Bar identified three modes of appropriation in general, which he and his colleagues have observed specifically in regard to mobile telephone use around the world:

• Baroque infiltration,
• Creolization, and
• Cannibalism

European cathedral builders in the Americas left blank spaces around the specified iconography of the churches’ facades, and encouraged native craftsmen to fill it in with references to their own culture, such as this cherub with a feather headdress and tropical fruit:

In regard to mobile telephones, the covers and attachments that people in many parts of the world use to personalize their phones are an example of technological baroque infiltration:

This boatman creolizes his appropriation of the mobile phone, which he rents out to passengers, by building a traditional phone booth on his boat:

Another example of creolization that Bar discussed was the use of Internet kiosks by small farmers and agricultural commodity traders in Africa to set up accounts and arrange for current market prices to be sent to their phones as SMS messages:

In a paper to be presented in Buenos Aires next week at “Seminario sobre Desarrollo Económico, Desarrollo Social y Comunicaciones Móviles en América Latina,”, Bar and his co-authors Pisani and Weber say this of cannibalistic appropriation and their observations of this mode in the field:

This third form of appropriation is the most extreme in the sense that it corresponds to practices where the user chooses to engage in direct conflict with the suppliers of the technology (or at least with the power relation as embodied in the technology.) Cannibalism includes modifications of the device that place the user in direct opposition with the providers’ business model, destruction of the device. Their goal is to destroy, subvert, defeat the device or service as offered. They represent a direct and explicit confrontation with the provider. We should acknowledge from the start that we found fewer examples for this last appropriation mode than we did for the two previous ones. This was to be expected since these kinds of practices have obviously not been encouraged by those in control of the technology. Yet, we do identify a number of examples that fit here.

In a first category are cases where users hack the technology itself in ways that are meant to defeat the provider’s control and come in direct conflict with the provider’s interests.

Examples include the installation of applications that would deprive the carrier of revenues. On the milder side, an illustration of that kind of cannibalism can be found in the current tussle over the conditions under which end users might be able to install skype on mobile devices, thus appropriating the hardware for a purpose diametrically antagonistic to the purposes of the carrier (Anderson, 2007). Increasingly more antagonistic cannibalism practices include phone unlocking (to defeat the contractual restrictions associated to device subsidies), and phone cloning (to redirect all charges to another, unsuspected device). One of the more extreme is the rebuilding of cellphones into detonators that let terrorists trigger explosions from a distance with a simple phone call.

If appropriation is the process by which people adopt and repurpose technologies (and media) to their own needs, then cannibalization is the root-source of cultural appropriation. So claimed Francois Bar on April 12, when he presented his current research at the DIY Media seminar at the Annenberg Center for Communication . Bar, with Francis Pisani and Matthew Weber, has been studying in particular the way people in Latin America have found their own uses for mobile phone technologies.

“In recent years, mobile phone penetration has increased dramatically throughout Latin America,” Bar noted, adding, “But rising penetration numbers only tell part of the story. To fully grasp the social, economic and political impact of mobile telephony, we need to understand appropriation: the process through which mobile phone users go beyond mere adoption to make the technology their own and to embed it within their social, economic, and political practices. The appropriation process fundamentally is a negotiation about power and control over the configuration of the technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. Within the Latin American context, today’s negotiation surrounding mobile technological appropriation echoes earlier creative tensions about the appropriation of cultural objects, people, and ideas from abroad.”

Before introducing his research on mobile phone practices in Brazil, Bar noted that the arrival of Bishop Sardinha from Portugal in 1556 could be seen as the founding event of Brazilian culture as an appropriative culture — Sardinha was shipwrecked on the Brazilian coast. The locals, impressed with the Bishop’s power, appropriated it by eating him. In 1928, Bar added, the Manifesto Antrofago claimed that these cannibals were the real founders of Brazil, calling upon Brazilians to appropriate from many cultures to grow their own.

In the 1960s, Caetano Veloso and Gilbert Gil led the tropicalismo movement, a globally appropriative cultural and political wave that was repressed by subsequent regimes, but resprouted in the 21st century when Gil, now Brazil’s Minister of Culture, founded the Cultura Viva movement of taking from abroad, remixing, adding Brazilian flavors, and making something new — a cultural stance that is powerfully augmented by DIY media production and distribution tools.

With this context in mind, Bar talked about the ways “innovation becomes embedded over a technology evolution cycle” that begins with adoption, moves to appropriation, which in turn leads to a reconfiguration of the technology. For example, the economically poorest users of mobile phones in Africa succeeded in creating a kind of mobile funds transfer system that large corporations in Asia and Scandinavia had been struggling to do. Because the most affordable way to use a mobile phone in Africa is to buy prepaid minutes, users have figured out that they can send each other the recharge codes they receive for prepaid minutes, substituting for small amounts of cash. If your recipient doesn’t own a phone, you can send it to a local public telephone service in which an entrepreneur rents out minutes on a mobile phone, and the entrepreneur will pay your friend. The re-appropriation/reconfiguration part of the innovation cycle began when mobile operators set up systems like Sambaza and Wizzit.

(To be continued…)

At today’s ACC DIY speaker series, Laura Robinson and François Bar presented research on the ways people integrate technologies with their lives, negotiating power and cultural dynamics in the process. Laura’s paper, “Parallel Systems and Cultural Difference in Art Auctions,” underlined the way cultural characteristics (or stereotypes) manifest in French and American approaches to eBay. Americans, for example, when compared to French eBay users, appear free flowing and effusive in their praise for fellow eBay transacters. The French seem miserly with praise by comparison. Americans also appear to spend lots of money and don’t mind trading with foreigners. The French trade in cheaper reproductions and steer clear of les etrangers.

You can read the rest of Laura’s findings here.

What does this suggest about DIY culture? To me it’s a reminder of the strength of offline dominant cultures and power dynamics. Although the opportunities to re-appropriate media tools and products and to invent our own relationships to technology and to one another can seem limitless in the world of the digital network, the heavy realities of national cultural identity, of the socio-economic, historical and political facts of our lives are at this point still doing a lot of the stage directing that matters.

Check back soon for Howard’s comments on François’s talk on re-appropriation and mobile phone use in Latin America.