Re/claiming the Utility and Novelty of Mobile Phones and Social Media

The story begins with the introduction of an innovation, often with an expansive promise. The mobile phone as well as what we now call Web 2.0 promised to democratize access to information and create a connected utopia. Inventors, like my fellow poets and researchers, experience it at a molecular level when they finally strike gold. The cell phone, the internet, and a social media application could change the world. Innovators and early adopters are thrilled by the sheer possibility and become evangelists for their pet products. The zealotry of this group of early-adopting fans eventually piques the interest of a slightly bigger group of users. The initial success of these products and services ensured their global adoption and popularity. People who remained reluctant were bullied into compliance and opting out was not an option, or softly coerced if the benefits are so radical or wide-ranging, like with M-Pesa in Kenya and with Google products globally. Luddites and other hard-core skeptics eventually experienced reputational, cultural, financial and interpersonal consequences for attempting to remain outside the sphere of these services.

Prior to my recent engagement with pastoralists, I would have described myself as firmly in this group of hold-outs: more perturbed by the risks than enthralled by the benefits of digital technology, especially social media. However, learning from pastoralists is challenging my notions to exist outside of digital media technologies. I now feel what I believe many experienced at the first introduction of mobile phones, and social media—giddy, and slightly constipated with the future.

I have found that beyond their resilience and impressive management of rangelands—even amidst the ongoing climate crisis—pastoralists’ inventive risk management translates in their relationship with mobile technology and social media. The pastoralists I have engaged with through a research consortium called Supporting Pastoralism and Agriculture in Recurrent and Protracted Crises (SPARC), organize their communities efficiently using technologies and have a strikingly healthy relationship with technologies that many of us on social media have been unable to achieve. You might consider them the original techies.

In my recommendations to redesign more inclusive technology, I share five lessons from my study on the cultures of pastoralists.

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Dear pastoralists, itinerants, travellers and wanderers:

Thank you for showing us it is possible to commune with this planet, with each other, and even with those of us who chose to settle. Yours is a sophisticated blueprint of a wild before—the best ‘greenprint’—a native in-between, and the wonder of an otherwise hereafter. I worry we the settled have little to offer you, but I appreciate that you continue your studentship of our visions of sedentary modernity and urbanity. May we apprentice ourselves to your stewardship of this gift of a world.

Shukran tele,

Alexis Grace.

To my fellow born-frees about town, and any interning first-‘worlders’:

Join me under the palm tree, by the Indian Ocean; under jamna, by Lake Victoria; in the desert, by our Lake Turkana or your jade sea; under the acacia, by Lake Nakuru or Lake Baringo or Lake Naivasha or Lake Elementaita or down River Tana if you would like. I call upon those I have learned from in Kaduna, and from the wonderful aggregators of herder wisdom across Nigeria: Fulbe Development & Cultural Organization (FUDECO). Let me pop your (internet) bubble. I will be gentle, but I plan to break things. This house we share, geographically and certainly digitally, has more rooms than you imagined possible. Our best housemates are our friends in the drylands. They have much to teach us. Pastoralists are clear-eyed about the risks facing this earth as well as the opportunities available to care for the planet and its peoples, animals and minerals. We can start by utilizing mobile technology to re/humanize and re/home ourselves in a world of our making. Here is an invitation to follow pastoralists’ generous guide of what an Otherwise might look like.

Anxiously,

Mx. Left-behind.

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Our research currently focuses on the drylands of East and West Africa—and the Middle East in the rest of the consortium—however we look forward to learning from researchers studying with the various pastoralist communities across the world.

We learned that pastoralists use phones, but slightly differently from non-itinerant users.  Mobile phones have become integral to the lives of many pastoral communities, with diffusion rates nearly doubling in a six-year period in the arid and semiarid lands of northern Kenya, for example. The rate of diffusion is similar in West as well as East Africa, with a similar uptick among Fulani pastoralists in northern Benin.

In addition to the pressures we urban or settled societies face, we struggle to tap into the opportunities and address the negative effects of mobile phones. For us, constant reachability makes it hard to set up boundaries with each other, especially where our employers are concerned. There is a deeper sense of entitlement to rapid response and infinite amounts of time from those we message because after all aren’t we always on our phones? A blizzard of social media apps also demands our attention, with high-tech algorithms designed to enrage, enrapture and compel spending on the latest this-or-that favoured by such-and-such influencers.

However, in the case of pastoralist mobile phone users, our research team found that cell phones, by design, integrate particularly well into their lives. They tend to own feature phones because brick phones such as the Nokia 3310 are affordable and have a long battery life of up to three days, hence, its convenience. However, staying connected is doubly important for people whose livelihood depends on travelling long distances, and who are likely to be separated from relatives and friends for months at a time. For those of us who have forgotten or were too young when mobile phones entered the market, we easily dismiss how much of a game-changer their portability is. My mother was wildly excited the first time someone paged, and she could separate the receiver from the landline and take it out to the veranda. Yet now, she takes how easily reachable her friends are from continents away. Pastoralists who can afford a phone find the capacity to be partially reachable critical to their way of life. In a recent publication, a Moroccan cattle breeder said: ‘It is important to be connected. I cannot understand life without a phone. He who does not have a mobile phone is not alive.’