Remaking the set: innovation and obsolescence in television’s digital future

Introduction

‘The company is afraid of India’, Shekhar said, ¹ amusement coloring his voice as he sketched out, on the back of a sheet of crisp white paper, a hierarchy of who worked in his shop. Team leaders, service engineers, himself, the proprietor, and his ‘co-owner’, Chandra. As he drew out his chart, I turned the words over in my head. Shekhar’s shop was a repair shop – more precisely, an ‘authorized service center’ – for a large corporation, well known both in India and abroad, to Shekhar’s great pride.

Shekhar – dressed neatly in pressed shirt and trousers, his forehead marked with tilak like a devout caste Hindu, his speech peppered with English – continued talking about other topics, as if this were a perfectly anodyne observation. He bemoaned the education and (especially) the morals of the men in his employment, but it was that singular statement which remained with me, days after our conversation.

Corporate fear was an incongruous emotion to invoke, given the space Shekhar inhabited, the space which I had come to try and puzzle out with his workers’ help. Surrounding us in his ‘authorized service center’ were the relics of a desirable, settled domesticity: washing machines were in the back, alongside air-conditioning units, refrigerators were lined up in the narrow entryway by the reception desk. Microwave ovens and old cathode ray tube (CRT) televisions sat on the workspace floor, behind the refrigerators, so that customers had to squeeze carefully past stacked cardboard boxes, gingerly making their way to the service engineers who worked on the televisions.

The fear that Shekhar spoke of perhaps had more to do with the state of the devices themselves: the drums of washing machines lying nakedly out on the shop floor, subject to cacophonous reshaping with nothing more than a hammer; microwaves whose control boards were studded with insect feces, CRT televisions whose ‘main boards’ were cannibalized for transistors, capacitors, and resistors for other repair jobs, for other televisions. The company, Shekhar emphasized, wanted a cleanly demarcated line of control over this process of repair, both parts and process. ‘India’, in his reckoning, had other, contrary ideas.

Shekhar’s office itself pointed to both the suspicion and the desire: it was the only enclosed and lockable space in the service center, other than the doors facing the street. Lining the walls around his desk were neatly boxed, bagged, and individually numbered parts; indeed, the sign above his office said ‘PARTS’, in clean capital letters. If a service engineer had to make any sort of repair on an appliance, they would first have to confront him or Chandra – the ‘co-owners’ of this entire space – in order to obtain the necessary parts for the fix. The encounter was not always pleasant.

The work of television repair, even under the aegis (and the guarantee) of a proudly international corporation, was thus never without an altogether-too-human anxiety. This anxiety – this tension between the corporate ideal of the way the technological world should be and the messiness that repairmen dealt with on a daily basis – mapped itself out onto both the repairmen’s labor and the space of the shop. Questioning these tensions allows us to interrogate how the ordinary stability of the television – its very presence within the contours of everyday routine – was itself a contentious creation, one which reveals the contradictions that lie at the heart of our understandings of technology, progress, and the ‘digital’ nation.

Producing the Indian television

Why look at the labor of television repair, and the space of the television repair shop in particular? As Anna McCarthy (2001) has observed in the context of television in the United States, the ‘quotidian geography’ of the television stretches far beyond the home and the domestic audience. McCarthy notes that television ‘shapes the way we experience a place as public or private, but not always in identical ways, producing identical meanings’ (p. 4). The broad impetus that animates this article is, ‘What televisual politics can we expose through a decentering of its place in the home, or in front of a viewing audience?’ The television, after all was not only an object watched for its programming – it was also an object broken, an object repaired; an object played with, admired, and cursed out.

Indeed, the television set’s propensity to mechanical failure colored early accounts of its reception among audiences. A 1971 report from a SITE (Satellite Instructional Television Experiment) installation shows that the primary complaint received from the community was about the upkeep of the set – its ‘maintenance and repairing arrangements were not satisfactory’. ‘Timely repair and proper maintenance’ ranked higher than a ‘regular supply of electricity’ as an audience suggestion to improve the installation’s efficiency.

The television’s tenuous functionality – and the anxieties that its functioning or breakdown could generate in both viewers and operators – was thus not peripheral to the experience of television in India. A 1986 report on SITE – prepared in anticipation of and the beginnings of nationwide television broadcast – also emphasized the need for ensuring the physical reliability of television sets, recommending that ‘top priority should be given in central and state government budgets to ensure the installation and maintenance of community TV sets’ (Agrawal and Sinha, 1986). Breakdown – and the consequent need for repairmen and their knowledge and labor – was thus viscerally central to the experience of television in India.

