t work in their homes at all, in some cases for 60% of the time. This wasn’t related to time of day; the dropped connection appeared to be random, and not something they could plan for. The result is that activities that those in cities and towns would see as entirely normal are virtually impossible in the country—online banking, web searches for information, even sending email. One respondent explained that she was unable to pay her workers’ wages for a full week because the internet was too slow and kept cutting out, causing her online banking session to reset. Linking villages So poor quality…

Economics

Economics for Orcs: how can virtual world economies inform national economies and those who design them?

by Vili Lehdonvirta 03/07/2014

Understanding these economies is therefore crucial to anyone who is interested in the social dynamics and power relations of digital media today.

by Vili Lehdonvirta 03/07/2014

Vili discusses his new book from MIT Press (with E.Castronova): Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis.

Digital gaming, once a stigmatised hobby, is now a mainstream cultural activity. According to the Oxford Internet Survey, more than half of British Internet users play games online; more in fact, than watch films or pornography online. Most new games today contain some kind of a virtual economy: that is, a set of processes for the production, allocation, and consumption of artificially scarce virtual goods. Often the virtual economy is very simple; sometimes, as in massively multiplayer online game EVE Online, it starts to approach the scale and complexity of a small national economy. Just like national economies, virtual economies incentivise certain behaviours and discourage others; they ask people to make choices between mutually exclusive options; they ask people to coordinate. They can also propagate value systems setting out what modes of participation are considered valuable. These virtual economies are now built into many of the most popular areas of the Internet, including social media sites and knowledge commons—with their systems of artificially scarce likes, stars, votes, and badges. Understanding these economies is therefore crucial to anyone who is interested in the social dynamics and power relations of digital media today. But a question I am asked a lot is: what can ‘real’ economies and the economists who run them learn from these virtual economies? We might start by imagining how a textbook economist would approach the economy of an online game. In EVE Online, hundreds of thousands of players trade minerals, spaceship components and other virtual commodities on a number of regional marketplaces. These marketplaces are very sophisticated, resembling real commodity spot markets. Our economist would doubtless point out several ways its efficiency could be radically improved. For example, EVE players can only see prices quoted in their current region, likely missing a better deal available elsewhere. (In physical commodity markets, prices are instantly broadcast worldwide: you wouldn’t pay more for gold in Tokyo than you would in New…

Development, Economics, Politics & Government

Is China shaping the Internet in Africa?

by Iginio Gagliardone 15/08/2013

Concerns have been expressed about the detrimental role China may play in African media sectors, by increasing authoritarianism and undermining Western efforts to promote openness and freedom of expression.

by Iginio Gagliardone 15/08/2013

CAPE TOWNSOUTH AFRICA, 06MAY11 - The Panel during the Future of China-Africa Relations session held at World Economic Forum on Africa 2011 held in Cape Town, South Africa, 4-6 May 2011. Copyright (cc-by-sa) © World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org/Photo Eric Miller emiller@iafrica.com

Ed: Concerns have been expressed (e.g. by Hillary Clinton and David Cameron) about the detrimental role China may play in African media sectors, by increasing authoritarianism and undermining Western efforts to promote openness and freedom of expression. Are these concerns fair? Iginio: China’s initiatives in the communication sector abroad are burdened by the negative record of its domestic media. For the Chinese authorities this is a challenge that does not have an easy solution as they can’t really use their international broadcasters to tell a different story about Chinese media and Chinese engagement with foreign media, because they won’t be trusted. As the linguist George Lakoff has explained, if someone is told “Don’t think of an elephant!” he will likely start “summoning the bulkiness, the grayness, the trunkiness of an elephant”. That is to say, “when we negate a frame, we evoke a frame.” Saying that “Chinese interventions are not increasing authoritarianism” won’t help much. The only path China can undertake is to develop projects and use its media in ways that fall outside the realm of what is expected, creating new associations between China and the media, rather than trying to redress existing ones. In part this is already happening. For example, CCTV Africa, the new initiative of state-owned China’s Central Television (CCTV) and China’s flagship effort to win African hearts and minds, has developed a strategy aimed not at directly offering an alternative image of China, but at advancing new ways of looking at Africa, offering unprecedented resources to African journalists to report from the continent and tapping into the narrative of a “rising Africa,” as a continent of opportunities rather than of hunger, wars and underdevelopment. Ed: Ideology has disappeared from the language of China-Africa cooperation, largely replaced by admissions of China’s interest in Africa’s resources and untapped potential. Does politics (e.g. China wanting to increase its international support and influence) nevertheless still inform the relationship? China’s…

