10

Mobile Handsets from the Bottom Up

Appropriation and Innovation in the Global South

Cara Wallis, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Rich Ling

Introduction

The setting could be a hole-in-the-wall that serves as a shop in a narrow alley in Guangzhou, a cart on a dusty street on the outskirts of Accra, a bustling marketplace in Bangalore, or a tiny storefront near downtown Los Angeles' garment district. At such locales, men and women hawk an array of mobile phone cards and accessories as well as various types of handsets,¹ including some that flash with disco lights to signal an incoming call or bear a “Mi-Obama” label with the slogan “Yes We Can.”² Workers fix broken phones, construct bastardized phones out of mismatched parts, and sell phones that have been brought to the premises through both legitimate and questionable means. The clientele of such establishments also practice their own forms of bricolage: sharing mobile phones, changing out SIM cards, “flashing,” reconfiguring the handset, and engaging in other creative uses not necessarily conceived of by designers. Though separated by language, culture, and geography, what all of these individuals share is that they have begun to form a chain of grassroots mobile innovation. Although such alternative handsets and practices are primarily located in the Global South, they can also be found in low-income, largely immigrant communities in cities in the developed world.

As mobile telephony has diffused across the globe, technological innovations associated with mobile communications are often thought to emanate from the West or from Japan, where global manufacturers such as Apple, Nokia, or Samsung spend millions of dollars on research, design, and marketing. In cooperation with an operator, who often locks the phone to its network and adds proprietary software, the handset is then distributed to an end user in a formal commercial interaction complete with contracts, warrantees, and receipts. The model we suggest – which we term “bottom-up,” “grassroots,” “alternative,” or “flexible” to signify that it exists outside the mainstream model of capitalist consumption and of the global brands – highlights instead the emergence of a diverse array of innovative modes of production and consumption that often blur the distinction between these two terms. For example, unlike the situation in developed countries where a new handset comes pre-packaged in a shrink-wrapped box, the mobile phone in developing countries is often constructed, in one way or another, “on site.” This may involve unlocking the software, replacing different components such as the keypad or the screen, or it might include composing a completely new device using the bits and pieces from discarded phones. Indeed, even after an individual has bought a handset, there could be further modification of the device, either intentionally or unintentionally. In the developing world as elsewhere, users – especially youth – often decorate phones with stickers or jewelry, change the cover, or in other ways deliberately modify the outside appearance of the phone (Fujimoto, 2005; Hjorth, 2009). However, if lack of electricity compels a user to consign his or her phone to a recharging service, an unscrupulous proprietor may substitute a good battery with one of lower quality, unbeknownst to the owner. All of these elements speak to a plasticity or “flexibility” in the social construction of the handset. They also give new depth to the idea of the social shaping of technology, one that goes well beyond what is seen in the developed world. Such an alternative handset culture – reaching from producers, to distributors, to users, and extending to agents and repair people with whom the owner interacts after purchasing the phone – arises within myriad relationships in particular contexts and requires that we rethink traditional models of both the manufacture and the social shaping of technology.

In this chapter, we seek to provide a general mapping of grassroots practices associated with an alternative mobile handset culture that has emerged from the bottom up in the Global South. We highlight the social, economic, and institutional factors, in local as well as transnational contexts, that have contributed to “flexible” handsets and grassroots practices within this alternative model of social innovation. Drawing upon theories of user appropriation, we discuss three factors – economic constraints, flexible manufacturing, and cultures of tinkering – that have led to innovative handset production, consumption, and circulation. We then outline a general taxonomy of alternative, or flexible, handsets that includes used, refurbished, shanzhai (or bandit), and counterfeit phones. In the process, we show how various types of relationships – at the familial, peer, community, national, and even international level – sustain and are sustained by this multi-tiered handset ecology.

Although we discuss practices in locations as diverse as Bangalore, Istanbul, the Philippines, and Copenhagen, we pay particular attention to China as representative of bottom-up innovation in mobile telephony. Our emphasis, however, is on processes rather than on particular places. Moreover, we focus specifically on the “information have-less” – i.e., those who are economically and socially marginalized and thus use lower-cost and sometimes less convenient forms of new communication technologies (Cartier, Castells, & Qiu, 2005; Qiu, 2009) – to understand how they exercise agency and creativity in accessing and shaping technology within the material constraints of their lives. Although certainly financial limitations affect how such users appropriate technology, we highlight other cultural, social, and demographic factors that are equally important, including age, gender, and locality. Through critically analyzing a range of innovative production and consumption practices, this chapter seeks to add to our understanding of how particular social and cultural groups produce various local understandings of technology. In focusing on those with limited economic and social power in society, we hope to disrupt conventional notions of who holds authority in technology design and usage.

Technology Appropriation

The mobile phone's diffusion across all corners of the globe and at all levels of society offers an unprecedented opportunity for deepening our understanding of how technologies are produced, taken up, and used by different people in diverse contexts. A large body of work has examined how various technologies have been shaped through interactions and negotiations between designers, developers, and end users who engage in “interpretive flexibility” around a technology until a point of “closure” and stabilization is realized (Bijker, 1995; Pinch & Bijker, 1984). Scholars have also analyzed the so-called “domestication” of technologies, or how users take the devices from the commercial world and place them into their everyday lives (Berker, Hartmann, Punie, & Ward, 2006; Silverstone, Hirsch, & Morley, 1992). Studies of the telephone (Fischer, 1992; Martin, 1991) and more recently the mobile phone (Ito, Okabe, & Matsuda, 2005; Katz & Aakhus, 2002; Ling, 2004) have also shown how a range of social actors – designers, manufacturers, marketers, middle-class users – have contributed to how these communication technologies have been understood and used in society.

