Zoom into Lunch & Learn about ... Indigenizing Platforms: Perspectives on Facebook from Island Melanesia

Platform studies explores the explosive proliferation of Internet organizations such as Facebook and what it means for social, cultural, political and economic life today. This new field of inquiry has largely focused on the platformization of Euro-American and Asian lifeworlds while often ignoring especially indigenous voices and experiences. We challenge Platform Studies to be more inclusive accounting for experiences such as those that we encountered during our ethnography of digital transformations in Solomon Islands.

About us: Stephanie and Geoffrey Hobbis are ethnographers who have spent the last decade researching digital transformations in the southwestern Pacific. Stephanie, an Assistant Professor with the Sociology of Development and Change Group, Wageningen University, focuses on the everyday politics of infrastructural development. Geoffrey, an Assistant Professor with the Centre of Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, explores the emerging trends in indigenous digital cultures and societies. Their research can be found in journals such as Visual Anthropology, Development in Practice and New Media & Society and in Geoff's monograph, The Digitizing Family: An Ethnography of Melanesian Smartphones (Palgrave, 2020).