Micro-Coordination: Looking into the details of face-to-face coordination

2013-05-09

Time: 10:30 Monday May 13
Place: KWII room 1110

Abstract:
Sociality is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. The key to sociality is coordination, that is, the bringi ...

Mobiles and mobility: The use of mobile phones by fishers in Kerala, India

2013-04-26 at 12:30:00 in Graduate Life Center, Room B

Presenter: Janaki Srinivasan

Abstract: Much has been written in the past decade about the proliferation and promise of mobile phones in low-income countries and populations. In this talk, I draw on research from a recent project I was involved in, where we studied the use of mobile phones by fishing communities in Kerala, India. An influential study a few years ago concluded that the fishing economy in Kerala had benefited greatly from the introduction of mobile phone services (Jensen 2007). The introduction of mobile phones, the study claimed, had made market price information available to fishers and thereby reduced price dispersion and wastage in the fishing economy. Based on three months of participant observation and interviews in 2012, we find that far from focusing on the phones primarily as a way to find market price information and enhance incomes, members of the fishing community were using phones in a variety of ways and for a range of ends. We examine how different members of the fishing community learned to use mobile phones, and how men and women, older and younger fishers, those who work out in the sea and those who work on the shore, focus on learning different features of the phone. We find that for many of them, using the mobile phone is as much about social mobility and learning of a world beyond the one where they lived and worked everyday.

Jensen, Robert. 2007. "The Digital Provide: Information (Technology), Market Performance and Welfare in the South Indian Fisheries Sector," Quarterly Journal of Economics, 122(3): 879 ? 924

Bio: Janaki Srinivasan is a post-doctoral research associate at the Virginia Tech Dept. of Engineering Education. Prior to this, she was at the UC Berkeley School of Information, where she completed her Ph.D. Janaki uses participant observation techniques and interviews to study information technology-based development initiatives. She focuses on the politics involved in the creation, access, and use of these technologies in government services and market processes in rural India. Janaki is currently working with Prof. Aditya Johri on two projects. One project studies how engineers design information technologies in globally distributed teams. The other examines how engineers went about designing and deploying the world's largest biometric database.