A Conversation about the Mobile Internet with Jonathan Donner

I recently spoke to Jonathan Donner, author of After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet for the New Books in Media & Communications podcast. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes or you can listen to our conversation and others on the New Books Network site.

Thanks to mobile phones, getting online is easier and cheaper than ever. In After Access: Inclusion, Development, and a More Mobile Internet (MIT Press, 2015), Jonathan Donner challenges the optimistic narrative that mobile phone will finally close the digital divide. How we log on, how long we stay, what we choose to do, what we can do — all are shaped by our environments, resources and digital literacies. After Access examines the implications of the shift to a more mobile, more available Internet throughout the developing world. Donner addresses these implications specifically for socioeconomic development and broad-based inclusion in a global society. He offers a note of caution about the Panglossian views of mobile phones arguing that access and effective use are not the same thing, and the digital world does not run on mobile handsets alone.

Donner, a Senior Director of Research at Caribou Digital, a UK-based consultancy focused on building inclusive digital economies in the developing world. After Access draws on ethnographic and survey research in South Africa and India, as well as the burgeoning literature from the ICT4D (Internet and Communication Technologies for Development) and mobile communication communities. It introduces a conceptual framework for understanding effective use of the Internet by those whose “digital repertoires” contain exclusively mobile devices. In showing that there is no singular internet experience, Donner argues that both the potentialities and constraints of the shift to a more mobile Internet are important considerations for scholars and practitioners interested in internet use in the developing world.

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John: The title of your book is After Access. I want to start with the first word of that title, after. Why is it there? Why are you looking forward past access? Is access some kind of foregone conclusion?

Jonathan: I think it’s almost foregone. We’re getting close to a situation where the significant majority of the world, in theory, has access to the internet and this was not always the case. For a long time the conversations about closing the digital divide or addressing the digital divide were conversations about infrastructure and about literally laying the cables making the connections or building the telecenters such people in resource-constrained settings would have the opportunity to be online. It was a physical access problem.

With the shift toward a mobile internet, basically the mobile boom that’s been happening for 10 or 20 years now becoming a mobile internet boom, that physical barrier has been removed for most of the world. So the figures vary a little bit depending on who’s supplying them whether it’s the International Telecommunications Union or the GSMA of some others that also try to make these estimates, but we think that by now about 85% of the world’s population lives under a cell tower signal. And about 50% of the world lives under a cell tower that has broadband 3G internet signals and those numbers are going to rise as well. They’re not going to get to 100%, but let’s say that within 5 years it’s that same 85% or 90% and 82% of those are living under a broadband signal. Well, in that case it’s not an access question. There are a whole bunch of other reasons why people who live under those signals may not be online or be online in the ways we think they should be so we can talk about that. I think we will. But that 80% or 90% is a remarkable accomplishment.

For years, conversations about closing the digital divide were about “literally laying the cables…It was a physical access problem.” Now it’s an effective use problem.

I should preface this with the fact that we haven’t solved for the other 10 or 15% of the world’s population that for various reasons still lives outside the mobile signal and therefore mostly lives without the chance to get online. This is people in extremely sparsely population areas, deserts and jungles and mountain valleys and that sort of thing. It tends to be populations without a lot of resources. The way we’ve, as a world, decided to wire the world is letting private companies invest in the infrastructure and then charge for access. For this last 10 or 15% currently the technologies and the business models don’t line up to make it economically sustainable to put in towers there. We can also talk about that and whether that’s something that will continue and what kind of policy things may be going on to address that last 15%.

John: Do you think that last 10 to 15% will remain a persistent gap even as the rest of the 85, 90% mobile experience matures?

Jonathan: I think so. I don’t know exactly how to project whether it stabilizes at 7 or 10 or 12 or 15 or 2, but I do think there are just…we’re talking about the physical, spatial access to an internet signal or some means of connecting to the internet servers. I think there will be geographies, maybe political regimes, local places, a whole bunch of reasons why certain populations may not have access. But it’s a pretty small fraction of the world compared to where I think we thought we would be by 2016. I think if you went back 20 years and imagined how much of the world was going to have access by now, I don’t even think the wildly optimistic projections would’ve put us that high. This is again physical access. We’re not talking about use yet. We’ll do that in a little while.

Let me say two other things about this. There are satellites up there that cover the whole world more or less, and you could buy yourself a base station, your village could buy a base station and get a type of internet access right now, satellite laggy meaning a long time that the signal takes to get up and back so it’s not great for real-time conversations like the one we’re having or some more intensive things that demand low latency. But you can get online.

The problem is that type of access right now costs a prohibitively large amount of money for the villages that don’t currently have access. If you’re a supertanker floating around in the middle of the Atlantic, you can have your satellite internet. You could use that same technology to wire a Himalayan village but we can’t afford that right now and the village can’t afford that. So in one sense we’re already at 100% coverage and it’s clearly not simply an access problem. It’s either an affordable access problem or an effective use problem.

