Cell Phone Nation: How Mobile Phones Have Revolutionized Business, Politics and Ordinary Life in India (41 page)

Most recycling was done in informal industries located at the margins of society on the outskirts of metropolises and towns. NGOs reported that places such as the settlement of Seelampur on the northeast outskirts of Delhi were becoming centres where e-waste was collected, segregated and heated to extract precious metals—gold, silver, copper and others. Many working in the informal e-waste market belonged to disadvantaged Muslim communities. Conditions were bleak:

The trucks are coming in honking and rattling with old computers, kids are playing gali [alley] cricket with computer monitors as wickets, women are boiling pots full of computer parts, children sitting on piles of keyboards are watching a Bollywood film. The streets are filled with entangled wires, destroyed computers, keyboards and cell phones. A scene from a futuristic dystopia? This is the hidden place where people wake up every morning to sort through the electronic trash of the world.
¹⁴

Technical work did not enjoy the dignity found in the clinical environment of places such as Nokia Care or even among street-side repair-walas. Those who worked in the e-waste recycling industry were themselves considered the ‘refuse of society’, engaged in a stigmatised activity, and for Hindus, compounded by views about pollution and waste, caste relations and practices of exchange shaped by a Hindu cosmological order.
¹⁵
This side of consumer society was based on existing ideologies and recycling practices, which emphasised recovery and reuse. The
kabaadiwala
—the junk dealer who came to your door—was a long-standing feature of Indian life. But the places where e-waste was collected and dealt with were sites of disorder, destitution and social fragmentation.
¹⁶
(See
Illus. 37
and
38
).

Electronic
waste will proliferate as more and more Indians use and discard mobile phones and other gadgetry. Rapid technological advance in the production of mobile phones and electronic goods means that the composition of e-waste will change constantly. The politics of waste leads researchers to ponder the roles that waste materials, wasting practices and ‘waste actors’ play in maintaining social order. Understanding the processes, dangers and lessons of this waste-work—collection, dismantling, processing, selling—merits another book.

Social networks

Of the puzzles that the mobile phone sets, perhaps the most nagging is the question of what it does to the way people interact—how they conduct their exchanges with others and organise their lives. To what extent do expectations and practices fundamentally change?

The earliest scholarly studies were struck by the dilemma that mobile phones posed for the industrial societies in which they first spread. ‘I am’, Rich Ling mused as he placed an order for a book from the Amazon company,

a data point in a dispersed and unconnected aggregate of individuals who have the same profile according to Amazon. I will never meet these others. Even if I were to meet them, we would not likely hit it off socially …
¹⁷

Yet for some
purposes he and they were now an entity. Ling struggled to explain the paradox. A business—Amazon—had been able to club him for commercial purposes with scores of people from all over the world whom he would never meet. He had been bundled into a mass, yet at the same time, the company treated him as an individual: referred to him by name, assembled his purchase order precisely and sent it to his address. All this happened without his having to be physically part of a group.
¹⁸
‘Networked individualism’ was a term put into use by Manuel Castells and Barry Wellman at the beginning of the twenty-first century to try to capture the experiences that mobile telecommunications brought into the lives of increasing numbers of people. Castells and his associates wrote of ‘an extraordinary strengthening of the culture of individualism’ with the result that ‘individualism rather than mobility is the defining social trend of the mobile society’.
¹⁹
A mobile phone owed its power and popularity to the autonomy it gave its owner—the chance to be alone with one other person—yet at the same time, to be in touch with people one might never see and across distances that previously would have been impossible to traverse.

Barry Wellman tried to conceptualise what was happening to societies as individual devices for communicating—e.g., mobile phones—came into the hands of larger and larger numbers of people. Most people, he suggested, once lived in ‘little boxes’—face-to-face communities. Over time, as communications developed, many of them came to live in an environment shaped by the forces of ‘glocalization’. People continued to live in ‘little boxes’ but added to their boxes distant connections, maintained by railways, steamships, telegraphs, telephones and aeroplanes. With the coming of global electronic communication, increasing numbers came to live in an environment of ‘networked individualism’, in which they were connected to hosts of people all over the world and at the same time could ignore their physical next-door neighbours as never before.
²⁰

Did this make people’s lives different? Of course it did. But like the unhappy family in
Anna Karenina
, countries and cultures experienced difference in their own ways. In India, a lax democratic state imposed only sporadic control over basic mobile telephony. Most ordinary people could use the phone without great fear of being monitored and punished by the state. The state of course did not like this, and security officials and government departments sought ways to monitor activity deemed to be illegal and subversive.
²¹

Violation of social norms, on the other hand, sometimes brought more rapid and targeted reprisals. India had many customs that the user of a mobile phone could become entangled with—rules and practices that were often more rigid than elsewhere. Relations between men and women, for example, were more inhibited than in much of Europe, Africa, China or North America. Everywhere in the world, mobile phones had the potential to disrupt such relations, but in India, it generated unprecedented (and often unanticipated) challenges to values, norms and practices. The vase that Cheeka, the Vodafone dog, threatened to knock over was bigger, more elaborate and perhaps more brittle than elsewhere.

