Paper short abstract:

The smartphone is unprecedented as an anthropomorphic machine based on intimacy and personalisation. Ethnographic study of this `smart from below' process in its wider social and cultural context is perhaps the best way to establish what the smartphone has now become.

Paper long abstract:

This paper suggests that the smartphone provides an important alternative to robotics in understanding the development of the anthropomorphic machine. Robotics is more superficial starting from appearance. The smartphone, by contrast, is unprecedented in creating anthropomorphism through intimacy to become an aspect of persons. While much of the focus upon algorithms and Artificial Intelligence concerns data extraction, for most people their current impact has been enhancing the potential for personalisation, socialization and the dynamic relationship between smartphone and user.

Based on our ethnographic study of smartphones in nine countries, we also show how understanding smartphones is more than simply addressing the culture of Apps. The smartphone presents an ecology of Apps based on the specific configurations of the individual user. These can only be understood through the ethnographic method of holistic contextualisation, in which it is the linkage with all aspects of offline life, as much as the internal organisation of the phone, which creates what the smartphone now is. This creates a particular role for anthropologists who are well placed to tackle these fundamental questions about smartphones because they can gain access to this intimate and mainly private configuration and processes of personalisation within their social and cultural contexts. Using Pype's concept of `Smart from Below' we provide Illustrations showing how ordinary users create smartphones. The evidence comes from our Palestinian, Irish and other fieldsites within the ASSA project