BOB GARFIELD:
And I'm Bob Garfield. Talk about the digital revolution tends to focus on the Internet, and, obviously, the Web has changed society on a grand scale, but maybe not so much as another technology so commonplace and integrated into our lives as to hardly seem cutting edge at all – the lowly cell phone.

According to Sara Corbett in a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, mobile telephony is transformational technology, not only in the West but in the most deprived corners of the developing world. Sara, welcome to the show.
SARA CORBETT:
Thanks for having me here.
BOB GARFIELD:
Your piece is a portrait of Jan Chipchase, who works for the Finnish manufacturer, Nokia, doing what sounds a lot like social anthropology.
SARA CORBETT:
Jan's job at Nokia is to understand human behavior, very broadly put. So he spends as much time as possible out in the world, not in an office, not in a design studio, but gathering intelligence about how people live, how they use technology and how future technologies might fit into their worlds – in this case, the cell phone.

And his job is to report back to the designers at the company as they start contemplating how to build cell phones that will work, and especially work under conditions that in a design studio in the U.S. or in Finland, where Nokia is based, you can't imagine. We don't know what it's like to be sitting in the monsoon rains of India or, you know, on a dusty street in Nigeria.
BOB GARFIELD:
Yeah. I can see how the technology that allows Courtney to text Brittany from the mall on one end of town to the mall [LAUGHS] on the other end of town might not be applicable somewhere, you know, in sub-Saharan Africa. Can you give me some examples of how Chipchase's findings have informed design of Nokia's phones?
SARA CORBETT:
When I embarked on this project, my idea of text messaging was that same thing – this is a lot of frivolous communication that's going on. And one thing that Jan's research has shown is that people use text messaging for increasingly vital parts of life.

So, for example, in Kenya, doctors will send text messages to tuberculosis patients saying it's time to take your medicine, or, you know, a farmer can use text messaging to communicate pricing and crop availability.
BOB GARFIELD:
And for millions of people, maybe hundreds of millions around the world, this isn't just an upgrade from the landline. They've never had a landline or even access to one, no?
SARA CORBETT:
Right. One interesting thing someone said to me was most Africans will make their first phone call on a cell phone, which to us is hard to conceive of, but in Africa, where landlines have been slow to be established, cell phones have come in and they've revolutionized everything. It's sort of leapfrogged. One technology has leapfrogged the next.
BOB GARFIELD:
I was recently in Estonia, or, as they like to call themselves, E-Stonia. The cell phone does things there that are scarcely imaginable even here. You know, they scan it and they pay for their parking at a garage or for their dry cleaning and so forth.

It gets even cleverer than that. Tell me about Uganda.
SARA CORBETT:
Right. People were using their mobile phones to transfer air time as a form of currency. And so if a woman lived in Kampala in the city and needed to get money to her mother out in the country, she would buy prepaid air time, and rather than putting it into her own phone, she would use her mobile phone to call somebody in her village who had a mobile phone, give them the code, they would get the air time, charge a small commission and give her mother whatever was left and whatever the cash value of that was.

And this has happened all around the world. It's given way to this much larger and increasingly more formal system of mobile phone banking. Many people don't live in towns that have banks or ATMs. Again, it overcomes, in many cases, the need for infrastructure.
BOB GARFIELD:
My cell phone bills are just preposterous. How in the world can people in Sub-Saharan Africa, in the poorest parts of Asia, in Eastern Europe, how can they pay the bills every month?
SARA CORBETT:
One interesting thing that Jan Chipchase of Nokia pointed out to me, when I traveled with him in Ghana late last year, is that people who sell air time were actually selling it in increments of parts of seconds, like a half a second, because it is, it's costly to anybody, you know. So if you're a two-dollar-a-day farmer, you may not want a thousand [LAUGHS] minutes a month. You might want 30.5 seconds.

And that's what people are doing. They are parceling minutes so that people with less money can afford them.
BOB GARFIELD:
So all of these ingenious ways of employing mobile technology in the developing world just remind me how relatively primitive our system here seems to be in the United States. Why are we so far behind, for heaven sakes, Uganda?
SARA CORBETT:
I think because we have a lot of choices here. If you are driving in a snowstorm and trying to decide whether to pull of the road, you have your car radio to listen to. Before you left, you could have turned on your television or you could have used your landline to call ahead to whoever you're visiting to find out the conditions. But somebody who lives in the middle of, say, Uganda, has access to, arguably, none of that.

And so, as married as we all are to our mobile phones and our BlackBerrys and our iPhones, it bears no resemblance - our idea of need, compared to the need of people in developing countries.
BOB GARFIELD:
Sara, thank you.
SARA CORBETT:
Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:
Sara Corbett is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine.