Abstract
In his book After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet, Jonathan Donner carefully dismantles the hype around mobile Internet and its promised impact on socio-economic development in the Global South. He develops an “After Access Lens” to explain the rise of mobile Internet, its affordances and potentials for the developing world, while also realistically assessing the constraints that mobile Internet places on its users.
Donner’s book draws from a range of fields including mobile communication studies and HCI (Human Computer Interaction), but is grounded in IC4TD (Information and Communication Technologies for Development), a field that has been criticized for uncomplicatedly presenting ICTs as technological fixes while ignoring their role as amplifiers of structural inequities. Donner wants to avoid “breathless, context-free cheerleading” (p. 14), but readily admits that as someone who works on promoting inclusive digital economies, he is optimistic about the potentials of ICTs to serve as forces for progress. His argument is twofold: ICTs structure daily lives and livelihoods and therefore have to be considered in terms of development; second, ICTs are not natural, but an aggregation of design, investment and capital, and therefore understanding their potentials and limitations opens the possibility for better harnessing them.
The core argument of the book, Donner’s “After Access Lens,” identifies six features that lead to the rise of mobile Internet and also shape and constrain its use. Some of these are linked to the economics of mobile phone penetration, such as cheaper devices, usage-based pricing, and wireless connections as opposed to fixed lines that are more expensive to install. Donner believes that market forces are expanding access, as data-enabled mobile devices become more affordable, mobile networks more available, and tariffs more reasonable.
But access is merely preamble. Donner breaks down the binary notion of a digital divide between user and non-user. Instead, he reorients the discussion to gradations of use that arise due to a combination of devices—basic, feature or smart phone—and the speed of the network. He argues that the Internet accessible to a feature phone user on a 2G network, or the Internet services accessible through a basic phone using SMS, is simply not analogous to the experience of a 4G smart phone user. As a result, the content users can access, and their engagement with it, is so different that Donner argues we are not talking about a singular mobile Internet, but rather many mobile Internets.
The remaining factors in Donner’s “After Access Lens” relate to how mobile phones fit in the lives of their users. He argues that mobile phones are personal devices in a way PCs are not while partially acknowledging that they are frequently shared in the developing world. He also connects the ubiquity of the mobile phone to its role in meeting near-universal human needs—of coordination, of communication, and of consumption of media. But the last factor, that mobile phones are “task supportive,” offers a view into the structural constraints of mobile Internet.
By task supportive, Donner refers to the use of apps, as opposed to the use of browsers to access the Internet. Donner distinguishes web logic, which relates to a wide open world that could be indexed and linked by Google, from mobile logic which emphasizes dedicated platforms where information is locked. The result is a fragmentation that hampers the discoverability and interconnectedness of knowledge. Similarly, Donner notes that mobile Internet relies on locked devices and app stores with licensing requirements that centralize gatekeeping power to a handful of technology companies, which he contrasts with the “chaotic” development of the conventional Internet. In both cases, users are figured as merely consumers and restricted in their ability to create.
Finally, in terms of constrained practice, Donner uses the concept of “digital repertoire” to capture the technologies and skills employed by the users of mobile Internets. He distinguishes between mobile-only and mobile-centric (go-to device, among a few others) digital repertoires in order to draw attention to limited production scenarios possible with the former. Even the smartest mobile phone is of limited use for students doing homework, even if they can listen to lectures on their phones. A mobile phone is of limited use to an entrepreneur to establish a website. This distinction is meant to caution his intended audience of policymakers, designers, and development practitioners against thinking that a mobile-only repertoire has the same affordances as a mobile-centric repertoire.
Despite his stated optimism, the book is most incisive when unpacking the constraints of a more mobile Internet. Donner explores new affordances as a component of the “After Access Lens”, by juxtaposing the place(full)ness (users bound to a physical space through GPS technologies) and place(less)ness (users transcend their connections to particular places) of mobile Internet. He offers examples that harness these paradoxical traits for socioeconomic development, from election monitoring (placefull) to mobile money (placeless), but even in that discussion must warn of incursions on privacy and security that should temper a celebratory rhetoric.
Donner foregoes a culturally grounded approach, in order to develop a transferrable conceptual framework. It is a pragmatic tradeoff and makes for a lucid introductory text that should help policymakers, development practitioners, technologists, and designers better approach their work.
Donner claims to be “mildly technologically deterministic” (p. 69). He contrasts determinism against appropriation by users, holding that there are immutable facets to technologies that carry across many contexts/cultures. It calls to mind Donald MacKenzie (1984), who defines determinism as “setting bounds or limits of action,” which others have described as a “soft” technical determinism, or not determinism at all (Wyatt, 2007). Rather than technology, it is his implicit faith in the private sector that draws my attention. He believes technology companies and telecom operators can address many of the challenges related to access, with assistance from development practitioners. The role for the state seems circumscribed to a regulator of spectrum. The book’s premise is that Internet access is vital to the lives and livelihoods of people in the Global South. It is worth examining why the state is absolved of responsibility in securing that vital Internet access.