By Georgiana Murariu and Laura Haapio-Kirk

In this blog post, we present the fifth comic in our ASSA comics series, set in rural Ireland.

The comic below highlights the concept of ‘perpetual opportunism’, which is one of the discoveries of our project, showing how smartphones can facilitate a profound reorientation to the world around us. It is so simple to take a picture, send a message or look something up, that having a more opportunistic approach to the possibilities that surround us, seems to follow naturally. This can, however, also create the feeling that one is ‘always on’, and always available to the opportunism of others.

Set in a small Irish town in Daniel Miller’s field site, this comic features an older woman who wants to enjoy some phone-free time on her walk – however, she quickly realises that having her smartphone with her ensures she is able to plan for future activities such going to a concert. In chapter 5 (see page 105) of the Global Smartphone book, the ASSA team discuss the notion of changes to the practice of photography as a result of smartphone ownership – photographing an event poster falls under the category of ‘functional photography’, which we might recognise as routinely taking photos of things such as flyers and notice boards for the purpose of recording and retaining information.

For the creation of this particular comic, the main discussion points were around how to set the comic in Ireland (which we achieved by using photographs from the fieldsite as a guide to the style of houses ), as well as character representation. We also discussed what the best examples of ‘perpetual opportunism’ would be and how to illustrate them – we settled on outsourcing human memory to the smartphone (i.e. taking a photo of the concert poster to remember later), receiving a notification from the family chat group to buy milk and taking the opportunity to catch up on the news (which flows in real-time) while queueing in the shop – three examples of the way in which the opportunism that smartphones offer changes our relationship to location and transport.

We hope you enjoy this latest installment, and invite you to view the previous comics set in Italy, Japan, Uganda, and Chile.