ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with fields delineated by the conventions of international development and other governing bodies, such as health, in which this assessment appears to be relatively unproblematic. It, then, proceeds to more difficult sectors, such as schooling and crime, where the assessments of the cell phone's uses are rather more difficult, since there is strong evidence for a deleterious as well as a beneficial impact. The chapter turns to a consideration of the church and of luck or fate, in order to comprehend the key idioms through which the benefits and costs of the phone are evaluated locally and the forces that people see as critical to the determination of their welfare. The central theme of the chapter is a desire to move from assessment based on the categories of welfare that derive from external agencies to something closer to Jamaican's own evaluations of the cell phone's impact on Jamaican life and welfare.
