How Maasai agro-pastoralists form and use accidental social ties (2021)

https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art41/

by wallflower • 2 years ago

62 58 2 years ago

For example, a bundle may provide 200 minutes of calling during a 7-day period for a discounted price. To avoid losing unused minutes, we learned that as people near the end of their bundle’s time period, some use available minutes to call back unusual numbers in their incoming call-log, which they had not answered.

This probably explains the reason for the accidental social ties.

I lived in a country where mobile phone calls were expensive relative to wages. Much of the time you'd receive a call that only rang once. The caller would hang up after only a single ring. This signalled they wanted to talk to you but didn't have enough "talk time" left. If the caller was a contractor or someone on your payroll, they would almost always employ this tactic to keep their costs down.

throwaway848492• 2 years ago

When I was a student (around 1998/99) I had to buy a mobile phone, but could not afford a subscription.

Fortunately we only pay for outgoing calls in my country, otherwise it would have been too expensive.

I bought a prepaid sim card, that had an expensive cost per minute (almost $1). I would call my parents landline once, as a signal to call me back.

It's one of the main reasons why SMS was the preferred communication methods between students, because calls were too expensive. This habit continued when we grew up, and now almost nobody calls each other. I guess the phone companies didn't think of that scenario...

sokoloff2• 2 years ago

Back in the early 80s (before caller ID), we’d use a collect call.

  “Do you accept the charges from <XYZ>?”
  “No.” <then place  a call to a known number in the other direction>

M_bara• 2 years ago

Back in the day ~23 years ago. A telco that had just launched started providing voice mail service. Normal outgoing call rates were about .5 usd per minute. The newly launched voice mail service was free. So university students found a new trick to call their friends, flash your friend (single ring signal to say that they don’t pick up their phone), hang up and call again, let it ring till it goes to voicemail, leave a long message, hang up and wait for the reply. Obviously it’s not full duplex and latency was high but what the e heck it’s free. The telco killed it within 2 days… and then we started having fun with all those smsc Center numbers from all over the world…

em-bee• 2 years ago

in some places this works even when the budget literally zero. that is without any money i can call someone, and let it ring until i get the message that i don't have enough money. but the receiver gets the ring and can call back. it makes sense, because it will encourage someone to spend money to make a call.

bbsz• 2 years ago

I forgot about it. Yeah. I had my first cell phone around 2000 and everyone was doing that. In my country outgoing calls were free, charges to the caller were only applied after receiver accepted (answered) the call.

I remember some of my friends being "famous" for doing that all the time for every single call, operating the mobile at like 5$/year. The whole thing had it own jargon.

h0l0cube2• 2 years ago

Random connection died with the uptake of social media. I remember in the early 2000s, chat programs like ICQ, AIM, and MSN Messenger permitted random connections, and it was fairly common for strangers to make chat requests from a genuine motivation of curiosity. For me, those online connections led to real connections around the world. Nowadays perhaps this niche is filled by online gaming

pzmarzly• 2 years ago

This was indeed the case, but I recall that even in late 00s there was already a spam problem with this mechanism.

OTOH over the years (especially during covid lockdowns) I got a few messages from strangers on FB Messenger and Snapchat, and usually replied to them, and it was fun. However, it was always caused by some FB post/comment or Snapchat story that I posted before. Still, I guess if you have enough bored people, they will find a way to socialize no matter the medium.

Almondsetat• 2 years ago

Please stop spouting these grandiose claims.

Go on Facebook, enter a local group and interact with posts and become active in the community. After a while either people will contact you or people will be nice towards you contacting them.

Iulioh2• 2 years ago

You know, i think the problem is in the numbers.

The internet is too vast and the people are too interchangable, i have beed banned for stupid reasons in a few comunities.

I think a lot of people knows how easy is to be banned from reddit from certain subreddits for example for...no reason?

