The Use of Private Mobile Phones at War: Accounts From the Donbas Conflict
Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapter › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review
Standard
The Use of Private Mobile Phones at War : Accounts From the Donbas Conflict. / Shklovski, Irina; Wulf, Volker.
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems . Association for Computing Machinery, 2018. Paper No. 386.Research output: Conference Article in Proceeding or Book/Report chapter › Article in proceedings › Research › peer-review
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Author
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - GEN
T1 - The Use of Private Mobile Phones at War
T2 - Accounts From the Donbas Conflict
AU - Shklovski, Irina
AU - Wulf, Volker
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Studying technology use in unstable and life-threatening conditions can help highlight assumptions of use built into technologies and foreground contradictions in the design of devices and services. This paper provides an account of how soldiers, volunteers, and civilians use mobile technologies in wartime, reporting on fieldwork conducted in Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine with people close to or participating directly in the armed conflict in the Donbas region. We document how private mobile phones and computers became a crucial but ambiguous infrastructure despite their lack of durability in extreme conditions of a military conflict, and their government and military surveillance potential. Our participants rely on a combination of myths and significant technical knowledge to negotiate the possibilities mobile technologies offer and the life-threatening reality of enemy surveillance they engender. We consider the problems of always-on, always-connected devices under conditions of war and surveillance and our responsibilities as HCI practitioners in the design of social technologies.
AB - Studying technology use in unstable and life-threatening conditions can help highlight assumptions of use built into technologies and foreground contradictions in the design of devices and services. This paper provides an account of how soldiers, volunteers, and civilians use mobile technologies in wartime, reporting on fieldwork conducted in Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine with people close to or participating directly in the armed conflict in the Donbas region. We document how private mobile phones and computers became a crucial but ambiguous infrastructure despite their lack of durability in extreme conditions of a military conflict, and their government and military surveillance potential. Our participants rely on a combination of myths and significant technical knowledge to negotiate the possibilities mobile technologies offer and the life-threatening reality of enemy surveillance they engender. We consider the problems of always-on, always-connected devices under conditions of war and surveillance and our responsibilities as HCI practitioners in the design of social technologies.
KW - political conflict
KW - war
KW - mobile technologies
KW - cscw
KW - ukraine
U2 - 10.1145/3173574.3173960
DO - 10.1145/3173574.3173960
M3 - Article in proceedings
BT - Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
ER -
ID: 83261742