However, accounts of television in India have analyzed its politics and its presence in everyday life through a primarily representational register, focusing heavily on the production and reception of various television programs and genres. Early studies of television in India, for example, analyzed television primarily as an educational tool bolted on to existing social development programs and outreach (Singhal and Rogers, 1989).

A similar focus on television programming and its representational stakes also animates Rajagopal’s (2001) and Mankekar’s (1999) foundational accounts of television in the 1980s and early 1990s. Their studies analyze the politics of Doordarshan, the state broadcaster, through detailed accounts of its programming choices and its reception by emergent audiences, an approach mirrored by other studies focused on that particular period of time. Studies of Indian television have also focused heavily on the post-liberalization era of the mid-to-late 1990s and the arrival of Rupert Murdoch’s STAR TV in India (Kumar, 2006).

Punathambekar and Sundar (2017), calling the 1980s a ‘time of television’, have adroitly noted that this focus on this post-liberalization era ignores the degree to which Doordarshan shaped the quotidian routines of everyday life through its program schedule, priming audiences for the continued presence of television in their lives. Alongside Doordarshan’s programming choices – and the broadcaster’s reshaping of the imagining of quotidian life – there was a significant material transformation as well. As Pendakur (1991), Chakravartty (2004), and Guhathakurta (1994) have pointed out, the 1980s was also marked by significant policy changes regarding television and video media’s material availability: restrictions on electronics imports were lifted or lightened, joint partnerships between domestic firms and international partners increased, and governmental investment in expanding television’s infrastructural footprint increased significantly.

Coming to terms with how the ordinary domestic presence of television was produced as a matter of material fact allows us to expose the myriad networks of people, locations, and technologies that were responsible for upholding the regular routine of a life with television. Drawing from a yearlong ethnographic study of television repair shops and cable television operators in small-town and rural parts of the south Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, I use this materially oriented optic to consider what kinds of politics the material presence of the television generated in spaces outside of the home.

The repair shop was a site where the normalized stability of the television – its ability to function as a ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ structure (Scannell, 2000) – thrown into question. But it was also in the repair shop that the television’s stability could be renewed and released back into the viewer’s world. As such, the repair shop presented a challenge to the promises of futuristic, technological seamlessness, and integration plastered on billboards and promised in shops, showrooms, and even by the state. The repair shop inhabited the unacknowledged, messy space of the present.

Historians of technology (Adas, 1989; Arnold, 2005) have observed that technology was deployed by European colonial authorities as a means to materially and symbolically enact their rule over, and their distinction from, their colonized subjects. Arnold observes that the materiality of industrial technologies in the era of empire was accompanied by an ‘ideological impact, proclaiming the technological and hence civilizational superiority of the West and differentiating between colonizers and colonized, between “advanced” and “backward” races’.

Postcolonial imaginations of technology were no less complicated. The anthropologist Jonathan Parry (2003), looking at labor migration to the Bhilai Steel Plant in central India, observes that the steel plant was ‘as much about forging a new kind of society as about forging steel’ – a Nehruvian era ethos which was then internalized by the Bhilai workforce, as they cast their own rural roots aside. The Verghese Commission imagined the state broadcasters Doordarshan and Akashvani to possess a similar sort of transformative potential, noting in its 1978 report on the broadcasters’ autonomy that the objective of a national communications policy would be ‘to awaken the people, inform, mobilize and educate them to be democratic citizens … and promote development and accepted national goals’.

Andhra Pradesh, where this study is based, has a particularly distinctive history in relation to public declamations of technology’s productive powers. The current chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, N. Chandrababu Naidu, drew inspiration from Malaysian and Singaporean urban planning (Bunnell and Das, 2010) in his public reshaping of the capital city of Hyderabad in the late 1990s to accommodate the growth and development of information technology–based service industries. In 1999, with the help of the consulting firm McKinsey, Naidu’s government produced an Andhra Pradesh Vision 2020 plan that projected its leapfrogging from an agricultural past right into the technology-based service sector economy.

Naidu himself would be feted as a particularly globally minded leader by neoliberal institutions like the World Bank and figures like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates. Naidu and his party were voted out of office in 2004, only returning to relevance a decade later with the breakup of Andhra Pradesh and the creation of the new state of Telangana, which lay claim to the city of Hyderabad. Naidu was then elected chief minister of the ‘residuary’ state of Andhra Pradesh in 2014, and his Telugu Desam Party continues to govern the region to this day.

