Download or read book The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones written by Robert J. Foster and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 163 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Money Games written by Anthony J. Pickles and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2019-06-01 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gambling in Papua New Guinea, despite being completely absent prior to the Colonial era, has come to supersede storytelling as the region’s main nighttime activity. Money Games is an ethnographic monograph which reveals the contemporary importance of gambling in urban Papua New Guinea. Rich ethnographic detail is coupled with cross-cultural comparison spanning the globe. This anthropological study of everyday economics in Melanesia thereby intersects with theories of money, value, play, informal economy, social change and leadership.
Download or read book The Global Smartphone written by Daniel Miller and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-05-06 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Education with Character written by James Arthur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2003-08-29 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Education with character' is the latest buzzphrase, but until now there's been no real concensus on some of the key issues. This book addresses the gap, adopting a cross-disciplinary approach to the matters in hand.
Download or read book Mobile Secrets written by Julie Soleil Archambault and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-26 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now part and parcel of everyday life almost everywhere, mobile phones have radically transformed how we acquire and exchange information. Many anticipated that in Africa, where most have gone from no phone to mobile phone, improved access to telecommunication would enhance everything from entrepreneurialism to democratization to service delivery, ushering in socio-economic development. With Mobile Secrets, Julie Soleil Archambault offers a complete rethinking of how we understand uncertainty, truth, and ignorance by revealing how better access to information may in fact be anything but desirable. By engaging with young adults in a Mozambique suburb, Archambault shows how, in their efforts to create fulfilling lives, young men and women rely on mobile communication not only to mitigate everyday uncertainty but also to juggle the demands of intimacy by courting, producing, and sustaining uncertainty. In their hands, the phone has become a necessary tool in a wider arsenal of pretense—a means of creating the open-endedness on which harmonious social relations depend in postwar postsocialist Mozambique. As Mobile Secrets shows, Mozambicans have harnessed the technology not only to acquire information but also to subvert regimes of truth and preserve public secrets, allowing everyone to feign ignorance about the workings of the postwar intimate economy.
Download or read book Uneven Connections written by Robert J. Foster and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2024-03-28 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Economics and Ethics of Private Property written by Hans-Hermann Hoppe and published by Ludwig von Mises Institute. This book was released on 2006 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Digital Anthropology written by Haidy Geismar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of “the digital age” by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital experience, critically examining the intersection of the digital to new concepts and practices across a wide range of fields from design to politics. In this fully revised edition, Digital Anthropology reveals how the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life around the world. Combining case studies with theoretical discussion in an engaging style that conveys a passion for new frontiers of enquiry within anthropological study, this will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in theory of anthropology, media and information studies, communication studies and sociology. With a brand-new Introduction from editors Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, as well as an abridged version of the original Introduction by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, in conjunction with new chapters on hacking and digitizing environments, amongst others, and fully revised chapters throughout, this will bring the field-defining overview of digital anthropology fully up to date.
Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?
Download or read book The Great Indian Phone Book written by Assa Doron and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-02 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four. In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere. The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.
Download or read book Is the Market Moral written by Rebecca M. Blank and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003-12-31 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the great tradition of moral argument about the nature of the economic market, Rebecca Blank and William McGurn join to debate the fundamental questions—equality and efficiency, productivity and social justice, individual achievement and personal rights in the workplace, and the costs and benefits of corporate and entrepreneurial capitalism. Their arguments are grounded in both economic sophistication and religious commitment. Rebecca Blank is an economist by training and describes herself as "culturally Protestant in the habits of mind and heart." She has also chaired the committee that wrote the statement on Christian faith and economic life adopted by the United Church of Christ. Addressing market failure, for her, requires that sometimes "freedom to choose" give way to other human values. William McGurn, a journalist and a Roman Catholic, uses his expertise in economics to reflect on the teachings of the church concerning the morality of the market. For McGurn, humans reach their fullest potential when they are free from the constraints of others. He writes that "our quarrel is not so much with Adam Smith or Milton Friedman but with the Providence that so clearly designed man to be his most prosperous at his most free." This book grapples with the new imperatives of a global economy while working in the classic tradition of political economy which always treated seriously the questions of morality, justice, productivity, and freedom.
