Gauravonomics Blog

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Nokia ethnographers Jan Chipchase and Younghee Jung share their experiences in conducting the Nokia Open Studio design contest in 2007 across three slums around the world — Dharavi (Mumbai, India), Favela Jacarezinho (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), and Camp Buduburam (Accra, Ghana) –

Ethnographic research methods guide the design research phase for innovation as far as creating opportunities through which we can understand the present living and underlying motivations behind why people behave the way they do. But it often does not let us see beyond the barriers of the present living: people who are not using technology not because they do not need it but because they cannot afford it; people who do not have time or social network to introduce them to new tools. Through open studios, we wanted to lift these barriers and understand how people see the relevance of technology in their lives, sometimes for the future, sometimes in relation to what is lacking today. It is not a marketing tool, and it is not a tool to hunt ideas to implement in products directly. But it is a tool that supports our thinking and projection about the future. (Younghee Jung)

(Cross posted on my fellowship blog)

TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb have written about a slide shared by Yahoo!’s Principal Research Scientist Elizabeth Churchill on geographical locations where Flickr users are more likely to post their photos with privacy settings (red) or use the default public setting (green). The sample set was 1 million Flickr users who self-reported their locations, in 2005.

Neither Michael Arrington nor Marshall Kirkpatrick share any details of the methodology behind the map, but a quick Google search led me to the presentation from which this slide seems to be taken: ‘Sharing Preferences and Privacy Cultures‘. The presentation itself is based on a paper by Elizabeth Churchill and Shyong K. Lam titled ‘The Social Web: Global Village or Private Cliques?’ The paper is behind a firewall but the presentation gives some more data about the research —

- More than 90% of users younger than 25 post their photos as public. In the 25 to 40 age group, public photo sharing behavior drops, almost in s straight line, to 80% and goes as low as 70% for users in their late 50s and early 60s.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

In my earlier post on the recently published Universal McCann study, I had written about how we use different communication channels to stay in touch with our contacts.

Perhaps the most important insight in the Universal McCaan study is that we use the internet for expanding our network of contacts but use the mobile phone to maintain our current network.

Here’s another interesting insight from the Universal McCann report: we use social networks for making new friends and personal blogs for socializing with friends –

In the previous post, we found that Brazilians and the Indians are amongst the most social online whereas the Americans are amongst the least social. The same trend can be seen here.

While differences in culture partly explain this significant difference in online social behavior, self-selection is also part of the explanation. Given the low penetration of the internet in Brazil and India, social media usage in these countries suffers from a serious early adopter bias.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

I had earlier used data from the Wave 3 of the Power of the People Social Media Tracker by Universal McCann to do a comparative analysis of social media usage in BRIC countries.

Now Universal McCann has published some more findings from the same study in another report titled When did we start trusting strangers? How the internet turned us all into influencers. The report is a treasure trove of interesting findings on how digital media is changing how we look at relationships and influence and I’m sure that I’ll return to it often in subsequent posts.

However, in this post, I want to focus on Universal Mccann’s findings on how we stay in touch with our personal contacts –

The evolution of the web as a social platform and primary communication channel has had a dramatic impact on the scale and nature of our friendship networks. Figure 8 shows the global average number of friends and personal acquaintances we maintain via different forms of communication including face to face, digital and letters.

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s the latest world map of social networks based on Alexa data (via Oxyweb) –

– and Indian and Brazil are the only two countries in the world where Orkut is the most popular social network.

I have often wondered what joins Brazilians and Indians in their love for Orkut. The answer is a combination of serendipity, first mover advantage, faster loading time, simplicity of the name, similarity of the name to Hindi/ Portuguese sounds, simplicity of the user interface, and association with the Google brand name, but the most powerful reason is the lax attitude towards privacy common to Indians and Brazilians.

In spite of the contrary results on the Synovate survey on online privacy, both Brazilians and Indians share generally lax attitudes about online privacy.

This is reflected in the much less fine-grained privacy controls (only friends and friend-of-friends), the excessively open, almost exhibitionist profiles (especially by Brazilian women), the very voyeuristic and totally transparent browsing behavior of Brazilian and Indian men (and their tendency to ask strange women to be friends), the general tendency to add strangers as friends, the open “crush” and “favorite” features, and, finally, the open and often spammy scrapbooks.