In light of Naidu’s history of public proclamations celebrating and confirming technology’s inherently progressive and futuristic potential, the space of the television repair shop poses some important questions for us to consider. How have the labor and the spaces that have produced television changed in the light of a perceived digital future? Studying the repair shop allows us to unpack the labor that lies hidden within television’s current everyday presence and availability. This labor – and this question of how television comes to be what it is in people’s everyday lives and spaces – is a question not readily answerable by analyses of television that treat it solely as a platform for discursive content.

In addition to allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how the television exists within people’s present lives, the repair shop also exposes the tensions that lie within the declamations and promises surrounding television’s future. In 2016, the Telugu Desam government launched AP FiberNet, a municipal broadband Internet project that promised citizen-consumers a ‘triple-play package’ of television, telephone, and Internet services. In the government’s mediation of AP FiberNet, television was yoked to the futuristic potential which it had previously attributed only to digital media and services.

But this ready attribution of innovation and seamlessness that the government was willing to present as the inevitable future of the state and its consumer-citizens was belied, questioned, and challenged by the technological instability of the present, an instability that the repair shop embodied quite starkly. Thinking through the space of the repair shop and the labor of repairmen thus gives us the analytic room through which to challenge the imaginings of technology that undergird projects such as these.

To illuminate the multiple ways in which the dialectic of innovation and obsolescence undergirded both the present experiences and future imaginations of television, I look at three instantiations of obsolescence and innovation in television-related repair work. First, I look at how notions of obsolescence and innovation shaped repairmen’s ideas about their own technological labor and knowledge. Second, I examine how innovation and obsolescence were materially instantiated into new television sets, through increasingly centralized surveillance and control of the necessary spare parts. Finally, I consider how disposability and replacement has overtaken repair and analyze how that change was shaped by a broader conceptual tension between technological innovation and obsolescence. I then conclude by outlining the implications these multiple and overlapping tensions have for studies of television – both in its present moment and its perceived digital future.

Obsolescence and the anxiety of repairmen

The pair of customers, when Narendra brings them to the back where we work on the television sets, look uncertainly at each other. Their television – an older flat-screen LCD television – lies face-down on Narendra’s chipped blue workbench, which is covered with a faded blanket.

Narendra begins to explain what happened to the set: the television’s ‘main board’ will have to be replaced. The man jokes about the 3-month warranty on the replacement part, wondering if he’ll have to bring it in again in a few months’ time. It is not a bad question – Narendra himself told me he thinks that the flat-screen televisions have an overall life span of only 5 years, total.

Narendra then shows the customers the television’s ‘main board’, off-handedly mentioning that the CRTs – the bulky, boxy televisions with CRT picture technology – were much easier to fix, unlike these newer sets. Narendra gestures at the green-and-silver board in his hand while he speaks. These newer parts, he says, these are harder to fix. The man and woman nod deferentially, and the trio heads back out to the front desk, where the pair signs some paperwork and deposit their advance for the repair.

Obsolescence, Evan Watkins (1993) writes in Throwaways, is not a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is a concept that must be actively produced, both ideologically and materially. The ideology of obsolescence – the determination that a given technology (or a given job, a given person) is no longer relevant to the relentless progression of society – is always, Watkins writes, dialectically bound up with (re)imaginings of the relations of progress, the relations of ‘innovation’. Where a determination of obsolescence is made and materially enforced, there too lies a certain vision of what the future ought to be. The process, Watkins notes, is constantly shifting, temporally limited in its reach: ‘innovation can only be innovation for the time being’. In the creation and enforcement of obsolescence lies the imagination of innovation, of futurity and movement away from the imagined ills of the present moment.

Drawing from Ernst Bloch (1977), who noted famously that ‘not all people exist in the same Now’, Watkins observes that to recognize obsolescence as produced in the present is to break the links between obsolescence and a fading, irrelevant past. Temporal concerns, perhaps not unsurprisingly, animated several of my conversations with television repairmen. Most of the time, an abiding concern with the future – or more specifically, with the lack of a viable future in their line of work – colored our discussions.

The majority of the repairmen I talked to and worked with were from the Kamma landowning caste and thus culturally bound a group that had historically tied itself quite explicitly to narratives of technologically aided progress (Biao, 2007; Damodaran, 2008). They spoke of children in the major metropolises of Bangalore, Hyderabad, or even further abroad, studying at universities or working in other, more ‘respectable fields’. None of the repairmen I had spoken to anticipated that their businesses or shops would continue after them. Linked to this absence of prospects was an ongoing uncertainty about the present moment, wherein the shifting material natures of the television sets were changing the very nature of the work that was possible for them to do.

