Mobile Branding: Creating Consumer-Citizens across the Caribbean and Pacific

The forthcoming Joel Kahn Anthropology Lecture 2015 is on the topic of Mobile Branding: Creating Consumer-Citizens across the Caribbean and Pacific

Thursday, 24 September, Melbourne
6pm, La Trobe University, Bundoora campus, ELT 3

Presented by: Associate Professor Heather Horst (RMIT University)

The growth of the mobile phone use around the world has corresponded with an increase in advertising for new mobile telecommunications services and a range of promotions and sponsorships. From billboards, signs and radio jingles to branded t-shirts, bags and umbrellas, advertisements and other branding strategies are designed to develop demand for an evolving suite of mobile-enabled services, often by drawing aesthetic connections between mobile companies and local, national and global senses of belonging. This talk compares the development of mobile telecommunications branding by one company – Digicel Ltd –  in the Caribbean and Pacific and their efforts to create consumer-citizens across these contexts. Combining attention to the semiotics of advertising with the reactions to these branding strategies by users, I suggest that being and creating a mobile phone consumer cannot be understood outside the broader state-company relationships that shape the global telecommunications landscape.

Associate Professor Heather Horst is Director, Research Partnerships in the College of Design and Social Context and the Founding Director of the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her research focuses upon understanding how digital media, technology and other forms of material culture mediate relationships, communication, learning, mobility and our sense of being human. Her books examining these themes include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, Berg, 2006), Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with Digital Media  (Ito, et al. 2010, MIT Press),  Digital Anthropology (Horst and Miller, Eds., 2012, Berg) and Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Pink, Horst, et al. Forthcoming, Sage).  Her current research, supported by the Australian Research Council and an EU Horizon 20/20 grant, explores transformations in the telecommunications industry and the emergence of new mobile media practices across the Asia-Pacific region.