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A Village Goes Mobile
STUDIES IN MOBILE COMMUNICATION
Studies in Mobile Communication focuses on the social consequences of mobile communication in society.
Series Editors
Rich Ling, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Gerard Goggin, University of Sydney, Australia
Leopoldina Fortunati, Università di Udine, Italy
Haunting Hands: Mobile Media Practices and Loss
Kathleen M. Cumiskey and Larissa Hjorth
A Village Goes Mobile: Telephony, Mediation, and Social Change in Rural India
Sirpa Tenhunen
A Village Goes Mobile
Telephony, Mediation, and Social Change in Rural India
Sirpa Tenhunen
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction 1
Diffusion of mobile telephony in the Global South 2
Social consequences of mobile telephony 3
Cultural diversity of mobile telephony 5
The promise of mobiles for development 6
Challenging developmental optimism 9
Research foci 10
Ethnographic research in rural West Bengal 13
Overview of the book 17
2. Theorizing Phone Use Contexts and Mediation 22
Domestication: technology use in the home 22
Remediation: emergence of media from cultural contexts 23
Contexts in media- saturated environments 25
Mediatization paradigm 26
The contested notion of media logic 27
Cultural perspective on mediatization 29
Mediation and interdependency between information and communication technology–based and face- to- face communication 30
The materiality of media in open-ended cultural contexts 32
Conclusions 35
3. Why Mobile Phones Became Ubiquitous: Remediation and Socialities 37
Ethnographic fieldwork in caste neighborhoods 38
Connections 43
Mobile telephony and changing communication 45
Radio: untapped potential 54
The allure of visual media 57
The last gadget to arrive: the computer 59
Conclusions 61
4. Mobile Telephony, Economy, and Social Logistics 64
Mobile phones and the market 66
Differing benefits of mobile phones for microentrepreneurs 70
Phones and labor relationships 74
Benefits of phones for agriculture 76
Coordinating kinship 79
Coordinating and arranging health care over a mobile phone 82
Social logistics and cultural meanings 86
Conclusions 87
5. Mediating Gender: Mobile Phones and Women’s Agency 89
Co- constitution of gender and technology 90
Social change and generations 94
Gendered calling patterns 100
Changing gender and kinship relationships 105
Mediation of gendered space through mobile phones 109
Conclusions 117
6. Mediating Conflict: Mobile Telephony and Politics 120
Theorizing technologically enabled rebellion 123
Globalization and conflict 128
Activist phone use and local politics 130
Conclusions 140
7. Smartphones, Caste, and Intersectionalities 144
Changing village intersectionalities 150
Phone use barriers 156
Entertainment from memory chips 157
Internet browsing through personal phones 162
Conclusions 164
8. Conclusions 167
Analyzing mobile phone use in contexts 169
Gender and kinship: subtle changes 170
Economic benefits of mobile telephony 171
Political empowerment 172
Bridging the digital divide? 174
The promise of mobiles for development 175
References 179
Index 197
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book is a result of more than a decade of research in rural India, made possible by numerous organizations and people. Among the most important persons to thank are the villagers of Janta who welcomed me for extended periods of fieldwork. I began fieldwork in rural West Bengal in 1999 as a postdoctoral researcher with the Academy of Finland (Projects 42968 and 54485). The Helsinki Institute of Science and Technology supplied funding for preliminary fieldwork on mobile telephony around the time rural West Bengal received mobile phone network coverage. The same institute provided an excellent research environment for me to embark on technology studies. I am particularly thankful for Ilkka Arminen, Lucy Suchman, Johanna Uotinen, and Marja Vehviläinen, who gave valuable comments on my first papers on mobile telephony at institutional seminars. I performed most of the research for this book as an academy researcher (Academy of Finland) during 2007–2011 (Project 118356). I was able to continue fieldwork in 2012–2013, particularly on the use of smartphones, as the result of funding from a research project titled “Mobile Technology, Gender and Development in Africa, India, and Bangladesh” funded by the Academy of Finland and led by Laura Stark. Other project members included Perpetual Crentsil, Jukka Jouhki, and Sanna Tawah. I am grateful to Kakali Das, Asima Kundu, Rekha Kundu, Ashis Pal, Samik Pal, and Dana Sugu for their research assistance. I thank Ilse Evertse for language editing. I wrote this book at the Department of Social Research within the discipline of social and cultural anthropology at the University of Helsinki and the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä. I thank colleagues in both departments for many fruitful discussions. Students from my 2015 technology course at the University of Jyväskylä helped to hone my arguments. Thanks go as well to scholars at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences in Kolkata, with which I have been affiliated during my fieldwork in India. A University of Western Ontario fellowship
enabled me to write and present papers on my work in Canada in 2015. I am grateful to Bipasha Baruah and Dan Jorgensen as well as my lecture audiences at the University of Western Ontario for their insightful comments.
