Emergence of multiplex mobile phone communication networks across rural areas: An Ethiopian experiment

Petr Matous, Yasuyuki Todo and Tatsuya Ishikawa

Network Science, 2014, vol. 2, issue 2, 162-188

Abstract: Mobile phones are spreading to remote areas of the globe, leading to the following question: “What is the potential of the new communication technologies for increasing individuals' access to information and the diffusion of attitudes and practices across rural areas of developing countries?” We have donated phones to 234 farmers selected by stratified random sampling in an agrarian region of Ethiopia and have tracked their main communication partners for six months. The panel data and qualitative interviews indicated that the phones were not typically used to expand the existing constrained social networks or to gain information from new sources but to call contacts who had been known personally and to individuals introduced through the experiment. Stochastic actor-based network models clarified that although agricultural information-seeking and casual calling are intertwined, the mechanisms underlying the evolution of instrumental and expressive communication networks are distinct. Acquaintances living beyond comfortable walking distances and individuals whom others call became preferred for information-seeking calls. Thus, mobile phones may accelerate information exchange within existing social networks and may support the creation of new information hubs that might facilitate more efficient information diffusion over long distances in the future. In contrast, the importance of geographical communities strongly prevails in casual phone conversations. Physically proximate community members who tend to be met frequently were preferred for sentiment-sharing calls. Preferential attachment was not evident for this type of communication. As a result, the network of these expressive calls was highly localized and fragmented, making it unlikely for personal feelings to diffuse across wide geographical areas through the new phone networks.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:netsci:v:2:y:2014:i:02:p:162-188_00

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Network Science from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().