Uneven connections: A partial history of the mobile phone in Papua New Guinea By Robert J.Foster. Canberra: <scp>ANU</scp> press. 2024. pp. xvi + 221, notes, figures, bibliography, index. <scp>AU</scp>$59.99. <scp>ISBN</scp> 9781760466251

Robert Foster, well known for his groundbreaking work on commodity consumption and nation-building in Papua New Guinea (PNG), has made another major contribution to this fascinating topic. In earlier work, he opened our eyes to the impact of the marketing of products like Coca-Cola on the national imaginary. Uneven Connections now offers a fascinating account of the early 21st-century arrival and development of digital communication technology in this hothouse corner of the Pacific. The book basically argues how utopian expectations—that mobile phones would result in ‘national simultaneity’ and ‘infrastructural citizenship’ (p. 183)—crashed into pre-digital realities and left an ‘uneven mediascape’ (p. 48) behind, rather than a total transformation either of society in general or the citizen-subject in particular. In 2007, the Digicel Company, headquartered in Jamaica, but owned and operated by Denis O'Brien, an Irish billionaire, entered the PNG market which it came to more or less monopolise for the next 15 years, before it was sold off to Telstra of Australia. In this brief interval, Foster notes, mobile phones became ‘normalised’ in PNG cities, where they entirely replaced pay phones. This is the lively ‘ethnographic present’ of Uneven Connections that Foster examines with analytical acuity and a flair for an effective illustration. Harking back to his earlier work, he is at his best when discussing how Digicel billboards and newspaper ads, in which mobile phones were attributed the power to create a new, inclusive community. Promoting itself as an egalitarian company, Digicel sought to deliver service to remote areas, thus allowing universal access to modernity. It also sponsored national sports teams and offered small amounts of credit from time to time, as well as ‘call-me’ texts and voicemail retrieval features at no charge, and free night-time calling. In a ‘moral economy’ derived from their own values and concepts of the good and the just, Papua New Guineans invented workarounds, such as deliberate ‘missed calls’ by hanging up after two rings, or other pre-arranged signals, so kin or friends might call back (and pay). Although the evidence he presents is somewhat thin on this point, Foster also claims that Digicel's prepaid format, requiring the purchase of credit units from street vendors or others, gave rise to individual discipline in order to manage usage. The phones became a kind of technological Benjamin Franklin in early American capitalism by promoting a ‘sense of time thrift’ and an association of time to money (p. 87). In a concise but thorough survey of the literature on the relationship between mobile phones and pre-digital culture across PNG, Foster cites, among several other examples, the famous case of an upper Sepik River people trying to call deceased kin in the afterlife. Credit requests, which were granted to close kin, followed pre-existing gender and kinship hierarchies. Texting resembled gift exchange in which receiving a text obliged a reply (especially between couples). Expectations that mobile telephony would benefit economic production and support new forms of entrepreneurship did not pan out. In Goroka town, where Foster himself conducted some research, street vendors sold phone credit and handsets, and offered repair services. As a result, a black market of pickpocketed phones arose. Pre-capitalist values prevailed among them, however. Vendors did not engage in price competition, looked out for each other, and even received gifts of food from customers. Smartphones began to be widely adopted in PNG, particularly when Digicel promoted sales, erected new towers and upgraded the network so consumers could watch the 2015 Pacific Games that were staged in Port Moresby. As this happened, a shift occurred from voice and texting to data use. People began posting on Facebook and accessing streamed television news, entertainment and radio. A new dimension of the digital divide thus emerged with smartphones; data were consumed in cities and towns in PNG but rather less so in rural settings. Street vendors also suffered as phone credit became available online via linked bank accounts. Foster does not ignore the negative impacts of digital technology on society. Phones ‘disrupted’ the distinction between public and domestic relations. ‘Phone friendships’, which involved a kind of intimacy-at-a-distance between complete strangers who initially called each other basically at random but then started relationships, arose. More broadly, as phone numbers often failed to match callers' identities, a level of mistrust about calls increased. The government sought to develop a program of SIM card registration in order to eliminate ‘unknown numbers’ in 2013. A law was eventually passed in 2020, but had no impact. Increased access to social media and news on smartphones moved political culture into a ‘new mediascape’ but due to a lack of governmental accountability and effectiveness, this shift gave rise to cynicism that Foster called a ‘resigned political discourse’ (p. 158) rather than a new mode of social action. Delivering services to consumers that Foster characterises as ‘post-political’, the Digicel Foundation partnered with the PNG state to build classrooms, provide disaster and pandemic assistance, financial services and infrastructure, as well as a moral vision of financial inclusion and individual self-sufficiency. At first, the arrival of Digicel phones did increase the sense of a ‘national space–time’, and the company enjoyed ‘universal affection’ across the country (p. 183). However, by 2017, PNG had become divided. Urban and rural sectors were ‘out of sync’ and involuntarily disconnected (p. 184). When Telstra bought Digicel in 2022, the goal of ‘national coevalness’ (p. 185) based in a private, digital infrastructure was no more than an ‘incomplete’ project at best (p. 186). One does not get a sense of inconclusion from this book, however. Foster's history of mobile telephony in PNG is comprehensive. It exhausts existing literature to which he has added his own, fresh research. Not at all in thrall of technology, or the expectation that its putative rationality will inevitably spread and resolve all problems, this narrative of the first decades of digital communication in PNG is at once complicated and captivating.