Invitations to lecture and present papers were crucial in helping me to develop my ideas, and I am grateful for all my hosts: Roger Jeffrey and Assa Doron invited me to the National University of Singapore, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan to Yale University, Ramaswami Mahalingam to the University of Michigan, Uwe Skoda to Århus University, Jo Tacchi and John Postill to RMIT University in Barcelona, Arild Ruud to the University of Oslo, and Nadja- Christina Schneider to Humboldt University of Berlin. I have also benefited greatly from comments and discussions at conferences during which I presented papers: International Communication Association, London, 2013; Mobile Telephony in the Developing World, Jyväskylä, 2013; NFU Conference, Oslo, 2012; Gendering Asia Network Workshop, Copenhagen, 2010; EASA Biennial Conference, Maynooth, Ireland, 2010; Globalizing South Asia Conference, Helsinki, 2010; Critical Internet Research Conference, Milwaukee, 2009; Gendering Asia Network Conference, Helsinki, 2009; All India Sociological Conference, Karnataka University, 2007; XXXII All-India Sociological Conference, Chennai, 2006; XVI ISA World Congress of Sociology, Durban, 2006; and Annual Conference of the Monash Asia Institute, Mumbai, 2004. I have also given lectures related to this book at the Helsinki School of Economics, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, NIAS, in Copenhagen and the Institute of Management in Kolkata. I thank the audiences for their comments.
Chapter 4 is derived, in part, from “Mobile Technology in the Village: ICTs, Culture, and Social Logistics in India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14, no. 3 [2008]: 515–34, http://onlinelibrary. wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9655.2008.00515.x/epdf). Chapter 5 is derived, in part, from “Mobile Telephony, Mediation, and Gender in Rural India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Contemporary South Asia 22, no. 2 [2014]: 157–70, http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09584935.2014.899981).
Chapter 6 is derived, in part, from “Culture, Conflict, and Translocal Communication: Mobile Technology and Politics in Rural West Bengal, India” (Sirpa Tenhunen, Ethnos 76, no. 3 [2011]: 398–420, http://www. tandfonline.com/10.1080/00141844.2011.580356). Chapter 7 is derived, in part, from “Gender, Intersectionality and Smartphones in Rural West Bengal” (Sirpa Tenhunen, in Transforming Gender in India, edited by Kenneth Bo Nielssen and Anne Waldrop, London: Anthem Press, 2014). Chapter portions are reprinted in revised form with permission from the publishers.
[ viii ] Acknowledgments
Special thanks go to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript as well as the founding editors of the Oxford University Press series on mobile communication—Gerard Goggin, Leopoldina Fortunati, and Richard Ling— whose comments helped me to improve the manuscript. I also thank the editors at Oxford University Press for their help throughout the editing process. Finally, I thank my partner, Juha Laitalainen, who has enriched my life and whose support and care have helped me to finish this book. I dedicate the book to the memory of my mother, Kaarina Tenhunen (1932–2011).
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
While much of the world was becoming media saturated around the turn of the millennium (1999–2000), I spent a year in an Indian village in West Bengal doing fieldwork on women’s political participation.1 Like numerous other village ethnographers who have worked in rural India, I faced the hurdles of living in a village without modern conveniences. It was a year without computers and phones, not to mention e-mail and the internet; occasionally, visitors from other villages conveyed the local news. When I left this village scene, which appeared quintessential, I had little idea that it was on the verge of changes. On my return in 2005, a mobile phone network covered the region. Although the phone density was initially low, the village had started to resemble an urban neighborhood crisscrossed by translocal networks. I could not help but be interested in the changes that had occurred and were still occurring.
