"Inventing Mobile Communication: From Nordic Countries + East Asia to Melanesia" - talk for Sarah Logan’s "ICTs in Melanesia Research Workshop" Australian National University, 20-21 April, 2015

1. Inventing Mobile Communication:
From Nordic Countries + East Asia to
Melanesia
talk for Sarah Logan’s
ICTs in Melanesia Research Workshop
Australian National University, 20-21 April, 2015
Gerard Goggin
@ggoggin
Department of Media & Communications
University of Sydney

2. what’s useful in mobile communication (&
media) research
for studying ICTs in Melanesia?
• the mobile phone is salient in ICTs in many
countries – so it’s helpful to understand basic
coordinates of mobile communication as a field -
& how it relates to other fields
• mobile technologies are in transition – what are
dynamics of this globally & regionally?
• What are emerging trajectories, questions, issues
in mobile research that might offer
opportunities/cross-fertilization for Melanesia?

3. mobile communication: a field guide
• as a field, mobile communication is in its second decade
• draws from many disciplines, esp. communication & media
studies, sociology, anthropology
• Takes shape because of the emergence of the cellular mobile
phone - e.g. Nordic countries; East Asia
• Number of early studies have a ‘telephone comes to the
village’hook (e.g. Georg Strøm, ‘The Telephone Comes to a Filipino Village’, in Katz & Aakus, eds., Perpetual Contact,
2002; cf. Heather Hudson’s classic 1984 When Telephones Reach the Village)
• a classic cross-cultural move in many studies is nomination –
what’s the mobile called in different societies/language groups –
e.g. mobail in David Lipset’s study of peri-urban Murik
• Some ideas about the nature of mobile communication are
established relatively early on – e.g. public/private split; mobiles
& youth; ‘smart mobs’; ‘telecocooning’ - but have evolved, been
contested, modified (cf. Lipset 2013)
• Dominance of development communication approach (now
M4D)

4. mobile communication
• ‘circuit of culture’ of mobile phones (Goggin,
Cell Phone Culture)
• Key issue is that the models of (mobile)
communication are constructed, based on
specific kinds of cultural contexts, places,
infrastructures, social relations etc
e.g. case of text messaging
• Different ‘social imaginaries’ of mobiles

5. how the ‘newness’ of new media is experienced by
people outside of the Global North …
how are the ways people’s historically situated
understandings of appropriate ways to interweave
dialogue and dissemination affecting how people
responded to new media?
How are people’s epistemological assumptions and
social organisation shaping how they incorporate
particular communicative technologies?
Gershon & Bell,’Introduction: The Newness of New Media’,
Culture, Theory and Critique 54.3 (2013): 262

6. mobile technologies in transition
• Mobile phone is part of broader
infrastructures & ecologies of media,
communication, ICTs + other infrastructures
(transportation; housing; educational;
everyday)
• Mobile Internet especially interesting
emergent formation

7. • rise of mobile Internet especially in global
south
• complexity of mobile Internets, e.g. three axes
of mobile Internet convergence:
mobiles/Internet; mobile Internet/TV; mobile
Internet/locative media
• Many new users of Internet in majority world
are using mobile devices
cf. Donner 2015, Goggin, 2011, Hadlaw, Herman & Swiss,
2015
Mobile Internet

8. Emerging trajectories & problematics
• ‘platform’ & ‘software’ studies - what are these
mobile/online technologies exactly? - e.g. Twitter, Facebook
etc) - little work on global south countries, or even Asian
platforms
• mobile communication & mobilities
• Situating mobile communication as enmeshed in other
domains - mobiles across/enabling money, health,
agriculture, electricity
• Possibilities/constraints of mobile ‘big data’ (e.g. mobile
network data; new kinds of mobile Internet data)
• Lot of scope for comparing studies of mobiles more
systematically across global, international base -e.g. ‘phone
friends’

9. Location technologies in
international context
• What would location technologies look like in global South?
(new project Wilken-Horst-Goggin edited volume, Location
Technologies in International Context )
e.g. Facebook or Twitter or Foursquare/Jiepang in different
countries?
or:
• Mobile info + communication in 3-wheeled auto rickshaw
in Sri Lanka (Jo Tacchi & Ben Grubb, ‘The Case of the E-tutuk’, Media
International Australia 125, 2007)
• WiFi on buses in Latin America?
• Drones?
• Way-finding technologies for Blind people in India?

10. References
Andersen, Barbara, ‘Tricks, Lies, and Mobile Phones: “Phone Friend” Stories in Papua New
Guinea’, Culture, Theory and Critique, 54:3 (2013): 318-334
Donner, Jonathan, After Access: The Mobile Internet and Inclusion in the Developing World, MIT
Press, forthcoming; see also papers at http://jonathandonner.com/
Goggin, Gerard. Cell Phone Culture (Routledge, 2006)
Goggin, Gerard. Global Mobile Media (Routledge, 2010)
Goggin, Gerard and Hjorth, Larissa, eds. Routledge Companion to Mobile Media (2014)
Goggin, Ling & Hjorth, ‘Must Read: Mobile Technology Research - a Field Guide’, in Mobile
Technologies (4 vols; Routledge, 2015)
Katz, James, ed. Handbook of Mobile Communication Studies (MIT, 2008)
Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries, edited by Jan Hadlaw, Andrew
Herman, and Thom Swiss. New York: Routledge, 2015,
Ling, Rich and Horst, Heath, ‘Mobile Communication in the Global South’, New Media & Society
13.3 (2011): 363-374.
Lipset, David. ‘Mobail: Moral Ambivalence and the Domestication of Mobile Telephones in Peri-
Urban Papua New Guinea,’ Culture, Theory and Critique, 54:3 (2013): 335-354
Watson, Amanda. Mobile phones and media use in Madang Province of Papua New Guinea.
Pacific Journalism Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, Oct 2013: 156-175
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