Mobile technology appropriation in a distant mirror: Baroquization, creolization, and cannibalism

What is it about?

As soon as people start using a new technology, they begin to change it and make it their own. This appropriation gives them some control over the technology, its uses, and the distribution of its benefits. The resulting creative tension yields innovation: through appropriation, users shape product evolution. To understand appropriation in its various forms, we draw insights from the history of Latin American cultures and their rich tradition of appropriating cultural objects, people and ideas from abroad. From Cuba and Mexico’s baroque, to Martinique’s creolization and the cannibalism that inspired Brazil’s tropicalismo movement, each represents a distinct way to appropriate alien element and negotiate power through creative practice.

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Why is it important?

The power negotiation and experimentation that characterizes technological appropriation is uniquely innovative. Appropriation challenges the initial power structure embedded in a technology, resulting in new practices and new technology implementations. Technology providers –device-makers or service providers—then face an important choice. They can choose to suppress the resulting innovation if they find it too antagonistic to their business or political goals. Or they can choose to leverage appropriation, learn from it, and embed new ideas into successive generations of their products and service. The path they chose matters to the subsequent technological trajectory.