This book is the result of my long- term ethnographic fieldwork (1999–2013) in the village of Janta in the Bankura district of the state of West Bengal, where I observed the appropriation of mobile telephony since the inhabitants started using phones. The book depicts how mobile telephones emerged as multidimensional objects that not only enable conversations, but also facilitate status aspirations, internet access, and entertainment practices. The book also explores how the multifaceted use of mobile phones has influenced economic, political, and social relationships and how these new social constellations relate to culture, social change, and development. I analyze social institutions as culturally constructed spheres tied to translocal processes that, nevertheless, have local meanings. Using a holistic ethnographic approach, I develop an understanding of how new
media mediate social processes within interrelated social spheres and local hierarchies. I delve into the social and cultural changes to examine agency, power relationships, and development issues: Who benefits from mobile telephony and how? Can people use mobile phones to help them achieve the goal of changing their lives, or does phone use merely amplify the existing social patterns and power relationships? How are people as mobile media users constrained by the different axes of their identity and social position and can they refashion their identities through this use? My observations of the changes that accompanied the appropriation of phones differ, ranging from optimistic to pessimistic scenarios of mobile telephony’s impact. Villagers told me that they had experienced their ability to use mobile phones as a major change; nevertheless, the phones could not, for instance, reduce poverty in the region immediately or drastically.
DIFFUSION OF MOBILE TELEPHONY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH
In Janta, the diffusion of mobile telephony corresponds to what has happened in much of India and the Global South during the past decade. In India, teledensity increased from less than 1 per 100 persons in 1991 to 81.82 per 100 persons in 2015 (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2012, 2016). Since mobile networks are cheaper to build than landline networks and since communication by phone does not require literacy, mobile phones have been increasingly adopted in regions with no extensive prior form of communication technology. In developing countries, mobile phone ownership nearly tripled between 2002 and 2006. By the end of 2010, mobile networks covered 90 percent of the world (International Telecommunication Union 2010). The worldwide number of mobile subscriptions grew from one billion in 2000 to over six billion in 2012, of which nearly five billion were in developing countries. Ownership of multiple subscriptions is becoming increasingly common; the number of mobile subscriptions is therefore likely to exceed the world population figure (World Bank 2012). The expansion of mobile telephony did not end with the overtaking landline telephony; it is now extending to internet access. Mobile broadband subscriptions exceeded the number of fixed connections in 2008, and much of this growth now occurs in developing countries (World Bank 2012, 11–30).
As mobile telephony has triumphed surprisingly rapidly in the developing world, mobile phones are now used in all spheres of life worldwide. Besides this book, three book-length works have so far examined a specific population’s mobile phone use on the basis of ethnographic research
in developing countries: Horst and Miller (2006) studied mobile phone use in Jamaica, Wallis (2013) among rural migrant women in China, and Archambault (2017) among youth in Mozambique. R. Jeffrey and Doron (2013) explored mobile telephony in India in its totality, drawing mainly on secondary sources, but also on ethnographic research in Varanasi, India, which includes policies, industries, and businesses.
This book focuses on phone use in a particular locality in rural India. This village in rural West Bengal offers a fruitful microcosmos to develop and broaden the scholarly discourse on mobile technology and digital media in general. Although my research was mainly carried out in one village, this book crosses village borders. In addition to the village’s social life, I observed people’s translocal networks. Moreover, while the village has unique features and by no means represents all of rural India, it exemplifies many of the forces and processes that people elsewhere share.
I will next elaborate my research approach and introduce my research questions, relating them to earlier research on mobile phone use. In just three decades, the scholarly discussion on mobile telephony has grown into a large, multidisciplinary field. I will therefore introduce the key issues of this scholarly debate from a social science and an anthropological point of view. My main focus will be on the scholarly discussions of mobile telephony in developing countries. However, since the lion’s share of the research on mobile telephony has focused on Western countries, I present this discussion briefly as a starting point that will help readers to understand and analyze the commonalities and differences in the cultural and social aspects of phone use.
SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES OF MOBILE TELEPHONY
As Goggin (2006, 39) notes, scholars of society and culture largely neglected the telephone2 until the 1990s. At this time, the role of telecommunication in social policy and the economy started to expand and the onset of mobile telephony increased scholars’ interest in studying telephony. The first studies in the 1990s focused on Nordic countries, reflecting the early start of mobile telephony in this region (N. Green and Haddon 2009). Roos (1985), who analyzed mobile phone use in Finland, was among the first to discuss how mobile phones help blur the boundaries between public and private, thus allowing people to become unwilling witnesses of each other’s private conversations in public places. Two pioneering edited volumes (Katz and Aakhus 2002; Brown, Green, and Harper 2002) exemplified the emerging academic discussion on mobile telephony, which centered on
the social consequences of mobile telephony in Western countries. Brown, Green, and Harper (2002, 4) sought to explore the meanings people give to their mobile technology, how they integrate the devices into their work and home lives, and how they interact with those devices and with other people through those devices. Katz and Aakhus (2002) based their central argument on the observation that, since the onset of mobile telephony, excuses for not being reachable no longer exist; mobile phones have created a condition for perpetual contact, which Katz and Aakhus identify as the contemporary Apparatgeist and a sociologic. Katz and Aakhus (301) state that “whenever the mobile phone chirps, it alters the traditional nature of public sphere and the traditional dynamics of private relationships.” These volumes identified such social consequences of mobile telephony as the improved coordination and flexibility of workplace and home activities and mobile telephony as a tool for surveillance; these themes have proved enduring research topics.
