This article examines how the use of mobile phones and associated software creates and sustains regionally diverse urban communities. There is an interdependent connection between music that is highly participatory and locally relevant, and processes involved in sustaining key social relationships across a variety of groupings. Increasingly ubiquitous technologies such as mobile phones are used for musical purposes in ways that specifically put certain processes to work to sustain these social phenomena. This connects people with transnational software-based commerce through social media, local telecommunications companies and phone manufacturers. That results in the navigation of ecologies and economies of data, hardware and software that work in local urban circumstances. In the case of data, we demonstrate how modes of exchange and reciprocity tied to social relationships exhibit similarities with informal economies of tobacco and betelnut. With social groups, the church-based community perspective provides urban examples of communities that cross regions, and extended family networks. This ethnographic perspective shows how increasingly global technologies are used in urbanite Melanesia in ways that sustain longstanding values and practices, while also incorporating identities and associations around changing urban, national and international circumstances.
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This article explores a scenario where digital tools of music production, distribution and consumption are prominent, but the role of the Internet has been less significant. This tends to reveal the importance of the physical aspects of digital technologies, an area that has to date been under-explored. Based on work centred on the creation and distribution of recorded popular music in the Central Province of Papua New Guinea, small home-based recording studios and mobile phones are discussed as pivotal technologies. In just a few years, the chain of production, distribution and consumption of popular music in Papua New Guinea has moved from studios, cassettes and cassette players to laptops, SD cards and phones. Production has moved from centralised and professional to more widespread and amateur. Sharing takes place through the exchange of digital music files (usually in the mp3 format) via Bluetooth networking, and the exchange of portable digital media such as Secure Digital (SD) cards. This raises concerns about the ethics of file sharing as part of ethnomusicological research practice. It is also suggested that, due to the increasingly non-commercial nature of this scene, a movement away from the language of industry is timely. Consequently, production, distribution and consumption are more appropriately referred to as creation, sharing and listening/using. Two main conclusions are explored. Firstly, it is argued that the value of local knowledge is intensified under conditions of increasingly distributed, amateur production, and that this activity reinforces the importance of ethnomusicological research approaches that have traditionally been focused more on performance. The second concerns the extent and nature of the commodification of music in Papua New Guinea, and how this raises issues of economic justice for local producers.
Utilising first hand experience the authors trace the attempted development of 'serious' jazz in PNG. Incorporating scholarly, promotional and 'musicianly' perspectives, they highlight the tension present in the PNG jazz scene
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