"I conceptualize mobilities (un) limited by attending to three interrelated aspects. First, there are the sociopo litical changes in India that shape and are shaped by the shifting affordances of the mobile phone from 2010 to 2025. The affordances of the mobile phone itself have changed as storage and distribution technologies have been transformed and erstwhile separate forces and flows of mobile computing, cloud computing, big data analytics, and social media networks have converged into mobile media apps. The book explores the relation between such techno material shifts in mobile phones and the changes in agential capacities, attitudes, and political subjectivities of Indian citizens. Second, digital infrastructures are emerging to move content, data, and money to reach mobile phone users in India. Studying these distribution assemblages involves tracing socio technical practices of content delivery networks (CDNs) and analyzing the role of formal and informal human and nonhuman intermediaries, including mobile repair shop owners and credit scoring algorithms in distribution systems. Third, with mobilities (un)limited, the focus is on the mutual imbrication of aspirational politics and media distribution, particularly around the questions of who, among India’s citizens, has access to platforms (WhatsApp, TikTok) and how they can represent themselves and circulate such represen ta tions, and who has access to networks of government delivery services and financial technology (fintech) apps and with what consequences? The Indian government envisions the mobile phone as the site of not only media content but also digital payments. With the circulation of digital media content and money through/to our mobile phones, there is also the circulation of ideologies, practices, and expectations, which can potentially change socioeconomic be hav iors and media cultures. I argue that the specific designs of distribution platforms enact/impact particular forms and regimes of inclusion/exclusion and access/surveillance, which are negotiated by everyday phone users in their mobile digital practices.
In this book, readers will find “unlimited” as a promissory note walking on two legs, one operating at the techno economic level and the other unfolding in the aspirational and experiential level. Both these runs of the “unlimited” promise unbounded horizons but are marked by constraints, whether they are logistical limitations or limits of an individual’s cognitive capacities or bound aries imposed by social stratifications. These related dimensions of the “unlimited” shape political subjectivities of Indian citizens and are deployed as governance strategies by state corporations, especially evident in “Digital India,” which is Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s flagship initiative aimed to connect the vast Indian population together and set targets of “universal mobile access” and “digital empowerment.” Beyond India’s cultural context and mobile phones, “we” are living amid a contemporary moment where the future is presented as a stage where we might be overwhelmed by abundance of some things and scarcity of other things, which will test the limits of “our” capacities and endurance. Amid the dangers of climate change and the hoopla around AI, technocapitalism(s) is remarkably adept at reinventing itself, presenting emerging visions of the future and society, asking us to recalibrate what ethical and bodily limits we are ready to cross." (Introduction, pages 4-5)