Creating Consumer-Citizens: Competition, Tradition and the Moral Order of the Mobile Telecommunications Industry in Fiji

Horst, Heather A.

doi:10.22459/memp.05.2018.04

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…The increase and impact of mobile phone usage in the Pacific, and Digicel's part in this story, have been well documented. Foster and Horst (2018) bring together a collection of perspectives on what they refer to as ‘the moral economy of mobile phones’ in Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji, with chapters covering the practices of phone sharing (Lipset, 2018), shifts in the formation and maintenance of phone‐based social relationships (Kraemer, 2018; Wardlow, 2018), user perceptions of the advent of mobile phone technology (Jorgensen, 2018), and phone providers' strategies both to project a vision of moral order via their marketing (Horst, 2018) and to influence consumer behaviour via their promotions (Foster, 2018). Foster (2020) expands on the same concept of the moral economy of mobile phones, focusing on the relationships between consumers, mobile phone providers and state regulators.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A number of other recent articles also explore the influence of mobile phone usage in the Pacific on social relationships (Andersen, 2013;Kraemer, 2015;Lipset, 2013;Singh & Nadarajah, 2011;Taylor, 2015;Telban & Vávrová, 2014;Watson, 2013;Watson & Duffield, 2016); on language usage (Handman, 2013;Temple, 2011;Vandeputte-Tavo, 2013); and on the reshaping of approaches to political campaigning and advocacy (Tarai et al, 2015;Titifanue et al, 2016Titifanue et al, , 2017. A recurring theme throughout these studies is the arrival of Digicel, which has swept across six countries of the region since 2006 (Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu), always with a splash and almost always with great success (Horst, 2018). Golding and Tennant (2017) and Horst andMiller (2005, 2006) tell a similar story of Digicel's transformation of the telecommunications markets of the Caribbean, the first region in which it set up shop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A recurring theme throughout these studies is the arrival of Digicel, which has swept across six countries of the region since 2006 (Fiji, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu), always with a splash and almost always with great success (Horst, 2018). Golding and Tennant (2017) and Horst andMiller (2005, 2006) tell a similar story of Digicel's transformation of the telecommunications markets of the Caribbean, the first region in which it set up shop.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Digicel! Topap long ples ia! An international telecommunications company making itself at home in the urban landscapes of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga

Willans

Gure

Vaifale

et al. 2022

Australian J of Anthropology

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Mobile phone usage has increased at an unprecedented rate across the Pacific over the past 10–15 years, radically transforming the way communication takes place. The catalyst for this transformation is generally attributed to the breakdown of monopolies previously held by national telecom corporations over their own domestic markets, and the entrance of one particular new provider, Digicel. This paper examines the strategies through which Digicel has managed to insert itself into the visual landscape of the urban spaces of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga. Through multimodal analysis of digital photographs from the landscapes of these countries' capital cities, the paper shows how the global company makes use of a range of techniques to establish its own place and identity as a local network. These techniques include the demonstration of largesse and dominance over competitors, slogans that stake a claim to belonging, and the use of local language terms and images that juxtapose the local with the global. Through these techniques, Digicel manages to position itself simultaneously as the provider both of fast and reliable global communication technologies and of a truly local, national service, while also radically transforming the physical spaces of our cities as it has made itself at home here.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Digicel! Topap long ples ia! An international telecommunications company making itself at home in the urban landscapes of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga

Willans

Gure

Vaifale

et al. 2022

Australian J of Anthropology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…This technological ‘revolution’ (Cave, 2012) is attributable to a confluence of events that also contributed to the proliferation of mobile phones elsewhere in the Pacific (e.g. see Cave, 2012; Horst, 2018). First, a telecommunications monopoly ended.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures

Hobbis

2021

New Media & Society

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This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all things. The object biography of mobile phones, including MicroSD cards, typically short, fits into a broader historical pattern of everyday engagements with materializations of transience in the Lau Lagoon. Three types of visual media are exemplary in this regard: sand, ancestral material cultures and digital visual media (photographs and videos). Ultimately, Lau experiences of transience in their visual media are located in their visual technological history and the choices they make about which materials to maintain or dispose of.

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“…Elsewhere (Horst 2018) I have argued that mobile telecommunications companies seek to create relationships with people who use mobile services, creating consumer-citizens (building on the work of media scholar Sarah Banet-Weiser and others). Vodafone emphasizes its long-term commitment to Fiji by stressing the citizen dimension of consumer-citizens and Digicel stresses consumers and broader values of global capitalism.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Cosmologies of the Internet: Situating Digital Networked Technologies in Diverse Moral Universes

Maddox

Sinanan

Carter

et al. 2019

SPIR

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In this panel we consider how social actors situate uses of technologies within systems of moral norms and values while at the same time compelling the creation of new ones. Popular discourse tends to present dualistic thinking of the positive and negative impacts of technologies. Scholars have engaged with the internet and digital media, emphasising emancipatory subcultures (Coleman 2014; Gehl 2016, 2018) or presenting a critical view of the constraining aspects of networked technologies (Fish & Follis 2019; Fuchs 2014; Lovink 2016). These approaches are complimented by scholarship that considers technological practices and how they are embedded in social and cultural cosmologies (Burrell 2012; Horst & Foster 2018; Miller et. al. 2016). We argue for a closer integration of these bodies of scholarship through an examination of the contentious moral economies operating in emergent social spaces. The panel interrogates the relationship that social, political and economic actors have between their own ideas about what is good, appropriate and right and the diversity of orientations towards trust in techno-bureaucratic systems. We draw attention to immaterial systems and consider the social relationships and individual and collective imaginations that shape the production and experience of networked technologies. Through the papers, we articulate the forms of negotiation, resistance and refusal that occur when diverse moral universes, techno-regulating systems, and the conditions in which people find themselves collide.

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Creating Consumer-Citizens: Competition, Tradition and the Moral Order of the Mobile Telecommunications Industry in Fiji

Cited by 6 publications

References 23 publications

Digicel! Topap long ples ia! An international telecommunications company making itself at home in the urban landscapes of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga

Digicel! Topap long ples ia! An international telecommunications company making itself at home in the urban landscapes of Vanuatu, Samoa and Tonga

An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures

Cultural Cosmologies of the Internet: Situating Digital Networked Technologies in Diverse Moral Universes

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