Abstract
In this digital age, mobile phones have become crucial tools for establishing and maintaining one’s contact with family, friends, and even strangers around the world. Within the context of the prevalence and necessity of mobile phones in people’s everyday lives, this book explores the dynamics of mobile phone practices between consumers, companies, and State agents through ethnographic methods. The chapters target different facets of mobile phone practices in Melanesia, including the use of mobile phones among individuals living in Papua New Guinea (PNG), Fiji, and Vanuatu (Chapters 1, 2, and 5); the marketing strategies used by telecommunications companies to promote their services; and the State’s regulation of both companies’ marketing activities and consumers’ mobile phone usage (Chapters 3, 4, and 6).
In Chapter 1, David Lipset demonstrates that the inhabitants of the rural Sepik River area of PNG use mobile phones to maintain and strengthen kinship ties across physical distances. Particularly, the case of the dangling phone in the doorway of Venis and her husband’s house highlights the “moral economy of the gift” (p. 32) around their phone practices. That is, the couple did not charge the villagers to use their phone but asked people to voluntarily transfer phone credit to help others maintain contact with their kin. Holly Wardlow, in Chapter 2, interprets the mobile phone as an “affective technology” (p. 40), as it was employed by the residents of Tari, PNG to build emotional intimacy with their kin and make “phone friends” (p. 40), who could also be perceived as intimate strangers known only through mobile phones. Particularly, the case of Lucy and Angela demonstrates the significant role played by mobile phones in helping HIV-positive women experiencing social contraction due to stigma. Through mobile phones, these women formed connections with their phone friends and thus received emotional and spiritual support. While Wardlow focuses on women’s mobile phone practices in PNG, Daniela Kraemer explores in Chapter 5 how young men in Port Vila, Vanuatu develop connections with strangers through mobile phones. With regard to maintaining ties with family and friends, young men were more likely to use mobile phones to expand and modulate their social networks with unknown contacts through the moral economy of gifting phone credit.
Delving into the issues of State surveillance and the telecommunications company Digicel’s dominance in PNG, Dan Jorgensen presents one of the interlocutors’ (Toby) stories to analyse local consumers’ perceptions of mobile technology in Chapter 3. Although a mobile phone saved Toby’s life when he was lost in the mountains, it did not diminish his concerns regarding the spread of Digicel. Toby viewed Digicel’s expansion as the impending “apocalypse” (p. 58), namely, the domination of PNG by foreign companies. In fact, this was also foregrounded as a common apprehension among other local consumers. While mobile phones could help them avoid getting lost and keep them connected, people can never escape surveillance by the companies and the State. Also focusing on Digicel, in Chapter 4, Heather A. Horst comparatively examines its competition with the telecommunications company Vodafone in terms of their advertising and marketing strategies in Fiji. Vodafone’s advertising campaign successfully evoked most Fijians’ sense of pride and belonging “through imagery of the National Rugby Union Team, batis [“The Bati Song” is a song created by Vodafone to advertise its products in Fiji] and the beauty of nature” (p. 84). In contrast, Digicel’s marketing campaign proved less effective in creating an emotional connection between its brand and Fijian citizens and was therefore regarded as a “foreign” company (p. 87). In Chapter 6, Robert J. Foster examines how Digicel employed new promotional strategies, such as prepaid subscriptions, to stimulate users’ consumption of voice calls, text messages, and data in PNG. Although prepaid services are normally sold at a much cheaper price, consumers are required to use these services within a limited period. Consequently, the author argues that such prepayment services cultivate responsible consumers, as they are responsible for consuming what they have paid for. Accordingly, prepaid mobile phone subscriptions were described as a type of technology similar to that of gambling machines, which aims to “extract greater amounts of revenue from players” (p. 108).
Overall, the six chapters in this book are cohesively and coherently integrated, and collectively depict a vivid image of how people living across the Pacific Islands use mobile phones to develop social relationships and intimacy within the context of moral economy. Above all, this book offers readers a precious opportunity to gain insight into the mobile phone practices of Melanesian residents—a group that has attracted only limited scholarly attention, and yet warrants significantly closer investigation.