Constant Touch (9 page)

Anthropological work carried out for CGAP, an offshoot
of the World Bank, by Olga Morawczynski has revealed how M-PESA is used in Kibera, a slum of 1 million inhabitants on the outskirts of Nairobi and in Bukura, a farming village in western Kenya. Typical users, she found, were men working in the city, who sent money; and women in the countryside, who received money. The impact on rural recipients was dramatic; their income increased by a third. Partly this was because they no longer had to travel – a waste of time and money – in order to collect old-style transfers from towns. Urban users chose M-PESA because it was cheaper, faster and safer than alternatives. M-PESA was popular both with those with bank accounts and those without.

However,
there were also problems and unanticipated outcomes. Congestion on the Safaricom network meant that sometimes M-PESA would stop working, leaving customers angry. Rural wives worried that their husbands, who because of the ease of M-PESA were making fewer visits home, might ‘become lonely and find a “city wife” '. ‘This finding counters a popular assumption that is often made about mobile phones – that these technologies amplify existing relationships,' writes Morawczynski and her co-author Mark Pickens, adding: ‘When used as tools for financial services, these technologies can have the opposite effect.'

The anthropologists also noted that the flow of credit could go into reverse during times of crisis. In December 2007 a presidential election was followed by an outbreak of violence, as opposition parties contested the reinstatement of President Mwai Kibaki. Ethnic tensions rose to the surface. Running battles took place in the Nairobi slums, railway lines were torn up, the police shot dead protestors, and a church was set alight, killing 200. Tens of thousands of Kenyans were displaced. The unrest lasted well into the spring of 2008. The M-PESA credit sent home to the countryside was returned hurriedly to the men in the towns, who re-converted the credit to money to escape the violence, or used it on their phones to pay for communication.

In general, then, African mobile has displayed two outstanding features: growth and innovation. By the end
of 2012 the estimated number of subscribers on the continent was 735 million, over six in ten of the population. This leap was from pretty much a standing start in the 1990s. The innovation has been locally led – M-PESA as an all-purpose mobile wallet is perhaps the most striking example – but it is matched in inventiveness by a host of smaller-scale mobile technology ideas, from devices to detect shoals of fish to ways of tracking stolen vehicles.

The
case of the Goma volcano reminds us that a key aspect of mobile culture is, perhaps obviously, mobility. (And a mobility that cuts across national boundaries.) But there is also a distinctive
material
aspect to mobile culture, which is best illustrated by the products of the phenomenal Finnish company, Nokia. While material culture might seem at first to be mere flotsam and jetsam, and not part of the great tides of history, I think the opposite is often the case. Indeed, something as trivial as a coloured plastic phone cover – called a facia or fascia – can arguably be as much a vehicle of grand historical change as fascism.

Nokia became, without doubt, the most influential manufacturer of mobile phones in the world. But why did such a firm emerge from Finland? Industrialisation came late to this country on the northern fringe of Europe, but when it did so it made use of one natural resource Finland, like Sweden, had in abundance: forest. In 1863 Knut Fredrik Idestam, after a daring act of industrial espionage, imported a new wood-pulp process from Germany, and set up a mill on the Nokia river, which flowed a few miles outside the small city of Tampere. Right from the start the enterprise had close links
with Finnish politicians: Idestam's partner was Leo Mechelin, a parliamentarian and financier who helped extricate Finland from its status as a Russian duchy to being an independent state. For much of the 20th century Nokia was an industrial coalition between pulp, rope, cable and rubber works. Indeed as late as the 1980s, as Nokia's historian Dan Steinbock records, Nokia at one and the same time brought electricity to 350 Egyptian villages, made most of the toilet paper in Ireland, and provided all the studded bicycle tyres in the world.

