Non-/Human Infrastructures and Digital Gifts: The Cables, Waves and Brokers of Solomon Islands Internet

Abstract

This article demonstrates how nonhuman and human infrastructural assemblages, and the brokers that operate as assemblers within them, give rise to localised Internets. With an ethnographic emphasis on the digital transformations of Solomon Islands, we examine agentive brokerage practices surrounding digital multimedia files, downloaded off the global Internet and circulated offline as gifts via MicroSDs. We show how digital brokers use their comparatively unique manoeuvrability within digital infrastructural assemblages. They extend the Internet to offline rural environments, while following and strengthening local systems of moral economic social reproduction. Recognising the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman actors, these brokers are also dependent on the broader infrastructural assemblages in which they operate, especially the cables and waves that initially allow digital bits to travel to Solomon Islands. Localised Internets such as Solomon Islands are, thus, continuously in flux, being perpetually reassembled by the agentive practices of their constituent parts.

We just ‘SHAREit’: Smartphones, data and music sharing in urban Papua New Guinea

“…Hobbis and Hobbis (2020) have detailed aspects of moral reasoning that Solomon Islanders carry out around the sharing of digital content, and we have observed similar processes. One of our research participants was a music producer who was a well‐known source for new music.…”

Beyond platform capitalism: critical perspectives on Facebook markets from Melanesia

“…As we have argued elsewhere (e.g. Hobbis, 2020 ; Hobbis and Hobbis, 2020 ), digital technologies and media are deeply entangled with processes of moral social reproduction through reciprocal exchange. For example, mobile phones primarily serve as ‘kinship technologies’ ( Hobbis, 2020 ).…”

“…For example, digital technologies face a lack of pre-existing cable infrastructures. The vast majority of network connections are facilitated through broadcast over airwaves which struggle to get into the nooks and crannies of mountainous jungle and terrain, being further frustrated by the fact that signal strength dissipates over water (see Hobbis and Hobbis, 2020 ).…”

Beyond electrification for development: Solar home systems and social reproduction in rural Solomon Islands

“…With no major economic development project, from plantations to planned, but never realised, canneries, ever having succeeded sustainably on Malaita (Moore, 2007;Hobbis, 2016), villagers have continuously had to rely on support from temporary or more permanent migration to access cash and cash-dependent foreign goods; and similar to rural settlements across Melanesia (see, e.g. Dalsgaard, 2013;Hobbis, 2017;Hobbis and Hobbis, 2020;McDougall, 2017;Petrou, 2018), remittances are an integral part of Gwou'ulu lifeworlds.…”

“…3 Geoffrey and I regularly publish together based on joint data collection and analysis (e.g. Hobbis and Hobbis, 2017;Hobbis and Hobbis, 2020), but also individually when the data and analysis, as presented here, reflects our respective individual research agendas. 4 For a more detailed discussion of my methodological approach including my positionality as female anthropologists see (Hobbis, 2016).…”