Full Description
At once a digital ethnography of smartphones and a classically conceived village-based ethnography, this book relocates the study of digital technologies to rural Melanesia, with a focus on the Lau of Malaita, Soloman Islands. In this 'technography', Geoffrey Hobbis studies the materiality and functional attributes of smartphones and their object biographies—modes of acquisition, maintenance, uses, limitations and the problems specific to this region in adopting and adapting smartphones in everyday life. As he examines the various uses of smartphones, as both telephone and multimedia device, Hobbis also explores the social and cultural transformations, the hopes and uncertainties, with which they are associated. Ultimately, in bringing together a study of digital technologies with classical anthropological theory, The Digitizing Family develops a theory of smartphones as kinship technologies and supercompositional objects.
Contents
Chapter 1: Introduction: Digitizing the Melanesian Family.- Chapter 2: Methodological Notes.- Part I: The Many Lives and Deaths of the Melanesian Smartphone.- Chapter 3: A Sketch of Many Births, Lives and Deaths of Smartphones.-Chapter 4: A Digital Swiss Army Knife.- Part 2.-Chapter 5: Digitizing Social Networks.- Chapter 6: Telephonic Immorality and Uncertainty.- Part 3: MicroSD Culture and Digital Parenting.- Chapter 7: The Muvi Haos.- Chapter 8: The Babysitting Smartphone.- Part 4: Towards a Theory of Smartphones as Kinship Tools.- Chapter 9: The Sociotechnical System of Melanesian Smartphones.- Chapter 10: Conclusion: The Supercompositional Object.