Economics, Ethics, Governance & Security

Staying free in a world of persuasive technologies

by James Williams 29/07/2013

Broadly speaking, most of the online services we think we’re using for “free”—that is, the ones we’re paying for with the currency of our attention—have some sort of persuasive design goal.

by James Williams 29/07/2013

We’re living through a crisis of distraction. Image: "What’s on my iPhone" by Erik Mallinson

Ed: What persuasive technologies might we routinely meet online? And how are they designed to guide us towards certain decisions? There’s a broad spectrum, from the very simple to the very complex. A simple example would be something like Amazon’s “one-click” purchase feature, which compresses the entire checkout process down to a split-second decision. This uses a persuasive technique known as “reduction” to minimise the perceived cost to a user of going through with a purchase, making it more likely that they’ll transact. At the more complex end of the spectrum, you have the whole set of systems and subsystems that is online advertising. As it becomes easier to measure people’s behaviour over time and across media, advertisers are increasingly able to customise messages to potential customers and guide them down the path toward a purchase. It isn’t just commerce, though: mobile behaviour-change apps have seen really vibrant growth in the past couple years. In particular, health and fitness: products like Nike+, Map My Run, and Fitbit let you monitor your exercise, share your performance with friends, use social motivation to help you define and reach your fitness goals, and so on. One interesting example I came across recently is called “Zombies, Run!” which motivates by fright, spawning virtual zombies to chase you down the street while you’re on your run. As one final example, If you’ve ever tried to deactivate your Facebook account, you’ve probably seen a good example of social persuasive technology: the screen that comes up saying, “If you leave Facebook, these people will miss you” and then shows you pictures of your friends. Broadly speaking, most of the online services we think we’re using for “free”—that is, the ones we’re paying for with the currency of our attention—have some sort of persuasive design goal. And this can be particularly apparent when people are entering or exiting the system. Ed: Advertising has been around for centuries, so…

Economics, Governance & Security

Personal data protection vs the digital economy? OII policy forum considers our digital footprints

by Vicki Nash 03/02/2011 1 Comment

The fact that data collection is now so routine and so extensive should make us question whether the regulatory system governing data collection, storage and use is fit for purpose.

by Vicki Nash 03/02/2011 1 Comment

Catching a bus, picking up some groceries, calling home to check on the children—all simple, seemingly private activities that characterise many people’s end to the working day. Yet each of these activities leaves a data trail that enables companies, even the state, to track the most mundane aspects of our lives. Add to this the range and quantity of personal data that many of us willingly post online on our blogs, Facebook walls or Google docs, and it is clear that the trail of digital footprints we leave is long and hard to erase. Even if in most cases, this data is only likely to be used in an anonymised and aggregated form to identify trends in transport or shopping patterns, or to personalise the Internet services available to us, the fact that its collection is now so routine and so extensive should make us question whether the regulatory system governing data collection, storage and use is fit for purpose. A forthcoming OII policy forum on Tracing the Policy Implications of the Future Digital Economy (16 Feb) will consider this question, bringing together leading academics from across several disciplines with policy-makers and industry experts. This is a topic which the OII is well-placed to address. Ian Brown’s Privacy Values Network project addresses a major knowledge gap, measuring the various costs and benefits to individuals of handing over data in different contexts, as without this we simply don’t know how much people value their privacy (or indeed understand its limits). The last Oxford Internet Survey (OxIS) rather surprisingly showed that in 2009 people were significantly less concerned about privacy online in the UK than in previous years (45% of all those surveyed in 2009 against 66% in 2007); we wait to see whether this finding is repeated when OxIS 2011 goes into the field next month. Our faculty also have much to say about the adequacy (or otherwise) of the regulatory framework:…