Our phones are becoming part of ourselves
This is the second part a conversation with cultural anthropologist Joshua Bell. (Read part 1.)
Jason: One person I talked to, Ting Kelly, who’s working with bio-hacking companies…she believes that soon these things will lay thinly on your skin. Her vision is that it will make us healthier.
Joshua: It could very well. When I interviewed Marty Cooper, the inventor of cell phones at Motorola, he said the point of engineering “is to design and make these things that are second nature so that you won’t notice it.” And the reason my colleagues and I are focusing on breakdown and repair; is because in the moment of breakage, you see what was previously unnoticeable. You see these devices, and then all your pre-conceptions of how these devices worked, of what it allows you to do, bubbles up. Right now, it’s not even been 10 years since the smart phone arrived. Next year, it will be. We still are in this period where we’re working out as a society…what is the etiquette with these things? How do we appropriately use them? But there will be a time, maybe 15–20 years from now, where people won’t even think about life without touch screens.
Thinking about Ting Kelly who you mentioned…making the technology totally transparent; adhere to you, to your clothing, will be a step forward in that direction. Looking at what Corning has done and is doing with glass, phones will be using fewer materials. It will help us transform a different gap. How can one use resources, or reuse them, and make them repairable. When I asked Marty Cooper what he thought the future of phones will be, he said, “There will be no repair, these things will be disposable.” I think he meant that mobile phones will be made with materials where dispensing of it, will have minimum impact or that they will be completely recyclable. And that will be a nice thing to have. But now at least, the extent to which these devices connect us in all the unseen ways to the hands that make these electronic devices and the places that these materials come from… For a lot of Americans, that is a largely unknown thing. Only until there is an incident somewhere in the world along the supply chain do people think about what is in their phone or who is involved in making them.
As an anthropologist, I’m interested in not only how do these devices affect us, but how these devices connect us globally in lots of interesting ways. I mean this not only in terms of communication but also through resource extraction, manufacture and cycles of repair and e-waste. More awareness about these connections will actually help all the people involved in the making and use of these devices. This is one outcome I hope the public will have coming to our planned exhibit — a new understanding of how their device connects them to the world in multiple ways: materially, socially, ecologically and economically. In terms of healthier, yeah I hope mobile phones of the future could do this. That’s a very hopeful utopian view on it. And yeah I would want that.
Jason: Going back to your earlier point…does the phone impact the culture or does culture impact the phone?
Joshua: Culture always puts a layer on how we understand the technology. In my fieldwork, people in the Purari Delta name things. They name shotguns, canoes and outboard motors. People in the neighboring group, in the Orokolo also name their tractors. When I asked people why they name them, one man in Luku village told me that if he names his tractor with an ancestral name, it will actually listen to him. For them naming things activate the object such that it becomes a vessel for ancestral power and is animated. In the Purari Delta, one family I know named a shotgun after one of their dead forefathers, and in doing that they felt that his spirit coalesced in the gun and they believed that if they treated the gun well and showed respect by oiling it that it would shoot farther, and it would pull the game to them. Naming the shotgun put them more in touch with their material objects. Now I never heard of people doing that with their cell phones, but one of the astounding things about culture is that it gives people a template or set of tools to tackle things. So designers will create things thinking that cell phones have certain parameters and should be engaged with in a particular way, and while design will certainly define some parameters of use, how the technology is understood will always depend on the culture in which it is used. Because cell phones are so new, what’s fascinating is how this cultural understanding is emerging. Ethnography on the cross-cultural understandings of this technology is exciting because phones are still so new.
Jason: Our phones are becoming part of ourselves?
Joshua: Yes, our phones have become an extension of ourselves. An interesting aspect of a cell phone is social media. While some draw a line between the virtual and physical world, cell phones expand oneself in various ways. It is through this that our sense of self becomes more similar to Papua New Guineans — we become more defined by the visible metrics of social media. Through social media we now overlap with people. Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, enables one to have new and different dialogues with others resulting in new understandings about oneself. With all these different choices of media, this is where our media ideologies emerge — that is we begin to see what our media preferences are. For example, we could have had this interview over the phone but this was not an option we discussed. Meeting in person was a choice that you made and it speaks about your media ideology. And I’m the same way. If I have a colleague in the museum I could email, call them or walk up and see them. If I have the time, I try to walk up to them because that is a lot more meaningful to me.
