Why Mobile Phones Became Ubiquitous: Remediation and Socialities
Sirpa Tenhunen · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
Chapter 3 describes and analyzes the incremental process through which mobile phones became ubiquitous in a village in rural West Bengal, India. It also introduces the village as the main setting of the research and describes the changing patterns of connections and interaction among the villagers, as well as between the village and the outside world. Mobile telephony invigorated and built on these connections that influence the forms of socialities in the village. Mobile phones were neither the first nor the only media in the village: radios and televisions preceded mobile telephony, and by 2012 some villagers had acquired landline phones and computers. This chapter compares the appropriation of mobile phones to how other media—landline phones, radios, televisions, and computers—were adopted. Mobile phones were affordable and could be easily integrated into preexisting communication practices.