Mobile phone use has become more widespread as costs drop, but web access and use is still low

In terms of household access to ICTs (Chart 1), mobile phones are widely available to the urban respondents to the AudienceScapes survey in Guatemala. Thirty four percent of respondents said they have a computer and 23 percent said they had an Mp3 player in their homes. Internet connections are far more rare, as are sophisticated mobile handsets such as Blackberries and i-Phones.

Chart 1

Although mobile phone access and monthly use correlate perfectly, a different trend is observed with web access. The number of regular web users are about twice as great as the number of respondents who said they have internet access at home (Chart 1). Indeed, Chart 2 shows that most users log on at internet cafés.

Chart 2

The typical internet user in urban Nicaragua is between 16 and 29 (Table 1). Most respondents had atleast a secondary or technical education, and this group also formed the majority of internet users.

A big pro-male gender divide showed up in the data. Also reflected in Table 1 is the fact that income levels and one’s socio-economic status had little effect on internet use. This could also be as a result of the availability of cheaper access points such as internet cafés.

Intermedia, Urban Guatemala, 2009, survey of urban adults, (16+), who had used the internet in the previous month, n = 244

Youth are leading the way in conducting a wide variety of online activities regularly, such as downloading music, listening/watching podcasts and playing games (Chart 3). However they fall behind the overall population in terms of accessing audio content and YouTube videos.

Chart 3

Social Networking is more popular with youth compared to the overall population. Blogging was more common across all ages; in fact half of all internet users had blogged in the previous month (chart 4).

Chart 4

Income and education also play a role in internet use: high-income and higher educated Guatemalans are more likely than those with lower incomes and education levels to conduct new media activities such as visiting social networking sites, watching videos on YouTube or even blogging.

Of those who had used blogs in the previous month, entertainment and news related topics seemed most popular while political blogs lagged (Chart 5).

Chart 5

Of all the popular news and politics related blogs, those from the newspaper Prensa Libre are the most popular.

Use of social networking websites (Chart 6) was led by interacting or keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances, which took precedence over joining and participating in new groups, taking quizzes and playing games.

Chart 6

Hi5 was the most popular social networking site among respondents, especially so with youth. But the site still received low marks on the level of trustworthiness of the information people obtained on it (Table 2).

Mobile Phone Activities

While greater proportions of the mobile phone users were young (16-29), respondents outside of those segments still had relatively solid access rates. Men and women were equally likely to be mobile phone users.

Text messaging is very common in Guatemala, largely due to its low cost relative to voice calls. Other activities such as taking and sharing pictures, financial transactions and other applications on mobile phones were less common.

Chart 7

Mobile Media Access

Accessing the internet on a mobile phone is uncommon, with most respondents saying that they have fairly basic phone models without web capabilities. A significant proportion (19 percent) also said that they were not interested in having web access on their mobile phones.

Chart 8

Unlike in some other countries listening to the radio via the internet is yet to become very common (Chart 9).

Chart 9