The Cell Phone

An Anthropology of Communication

Heather Horst, Daniel Miller

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781845204013
• eBook ISBN: 9781000190083
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Philosophie et éthique en sciences

Few modern innovations have spread quite so quickly as the cell phone. This technology has transformed communication throughout the world. Mobile telecommunications have had a dramatic effect in many regions, but perhaps nowhere more than for low-income populations in countries such as Jamaica, where in the last few years many people have moved from no phone to cell phone. This book reveals the central role of communication in helping low-income households cope with poverty. The book traces the impact of the cell phone from personal issues of loneliness and depression to the global concerns of the modern economy and the transnational family. As the technology of social networking, the cell phone has become central to establishing and maintaining relationships in areas from religion to love. The Cell Phone presents the first detailed ethnography of the impact of this new technology through the exploration of the cell phone's role in everyday lives.

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Introduction

On a Friday evening in November of 2004,¹ an executive bus, travelling between Half-Way-Tree (the main bus terminus in central Kingston) and the suburb of Portmore, made its way down congested Hagley Park Road. As the bus stopped at a traffic light near Three Mile, an area surrounded by many of Jamaica's infamous garrison communities, four 'youths' shoved open the door.² Brandishing an AK-47, they boarded the bus and ordered every passenger to place their cell phone in a black scandal bag.³ The passengers on the full bus passed up their cell phones one by one. But when only twenty-six cell phones arrived the youths became angry and demanded that the remaining three phones be passed to the front of the bus, where it is clearly stated that the bus capacity is twenty-nine passengers. Eventually the youths were able to coerce the reluctant passengers into giving up the remaining phones and got off the bus without further incident.

Although we travelled this very same route to Kingston on a regular basis in order to interview government and company officials, this particular evening we had remained in Portmore. When we heard about the hijacking, its significance for our project was obvious, but became even more so over the course of the next month as it was transformed into urban legend. When we presented a workshop at the University of the West Indies less than two weeks later, a woman recounted the incident. By that time some of the details had changed; one account added some violence and some details about the age of the youths and another version included extra guns. The story continued to travel and capture the imaginations as well as the fears of residents across Portmore and Kingston, not only because it signalled what many predicted would be a bad season for crime in the aftermath of Hurricane Ivan, but because of what it said about the cell phone - whereas just a few years ago many low-income Jamaicans had little access to any kind of phone, now these youths could simply assume that twenty-nine passengers represented twenty-nine phones.

Our project, funded by the British Department for International Development (DFID), was one of four simultaneous ethnographies devoted to a generai assessment of the relationship between new information and communication technologies (ICTs) and poverty alleviation in Ghana, India, Jamaica and South Africa.⁴ Our contribution involved research on the impact of ICTs among Jamaicans in two low-income communities over the course of a year (January 2004 to December 2004). As anthropologists, we viewed poverty as something more than macrosta-tistics of income and gross domestic product (GDP) and we were specifically concerned with documenting the experience of poverty among low-income Jamaicans. We wanted to assess the extent to which communications were felt to be of value in their own right, and the degree to which they had also become integral to people's relationship to health, crime and other people as well as to their own sense of self.

While the project was aimed at assessing the wider communication ecologies of low-income Jamaicans (e.g. the Internet, telecommunications, television, radio and the transport system), it soon became clear to us that the cell phone was dramatically changing the lives and livelihoods of low-income Jamaicans. During the same year, it was also apparent that Jamaica was not the only country where cell phones were being incorporated into people's lives with extraordinary rapidity. The integration of the cell phone in China, India and many countries in Africa raised what we considered to be urgent questions about the impact of the cell phone for development and poverty alleviation throughout much of the world. By 2003, there were already more cell phones in the world than landlines and in many European countries more than 75 per cent of the population were subscribers. China is by far the biggest market, with 200 million subscribers, although notably this comprises only 16 per cent of the population. The Caribbean country of Martinique, much like Jamaica, has 78.9 per cent penetration, compared with the USA with only 48 per cent (Ling 2004: 13-14; cf. Castells et al. 2005). Because many non-metropolitan countries did not have household landlines, the availability of cheap and accessible cell phones and cell phone towers represented the first opportunity to possess this means of communication. Given that many developing countries are superseding countries such as the USA in their use and integration of these phones, we are faced with an example of global leapfrogging and we feel compelled to obtain a sense of how these new developments in communications are transforming the world, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer.

The increasing use of the mobile phone in countries such as Jamaica also represents a renewed opportunity for anthropologists to consider the overall impact of telephony as a form of communication, a telephony that is analogous to the original introduction of the phone within metropolitan regions nearly a century ago or the introduction of the cell phone within metropolitan countries only a decade or two ago. These differences in access form part of what has become termed the 'digital divide', that is, the possible tendency of new technologies to exacerbate differences between the rich and the poor. One of the central questions guiding our research revolves around the question of whether the cell phone (as it is manifested in Jamaica) represents a symptom or a solution to the digital divide; that is, does the cell phone reduce or exacerbate differences between the wealthy and the poor of this world? But there are no easy answers to this question and, as technology continues to move forward new issues emerge. For example, The Economist (12-18 March 2005) recently devoted its front cover and editorial to the possibility that the cell phone, rather than the Internet, was the key technology for helping the world's poor move out of poverty. Our own research led to us to further question the degree to which the Internet through the cell phone might also become equally important in the long term, given the relatively low expense of cell phones compared with computers.

