The Solomon Islands Smartphone Today

Smartphones are everywhere from the urban jungles of Tokyo (Ito, Okabe and Matsuda 2006) to the jungles of Solomon Islands (Hobbis 2020), the focus of this essay. In this set of small islands in the southwestern Pacific, over 80 percent of the population continue to live as largely rural subsistence horticulturalists and fisherfolk. Despite their global prevalence, use of smartphones varies and “particular cultures can foster different patterns of use” (Tenhunen 2018, 5). In different places smartphones are distinctly entangled with material cultures and techniques, skills, and systems of verbal and non-verbal knowledge, including knowledge on how to obtain, use, maintain and discard them. The combination of global ubiquity and differentiated practices means smartphone use necessitates in-depth ethnographic study.