But the peculiar position of Finland in world politics meant that Nokia was quite unlike any other European conglomerate. Firstly, ever since the Russian revolution, Finland had had to play a delicate balancing act between capitalist West and communist East. This strategy, a combination of cautious neutrality and
realpolitik
, has a name: the ‘Paasikivi-Kekkonen' line, named after the two politicians who adopted it. For example, Nokia's major market was the Soviet Union (not least supplying much of the power cables for Lenin's, and later Stalin's, programme of electrification), but later, with some prescience, Nokia's boss Kari H. Kairamo decided that such dependency should be balanced by building up western-European links. The policy had been echoed at a national level; Finland, after delicate negotiations between East and West, joined the European Free Trade Area in 1961 and signed
trade agreements with the European Economic Community. Second, Finland was extremely dependent on imported oil; this had to be paid for by increased exports, which again gave cause for good trading relations with both East and West. So, under Kairamo from 1977, Nokia sought the means to create innovative exportable electronic products. Finally, when the telephone originally came to Finland, it was not – unlike in any other country in Europe – placed under the control of a single monopolistic operator, but was controlled by a host of independent local operators instead. There were over 800 in 1938, and still around 50 in the 1990s. Again, the cause can be found in Finnish foreign relations. The distinctive Finnish telecoms pattern of links between private companies and many local cooperatives was, notes Steinbock, due not so much to ‘boosting the efforts of the private sector as trying to keep Russian authorities away from the emerging industry' (a strategically important industry at that). The important consequence for Nokia was that it had on its doorstep a diverse market for competitive products, and that it never had to compete with a big national telecoms monopoly.

Nokia had already manufactured a few mobile phones, at its Oulu plant in the far frozen north of the country, when Kairamo signed deals with the Finnish TV manufacturer, Salora Oy. The joint venture, Mobira Oy, begun in 1979, was soon owned outright by
Nokia when it swallowed up Salora in 1984. Also in this period, and for reasons that are unclear, Kairamo tore down Nokia's hierarchical organisation, typical of many a European conglomerate, and replaced it with a decentralised ‘flat-pyramid' management. This radical change, which would only later become a new orthodoxy of managerial science, seems to have been based on Kairamo's shrewd analysis – or guess – that the world system of two superpowers was nearing its end and only a nimble company would be able to exploit the new global opportunities. What is certain is that if the tremors of the coming earthquake
could
be felt, then Finland, balanced precariously between East and West, was near the epicentre.

Kairamo, who had manic depression, hanged himself in December 1988, having become convinced that a forced break-up of Nokia was imminent. In fact the restructuring that later took place, initiated by Simo Vuorilehto and completed by Jorma Jaako Ollila, built on Kairamo's legacy. Ollila was the person most responsible for focusing Nokia almost entirely on mobile phones. In effect Mobira Oy, along with a few other electronics and cable divisions, became the whole company. Many factors had combined around 1990 to permit this. Finland had a purely conservative government, intent on telecoms deregulation, for the first time in decades. The Finnish economy was in tailspin following the collapse of Soviet trade, and a new direction
was needed. This direction clearly pointed towards further European integration (Finland joined the European Community in 1995), of which GSM was to be the showcase for pan-European potential. Indeed the pro-European emphasis, echoed at a national level, had already prompted Nokia's involvement with the Nordic NMT standard and in early GSM discussions. So Ollila bet the company on mobile phones.

But
if placing Nokia in a political context helps us understand why it was in a position to become a major mobile phone manufacturer, we need to go a bit further to account for its extraordinary success based on distinctive products – the material culture. Nokia's mobile phones of the 1980s, such as the Cityman (1986), which was very popular in the UK, already boasted superior design. Styling and brand were more important to Nokia than they were to competitors – such as Motorola or Siemens, say – or at least were pursued with greater success. (Again there was a cultural advantage: good industrial design was the material analogue of Nordic social welfarism – sharing the benefits of industrial society through rational planning.) But let's take just one object – to my mind, an iconic one – and look to see what it shows about the Nokia way.

The Nokia 3210 was launched in summer 1999. It is a design classic. ‘Elegantly styled, with no protruding aerial and lovely slim proportions,' drooled
What Cellphone
. I, too, recall the thrill: the silver and grey phone seemed moulded to fit perfectly in the hand. It was obviously, immediately an icon, like Coca-Cola's bottles or the Citroen DS. (And by 2020 the sight of a Nokia 3210 will trigger millennial nostalgia.) In one sense the 3210 did for mobile phones what the Model T Ford did for the automobile: it was a cheap, but beautifully engineered, vehicle for mass communication. But if the Model T Ford symbolised the dominant style of
production of much of the 20th century, the Nokia 3210 represented its opposite. Fordism stood for centralised control, hierarchical management and, famously of the Model T, ‘any colour, as long as it's black'. Nokia boasted flexibility of production, flat hierarchies and products that reflected this organisational style. With the Nokia 3210, you could change its colour simply by choosing a new ‘Xpress-On' fascia.
What Cellphone
relayed the reaction of Janice Caprice, a London beauty therapist:

It's got to be eye-catching, anything from the British flag to a flower. Most of my friends buy a phone because they can get a cover for it. I bought an Ericsson PH337 for that very reason but that's old now so I'm saving up for a Nokia next.