Abstract
The Global Smartphone: Beyond a Youth Technology is another book based on ‘The Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing’ project. It is co-authored by the 11 researchers collaborating on the project with the primary aim of understanding the ‘consequences of smartphones for people around the world’ and a secondary aim of gaining ‘a better understanding of what a smartphone really is’ (p. 4). The book is based on the authors’ ethnographic work for 16 months in nine countries directly observing how people use smartphones in everyday life. The authors define ‘smart’ as ‘smart from below’, namely rather than focusing on the (self-)monitoring aspects, they focus on the way the smartphone is transformed by ‘its user, a form of craftmanship that only begins after purchase’ and which ‘turns the smartphone into an extraordinarily intimate and personal tool’ (p. 5). Similarly, when defining what they mean by ‘phone’, they argue that the smartphone is not necessarily a phone – a device mainly used for making phone calls because it has considerably more uses and functions. They see the smartphone as ‘an aggregate of dozens of prior practices’ (p. 5). The book is split into an introductory chapter, seven substantial chapters and a concluding chapter. The substantial chapters deal with a range of issues such as what people say about smartphones; the smartphone in context; from apps to everyday life; what they label as ‘perpetual opportunism’ (p. viii), namely the fact that the smartphone is always available and ‘the ways in which this changes people's relationship to the world around them’ (p. viii); crafting; age and smartphones; and the prominent role of apps such as LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp. All in all, both books in the series provide interesting ethnographic insights into the use of the smartphone.