We share with the above body of work an insistence on the constitutive nature of technology and society, yet we shift the focus by looking at an entire circuit of alternative handset consumption and production among the information have-less in the Global South. Rather than analyzing the decisions that go into purchasing and “domesticating” a technology, we show how certain types of handsets are obtained, sustained, and reinvented within limited economic circumstances and numerous sociocultural constraints. Because we are concerned with how users “make do” and innovate from the bottom up, we draw from theories of technology appropriation that have highlighted power differentials in the global flow of knowledge, communication, and technology, in particular Ron Eglash's (2004) notion of “appropriated technologies” and Bar, Pisani, and Weber's (2007) model of mobile appropriation.

As Eglash (2004) notes, technology not only flows along an axis of production to consumption but also depends on users' geographic location, social power, gender, ethnicity, and so on. He uses the term “appropriated technologies” to denote how those who are socially and/or economically marginalized reinterpret, adapt, or reinvent technologies invented in the traditional locales of global influence. In his formulation, “reinterpretation” means “change in semantic association with little or no change in use or structure” (p. x); “adaptation” involves “change in both semantic association and use” as well as a “violation of [. . .] intended purpose” (p. xi), thus implying user creativity; and “reinterpretation” entails changes to “semantics, use, and structure” (p. xii). Appropriated technologies can run the gamut from radical reinterpretation to use of a certain technology by groups not initially considered by designers, such as those at the margins and thus not thought capable of using “elite” devices. As Eglash argues, “movement along the axis of social power is just as important in defining appropriated technologies as movement along the consumption–production axis” (p. xv, emphasis in original).

Whereas Eglash outlines a framework for technology appropriation more generally, Bar and colleagues (2007) theorize mobile phone adoption, appropriation, and reconfiguration. In their approach, appropriation is the crucial site for user experimentation and innovation. Finding inspiration in Latin America, with its mix of peoples and cultures, they develop a three-pronged model of user appropriation. It includes, first, “baroque” layering, where users “fill in” the spaces that manufacturers and operators provide for them, such as personalizing a phone with special wallpaper. Second, there is “creolization,” which involves a process of mixing, with the result being a new, hybrid form. Finally, there is cannibalization, which is appropriation through “dismantling, absorption, and chemical transformation” (p. 15). All of these are ideal types and can blend into one another, but they “represent increasing degrees of power contestation by users (and growing challenges to the established structure), as well as increasing engagement with ‘doing’ technology (rather than simply ‘using’ it)” (p. 24).

Eglash's (2004) and Bar et al.'s (2007) appropriation frameworks are useful to our analysis for three reasons. First, they draw attention to issues of social power and inequality that cannot be overlooked when studying technology use among marginalized populations. Second, they highlight users' agency and creativity in incorporating technology into their lives. Third, both frameworks attempt to understand appropriation in terms of a continuum from minimal to radical modification of a technology by users. In the discussion that follows, we note how some of the alternative handsets in our taxonomy could be placed into the aforementioned categories of reinterpretation, adaptation, and reinvention, or baroque layering, creolization, and cannibalization, but our main goal is to reveal varying degrees of modification to typical uses, structures, and meanings of mobile phones. Our definition of innovation is thus quite broad; we mean the term to denote technical innovations, such as the shanzhai phones discussed later, as well as practices that go against norms of capitalist consumption, such as the extended life given to phones through reuse and refurbishing. Although our taxonomy focuses on the actual “tool” itself – the mobile handset – we do not view technology as a distinct object separate from social life, but rather the opposite. We distinguish types of alternative handsets in order to generate insights into the needs, meanings, relationships, and investments (emotional and financial) that give rise to a grassroots mobile handset ecology embedded in the everyday lives of users.

Most frameworks of technology appropriation focus on what occurs once a user has already adopted a technology. For example, although Bar et al. (2007) acknowledge that manufacturers and providers might co-opt user innovation into future designs and services, they do not take into account innovations in design, manufacturing, and distribution that can also occur outside of the dominant model of the global handset manufacturers and operators. In our study, we focus on the broad social shaping process of alternative handsets. We therefore widen our scope to include the entire Global South, where in recent years the phenomenon of user appropriation has not only expanded but should also be seen in the larger context of several levels of innovation as well as transborder connections among the Southern countries. Therefore, we focus on modes of user appropriation embedded in familial, peer, and community relationships while also revealing a relatively more centralized pattern of “flexible manufacturing” in terms of research and development, production, wholesale, and retail, as seen in the rise of China as a global mobile manufacturing power, which will be discussed in more detail below. To set the stage for this discussion, we first examine the diffusion of mobile telephony and manufacture in recent years in both the developed and developing worlds.

Diffusion and Manufacture of Mobile Phones

While the mobile phone was first developed and adopted in Europe, Japan, and the United States, the preponderance of phones is now found in developing countries. According to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), in 2010 there were about 75 mobile telephone subscriptions for every 100 persons in the world (ITU, 2010b). If we simply consider the number of subscriptions, the greatest numbers are found in the most populous countries, including China (747 million subscriptions in 2009), India (525 million), the United States (285 million), Russia (230 million), and Brazil (173 million). At the bottom of this list are small countries like Tuvalu (2,000 subscriptions), the Marshall Islands (3,000), Kiribati (1,000), and Palau (13,156) (ITU, 2010a). These numbers point to the diffusion of mobile phones in a country.

However, if we examine the number of phone subscriptions per 100 persons, a different picture arises. Figure 10.1 displays the actual density of mobile phones in a population according to the gross domestic product (GDP) of a country (sorted into three groups ranging from lowest to highest GDP). Though not shown in the chart, tiny Palau, with 64 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, is somewhat ahead of both China (55 per 100 inhabitants) and India (43).

