Communication Infrastructures: contested ecologies
Communication infrastructure is increasingly incorporated in our everyday life. As we are in the era where ‘change is the new trend’ and where change is a natural step in human development. Thus, it is important to understand the link between media and communication and the humans.
Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman in the 1960s and 1970s introduced the metaphor of ecology in media and communication studies. According to Neil Postman media ecology is well understood as “the matter of how media of communication affect human perception, understanding, feeling, and value; different ways in which the interaction between media and human beings gives a culture its character and, one might say, helps a culture to maintain symbolic balance” — Postman (Wilken, 2013).
There are efforts taken to merge the telecommunication and internet industries as the natural step in human development. This action is taken to create more opportunities for the world to stay connected and be able to access media services anytime and anywhere. Communication infrastructure’s rapid surge into everyday life have seen penetrating the lives of people. This has opened the gate for huge investments in emerging countries.
An initiative by Mark Zuckerberg called ‘Free Basics’ was to be introduced in India. This platform focused on bringing the rural population online and introduce them with the power of internet. India which is a mixture of big population in both literate and illiterate, it offers big opportunities for companies like Facebook to work towards a project that could bring the illiterate/rural population as their new customers. A Facebook executive shared Facebook’s analysis report that showed approximately “30% of the new customers that the company(Facebook) hopes to join by the year 2020 will be from India” (Bhatia, 2016).
But the ‘Free Basics’ offer by Zuckerberg for a digital future that involved reaching millions of new users resulted as a failure (Facebook, n.d.). The reason’s that led to the failure of this program in India was mainly due to having poor understanding about the rural way of living. Another important factor that led towards the failure of ‘Free Basics’ was its way of working. It mainly focused on gathering new Facebook users rather than a service to educate people about the internet and its power. Facebook also gave free access to only those websites who had partnered with Faceboook which led towards governmental debates in India and disputes between phone companies on the basis of ‘net neutrality’ (Bhatia, 2016).
References
Bhatia, R. (2016, 05 12). The inside story of Facebook’s biggest setback. Retrieved from The Guardian : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/12/facebook-free-basics-india-zuckerberg
Facebook. (n.d.). Free Basics Platform. Retrieved from facebook for developers: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org
Postman, N. (2002). Media Ecology as a Scholarly Activity. Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 3, 7.
Wilken, R. (2013). National, local and household media ecologies: The case of Australia’s National Broadband Network. Communication, Politics & Culture — Vol. 46, 137–154.
