In March, internet researcher and designer An Xiao Mina published a fascinating piece on The New Inquiry about "the sneakernet," a concept that addresses the nuances of connectivity and the myriad social methods through which people exchange culture, access, and information. In the article, she shares an anecdote from a research trip to Northern Uganda, a region where residents had no access to the electric grid or running water and access to 3G internet was limited by both availability and affordability. She writes:
At night, residents turn on their radios, and those who can afford Chinese feature phones play mp3s. One day, I heard familiar lyrics:
Hey, I just met you
I turned my head. A number of young people gathered around a woman rocking out to Carly Rae Jepsen’s "Call Me Maybe ," a song that owes so much of its success to the viral power of YouTube and Justin Bieber. The phone's owner wasn't accessing it via the Internet. Rather, she had an mp3 acquired through a Bluetooth transfer with a friend.
Indeed, the song was just one of many media files I saw on people's phones: There were Chinese kung fu movies, Nigerian comedies, and Ugandan pop music. They were physically transferred, phone to phone, Bluetooth to Bluetooth, USB stick to USB stick, over hundreds of miles by an informal sneakernet of entertainment media downloaded from the Internet or burned from DVDs, bringing media that;s popular in video halls—basically, small theaters for watching DVDs—to their own villages and huts.
In geographic distribution charts of Carly Rae Jepsen's virality, you'd be hard pressed to find impressions from this part of the world. Nor is this sneakernet practice unique to the region. On the other end of continent, in Mali, music researcher Christopher Kirkley has documented a music trade using Bluetooth transfers that is similar to what I saw in northern Uganda. These forms of data transfer and access, though quite common, are invisible to traditional measures of connectivity and Big Data research methods. Like millions around the world with direct internet connections, young people in "unconnected" regions are participating in the great viral products of the Internet, consuming mass media files and generating and transferring their own media.
What does this have to do with public policy? At the end of the piece, An explains how understanding connectivity as a spectrum, rather than a binary, can inform policies and strategies for outreach and access. To illustrate this, she uses a vivid water analogy:
Like water, the Internet is vast, familiar and seemingly ubiquitous but with extremes of unequal access. Some people have clean, unfettered and flowing data from invisible but reliable sources. Many more experience polluted and flaky sources, and they have to combine patience and filters to get the right set of data they need. Others must hike dozens of miles of paved and dirt roads to access the Internet like water from a well, ferrying it back in fits and spurts when the opportunity arises. And yet more get trickles of data here and there from friends and family, in the form of printouts, a song played on a phone’s speaker, an interesting status update from Facebook relayed orally, a radio station that features stories from the Internet.
Like water from a river, data from the Internet can be scooped up and irrigated and splashed around in novel ways. Whether it’s north of the Nile in Uganda or south of Market St. in the Bay Area, policies and strategies for connecting the "unconnected" should take into account the vast spectrum of ways that people find and access data. Packets of information can be distributed via SMS and mobile 3G but also pieces of paper, USB sticks and Bluetooth. Solar-powered computer kiosks in rural areas can have simple capabilities for connecting to mobile phones’ SD cards for upload and download. Technology training courses can start with a more nuanced base level of understanding, rather than assuming zero knowledge of the basics of computing and network transfer. These are broad strokes, of course; the specifics of motivation and methods are complex and need to be studied carefully in any given instance. But the very channels that ferry entertainment media can also ferry health care information, educational material and anything else in compact enough form.
An Xiao Mina is a product owner at Meedan and an internet researcher with The Civic Beat .
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