RAPID: Collaborative Research: Technology Adoption during Environmental Jolts: Mobile Phone Use and Digital Services Appropriation during India's Demonetization Crisis

George Mason University, Fairfax VA

Investigators

Abstract

Occasionally, events such as crises or new laws force a rapid change in the technologies people use in their daily lives. These jolts often raise concerns about peoples' access to and ability to use these new technologies, and about the stress they put on the infrastructure that supports them. This proposal studies the impacts of a rare "natural experiment" caused by the recent policy decision in India to remove certain currency from circulation, which is leading to a sudden and massive push toward the use of digital tools for managing money. The research team plans to work with students, businesspeople, and people with visual impairments in India to address two main questions: (1) how financial technologies such as phone-based payments are adopted and adapted to respond to new legal requirements; and (2) how the usability, availability, and necessity of using a given technology interact to shape its success. Better understanding of how the social and technical elements of the financial system adapt to this jolt will advance our understanding of technology infrastructures in general and inform the design of accessible technologies and technologies for contexts where financial, educational, and technology experience resources are limited. Studying this in India will provide important insights for U.S. companies looking to enter the Indian market or already operating there, and will also offer key insights on prospects and challenges in broadening the cashless economy in the U.S. The project will also provide educational experiences that cross both intellectual and national borders that will help train a diverse and globally competitive STEM workforce. Based on an integration of ICTD and infrastructure studies, this project will develop better understanding of how people adapt to technology in forced or deterministic contexts. The team will study and compare three different user populations: 1) college students; 2) people working in the informal sector; and 3) people with visual impairments. These populations were chosen to highlight different aspects of the broader population: college students are less reliant on the cash economy and more educated; those in the informal sector are more cash-reliant and less educated; and those with visual impairments may gain transactional benefits from not having to handle cash, but also have to overcome inaccessibility of mainstream technology. The research will employ a two-stage plan that starts with interviews to capture nuance and inform questions that can be asked in a second, survey stage; the team plans to conduct the research twice, once in the first 6 months and again (with improvements based on the first round) in the last 3 months of the year-long project, to capture both relatively fresh and longitudinal experiences of the jolt. Leveraging existing relationships with payment providers, visually impaired groups, and informal workers, the researchers will study the ecosystem of payment technologies people use, the ways their specific design affects people's ability to use them, and how their social network both supports (through intermediation) and affects (through network effects) the ways they can use those technologies. This will provide lessons for understanding and improving innovation and technology use in marginalized communities, lessons that may transfer to other contexts such as the rapid adoption of mobile health apps and the use of technology in natural disaster situations.