Ling and Yttri (2002) developed the concepts of micro and hypercoordination to describe how Norwegian adults and teens use mobile phones to coordinate their social activities. Microcoordination refers to how, with the help of mobile phones, it is possible to adjust agreements to meet as the need arises, instead of setting predefined meeting times. The authors use the term hypercoordination to denote how mobile phones, in addition to instrumental coordination, are employed in emotional and social communication. Hypercoordination was found to be especially important for Norwegian teens’ relationships with their peers. Teenagers elsewhere were also found to be among the heaviest users of mobile phones. Kasesniemi and Rautiainen (2002) describe how Finnish teenagers pioneered the development of texting as part of the youth culture. They conclude that teens use texting to construct an identity and to fine-tune their social relationships. Mobile phones were found to enable teenagers to overcome the spatial boundary of the home and to communicate with their peers without direct parental control in Italy, Japan, South Korea, and Germany as well (Fortunati 2001; Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2006; Yoon 2006a, 2006b; Höflich and Hartmann 2006).
Gergen (2002) elaborates on the concept of absent presence to explain how communication technologies have made translocal communication possible, thereby eroding face- to- face communication. He notes that for the classification of communication, mobile telephony is an enigma, since, unlike other media, it can strengthen the dyadic communication from person to person. Gergen also notes that mobile phones can potentially act as bridging devices across disparate enclaves of meaning. Ling and Campbell (2010) argue that mobile phones help blur the boundaries
of social spaces. As Fortunati (2002, 615) concludes, mobile phones transform social relationships and influence the meaning and experience of time and space. Castells (1996; Castells et al. 2007) extends the work of social analysts with regard to the consequences of mobile telephony by arguing that mobile phones enhance a specific value, namely individualism, and by maintaining that telephony helps favor individual projects and interests rather than societal norms. His thinking inherently associates the triumph of individualism with agency, while traditional social networks are seen as obstacles to agency.
CULTURAL DIVERSITY OF MOBILE TELEPHONY
The rapid worldwide spread of mobile technology has led to substantial variation in phone use, which has helped draw attention to the role of culture and meaning in its appropriation. Various studies (see, e.g., Stammler 2009; Ito, Okabe, and Matsuda 2006; Yoon 2006a, 2006b) have revealed that no single mobile phone culture has emerged. Much of the anthropological research on the use of new technologies emphasizes the way technologies tend to reinforce existing structures and, especially, adherence to kinship patterns (Horst and Miller 2006; Barendregt 2008; Archambault 2010; Doron 2012; Jouhki 2013; Lipset 2013). Horst and Miller’s (2006) pioneering ethnographic study of mobile phone usage in Jamaica differs from sociological studies through its emphasis on how particular cultures can foster different patterns of the use of similar technologies, as well as through its description of the appropriation of phones in Jamaica in relation to local practices and categories. The authors describe how mobile phones have fed into, and reinforced, local practices regarding the building of extensive networks that keep lines open to as many individuals as possible. By emphasizing local meanings, these studies concur with those of Miller and Slater (2000) that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are media continuous with and embedded in other social spaces. Instead of acting as a radical change agent, new media are perceived as means of cultural reproduction.
Nevertheless, there is a growing interdisciplinary interest in how mobile telephony growth induces change and impacts development in the Global South.3 At the turn of the millennium, the discourse on ICTs for development had envisaged that access to the internet and computers would induce development in the Global South. The ideas that emerged about the empowering capacities of computers and mobile telephony echoed the debates of media and communication scholars on the digital
divide. The digital divide concept, which surfaced in the 1990s, referred to the unequal access and usage of digital technologies. Castells’s (2001, 269) argument that not having access to the internet is tantamount to marginalization in the global, networked system summarized the digital divide idea well. Discourses in ICTs for development have profoundly influenced national development strategies. In India, the government’s National e-Governance Plan endeavored to provide all government services at computer kiosks in 2006, and the Modi government introduced the Digital India Plan with similar but more comprehensive goals in 2015 (Kapoor 2015). However, the National e-Governance Plan, along with other massive investments in computer-based development initiatives, has tended to fail to deliver on its promises. Sreekumar and RivieraSanchez (2008) note that although there are not many substantive studies on the impact of ICTs for development projects, anecdotal evidence of their success often crumbles when scrutinized critically. According to Sreekumar and Riviera- Sanchez, a typical success story refers to farmers who, with the help of computers, are able to access market prices and improve their incomes and lives. However, on closer examination, schemes like this are usually only useful for a few wealthy farmers with storing facilities, who do not depend on wholesalers or money lenders for credit to cover the costs of cultivation. For instance, Cecchini and Raina’s (2002) research in rural India (Maharashtra) shows that the elites were the main users of public computers.
