‘Do you have a mobile?’ Mobile phone practices and the refashioning of social relationships in Port Vila Town
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mobile phones have quickly become an important part of young people's social relationships in Port Vila Vanuatu. In particular, young people embrace the new technology's capacity to broaden the breadth of their sociality. They use the mobile phone to facilitate private and secretive communication, engage in unsanctioned relationships, pre‐marital sexual relationships, and also multiple concurrent intimate relationships. Literature on mobile phone use often either takes the approach that mobile phone technology becomes purely incorporated into pre‐existing social practices, or that it dramatically reshapes social ontologies. The present article argues for an alternative view, one that takes into account the nuances between these two analytical poles. This article suggests that young people use the mobile phone in practices informed by previous models of social relationships, yet the specific materiality of the mobile phone technology is influencing the direction in which models of social relationships are changing. In demonstrating this point, I pay particular attention to two material aspects of the mobile phone technology ‐ the mobile phone as a repository of a particular kind of information ‐ ‘evidence’, and the capacity of the mobile phone to ‘disconnect’ people from their relationships by switching off the mobile. This article argues that these practices are influencing the emergence of a radically altered kinship and gender landscape in the urban context.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".