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The Sociotechnical System of Melanesian Smartphones

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Abstract

While the Lau unquestionably exercise great agency in how they incorporate foreign consumer goods into their day-to-day lives, the scope of possible actions is demarcated, sharply, by notable constraints. To account for these constraints, I found it useful to go to Pierre Lemonnier’s technographic approach to studying the relationships between “choice” (agency) and “constraint” (structure). By framing my work in these terms I am extending into the realm of digital consumer experiences the methodological project of studying techniques—the ways users operate digital technologies—and sociotechnical systems as a way to generate understanding of artefacts based on the French approach started by Marcel Mauss (1935), elaborated upon by André Leroi-Gourhan (2013, 2015) and André-Georges Haudricourt (1968, 1987) and continued into the present by, among others, Robert Cresswell (1973, 1996), Marie-Claude Mahias (1993, 1994), Ludovic Coupaye (2009a, b, 2013) as well as Pierre Lemonnier (1986, 1992, 2004, 2012).

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  1. Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

    Geoffrey Hobbis

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Hobbis, G. (2020). The Sociotechnical System of Melanesian Smartphones. In: The Digitizing Family. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34929-5_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34929-5_9

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34928-8

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