Cowboys and Aliens: Crises of Visual Information in the Digitalizing Lau Lagoon
Résumé
The people of the Lau Lagoon in North East Malaita adopted mobile phones, including smart phones, en masse between 2012 and 2014. While telephonic activity has been restricted due to prohibitively high operational costs these devices have resulted in an explosion of visual media production and consumption, jpegs, gifs and mp4s or images both still and moving. This presentation focuses on the side of consumption and on a comparative analysis of the locally celebrated genre of Western, or cowboy, movies versus the irritatingly alien genre of science fiction, or new technology movies. It explores a crisis of confidence, the renegotiation of ‘fact and fiction’ in response to the Lau Lagoon’s sudden exposure to global visual media.