These conversations, and the latent anxieties that surfaced within them, forced me to consider – as Watkins does – how obsolescence takes shape in the world. If the production of obsolescence lies entwined with a vision of the future, then it falls to us to ask what kind of future is at work in the procedures that govern an arena such as the company-authorized service center – with its spare parts locked behind the boss’ doors, with its printed-up guarantees – and what ways of knowing, learning, and life were being rendered out-of-the-ordinary (or at least, out-of-warranty). The question the anxiety of the repairman poses to us is simply this: What vision of the future undergirds those mundane media technologies that shape or lives, and how is this vision of the future lived with and encountered in the space of the present moment?

The power of repair, Watkins notes, lies precisely in its ability to join up, patch, reshape, and redeploy disparate and discarded entities into new and unexpected possibilities. Of repair, Steve Jackson (2014) also writes that it might be considered a ‘subtle act of care’, a means by which the disorder of the world may be contained, and human order precariously knit together. But as Shekhar’s office – and Shekhar and his employees themselves – illuminated, this work of care was shot through with ambiguity and colored by competing desires: desires for control, for affordability, for efficiency, for flexibility, profit, or a desire to be of assistance.

Whatever vision of the future lay embedded within the carefully surveilled spare parts and the service guarantees of the ‘authorized service center’, it was a vision that collided with the chaotic mix of objects that customers brought in for repair: devices such as DVD players whose parts the company no longer supplied, CRT televisions that the company no longer actually sold or serviced (but whose repair ate up a considerable chunk of technicians’ working hours), and microwaves driven to breakdown by insect feces and fungi.

The temporal terrain of the conflict voiced by repairmen – between a future already foreclosed and a present marked by definitional uncertainty – was somewhat alleviated by the very nature of their work. Repair served as a means by which obsolescence (and the implications of innovation it was necessarily bound to) could be contested, pushed aside, or ignored, for just that much longer. Outside of these temporally oriented questions, the other issue that repairmen’s anxieties illuminated was a more materially bound one: What did it mean to live and labor with and among broken and obsolescent things, as a condition of everyday life rather than as a rarely encountered state of exception?

That the world of everyday objects – electric outlets, televisions, phones, toilets, pipes – was something to be actively wrestled into functionality was an unremarkable observation, both to myself and to the repairmen whom I talked to. How did the reality of the moment – the reality of breakage and failure – color the ideology of innovation embedded within authorized chains of service and emerging attitudes of consumption and disposability?

Consumption, as a moral signifier, has marked the post-liberalization middle classes of India both in public discourse (Brosius, 2012; Fernandes, 2000) and in private moments (Van Wessel, 2004). Accompanying this notion of ‘moral’ consumption was a concomitant notion of consumer goods as disposable and replaceable. As Giles Slade (2006) notes, the ‘disposability ethic’ – along with branding – is intrinsically tied to manufacturers’ efforts to market and encourage repetitive consumption. Repairmen were particularly attuned to this change in consumer behavior, and it was this dispositional change – alongside the specter of the ‘China item’ – which they pointed out as illustrative of a broader material and ideological shift. This material and ideological shift, I argue, was strongly connected to emergent, intertwined notions of quality and control: notions whose instability was embodied in the very work of the repair shop.

Innovation and control in the breaking world

Ishtiaque Ahmed (2015), in a study of mobile phone repairmen in Dhaka, noted that the repairmen thought the environment they lived in – the very heat and humidity of the Bangladeshi capital – caused devices to fail. The television repairmen I encountered in south India also characterized televisions through their environmental tolerances: the older CRT television was ‘rough and tough’, suited for the village and for the laborer and never a real problem to fix up and send back out. The newer LCD/LED flat-screen televisions were ‘metro’, unsuited for rural environments (or rural inhabitants, despite their growing presence in wealthier locals’ homes), and subject to expensive and debilitating failures.

Even the perceived quality of repair work was not immune from the taint which ‘India’ could inflict. Shekhar, the proprietor of the authorized service center, noted wryly to me that he no longer engaged in the ‘Videocon’ model of repair in his shop, after having worked at Videocon for several years. I only knew of Videocon at this point as an Indian brand of consumer electronics. The company made everything from televisions to washing machines, much like the multinational company Shekhar now worked for, and I wondered why he emphasized his distance from the name and all it stood for.

