Abstract
There were approximately two hundred and fifty adults in the village and I collected information on a total of one hundred mobile phones, including fifty smartphones. Most of these handsets were acquired in the previous year, and most of them were replacements for phones that did not survive the harsh tropical environment. The transient materialism of Solomon Islands’ tropical ecology makes the lives of smartphones a sort of Hobbesian dystopia; they are nasty, brutal and short. And yet, in spite of their short lives, smartphones have come to play pivotal roles in the lives of the Lau, their absence is sorely missed and quickly rectified, thus perpetuating a cycle of smartphones continually being (re)adapted in the day to day life. The social lives of smartphones, their arrival in the village, how they are used and how they expire, offer insight into the digitization of family life which are grounded in the sociotechnical system (Fig. 3.1).
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Notes
- 1.
Chinese shops are retail businesses run by members of the Asian community in Solomon Islands. They make up around 70–80 percent of all retail trade in the country (Moore 2008: 72). Chinese shops sell all manner of goods and services, from electronics such as mobile phones, DVDs and solar power units to clothing, soaps, and at times medication, a variety of foods, most manufactured and imported from across and at times beyond the Asia-Pacific region (for example, one store in Auki sold Dagon brand beer imported from Myanmar).
- 2.
A bon mot playing on the Melanesian Pijin word wantok, “an extended kin network.”
- 3.
See Foster (2018) for a more detailed discussion of this intersection between consumption and company regulations through top-up and subscription policies.
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Hobbis, G. (2020). A Sketch of the Many Births, Lives and Deaths of Smartphones. In: The Digitizing Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34929-5_3
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