Back to my study with teenagers, they have much more choices with how to communicate. Their parents also have much more choices. So if dinner’s ready do you physically call them with one’s voice or do you text them to let them know? So the potential for cell phones is actually really interesting. What our devices tend to do, is to allow us to do what we’ve already done (talk), but the to do so with new possibilities such as through texts, images and videos. I can now Facetime my parents at the dinner table. When I was in Japan last year, I Facetimed with my family. The struggle that humans have always had is how to communicate with each other. Most of us at some point in our lives or daily communication wonder: Am I intelligible to the other person? That’s why my colleagues and I are interested in the breakdown and repair. In our social life we’re always repairing things. There’s always that gap between us and others. That’s where asking for clarification is interesting. What the cell phone does is magnifying our capability and our reach of communication. Doing so, it raises the stakes of those breakdowns. Mis-sent text, email, or humor that don’t translate. That’s really interesting. The cell phone amplifies our ongoing human anxiety about being social with one another. Is that working? Are we being understood? Are we on common ground? Et cetera. What’s exciting is that the mobile phone allows us to communicate in old and new ways, but there’s room for more mistranslation and working through that.
Jason: In Africa, they are using phones for more than we might be here in the states. They were so “far behind” in wifi innovation that they innovated a mobile solution. Is that like how it’s going to be in the future, even here in the states, innovations leapfrogging each other?
Joshua: I think it could be. If you look at where we are compared to Europe and Africa, we’re behind. Even repair work, individuals in Africa are constantly innovating these products. That’s the future. That’s the way we get out of the dystopian view of what these devices will do to us. We need to look at the innovation, in Africa, for the potential future. But there’s not a lot for regulation, or certain societal issues, in place so people are actually freer to work on these devices. I think within the US there are a lot of constraints in some ways, particularly due to copyright laws. In Africa, mobile money is one of those fantastic things that addresses a certain lack of infrastructure. To generalize, what’s happening here are innovations around engineering and corporations thinking about new ways of refining their devices and apps. In Africa, again to generalize, there is more innovation at a local level. Going forward, one would hope that the DIY movement will continue to gain favor in the US so that people will continue to tinker. If we want to become semi-autonomous with these devices, we have to know how these devices work. In the event that they break down, we can start fixing them. It also means we can help make them better.
Jason: Is there a key insight on culture and mobile you want to make sure I capture from this conversation?
Joshua: In the wake of the Orlando shootings, it was astounding to see the outpouring of emotion and solidarity from around the world, online, in social media. That’s actually fascinating and that gives me hope that social media can also help to promote the solidarity. Here we see people using mobile phones to connect to each other in meaningful ways. It is in such moments that we all begin to realize we live on a planet of finite resources, and that despite cultural difference we are a part of something bigger. The issue then is that we need to work collectively to figure out what the future will hold. The hope that I have for mobile technology is that it will help us all to make this vision of the world. So if you think of the famous photograph “Earthrise” taken from the moon, during the Apollo 8 mission…that image of the earth really worked to galvanize the environmental movement. That image helped us all see where we live in a new way. So the question is, how can mobile technology do that? Maybe it is through connecting with each other through new, exciting and meaningful ways. Maybe if we all recognize our cyborg selves, we’ll actually realize that we are actually connected to each other through our technology and the labor, resources and ideas they bundle. And yes relations can be difficult, tricky, sticky, and messy, but they are important.So my hope is that mobile technology will led to a new understanding of community and us all better understand how we are connected to one another.
Joshua walked me out of the Smithsonian, down more hallways lined with cabinets. We entered one area, more like a room, filled with newer metal cabinets. These cabinets had 8x10 images affixed to each narrow side. I walked closer to get a closer look…bugs. These cabinets held thousands and thousands of different types of insect specimens.
“Bugs?” I asked.
“This is a natural history museum.” Joshua replied.
“What a fun place to work.”
“It really is,” Joshua agreed, “It’s an amazing place.”
The vision for this series is to surface and share insights of thought-leaders and trailblazers who live at the cutting edge of technology. While the opinions featured may not necessarily represent those of Verizon and its employees, we still believe that we can each learn from experiences and opinions of others, which is why we’ve chosen to feature them here. This dialogue is how we take the first steps towards making innovations that matter.
A version of this article featuring the full conversation between Joshua and Jason was originally published at www.verizon.com on September 26, 2016.
