When I re-read The Cell Phone again, I realized I have learnt something new.
The first time I read it. These two chapters to me were about cell phone uses of low-income people in Jamaica. They use it differently besides phone calls. Cell phones are symbols of identities when Jamaicans interact with each other. And that was all.
At the second time, it was: A medium, or a technology, is being used in a certain set of situation. And people in this set of situation use cell phone to create different contexts so that new meanings have been created, not only the meanings of the usages of cell phones, but also the meanings of the interactions, relationships, social behaviors of the communities. And what’s more, is the way the authors used to do the research and present it to us. It shows me vaguely what ethnography is: about people, about single cultures, about interactions and relationships.
DW
