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The Increasing Sophistication of Mobile Media Sharing in Lower-Middle-Class Bangalore

Published: 03 June 2016 Publication History

Abstract

During the first decade of the 21st century, the rise of mobile feature phones in India saw the development of both an economy of informal media exchange and a culture of active media sharing for entertainment. Mobile phone owners paid for pirated movies and music on the grey market, and they traded them with one another, even using poorly designed mechanisms such as Bluetooth file exchange.
In this paper, we update what is known about the dynamic mobile media sharing culture through qualitative interviews conducted with low- and lower-middle-class participants in and around Bangalore. We find that with the increasing penetration of smartphones and data packs, media sharing has not only continued, but has blossomed into a rich and varied range of activity in which mobile owners display sophisticated knowledge and behaviors. Our participants deftly juggle multiple media devices, mobile handsets, SIM cards, storage devices, mobile applications, and cloud services as a way to navigate issues of cost, file size, data bandwidth, physical proximity, and social engagement styles. We consider our findings in the context of domestication and amplification theories of technology.

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    ICTD '16: Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development
    June 2016
    427 pages
    ISBN:9781450343060
    DOI:10.1145/2909609
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 03 June 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. ICTD
    2. Mobile media sharing
    3. WhatsApp
    4. entertainment
    5. information and communication technologies and development
    6. mobile internet
    7. mobile phones
    8. smartphone adoption

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    • (2022)Putting the Waz on Social Media: Infrastructuring Online Islamic Counterpublic through Digital Sermons in BangladeshProceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491102.3502006(1-19)Online publication date: 29-Apr-2022
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