Simon seems to be indicating a very productive direction here, and I think this is what my somewhat gnomic 'what does it mean that everybody has a mobile?' earlier was gesturing to as well. If the favoured consumer imaginary for the mobile phone/device is enunciated in the grammar of enhanced connectivity/fashion/entertainment/security/surveillance, a projection of alternative or counter-strategies in the use of a technology like this would need to take into account its adoption in contexts where the basic infrastructural provisions and lifestyle habits that the mobile phone is purported to enhance are just not there - where the priorities for its use are very different, although 'communication' remains a constant, albeit with much higher stakes. This of course would not exclude an analysis of how mobile technologies are deployed in the West, where there is no shortage of internal planned and spontaneous 'underdevelopment.' I'll just briefly quote an exchange I had with Brian yesterday: "the ubiquity of the mobile phone as a utility of daily life in places and societies where many of the other utilities and infrastructures we would take as baseline are missing or highly stratified in terms of access (running water, food, transport, etc). How does the mobile phone mediate social relations which are otherwise intractable, i.e. overwhelming social marginality,'surplus slum populations . . ."Where the cell is gaining predominance as the preferred communications medium - I understand from the media! - is in territories which do not fit the fully urban western white middleclass assumption, and often areas lacking copperwire infrastructures. West Africa, for example, where the cell is invaluable as a price-gauging tool for small businesses and primary producers, for discovering relative prices at different marketplaces, so finding out where it's best to sell. The competition for this 'market' is not of serious strategic interest so there would seem to be practical reasons for promoting connectivity via cell, indeed, its self-promotion as practical.
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