After the begging of 21st century, cultural anthropologists who conduct study of pastoral society have been focusing on impacts of modern communication technology such as cellular phone, of which pastoralists make use. In Mongolia a boom of mining industry brought about a heavy investment into infrastructure development such as paved road and coverage of cellular phone. At the same time, it caused re-emergence of market function of cities and pastoralists who kept mobile lifestyle was more and more involved with market economy, in which they purchased more commodities such as solar generator, TV set, cellular phone, and private car for instance, relying on selling livestock products. Under such circumstance, Mongolian pasture was divided into below two types; suburban pasture that can be characterized by sales of dairy products which requires short-time delivery and remote pasture that can be characterized by large-scale livestock flock owned by a pastoralist household. Because dairy products can easily go bad during transportation, only pastoralists in suburban pasture can sell it, making use of mobile media like Facebook to receive orders from customers and paved roads for delivery to city dwellers. On the other hand, pastoralists in remote pasture just rely on sales of livestock for meat production and cashmere to secure cash income, so relatively large number of livestock is needed, as sales of livestock make its decrease directly. According to the presenter’s calculation, about 90% of the whole pasture in Mongolia belonged to remote pasture before the COVID-19 pandemic. During the pandemic, as they had to refrain from face-to-face communication, importance of mobile media increased more in suburban pasture with cellular phone coverage. Although most area of remote pasture was out of service, a similar trend can be found according to case study data in post pandemic days.