Mobile phones are more affordable than computers and do not require a constant source of electricity. Moreover, mobile phone users do not need much technological knowledge—even those who are illiterate can talk over the phone. Consequently, during the past two decades, mobile phones have emerged as the first extensive electronic communication system in most parts of the developing world. In 2015, 92 percent of the people in developing countries had mobile phone subscriptions, whereas only 34 percent of households in developing countries had internet access (International Telecommunication Union 2015). The rapid spread of mobile telephony revived many of the hopes for development raised by the discourse on ICTs for development and gave rise to the mobiles for development discourse, which addresses the use of mobile technologies in global development strategies.
THE PROMISE OF MOBILES FOR DEVELOPMENT
In India, the rapid growth in phone density coincided with broader economic reforms. A similar deregulation of the telecommunications
sector, which opened telephony to private operators, has accompanied the growth of mobile telephony in most parts of the Global South. Mobile telephony expansion is thus often celebrated as a showcase example of how neoliberal globalization can promote development and reduce poverty, and mobile phone users in developing countries have been depicted as iconic figures signifying change and progress. In turn, multinational companies have become infrastructure builders and, hence, initiators of development policies, which had earlier been considered the purview of governments (Horst 2013). In his review of mobile telephony and development literature, J. Donner (2008a) distinguishes three strands of the discussion: scholarly works on the factors that determine the diffusion of mobile phones in developing countries, studies on the impact of mobile phones on development, and studies on how users actively choose to use their phones. Of these three strands, I discuss the latter two.
Most social scientists are critical of technological determinism, which views technical innovation, or technology in general, as the sole or prime cause of change in society. Nevertheless, economists have been interested in exploring the role of mobile telephony in economic development (Bayes, von Braun, and Akhter 1999; Jensen 2007; Samuel, Shah, and Hadingham 2005; Waverman, Meschi, and Fuss 2005; Esselaar et al. 2007). Jensen’s (2007) longitudinal study of sardine prices at various landing ports in northern Kerala, India, over five years has become one of the most cited examples of the economic benefits of mobile phones. Jensen found that the arrival of mobiles brought significant and immediate reductions in the price variability and in the amount of waste in Kerala’s fishing system. These findings have been generalized to other contexts and applied to the development of mobile technology–based applications that convey price information to small- scale entrepreneurs in the Global South. Popular journals like the Economist have regularly reported about these business benefits. Like the global development narrative used to depict a farmer who used a computer for economic activities, the narrative now portrays a successful entrepreneur who uses a mobile phone to increase business profits.
One crucial economic role of mobile telephony has been money transfer by low-income people. By 2012, mobile money transfer systems had more than forty million users. The largest of these is M-Pesa, which began in Kenya and now operates in six countries. In 2011, twenty million users transferred $500 million per month through M-Pesa (World Bank 2012). Morawczynski (2009) found that the M-Pesa application was utilized for the cultivation of livelihood strategies, which helped residents cope
with and recover from economic crises. It was used for the solicitation and accumulation of financial assets and to maintain social networks. Although the mere calling and texting functions of phones have given users developmental benefits, an increasing number of studies (World Bank 2012) have focused on the developmental applications of mobile technology, such as M-Pesa, which users must download on their phones. Such applications allow users to receive information or services via the internet or text messages. Based on examples from Kenya, India, and Ecuador, Rea et al. (2017) describe how mobile money transfer systems can become rails on which other financial products such as business- toperson and government- to-person payment channels can emerge and ride in regulatory contexts.
A World Bank (2012) report on the developmental applications of mobile telephony starts with the assumption that mobile communications offer major opportunities to advance human development and presents various successful mobile technology developmental applications. Nevertheless, the report’s overall stance toward M-development (the use of mobile technologies in global development strategies) combines technological optimism with skepticism. The report acknowledges that most of the successful projects it mentions are small- scale undertakings. It laments the lack of a viable business model for developmental applications of mobile technology and provides recommendations. The authors emphasize the role of the government as a regulator; in addition, they recommend careful consideration of the local context and the existing information systems into which new information services must be integrated before any M-development applications can be implemented.