John: For listeners who have not traveled as extensively or spent as much time as you have in these areas around the world, help us understand what the mobile internet looks like from the perspective of someone living in an emerging market. You refer to it in the book as the Global South. Let’s say I’m in the bottom 1% as judged by per capita income around the world, but I’m closer to the top of that so I’m actually earning money. I’m scraping out a living day-to-day, week-to-week, something like that. Say I live in South Africa, where you’ve been and I have a mobile phone with internet access.

First off, what does that phone look like? Who’s the maker? What can it do? How much is it costing me? What am I doing? What do I have?

Jonathan: Well there’s a lot to unpack and explore there and I think one of the challenges I found in the book and I think people who work in these spaces wrestle with a lot is there’s no single archetypal user that represents the majority of people in the world. Most people live in the developing world, not in what we call the developed world. And there’s a whole different variety of profiles, ways of living there. There are places in South Africa…funny, South Africa is kind of a microcosm; there are incredibly rich people living in beautiful cities in South Africa; there are incredibly rich people living in beautiful ranches in South Africa; there are also a whole lot of poor people and everything in between.

So there’s no single experience which I could point to that would kind of say, well this is how the rest of the world uses it and it’s different from how we use it. But there’s a lot of heterogeneity and what you do find are a lot of new use cases where the cost of technologies has come down, the cost of a handset has come down in particular as those towers have gotten out there to more and more of the population and the landscape. That means there are cases now where people who had lived outside a signal before now have access.

Why don’t we do two? Let’s talk about an urban case and a rural case. The urban case would be somebody, maybe the urban working poor in any one of hundreds of cities around the world where access has been around for a while, but they’ve been able to switch from maybe only getting access to an internet through a telecenter or like a cybercafe or maybe a shared connection somewhere to getting a phone. And maybe the first phone that they bought didn’t ever have internet on it. It was just a basic like a candy bar Nokia phone that was so popular for so many people around the world because the battery lasted for two weeks and dust wouldn’t kill it. Didn’t have internet or what we think of as internet.

But then phone number 2 (was) what we maybe call a feature phone and it started to have little bells and whistles and maybe some early internet capability through something called WAP (Wireless Access Protocol). Maybe it had things that felt like a data connection even if it wasn’t a particularly good one. And then this thing called 2.5 or Edge networks, which maybe some of us remember from having it here in the States or Europe a few years ago. But basically every generation of phones has gotten better and better and the phones that did have an internet connection have gotten cheaper and cheaper.

“If they don’t have access to wi-fi…they probably pay by the bit…Then it’s like the experience of roaming. Even though you are in your own house, it’s that feeling of ‘I don’t know how much it’s going to cost. I better not click on that’…That becomes the pervasive, what I call the metered mindset, which is a kind of a check on whatever people want to do online.”

Now we’re in a scenario where almost anybody who buys a phone, whether or not they want to buy an internet-enabled phone, gets an internet-enabled phone. There are people keep walking around with theoretical internet access who haven’t elected to turn it on. If they turn it on, and this is going to count for rural or urban…means, ok so you’ve got a phone, maybe it’s still a feature phone, it’s not a smartphone, it’s not an Android or an Apple device that are so popular here. It’s just a phone with a data connection so that if someone sent you a text message that had a URL and you clicked on it using your little selector or cursor you would initiate a data connection.

On those feature phones, the internet experience is better than nothing and not quite what we might hope for right? The browser would be small, limited by screen real estate. It’s kind of hard to navigate the internet in a world wide web kind of way. The little programs like we know calls apps become a much more effective way to navigate. It doesn’t even matter if you are just using a feature phone, you still may have a downloadable program like chat or something like that that you use to be your interface with the internet. Certainly if you are using a smartphone where the app experience becomes something where people want to spend more time in.

The phones that people buy aren’t traditionally bought on these 2-year installment contracts like we get access to but people save up and they buy a phone for the equivalent of $75 or so. And then here’s the important part: If they don’t have access to wi-fi and they don’t have access to an internet connection at home they probably pay by the bit, which means they buy little bundles of airtime, which are minutes to use on their phone and then some of those minutes can get converted into megabytes or if they are lucky a GB of data. But probably they are buying 100 MB at a time. Then it’s like the experience of roaming. Even though you are in your own house, it’s that feeling of “I don’t know how much it’s going to cost. I better not click on that. Maybe I think twice about whether I want to click on that. Maybe if I click on it I’m worried I’m going to run out of my minutes.” That becomes the pervasive, what I call the metered mindset, which is a kind of a check on whatever people want to do online.

I think that that is…one of the two most important things to think about when we think about people using the internet through mobile devices. The first is the size of the device itself and the limitations on the keyboard and that kind of thing. The second is this metered mindset that people pay by the bit.

