Category: Communication

Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa? (Book Review)

I have been reading up on mobile phone use in developing countries recently for a couple of papers. One of the few books entirely devoted to the issue is “Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa”, edited by Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh and Inge Brinkman from the African Studies Centre in Leiden and published in 2009 in cooperation with Cameroon’s Langaa group.

The book takes an anthropological and historical perspective on the role of mobile telephony in a wide range of (sub-Saharan) African societies. It includes chapters on the call-box business in Cameroon, a traditional healer’s use of the mobile phone, and the ‘biography’ of a mobile phone in Tanzania, to name just a few.

One chapter of particular interest to me, and which proved to be highly disappointing, is Thomas Molony’s account of a Tanzanian wholesaler’s non-use of mobile telephony. The author first outlines how traders of perishables in Tanzania use mobile phones to transmit supply and demand information, a field that is well researched in a range of quantitative studies (see Aker, 2008, 2010; Jensen, 2007). He also looks at the efforts farmers had to undertake in 2004, when Molony conducted his research, to access mobile phone networks (a situation that has certainly improved since then).

Despite finding that mobile phone usage was already wide-spread among wholesalers in 2003 (when it was considerable more expensive then today), Molony then singles out one trader who, at that point, refused to use a mobile phone to argue that “the telephone may be considered unimportant because personal relationships are formed during meetings conducted in person”. On this still successful wholesaler, he writes that

while not having a mobile phone may make his jo hectic and he may lose some friends alng the way when he is unable to sell farmers’ consignments to his many contacts in Dar es Salaam, his visits to farmers ensure that he is known localy, and crucially, recommended to emerging farmers”.

While the importance of face-to-face contact for trust-building should not be underestimated, I was disappointed with this conclusion which stands in seeming contradiction to most of the preceding chapter. Moreover, the author ignores much of the relevant literature, in particular Overå’s (2006) very similar, great research on wholesalers’ use of mobile phones in Ghana.

This ignorance of related empirical literature has bugged me throughout the whole book. There is a great deal of references to other anthropological studies, but in the end, a lot of anecdotes still doesn’t make up for the need of quantitative evidence. Another issue is that much of the research the chapter are based on was conducted as early as 2003. In the history of mobile telephony, the six years that are between data collection and the book’s publication in 2009 are a lifetime, and many of the observations might well be outdated today.

“Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa” provides some interesting qualitative research from a great variety of countries and a range of different viewpoints. I also like the fact that it includes at least some chapters by African researchers, who are often greatly underrepresented. However, in the end, I felt that the book lacks a quantitative component to assess the relevance of the phenomena described.

Mirjam de Bruijn, Francis Nyamnjoh, & Inge Brinkman (editors). Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Africa. 2009. Bamenda: Langaa. Amazon.com.

Ants, Genes, and Robots

Have you ever watched an ant trail and wondered how the apparent order in these insects come about? Ants are determinedly running back and forth, carrying food and building materials – somehow, you may have thought, this order must have been created. You might have imagined an ant queen ruling over her kingdom, or ants that are genetically programmed to perform their tasks. Indeed, your imagination might tell a lot about yourself1 – as it does about the French revolutionary Latreille, who thought that the colony has “a single will, a single law” based on the love the ants feel for each other.

As Deborah M. Gordon’s recent book “Ant Encounters” shows, the reality might be even more fascinating than Latreille’s altruistic phantasy. Ant behaviour, she writes, is determined by “interaction networks”: “An ant colony’s behavior is guided by a pulsing, shifting web of interactions, in which the pattern of interactions is more important than the content.”

“Understanding how ant colonies actually function”, Gordon writes in an article for the wonderful Boston Review, “means that we have to abandon explanations based on central control”. Each ant responds only to its immediate surroundings and to its interactions with other ants nearby, yet from this interaction network, coordinate behaviour emerges.

One of the most fascinating parts of “Ant Encounters” is devoted to the question how ants communicate. “An ant uses its recent experience to decide what to do. The pattern of interaction itself, rather than any signal transferred, acts as the message”, writes Gordon. It’s not important what ants tell each other when they meet, but simply that they meet.

The author herself reminds us of the stunning parallel between ant behaviour and the self-organization that forms the human body: “Ant colonies, like genes, work without blueprints or programming”, she writes. Just as in ants, the messages of neurons are not transmitted by one neuron, but a multiple. A single neuron can only send an excitatory or an inhibitory signal, or not fire at all. Yet one excitatory signal is not enough, just as one ant can’t tell another what to do – a whole pattern of interactions is necessary to trigger an effect.

On the other hand, Gordon points out where the scientific strife to create cognitive systems still falls short of its aspirations. Engineers have started to model robots after insects, and ants in particular. But even as robots communicate amongst each other to coordinate behaviour, they are far from living beings, writes Gordon: “[T]he complexity of complex biological systems is not what makes living systems unique. One way that living systems are unique […] is that they cause their own development and activity.” A robot is still programmed to achieve a certain goal – an ant can change its task by simply encountering enough nest mates.

Deborah M. Gordon’s “Ant Encounters” gives a fascinating insight into the organization of an ant colony. Most of all, however, it is a great read because it inspires to question common place understandings of communication and organization, far beyond the world of insects.

Deborah M. Gordon: Ant Encounters. Interaction Networks and Colony Behavior. Princeton University Press. 2010.

Crossposted from the BeTA Lab website. BeTA Lab is led by Dr. Sennay Ghebreab, who teaches my course Information, Communication, Cognition. The lab operates “at the crossroad of the brain sciences and information technology”.

  1. If this intrigues you, you might be interested in Diane M. Rogder’s “Debugging the Link Between Social Theory and Social Insects”, which explores the link between political fashion and the interpretation of insect behaviour in depth. [↩]

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

I have just started my second semester at Amsterdam University College with a course called “Information, Communication, Cognition”. Trying to link tracks in computer science, media studies and psychology, this course looks at cognitive systems: artificial intelligence and the human brain. It seems pretty interesting so far, and I will probably write more about it on this blog as it unfolds.

For the start, we watched an unusual documentary: Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, a 1997 film by Errol Morris. It’s hard to describe this movie without asking: What do an elderly topiary gardener, a retired lion tamer, a man fascinated by mole rats, and a cutting-edge robotics designer have in common?

As it turns out, they share more than they might be aware of. All four of them deal with complex systems – and as different as a bear-shaped tree and a lion, a mole rat colony and an insect-like robot might be, interaction with them has shaped similar ideas in the protagonists of the movie.

Complex systems are not stable. They collaps, like a carefully shaped tree statue burdened by a winterly blizzard’s snow, and they can even turn against their human “master”, like a lion suddenly angered by a hidden irritation.

Often it seems as if such systems have a “will”, as if they where progressing in a determined direction. Yet in fact their behavior emerges from inherent qualities – their design, so to say – and their interaction with the environment (including others of their species).

Sensory capacity is thus extremely important. As in the lion which the tamer holds at distance with a chair – because the lion can only focus on one of its four legs and lets go as the chair is put down.

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control is a great inspiration to think about the behavior of complex systems and our interaction with them. The individual stories of its four protagonists lead to great question – how do complex systems work? What is communication? At first, however, its message might be hard to find – I will definitely watch the movie again, because I’m sure I still missed quite some parts of it.

Finally, I also have to mention the film’s fine and quite unusual cinematography (by Robert Richardson, whose work has won him two Oscars for JFK and The Aviator). I loved how sometimes a scene would go on while a different interviewee started to speak, blurring the lines between their seemingly so distinct fields and often making me realize the connecting link between them. All in all, an inspiring and enjoyable movie.