The main challenges for developmental applications of mobile telephony in low-income countries are to continue delivering services once initial funding of the pilot projects ends and to scale up or replicate effective models in large- scale implementations. Even the mobile money industry has only achieved significant scale in a handful of countries, despite M-Pesa’s success in Kenya (World Bank 2012, 66). The low-income people targeted by educational services often choose to spend their income on other, more urgent, priorities instead of educational text messages. Nevertheless, pilot cases have proved that it is possible to use mobile technology to set up electronic marketplaces, banking systems, and labor banks, as well as to deliver information on education, health issues, and women’s concerns via phone. The technology exists, but the problem is whether the various telemarket, government, service provider, nongovernmental organization, and industry stakeholders can cooperate to provide affordable developmental applications in sustainable ways.
Ethnographic studies of mobile telephony have vigorously challenged the technological determinism and optimism inherent in the M-development discourses. Horst and Miller (2006) observed that phones rarely helped people in Jamaica start new businesses; instead, Jamaicans used phones to solicit economic help, which burdens the well-being of those from whom assistance is frequently sought. Archambault (2011, 2017) found that, in Mozambique, young people’s opportunities to use phones for development purposes are limited because of a lack of jobs and business opportunities. She broaches the idea that the link between ICTs and development might be based on wishful thinking. By studying phone users’ positionality in various contexts in urban China, Wallis (2013) shed light on the reasons that marginalized workers’ use of mobile phones did not necessarily lead to a better income, a better job, or more autonomy. Phone use may also be detrimental as in a Dar es Salaam slum, where mobile phones afforded minors the ability to conceal their sexual behavior from their careers, which is a key element in the intergenerational transmission of female poverty through early pregnancy and marriage (Stark 2013). Stark also demonstrates that teenagers aiming to gain social capital with the help of mobile phones often increase their risk of HIV infection and contribute to the fragility of family bonds. Tawah (2013) points out that, although Cameroon traders receive support from their mobile phone use, individual traders were still stuck in poverty. These traders continued to cope as before, although they now have phones to coordinate their trade, which has increased their business costs. Tawah concludes that social and economic forces, such as the lack of capital, harsh market competition, vulnerability, and the gender hierarchies in Cameroonian society, create barriers that cannot be tackled simply with the use of phones. Ethnographic studies demonstrate that impact studies have tended not to account for the many factors other than mobile telephony that influence the well-being of phone users. For instance, mobile telephony is likely to strengthen economic growth in locations where a sizeable market demand emerged prior to its onset.
Initially, interest in economic impacts dominated the M-development debate. However, most ethnographic studies on mobile telephony in the Global South indicate that people tend to largely use their phones for purposes other than mere narrow economic ones (J. Donner 2009; Horst and Miller 2006; Sey 2011; Archambault 2011, 2017; Watson and Duffield 2016). Recent research on mobile telephony has sought to develop a nuanced understanding of the role that mobile technology plays in development by noting the range of benefits that users gain from mobile
phones. Burrell (2014) criticizes the overt importance assigned to mobile phones as improving access to market information. For instance, the utility of phones led to lively trade networks among market women in Ghana, instead of them simply acquiring or exchanging information impersonally. Burrell notes that price is often an important factor in decision making, but it is just one of several variables such as long-term relationships with trade partners and individual attitudes toward risk. Oreglia (2014) discovered unlikely ICT users in rural China, where older women had learned the basics of mobile phone and computer use. These women pursued their goals of maintaining relationships and accessing online entertainment after receiving training from their children, through collaboration and knowledge sharing with their peers, and through frequent reliance on other people to perform specific actions. Ling and Horst (2011) conclude that ethnographic studies do not indicate that mobile phones can bring about revolutionary changes in daily life, but do show that phones help people adjust to and reshape existing activities. The consequences of mobile telephony depend on how users choose to use them, as well as on the terms that mobile services are offered to their users. Nevertheless, this does not mean that mobile technology plays no role in social change or that some changes could be experienced positively.
RESEARCH FOCI
This study explores and analyzes the incremental and drastic changes I witnessed in Janta over the course of the appropriation of mobile phones. Indeed, this research project continued longer than I had planned, because each visit to the village revealed more unexpected changes relating to new aspects of mobile phone use. I argue that mobile telephony contributes to social change and development by helping to diversify the cultural contexts of social interaction. This book develops a research strategy to understand the role of new media in development by exploring how different forms of mediations interact as part of the local hierarchies when a powerful new medium is appropriated. The book unveils mobile phone use as a multidimensional process with diverse impacts by exploring how media- saturated forms of interaction relate to preexisting contexts by either clashing or merging with them.
