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

Doron, Assa; Jeffrey, Robin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674072685 ISBN 13: 9780674072688

Publisher: Hurst and Co., 2013

Synopsis

In 2001, India had 4 million cell phone subscribers. Ten years later, that number had exploded to more than 750 million. Over just a decade, the mobile phone was transformed from a rare and unwieldy instrument to a palm-sized, affordable staple, taken for granted by poor fishermen in Kerala and affluent entrepreneurs in Mumbai alike. The Great Indian Phone Book investigates the social revolution ignited by what may be the most significant communications device in history, one which has disrupted more people and relationships than the printing press, wristwatch, automobile, or railways, though it has qualities of all four.

In this fast-paced study, Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey explore the whole ecosystem of the cheap mobile phone. Blending journalistic immediacy with years of field-research experience in India, they portray the capitalists and bureaucrats who control the cellular infrastructure and wrestle over bandwidth rights, the marketers and technicians who bring mobile phones to the masses, and the often poor, village-bound users who adapt these addictive and sometimes troublesome devices to their daily lives. Examining the challenges cell phones pose to a hierarchy-bound country, the authors argue that in India, where caste and gender restrictions have defined power for generations, the disruptive potential of mobile phones is even greater than elsewhere.

The Great Indian Phone Book is a rigorously researched, multidimensional tale of what can happen when a powerful and readily available technology is placed in the hands of a large, still predominantly poor population.

About this title

Review:

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.--Christopher Pinney, University College London

The book makes for fascinating reading and probes the entire universe of the mobile phone in India, the upside and the downside.--Dilip Bobb"Financial Express" (03/03/2013)

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.--Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago

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.--Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

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.--Tarun Khanna, author of Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping Their Futures--and Yours

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.--Sevanti Ninan, author of Headlines from the Heartland

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.--Arvind Rajagopal, New York University

Superb...Reminds us how little we have explored the new landscape of opportunity, aspiration and, inevitably, disappointment that mobile phones have opened up in India...[A] lively book.-- (01/27/2013)

In this fine anthropological study, Doron and Jeffrey look at how the introduction and current widespread use of the cell phone has altered life in one of the world's largest countries...This rich study reveals much about modern India and should be read by both students and scholars of technology and South Asia.-- (02/08/2013)

This is an important book that can usefully be read by students, social scientists, and business managers--indeed, by anyone interested in change and its effects on developing and complex societies.-- (03/01/2013)

About the Author:

Assa Doron is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the School of Culture, History & Language, Australian National University.Robin Jeffrey is Visiting Research Professor at the Institute of South Asia Studies and Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hurst and Co.
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0674072685
• ISBN 13: 9780674072688
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 284