Blurring Livelihoods and Lives: The Social Uses of Mobile Phones and Socioeconomic Development

Abstract

tos you might have set to appear as caller ID, the ringtone you have chosen, and the bookmarks or applets you may use to check everything from sports scores to movie times. But mainly, just think of the basic flow of incoming and outgoing calls; chances are, you may have used your handset to call a colleague one moment and your mother the next. Even if you haven’t made any calls today, your phone is probably on, waiting patiently to connect you to the office, to students, to friends, or to family. As technologies go, mobile phones are quite flexible. GSM and CDMA networks provide coverage to homes, to workplaces, even to the wilderness. People carry handsets with them as they move from place to place and between social situations. By enabling and strengthening social and economic relationships at a distance, mobiles shift time and place, and complicate contexts and roles to an even greater degree than the landlines that preceded them. Carrying a mobile invites consideration or even reconfiguration of being “at work,”“in transit,”“at home,” or “at play.” 1 Mobiles blur the lines between livelihoods and lives, and not just among smartphone-wielding information workers. Rather, this blurring can be experienced by almost anyone engaged with work. Around the world, farmers and fishermen, artisans and day laborers, community health workers and primary school teachers are carrying handsets and using them for both productive and personal uses throughout their daily routines. This paper focuses on how this intermingling of lives and livelihoods, as mediated by the mobile phone, figures into the micro-processes of economic development. It neither broadly elaborates the core contributions of mobile phone use to economic development (synchronizing prices, expanding markets, reducing transport costs, etc.), nor suggests that one kind of mobile use is more important than another. Instead, it argues simply for a perspective on work and on livelihoods that is broad enough to account for (and perhaps even take advantage of) the social processes surrounding these activities. Analysts, policymakers, and technologists