The afterlife of mobile phones: mnemonic labour in China

The past fifty years (from 1973 onward) have witnessed a global acceleration in mobile technology development and significant transformations in individuals’ mobile and digital lives. Since the 1990s, China has emerged as an influential mobile market under the Chinese Economic Reform (1978-). While smartphones are now widely applied in contemporary China, the rapid pace of mobile technology variation and broader social changes due to the Reform have evoked a shared long for past media and motivated vernacular engagement with older devices.

This thesis explores how people remember mobile technologies from the past through a case study of a Chinese enthusiast group, where sellers and consumers circulate and engage with ‘old mobile phones’ – devices used before the advent of Apple and Android smartphones – in the second-hand marketplace. The study highlights how these devices’ cultural significance and economic value are reconstructed through second-hand transaction and consumption. Using a digital ethnography, the research involved online qualitative interviews with 13 sellers and 17 consumers, and participant observations of four live commerce channels on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), where sellers display and market these old mobile phones. The qualitative data generates insights into: how do sellers circulate old mobile phones through sourcing and selling? What symbolic meanings do consumers assign the devices? And how do consumers materially engage with them?

In addressing these questions, the thesis responds to the recent call for emphasising the economic underpinnings of remembering in the field of memory studies. The thesis contributes to this concern by proposing a theoretical framework of ‘mnemonic labour’, which positions remembering practices in the intersections of memory culture and memory economy, as well as material and immaterial forms of remembering. It highlights the multidimensionality of mnemonic labour and provides a theoretical tool for discerning memories in commercialised contexts. The framework sheds light on the active roles of sellers and consumers in constructing the value of old mobile phones, examining sellers’ economic labour of remembering – involving sourcing, transactional, relational, and informational labour, and consumers’ immaterial cultural labour (symbolic practices) and material cultural labour (material engagement) in shaping the devices’ cultural significance.

The study also reveals how past media contribute to the cultural construction of our everyday experience and provide symbolic resources for making sense of social changes. By employing the framework of mnemonic labour, it shifts from a micro-level analysis of individuals’ attachment to past media a meso-level examination of the dynamic mnemonic landscape, influenced by intertwined cultural and economic forces. Furthermore, the study broadens memory studies by focusing on mundane engagement with the past and exploring diverse affective modalities of remembering, moving beyond the heavy focus on traumatic memories.