Same internet, different experience

Photo by Renan Martelli da Rosa

In recent years, we’ve all read about mobile phones becoming widespread throughout the world. A lot of people in the so-called Global South, or developing economies, can now finally afford smartphones. They use Facebook, they use YouTube, they participate in e-commerce. Since these apps are what “we,” that is people in Western countries, use to access a lot of the internet, we often think that the way we experience them must be how they experience them, too. But there are some big differences in this experience that have to do with economic conditions, infrastructure and general living conditions.

How much did you pay for your Facebook account? That’s not a trick question. We know that the correct answer is that a Facebook account is free. But it’s not free everywhere.

Buying an iPhone in Cambodia

Let me tell you the story of this young Cambodian woman that I talked to in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. She’s in her early 20s. She works in a garment factory. She makes about $150 per month. When I spoke to her, she had two mobile phones, one of which was an old-fashioned, candy-bar-style phone with no smart features. You can just call and send messages. That was her calling phone; she had a SIM card that she used to call her family back in the province she was originally from.

She also had a second-hand iPhone. It was her third smartphone in the course of a year. She said she had lost her other phones, which is usually a euphemism for saying that the phone was stolen, and she had paid about $200 for it. I want to talk about how she got her phone and how she started using it, because that really is a window into how different her internet experience is from the standard internet experience in the West.

The price of Facebook

She saw other people using iPhones and thought they looked nice, so she asked her brother to buy one for her. It was her money, but she didn’t want to go by herself to the market where second-hand phones were sold. Her brother got her the phone – a very good second-hand iPhone, whose interface was entirely in English. The operating system was in English, all of the apps were in English and there was no Facebook.

She didn’t speak English and she didn’t read English, so the first thing she did was go to one of the many mobile phone shops that don’t sell mobile phones but which help customers to download content and set up their mobile phones for use. The shop owner downloaded Facebook, YouTube and other popular apps to her iPhone and then transferred content such as films, songs and TV series, from his computer to her phone. She paid about $1 to have her Facebook account downloaded and set up, $1 for other content and $1 for airtime.

What’s interesting about her Facebook account is that she told the shop owner her name, but then he set up everything else. He set up her password, he confirmed the account using his own email address, and he started following a few accounts so that she would have some content already populating her Facebook page when she first logged in. This was standard practice. He had a list on his desk of all the people he had set up Facebook accounts for, with their passwords. He also gave her a piece of paper with her username and password, which she gave to her brother for safekeeping.

Why spend the time and money?

There she was, ready to use her Facebook after having spent all of this money and after having had all of these people help her to set it up. Someone making $150 per month had just paid about $200 dollars to buy a second-hand phone that was not in her own language, and she had just paid about $3 for content that we consider to be free.

Using the phone itself was a very cumbersome operation. She didn’t have the language changed to Khmer, even though this is a language that is well supported by mobile phones, and she was literate. She just didn’t feel very comfortable reading. She preferred to navigate her phone by remembering the shape and position of all of her apps and by using mostly non-textual communication. But the phone offered her an important human connection. It offered her the opportunity to meet new friends, follow the news and get entertainment that was often much-needed relief after working in the factory.

Young, urban and educated

Photo by Juan Ci

Around twenty years ago, the historian of technology Ron Eglash pointed out that, as Westerners, we often don’t realise just how our access to digital technology is facilitated because we are the users foremost in the minds of technology designers and developers. Even though a lot of digital technologies today are designed – not only made – in China, the ideal user around whom technology is designed is still young, urban and educated. It’s someone who is comfortable with reading and writing, who lives in a place where there is good connectivity and who has a reasonable amount of disposable income to spend on devices, apps and content. As soon as you step away from this user – especially in the Global South, but also in rural areas in the peripheries of the Global North or Western countries – the situation really changes.

How technology is optimised for the West

Take something like language. Digital technologies are built on and optimised for the English language. Think of keyboards and computers – they are alphabet-based keyboards. For any language that is not based on the alphabet – such as Chinese, with its characters, or Burmese and Khmer, where consonants and vowels are written together in a way that doesn’t map very easily to the keyboard – that adds a big layer of effort just to be able to write.

Or think of something like paying for your connectivity. In Western countries, most people have mobile phones with a monthly or yearly contract that includes a certain amount of data – usually a very generous amount of data. We don’t often think about how much data we might be using when we watch a YouTube video, exchange photographs or use our instant messaging platforms.

Facing a data diet

In many countries in the Global South, and certainly in Cambodia and Myanmar, another country where I did a lot of work, most people use pay-as-you-go contracts. Often that means pay as you go, and then stop, and then go again, because you put airtime into your phone, you watch a video and then all of your data credit is drained. You don’t have any more connectivity, and until you have money to buy some more, you’re cut off from the internet.

When you have to think of your content on the basis of its weight, you go on a data diet. You have to figure out strategies for understanding what is heavier and what is lighter. We all know that a YouTube video is heavier than a photo, and a photo is heavier than a text message. But by how much? We’re not really sure.

Coping strategies

If you have to pay for every single byte of content that you use, then you figure out pretty quickly whether it’s worth watching a YouTube video by streaming it on your phone, or whether it’s better to visit a store and buy the same content from someone who has already downloaded it onto their desktop and can transfer it to your mobile phone.

Data is saved for what are considered key functions of a mobile phone: Facebook and connecting with other people by sharing photos, commenting on their posts, sending emoticons, etc. All other content, as much as possible, is to be consumed offline: purchased from other people or exchanged with friends. The apps might be the same – Facebook, YouTube, games – but the way people consume them around the world can be very different.

Connectivity is key

Photo by nuttapon kupkaew

Nonetheless, a global similarity in how we relate to the internet and to digital technology is the importance of connectivity. Would you spend a month and a half of your salary to get a new smartphone? Would you pay for content that we typically consider free? You probably would, especially today. Could you really give up your instant messaging or your ability to connect with family and friends using video communication?

The importance of creating a connection, of keeping in touch, of feeling a little bit less alone, is such that it pushes us to forget the significant downsides that come with this connectivity. In the case of this young woman in Cambodia and many people in the Global South, but also people around us, those downsides include significant expenditures and a very cumbersome route to access and use digital technologies.

Discover more about

internet at the margins

Oreglia, E., & Ling, R. (2018). Popular Digital Imagination: Grass-Root Conceptualization of the Mobile Phone in the Global South. Journal of Communication, 68(3), 570–589.

Oreglia, E. (2014). ICT and (Personal) Development in Rural China. Information Technologies & International Development, 10(3), 19–30.

Oreglia, E. (2019). Location-based Technologies from the Walls of Rural China. In R. Wilken, G. Goggin, & H. A. Horst (Eds.), Location Technologies in International Context (pp. 17–30). Routledge.

Using the internet at the margins of the world