In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women
Preeti Mudliar
There is little that the WiFi infrastructure has to distinguish itself by virtue of any kind of visibility. The materiality of its presence is not high on manifestations and unless there is an explicit notice that alerts you to its affordances, the WiFi for the most part, can be ‘seen’ only on devices, courtesy the WiFi icon that cues users to the infrastructure’s connectivity status and strength of signal. This sense of minimalism that characterises the WiFi, relative to more capital and resource intensive Internet infrastructures such as fibre optic cables, makes it a particularly attractive option to connect the unconnected. Not surprisingly, in telecom policy imaginations that seek to bridge India’s digital divides, public WiFi hotspots have emerged as the infrastructure of choice that swiftly and economically, will bring last mile Internet connectivity in the country. In the words of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), public WiFi will allow for the consumption of data for the average Indian to become as common as consuming a cup of hot chai.
Thus, even while the easy-to-deploy technological properties of the WiFi technology inspire optimism and are being harnessed to serve public connectivity needs, it is worthwhile to also interrogate if the infrastructure requires to be socialised into assuming a truly public and inclusive role that will serve everyone. Writing about infrastructures, Brian Larkin notes, that apart from their technological affordances, infrastructures also exist as semiotic and aesthetic vehicles that are oriented towards addressing selective subjects. What does the publicness of WiFi infrastructures then mean if they appear to be selective to potential users? How does gender and space interact to create subjectivities of access and use? Who assimilates as a naturalized user of the public WiFi and who struggles to be recognized as one? Drawing from interviews and observations around WiFi access points in a rural community in Rajasthan, this essay reflects on these questions to draw attention to the ways in which assumption of the publicness of spaces, may not always be true, but in fact, can create inequities of Internet access and use for women.
Among the many intrigues that surround a government office in a rural community, the role that technology assumes in the social order of the village can often unfold to a folk beat all of its own. Such as the naming of the room with the fibre optic connectivity that the gram panchayat received as part of the National Optical Fibre Network (NOFN) pilot programme as the ‘Third Eye’ room. Or the freely circulating password to the panchayat office WiFi password that inevitably leaked into the village community the moment the building received WiFi to enable its office work. Hence, even while the WiFi infrastructure itself remains invisible, its presence manifests itself in various other performative ways. First, is the ready offering of the password to you by every other young man, in a bid to display hospitality in the limited way they can, to a woman on ‘research’ work about their ‘Third Eye’. Second, is the steady stream of men who on reaching the office premises, set out to determinedly scale the boundary walls and climb the trees in the vicinity to be in closer proximity to the WiFi signals that satiates their thirst for Internet data. Third, is the peeved network administrator of the panchayat who storms out occasionally to snatch away the phones of the ‘illegal’ users if he finds the Internet slowing down as a result of user overload on the network. It makes him long for the time when the village had free ‘legal’ WiFi service by two commercial service providers who were piloting trial runs of their WiFi on the NOFN infrastructure. Their WiFi was available around the panchayat office and the Atal Seva Kendra and they had distributed free user coupons to test various aspects of their service. The trials that continued intermittently for a year had concluded a month before I visited the village and both the network administrator as well as the men in the village frequently referenced their enjoyable experiences in using the WiFi during the pilot runs.
In addition to the panchayat office, passwords of two other government buildings in the village had also leaked and were equally common knowledge in the village. These were the BSNL office that housed the GPON (Gigabit Passive Optical Networks) and ONT (Optical Network Terminal) infrastructure of the NOFN infrastructure and the Atal Seva Kendra that was connected with the NOFN’s WiFi connectivity. However, the always busy panchayat premises remained the most preferred WiFi access point in the daytime owing to the plentiful shade of the trees surrounding it. In the brutal heat of the Rajasthan summer when I was in the village, the relief this offers cannot be emphasised enough. It also demonstrates how the characteristics of space, shape access and use of the WiFi. All in all, the drama around the WiFi made for an engrossing spectacle that also reveals its eminence in the social life of the young people in the community.