Do you want to do a rural one real quick?

John: Yeah, do a rural one real quick. I want to come back to this with a thought, but do the rural one.

Jonathan: So the rural one is kind of all of the above with even…and by rural in this case I’m sort of imaging the idealized rural village down a dusty road somewhere, certainly not with a lot of electricity, and electricity becomes a big limiting factor on using one’s phone. Some people are in situations where there’s a cell tower that touches their home or their village but there’s no electricity in the village. They actually have to pay more to recharge their phone and keep their phone charged than they do on the bits or the minutes they consume via the phone. That’s one of the things that’s going to keep us from having that 100% coverage you were talking about earlier. The electrical grid isn’t there either. The connectivity challenge goes hand-in-hand with the electricity challenge.

So you’ve got a rural area. Maybe you’ve got electricity. Maybe they charge by even a car battery and some guy sells electric top-ups charges for a few pennies depending on how cheap it was to get the electricity. People can use the phone. And then if they are lucky there’s content that’s in the language they speak. If they are lucky they’ve got the digital skills and literacies required to navigate the internet, they’re able to get online through their phone. In many ways, the remarkable power of this, the promise of this is already being seen. Someone down that dusty road in that village doesn’t have to spend two hours waiting for the bus, two hours taking a bus down to the medical clinic, wait an hour for a nurse to see them to talk about what they should be doing for whatever thing is making them feel bad and then do the same thing in reverse.

What After Access tries to raise “is whether we should just be declaring victory just because that 85% number has been reached and most people live near a tower.”

There’s promises about using the internet for rural medicine or for job search or for education, reading little things on the side — I don’t think it replaces a teacher or a school — but there’s ways to use even a tiny connection through a phone in ways that really allow more people to overcome distance, be much more productive with their time because they are not sitting there waiting for that bus, to search for information over a broader area, to express themselves through chat or Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram…all three of those companies are owned by Facebook, which is remarkably prevalent throughout the developing world. I’m not knocking it and I don’t want to sound like I’m not acknowledging…that this isn’t already a transformative thing in development in terms of the shape of communication and the potential that’s there.

What I think the book tries to raise through these urban cases and rural cases and things we’ll get into is whether we should just be declaring victory just because that 85% number has been reached and most people live near a tower. I do raise some ways in which I don’t think the internet that we’ve gotten through a mobile channel is the one I think we all were expecting to get.

John: You draw the distinction between access and effective use in the book. I want to get to that, but first I want to go back and put a point on this What is my phone? What is my experience?…Say there is heterogeneity and there’s a range, but I’m buying this phone, $75, feature phone, a couple things on it: Does it have features that are not internet related like a camera? A recorder? And would these be useful? And put that $75 with a data plan that I’m paying for separately in the context of overall monthly budgets.

Jonathan: That’s the trick. There are a couple things going on. First off, the news is generally good on devices. The devices are getting less expensive every year. They do more. And this is the same thing that we’re accustomed to. The camera was 2 megapixels and now it’s 6. For $75 maybe it used to be half a megapixel and now it’s 2 megapixels. You don’t get the same performance. You get slower processors, smaller screens, things that are laggy meaning there’s a long response time when you click something before it actually executes. The storage may not be as high as you want. The battery life may not be as good as you want. The interface may nit be as clean and breezy as the ones we enjoy. But still, increasingly now it’s a smartphone and the idea that you can now get a smartphone for under $100 isn’t fanciful anymore. You can get it. And it’s probably pretty good as the smartphone you would have spent $300 or $400 on three or four years ago.

“Whereas for us that mobile device is one of several different types of internet…methods that we use to get (online), folks who only have that mobile phone and only have that cell tower have a…digital repertoire that is mobile-only.”

The progress on devices is pretty good already. They’re not that far off. There are plenty of basic phones around, candy bar phones…dumb phones…and then there’s this middle category of phones, feature phones which have some things like media player or a camera or something on them, but aren’t an Android phone or an Apple phone. That’s the category that’s really been under pressure lately. I think the proportion of new phones being sold every year that fit that feature phone category is declining and smartphones are rising. In a few more years it will be hard to buy anything but a smartphone new. And that’s a remarkable transformation and a good tech story.

In that sense, the internet that one consumes or interacts with through a mobile device in Rwanda or India or South Africa or Nicaragua or wherever isn’t that different from the internet that you and I might consume through our mobile devices. The distinctions I make in the book is that whereas for us that mobile device is one of several different types of internet modalities or methods that we use to get there, folks who only have that mobile phone and only have that cell tower have a…digital repertoire that is mobile-only. This means they are making more compromises, essentially in spending less time on a device that’s perfect for all their tasks.

John: I just want to go back and on the budget piece, relative to electricity or water or food, is it equal to those?