I personally think that permanent bans should not be a thing if not for really specific, grave and repeatet reasons. timed bans (even really long ones) i think are way more effective for incentivize anyone to change behaviour (creating a new account after begin banned is the preferred solution to a perma ban)

We lost a lot of humanity in the process.

kjqgqkejbfefn• 2 years ago

The claims is not as grandiose as your demand for it to stop

h0l0cube2• 2 years ago

Just like family and friendship groups, Facebook groups are silos like local areas, hobbies, political leanings etc. ICQ requests really were surprising connections

melagonster• 2 years ago

MoRPG is not popular in current world. I trust most of people just want social media.

Rygian4• 2 years ago

Some years ago there was a silly game, the topic was to make friends with "phone number neighbors" whose phone number is just one digit away.

I gave it a try, texted $(my_number + 1) and said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"

Their reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"

netsharc2• 2 years ago

I met a girl whose birthday is the day after mine, and the last 4 digits of her phone number was also mine +1.

Sadly she turned me down when I asked her out.

jojobas• 2 years ago

That was a near miss.

ignoramceisblis• 2 years ago

It was probably the wrong time.

jbaber• 2 years ago

What shell are you using? For bash, that's got to be $(( $my_number + 1 ))

Rygian4• 2 years ago

It was pseudo-code :-)

tetris11• 2 years ago

I always titter when I see arithmetic in shell operations.

In Python, one would merely do:

    export mynumber="+4912341234123"
    python3 -c "import pip; pip.main(['install', 'phonenumbers']); \
    import phonenumbers; x = phonenumbers.parse(\"$mynumber\", None); \
    x.national_number = x.national_number + 1; \
    print(x)"

Just plain and simple, really.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

I would assume this was a spammer/scammer trying to verify if they could reach a real person at my number.

Rygian4• 2 years ago

Even if the originator phone number was indeed one minus yours?

rahimnathwani3• 2 years ago

I got a call from a spam caller who spoofed the caller ID to be $(my_number - 1).

They said "hi, you're my phone number neighbor, our numbers are very similar. What's up?"

My reply: "who are you and how did you get my number?"

Rygian4• 2 years ago

At that point, any reply back from the original sender just proves them to be legitimate (ie. able to receive messages on the originator phone number, so not spoofing it).

justsomehnguy• 2 years ago

... the conditions under which wrong number connections (WNCs) are made;
Working in 10 rural communities in Tanzania, we conducted 16 group interviews with men about ...
Nine separate interviews with groups of women revealed that women do not create WNCs

Wow.

smeej• 2 years ago

I can guess a couple reasons for this:

1. Women tend to have stronger/closer "RNCs," or actual face-to-face communities.

2. Women have a good reason to be more wary of connecting with strangers under unexpected circumstances than men do.

twic• 2 years ago

The paper says:

However, women informed us unequivocally that they (women) do not create these types of connections, largely because men often control women’s use of phones (Summers et al. 2020).

lou1306• 2 years ago

This might explain why scambots routinely try this approach on messaging apps (Telegram/Whatsapp/you name it). As in, send an absolutely out-of-the blue message like a table reservation, wait for the predictable you-got-the-wrong-number reply and use that as an inroad to strike a conversation.

To me it always seemed like such a dumb attempt to lure people in, but perhaps other cultures might honestly read this as a genuine social relation.

soneca• 2 years ago

I started to get a lot of simple ”Hello!” and that’s it, from unknown numbers on WhatsApp. I block without replying, but I can see how a lot of people would reply returning the greeting and asking who they are.

klabb3• 2 years ago

As in, send an absolutely out-of-the blue message like a table reservation, wait for the predictable you-got-the-wrong-number reply and use that as an inroad to strike a conversation.

I thought that was “active number farming”. If so, a human replying is the end goal.

user_7832• 2 years ago

If you go to r/scams or r/scambait you can see their full script. It's sometimes funny, but apparently a lot of these scammers are being held literally captive in a foreign country, and apparently some of them have had their kidney taken. They are held until they manage to recover their "ransom" amount through these scams.