Throughout the book, I discuss mobile phone use in relation to ongoing social changes in rural West Bengal. I thereby answer Postill’s (2012) call to understand the role of media in social change by undertaking diachronic ethnography that examines the actual changes instead of describing the
ethnographic present. In rural West Bengal, phones were adopted not by a stagnant society, but by a changing rural society and culture influenced by broad processes, such as political reforms, the introduction of new agricultural methods, economic liberalization policies, and the women’s movement. These processes are not limited to the village, but are nevertheless locally articulated. The evolving features of mobile phones and mobile phone–based services are one source of change. Technological change is not an independent factor that impacts society from the outside; instead, technology and society are mutual components (MacKenzie and Wajcman 1985, 23). Technologies emerge through choice and negotiations between social groups; they are designed in the interest of a particular social group and against the interest of others (Webster 1995). Phone density in rural India has risen as a result of state efforts to expand the networks and the competition between service providers and phone manufacturers across the rural market, which has led to a decrease in handset prices and to tariff reductions. State and multinational companies play central roles in shaping the mobile market’s recent expansion into new regions. Governments can enable the business of private service providers by means of deregulation and play a role by ensuring that new technologies also benefit the poorest strata of society. Indeed, the Indian state has successfully contributed to the growth of the telecommunications industry through government deregulation and reregulation (Singhal and Rogers 2001; R. Jeffrey and Doron 2012).
The theoretical framework of this book draws from three, largely separate, scholarly discourses: media anthropology, mediatization/mediation scholarship, and development research. Since the 1990s, when the critical school of anthropologists suggested that anthropology should be liberated from the space mapped by the development encounter, the concept of development has had a troubled relationship with anthropology. The work of Escobar (1995), who views development as the West’s convenient “discovery” of poverty in the Third World to reassert its moral and cultural superiority in supposedly postcolonial times, embodies this critical school of thought. This criticism views development as a monolithic and uniform enterprise heavily controlled from the top. As Slater (2013) notes, critiques of development have tended to mirror the grand narratives of those they critique. From the viewpoint of the critical school, ICTs could be interpreted as yet another technological fix and modernist mythology that promise accelerated growth. I concur with Wajcman (2002), who argues that ICTs do not offer simple technological fixes for social problems, but are part of social changes through the ways technologies are socially produced and used. My understanding of development follows recent anthropological
formulations that show that development ideas are partial and heterogeneous. Slater (2013) argues that development is about strategic thinking and acting on the basis of provisional and contingent values and knowledge, which all discourses and practices seeking to understand and act on the future are. I also build on the work of Nussbaum (2000) and Sen (1999), who take capabilities into consideration, that is, what people are effectively able to do, instead of merely measuring wealth and poverty levels. I furthermore draw on the work of Sen (1999), who views development ideas as originating from contemporary local and global debates. Appadurai (2004, 2013) has availed of Sen’s notions by coining the term the capacity to aspire. He (2004, 2013) views the limited capacity to form conjectures and refutations about the future as a hallmark of poverty. Hence, the capacity to aspire can be regarded as a key element for the empowerment of the poor.
To frame my aim in anthropological terms, I am interested in how mobile telephony influences and draws from local social, cultural, and political processes as cultural practices and enables agency. The anthropology of media emerged in the 1980s and 1990s during a historical conjuncture when the reflexive turn challenged preexisting paradigms, thus enabling new research foci (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002). The discipline of anthropology had evolved as the study of non-Western cultures, whereas media are identified with Western modernity; consequently, anthropologists developed an interest in studying media relatively late. When they turned to studying media, anthropologists explored the topic as integrated into communities as parts of nations and states and as transnational networks. They have often challenged the work of communication scholars and sociologists by emphasizing the persistence of difference and the importance of locality (Ginsburg, Abu-Lughod, and Larkin 2002, 25). Anthropologists were also latecomers to the study of internet-based sociality and culture. Miller and Slater’s (2000) study of internet use in Trinidad was one of the first ethnographic studies of digital media to challenge the idea that people’s online lives and experiences could be divorced from their offline lives, as proposed by Rheingold’s (1993) virtual community concept. Horst and Miller (2006), who carried out the first ethnographic research on mobile telephony, argue that the use of mobile phones in Jamaica led to the reinforcement of preexisting cultural practices, instead of helping to privilege individual projects and interests rather than the norms of society, as Castells suggests (1996; Castells et al. 2007).