Curious, I pressed him to explain what he meant by ‘Videocon model’. It was, Shekhar said, the ‘old way’ of doing things in India, a way not suitable for the company he presently worked for. Another shop owner, upon hearing that I had spent time in Shekhar’s service center, would later tell me that the Videocon model of service involved delaying the repair, interminably, until a customer took matters into their own hands and delivered the necessary beating. Common to both these descriptions was the notion that the Videocon model of repair was peculiarly Indian, specifically regional and thus, consequently, corruptible and damaging in its very essence. India’s presence, like Dhaka’s, seemed to inhibit both the proper functioning of devices and the approved methods by which their damage might be rectified.

The historian Rudolf Mrázek (2004) wrote, musing on Jakarta’s new highways,

I recall Jakarta most as it was at the time of the riots in 1997 and 1998. The wide and smooth throughways of the city, then, at last begin to function as designed. Models came alive. Highways, to use Heidegger’s term, came forth into becoming. They became arteries … A trip to an interview on the other side of the sprawling city – usually one to three hours of speeding and braking – could now be made in twenty minutes. Horizons opened up or, rather, there were no horizons anymore; only the open road.

The shift Mrazek makes here – from the physicality of Jakarta’s newly built, wide, and smooth roads to the deeply affecting exhilaration of ‘no horizons’ – reflects Shekhar’s attachment of affective and moral qualities to functioning technological objects and their brand names. Videocon televisions were not only technologically deficient in his estimation – suspect to breakdown, suspect to delayed repairs with no real recourse – but were also indicative of an insurmountable affective and moral compromise, a compromise physically embodied in these technological deficiencies.

Part of Shekhar’s admiration for his current employer was based, in part, on how he assessed the company’s quality. Quality, in Shekhar’s estimation, was driven by a fine-grained control. It was control – over the availability of parts, over the moral rectitude and work habits of employees – that Videocon lacked. Badly repaired televisions and delayed parts were thus only a physical instantiation of what Shekhar deemed to be Videocon’s corrupt internal nature. In Shekhar’s shop, this admired, fine-grained control was most evident in the service center’s repair process for new flat-screen televisions.

The parts for a flat-screen television were carefully tracked: Narendra, the senior repairman, had to request the parts for flat-screen televisions directly from Shekhar, who kept them in his office, the one room in the repair shop with a lock on the door. The needed part was usually one of three things: a ‘power’ board, an ‘input/output’ board, or a ‘TCON’ board. Narendra would bag and label the defective part he had removed from the customer’s set, and hand the defective part over to Shekhar, after noting its serial number down in a long notebook he kept on his workbench. All of this was done before Narendra received the spare part he needed to perform the repair. It was Shekhar’s responsibility, he later told me, to send all the defective parts back to regional headquarters.

This control over parts was necessary, Shekhar told me, to maintain the company’s ‘name’ and its association with ‘quality’. If the parts leaked out on to the open market, and botched repairs were made with them, the company’s name would be compromised. The company’s view, according to Shekhar, was that their standing in the market (and their customers’ estimation) was because they provided ‘maximum’ service to the customer. In Shekhar’s telling, the company’s ‘service’ extended to the provision of guarantees, ‘genuine’ parts and timely repairs.

Key to this whole endeavor was a careful and formalized system of tracking both parts and time spent on repairs, with consequences if target times were not met. The baseline for responding to a customer issue was 48 hours, and Shekhar showed me how he tracked his engineers and intervened as the clock ticked upward. Shekhar noted proudly that over 80% of the calls answered by his shop were dealt with within 48 hours. (This, of course, did not include time that was spent waiting for a part, which Shekhar termed a ‘company mistake’, if the 48-hour deadline was exceeded.)

Narendra was considerably (and somewhat hilariously, in the face of Shekhar’s earnest exposition of the company’s values) less invested in this particular idea of quality and mourned that repairs were priced as high as they were. In his estimation, the company’s (and the service center’s) foremost motivation was making a profit, even if it wasn’t always beneficial to the customer. Repair, in Narendra’s view, should primarily have been about figuring out what they could do to help the customer – but these good intentions could (and often were) thwarted by the kinds of authorized parts that were made available to him by the shop.

For example, the cost of a complete panel replacement hardly seemed like a justifiable expense when the problem was a single defective strip of light bulbs in the backlight assembly. But the company only provided complete panels to the service center, not smaller components like strips of light bulbs. Although Narendra tried, he couldn’t perform these smaller fixes on flat-screen television panels. He noted disdainfully that fixing flat-screen televisions was dreadfully boring work: swap in a new board for a defective board, charge the customer the appropriate markup, and one’s job was done.

Narendra told me that almost all the fixes one could make on newer flat-screen televisions were disproportionately expensive in comparison to the price of a new set. Broken panels, a common issue, required that the entire panel be replaced, instead of the damaged layer, both because of the way the flat-screen televisions were constructed and the tightly controlled availability of their parts. Quality – and Shekhar’s maintenance of the company’s ‘name’ and its affective potential to draw in customers – demanded this control.