Figure 10.1 Mobile telephone subscriptions per 100 inhabitants, 2000–2010 by GDP.

Source: Adapted from International Telecommunication Union data found at http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/definitions/regions/index.html.

In this metric, the countries with the highest density of mobile phone subscriptions are the United Arab Emirates (232 subscriptions per 100 inhabitants),³ Montenegro (207), Cayman Islands (193), Macao, China (192) and Hong Kong, China (179). At the bottom of the list are the Marshall Islands (5), Eritrea (2), and Burma and Kiribati (1 subscription per 100 population). The country with the least density of mobile phone subscriptions is North Korea with .029 phones per 100 population. Figure 10.1 also reveals that since roughly 2006, the growth of mobile phones in the developed world is flattening out while in the developing world growth has been climbing more steeply. In other words, although countries that were early adopters of mobile phones, such as Iceland and Norway, have seen slow growth rates in recent years, societies in the Global South have become the main driving force for the diffusion of mobile phones worldwide.

In addition to diffusion, it is important to look also at manufacturing. In the past two or three years, the epicenter of mobile phone manufacturing, especially in terms of low-end grassroots innovation, has shifted away from industrialized Northern countries. China alone produced 619 million mobile phones in 2009, when its output accounted for 49.9% of the world market share (ifeng.com, 2010). Other Southern countries like India, Kenya, and Venezuela have also entered the mobile phone manufacture business in collaboration and/or competition with the Chinese manufacturers and with each other, using various innovation models that reflect their social reality but are very different from those of large Western and Japanese corporations. In order to find the answers to key questions, such as who invents the phone and how that innovation takes place and why, we need to shift our attention to the Global South, to countries like China, whose critical importance should be appreciated in terms not only of adoption and consumption but also of manufacturing and innovation.

Methods

This chapter is the result of data gathered through a variety of qualitative methods – ethnographic fieldwork, participant observation, and interviews in diverse contexts between 2006 and 2010. Participant observation among dozens of low-income mobile phone users and retailers was carried out extensively by two of the authors in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, China, for extended periods (2 to 10 months) throughout the duration of the research. Participant observation for briefer periods (two days to three weeks) was also conducted by all three authors among a variety of mobile phone retailers and low-income users in Antalya, Istanbul, Los Angeles, Houston, Manila, Bangalore, and Riyadh. In all of the above locations, as well as in Shanghai, Copenhagen, and London, over 40 interviews and numerous casual conversations were conducted with mobile phone retailers, in some cases with multiple followups.⁴ In-depth interviews with 12 mobile phone refurbishers were conducted in Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Beijing while in-depth interviews with three mobile phone manufacturers and approximately 15 distributors were conducted in Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

The purpose of the interviews and observations was to gain an understanding of the types of alternative mobile handsets that have emerged in recent years as falling costs and flexible manufacturing techniques have led to an expanded mobile phone market. In addition, we sought to understand how ordinary users engage in various types of bricolage, or making do, as they appropriate mobile phones to suit their purposes. Our goal was to gather sufficient data that would allow us to generate preliminary taxonomies of, on the one hand, alternative, or flexible, mobile handsets, and, on the other hand, emergent grassroots practices among the information haveless. We also rely on mobile phone policy documents, mobile operator data from Bangladesh and Denmark, media reports, and research studies to supplement our own findings.

Alternative Phones and Grassroots Innovation

Alternative phones at the grassroots level emerge from a confluence of diverse social, economic, and cultural factors, but here we focus on three that are of particular relevance to our analysis: economic constraints, flexible manufacturing techniques, and what we refer to as “cultures of tinkering.” Although we separate them for analytical purposes, in reality they overlap and are mutually constitutive. In the following discussion, we briefly highlight how each of these plays a role in grassroots mobile innovation.

Economic Constraints

In the developed world, in most cases mobile operators offer customers discounted or “free” phones. In exchange for a subsidized handset, the user signs a contract – often for one or two years – and is “locked” onto a particular operator's network, ensuring the operator a secure revenue stream for the period of the contract. When the contract time nears its end, the operator often offers a new handset to the individual in the hope that he or she will continue as a subscriber. Without a contract, users usually have more flexibility in choosing a new phone. However, “unlocked” phones, that is, phones not subsidized by the operator, are often far more expensive than “locked” phones. Still, there is an active “unlocking” industry that is readily available.

In many parts of the developing world, however, such contract arrangements are either nonexistent or are used only by the elite since they often entail not only having a certain level of income but also other requirements related to residency or bank accounts.⁵ Thus, finances obviously play a significant role in decisions regarding mobile phone adoption and types of use among those at the lower end of the socioeconomic strata (Kalba, 2008; Zainudeen, Sivapragasam, de Silva, Iqbal, & Ratnadiwakara, 2007). Thus, a prepaid “top-up” system, with no regular monthly charge and where an individual buys a certain number of “minutes” that are used as needed, is preferred by millions of people. Given the irregular income of many people in the Global South, this type of subscription fits their needs better than a postpaid contract with a monthly bill. Kalba (2008) reports that in several countries as many as 92% of all subscriptions are prepaid. With the 2008 global economic downturn, prepaid phone cards have also become more popular in mature markets where postpaid, contract-based plans formerly dominated, as in the United States (Reardon, 2009).