As we hope this volume will demonstrate, trying to assess the relative merits of new communication technologies in alleviating conditions of poverty is no simple matter and the answer to these questions is not likely to remain the same across every country or region. Nonetheless, our hope is that this volume will make a considered contribution to an ongoing and essential debate for those of us for whom social science is intended to contribute not just to academic advancement but also to understanding contemporary issues outside the academy which evolve over the course of days and months rather than years and decades, a contribution to debates that take place not only in academic journals but also in newspapers and television as well as the Internet. This is not at all typical of the traditions of anthropology, which is a discipline that aims to contribute to a general comparative study of humankind, through the patient and long-term collection of materials through ethnography, comparison, analysis and theory.⁵ We want to build on this tradition, but add another possibility, which is that we can use anthropological methods such as long-term ethnography (Bernard 1995) to tackle something as dynamic and extensive as the astonishing spread of the cell phone while also producing material and conclusions that engage with anthropological debates on new technologies and changes in communication and connectivity, as well as Caribbean anthropology generally. The difference is that we aim to understand the phenomenon as it is occurring.

But the word timely also seems to us appropriate to the emerging academic debate on this topic. Between 2004 and 2005, the first general books that summarize the findings of work on the wealthy societies of the metropolitan world are being published such as the work of Richard Ling (2004) in Norway and Ito et al. (2005) with respect to Japan. This book is also intended to be timely in the sense of complementing these early works by becoming one of the first volumes to consider the impact of the phone in the developing world. One of the reasons the early emphasis is upon metropolitan regions is that much of the financial backing for research has, in part, come from commercial forces concerned with wealthier consumers and also because these are the regions in which most research was based (see Pertierra et al. 2002; Ling 2004). Our study, in contrast, is funded by development aid and is undertaken under the auspices of anthropology in a place where, as the figures show, the impact on low-income households is likely to be, if anything, more dramatic and perhaps more significant in the long run. Above all, we felt a moral commitment to rapidly document, understand and evaluate how this particular communication technology is changing the face of countries such as Jamaica, an evaluation that could in turn be utilized as the basis for an informed response for further research and support of new communication technologies in the developing world generally.

Outline of Contents

The aim of this book is, then, clear-cut and unequivocal - it is the task of evaluating the consequences of the cell phone for low-income populations through presenting an ethnography of the cell phone in Jamaica. In order to accomplish this aim, the various chapters that comprise this book take up particular and complementary perspectives. Here in the introduction we have briefly summarized the prevailing literature first on the global impact of the cell phone and then the specific nature of communication in Jamaica. These two perspectives frame our enquiry and establish often contrasting expectations of what we might encounter. We can thereby be clear as to the degree to which our findings accord with or enable us to rethink these expectations. But, before we can understand Jamaicans' use of the cell phone and especially why the cell phone has made such an impact upon the landscape of communication in Jamaica, we need to consider how it is they obtained cell phones in the first place. Chapter 2 is therefore a discussion of the dual role of the major commercial companies and the Jamaican government in instituting a situation where today, in a country of '.7 million people, there are 2 million subscriptions to cell phones. This provides us with an initial consideration of one of the main topics that are central to the kinds of debate that publications such as The Economist are keen to foster: that is, the impact of liberalization and the relationship between the state and commerce. The context for the extraordinary and rapid spread of the cell phone is given in the following chapter, where we introduce the basic economic and social parameters of low-income households in contemporary Jamaica. By introducing the results of our survey work in the two locations where fieldwork took place, we are able to convey more precisely what we mean when using this term 'low-income' to describe individuals and households

Chapter 4 is concerned with the issues of possession and usage that have been the mainstay of the commercially driven research that has dominated early studies. It thereby comes closest to the previously established literature on the cell phone. One of the most important aims of this chapter is to provide readers with a sense of how Jamaicans carry themselves in relation to the phone, and the ways in which the phone changes how it feels to be Jamaican. By considering our evidence in relation to this wider literature we can ask ourselves how far it is reasonable to think in terms of a Jamaican cell phone. Certainly there are marked differences in the use made of the varied potentialities of the technology, which lead us a long way from any simple technological determinism.