I follow media anthropologists in exploring local meanings and understandings of mobile telephony. At the same time, I am interested in exploring the intertwining of change and continuity. Issues of media
and change have been the key focus of the recent scholarly debate on mediatization/mediation. Mediatization refers to the interrelation between the change in media communication and the change in culture and society (Hepp and Krotz 2014, 3). My endeavor has many aspects of the mediatization paradigm in common, but there are also crucial differences. To discuss how this book draws from and contributes to the mediatization debate, I will introduce this broad and topical scholarly debate in Chapter 2 and build my theoretical approach.
ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH IN RURAL WEST BENGAL
Janta is a multicaste village with 2,441 inhabitants (Census of India 2011a) in the Bankura district of West Bengal in India (Figs. 1.1. and 1.2). Agriculture is the main livelihood, although it has become less sustainable in the past decade, and young men increasingly work in cities in other parts of India. West Bengal, which lies in the eastern part of India, is considered a middle-income state in India. Unlike its neighboring states, it is not among the poorest states of India. Poverty reduction in West Bengal, largely attributed to land reform, was among the fastest in India between 1970 and 2000 (Planning Commission 2012). West Bengal has not fared as well as other parts of India in terms of infrastructure and education and health care, however.
My research materials from this village and its translocal connections span more than a decade, illuminating diverse spheres of the social life and providing a unique scope for understanding the role of technology in social and cultural change. I speak Bengali fluently, which has facilitated my interaction with the villagers. I made several fieldwork trips to the area to study the use of mobile telephony, which has made it possible to explore
Figure 1.1: Most of the ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in the village of Janta. (Photo by author.)
the different phases of mobile technology appropriation, from shared village phones in 2005 to when the villagers started using smartphones in 2012. The book is based on eleven months of ethnographic fieldwork including interviews, observation, and survey data on the use of mobile phones in rural West Bengal: two months in 2005, five months in 2007–8, two months in 2010, and two months in 2012–13.
I gained some of the greatest insights into the role of mobile phone use by interacting and chatting with the villagers and by noting my observations in my fieldwork diary. I began my research on mobile telephony in 2005 by
Janta, West Bengal
Figure 1.2: Location of Janta in India.
interviewing the first ten phone owners in the village. My initial interview questions delved into phone owners’ motivations to buy the phone, patterns of phone use, and the perceived benefits and possible disadvantages of the phones. I kept my interview questions loosely structured to explore unanticipated aspects of emerging phone use. I retained the questions I formulated for my first interviews as part of subsequent interviews but I added new questions on such themes as phone use for political action, gender relationships, economic activities, and the use of smartphone applications in the course of observing new facets of phone use.
Initially, I had little success in eliciting long conversations about mobile telephony. I consider these difficulties somewhat typical for ethnographic fieldwork and interviews—ethnographers usually increase their understanding of the cultural universe under study, gradually discovering the key questions, the themes, and their meanings in the course of the research process. These initial hurdles also had to do with the newness of phones— the ten persons I interviewed in 2005 had purchased their phones just one or two months before the interviews; consequently, they had not yet gained much experience with mobile phone use. Moreover, both phone ownership and use were still rare and hence not a part of everyday life I could easily observe. To gain a deeper understanding of phone use than was possible with the help of interviews or observation at the time, I filmed one hundred phone calls from communal phones in the village shops and discussed these calls with the callers.4 The filming captured phone use as a part of ongoing social situations, while discussions with the phone users helped me understand the broader context of calls. In retrospect, the method I developed resembles sensory ethnography (Pink 2009) in that I used filming to elicit discussions by asking people to reflect on their largely taken- forgranted everyday activities. In 2007–2008, I again interviewed all phone owners of the village. The distribution of interviews reflected mobile phone ownership in the village at the time of the interviews: of 72 interviews, 60 took place in the Tili caste (upper- caste) neighborhood. In addition, I interviewed 2 Tati, 2 Chasa, 6 Brahmin, and 2 Bagdi caste persons. Most of the people I interviewed were men since men were usually considered the primary phone owners in a household. However, during each interview, I asked questions about the phone use of other family members. When other household members and especially women were present, I also asked questions directly of them. I carried out a few interviews in adjacent villages, as well as in nearby towns and cities, to specifically understand translocal political communication. When I returned to the village in 2012, phone ownership had become ubiquitous, which, for the first time, made it possible to interview several women and scheduled caste (low- caste)