The attention that “have-less” individuals give to pricing is not lost on mobile phone operators in emerging markets, who tend to offer a range of prepaid calling cards (including cards with bundles of text messages or wireless instant messaging service, or where the caller pays). Top-up cards can also come in very small denominations, for example only 50 cents (Ling & Donner, 2009).⁶

In addition, financial as well as technical constraints mean that users may often have several subscriptions, and thus several SIM cards. Indeed, this accounts for some of the double counting of mobile phone users described above. The users know that one subscription is cheaper during the day and another less expensive in the evening. They also know that one subscription may allow them coverage in one location, while a second subscription is better in another area. We have found that such “SIM switching,” as it is often called, is particularly common among Chinese rural migrants working in the service and manufacturing sectors in Shanghai and Guangdong along China's coastal regions, where labor mobility is high.

Economics is also a factor in the manner in which mobile phone handsets are circulated. In major cities in both the developing and developed world, it is possible to find vendors selling used, reconditioned, and quasi-illicit phones. This is as true for Guangzhou and Mexico City as it is for Copenhagen and London, as will be discussed in more detail later in the chapter.

Flexible Manufacturing

In addition to micro-level economic issues, new modes of manufacturing at the level of entire industrial systems have given rise to the production of mobile handsets that fall outside the major global brands. The trend of flexible manufacturing can be traced back historically to the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism (or Toyotism) since the 1970s. As recently as a decade ago, in East Asia there was a clear division of labor in the flexible mode of manufacturing mobile phones, with Japanese corporations controlling research and development and reaping most of the profits, Taiwanese firms undertaking the actual manufacturing, and Hong Kong companies doing the marketing. However, in recent years this hierarchical relationship has been seriously eroded. Initially, Chinese and Korean firms started imitating the best-selling phones on the market. While their phones were inexpensive, their quality was also unreliable. Over time these firms' emulation skills improved, and they started designing features that were unavailable on the brand-name phones, as in the case of shanzhai or bandit phones, which we will discuss shortly. These low-end phones, with improved reliability, more functions, and low price, then diffused quickly, both domestically and overseas, to claim, for instance, a quarter of China's huge mobile phone market (Su, 2009).

This latest trend of structural transformation in the flexibility of mobile phone manufacturing reflects the heightening of flexible capitalism since the turn of the century. The alternative mobile handset ecology can be understood, in this sense, as a crystallization of a new form of “network enterprise” beyond the original model identified in the Western context of the 1990s (Castells, 2000). This is not a coincidence because the traditional hierarchical model, as seen in the case of “locked” phones, is ultimately not “flexible” enough to meet the demands of both low-end consumers and the fiercely competitive mobile phone market. After all, the production cycle of mobile phones is quite short and some of the major manufacturers produce as many as 50 new (or somewhat modified) models a year. As new models hit the market, prices drop quickly. At the same time, low-end handset manufacturers need to make their products for a wide variety of have-less people. The restrictions imposed by mobile telecom operators and government regulators also tend to make the global brands less competitive by increasing their production costs and/or keeping them from adding attractive features such as the dual-SIM card design to facilitate the SIM switching discussed above.⁷

A prime example of this flexible mobile phone manufacturing can be found in the Pearl River Delta of China, bordering Hong Kong. For years this region, known as the “world's factory,” has produced the vast majority of the world's apparel, electronics, and textiles. Its large number of factories and huge labor force made up of rural-to-urban migrants mean that production is quick and costs are cheap. By 2008 there were about 3,000 to 4,000 shanzhai mobile phone businesses in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone alone (Farrar, 2009), making Shenzhen the world's shanzhaiji (“ji” meaning handset) production and marketing capital. The owners of many of these alternative mobile phone manufacturing facilities often have had prior experience working in joint ventures or local factories that subcontract with global brands to produce handsets and accessories, as do their workers. Yet they have left the mainstream and entered this newly emerging system of flexible manufacturing for a higher profit margin, faster returns, more room for technical innovation, and/or grassroots entrepreneurship.⁸ This indeed suggests a systematic change in the global division of labor for mobile phone manufacturing, with the epicenter of low-end design and production shifting decisively to places in the Global South like Shenzhen.

Cultures of Tinkering

A final factor that is constitutive of the rise of alternative handsets and grassroots mobile innovation is the practice of tinkering as a mode of cultural production (Balsamo, 2011). Although “to tinker” can connote aimless toying or unskilled repair efforts, in reality tinkering can be done by experts and novices alike. To tinker is to explore and experiment with an object to fix it or to understand more fully its inner workings. As a form of innovation, tinkering involves creativity and is akin to bricolage in that it implies using whatever materials one has at hand. Tinkering means having a certain skill set, but more importantly a certain mindset; thus, it is often associated with a DIY, or do-it-yourself, ethos that informs everything from the punk to the hacker subcultures.

Because of its association with learning and creativity, tinkering has been increasingly embraced in the West as an important means of “cultivating the technological imagination” (Balsamo, 2011), and “tinkerability” is an intentional feature in certain software and programming languages designed for children (Resnick, 2007). Within a variety of grassroots movements formed around creating with one's own hands, tinkering is also emphasized as a form of personal fulfillment, a way of emancipating production from the control of huge global manufacturers, and a means of forming community (e.g., Make magazine and Maker Faires in the United States).

While such Western-based domains of tinkering share some qualities with the cultures of tinkering that are the focus of our analysis, they also present some striking contrasts. Grassroots mobile innovation certainly derives from creativity, exploration, and bricolage, and there is no doubt that a hacker ethic informs some aspects of the alternative handset ecology, where there is often a clear disregard for intellectual property and a strong desire to open up the “black box” of technology to see what is inside. However, the key difference is that whereas in the West tinkering often informs leisure activities, in the Global South tinkering is more likely to arise out of necessity. Such tinkering is more akin to the self-reliant repair and maintenance that has been practiced for hundreds of years by people living in quasi-subsistence situations.⁹ While this work is seen as skilled in its local context, it is routinized repair work that is often linked to a system of receiving functional and broken handsets from either local customers or domestic or international suppliers, and then repairing them or perhaps selling them to a small retail outlet. In other words, it is labor – waged labor as opposed to the leisure interest often associated with hacking or open source software – and thus a means of feeding oneself and one's family. It is this “subsistence tinkering” that stimulates grassroots innovation and informs the appropriation, manufacturing, and distribution of alternative mobile handsets.

