A Mobile Phone, Amid the Darkness

David Larish

I just read Amy Spira’s post on this website, “What we lost when we gained the light bulb”, 18 November 2011, in which she detailed the sadness of Nicaraguan townspeople at the prospect of electricity darkening their lives. I want to share a similar experience from my time in Kenya in 2010 but from an altogether different perspective.

I was working at Olmaroroi Primary School, which consisted of a series of sheds haphazardly constructed on dusty, red dirt in Maasai territory in the Rift Valley. The nearest town, Ngong, was a bumpy, 45 minute motorcycle ride away. I stayed with a local family of fourteen, including two wives. They lived in mud brick huts, used a hole in the ground as a toilet and, in the absence of electricity, burned wood for cooking and lit candles when the sun set. There was no running water. The nearest source of it was the communal well at the school, a ten minute walk.

Like Amy, I found myself as far away from technology as I had ever been.

This, in my mind, was a good thing. On my first night, after the older children had finished looking after the cows and goats for the day and after the younger ones had returned home from school, the family gathered in the kitchen, drinking tea, cooking dinner, eating together and then chatting into the night in semi-darkness. I contrasted this with a Western childhood of the Noughties – spending the afternoon on the phone to friends while commentating on the video games I was playing, watching TV during dinner, rushing back to the computer in my bedroom to go on MSN – and I was envious. What I had when I grew up meant that there were a lot of things that I did not have.

The bliss I was experiencing that night was punctured by the shrill beep of a text message which, to my immediate relief, did not sound as if it had come from my phone. In fact, there was confusion as to whose phone it had come from because, as it later emerged, each of the children aged over 13 had one.

My initial thought was that convincing a family who lived without running water or electricity of their need to own multiple mobile phones must have taken some phenomenally effective marketing on the part of the then major Kenyan mobile phone companies, Safaricom and Zain. In fact, these companies had even implemented a system whereby you could buy phone credit and transfer it to loved ones, family or friends (imagine that: ‘happy birthday my brother – here’s enough credit to call me on my birthday’).

I felt that this was a clear instance of these companies exploiting the technologically-starry-eyed family by enticing them to spend the limited money they had on things that they did not need. This view was reinforced when I later became aware that a family member was required every few days to make a trip into Ngong in order to charge a half dozen or so battery-depleted mobile phones at the “electricity shop” that had opportunistically sprung up to service this niche.

I was also concerned that the special traditions held by the family and the atmosphere when the family came together would be eroded by the mobile phone, which I saw as a gateway – both symbolically and practically – to the spectre of other technologies spreading into their lives.

One night towards the end of my stay, I (subtly) raised these issues with those members of the family who were old enough not to have received a mobile phone when they had reached puberty. As they pointed out, I had failed to see the benefits the mobile phone had brought to the togetherness of the family. The family was now able to stay in touch with family members who had moved away for school or work. It was easier for the family to make arrangements for everyone to be in the one place. By keeping in contact with past volunteers who had returned home, the family would reminisce together.

I still have mixed feelings about the impact of the mobile phone on the family, but I now see it in a more balanced light than I first did. In hindsight, it was difficult for me to dissociate my anxiety about having too much technology in my life from my views. I now think that the mobile phone is far less of a threat to the family’s connection and values than the computer, iPod or television – which are a while away yet.

But if I want to know if any of their attitudes have changed, I’ll just ask them next time I Skype their mobiles.


Image by Charles Crosbie, made available by Creative Commons licence via Flickr.

Memories of Car and Phone, prosthetics of the cyborg citizen (Part II)

Kieran Tranter

This post continues Dr Kieran Tranter's series on 'Memories of Car and Phone', the first instalment of which can be accessed here.

The demographics of the car, of the makes and models of drivers and vehicles, over the past 15-20 years in the West make an interesting study. There are more cars per head of population, women are now almost equal owners of the Western fleet, and by percentage there are less "male hero" and "man of the family" vehicles than in the past. The "average" Western car can probably be described as a Toyota Corolla, front wheel drive, 4 cylinders, practical, functional, user-friendly, economical, safe, and it is owned and driven by men and women alike. It will be owned/leased for three years and then traded in for a newer…Toyota Corolla. Its bonnet will probably never be lifted by the owner. In short it is the internal combustion engine version of an iPhone on a 24 month contract. I think this challenge to the traditional automobility of combustion masculinity is interesting.

Foremost, it represents a souring of the mythos of the car in the West. The symbolism of freedom mass-produced in chrome and steel had to reach the end of road when the common experience was gridlock and repetitious commutes. Combustion masculinity’s linking of car to hetero-normative sex was also doomed to a cul-de-sac when it became increasingly clear that burnouts in a “fully sick” car only appealed to other young men. The green movement’s chipping away at the car’s fender slowly rendered the car and car usage problematic, and the roadside memorials have come to haunt our travelling dreams. The car has made a life that is not sustainable in environmental and social terms, and the changes in car demographics mark an interesting evolution in automobility away from the hydrocarbon and testosterone fuelled combustion masculinity to a less identity focused use of cars. As I anticipate my plug-in electric car recharged by a photovoltaic array on the carport roof, this is to the good, even if it will be the car equivalent of the mobile phone, used, abused, and then replaced with same.

But I worry about the types of memories that we’ll take from this future. Sure there might be thousands upon thousands of images of our life and loved ones stored in our portion of the cloud accessible at will through whatever access device is de jure, and available on a 24 month contract, but will we have memories? The car’s physicality, its imposing on life, makes memories. The sunlight machines might access images of the past, but they do not seem to be mnemonic aids in themselves.

What I am concerned about is life. Martin Heidegger’s account of human living was as an entity in time and aware of time; an entity whose memory of past grounds certainty of future. Time passed,and memory was the storehouse, and safeguard, of that life that was. Through memory future becomes possible. Pre-modern Western time could be seen as different. The life of the seasonal cycles and ecclesiastical calendar was a life of repetition, of the same over and over again. Modernity was ultimately a revolution in time; the past became history that could be known, remembered, studied; and from this, the possibility of future, a future different to the past, could be aspired towards.

While Heidegger was famously concerned about the impact of modern technology on human experience, the car has been a memory aid for the cyborg citizens of the West for probably over half a century. With the fading of the car to white(good), to another sunshine machine, the hard materiality of the fabric of memory is potentially reduced. An important way that life has been marked and remembered in the modern West declines. The endless cycle of another featureless, while feature-full consumer good, almost returns us to pre-modern time of endless present. It raises the possibility that our future memory of past will be of a past as same giving rise to an anticipation of a future that is same. In the sunshine our chronological horizons collapse.

So possibly we need the car to be human. But perhaps, as I get ready to ride my bike home, what is also possible is that out of the near limitless data of our contemporary lives we learn to piece some solidity from the zeros and ones. Maybe without the imposed cultural meanings of our car prosthetic, there is a possibility to freely create more complex and empowered life narratives, through the sunshine, from the cloud.