The Digitizing Family

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 biographiesmodes 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.

One of the first book-length efforts to address the lack of scholarship on digital material cultures and societies in Oceania Contributes to key debates in anthropological engagements with technology, digital anthropology, and digital ethnography Examines mobile technology in their totality, including telephony, the use of mobiles as multimedia devices, entertainment, flashlights, calculators, and beyond

Autorentext

Geoffrey Hobbis is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l'Océanie, France, and lectured at the University of British Columbia, Canada.

Inhalt

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.