People with
cell phones acquired what often seemed a new individuality—some would call it ‘atomisation’. ‘It is not an individualism … forced by the actors’, Ling wrote, ‘but, rather, an individualism that arises out of the direction of the social order’. People were individuals, but they were individuals in a powerful current; they could conceivably swim against it, but it was easier not to try. Grewal wrote a book about such ‘direction of the social order’. He called it
Network Power: the Social Dynamics of Globalization
and argued that ‘the accumulation of individual decisions’, led people, in a digital, globalised world, to adopt standards that became almost irresistible. In effect, millions of ‘free’ decisions by millions of individuals spun webs that entangled people in practices that proved hard to escape.
²²
In India, such convergence on common standards hastened processes that had been going on at much slower paces—processes by which diverse local practices were slowly absorbed into more homogenised national customs. A country that worked in eleven different scripts, and recognised twenty-eight official languages, would only move in such directions idiosyncratically.

Homogenization into some sort of ‘national’ standard occurred at the same time that distinctive
local
practices were becoming more solid and celebrated. In a splendid essay entitled ‘Music Mania in Small-town Bihar’, Ratnakar Tripathy met ‘a 54-year-old Bhojpuri poet’ who told him that ‘the technological churning has … thrown up [artistic] forms he had last heard in childhood and long suspected to be extinct. For once’, Tripathy concluded, ‘you cannot blame technology for cultural extinction!’
²³
How was this solidification and celebration of local forms achieved? ‘In brief’, Tripathy wrote, ‘phones are the CD players of the day’.
²⁴
Local musicians made and disseminated music, usually as cheap CDs, which were loaded onto mobile phones, sent to friends and Blue-toothed round the bazaars.
²⁵
‘Suddenly’, Tripathy wrote, ‘music [in Bihar] was a respectable profession, and young girls could discuss their musical careers[,] something they could only dream of earlier’.
²⁶
Cheap, readily available mobility placed a remarkable capacity for communications within reach of people to whom it would have been denied in the past because of their status, gender or poverty.

Electronic
games and the practice of ‘gaming’ also arrived on mobile phones at a cost poor people could afford. To some, the global phenomenon of gaming was a global menace,
²⁷
but its popularity was certain to grow in a country where ‘
timepass
’ was a way of life for many underemployed young men.
²⁸
In a slum in Hyderabad, fifteen out of the twenty young people interviewed in a survey had ‘their first experience of the internet … on a mobile phone’, which provided ‘a pathway to games, music and video’.
²⁹
Games became a passion for many. ‘I simply am mad about the games they have on these phones’, a 17-year-old wage labourer told the researchers and explained how he barely paused to bathe after work before he borrowed a phone.
³⁰
Another avid gamer said that gaming gave him ‘nimble fingers’ and improved his skills. The ‘techie’—the technical wizard—in this group was ‘an 8th grade drop-out’ whose ‘lack of literacy … drove him to experiment and discover hardware and audio-visual content’.
³¹
The gaming and entertainment that mobile phones made possible had the effect of ‘binding people and creating an informal technology hub’. This, the researchers concluded, is ‘hardly developmental in any conventional sense’, but ‘what begins as entertainment can lead to more serious activities’.
³²
Globally, electronic gaming was said to be worth US $90 billion in 2012, and the best international gamers, mostly in their teens, earned more than US $200,000 a year as part of sponsored teams that toured ‘the games circuit’ like tennis players or Formula 1 car drivers.
³³
In the uncertain future of 4G in India, interactive gaming held out the promise of revenue for telecom companies, if only the costs could be kept low enough to let 17-year-old wage labourers participate and high enough to let companies recoup big investments.

The cheap mobile phone was not a magic wand of liberation. It was more like ‘the old equalizer’, the Colt .45 revolver in the Wild West: something to be struggled over and once possessed, not readily surrendered. More than 830 million people lived in rural India in 2011 and more than half of rural households owned a phone.
³⁴
Though a potential tool for power-holders, the cell phone gave the less powerful—the ‘information have-less’, as one writer describes them—vast new vistas of entertainment and a chance, however slight, to even up life’s odds a little.
³⁵

Language and media

A surprised
scholar of linguistics told a journalist in 2012: ‘We are getting languages where the
first writing
is not the translation of the Bible—as it has often happened—but text messages’.
³⁶
He explained how people who grew up speaking small, unwritten languages, in danger of being smothered by the great state-supported languages of modern countries, found it relatively easy to write SMS messages in their mother tongue. They took whatever script—Roman, Arabic, Cyrillic, etc.—they may have picked up during a brief schooling and used it as a code that enabled them to SMS in their mother tongue. The 160-character limit to an SMS message was an advantage: it not only permitted codes and contractions; it demanded them. There was no literary style to follow; one created one’s own.

Such practices of code and contraction quickly appeared in highly literate European cultures when the mobile phone became common in the 1990s. SMS-ing in Finland caught on among adolescents from about 1997, and their message styles bore ‘more resemblance to code than standard language’.
³⁷
In Japan,
keitai
(cell phone) novels were written via text messaging, read widely across the globe and opened up new literary possibilities.
³⁸
The language of text messages, often decried as the death of good grammar, also held the possibility of being the lifeblood of endangered languages.
³⁹

Because India operated in so many scripts,
⁴⁰
SMS-ing proved less popular than in the Philippines, Indonesia or Europe, where the Roman alphabet was the sole standard. In India, many literate people were familiar only with the script of their mother-tongue, learned at primary school, and not with the Roman alphabet. The boatmen Doron knew in Banaras did not take to SMS; but they were comfortable with numbers and key sequences, very good at downloading songs and video clips and practised in using Blue-tooth to transfer files. Cell phone manufacturers and service providers recognised and adapted to such markets. By 2012, Nokia had free fonts available for its phones in most Indian scripts, and the ‘Panini Keypad’, named for the great Sanskrit grammarian of antiquity, enabled people to download programs ‘to write in all languages of India on the phone, fast and easily’.
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