ABSTRACT

This chapter makes use of the notion of interruption in order to explore the anxieties that surround cellular phone communication in early 21st-century Brazil. While corporations and workers often celebrate cellular communication because of its instant connections and transcendence of vast spaces, in numerous quotidian circumstances, interlocutors find themselves terrified of their phones and the communicative modalities they incite. Shame associated with perceptions of inadequate development and the omnipresence of organized crime (in the absence of a strong state) lead to critiques of cellular communication. One prominent critique is the piracy of cellular phones, for better and worse.