Beyond Access to Information: Understanding the Use of Information by Poor Female Mobile Users in Rural India

Abstract

Digital inclusion research has focused overwhelmingly on access to information. But access to information by itself is of limited value unless the intended beneficiary has the capacity to use it. It is the use of information that delivers the benefits. However, in information and communication technologies for development literature, there is little empirical work on the process by which use of information delivers benefits. This study fills the gap by studying information use by poor female mobile phone users in rural India. It identifies six stages in the information use process and models them.

Keywords:

• access to information
• digital divide
• digital inclusion
• grounded theory
• information behavior
• information needs
• information seeking
• use of information

Notes

1 . Total population of India is around 1.2 billion.

2 Here it is worth noting that digital divide researchers have started taking a process-oriented perspective (Barzilai-Nahon 2006; Lenhart and Horrigan 2003; Meredyth and Thomas 2002; Warschauer 2002; Warschauer 2003).

3 Information behavior is defined as the many ways in which humans interact with information, especially the ways in which people seek and utilize information (Bates 2010). In effect, information behavior encompasses both access to information and use of information, which more comprehensively can be described as follows:

The totality of human behavior in relation to sources and channels of information, including both active and passive information seeking, and information use. It includes face-to-face communication with others, as well as the passive reception of information as in, for example, watching TV advertisements without any intention to act on the information given. (Wilson 2000, 49)

4 These findings contradict those of several studies (Huyer et al. 2006; Ling 1998; Ling 2004), which reported that poor women use mobile phones mostly for personal and social reasons alone and not for professional or work-related reasons.