An ethnography of deletion: Materializing transience in Solomon Islands digital cultures

Geoffrey Hobbis,Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis

doi:10.1177/1461444820954195

Geoffrey Hobbis, Stephanie Ketterer Hobbis

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444820954195

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Abstract

This article demonstrates the fragility of digital storage through a non-media-centric ethnography of data management practices in the so-called Global South. It shows how in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita Province, Solomon Islands, the capacity to reliably store digital media is curtailed by limited access to means of capital production and civic infrastructures, as well as a comparatively isolated tropical ecology that bedevils the permanence of all things. The object biography of mobile phones, including MicroSD cards, typically short, fits into a broader historical pattern of everyday engagements with materializations of transience in the Lau Lagoon. Three types of visual media are exemplary in this regard: sand, ancestral material cultures and digital visual media (photographs and videos). Ultimately, Lau experiences of transience in their visual media are located in their visual technological history and the choices they make about which materials to maintain or dispose of.

Highlights

There is a common myth that considers data as ‘divorced from the everyday dirt and matter of daily life’ and ‘accessible everywhere yet located nowhere in particular’ (Bollmer, 2015: 66)
This article builds on Grant Bollmer’s (2015) call to move beyond this myth and uncover the fragility of data storage ‘as something that has direct effects on our ability to record and understand our history and our present’ (p. 67). We argue that this myth is a product of what David Morley (2008) describes as a media-centric Media Studies that has too often focused on the virtual rather than material dimensions of the digital while, as Raka Shome (2019) elaborates, nearly exclusively accounting for experiences in the so-called Global North
This article responds to this dual shortcoming by addressing the fragility of data management through a classically conceived, anthropological ethnography of everyday media practices and their materialities in an emerging digital society and culture on the ‘wrong’ side of the global digital divide: in Solomon Islands, a least developed state in the southwestern Pacific on the margins of global capital

Summary

Introduction

There is a common myth that considers data as ‘divorced from the everyday dirt and matter of daily life’ and ‘accessible everywhere yet located nowhere in particular’ (Bollmer, 2015: 66). Keywords Deletion, digital media, ethnography, Melanesia, Solomon Islands, storage, transience, visual culture

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