more on handset sharing
February 4th, 2009
India, sharing behavior
Molly Steenson and I wrote an article on handset sharing, based on her fieldwork in Bangalore. The chapter is now available in The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices, edited by Rich Ling and Scott Campbell. In the chapter we describe different forms of handset sharing we observed, and their relationship to the physical spaces in which we observed them.
We saw lots of instances of basic, conspicuous sharing (X borrows Y’s phone with ‘s permission). We also saw stealthy sharing (X borrows Y’s phone, and hides his tracks doesn’t make that clear). In business settings, we observed mobiles imitating landlines, so that incoming callers were ‘place seeking’, expecting to call a partiuclar business, even if they did not know whom would pick up the line.
Most quirky of the four modes we saw is ‘person seeking’ or ‘approxi-calling’. If X wants to find Y, but Y does not own a mobile (common among teens in Bangalore in 2006), then X might call Z if he/she thinks it is likely that Y and Z are nearby to each other. The better X knows the social habits of Y, the better chance X has of calling a mobile which will be proximate to Y at the right time of day. Y and Z are thus sharing a handset, but the sharing behavior is initiated by an external and non-proximate third party, X.
There are many interesting papers in the volume, including “Migrant Workers and Mobile Phones“ by Fernando Paragas, which examines how mobile use provides increased opportunities for temporal and spatial simultanaeity with lives back at home.