Download or read book The Fourth Industrial Revolution written by Klaus Schwab and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-01-03 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World-renowned economist Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, explains that we have an opportunity to shape the fourth industrial revolution, which will fundamentally alter how we live and work. Schwab argues that this revolution is different in scale, scope and complexity from any that have come before. Characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, the developments are affecting all disciplines, economies, industries and governments, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. Artificial intelligence is already all around us, from supercomputers, drones and virtual assistants to 3D printing, DNA sequencing, smart thermostats, wearable sensors and microchips smaller than a grain of sand. But this is just the beginning: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than a strand of hair and the first transplant of a 3D printed liver are already in development. Imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made of biosynthetic materials. The fourth industrial revolution, says Schwab, is more significant, and its ramifications more profound, than in any prior period of human history. He outlines the key technologies driving this revolution and discusses the major impacts expected on government, business, civil society and individuals. Schwab also offers bold ideas on how to harness these changes and shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them; progress serves society rather than disrupts it; and in which innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than cross them. We all have the opportunity to contribute to developing new frameworks that advance progress.
Download or read book The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco written by Hsain Ilahiane and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-02-14 with total page 123 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Mobile Phone Revolution in Morocco, Hsain Ilahiane examines how Moroccans use the mobile phone to redefine core notions of gender and space, honor and shame, placemaking, and surveillance and control. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with urban street vendors, urban micro-entrepreneurs, urban female domestic workers, and smallholder farmers in urban and rural Morocco, Ilahiane illustrates how the mobile phone has the endowed capacity to inform, rearrange, and transform almost every aspect of Moroccan society.
Download or read book The Moral Economy of the Countryside written by Rosamond Faith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Shows the 'moral economy' of early medieval England transformed by 'feudal thinking' in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest.
Download or read book The Digitizing Family written by Geoffrey Hobbis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-02-07 with total page 226 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At once a digital ethnography of smartphones and a classically conceived village-based ethnography, this book relocates the study of digital technologies to rural Melanesia, with a focus on the Lau of Malaita, Soloman Islands. In this ‘technography’, Geoffrey Hobbis studies the materiality and functional attributes of smartphones and their object biographies—modes of acquisition, maintenance, uses, limitations and the problems specific to this region in adopting and adapting smartphones in everyday life. As he examines the various uses of smartphones, as both telephone and multimedia device, Hobbis also explores the social and cultural transformations, the hopes and uncertainties, with which they are associated. Ultimately, in bringing together a study of digital technologies with classical anthropological theory, The Digitizing Family develops a theory of smartphones as kinship technologies and supercompositional objects.
Download or read book Papua New Guinea written by Stephen Howes and published by ANU Press. This book was released on 2022-03-15 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Papua New Guinea (PNG), a nation of now almost nine million people, continues to evolve and adapt. While there is no shortage of recent data and research on PNG, the two most recent social science volumes on the country were both written more than a decade ago. Since then, much has changed and much has been learnt. What has been missing is a volume that brings together the most recent research and reports on the most recent data. Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society fills that gap. Written by experts at the University of Papua New Guinea and The Australian National University among others, this book provides up-to-date surveys of critical policy issues for PNG across a range of fields, from elections and politics, decentralisation, and crime and corruption, to PNG’s economic trajectory and household living standards, to uneven development, communication and the media. The volume’s authors provide an overview of the data collected and research undertaken in these various fields in an engaging and accessible way. Edited by Professor Stephen Howes and Professor Lekshmi N. Pillai, Papua New Guinea: Government, Economy and Society is a must-read for students, policymakers and anyone interested in understanding this complex and fascinating country.
Download or read book Moralizing Technology written by Peter-Paul Verbeek and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2011-12-01 with total page 195 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology permeates nearly every aspect of our daily lives. Cars enable us to travel long distances, mobile phones help us to communicate, and medical devices make it possible to detect and cure diseases. But these aids to existence are not simply neutral instruments: they give shape to what we do and how we experience the world. And because technology plays such an active role in shaping our daily actions and decisions, it is crucial, Peter-Paul Verbeek argues, that we consider the moral dimension of technology. Moralizing Technology offers exactly that: an in-depth study of the ethical dilemmas and moral issues surrounding the interaction of humans and technology. Drawing from Heidegger and Foucault, as well as from philosophers of technology such as Don Ihde and Bruno Latour, Peter-Paul Verbeek locates morality not just in the human users of technology but in the interaction between us and our machines. Verbeek cites concrete examples, including some from his own life, and compellingly argues for the morality of things. Rich and multifaceted, and sure to be controversial, Moralizing Technology will force us all to consider the virtue of new inventions and to rethink the rightness of the products we use every day.