A Taxonomy of Alternative Phones

In the following discussion, we put forward an initial taxonomy of grassroots handsets that have arisen out of the financial constraints, flexible manufacturing, and cultures of tinkering outlined above. This is a preliminary effort to map types of alternative or flexible phones and understand those who produce, consume, and appropriate them based on our limited empirical observations. In theory there can be more types and, in reality, the various categories and actors overlap. This is not a fixed or exhaustive analysis, but we offer it so that we can begin to appreciate fully the scale and scope of the bottom-up mobile phone phenomenon worldwide.

Used Handsets – Kinship Networks, Technology Transfer, and Intermittent Entrepreneurship

Used phones form a large part of the alternative handset ecology in the Global South and circulate in a variety of ways. Research done in a number of different contexts in the developing world has found that it is common for family members to hand down phones to other family members once a new phone is purchased (Donner, 2009; Horst & Miller, 2006). Yet “handing down” is actually a misnomer since phones can circulate both up and down and back and forth. In some cases, used phones are passed from parent to child, such as in China when a young rural woman leaves home for the first time to find work in an urban area. Older siblings are also likely to pass phones down to a younger brother or sister. Although these two examples are representative of the guardian role of a parent or older sibling, it is also common that an adult child will pass a phone up to an elder parent. To again use China as an example, in both our fieldwork and that of others (cf. Oreglia, 2010), we have found that young adult rural migrants working in cities often pass along a used mobile phone to parents or siblings in the countryside (though some might buy a new one for parents as well). This facilitates communication but also can be seen as a form of technology transfer, given the vast rural–urban divide in China (Oreglia, 2010). Husbands also pass phones to wives, and occasionally phones are given by one friend to another. Among friends and family, used phones serve variously as a means of gifting, maintaining contact, and ensuring safety. The key points are that phones pass in multiple directions; such directions are often, but not always, dictated by familial obligations, age, and gender (females are more likely to have a used phone than males); and such passing along is not a finite occurrence: one phone can change hands three or even four times.

In addition to such exchanges that take place within kinship networks (and sometimes friendship networks), used phones have also become part of an informal, albeit often irregular, mobile economy. In this case, the transactions are also marked by a fluidity and flexibility not found in dominant models of exchange in the West: a shop and a street corner can equally serve as the locale for conducting business. In China, for example, where young, middle-class urban mobile phone users often purchase a new phone every 9 to 12 months (Rein, 2008), used phones easily find their way to the market, either through the owner pawning the phone to a second-hand shop or by an entrepreneurial trash collector, who secures additional income through hawking phones that have been discarded by others, as in Figure 10.2. Of course, the source of used phones can often be questionable, as mobile phone theft is a serious problem in large cities such as Rio de Janeiro (de Souza e Silva, Sutko, Salis, & de Souza e Silva, 2011) and Beijing, where female migrants newly arrived from the countryside are often a prime target for rings of pickpockets.

Figure 10.2 A trash collector selling used phones on a street in Shenzhen, China. Photo: Cara Wallis, 2008.

This is not to say that in the developed world used mobile phones do not also circulate. They do, but on a much smaller scale. Interviews with shopkeepers selling used handsets in locales as diverse as Houston, London, and Copenhagen indicate that the phones largely come from local sources in a type of pawning arrangement. These shops often have an agreement with a nearby repair store that can recondition the phones and prepare them for reintroduction onto the market. However, these phones are not a significant part of the handsets that are on the mobile operator's network. The market for these phones is people who either want to cultivate a type of “retro” image or who wish simply to have an inexpensive phone, such as immigrant workers. In any case, the phones number in the hundreds on networks that have millions of handsets, indicating a much smaller market for these phones than in the developing world.

Whether they are passed along among family members, offered on an irregular basis by an enterprising worker finding opportunity in what others have discarded, or sold in shops along with new phones, used handsets entail zero or minimal change to the actual device. We include them as a mode of appropriation because they are a means for technology to be in the hands of those who are not the intended users of such devices in the eyes of designers and marketers, and because they disrupt the “desirable” mode of consumption in a capitalist model of production that can only survive by inciting desire for the new. They are thus a mode of “reinterpretation” or “baroque” layering, whereby the used or discarded becomes a valuable channel of communication, an object embodying social relationships and obligations, and/or a means of irregular income.

Refurbished Phones – Apprentice Work in an Era of Mass Production

In developed countries, when a mobile phone breaks, in most cases it is thrown away, given to a charity, or put in a recycling bin. Most ordinary users do not know how to fix a broken phone, nor do they know of any business offering such services. A broken phone – once the initial frustration or disappointment has subsided – then offers an exciting opportunity to purchase a new phone. This is not necessarily the case in the Global South, however, where the financial constraints and the subsistence tinkering discussed earlier have led to the emergence of micro-entrepreneurs offering an array of services, including battery charging and phone repair, as shown in Figure 10.3.

Clearly, refurbished phones save low-income users money since they do not have to purchase a new phone if theirs breaks. What we wish to highlight, however, is that for those who can gain the requisite skills and equipment, phone refurbishing creates important employment and income-generating opportunities, which are crucial for those living at the margins of society. Furthermore, refurbishing sustains apprentice–novice relationships that are thought to have all but disappeared in countries that rely on large-scale manufacturing to produce their technologies. Moreover, shops offering such services support communities that are often isolated from the infrastructure that caters to those who are better off in society.

