This was a paper I submitted for my class in “Experimental Approaches” for the MSc, University of Oxford. We were asked to improve on a published paper by designing an experiment. Final grade: 80
Facebook is often regarded as a free service, particularly in advanced economies where nearly every citizen has access to the internet and owns a smartphone. In developing societies however, particularly in Kenya where internet penetration is low and access is limited, having a Facebook account is considered a status symbol that is only accessible to the wealthy and educated. Kenyans in the rural areas who wish to connect with their friends and family globally are simply priced-out.
In this essay, I discuss the paper “Facebook is a luxury: an exploratory study of social media use in rural Kenya” by Wyche et al. (2013), a thematic analysis on the impact of the high cost of internet access on the usage of social networking sites (SNS). The authors found that financial cost was a huge barrier to access for Kenya’s poorest citizens, in contrast to literature suggesting that low internet usage in the developing world may be driven by infrastructure-related issues and digital literacy. For example, technical (e.g. connectivity, electricity) and educational (e.g.digital/language literacy) barriers were found to be an impediment to usage of Face-book in Ghana (Gebhart, 2016), while network performance impairments provided a constraint for Facebook basics users in Pakistan and South Africa (Sen et al., 2016).
My goal in this essay is to design an experiment that tests the cost-driven hypothesis observed in rural Kenya. In the next section, I describe the Wyche et al.study, its purpose and the strengths/ weaknesses of their research design. This then provides an ample landscape and motivation to propose an extension of the study via a detailed experimental design. Lastly in section 3, I provide implications and a discussion on how the experimental design boosts the study conclusions.
Full version of the paper: email me on LinkedIn!
