New Media and ICTs in Urban Nicaragua

Nicaragua is one of the poorest nations in Latin America- World Bank data estimates that the annual GDP per capita for 2010 is just below $2670 (click here for more econmic data from Nicaragua) In urban areas, where this survey is based, growth and development levels tend to be higher, and consequently technology access is also higher by national standards, but advanced use of ICTs is still to develop completely.

In terms of household access to ICTs (Chart 1), mobile phones are widely available to the urban respondents to the AudienceScapes survey in Nicaragua. This is largely due to cheaply available pre-paid connections. Less than a quarter of respondents said they have a computer or an 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

The percentage of those who used their mobile phones in the previous month is lower than those who have household access. This could signal that the mobile phones available to people in their homes are being shared with many members of the family, restricting their availability to any given person. Alternatively, it could mean that mobile users are using their devices sparingly, due to cost or literacy limitations.

Internet use shows the opposite pattern. The number or regular web users are about seven times 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 the ages of 16-29.,reflected in the fact that schools or universities are the second most popular places to go online (Chart 2 and Table 1). Most respondents had atleast a secondary or technical education, and this group also formed the majority of internet users. A moderate gender divide was indicated; with internet users somewhat more likely to be men than women.

Table 1: Profile of the Internet User in Urban Nicaragua

InterMedia Urban Nicaragua 2009: survey of urban adults, (16+), who had used the internet in the previous month, n = 483

Youth are lead the way in conducting a wide variety of online activities regularly, such as accessing YouTube videos, playing various audio content and playing games (Chart 3).

Chart 3

The data showed an intriguing educational spread in web 2.0 activities, with blogging more popular among the university educated than among those with primary education only, while the reverse was true for visitors to social networking websites (Chart 4)

Chart 4

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

Use of social networking websites (Chart 6) was led by interacting in touch with friends and acquaintances 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 the youth. But the site still received typically low marks for such a site on the level of trustworthiness of the information people got from it (Table 2).

Mobile Phone Activities

While the majority of the mobile phone users were young (16-29) and well educated, respondents outside of those segments still had relatively good access rates. Interestingly, women were 12 percentage points more likely than men to say that they were mobile phone users (Table 3)

Table 3: Profile of a Mobile Phone User in Urban Nicaragua

InterMedia, Urban Nicaragua, 2009, survey of urban adults, (16+), who had mobile phones in previous month, n = 793

However, even though women register higher general use, men led the way in use of a number of phone applications (Chart 7).

Chart 7

Mobile Media Access

Chart 8

Accessing the internet on a mobile phone is uncommon, with most respondents attributing this to the fact that they have fairly basic phone models without web capabilities (Table 4).

Listening to the radio via the internet is yet to become very common (Chart 9)

Chart 9