Which leads an observer to ask — “Who gets to use the WiFi?”. I was confronted by this question both owing to the noticeable absence of women visiting the panchayat office for Internet access as well as the constant efforts to censor and control my presence in the village by the older men of the community who questioned my need to hang out in the ‘public’ spaces of the village instead of gathering data by remaining indoors. The most extreme manifestation of these microagressions was when I was denied accommodation by hotels in the town nearest to the village on account of being a single unchaperoned woman. Thus, my observations coupled with reflexivity on my own experiences spurred me to interrogate how women in the village experienced the Internet. If the men flocked to the accidental WiFi access points in the village, where were the women and what was their relationship with the Internet?
However, finding women to talk to about the Internet proved to be a challenge. Much like the material invisibility of the WiFi infrastructure, women also weren’t a visible part of the public spaces of the village. The women who were accessible for conversations were more often than not very elderly women or the rural poor who like their male counterparts had no use for a smartphone or the Internet. The quest to find the younger woman of the community who were more likely to be Internet users continued to draw a blank until a serendipitous encounter with a girl in her late teens in the market place who invited me home to speak to her sister and herself about their Internet use. The two sisters also helped snowball their woman friends for me to speak to. These interactions allowed me a valuable glimpse into the lives of the young women of a rural community and how their interactions with the Internet and its allied technologies was shaped by their gendered experience of space.
The women I interacted with were in their 20s, unmarried, and although living with their parents, were drawing salaries from their jobs as part-time teachers while studying for competitive exams. One of them even managed her family’s grocery business in the village, which earned her the admiration of her peers since it thrust her into a fairly public role in the village, requiring her to interact with the menfolk. All of the women owned smartphones and were regular users of mobile Internet, which was their primary means of Internet use. They maintained prepaid mobile plans and recharged their plans whenever they needed to use the Internet — mainly to look up job postings and access study material for their exams. They enjoyed using WhatsApp and Facebook, but were infrequent users owing to the tedium of relying on patchy Internet signals to participate in online activities that often tried their patience. On days that they were feeling particularly indulgent, they would use up their 1GB quota of data on downloading a song or movie clips, but these were rare occasions since they had to be mindful of their budgets. Overall, the women were unanimous that their Internet experiences were deeply unsatisfying and curtailed owing to spotty signals in their area that did not allow them to use the Internet in the way they wanted to.
At the same time, the women were sharply aware of how their access to the Internet was different and more curtailed than their male peers in the village who had access to WiFi in various ways and who were also the only beneficiaries of the WiFi pilot trials coupons. In their responses, they demonstrated a deeply reflexive awareness of their invisibility as people — both literally and metaphorically owing to the secluded lives they led. They pointed to the widespread observance of the purdah by older women in the village as a metaphor for the ways in which women are expected to retreat from the public eye and veil themselves inside their homes even if they do not wear the purdah. They reflected on how social norms that restrict and confine women’s mobilities to sanctioned areas or their homes, do not allow their Internet and digital literacies to be visible in the same way as men who are more easily recognized as active Internet and technology users. Discussing how the free coupons of the free WiFi pilots never made it to a single woman, one of the women said, “We are not visible in the same way that men are. They are able to be outdoors and occupy public places and therefore get noticed more. Our use of the Internet is indoors because we remain indoors. Nobody really came looking for women users when they distributed those coupons. I don’t know if this thought even crossed their mind.”
When I spoke to one of the commercial WiFi service providers about the considerations that guided them when deploying their pilot trials and recruiting users, he was clear, “To use the WiFi, you need a smartphone, not your gender.” Implicit in his response is the belief that if women had smartphones and knew how to use the Internet, they would be using WiFi. As infrastructures, WiFi networks are thought to privilege democratic notions of freedom, mobility, and connectivity by rendering space salient as networked areas that only require a WiFi enabled device to get online. The recognition that public WiFi infrastructures are usually outdoor deployments with spatial politics that can exclude members of communities such as women is not popularly recognized as an impediment to access and use of the Interent.
