1. Decolonizing mobile media: Mobile Internet appropriation in a Guaraní community
- Author
-
Sarah Wagner, Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol, Wagner, Sarah, and Fernández Ardèvol, Mireia
- Subjects
Sistemas de comunicación móviles ,Resource (biology) ,Computer Networks and Communications ,Communicative ecology ,050801 communication & media studies ,Communication in community development ,Digital inclusion ,Mobile communication ,Indigenous ,World Wide Web ,Appropriation ,Decolonization ,0508 media and communications ,Comunicació en el desenvolupament comunitari ,Media Technology ,Mobile technology appropriation ,business.industry ,Mobile internet ,Communication ,Community communication ,05 social sciences ,Cultural revitalization ,050301 education ,Desarrollo comunitario ,Mobile Internet ,Indigenous media ,Mobile media ,The Internet ,Business ,Mobile telephony ,Mobile communication systems ,0503 education ,Sistemes de comunicacions mòbils - Abstract
The Internet has been a valuable resource for many indigenous groups as a vehicle for self-representation. In this paper, we describe how the installation of a Wi-Fi signal in a Guaraní community in Greater Buenos Aires—as part of the community leader’s decolonizing media projects—generated issues within the community. While much indigenous media research concerns the politics of cultural representation, we consider the politics of everyday, intracommunity mobile communication practices. Firstly, our findings show how the choice of communication medium can become a political issue. An upsurge in mobile-mediated communication within the community contributed to the decline of face-to-face deliberations, which were the mainstay of communal sharing arrangements and which held a central position in understandings of Guaraní culture. Secondly, our findings show how discrepancies between users’ communication preferences and the readily available mobile media services can generate a use barrier by deterring users from obtaining the skills needed to effectively appropriate or transform mobile media services. Familiarity with a few mainstream social media apps not only reinforced imaginaries of the Internet as a nonindigenous space but also generated set ideas of what the Internet supports in terms of communicative form—social networking—and content type—mainstream media. In the end, the community leader’s decolonizing projects, aimed at using social media for community media dissemination, were not only rejected by community members but also undermined by the dynamics of mobile media practices in the community. We argue that limited mobile technology skills combined with commercially oriented mobile media services can hinder creative and adaptable mobile media practices, and in turn, undermine decolonizing mobile appropriations.
- Published
- 2019