Robert J. Foster
Robert J. Foster is Professor of Anthropology and Visual and Cultural Studies, and Richard L. Turner Professor of Humanities at the University of Rochester, and Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He has published widely on globalisation, nation making, corporations, commercial media and material culture. His books include Materializing the Nation: Commodities, Consumption and Media in Papua New Guinea (2002); Coca-Globalization: Following Soft Drinks from New York to New Guinea (2008); and Art, Artifact, Commodity: Perspectives on the P.G.T. Black Collection (2017, co-edited with Kathryn H. Leacock).
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4353-956X
Uneven Connections »
A Partial History of the Mobile Phone in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Robert J. Foster
Publication date: March 2024
In the first years of the 21st century, economic liberalisation began to transform telecommunications services throughout the Pacific Islands. Government regulators, corporate executives and everyday consumers hopefully imagined that opening mobile phone markets to competition would result in greater access, lower costs and accelerated development.
Uneven Connections examines the ways in which liberalisation took hold in Papua New Guinea (PNG) when a unit of the Caribbean-based mobile network operator Digicel Group Ltd. seized the opportunity to compete with the state-sponsored incumbent. The book highlights how mobile phones entered the lives of urban and rural Papua New Guineans after Digicel’s arrival in 2007. In so doing, it describes a moral economy in which companies, consumers and state agents continually negotiate who owes what to whom. In what ways have these various actors invented and negotiated new forms of both freedom and constraint?
Uneven Connections advances understanding of how a so-called digital revolution in PNG unfolded, resulting in outcomes that often confounded the expectations of policy makers and ordinary citizens alike. It assesses the extent to which some of the promises of this revolution have been redeemed and identifies the challenges faced by companies, consumers and state agents in establishing and experiencing novel forms of uneven connectivity. The book provides a short and selective history of mobile phones in PNG, ending with the sale of Digicel’s Pacific operations to the Australian company Telstra in 2022.
The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones »
Pacific Islands Perspectives
Edited by: Robert J. Foster, Heather A. Horst
Publication date: May 2018
The moral economy of mobile phones implies a field of shifting relations among consumers, companies and state actors, all of whom have their own ideas about what is good, fair and just. These ideas inform the ways in which, for example, consumers acquire and use mobile phones; companies promote and sell voice, SMS and data subscriptions; and state actors regulate both everyday use of mobile phones and market activity around mobile phones. Ambivalence and disagreement about who owes what to whom is thus an integral feature of the moral economy of mobile phones. This volume identifies and evaluates the stakes at play in the moral economy of mobile phones. The six main chapters consider ethnographic cases from Papua New Guinea, Fiji and Vanuatu. The volume also includes a brief introduction with background information on the recent ‘digital revolution’ in these countries and two closing commentaries that reflect on the significance of the chapters for our understanding of global capitalism and the contemporary Pacific.