Jonathan: Right. It’s probably often higher than those. Sometimes it’s hard to get good data on this because it depends on the country. There’s actually a lot of variability in how much a minute costs of voice talk time or how much a megabyte costs of data. It depends on how regulators have sold the spectrum and how competitive the market is and how many strange taxes there are, a whole bunch of reasons why it’s not the same from place to place.

But there are plenty of places where civil society movements are making the case that it’s still too much. That it’s still 10 and 20 and 30 percent of the total monthly household income (that) goes to telecommunications. That’s too high. The Broadband Commission, which is a group sponsored by the United Nations, it’s a standing group and every few years they put out a report on the state of broadband. They’ve got agreed on targets that they would like to see broadband cost no more than 5 percent of monthly household income around the world. Over the last several years, most of the developed world, most of the more prosperous economies have had no problem hitting that 5 percent threshold. But there are countries left in the world, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa where that threshold is not nearly there and that’s for a reasonably big bundle, a decent chunk of megabytes that you could feel like you’ve got a good internet experience for the month. That’s costing more than 5 percent and that’s higher than the Broadband Commission wants.

John: Now for part of your research, staying in South Africa, you were in Cape Town and you asked teenagers you found in libraries around some of these low-income neighborhoods an interesting question, that being “Your phone has internet, why are you at a library PC?” What prompted you to use that as a starting question? Where did it come from? What does that (question) represent about this issue of use versus access?

Jonathan: This was a study I did with research partners at the University of Cape Town, Marion Walton in particular is a professor media studies there who was this co-investigator with me and I’m really grateful getting to know Marion and working with her on this. She’s spent several more years than me living in Cape Town and working with me on these questions of what affordable use looks like.

We were funded by the International Development Research Center, which is a Canadian organization, part of the Canadian government that’s always been interested in these questions of technology and development, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as part of a larger project that was looking at the state of public access to the internet, telecenters and libraries and cyber cafes, those sorts of things, around the world.

We, Marion and I, got to be the ones thinking about how mobile was complicating that whole idea of public access and so our question really had to be about mobile as part of this project, but it was funny that the best way to look at it actually was to still go back to the public access places and use that kind of question, which is a bit of a cute question and obviously we didn’t spend the whole time just on that one question. But the question helps us unpack some of the things that you already heard me talk about, this difference between only having one device or one network and having a repertoire of things to choose from. What we were seeing with the teenagers we were talking to at these public access venues was actually a strong case for the continued importance of public access venues because each of these kids already had the internet in their pocket. But they had one internet that wasn’t the same internet when they walked half and hour and waited in line for half and hour to get half an hour of free PC-based internet a day to do their homework on.

That to me was a real penny drop that we can’t declare victory just because 85% of the world lives under a cell signal. These teenagers were voting with their feet essentially, voting with the pocketbooks, and going back to the cyber cafes and the telecenters to get their work done.

The Cape Town teenagers “had one internet that wasn’t the same internet when they walked half and hour and waited in line for half and hour (at a library) to get half an hour of free PC-based internet a day to do their homework on.”

The questions that Marion and I got to work through a little bit helped me think through…a study that helped me want to frame the whole book was how do these repertories look like? And how can it be that (if) the cell phone as a means to access the internet is so powerful for these students and other people in so many ways, then why is it that they are still back there in the venue?

There are two generalizable answers and one not-quite-so-generalizable answer. The not-quite-so-generalizable answer is specific to Cape Town, or specific to South Africa, is little bit around safety in some cases. These guys and girls lived in small homes and maybe had trouble finding a place to do the homework and all that. That’s a pretty universal thing. Add to that some of them live in really tough places and it’s a good place to go.

Letting aside the fact that there is technology there, the idea of going back to a library or going back to an institution where they could do their homework kind of in peace and focus again gave me great respect for the ideas of libraries and safe places again.

But the two more generalizable ones that came out of the work are what we call the affordances, which are what the technology lets you do or suggests you should do. The particular affordances of personal computers of unmetered access. And the second was this price issue. The number one reason people were there was it was cheaper to do their homework with somebody else paying for the bits than for them trying to do it on their phones. I can talk more about each of those if you want.

John: Let’s get into that with a conversation about what are the most popular uses for internet activities on a phone. You point out there is remarkable universality (in developing and developed markets) in the most popular kinds of online activities. They are chat, social networking, games, and media. So you have the top 10 app downloads being YouTube and Snapchat and Instagram and Skype and Facebook, all these things basically from Silicon Valley companies.

But all of them are largely around consumption versus what you touched on a little bit, which is productivity. That would be the library example there of doing your homework. Why is productivity lagging so much in the mobile experience? Are there ways to improve that? What’s your outlook on the distinctions between the two and where they’re headed?

