Emergent practices around CGNet Swara, voice forum for citizen journalism in rural India

Abstract

Rural communities in India are often underserved by the mainstream media. While there is a public discourse surrounding the issues they face, this dialogue typically takes place on television, in newspaper editorials, and on the Internet. Unfortunately, participation in such forums is limited to the most privileged members of society, excluding those individuals who have the largest stake in the conversation.This paper examines an effort to foster a more inclusive dialogue by means of a simple technology: an interactive voice forum. Called CGNet Swara, the system enables callers to record messages of local interest, and listen to messages that others have recorded. Messages are also posted on the Internet, as a supplement to an existing discussion forum.In the first 21 months of its deployment in India, CGNet Swara has logged over 70,000 phone calls and released 1,100 messages. To understand the emergent practices surrounding this system, we conduct interviews with 42 diverse stakeholders, including callers, bureaucrats, and members of the media. Our analysis contributes to the understanding of voice-based media as a vehicle for social inclusion in remote and underprivileged populations.

Moving the centre to design social media in rural Africa

“…Some strategies for creating and sharing information use lower-cost channels on cell phone networks to share audio asynchronously in interactive voice forums (IVF) (e.g. Patel et al 2010;Mudliar et al 2012). Others involve sharing multimedia via displays in common access sites (e.g.…”

Situating Asynchronous Voice in Rural Africa

“…Cell-phones offer many new opportunities to people in technology-sparse regions but they may also amplify gaps between oral and literate users and this has motivated recent efforts to develop asynchronous voice platforms for rural settings where literacy is lowest. Such efforts include interactive voice applications and services for cell-phones to record and access content produced locally, or by authorities or NGOs [19,27,31,39] or participate in citizen journalism or online social networks [25,29]. However, there are few empirical studies [29] and design tends to be oriented by theory that contrasts the mental functions of oral and literate people, not by practices in social situations.…”

KrishiPustak

“…[1,8,23,34,40,49,53]. Particularly relevant for our context are a Q&A forum for small-scale farmers [40] and a citizen journalism portal for rural users [34].…”

“…[1,8,23,34,40,49,53]. Particularly relevant for our context are a Q&A forum for small-scale farmers [40] and a citizen journalism portal for rural users [34]. Researchers have examined the tradeoffs between IVRs (spoken menu output with DTMF/keypad input navigation) and spoken dialogue systems (SDS) (spoken menu output with speech input navigation) and have reached varying conclusions regarding the benefits of typed versus spoken inputs [15,54].…”