Flying Without Fear: An Ethnographic Exploration of Incongruences Between Mobile Phone Design and Practices

• In Event: Privacy Issues With Social Media #3

Abstract

This study compares the design of mobile phones developed for Indian women’s safety with the ways in which young women use mobile phones to keep themselves safe. Analysis of the design of “safety” phones reveals that these phones frame safety and privacy as mutually exclusive, emphasize that women should be responsible for their safety, and solidify safety and mobility as privileges of the economically advantaged. Although the mobile phone practices of participants aligned with these neoliberal ideas about safety, thus reinforcing discourses of mobile phones as “technologies of safety,” they rejected the constant surveillance advocated by the specialized phones, and advocated strategic surveillance by favoring texting, phone calls to those in social networks, and “missed calls.” This paper shows that technologies are embedded in gendered social relations by contrasting how the tensions between mobility, safety, and privacy manifest in design and how these tensions are negotiated “on the ground.”

Author

• Marissa Joanna Doshi, Hope College