Digital Inequality and Relatedness in India after Access

Abstract

The scholarship on digital inequality and divides has relied mainly on quantitative data and such general criteria for digital inequality as access, motivation, skills, and the autonomy of use to measure the empowering effects of internet access. This chapter develops a novel way to understand digital inequality based on ethnographic fieldwork on smartphone use in rural and urban India among low-income and little-educated people. It analyses digital inequality through the concept of digital relatedness exploring how people’s digital media use is embedded in social relationships and how media use serves to refashion relationships and hierarchies. The chapter argues that the focus on autonomous uses can leave unacknowledged a great variety of digital practices, which users can find valuable and even transformative. It also demonstrates how even seemingly autonomous media use is embedded in social relationships in the sense that people usually learn their uses from others.