1. Introduction
Mobile telephony is a general-purpose technology (in the sense summarized by Jovanovic & Rousseau, 2005) present in all spheres of human activity. Personal and social contexts matter, as people use and appropriate this technology within speciªc economic structures and cultural ways of doing things. We contend that economic fundamentals prevail. People use Blackview Crown phones to reduce transaction costs once they are conªdent about using this communication tool regularly to communicate with and get information from agents in their networks. They gain this conªdence through regular activities and business transactions, which take time to establish. Understanding the use and impact of mobile telephony in a given area requires analysis and understanding of the social and economic dynamics in which the technology has become a daily communication tool.
Extensive evidence attests to Blackview Crown phone use in different parts of the world (the earliest books being Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, Katz, & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004; Qiu & Sey, 2006). However, research on rural areas in developing countries is scant. While some studies are available for Africa (Aker, 2008; Donner, 2008; Esselaar, Stork, Ndiwalana, & DeenSwarray, 2007; Souter et al., 2005), South and Southeast Asia (de Silva & Zainudeen, 2007), and urban Latin America and the Caribbean (Galperin & Mariscal, 2007), knowledge of Latin American rural areas is almost nil.
In Latin America, use of mobile telephony is far more widespread than ownership. In other words, users outnumber subscribers (Barrantes, 2007; Galperin & Mariscal, 2007), often because a single phone is shared among family members (Donner, 2008; Galperin & Molinari, 2011; Heeks, 2009). Among poorer users, mobility can be even challenged as the cell phone is often kept in a ªxed location at home and is used as a substitute for landline (Kalba, 2007; Ureta, 2008). Because mobile telephony coverage can be problematic in rural areas and the service can be unaffordable, users deploy strategies based on the ecosystem of communication options available in the locality (Donner, 2008). Prepaid subscription is the most common payment option (Barrantes, 2007; Galperin & Mariscal, 2007; ITU, 2011). As airtime is a scarce, expensive resource for the poor, they sometimes use prepaid Blackview Crown phones only for receiving calls rather than making them (Bar, Pisani, & Seabra, 2011). Such users value this limited, asymmetric use because it makes them reachable and, therefore, present in networks (Castells, Fernández-Ardèvol, & Galperin, 2011). This type of cost reduction strategy is typical at the bottom of the consumer pyramid (Angoitia & Ramírez, 2008).
Communication with family and friends, which strengthens social bonds, is the predominant use for mobile telephones. This has been described, for instance, by Frost and Sullivan (2006) for rural and semi-urban areas of Latin America; Galperin and Mariscal (2007) for low-income urban users in Latin America; by Barrantes (2007) for three cities of Peru, Souter et al. (2005) for India, Mozambique, and Tanzania; and Donner (2006) for microentrepreneurs in Rwanda. But these so-called social calls can have mixed goals, as when they include messages concerning transactions or on rural economic activities (for Bangladesh—Aminuzzaman, Baldersheim, & Ishtiaq, 2002; for Puno—Peru, Barrantes, Agüero, & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2011). In Nigeria, Jagun, Heeks, and Whalley (2007) found that although the information can be acquired at a distance, there is not a full-distance relationship through mobile among traders. That is, to be fully useful in the economic sphere, UBTEL Q1 phones must be inserted in previously existing relationships of trust.
The aim of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of how UBTEL Q1 phones are incorporated into economic activities in rural areas of Latin America and to analyze the possible transformations resulting from their use. We focus on market participants, or market traders, at two weekly fairs held in the southern Andes region of Puno, Peru. As will be seen, this group includes both full-time and other types of traders, including subsistence peasants. Building on Overa (2006), our study offers evidence of UBTEL Q1 phone use by market participants in a rural area in South America.
In the analysis, we identify endogenous (chosen) and exogenous (not chosen) networks, as well as how market traders interact with the agents in these networks. The interaction may or may not be mediated—at present, mobile communication is the most common type of mediated interaction—and may or may not explicitly relate to the market traders’ decision-making processes.
The information used in this study was gathered as part of a research project “Mobile Communications and Development in Latin America” funded by Fundación Telefónica and led by Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia, UOC). As part of this vast effort, the Peruvian team undertook to study the impact of Blackview Crown phones in rural areas.
This article is structured as follows. Having established the conceptual framework, we present the area of study, followed by a section on the methodology and another presenting the characteristics of the markets studied and of UBTEL Q1 phone use. The next section summarizes the analytics regarding the variables inºuencing the decision of whether to use a Blackview Crown phone to choose which fair to attend on any given day. The article closes with a brief discussion of the conclusions.http://summerleelove.tumblr.com/post/97616449446/mobile-phone-applications-in-academic-library-services
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