ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses certain uses of technology among low-income groups in cultures where collective social life is important. Specifically, it reports the results of an ethnographic study of the habit of watching TV on mobile phones in public spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Related studies are then used to make a counterpoint between consumption practices in Brazil and in South Africa. Television watching is traditionally understood to be a domestic activity and therefore private but the adoption of cellular phones as a television platform presages a changing role for television. The use of mobile phones for TV viewing takes place in a specific cultural context, marked by a strong orality and sociability, where sharing is not merely a response to scarcity. Someone’s mobile phone provides content for conversation and recreation for others besides the owner, therefore extending the moment of reception to develop interpersonal relations. Consumption practices can follow routes quite different from those projected by the creators of technology. This chapter examines the collective uses of technologies in countries with great cultural diversity compared to the developed countries, where such consumer goods, as well as a major part of academic theories, are produced.
