Inventing Mobile Communication: From Nordic Countries + East Asia to

Melanesia

talk for Sarah Logan’sICTs in Melanesia Research Workshop

Australian National University, 20-21 April, 2015

Gerard Goggin @ggoggin

Department of Media & CommunicationsUniversity of Sydney

what’s useful in mobile communication (& media) research

for studying ICTs in Melanesia?

• the mobile phone is salient in ICTs in many countries – so it’s helpful to understand basic coordinates of mobile communication as a field -& how it relates to other fields

• mobile technologies are in transition – what are dynamics of this globally & regionally?

• What are emerging trajectories, questions, issues in mobile research that might offer opportunities/cross-fertilization for Melanesia?

mobile communication: a field guide• as a field, mobile communication is in its second decade• draws from many disciplines, esp. communication & media

studies, sociology, anthropology • Takes shape because of the emergence of the cellular mobile

phone - e.g. Nordic countries; East Asia• Number of early studies have a ‘telephone comes to the

village’hook (e.g. Georg Strøm, ‘The Telephone Comes to a Filipino Village’, in Katz & Aakus, eds., Perpetual Contact, 2002; cf. Heather Hudson’s classic 1984 When Telephones Reach the Village)

• a classic cross-cultural move in many studies is nomination –what’s the mobile called in different societies/language groups –e.g. mobail in David Lipset’s study of peri-urban Murik

• Some ideas about the nature of mobile communication are established relatively early on – e.g. public/private split; mobiles & youth; ‘smart mobs’; ‘telecocooning’ - but have evolved, been contested, modified (cf. Lipset 2013)

• Dominance of development communication approach (now M4D)

mobile communication

• ‘circuit of culture’ of mobile phones (Goggin, Cell Phone Culture)

• Key issue is that the models of (mobile) communication are constructed, based on specific kinds of cultural contexts, places, infrastructures, social relations etc

e.g. case of text messaging

• Different ‘social imaginaries’ of mobiles

how the ‘newness’ of new media is experienced by people outside of the Global North …

how are the ways people’s historically situated understandings of appropriate ways to interweave dialogue and dissemination affecting how people responded to new media?

How are people’s epistemological assumptions and social organisation shaping how they incorporate particular communicative technologies?

Gershon & Bell,’Introduction: The Newness of New Media’, Culture, Theory and Critique 54.3 (2013): 262

mobile technologies in transition

• Mobile phone is part of broader infrastructures & ecologies of media, communication, ICTs + other infrastructures (transportation; housing; educational; everyday)

• Mobile Internet especially interesting emergent formation

• rise of mobile Internet especially in global south

• complexity of mobile Internets, e.g. three axes of mobile Internet convergence: mobiles/Internet; mobile Internet/TV; mobile Internet/locative media

• Many new users of Internet in majority world are using mobile devices

cf. Donner 2015, Goggin, 2011, Hadlaw, Herman & Swiss, 2015

Mobile Internet

Emerging trajectories & problematics

• ‘platform’ & ‘software’ studies - what are these mobile/online technologies exactly? - e.g. Twitter, Facebook etc) - little work on global south countries, or even Asian platforms

• mobile communication & mobilities• Situating mobile communication as enmeshed in other

domains - mobiles across/enabling money, health, agriculture, electricity

• Possibilities/constraints of mobile ‘big data’ (e.g. mobile network data; new kinds of mobile Internet data)

• Lot of scope for comparing studies of mobiles more systematically across global, international base -e.g. ‘phone friends’

Location technologies ininternational context

• What would location technologies look like in global South? (new project Wilken-Horst-Goggin edited volume, Location Technologies in International Context )

e.g. Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare/Jiepang in different countries?or:• Mobile info + communication in 3-wheeled auto rickshaw

in Sri Lanka (Jo Tacchi & Ben Grubb, ‘The Case of the E-tutuk’, Media International Australia 125, 2007)

• WiFi on buses in Latin America?• Drones?• Way-finding technologies for Blind people in India?

References

Andersen, Barbara, ‘Tricks, Lies, and Mobile Phones: “Phone Friend” Stories in Papua New Guinea’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 54:3 (2013): 318-334

Donner, Jonathan, After Access: The Mobile Internet and Inclusion in the Developing World, MIT Press, forthcoming; see also papers at http://jonathandonner.com/

Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture (Routledge, 2006)

Goggin, Gerard. Global Mobile Media (Routledge, 2010)

Goggin, Gerard and Hjorth, Larissa, eds. Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (2014)

Goggin, Ling & Hjorth, ‘Must Read: Mobile Technology Research - a Field Guide’, in Mobile Technologies (4 vols; Routledge, 2015)

Katz, James, ed. Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (MIT, 2008)

Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries, edited by Jan Hadlaw, Andrew Herman, and Thom Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2015,

Ling, Rich and Horst, Heath, ‘Mobile Communication in the Global South’, New Media & Society13.3 (2011): 363-374.

Lipset, David. ‘Mobail: Moral Ambivalence and the Domestication of Mobile Telephones in Peri-Urban Papua New Guinea,’ Culture, Theory and Critique, 54:3 (2013): 335-354

Watson, Amanda. Mobile phones and media use in Madang Province of Papua New Guinea. Pacific Journalism Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, Oct 2013: 156-175

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