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.