Paper short abstract:

The results of my ethnographic research in India suggest that even though the cell phone saves time and money, and helps to maintain social networks, it also appears to reinforce the gap between sexes, age groups and castes.

Paper long abstract:

Indian people feel that the cellphone has improved their lives socially and economically. It saves time and money, helps to maintain social networks, and provides access to entertainment and online information. The findings of my 5-month ethnographic fieldwork in the coastal villages of Tamil Nadu in South India concur this view, to some extent. People have welcomed the ease and efficiency of mobile telephony but are also concerned about the new technology. This is most evident in the discourses about the youth and their mobile phone use. As the young master the technology better than their elders and are more prone to use it frequently, there are worries about the youth "misusing" the phone for interacting with the opposite sex, for example. Moreover, despite common scholarly visions of mobile phones increasing gender equality, the value, use and actual benefits of the new technology seem to reflect traditional patriarchal gender relations within the society. Women own, use and master the phone less than men. Hence a mobile telephony gap can be detected between genders as well as socio-economic classes and/or castes in my fieldwork area. Thus, I suggest that even though the cell phone improves the quality of life of people in absolute terms (meaning that almost everyone benefits from it) at the same time it reflects and possibly reinforces boundaries between the young and the old, men and women as well as socio-economic strata.