RAPID: Collaborative Research: Technology Adoption during Environmental Jolts: Mobile Phone Use and Digital Services Appropriation during India's Demonetization Crisis

偶尔，危机或新法律等事件会迫使人们在日常生活中使用的技术发生迅速变化。这些震荡经常引起人们对人们获得和使用这些新技术的能力的担忧，以及他们对支持这些技术的基础设施的压力。这项提议研究了印度最近做出的将某些货币从流通中移除的政策决定所引发的罕见的“自然实验”的影响，这一决定导致了使用数字工具管理货币的突然而大规模的推动。研究团队计划与印度的学生、商人和视障人士合作，解决两个主要问题：(1)电话支付等金融技术如何被采用和调整，以适应新的法律要求；(2)使用特定技术的可用性、可用性和必要性如何互动，以决定其成功与否。更好地了解金融系统的社会和技术要素如何适应这种冲击，将促进我们对技术基础设施的总体理解，并为在金融、教育和技术经验资源有限的情况下设计可获得的技术和技术提供信息。在印度研究这一点将为希望进入印度市场或已经在印度开展业务的美国公司提供重要的见解，还将为在美国扩大无现金经济的前景和挑战提供关键见解。该项目还将提供跨越智力和国家边界的教育经验，帮助培训一支多元化的、具有全球竞争力的STEM劳动力队伍。该项目将基于ICTD和基础设施研究的整合，加深对人们如何在强迫或确定性环境下适应技术的理解。该团队将研究和比较三种不同的用户群体：1)大学生；2)在非正规部门工作的人；3)视力障碍者。选择这些人群是为了突显更广泛人群的不同方面：大学生对现金经济的依赖较少，受教育程度更高；非正规部门的人更依赖现金，受教育程度较低；视力障碍者可能因为不必处理现金而获得交易利益，但也必须克服无法获得主流技术的问题。研究将采用两个阶段的计划，从采访开始，捕捉细微差别，并提供可以在第二个调查阶段提出的问题；团队计划在为期一年的项目的前6个月和最后3个月进行两次研究，一次在第一轮的基础上进行改进，以捕捉相对新鲜的和纵向的颠簸经验。利用与支付提供商、视障群体和非正式员工的现有关系，研究人员将研究人们使用的支付技术的生态系统，他们的特定设计如何影响人们使用这些技术的能力，以及他们的社交网络如何支持(通过中介)和影响(通过网络效应)他们使用这些技术的方式。这将为理解和改进边缘化社区的创新和技术使用提供经验教训，这些经验教训可能会转移到其他背景下，如迅速采用移动保健应用程序和在自然灾害情况下使用技术。

Occasionally, events such as crises or new laws force a rapid change in the technologies people use in their daily lives. These jolts often raise concerns about peoples' access to and ability to use these new technologies, and about the stress they put on the infrastructure that supports them. This proposal studies the impacts of a rare "natural experiment" caused by the recent policy decision in India to remove certain currency from circulation, which is leading to a sudden and massive push toward the use of digital tools for managing money. The research team plans to work with students, businesspeople, and people with visual impairments in India to address two main questions: (1) how financial technologies such as phone-based payments are adopted and adapted to respond to new legal requirements; and (2) how the usability, availability, and necessity of using a given technology interact to shape its success. Better understanding of how the social and technical elements of the financial system adapt to this jolt will advance our understanding of technology infrastructures in general and inform the design of accessible technologies and technologies for contexts where financial, educational, and technology experience resources are limited. Studying this in India will provide important insights for U.S. companies looking to enter the Indian market or already operating there, and will also offer key insights on prospects and challenges in broadening the cashless economy in the U.S. The project will also provide educational experiences that cross both intellectual and national borders that will help train a diverse and globally competitive STEM workforce.Based on an integration of ICTD and infrastructure studies, this project will develop better understanding of how people adapt to technology in forced or deterministic contexts. The team will study and compare three different user populations: 1) college students; 2) people working in the informal sector; and 3) people with visual impairments. These populations were chosen to highlight different aspects of the broader population: college students are less reliant on the cash economy and more educated; those in the informal sector are more cash-reliant and less educated; and those with visual impairments may gain transactional benefits from not having to handle cash, but also have to overcome inaccessibility of mainstream technology. The research will employ a two-stage plan that starts with interviews to capture nuance and inform questions that can be asked in a second, survey stage; the team plans to conduct the research twice, once in the first 6 months and again (with improvements based on the first round) in the last 3 months of the year-long project, to capture both relatively fresh and longitudinal experiences of the jolt. Leveraging existing relationships with payment providers, visually impaired groups, and informal workers, the researchers will study the ecosystem of payment technologies people use, the ways their specific design affects people's ability to use them, and how their social network both supports (through intermediation) and affects (through network effects) the ways they can use those technologies. This will provide lessons for understanding and improving innovation and technology use in marginalized communities, lessons that may transfer to other contexts such as the rapid adoption of mobile health apps and the use of technology in natural disaster situations.