As an example, Xiao He, a 19-year-old rural-to-urban migrant from Henan province in China, had migrated to Guangzhou when he was 16. There he joined his parents, who rent a small cramped space in a migrant enclave (or “urban village”). The family lives upstairs while the downstairs area serves as a small pay phone business. For 20 months, until June 2008, Xiao He was an apprentice learning how to refurbish mobile phones. He was trained – while providing free labor – by a more experienced technician in a large workshop that consisted of dozens of mobile phone repair stands, most of which had at least one or two apprentices at any given time during our earlier fieldwork period from 2006 to 2008. After this training, he finally opened a mobile phone repair business inside his parents' shop. His tools – mostly secondhand – consist of small screwdrivers, soldering equipment, electric dryers that soften plastic, devices to measure current, and so on. Xiao He is intimately acquainted with the motherboards of various types of handsets and is well versed in what might go wrong with a phone's numerous components. As a refurbisher, he engages in the subsistence tinkering we mentioned earlier, and he offers a vital service to those in his community.

Figure 10.3 Mobile phone repair shop in Beijing, China. Photo: Cara Wallis, 2008.

In our fieldwork, we found that typically refurbishers are male, as in Xiao He's case, though in Beijing we met a young woman who had learned to do simple tasks, such as changing and charging batteries. This divide between jobs requiring “high” technical skill, and thus deemed appropriate for males, versus “practical” or unskilled jobs designated for females is common in low-level service work in China (Wallis, in press). That refurbishing phones is gendered masculine is also in line with broader ideas found in diverse cultures regarding the relationship between gender and technology.

Of course, aside from the gendered bodies that engage in repair work, a key aspect of mobile handset repair is access to parts and software. From a refurbisher's perspective, the fewer the number of phone types the better. If there are only a few types of handsets, spare parts can be cannibalized from older handsets and the software is more standard. To compare refurbished phones in the developing and developed world, one can take phones on the networks in Bangladesh versus Denmark. The material in Figure 10.4 shows the distribution of the top 1,000 mobile phone handsets for a major operator in Bangladesh.¹⁰ Nokia 1000 series phones make up about two-thirds of all these phones, as indicated by the dark shading. In considering all phones used in the Bangladeshi network, only about 15% are made by other manufacturers. When compared, for example, to the top 12 phones for an operator in Denmark, each of the top phones accounts for less than 1% of the total number of phones in Bangladesh. One phone, the Nokia 1200, represents twice as large a portion of the phones on the network as do the top 10 phones in Denmark.¹¹ What is surprising is that such a small set of phones dominates the market to the degree that it does. This type of “mono-culture” of mobile phones is an advantage for those who wish to reconstitute and rebuild handsets. The fact that there are so many of a small number of handsets means that there are always spare parts available. Indeed, this would encourage the culture of tinkering described above, while facilitating structural adjustment of the national mobile phone sector in Bangladesh from the bottom up.

Figure 10.4 Distribution of the top 1,000 mobile phone handsets for a major operator in Bangladesh. Source: Adapted from data from Telenor.

Refurbished handsets, like the used phones discussed earlier, reveal how mobile phone users “make do” within the constraints of their lives. Rather than reinterpreting the device or engaging in baroque layering, however, refurbished phones could be seen as appropriation through “adaptation” or “creolization.” Certainly, opening up a phone to fix it violates the warranty agreement of all of the phones produced by the global manufacturers. Furthermore, refurbishers often engage in creative bricolage or “creolization” as they mix parts and components to come up with a phone that is a hybrid mix, either inside or outside, or both. Through giving new life to a phone that would otherwise be discarded, intentionally or not they also reveal how mobile phones can be about sustainability, in contrast to the concerns raised by the escalation in electronics waste that has increased immeasurably since the widespread diffusion of mobile telephony – waste that often ends up dumped in the developing world.

Imitating and Innovating – Shanzhaiji (Bandit Phones)

In our next example, we focus not only on a type of handset that is appropriated by the information have-less, but also on an entire industrial system made up of producers, distributors, and end users. Shanzhaiji, or bandit phones, are one of the more interesting examples to emerge within the realm of flexible handsets and grassroots innovation. These phones are manufactured in and around Shenzhen, China, and are neither part of the black market nor fully legal. Instead, they constitute a gray zone within China's burgeoning domestic mobile phone industry. They tend to be inexpensive and loaded with functions such as mp3 and mp4 players, televisions, radios, and dual SIM cards (for switching between two phone numbers). While bandit phones can mimic popular global brands in their design (and indeed can come in shrink-wrapped boxes),¹² the spelling of the brand name often intentionally betrays their bandit nature. For example, instead of Nokia, one can find Nckia; by the same logic, iPhone becomes Hiphone or iPheno. The more unique bandit phones are shaped like sports cars, rockets, cigarette packs, and even Doraemon and Mickey Mouse.

The information have-less are the prime market for shanzhai mobile phones. As we found in our fieldwork among young adult rural-to-urban migrant workers in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, bandit phones were commonly used precisely because of their low price and multiple functions. In brief conversations with shanzhaiji sellers in Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, many echoed such sentiments, stating that shanzhaiji were suitable to the needs of low-income users, both because of price and because they came equipped with such commonly used functions as QQ, an instant messaging, social networking, and gaming platform. As shanzhai phones spread, urban youth also began collecting them for their humorous or kitsch designs (Yang & Li, 2008). We could argue that marginalized youth were at the forefront of shanzhai appropriation, yet urban youth's embrace of bandit phones emerges from a much different position of social power. Moreover, more mainstream, brand-conscious urban youth belittle migrants who use shanzhai phones, perceiving them to be striving for something they cannot attain (Zhou, 2010).

