“Free Culture” and Mobile Phone Economies in the Pacific - Heather A. Horst

Date: Thursday, 15 August 2019
Time: 11.30am–1pm
Venue: EZ.G.23, Female Orphan School, Parramatta South campus, Western Sydney University

“Free Culture” and Mobile Phone Economies in the Pacific

Presenter: Professor Heather A. Horst (University of Sydney)

Discussant: Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar

Abstract

In the first decade of the 21st century, digital technologies were lauded for their democratic and liberatory potential. “Free culture” practices such as sharing and remixing, and movements that set out new principles for distributing and modifying content (e.g. Open Source, Creative Commons), were celebrated for creating alternative values and forms of public culture. Yet, as free culture ideology circulated so, too, did other logics associated with digital media and technology. The liberalization of the telecommunications markets, for example, led to exponential growth in the distribution and use of mobile phones and associated technologies. The mechanisms that enabled relatively affordable and accessible mobile phones resulted in the emergence of an alternative definition of free culture. This talk examines the vernacular forms of free culture that emerged in contexts such as Fiji and Papua New Guinea with the integration of mobile and smartphones. Through an analysis of the ways in which different stakeholders - especially companies and consumers - understand free culture in discourse and practice, I explore how ‘freeness’ has become a core dynamic in the relationship between technologies, companies and consumers.

Biography

Heather A. Horst is Professor of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology. Her books focused upon these themes include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication; Hanging Around, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media; Digital Anthropology; Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices; and The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives. Her current research examines the circulation of protest music in Melanesia through mobile technologies and fashion in Fiji and the Pacific.