ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the wider relationship between smartphones, care and surveillance. Turning back to the main theme of this chapter, which is how the balance between care and surveillance plays out after Covid-19, the primary way in which cultural relativism becomes manifest is through ordinary people's judgements about fairness. At the level of the microcosm, the ASSA project showed, even prior to Covid, how fairness in adjudicating the balance between care and surveillance was the everyday practice of ordinary people in using, but above all in domesticating, the smartphone. Whether it was an argument with children as to how much parental surveillance of their smartphone usage is acceptable as parental care, or discussions within a WhatsApp group as to the allocation of care between siblings responsible for a dying parent, the principles in contention were often that of fairness.
