Mobile Phones and Changing Media Consumption Practices in Bangalore

This thesis is a study of the use of mobile phones - usually viewed as a communication technology -as an emerging digital technology. It focuses on users who have experienced the digital world for the first time through mobile phones, highlighting less examined aspects of their use – in particular, for multimedia consumption. Drawing on research carried out in Bangalore with digitally marginalized users, it maps the practices that have emerged around mobile phones and their peripheral technologies after their arrival in India, the forms of sociality and work that frame and enable this modality of consumption, and the life-worlds of these consumers. The thesis also documents the offline digital economy—driven by small mobile phone shops—that constitutes, facilitates and sustains these practices and circulations. Theoretically, the thesis is located within debates on informational capitalism and digital economy. Methodologically, the study has taken a syncretic and eclectic approach, drawing upon insights from economic anthropology and tracing the ‘social life of things’. To understand the technological aspects of these developments, the thesis also borrows from recent descriptivist methods of studying informational and digital infrastructures, focusing on their materiality and utilitarian affordances. The main argument of the thesis is that media consumption practices through mobile phones bolster emergent modes of distribution and circulation of digital multimedia content by significantly expanding the market. The study sheds new light on the new model of capitalist accumulation that characterizes the digital content industry, which tries to capitalize on, and generate value from, each act of media consumption

Data Spaces

This open access book aims to educate data space designers to understand what is required to create a successful data space. It explores cutting-edge theory, technologies, methodologies, and best practices for data spaces for both industrial and personal data and provides the reader with a basis for understanding the design, deployment, and future directions of data spaces. The book captures the early lessons and experience in creating data spaces. It arranges these contributions into three parts covering design, deployment, and future directions respectively. The first part explores the design space of data spaces. The single chapters detail the organisational design for data spaces, data platforms, data governance federated learning, personal data sharing, data marketplaces, and hybrid artificial intelligence for data spaces. The second part describes the use of data spaces within real-world deployments. Its chapters are co-authored with industry experts and include case studies of data spaces in sectors including industry 4.0, food safety, FinTech, health care, and energy. The third and final part details future directions for data spaces, including challenges and opportunities for common European data spaces and privacy-preserving techniques for trustworthy data sharing. The book is of interest to two primary audiences: first, researchers interested in data management and data sharing, and second, practitioners and industry experts engaged in data-driven systems where the sharing and exchange of data within an ecosystem are critical

Rescaling City Property

This Article seeks to identify the growing tension between the contemporary physical and digital reality of cities across the world and the formal, often archaic, body of norms that governs city powers and duties vis-à-vis different types of persons and corporations: locals, non-local residents of the same nation-state, and foreigners. The nation-state’s continuing dominance, both in the domestic division of power across various legal systems and in the international arena, often results in a systemic mismatch