Shekhar’s company-driven implementation of surveillance and processes of small-scale control in the authorized repair shop – and the slippery way in which an obsolescent technology like the CRT television was exempted from surveillance and formal oversight, living alongside its futuristic counterpart in a strange conjoining – mirrors Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) claim in Provincializing Europe that ‘the task of conceptualizing practices of social and political modernity in South Asia requires use [to assume] that historical time is note integral, that it is out of joint with itself’. Although Chakrabarty invokes the coeval nature of gods and spirits with man in his explication of disjointed time, it is worth considering how the technologies and tools that undergird the experience of everyday routine – such as televisions, motorcycles, or light bulbs – are also entangled within these disjointed flows.

This disjointed temporality – this strange mash between the innovative future and the already-obsolescent present – was made obvious to me when I compared Narendra’s work on the flat-screen televisions with his efforts to repair CRT televisions. These televisions were not covered by any official company warranty or company-supplied parts, and Narendra’s work on them was more individualized and attuned to specific problems, rather than fixed procedures. He repaired individually defective transistors and capacitors, which he usually pulled from a collapsed cardboard box containing the ‘main boards’ from other CRT televisions. These parts, not being model-specific, could easily be swapped into other sets.

Unlike the flat-screen televisions, fixing a CRT television was a time and labor-intensive process. Even if the parts were readily available, finding the parts that needed to be replaced on each set was a time-consuming process of elimination. Narendra would sit with the television’s board under a magnifying lens and lamp (sometimes coated in years-old layers of dust and spider webs that had to be cleaned off with a dust blower before closer-eyed work could begin), checking flow of current and voltage for each section of the board with a multimeter before figuring out which single transistor, capacitor, or component was defective.

This slow process of elimination was never necessary for flat-screen televisions; given that there were only specific fixes that could be made with the provided and authorized parts, and given that most parts that couldn’t be bought in the electronics bazaars, Narendra analyzed problems in terms of what needed to be replaced, and not necessarily in terms of the components that needed to be repaired. Defective panels needed a panel to be replaced, televisions that didn’t turn on probably needed a power board replaced. The process was quicker; the prices charged to customers higher.

Yet Narendra never turned away customers who brought in a CRT television when they came in for a consultation, despite Shekhar’s grumbling and occasional scolding. One customer brought a bare CRT television’s ‘main board’ in a cardboard box, sans plastic housing, screen, or anything else that indicated its brand or point of origin. Narendra wryly noted that he was only supposed to work on one brand of television, and then told the customer to come back the next day, promising him he would take a look at it.

Replacement and the fading attraction of repair

The authorized service center was not, of course, the only embodiment of repair work in the region. In 2013, 3 years before I went to study Shekhar’s service center, I had met Adi, a television repairman in a village 2 hours’ drive away from the service center, heading toward the Andhra coast. He worked from his house, with no assistants, at a large wooden worktable that blocked access to the front door from his sandy courtyard.

When I arrived to speak with him in the early summer evening, he was dressed casually, in a white singlet and a dust colored lungi, sitting under a slowly turning fan. He was working on a Sansui CRT television, popping the back of the set with a long-handled screwdriver, poking and prodding as he asked his customer when the picture on the television set had gone out. He talked with the customers – all men – who waited on him as he worked, sitting or standing in his courtyard. The language was casual: there were few formalities, linguistic, or otherwise, here.

His wife was at the other end of the house, and a boy played in the middle room, away from the customers milling about in the courtyard. The television set he was working on was covered in layers of dust, inside and out. After 12 years doing this work, he knew exactly what to ask his customer. He had only started his work for the day; the hours of his job, he noted wryly, depended on the timing of that day’s power outage. When power returned to the village, then only he began to work.

If the ability to repair within the authorized service center was constrained and mutated through increasingly fine-grained surveillance and regulation, other forces were at work outside of its walls. Few independent television repairmen worked on flat-screen televisions.

Kumar, a repairman whom I met in the bustling city of Vijayawada, working in a shop on a narrow lane full of television and electronics repair shops, told me with a not inconsiderable pride that he could repair anything. He had been in the trade for over 13 years, and unlike most of the independent repairmen I had met, also ran a secondhand electronics shop. His shop was crammed with all sorts of domestic appliances: televisions, air-conditioning units, refrigerators pushing out in front of his small desk.

