The missed call emerged in India as a critical means of communication for those who counted every rupee spent on recharge credit. Leaving missed calls in this way - effectively using a mobile phone as a kind of latter-day pager - was a consumer hack that, in the 2000s, before India’s cheap smartphone and data revolution, grew more popular than texting. “We would say, if I’m coming to pick you up, I’ll give you a missed call, and you come out of your house.” So Kumar’s friends and family members began ringing each other but hanging up before being charged for a call the resulting missed-call alerts functioned as a kind of code between them. “We didn’t have enough money to say everything on the phone.” Each outgoing minute was charged about eight cents, so a 10-minute call cost about as much as the average daily wage at the time. But for the 29-year-old schoolteacher from the eastern state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest, to use the device to talk to his friends was inadvisable. In 2003, Praveen Kumar bought his first mobile phone, as several of his friends already had.
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