Mattering the world of a mobile phone app : an anthropological study of design decision-making in a South African corporate context

Abstract

How users integrate mobile phones and their apps into their lives is well-documented in scholarly literature (Kusimba, 2021; Miller et al., 2021), but their design and construction processes are understudied. As mobile apps increasingly become integral in human interactions globally, I suggest that an ethnographic examination of the processes and relations of their production in one corporate contact in South Africa is essential in ‘mattering’ and ‘worlding’ (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) apps. Furthermore, as the Global South is often absent in emerging discourse about technology’s construction (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2012), this study seeks to contribute to understandings of app development in the Global South. The inequitable underpinnings of both the labour involved in creating technologies (Ashworth, 2022) and in how technologies are deployed to users have recently become controversial, evident in Couldry and Meijas’ (2019) arguments about datafication and data colonialism. In this dissertation, I suggest that the political economy tradition of exposé anthropology in S.A. is a useful starting point for exploring the power relations in data colonialism. Specifically, Spiegel’s (2005) call for exposé anthropology to progress from exposing relations of power and exploitation under colonialism and Apartheid to embracing an ethics of care, enabled by the theoretical developments on “thinking with care”, allows me to deploy Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) and others to trace the harmonious and non-harmonious relations in the work of building an app in South Africa. In analysing the data I made through participant observation in this corporate, office environment from mid-February to mid-May 2022, which focused not on users and their exploitation but on design decision-making as member of the Design Team, I reformulate Latour’s “network” towards Ingold’s (2013) “meshwork” to position human and non-human actors involved in the making of apps. Specifically, I take ideas from more-than-human anthropology and Science and Technology Studies to depict Jira – a software task allocation system deploying ‘agile methodologies’ in the company that was the field site – as both a focal actor in the meshwork (Silva, 2019) and a companion (Haraway, 2003), showing the way in which translations (Silva, 2019) and boundaries (Bowker & Star, 2000; Sachs, 1995) feature in decision-making processes and the worlds of apps.