The heart of our ethnographic description comes in the following three chapters. Chapters 5 and 6 establish the grounds for this volume to be seen more generally as an anthropology of communication. In these chapters we shall argue that, just because our focus is on low-income families, it does not mean that we reduce our anthropology to a simple logic of function and coping. Indeed, we suggest that to account for our evidence we need to turn around the apparent relationship between what are considered economic and other aspects of social relationships. The way people obtain money and resources that enable them to survive is itself seen to be in many ways parasitic upon a more foundational drive towards certain modes of communication. Low-income Jamaicans give, exchange and receive help in a manner that seems designed to maximize communication and connectedness. Our argument is that we need to understand this anthropology of communication in its own terms. Our study of coping strategies is therefore enhanced by not reducing communication to a function of that struggle to survive. In Chapter 6 we demonstrate that coping strategies are fundamentally based on connectivity since, for nearly one-third of the households we surveyed income is derived through social connections rather than either work or entrepreneurship. But we then also show that this form of connectivity derives from a particular mode of communication, locally called link-up, which we analyse in Chapter 5.

In the final three chapters we recognize that, in addition to trying to contribute to this project of an anthropology of communication, this volume is also intended to contribute to the sorts of evaluations undertaken in development studies and policymaking. We move from our ethnographic examination to a more policy-focused analysis in three stages. In Chapter 7 we remain within our more conventional anthropological perspective on such issues by reflecting upon the very concept of welfare and the salience of understanding welfare in Jamaican terms. The chapter explores the word 'pressure', well known from the lyrics of globally successful Jamaican music, and the insights this term provides for comprehending the ways in which Jamaicans also assess and understand issues of welfare. In Chapter 8 we focus upon the impact of the cell phone in three key sectors of development: education, health and crime. Yet we remain committed to relating these appraisals back to particular Jamaican ideologies, for example, by examining Jamaican relationships to gambling and religion as the backdrop for assessing this idea of welfare.

In our final chapter we bring these themes together under the overall rubric of evaluation. As anthropologists we are committed to a consideration of the way Jamaicans themselves evaluate, not just the phone, but each specific aspect of phone use, from its consequences for social relationships to its effect on entrepreneurship. But we also needed to find a way to relate this evaluation by those who participated in this study to that demanded by powerful bodies responsible for policy, whether the Jamaican government or the World Bank. One of our strategies is to compare our material with the approach of academics, such as Amartya Sen (e.g. 1987, 1992, 1999a, b), who have tried to take rather esoteric economistic models and make them instruments of welfare evaluation that engage with the declared interests and choices of populations. In our conclusion we attempt to highlight the dangers of focusing upon any one particular player in this story, whether commerce, the state or the 'popular voice'. Instead we concentrate on trying to make the relativism of anthropology, whose conclusions are highly specific to time and place, an asset in policy formation, rather than simply a critique of those generalizations required by policymaking.

The Cell Phone

In the remainder of this introduction we define our project in relation to two bodies of literature, both of which create expectations for our findings. In this section we consider writings about the global impact of the cell phone, while in the final section we deal with studies that start from the opposite end, that is local forms of prior communication. It is in the meeting between these two that we hope to establish our study within the wider terms implicated in the subtitle of this book — an anthropology of communication.

While there have been many academic contributions to the study of telephones and their impact upon society, Fischer's (1992) work on landlines and Ling's (2004) early research into cell phones have been particularly influential on this volume. It is important to our project to start with Fischer, who provides a general appraisal of the social impact of the original landline phone in the USA between 1900 and 1940. This is because our approach to the cell phone is that it needs to be considered as a telephone in the first place and only then in terms of its specific quality as a cell phone. Fischer (1992: 5) concludes that 'the telephone did not radically alter American ways of life; rather, Americans used it to more vigorously pursue their characteristic ways of life'. This seems to us to establish a core theoretical foundation. When people adopt new media, we tend to assume that they first seize on all the new possibilities that the media offer in order to achieve previously unprecedented tasks. But this may be a mistaken expectation. When Miller and Slater (2000) studied the impact of the Internet in Trinidad what became clear was that Trinidadians did not focus on the unprecedented new possibilities. Rather, the technology is used initially with reference to desires that are historically well established but remain unfulfilled because of the limitations of previous technologies. These pent-up frustrations thus determine the way the new technology is first seen, what Miller and Slater termed 'expansive realisation'. As will become clear in this volume, we see the results of our ethnographic study of the impact of the phone in Jamaica as in many ways complementary to Fischer's historical study of the initial impact of the phone in the USA.

We also seek to build upon the general arguments that have emerged from studies of the adoption of media. Ling (2004), for example, provides one of the most thoughtful texts that attempts to assess the literature concerning the impact of the cell phone to date. Following Silverstone and Haddon (1992) and Silverstone and Hirsch (1992) he argues that the evidence to date supports an approach termed the 'domestication of technologies', which was devised in order to move beyond arguments between various forms of technological determination and social determination. Several of the terms and ideas employed in this approach, such as appropriation and objectification, were adopted and adapted from Miller (1987, 1988)⁶ and, in the main, this is the perspective we employ here.

In essence such approaches have their original derivation in dialectical phi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Orthography
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Infrastructure
• 3 Locations
• 4 Possession
• 5 Link-up
• 6 Coping
• 7 Pressure
• 8 Welfare
• 9 Evaluation
• Notes
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index