The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life

Assa Doron; Robin Jeffrey

Published by Harvard University Press 2013

The Great Indian Phone Book

How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life

Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674074248

Overview
Contents

About this book

Over just a decade in India, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare, unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized staple that even poor fisherman can afford. Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey investigate the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history and explore the whole ecosystem of cheap mobile phones.

Author / Editor information

Doron Assa :

Assa Doron is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University.Jeffrey Robin :

Robin Jeffrey is Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asia Studies and Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

Reviews

Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago:
Doron and Jeffrey's landmark study of how the humble mobile phone is changing the culture of Indian democracy in everyday life has no competitors. Their interdisciplinary analysis of popular aspirations and anxieties surrounding mobile telephones will invite and inspire comparative studies set in other emerging economies. A remarkable achievement.

Arvind Rajagopal, New York University:
This is a fascinating, smart, and erudite volume on how the Indian cell phone industry developed and what its extraordinary growth has meant for the country. It can serve as a kind of vade mecdum for many thousands of interested readers seeking to learn about the subject, whether as amateurs or as specialists entering a new domain.

Christopher Pinney, University College London:
A marvelous, briskly written book, combining a panoptical overview of the broader media landscape with gripping vignettes. Doron and Jeffrey write with insight and journalistic brio, making this book highly accessible to a very wide range of readers.

Sevanti Ninan, author of Headlines from the Heartland:
A comprehensive chronicle of how mobile phones changed Indian life, and in the process, India's economy. Capitalists, ministers, boatmen, farmers, advertising geniuses, porn peddlers, political workers, and tireless salesmen populate this story. Doron and Jeffrey's sociological take on the mobile phone as a great leveller is rich and riveting.

Tarun Khanna, author of Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures—and Yours:
An engaging and informative analysis of the use of cell phones in India, a nation of over one billion people, where this small device has been a harbinger of big social and economic changes—and an enabler of unbridled entrepreneurship.

Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications:
The Great Indian Phone Book is a wake-up call for anyone intrigued by today's network society. Engagingly written, intelligently researched, and enlivened with memorable anecdotes framed by deft exposition, it offers up a compelling and compellingly readable introduction to a subject of unquestioned significance: the remarkable emergence of the mobile telephone as an agent of change in the developing world.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	v
GLOSSARY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xv
ABBREVIATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xvii
LIST OF MAPS, ILLUSTRATIONS, FIGURES AND TABLES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xxi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xxvii
RADIO FREQUENCY AND MOBILE PHONES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	xxxi
INTRODUCTION ‘SO UNCANNY AND OUT OF PLACE’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1 CONTROLLING COMMUNICATION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2 CELLING INDIA Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
3 MISSIONARIES OF THE MOBILE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
4 MECHANICS OF THE MOBILE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	89
5 FOR BUSINESS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	115
6 FOR POLITICS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
7 FOR WOMEN AND HOUSEHOLDS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	165
8 FOR ‘WRONGDOING’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
CONCLUSION ‘IT’S THE AUTONOMY, STUPID’ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	209
NOTES Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	225
BIBLIOGRAPHY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	265
INDEX Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	281
PREFACE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 351
Illustrations
- Other: 16 halftones
Keywords: TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Mobile & Wireless Communications; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural; BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Development / General; HISTORY / Asia / India & South Asia

eBook

Published: April 2, 2013
ISBN: 9780674074248