Jonathan: There are a couple threads to pull on there. The first is what do we mean by most important? By time? By popularity? The second is who cares about productivity? We should care about productivity. One group that cares about the broader policy conversation, that cares about productivity, or production, not just economic productivity but this idea of contributing and making and earning a living or having a voice, which are the two categories I use to describe expressing oneself. But why do those sorts of production things matter?

Part of the reason they matter is in these broader policy discussions is that’s the stuff of economic development and creating prosperity and creating well-being and getting out of poverty and all that, there is a production component to that. And whether people are never touching a computer and they are going off and building homes or working in manufacturing or whatever, there’s all sorts of things about productivity in the economy. There are questions then how digital changes productivity. We want to privilege the productivity conversations when we are linking processes to economic development. And there’s nothing wrong with linking it there.

I think the problem is that somewhere between the formal research literature and the more informal, broader discourse around the role of communication technologies in development has been so focused on productivity or information seeking as related to that they have turned a blind eye to the totality of people’s online practices and digital practices. So that you end up with agricultural economists studying how farmers check farm prices on the cell phones…You play that out and they forget that that farmer probably makes one phone call about prices a day and makes five calls to his cousin. Or that we’re trying to figure out how to use the internet to distribute information about pre-natal care or something like that and that that app, which may be distributing information about pre-natal care has to sit on a home screen with nine other apps, most of which are Facebook and Google and YouTube as we were just talking about.

I think it’s very important for even the practitioners and researchers who want to study the potential of these technologies to do good to enable productivity or enable expression to see where those practices and enabling processes sit as part of the whole.

Agricultural economists may study how farmers check farm prices on the cell phones. “They forget that that farmer probably makes one phone call about prices a day and makes five calls to his cousin.”

And in fact to complicate the idea that there’s some stuff that’s not social and some stuff that is; some stuff that’s instrumental and useful and some stuff that’s not. Actually the lines are quite blurred and getting more blurred all the time. That’s why the farmer who are figuring out how to do price check mechanisms, either make phone calls, which is what they used to do. Maybe the government sets up some system of text messages with the price of mangos every week. And maybe they set up a Facebook group…where they can exchange information with each other about mango prices. It’s not even really fair to say Facebook is always social or always frivolous, right? People are using these platforms for both the frivolous and the very serious and the productive and the non-productive. Towards the end of the book and a little bit in the work I’m doing now I’m interested in pursing these things in more detail.

John: I think of that chat example as such a powerful one for blurring those lines exactly as you say here. You are expressing yourself one minute, chatting with a friend another, and the next you are lining up business all within the same feature, the same app, but very different use cases. It’s a question of what is that thing, really? How useful at this point do you even find distinctions around voice versus consumption versus this productivity?

Jonathan: The same argument can be made for voice. Some of the earliest work I did, research I did in the space was in Rwanda with microentreprenuers to small business owners who had been getting their first phone. This was back in 2004, 2005. It was all voice. We started out with questions, we did a survey, it was like an intercept thing where we walked up with people and said can we interview you? Can we look at your last 10 calls? And you pull up the phone book on the phone and you go down the last 10 calls and say who was that and what did you talk about. We started with only allowing people to check one thing. Was it a business call? Was it calling to say hello? Was it a joke? Was it friends and family kind of thing? We found we couldn’t do that. We had to make the categories check all that apply.

The blurring between the social and the instrumental. The productive kind of uses of the medium, the phone, the voice call, needed to pay close attention to the way the non-productive and productive activities are embedded in social relations. This is old sociology stuff playing out in tech. I think that the same stuff is happening now, in fact, arguably even more so, in Facebook and Twitter and YouTube with all its hosted course content for studying and for Khan Academy and all these sorts of things, you could make the argument that there’s lots of productive stuff happening there alongside stuff that’s maybe not so central to the development of priorities for states or NGOs or whatever.

What’s broken isn’t that. That’s just the way humans behave. Embedded and complex and blurring and dynamic. It’s the narratives that are stale and siloed and it’s the pitch mechanisms people can do to make an app to help farmer’s check corn prices when we don’t actually need another app taking up space on the home screen. What we need is the people teaching social media skills to farmers for facilitating groups such that they can build a Facebook group, a Twitter list or whatever, that allows them to exchange the information they need on these platforms more effectively.

John: The structural challenges with either providing the end-service or app or some kind of productivity piece or teaching the skills within existing apps, I was thinking when I was reading these sections of the book just about baseball and these big-market, small-market teams where essentially you have the Yankees who have these huge payrolls and they are able to support them year after year and then you have these other teams like the Pirates. They can win sometimes, but essentially you’d rather bet on the teams that have the resources and the range of skills and literacies that they have.

There will always be examples of people, someone the other day in America who had been homeless and developing mobile games who overcome and create amazing things and be incredible citizens and economic engines with the mobile experience, but what is necessary are really basic blocks. Teaching people how to use Facebook groups to do whatever they want to do. What else can be done to teach those digital literacy skills?