Given the diffusion of shanzhai phones among diverse users, they have become a serious competitor within China's mobile phone market, constituting from 20 to 25% of domestic phone sales (Barboza, 2009; Golden China Brands, 2008). By one estimate, China has produced about 200 million shanzhaiji, of which about half are sold within the country, and the bulk of the other half find their way into the Global South (Su, 2009). Bandit phones are exported to India, Africa, the Middle East, and Russia. They are also expanding to other markets; in our fieldwork we have seen shanzhaiji in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Manila, the Philippines, Antalya, Turkey (see Figure 10.5), and even Houston, Texas.

Figure 10.5 A mobile phone shop in Antalya, Turkey, offers dual SIM card phones. Photo: Cara Wallis, 2008.

If we turn from users to producers, as with refurbished phones the shanzhaiji industry represents an example of grassroots innovation, albeit on a much larger scale, generating new functionalities (e.g., the dual SIM card) and a circuit of R&D personnel, producers, distributors, and retailers. This large-scale alternative phone praxis has produced a huge industrial system with its own logic (for a more detailed discussion, see Wallis & Qiu, 2012). The center of this system is made up of research and development teams, who work with providers such as MediaTek (MTK, the largest Taiwanese mobile phone motherboard maker) as well as channel companies that have a deeper understanding of market demands. To prepare the technical design of the phone, the R&D team gathers technical solutions and parts from these providers and channel companies. If necessary, other phone designs are copied, but the biggest concern is controlling production costs. After the basic design is in place, manufacturers test a demo version of the phone, complete with hardware and software, and the product is then improved through multiple iterations. Once orders are commissioned, the manufacturer produces a large quantity of the shanzhaiji. Finished phones eventually go directly to wholesalers or reach the wholesaler via a channel company. Wholesalers then distribute the phones to retailers, who in turn sell them to customers.

The industrial system of shanzhaiji production has multiple phases, and each phase is extremely competitive, which forces everyone to focus on efficiency, reliability, and low cost as they seek to innovate new product lines, production processes, and software solutions. Companies making substandard products do exist, but they will be quickly discovered and marginalized in the shanzhaiji production system centered in Shenzhen. Although this is very much an informal economy system that relies solely on cash transactions, the people involved are also closely networked with each other.

Shanzhaiji producers thus reveal a reinterpretation of the typical mode of production maintained by the global brands. They have both reengineered the handset – adding formerly unheard-of functions like the dual SIM card – and have created an industrial system that efficiently caters to the needs of have-less users throughout the Global South.

Counterfeit Phones

Counterfeit phones make up the last type of grassroots handset in our taxonomy. These bear a resemblance to the shanzhai phones discussed above in terms of their production and distribution. The difference is that, unlike bandit phones that revel in their intentional bandit status, counterfeit phones try to pass themselves off as the real deal. Indeed, when the shanzhaiji industry started to take shape in China in about 2004, it was very much in the counterfeit business, using mostly Korean solutions to imitate Nokia models, for example. But since 2006, with the considerable profit made and the enhanced level of alternative R&D, many bandit factories have started to work on their own brands. A prime example is found in K-Touch (Tianyu), which has transformed from shanzhaiji maker to become one of the top-selling domestic brands in China. However, a large number of counterfeit phones are produced, including the iPhone, which is manufactured in Shenzhen (see Figure 10.6). This is because Apple had no formal business partner to distribute its popular handsets in China until August 2009, when it finally signed a deal with China Unicom.

But more commonly, counterfeit phones are made for rural markets not only in China but also in other Southern countries, where customers do not have sufficient knowledge to tell the fake from the real (one simple way is just to weigh the handset – counterfeits are usually much lighter). Many such counterfeit phones–as well as used and refurbished ones – go through Chungking Mansions, a residential and business complex in Hong Kong, for instance, which is right next to Shenzhen and open for male South Asian and African traders who cannot easily get into mainland China (Hong Kong has a much more relaxed visa policy). According to a West African trader, speaking with Gordon Mathews, an anthropologist who has been studying Chungking Mansions for several years, “When I carry phones back to my country, I mix them, real and fake. I sell the fakes to people off in villages, who don't know any better. I sell the real ones to people I know” (Mathews, 2009, pp. 172–173). In our fieldwork in Guangzhou, we noticed several phone vendors who sold phones with French, Arabic, and English language capacity, but not Chinese. While some of these were legitimate domestic models made for export, others were labeled with name brands, and were clearly for export.

Figure 10.6 Counterfeit iPhones, iTouch, and iPads for sale in Shanghai. Photo: Cara Wallis, 2008.

Counterfeit phones, in this sense, constitute one of the more problematic examples of alternative handsets. They can be viewed as appropriation through reinterpretation or cannibalization, not of the actual device itself but of intellectual property rights and ethical business practices. However, the counterfeiters and sellers often see themselves as simply trying to make do in the global flows of money, technology, and power that have relegated them to the margins.

Concluding Remarks

In this chapter we have provided an overview and critical examination of an alternative handset ecology consisting of flexible mobile phones and grassroots innovation from the bottom up in the Global South. Basing our analysis in the user appropriation literature, we have introduced the basic patterns of alternative mobile handsets, including user characteristics and networks of relationships that influence the price, lifespan, and functionality of the phones, modes of flexible manufacturing that transform the mobile phone industry structurally, and the cultures of tinkering at the grassroots level. These converge to give rise to a diverse array of innovative modes of mobile phone production, appropriation, and consumption that often intersect with age, gender, and locality. We have brought together observations from around the world, though we have placed particular focus on China, to propose a taxonomy of alternative phones in the Global South, including used, refurbished, shanzhai (bandit), and counterfeit phones. Our analysis is only a first step in mapping what is undoubtedly a much broader alternative mobile handset culture that arises out of user necessity and ingenuity.

