Unlimited

How telecom companies in India have added a whole new group of mobile phone users—and the tremendous impact of this new reach.

Around 2016, buoyed by affordable data plans of telecom companies, an aspirational neo-middle class of users in India accessed internet for the first time on their mobile phones. What kinds of digital infrastructures are emerging for content and money to move and reach such users? And how does their design impact access, exclusion, and surveillance as well as the horizon of social behaviors and expectations in “Digital India”? In Unlimited, Rahul Mukherjee explores how aspirations shape practices of distribution as well as how distribution technologies aid state-corporations to set aspirational targets for consumer-citizens who encounter gender- and caste-based fault lines.

This book traces the supply chains of content delivery networks enabling streaming video-on-demand services, such as Hotstar and SonyLIV, and informal ways of circulating vernacular Bhojpuri music videos through memory cards. It assesses the possibilities and limits of the platform economy with the rise of mobile payment and lending services, as well as the accompanying online scams. Unlimited offers the first systematic examination of distribution considerations—including localization strategies—required for imagining mobile phone users across the varied regional geographies of India.ENDORSEMENTS

“Unlimited is an extraordinarily path-breaking study of the electric, unstable infrastructures of aspiration in a decade where everything changed. Each chapter in this book crackles with original insights.”
—Ravi Sundaram, author of Pirate Modernity: Delhi’s Media Urbanism

“Unlimited reveals how the infrastructures that circulate money also circulate aspirations, anxieties, and risk. Mukherjee vividly and insightfully maps the real human stakes of India's mobile transformations.”
—Lana Swartz, author of New Money: How Payment Became Social Media

“This is a landmark study of mobile media—essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand the profound role the mobile phone plays in the foundations of digital societies globally.”
—Gerard Goggin, coauthor of Mobile Media MethodsRahul Mukherjee is Associate Professor of TV and New Media in the Department of Cinema & Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Radiant Infrastructures.