Conference proceeding
Hustling online: understanding consolidated facebook use in an informal settlement in Nairobi
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 2823-2832
27 Apr 2013
Abstract
Facebook is a global phenomenon, yet little is known about use of the site in urban parts of the developing world where the social network's users are increasingly located. We qualitatively studied Facebook use among 28 young adults living in Viwandani, an informal settlement, or slum, in Nairobi, Kenya. We find that to overcome the costs associated with Internet use, participants consolidated diverse online activities onto Facebook; here we focus on the most common practice--using Facebook to support income generation. Viwandani residents used the site to look for employment opportunities, market themselves, and seek remittances from friends and family abroad. We use our findings to motivate a design agenda for the urban poor built on an understanding that Facebook is used, with mixed-success, to support income generation. A key part of this agenda calls for developing ICT interventions grounded in users' existing practices rather than introducing new and unfamiliar ones.
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39 citations in Scopus
Details
- Title
- Hustling online
- Creators
- Susan Wyche - Michigan State UniversityAndrea Forte - Drexel UniversitySarita Yardi Schoenebeck
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on human factors in computing systems, pp 2823-2832
- Conference
- SIGCHI Conference on human factors in computing systems
- Series
- CHI '13
- Publisher
- Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
- Number of pages
- 1
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84878002120
- Other Identifier
- 991019173460204721