Jonathan: There’s a couple things involved there. The idea of helping people get the most out of the tools through improving digital literacies is something we haven’t cracked at scale yet. I don’t think middle school curriculums or high school curriculums do enough quickly enough — and this is not just in the U.S. but around the world — to train up digital literacy. It would be very hard to justify, Hey we’re going to teach kids Facebook and Twitter or WeChat or Weibo depending on where you are — these are ones that are popular elsewhere — it seems crazy to do, but I think there’s enormous value in that and that isn’t turning everybody into an app entrepreneur or saying that the only way to make money is to do something directly in tech. It’s using tech to pursue your own livelihood or your own expression or whatever more effectively. Digital literacy, as much as the devices and networks unlock that, they only work to the extent that people have the skills to use these pieces effectively

“What we need is the people teaching social media skills to farmers for facilitating groups such that they can build a Facebook group, a Twitter list or whatever, that allows them to exchange the information they need on these platforms more effectively.”

It’s the hardest one to do well because it doesn’t scale very well. It’s hard to train thousands of people at a time unless we can somehow make these things more bootstrappy than they are. So I think the (digital) literacy question remains somewhat unsolved although there’s a lot of great work happening there, I don’t want to diminish it, I’m not the only person saying this, trying to work on these pedagogies. And certainly under-resourced and kind of under-embraced as part of the puzzle. Other researchers have spoken, Hargittai talks about second-order divides and skill divides, and Michael Gernstein talks about effective use, and Mark Warschauer talks about the social capital that surrounds this, a whole bunch of scholars and a community of people working on this, they all see the ways in which literacies remain, the human side of technology use remain as much a limiting factor and an enabling factor as the technology conversation tends to get framed around digital divides.

Let me say one more thing on literacies, which is the last people that come into mind right now in the World Development Report this year published by the World Bank takes a big development topic every year, they do a massive, hundreds of pages of analysis across various sectors on some element of the development puzzle and this year is was on technology and development. The World Development Report 2016 identifies a lot of things that are analog partners to the development that are happening digitally and basically saying if we want to get the most out of digital, we actually have to invest in things like literacies and regulatory regimes that promote competition as opposed to monopolies in the digital space in things that promote the broad-based adoption of technologies in sectors other than technology, for example. The World Bank itself has come to a place (that isn’t) just applying this pro-technology banner and rather seeing technology as something linked to broader and more ongoing recognizable development challenges, of which literacy is one of them. So the literacy thing is something worth keeping an eye on.

John: Literacy doesn’t just apply to productivity or economic development. I was thinking about, again, where you are discussing voice and engagement where if I have mobile phone access and say it has a chat service of what not, it’s harder for me to engage in lengthy, rich dialogue. It’s harder for me to create and post some kind of thoughtful view the way I would on a blog post even. This digital literacy question seems to me applies well beyond economic development.

Jonathan: Yeah. Because there’s types of production that aren’t directly tied to economic development and they’re just part of being human and expressing and creating art and finding a voice and all that. And this is not to say there isn’t plenty of production happening on mobile devices. At the top end you drive by these billboards and Apple is happy to show you some fantastic photograph that was taken on an iPhone. Great. The services, these platforms like Facebook, Instagram, whatever, that allow people to seamlessly share images and videos and Vines, little 10-second videos, back and forth means…there’s more production happening by more people thanks to mobile devices than ever before.

The kind of annoying critique I raise in the book is that I don’t see those kind of production activities are getting the traction, either the monetary return in a development sense, or the opinion-leadership…culture influencing things that we may want to see when we talk about technologies being as empowering as they can. Some of the most high-value activities, those tasks, whether it’s running a climate model — not everybody is going to run a climate model, I know — but you can make some money if you run a climate model, an economic model. Or writing a long piece of prose. Or creating a movie with careful cuts…some of these things are still easier on devices other than mobile phones and on networks other than mobile networks. We all still have them in our life. And not everybody does.

We need to be careful about not letting our rhetoric get out ahead of the affordances of the devices and the networks that people who have mobile-only internet experiences have. I would link that to a few years ago, Steve Jobs was interviewed — this was 2010, I think — he was asked about whether PCs were dying. This was at a conference on the future of the net with the enthusiasm for the iPhone, of course. The question was: Are PCs dying?…Steve Jobs said, Well, they’re not dying because, well, he used the reference of a farm, and he said, in the old days all we had were trucks because we all lived on farms and we needed trucks to do all our farming stuff. Now we’re not all farmers and not everybody needs a truck. And he said PCs are like trucks. Not everybody needs a truck.

I don’t actually disagree with that, but the rotation I would ask, and the book asks on that quote, on that worldview is it’s not that certain people need trucks and other people don’t. It’s an identification that certain tasks, certain activities still need the digital equivalent of trucks, PCs and networks that carry lots of data like trucks and that some tasks don’t.

Certain tasks like running climate models and editing video, “are still easier on devices other than mobile phones and on networks other than mobile networks. We (in developed markets) all still have them in our life. And not everybody does.”

We need to ask who has access to the tools and networks they need to pursue those tasks if they want them. I don’t think we’re done, to back to your original first question about being 85% and after access, I don’t think we’re done, I don’t think we can declare victory just because 85% of the world lives under a signal that they can barely afford to use on a device that’s not going to allow them to do everything they want to do. There’s room to keep doing things like community access telecenters or free wi-fi in the train stations like Google is doing in India right now will…do an enormous amount to give people more affordances that will allow them to be more effective users of the internet than they are now. Those are not just mobile affordances.

“There’s plenty of content being created on Facebook every single day and nobody other than Facebook is getting paid for that content.”

John: You say in the book the problem is not that it’s difficult to produce content or earn money for this kind of micro-work performed on a mobile phone but the persistent issue is quote “the shift to a more mobile internet that remains relatively difficult to produce content for which one will be paid relatively well,” which I think gets to that point that sometimes trucks are necessary for doing that kind of work.

Jonathan: Yeah, I think there’s plenty of content being created on Facebook every single day and nobody other than Facebook is getting paid for that content.

John: In the last part of our conversation I’d like to shift away from development and go back to human usage for a second here. How do people try to figure out how much data they are using or how much they are using the internet with their phones given that it’s still a costly device for them including the data and given your comments about (them) operating under this metered-mindset?

Jonathan: So the metered-mindset has two components. There’s this cost by the bit…Let me do two problems and one clear impact of why this stuff is important. The two problems are the real, the undeniable problem that it costs a lot per bit to consume data on a mobile phone over a mobile network if you are a prepay user and you don’t have a contract. So the cost of watching a bunch of YouTube videos, whether they are Shakira videos, which is an example I use in a study I did and picked that at random, or an incredibly important video issued by the World Health Organization about how to prevent the spread of a disease. If you are paying by the bit, the chances of you watching as many of (those) or consuming as much as you want are lower than if you have access to a plan you can afford or an all-you-can-eat situation. There are research studies that suggest if you flip people from pay-by-the-bit to all-you-can-eat their consumption goes way up. So there’s the real problem of on a per bit basis it’s too expensive to get that cost down.

There’s a second problem which is because there’s sort of a detachment between bits, bytes are very abstract, money is not, you’re not actually consuming money you are consuming bits, it’s hard to map those things effectively. So you get all these sorts of cognitive errors where you’re…kind of over-accounting for…you’re being overly cautious. You leave bits on the table. You don’t click on links you want. You don’t spend as much time on Facebook as you might want or you don’t spend as much time on YouTube. You certainly don’t leave stuff running in the background.

This isn’t just a rational thing, (which are) the cognitive kind of challenges. I think the best way to empathize with that metered mindset is to think back to any time you got stung by a roaming bill on your own cell phone and how careful you were about using the net or making phone calls when you were roaming next time. We’re back in a situation where the victory that we claim to have had, that most of the world has internet access, at least hypothetically, involves them doing so with this kind of pervasive, persistent feeling of dread or caution that they are going to over-click.

There are ways in which this is getting better. The Android operating system and the Apple operating system are getting better with each passing iteration at representing how much data is getting consumed and which apps are doing it. Google’s done some interesting experiments, still research, where they’ve actually put the amount of bits that it will cost if you click on a link off their home page. They’re just sort of exploring, it’s not rolled out yet, it’s just research. But the trial is really interesting. I’m kind of curious to see how they’re trying to empathize with the metered mindset.

Microsoft is certainly doing that in their operating systems about when you pull down updates whether you are on a cell connection or a wi-fi connection; it’ll change the behavior now, which is good. Certainly, and this is big impact I was going to talk about, Facebook’s been very good about empathizing with the metered mindset. So good that they’ve run up against the vision of the internet itself. Here I’m talking about their proposals to subsidize the mobile internet, the Facebook experience of many users in many developing countries.

John: You’ve noted that the result of these cognitive errors, these biases, is underconsumption. Has anybody to your knowledge tried to figure out how serious a problem is that considered? Is under consumption really bad? What are they giving up?

Jonathan: I think it’s really bad. I don’t think there’s enough research on this. I did a bit of a review in the book on this, but that’s already a couple years old and I think you would find more studies coming out that are trying to quantify the extent to which this kind of feeling of being on pre-pay changes your internet, changes the amount you consume. But it’s just an empathy thing to some extent, which is if you’re spending 20% of your household income you haven’t hit those ITU Broadband Commission 5% targets cause you live in a place where data is expensive and incomes are low and you pay by the bit. You know every two weeks when you go down to the corner store and buy more air time — I think it’s converted into minutes — that it costs you more than you want to pay, your chances of swimming in the internet and using it effectively in the way that some of us almost take for granted with background process and huge HD videos on Netflix or whatever is living in a bandwidth cornucopia that the rest of the world doesn’t have right now. We risk a kind of stratification of the internet into those who can use it without that feeling of constraint and those who feel constrained all the time.