Here's an NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/17/world/asia/my...

mtreis86• 2 years ago

My current goto response (which anecdotally seems to work) is to empathize with them and call out their situation for what it is. At the very least if their supervisors find I'm trying to support (radicalize) them they'll take my number off the list. Something like "I know you're a scammer and I hope you're safe, I hear ya'll are often enslaved"

isoprophlex• 2 years ago

Interestingly, I remember trying to connect (with some success) to random @hotmail.com emails using MSN messenger, back in the early 2000s.

scottmcdot• 2 years ago

Are the Masaai Wrong Number Callers (WNCs) calling other Masaai or just anyone in the East African region?

tempaway746412• 2 years ago

Mostly other Masaai, if the person answering speaks their language they are more likely to chat. See the "Qualitative results" section of the article.

tempaway746412• 2 years ago

Connecting through a wrong number is relatively straightforward, but involves multiple steps. First, an individual dials a number incorrectly. This may result from writing a number down incorrectly to begin with, or simply mis-keying a number in the phone, each of which can stem from low levels of literacy, as noted by our respondents. Furthermore, the likelihood of these errors may be increased by the common practice of using a friend’s phone when one’s battery is dead. Second, the receiving party answers the phone in a specific language, signaling to the caller something about the receiver’s identity. Third, the error is quickly identified. Fourth, the parties either end the call swiftly or they do not. In some instances, individuals may chat for a while, especially (but not exclusively) if the receiver answers in Maa. Maasai social institutions can help members, who may be far from each other geographically, find common ground and mark their social position relative to each other.

...

During our interviews, participants regularly received calls and nearly always answered the call, generally stepping away from the group until the call was over. This happened dozens of times over many meetings. And on a few occasions, the individual returned to the group and announced that the call was a wrong number.

...

During one meeting, a respondent received a wrong number call from another Maasai he had never met, and over a short conversation learned that their fathers were brothers. It was an astonishingly timely example of what we had been discussing. (That cousins would not have known about each other is not necessarily unusual in a society where polygynous families can be very large, and extended families exponentially so.)

This is great. The "Results - qualitative results" section is particularly worth reading

sydbarrett74• 2 years ago

Something like this happened to a roommate of mine back in the day. A female ended up accidentally calling him, and he took it as an opportunity to flirt with her. They ended up dating for several months.

martopix• 2 years ago

One of the most surreal moments of my life was walking in the bush in Tanzania near a village, two maasais passed by on a motorbike, stopped, took out a mobile phone from the folds of their red garment, took a picture of me without saying a word, and left.

At the time, smartphones were not common and I was somewhat surprised that all maasais had cellphones (non-smartphones, usually). But of course I now understand that they're essential for a society that doesn't have any other form of connection (no landlines, so fast adoption of mobile, and also poor roads and no postal service).

And of course, it must have been much more surreal for them to see a random white young man walking alone in the middle of nowhere near their village.

sillystuff• 2 years ago

Everyone needs a phone for M-PESA (electronic money transfers are huge in E. Africa). In Kenya, I met people with multiple phones-- a phone for normal calling/texting on a cheaper provider, and one with Safaricom just for M-PESA (Safaricom exclusive there [at least, at the time]).

My son and I never saw other muzungu, outside of tourist areas, while traveling overland by matatu/dala dala/minibus and probox across E. Africa / the horn (other muzungu seemed to all be traveling via organized tours-- or, at least, never by public transit like we were). Lots of villagers wanted photos with us when we stopped. It is an odd feeling to be the center of attention.

Most of our interaction with Maasai was just across the border from Tanzania inside Kenya in villages surrounding the Maasai Mara. Everyone we met was super nice. Although that was our experience pretty much everywhere in Africa except some large cities (which we tried to avoid anyway).

How Maasai agro-pastoralists form and use accidental social ties (2021)

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