He noted that he had a good working relationship with the authorized electronics sellers in the area: he picked up the abandoned television sets that customers left behind in the authorized shops after they’d bought a new replacement. He then repaired and resold these televisions in his own shop. Unlike many of the independent repairmen I’d spoken to, Kumar fixed flat-screen televisions, though even he claimed that there really wasn’t much one could do on them.

Kumar had learned how to switch and swap broken panels out, unlike other independent repairmen I encountered. But Kumar also had some access to flat-screen television parts from the abandoned sets he received through his showroom contacts. He noted, with considerable amusement, that the repairmen at authorized centers sometimes came to him for parts, especially for older sets they no longer had parts for.

Shankar, another independent repairman who, when I met him, was working out of the offices of a regional political party in a small village an hour’s drive southeast of Vijayawada, had a rather grim outlook on the future of his career, in sharp contrast to the Kumar’s confident cheer. Working in a room with banners and cutouts of political party honchos strewn in the corner, a black and white portable television glowing at the edge of his desk, Shankar was certain that the television repair trade’s days were numbered, even in his small town.

It was a decline he directly linked to the changing technological nature of television sets themselves: within 5 years, Shankar thought that the growing availability of cheap ‘China items’ would drive repairmen out of business. He had enjoyed working on older analog electronics like tape recorders and told me he felt as if he was learning something new while repairing them. Newer devices, he felt, were both harder to repair and to learn from.

The ‘China item’ was a recurring specter in the conversations that I had with repairmen, and something that they often pointed to as a herald of their trade’s decline. Insofar as repair could be constituted as a response to the everyday frustrations of broken televisions and power outages, it was only viable if customers imagined it to be the best way to maintain the continuity of their lives. This need to maintain continuity – in terms of television, anyway – was couched (by the mostly male clientele) in terms of making sure women and children in the household were able to watch their serials and movies. Why repair a television, if new televisions (buoyed by pay-by-installment schemes and cheap Chinese brands) were there to be had?

Another repairman, Chinna, had a similar story to tell, though he did not invoke the specter of the ‘China item’ quite so baldly. Chinna said that even though the actual process of repairing a television had grown somewhat easier with the advent of LCD/LED flat-screen televisions – you only had to replace the defective board, rather than examining the circuits up close to figure out which exact transistor or capacitor had failed – the prices of repairs had skyrocketed, while those of new televisions had collapsed. The only reasonable choice for a customer, he explained, was buying a new set – if an LED/LCD panel cost Rs. 15,000, and an entirely new LED/LCD television cost Rs. 22,000, what reasonable person would get their television fixed?

This growing shift toward replacement was easiest to witness in the independent repair shops. Many shops I visited had a corner or a backroom with a steadily growing pile of CRT televisions that had been abandoned, and not all the repairmen I met were as entrepreneurial or as willing as Kumar to turn it into another facet of their business. Given that most customers who still came to the independent shops owned CRT televisions, they were useful sources of small parts like single capacitors or transistors.

The authorized service center was a completely different story. Shekhar would harangue the service engineers at semi-regular intervals to throw away the accumulated CRT televisions, in order to maintain a professional appearance. Narendra, as was his wont, calmly ignored him.

Tension and temporality: the tug of war between innovation, obsolescence, and repair

If we think about obsolescence and innovation functioning in an intertwined relationship – profoundly opposed in their existence and ideal but nevertheless bound to each other – then the repair shop becomes the site in which these definitional contradictions are materially enacted. The dreams displayed in newspaper advertisements and on showroom walls collided with the messy reality of workers’ schedules and unavailable parts; the sleekness of flat-screen televisions lined up in gleaming malls crashed up against the abandoned skeletons of outdated CRT televisions in repair shops. In the authorized service center, the corporate desire to maintain the ideal of an abstracted, brand-specific quality stood against the technicians’ competing wish to help their customers, and try and fix whatever set they brought in for examination.

In Vijayawada, the electronics showrooms were bustling when I went to visit them, accompanying a colleague who is shopping for televisions to place in a building he was renovating. There were no CRT televisions in any of the showrooms we go to; instead, the walls of the showroom were covered, with few inches to spare, with flat-screen televisions of varying sizes, blasting cheerful Tollywood music or cricket matches, depending on the salesman’s preference. The showroom employees led me to a stand of brochures when I asked for more information about the sets that they sold. The glossy books, mostly from multinational brands, shared a singular theme: flat-screen televisions set in perfectly minimalistic environments of large glass windows, blonde wood furniture, light-skinned viewers. Set against this imagination was the very present reality of the repair shop, with worktables covered in scattered parts, spliced cables, and televisions in various states of breakdown and functionality. Most of these parts belonged to CRT televisions, as most of the televisions that repairmen saw in their shops were CRT televisions, despite having been banished from the showroom and the future it had on offer.

