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ABSTRACT
The term ‘slowbalisation’, coined in 2015 by a Dutch trend watcher and elaborated in an early 2019 issue of The Economist, explains a noticeable slowing down of cross-border movement of capital, goods, money and technology, beginning from the post-recession period following the year 2008. This study expands the conceptual and explanatory scope of this phenomenon beyond the economic by considering other possible factors, political and social, using a recent case – global social media giant Facebook’s unsuccessful attempt to introduce its version of the Internet through a cost-free programme – Free Basics – in India. The Indian regulatory body in this instance, Telecomm Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), prevented the introduction of Free Basics on grounds of protecting net neutrality, and objection to Facebook’s free harvesting of data on millions more of Indians. Grounded theory methodology was employed to analyze news coverage in a leading national daily, The Times of India, and a letter to Mark Zuckerberg written by Indian activists. The grounded theory approach helped identify theoretical constructs that explain the phenomenon of slowbalisation from perspectives that rely less on solely an economic explanation of the phenomenon and delineate other contributing explanations such as regulation and public interest.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The news articles from Nexis Uni were downloaded from the institutional libraries’ database. The listing in the download appears as LexisNexis. There is no URL available. Hence sources for stories are listed as LexisNexis/Nexis Uni in the References.
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Notes on contributors
Sujatha Sosale
Sujatha Sosale is Associate Professor, School of Journalism and Mass Communication, The University of Iowa, USA. Her research interests include media development and social change in Global South countries, with a focus on South Asia and the southern Indian Ocean Rim. She has published in the areas of news and public affairs reporting about contemporary development, trade agreements in the news, national identity and news discourse at critical historical junctures, the political economy of the development of media technologies in colonial contexts, and media technology use in contemporary urban contexts. Her publications have appeared in journals like the Journal of International Communication, Global Media and Communication, International Communication Gazette, Journal of Developing Societies, Journalism and Communication Monographs, Journalism Practice, Digital Journalism, and Journalism. She is author of Communication for Democracy or Development? Mapping a Discourse (Hampton Press, 2008).