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The Great Indian Phone Book: How the Cheap Cell Phone Changes Business, Politics, and Daily Life. By Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Pp. 336. $29.95.
The Great Indian Phone Book is Tolstoyan in its breadth even though it starts offanswering simple questions, such as: What led to the spread of mobile telephony in India and what are the effects? The narrative weaves in the story of 1.2 billion people and their 900 million phones (in 2012) and explores the "relationships and networks that grow from mobile phones." The ecosystem Assa Doron and Robin Jeffrey describe brings in insights from many social sciences, cultural studies, and technology. The book follows in the best traditions of work in science, technology, and society (STS) studies.
The chief theoretical contribution here is the focus on the network effects that enabled the diffusion of mobile telephony in India. Thus, cheap mobile phones "took off" in India as much through the painstaking grassroots network where hundreds and thousands of retailers learned to sell airtime and phones as through the millions of consumers who learned to adapt them to their everyday lives. Politics, business, and society intersect and overlap in...