Global Smartphone / Daniel Miller.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Daniel, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Technology and older people.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (320 pages)

Other Title:

Global Smartphone

Place of Publication:

London, England : UCL Press, 2021.

Summary:

The smartphone is often literally right in front of our nose, so you would think we would know what it is. But do we? To find out, 11 anthropologists each spent 16 months living in communities in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America, focusing on the take up of smartphones by older people. Their research reveals that smartphones are technology for everyone, not just for the young. The Global Smartphone presents a series of original perspectives deriving from this global and comparative research project. Smartphones have become as much a place within which we live as a device we use to provide 'perpetual opportunism', as they are always with us. The authors show how the smartphone is more than an 'app device' and explore differences between what people say about smartphones and how they use them. The smartphone is unprecedented in the degree to which we can transform it. As a result, it quickly assimilates personal values. In order to comprehend it, we must take into consideration a range of national and cultural nuances, such as visual communication in China and Japan, mobile money in Cameroon and Uganda, and access to health information in Chile and Ireland - all alongside diverse trajectories of ageing in Al Quds, Brazil and Italy. Only then can we know what a smartphone is and understand its consequences for people's lives around the world.

Contents:

Cover

Half Title

Title Page

Copyright Page

Contents

Chapter summaries

List of figures

List of abbreviations

List of contributors

Series Foreword

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

The smart and the phone

An outline of our project

The fieldsites

Bento, São Paulo, Brazil

Cuan, Ireland

Dar al-Hawa, Al-Quds (East Jerusalem)

Kampala, Uganda

Kyoto and Kōchi, Japan

NoLo, Milan, Italy

Santiago, Chile

Shanghai, China

Thornhill, Dublin, Ireland

Yaoundé, Cameroon

History of the smartphone

Anthropology and other disciplines Externalities

Conclusion

Notes

2 What people say about smartphones

The state and the media

Citizenship and consensus

Commerce: the smartphone and app industries

People's discourse and ambivalence

The unambivalent

Fake news

Academic studies of these discourses

3 The smartphone in context

Smartphones as objects

Smartphones and status

The cost of smartphones

Problems of access

Screen Ecology

Social Ecology

Networks

4 From apps to everyday life

Introduction: not starting with apps The app interviews

Scalable Solutionism

How the world changed the app

Health beyond solutionism

Apps and screens

Where do apps come from?

5 Perpetual Opportunism

Opportunistic photography

Bibliography

Index

Back Cover.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.