What are the most essential lessons learned from alternative mobile handsets and grassroots innovation in the Global South? First, this analysis provides new insight into the social shaping of technology. Drawing upon Eglash's (2004) and Bar et al.'s (2007) models of user appropriation, we have sought to disrupt the conventional perception of innovation as an exclusive privilege of elite individuals or big transnational corporations in Northern countries. Furthermore, we have argued for a broad notion of appropriation, which encompasses everything from sharing or resuscitating used phones, to modifying and remixing the handset, to technical innovations at the design, manufacturing, and distribution level. Grassroots practices that go against typical norms of capitalist consumption, traditions of technological mastery, and the creativity that goes into improving the business networks that enable mobile phone transactions locally, nationally, and transnationally can be found in many parts of the Global South. Our findings among the information have-less of China have also been noted in other developing countries, for instance, Morocco (Ilahiane & Sherry, 2008). These trends have been stimulated by, and will continue with, the further spread of mobile phones in the developing world.

Second, flexible mobile handsets and grassroots innovation are no longer small-scale, low-tech operations scattered outside the periphery of the modern industrial system of mobile phone manufacturing. On the contrary, they have moved into the center of that very industrial system, to a certain extent following the established path of flexible accumulation, but also pushing it to a new level of flexible manufacturing beyond the formal control of the multinationals and the intellectual property regimes. They operate on a huge scale, involving hundreds of millions of phones, if not billions, and in so doing they can generate rather sophisticated ways to improve both the technology and the business arrangements, as seen in the case of China's shanzhai phone sector.

Third and finally, grassroots innovation in the Global South happens in the stark reality of the developing world, where the majority of people struggle to survive on a daily basis. This cannot be more different from the mobile youth culture and DIY groups in Western societies, who engage in grassroots innovation for fun and for the expression of particular group identities. Instead, grassroots innovators in Southern countries often are involved in alternative praxis because they have no other choice. Either they fix the phone and do it in the most affordable way, or they risk losing business in a fiercely competitive market, which could lead to more hardship or even starvation. It is therefore a form of “subsistence tinkering” that emerges from the bottom up, as a response to the existential issues of the Global South, where the forces of globalization constantly threaten to make more and more people “structurally irrelevant” in the network society (Castells, 2000, p. 436). Understanding alternative mobile phones in the developing world thus sheds light on these fundamental survival politics as well.

NOTES

1 We use “handset” to refer to the physical object that a person uses to place/receive calls and texts, or to access advanced services.

2 See “A Barack Obama branded mobile phone,” Cellular-news (2009, January 15). Retrieved from http://www.cellular-news.com/story/35527.php

3 We have pedantically been referring to the number of subscriptions per 100 persons, not subscribers. It would be absurd to claim that there are twice as many mobile phones in the United Arab Emirates as there are people. This discrepancy arises because often people have more than one subscription, especially in developing countries. Also, phone companies carry prepaid subscriptions on their books that may not actually be in use.

4 Obviously some of these cities are not in the Global South, yet a small market for used and reconstituted telephones still exists in these locations.

5 For example, in China many low-income migrants do not have a permanent, or relatively stable, mailing address – a requirement for such contract-based services.

6 Content providers as well tailor their offerings for low-income individuals. In Mexico and parts of the Southwest and Western United States, regional Mexican music – the music of choice for many working-class Mexican immigrants and their children – is downloaded not onto laptops but onto mobile phones in the form of songs and ringtones (Kun, 2009). According to our interviews with employees at Kongzhong, a popular content provider in China, games, ringtones, horoscopes, and the like are targeted specifically at segments of the information have-less, in particular college students and young adult migrant workers.

7 Mobile operators are often the strongest force against innovative designs such as dual-SIM cards because the flexibility they offer may mean less profit. Also, in countries like China, where the state plays a central role in setting rules for the mobile phone industry, brand-name manufacturers need to spend dearly on licensing their products, which adds to the cost of production and reduces the companies' flexibility in the marketplace (see Wallis & Qiu, in press, for more details).

8 Although beyond the scope of this chapter, a “white label” phone manufacturing industry also exists that is somewhat similar to shanzhaiji production. For example, an operator, such as Vodafone, might wish to have a Vodafone branded handset that is not a Nokia, Motorola, etc. Thus, it turns to a “white label” manufacturer, often located in Asia, who specifies the technical elements of the handset and inexpensively produces it in batches of several hundred thousands or a million.

9 The tinkerer certainly differs from the accredited, manufacturer-certified repairperson who has an employer-provided workspace as well as codes, specialized tools, and proprietary software that facilitate more fundamental access to the workings of the device. The tinkerer in our context could have some of these elements but in a limited capacity.

10 Through using the International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number it is possible to determine at any given point the number of a particular type of handset on an operator's net.

11 The top models in Denmark include the Sony Ericsson W890i, W595, C702, and K660i and the Nokia 6220, 6500, E51, 6230i, 5310, and 5500.

12 The shrink-wrapped boxes for shanzhaiji are usually nothing but another layer of emulation. Individual shanzhaiji are usually sold without a box. However, for a small sum the buyer can get it in a “shrink-wrapped box” that looks professional. Unlike the “authentic” box, however, the shanzhaiji box is always assembled with the phone put inside at the moment of purchase. It therefore is not wrapped in transparent plastic. Because of this last-minute assembly, usually in a rather chaotic environment, often the handset model information outside the box and the user manual inside do not match the shanzhaiji that has been purchased.

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