Over the last week, reposts of a rather misleading Trend Micro press release on on spam in BRIC countries¹ kept showing up in my Google Alert feed for “BRIC + Internet”. The press release and most of the news articles quoting it verbatim focus on the high incidence of spam in BRIC countries. However, even some cursory math showed me that the incidence of spam in BRIC countries is not unusual: BRIC countries account for 28.5% of the world’s internet users and 27.1% of the world’s spam (according to Trend Micro). In fact, two other reports from Sophos² and Secure Computing³ peg the contribution of BRIC countries to worldwide spam at 19.7% and 18.5% respectively.

If you compare the three sets of data, three trends emerge strongly –

- USA still remains (one of) the largest contributors of worldwide spam, which is understandable given its high internet user base.
- China’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately low, perhaps because of its strict censorship regime.
- Russia’s contribution to worldwide spam is disproportionately high, so much so that Russia is being called the “spam superpower of the world”^{4 5}.

The question to ask, however, is: why is spam so high in Russia?

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

When you are doing an interdisciplinary study of social technologies across four countries, it is important to focus on the connections between otherwise unrelated factors, and it is useful to develop a framework to look for these connections.

Here’s the framework we have been using for our research on social media in BRIC countries –

The outer circle is the national context, which comprises of the five interconnected Cs of computing devices, connectivity, culture, content and capabilities. The inner circle is the social media ecosystem itself. Our research, which looks at the connections between the two, has three layers –

Layer 1: The role of the national context in social media adoption
Layer 2: The dynamics of the social media ecosystem
Layer 3: The role of social media in changing the social context

Finally, the national contexts we are looking at are the four BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) and United States (as a reference point).

(Cross-posted on my fellowship blog - How International Values Shape Communications Technologies)

Here’s a brilliant TED presentation by Hans Rosling on how to look differently at development indicators across countries and continents, using Gapminder’s trend visualization tool Trendalyzer –

I spent an hour playing around with Gapmindmer and discovered some interesting trends related to the diffusion of communications technologies in BRIC countries.

In all these charts comparing Brazil, Russia, India, China and United States, the X axis represents the income per person (in fixed PPP$) on a logarithmic scale while the Y axis changes. By pressing the ‘play’ button, you can see how the variable changes for these five countries over years.

Let’s start with the Y axis representing the number of cell phones users on a logarithmic scale. It’s fascinating how each country seems to stay close to the X axis until something happens and it rises vertically. It happens to the USA in 1980, China in 1986, Brazil in 1989, Russia in 1990 and India in 1994. As of now, these five countries have the biggest cell phone user bases across the world¹ (China at #1 with 601 million, India at #2 with 305 million, USA at #3 with 260 million, Russia at #4 with 172 million and Brazil at #5 with 135 million).

This riff on how BRIC countries will adopt cloud computing is triggered off by Ben’s post on cloud computing at our official fellowship blog.

JP Morgan analyst Tarry Singh has been speculating (based on search data from Google) that BRIC countries, esp. India, will be early adopters of cloud computing. However, the high interest in cloud computing in India is surely driven by IT vendors and not end users. You can see a similar skew, especially for India, on searches on “social media”, which is again driven by IT vendors instead of end users.

I can imagine IT companies in India being early adopters of cloud computing because of high familiarity and low cost. However, I can’t imagine mainstream businesses or individual users in India (or Brazil/ Russia/ China) adopting cloud computing anytime soon because internet access in these countries is far from ubiquitous. Even the much higher penetration of mobile phones in BRIC countries won’t drive cloud computing because most of these mobile phones still don’t have data access.

So, search volumes apart, cloud computing is still far from the ground realities in BRIC countries.

Here are some highlights from a survey conducted by research firm Synovate amongst 13,000 respondents aged 18-65 in Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, South Africa, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the US (via eMarketer) –

- Only 42% of the respondents knew about social networking, even though a higher percentage of younger respondents were aware of social networking.

- Only 26% of the respondents were members of any social network. Some markets (like India) seemed to favor multiple memberships and some seemed to stick to one or two major ones.

- 51% of the respondents expressed concerns about privacy and security issues online. Brazilians (79%) and Americans (69%) were most concerned about such issues while Indians (19%) were the least concerned. Amongst members of social networking sites, only 26% were comfortable giving out personal details. Indians (57%) were amongst those most comfortable sharing personal details while Brazilians (23%) and Americans (30%) were amongst those least comfortable.