‘Mobile Love Videos Make Me Feel Healthy’: Rethinking ICTs for Development

Abstract

ICT4D discourses tell stories of poor farmers using the internet to compare crop prices, and nurses who use SMS to remind people to take their anti-retrovirals. Do nurses also use work-mobiles to make private phone calls? Do farmers surf for pornography when they are supposed to be comparing crop prices? In the ICTs for Development discourse, ICTs are positioned as tools and processes to fight poverty and facilitate empowerment through economic and educational gains; I argue that this discourse ignores the diverse ways in which the poor and the marginalised use media technologies in their everyday lives for social networking, entertainment, to produce and participate in intimate and erotic economies, and to express and experience their sexuality, relationships, pleasure and intimacy in ways that could also be considered empowering. Media use (like development) is an area where sexualities are actively made and remade. ICT4D needs to include an understanding of the potential emotional and sexual effects of interventions. Ethnographic studies of media consumption and use are needed to provide a deeper understanding of sexuality in a way that contributes to applications in a development context.

This paper presents one such ethnographic study on how a community uses mobile phones, with the hope that it may provide clues and cues for people and organisations working across these related areas of ICT4D, sexuality, culture and gender. This paper presents a short pilot project of in-depth interviews with six self-identified Kothis, a South Asian feminine male identity. This was supported by observations of and participation in weekly support group meetings in an HIV related NGO of which they are members. The study finds that ICTs changes possibilities for finding sex, love and social mobility, as well as presenting new channels for harassment by police and others.