Even more interesting are the ways in which the women spoke about experiencing the WiFi’s presence as non-users who were nonetheless aware of the free WiFi access points in the village. The women reported ‘seeing’ the use of WiFi because of the many men who clustered around the access points. They also reported ‘hearing’ about the WiFi because of their brothers who would tell them about it, but the experience of being WiFi users themselves was not a realistic scenario they could fathom or even expect. Instead, they turned into indirect users of the WiFi points in the community. This was mostly manifested by sending their phones with their male relatives for software updates that would keep their phones current because they could not accomplish these tasks with the limited mobile data they had access to.
With its inaccessibility, the WiFi infrastructure was thus a contradictory presence in the community for the women. Their use and experience of the Internet was in many ways diminished and limited and they reported experiencing a state of offlineness in contrast to the men in their community who could frequent the WiFi hotspots and avail of high speed Internet. Unsurprisingly, this was also reflected in the very different ways that men and women in the community were using the Internet. While the women spoke about restricting themselves to very instrumental uses despite wanting to spend more time online for entertainment and leisure. In contrast, the men displayed more extensive repertoires of use ranging from streaming films, downloading songs, exploring the Playstore to look for apps, and having a more active presence on Facebook by uploading pictures and videos and through their social media interactions with their friends.
How can public WiFi then strive for inclusivity in light of the challenges that women may face with the varying characteristics of public spaces? A good first step would be to talk to women when WiFi deployments are to take place to understand their relationship with different spaces in their communities. For instance, one of the things I learnt from women about their relationship with the public spaces in their village is the fine distinctions they draw about being able to linger in a place as opposed to visiting a place. So while places such as the post office and the gram panchayat were deemed to be places they could visit, other places such as the bus stop and the temple in the village were places that they could linger in. Given accessing the WiFi requires users to spend time bounded in a particular space, these distinctions are helpful in being sensitive to the often complicated relationships that women share with spaces that can also influence their WiFi access and Internet use.
It is also useful to think of the different ways that users occupy subject positions within infrastructures to understand how best we can design more inclusive systems of use. The notion of the user is foundational to the discipline of human computer interaction and there are different ways in which users have been theorised. Jeffrey Bardzell and Shaowen Bardzell discuss how design decisions contribute to designing not just systems and products, but also the users of these systems themselves. They urge designers to think more broadly and analytically of ways in which their design decisions can acknowledge the subjectivities of felt experience and agencies of the various subject positions that users come to inhabit. Recognising the subjectivities of women as Internet users would then acknowledge that: a) women are users who may be active, but not always visible as Internet users, b) as users who do not share the same relationship with spaces that are deemed to be public as men do, c) as users who can and want to use the Internet for a range of reasons, but find themselves restricting their use to instrumental purposes.
Remaining mindful to the varying subjectivities that inform the way women users experience different forms of Internet supply sources in relation to men will allow governments and service providers to be more gender inclusive in conceptualising and deploying WiFi infrastructures. It can also serve as a starting point to begin conversations about the way other kinds of minorities may be experiencing exclusion in their access and use of infrastructures. It is only then can the WiFi infrastructures claim to be truly serving public connectivity needs.
References
Bardzell, J., & Bardzell, S. (2015). The user reconfigured: On subjectivities of information. In Proceedings of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus Conference on Critical Alternatives (pp. 133–144). Aarhus University Press.
Larkin, B. (2013). The politics and poetics of infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42, 327–343.
Author
Preeti Mudliar is an Assistant Professor at IIIT-Bangalore. Her research
interests centre around using ethnographic methods and analyses to study
social contexts around technology access and use. She is particularly
interested in the ways in which gender constitutes the lived experiences of
people and finds herself researching and writing about gender both
intentionally and serendipitously.
