REGISTRATION
INFORMATION
World University Rankings - Top 600

DigiTalk with DUT’s Digital Activist, Colin Thakur: Why Talk Should Be Cheap

DigiTalk with DUT’s Digital Activist, Colin Thakur: Why Talk Should Be Cheap

Ebrahim Asmal is DUT’s resident network expert and one of the most popular lecturers in Information Technology. He is a committed serial teacher who works at explaining complex evolving concepts in layman’s terms. I deeply admire people who work at their work. He is also an awesome travel companion.

A few years ago, Ebbie and I were in Mumbai, the city of dreams, when we came across a person shaving at an informal settlement. The sheer majesty of his moustache had us in awe. And he knew it. The traffic, well being the traffic in Mumbai, meant that we were pretty much going to watch him shave before we moved an inch. So Ebbie engaged him in conversation and asked if we could take a picture.

No problem. Ebbie used his swanky month-old mobile (my personal word preference for the “cellphone”) to take the picture. Wait, the man gestured, as he dashed into his home only to triumphantly reappear with an even better phone! He proceeded to take our pictures!

Being a naïve new traveller I admit to being embarrassingly condescending in my attitude to India’s poor. It was for this reason that I was gobsmacked by the impunity with which Indians called one another. You see, in India, a mobile is a resource. The affordable cost means that you call when you want to, not when you can afford to.

What do we do? We use the Morse code of the 21st century: we “miss call” one another! “Miss-call” me when you get home. “Miss call” me when you are outside. And so on. This is why we “innovated” the “Please call me” service. This, folks, is not and cannot be called an innovation – it is a national shame.

I was whining about this to my good friend Albert Mucunguzi, editor of a real Southern African gem called PC Tech magazine. We both attend virtual group therapy sessions as tormented Manchester United fans. He smiled warmly – a really good sign in treatment – while proudly informing me, “We Ugandans have a word for it – beep.” How cool is that? Well, Albert, we South Africans coin terms only for really important things like “tenderpreneur”.

When a call genuinely happens for reasons out of your control it is called a dropped call, as in “the call dropped”. Fascinatingly the phrase “missed call” is miskol in the Philippines. Miskol actually won the 2007 Word of the Year in that beautiful country of 7 000 islands. The Nigerians, use the word “flash”, while some Western countries use the word “prank”.

If we did have a word in South Africa, what would it be? “Dallah” – as in “I will dallah you”? “Chune”, as in I will chune you?. Here tilt becomes a dropped call. I didn’t chune you, it just tilted! Suggestions? Alas, I am having too much fun with this. Let’s move on and return to my point.

The mobile must be commoditised. South Africa has not made mobiles accessible despite the fact the device is pervasive. A person ought to be able to just pick up her phone and call mommy, even a chommie, when she wants to. Not between 7pm and 7am or on alternate weekends.

An Indian colleague at work, who is on international roaming, simply dials her family back home on a whim. Yet the self-same person thinks carefully before phoning somebody on an SA line, when using a local mobile.

We need a Barry Le Roux /Gerrie Nel combo here. Who or what is behind that network cloud that wants to deny our people the right to communicate easily? Why?
We therefore use our phones as WhatsApp walkie-talkies. Or even as FaceBook tagging tools. The reason is mostly the high cost of talking. Have you considered the cost of your device in the context only of the number of outgoing calls you make?
There are 6.9 billion mobile subscriptions, of which 4.5 billion were unique in 2014. Although this is bigger than the Internet base, the world has not yet reached the holy grail of one-person-one-connected device, which is termed the “mobile moment”. This, I regret, has not translated to our nirvana of one-person one-connected device.

This massive penetration is an unparalleled opportunity to educate, to communicate, to respond to disasters and to make our lives easier. Yes, Councillor Fawziah Peer, you may even use it to determine where the potholes are. I fear. madam, that the people will develop this sooner and they will tell you, in increasing numbers where they are and at what rate they grow. Be careful what you ask for.

Most of the youth and especially those in Africa, only ever experience the Internet through their mobiles. Surfing on a mobile? Oh, boy, don’t get me going on this. This is a story for another day.

We have a myriad of mobile contract options all carefully designed to obfuscate their offerings and confuse us. The only purpose is to make inter-company comparisons difficult. We also need to commoditise the rules of engagement. The contracts we sign demand a signature in a hundred places. The cost of service and the contractual obligations must be comprehensible to all the people.

The pinnacle function of a mobile must be for people to talk to people, conveniently. For now, please use your free minutes and talk to someone. And change your network every two years – generate churn, as they call it and tell your service providers why.
Ebrahim, please return my call, after I “miss call” you. It’s about those pictures from the Indian trip…

Published in: East Coast Mail, 6 February 2015

Pictured: Colin Thakur is the Director of the iNeSi e-Skills CoLab at the Durban University of Technology. He is a digital activist keen on upgrading the e-skills of the nation to enhance the quality of life. He lives and subscribes to the mantra One-person-One-connected device.

No comments