Herbert Marcuse (1979) writes that capitalism

accumulates an increasing quantity of general ability, skills, knowledge … [which is] channeled into unnecessary work, unnecessary in that it is not required for the construction and preservation of a better society but is necessitated only by the requirements of capitalist production.

Marcuse does not go into the specific form that these skills take, but the contrast between the kind of ‘practical’ knowledge that the television repairmen I talked to possessed – knowledge that was pieced together through hands-on work with devices, through laboring in gurus’ shops, and the occasional certification course – and the knowledge that the miniaturized components and sealed-together panels of ‘innovative’ new flat-screen televisions demanded, illuminates his point better than most.

The journalist Vance Packard (1960) noted that manufacturers of consumer goods – alongside building their products with an eye on complexity, instead of durability – began to engage in creating an ‘obsolescence of desirability’, directly working to temporally influence consumers’ perceptions of the goods they were buying in an effort to systematize their buying habits on a predictable temporal scale, one not necessarily linked to major technological improvements. The flat-screen LED television, however, represents a more complex commingling of the obsolescence of function – the picture was indeed sharper and clearer, when paired up with the right set-top box, the sound less distorted, the set itself lighter and easier to transport – with this obsolescence of desirability. CRT televisions, though they were common in secondhand electronics shops, had been banished from the showroom floor and salespeople’s minds.

And yet the tenuous existence of repairmen and repair shops proves that the work of living with the commodities that capitalism so incessantly produces does not always result in an unsated desire for the innovative. The televisions that customers brought bore marks of being lived with in ways that stretched beyond mere utility: fading stickers of gods and cartoons pasted on the black casing of CRT televisions, or marks of vermilion and turmeric above the screen, a Hindu sign of blessing. Customers expressed disappointment when fixes weren’t available – and while this may have been due to the expense they would now incur buying newer, pricier consumer goods, part of it also appeared to be genuine disappointment at having to let go of objects that had, by then, spent several years in their homes and lives.

The repair shops – insofar as they were enmeshed in the web of relation that connected corporate innovation and the continuously obsolete television sets and DVD players filling up their backrooms – illuminate the uncertain material enactment of the relation between innovation and obsolescence. The determination of an object’s value was a dialogue rather than a determination, subject as much to a customer’s frustration and wheedling as it was to the repairman’s ability to secure parts. Affective value did not often come up in these conversations – which mostly tended to focus on price and the quickness of repair – but repairmen could be cajoled to take on jobs, to render value into objects that had limited use at the time they entered the shop.

Repairmen’s gloomy outlook on their own futures were tied to a closing of this conversation. Assigning value to the flat-screen television was a less flexible task, given the fact that spare parts were now so tightly tied to companies’ notions of temporally enforced obsolescence, and to the maintenance of reputation alongside physical product. CRT televisions were more amenable to cheaper fixes, but even their viability was being abrogated by upstream changes, particularly the shift to digital signals and high-definition broadcasting by the cable television providers.

Conclusion: television and its digital futures

Graeme Turner (2011) has observed that

especially since the digital revolution and notwithstanding the processes of globalization, “television” involves such varying forms, platforms, and content in its different national and regional locations that it is increasingly implausible for one set of experiences to be regarded as representative. (p. 32)

Turner’s provocation here is compelling: What does the ‘digital revolution’ entail at a material level for lives lived with television, in specific places, with specific histories? How does the ‘digital’ (such as it is) come into being, in the multiple worlds in which the television operates? This essay looks at how transforming television technologies were encountered and made sense of within the walls of the repair shop, but these stories are inevitably linked to other manifestations of the digital future of television.

In their account of the ‘digitalization’ of cable television in India, Parthasarathi et al. (2016) astutely observe that the ‘techno-organizational practices’ involved in the digitalization of cable also formalized and reconfigured the chain of value in the industry, taking power and customer-oriented flexibility away from last-mile cable operators (who were primarily responsible for the early formation of cable television in India) and consolidating it within larger corporate organizations higher up the chain. Television, then, is more than the sum of viewer experience or the product of creative personnel. Routes of distribution and modes of encountering television outside of reception and production need to be more carefully studied not only for the nuance they can provide to accounts of television’s transformation, but so that the entity of the ‘digital’ – a term used by parties as distant as politicians and repairmen to invoke a future apart from the moment of the present – can itself be grounded within the reality of contingent, everyday experience.