“Em um relacionamento sério com o celular”: uma etnografia das práticas de consumo se smartphones por mulheres

Abstract

This dissertation is an ethnographic study about smartphones consumption by low-income women from different age groups in the city of Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul. Based on the ethnography, which I choose to use as a theoretical-methodological approach because of its qualitative and empirical character, with participant observation, interviews and duration of twelve months, I try to understand in this work which are and how the practices of smartphone consumption occur among women from the low-income groups from different districts of the city. I also try to investigate the social and cultural practices that are found in the relation between women and their smartphones, as well as verify if the cell phone brings possibilities of female empowerment. Understanding what women intend to communicate through the use of smartphones, which strategies they use, and to identify the relevance of mobile devices on a day-by-day basis and in the women surveyed lives are also part of the specific objectives of the work. Theoretically, this dissertation mainly addresses anthropological researches on cell phones and social media, studies on consumption and material culture and work on gender and technology. As research considerations it is possible to state that: smartphones have become everyday; there is a gender consumption of the devices, related to what is to be a woman, to motherhood, to sexuality, to love and to family relations; currently the smartphones move the jobs of the working women, mainly the autonomous ones; and these artifacts, through their various functionalities, enable low-income women to feel included in the digital world and to know new ways of sociability, communication and how to be a woman. Women are in a relationship with their cell phones.