ABSTRACT
This chapter examines mobile media technologies in Samoa, a small island developing state (SIDS) in the South Pacific. Drawing on key informant interviews conducted with various Samoan telecommunications stakeholders, we explore how mobile phones have altered the notion of “location” across the country. Through our analysis, we identify a range of different context-dependent ways that location is defined, understood and mobilised. We argue that questions of location are crucial to understanding the telecommunications landscape in Samoa and the numerous infrastructural challenges that lie ahead. Therefore, location must be subsequently considered at a variety of scales. The argument is developed conceptually and theoretically by building on recent work in human geography on relational understandings of place and extending Mimi Sheller’s work on “uneven topologies of geomedia.”
The article will proceed in the following fashion. We outline and analyse three locative scales in Samoa – the macro, the meso and the micro – as well as articulate the relational ties that exist between them. The macro level emerges when respondents situate issues around mobile phones in relation to Samoa’s own geographic location, for example the use of mobiles to communicate with relatives overseas or to use the mobile as a substitute for intra-island travel. At this level, we see the ways that the mobile has helped Samoans negotiate their own comparatively isolated geographic position in the middle of the South Pacific, for example allowing them to “locate” other family members living in other countries. The meso level emerges as we attend to movement and social relations, through an analysis of mobile money use in Samoa. Mobile money provides an excellent example of intersecting and often clashing alternative topologies of location, with the de-territorialised affordances of the internet merging awkwardly with the on-the-ground capacity of Samoa to deliver a seamless mobile money experience. Finally, we turn to the micro level and explore how mobile usage fits into a country that is already highly connected socially. Drawing on a number of brief examples, we examine how the mainstreaming of mobile usage can both re-configure already existing locative norms as well as contribute to a problematic compression of these various locative scales.
This chapter contributes to the broader scholarly project of understanding how the affordances of mobiles can constitute “location” in different ways, depending on specific regional and local contexts, in turn altering both infrastructural and personal understandings of location.