The rhetoric doesn’t often line up with that. We tend to say that everybody is on the same side of the divide and everybody has the same internet just cause they’ve got hypothetical access and that’s what I’m challenging.

“We risk a kind of stratification of the internet into those who can use it without that feeling of constraint and those who feel constrained all the time.”

The way that this amplifies up from just being something that happens at the individual level is Facebook and a few others, not just Facebook but Wikipedia found this, Facebook tried it, Airtel in India tried it, Twitter does it in the U.S., T-Mobile will let you in the U.S. download songs that don’t count against your data cap because they want you using more. A lot of the companies are exploring ways to enter relationships with mobile internet operators to subsidize the bits of internet users for the services that they want those users to spend time on. As a practice this is called zero rating and I do need to say, since the book came out, I talk a little bit about zero rating in the book, things have really come to a head in India in particular and particularly around Facebook.

Facebook in 2014 and 2015 was pushing something called internet.org that was dressing up a lot of the benefits of the internet for maternal health and farm prices and education, all that stuff we were just talking about, along with Facebook. So you had a suite of nine or ten things you could choose. putting it on an app and working with a mobile network operator to say everything inside that app is free and doesn’t count against your cap. That only works as something that’s compelling to people because of the metered mindset and the fact that there’s such a palpable sense of “I don’t want to click on anything that I think I’m going to have to pay for. But if I stay in my Facebook+ zone, this thing called internet.org rebranded as free basics.”

Facebook did really well with this. It rolled out in a dozen, maybe two dozen countries, kind of without major incident until late last year and it then bumped into India where there was a blowback that this practice violated net neutrality and the principle that all bits should be treated the same and not discriminated against, that some services can’t get discriminated against in prices. The Indian regulator had about a million comments come from the civil society, the internet civil society in India, most of which were protesting against zero rating. The regulator took it all under advisement and after several months just recently issued a ruling banning zero rating apps as a practice. There’s some detail to which ones are special cases, but for the most part saying Facebook and others, you want to use this to subsidize other services, you can’t do that. This is a major turning of the tide in how we approach the shift to a more mobile internet.

The zero rating brouhaha, tension, crisis, however you want to call it, is only because of the metered mindset and that’s only because that the only way you can allocate spectrum is to have people and have mobile network operators and charge by the bit for it. If we had a different internet with more wi-fi and more stuff in train stations and more people with home connections and maybe someday with satellites and drones taking the pressure off the mobile channel then this zero rating conflict will go away.

John: Final question for you here. What is your current level of optimism, say 25 years from now about an internet that’s more inclusive and more effective use for people everywhere, in every country, but particularly in the emerging markets?

Jonathan: Twenty five years is a long time, but even in five or ten years you will see some of there first-level access problems recede…But I think that an internet with 5 billion people on it is going to look different than the internet we have right now, which is 2 or 3 billion people depending on how you count. As the internet population starts to look more like the world population two types of things could happen. It could be that the internet itself, the fact that everybody has access is going to change the structures of society and change the nature of economic stratification and all that kind of stuff.

I think you’ll see some of that , but I don’t think it’s all necessarily good news. Nairobi is having protests right now about Uber disrupting, to use that word, the taxi markets in Nairobi. Say what you will about whether the taxi market in Nairobi should or shouldn’t be disrupted and whether Uber is the right organization to do it. But it is changing, right, that even these local services have a digital component to them and it’s not just happening in Seattle and Boston and Helsinki. It’s happening in Nairobi and in smaller towns all around Kenya as well.

That’s the thing where I think the right answer, the more accurate answer isn’t that it’s going to get better for everybody, but that the ways in which a more mobile internet will bring more people online in certain kinds of ways that are good in some senses and constraining in others will actually reinforce existing stratifications and ones that we’ll recognize. It’ll look as stratified as it does now and set up these new disruptions. I think there’s a lot to keep our eye one.

I would say this is my final point is just, again, I come back to this idea we don’t want to declare victory that the access problem is the right one to have solved or that it’s a sufficient problem to have solved. These questions of effective use don’t scale very well, and I think as we explore what it means to be effective online, those old paradigms of developing world versus developed will probably fall away and in ten years the discussions we’ll be having will be more reflective of the same types of discussions we’re having here in the U.S. about the shape of the income distribution in the U.S. and whether the new digital world is good for people of modest means or not. I think you’re going to see those same kinds of conversations happening on a global level as more of daily life has to go through these servers sitting in air-conditioned rooms sometimes 7,000 miles away.

John Balz is Director of Strategy at VML. Follow him on Twitter @Nudgeblog.