‘I Don’t Play Games’: Migrant Workers and Digital Media in Bengaluru

Introduction

Labour and leisure have been placed as polar concepts within theories of industrialisation and accompanying social transformations. Karl Marx’s argument about the alienation induced by labour in capitalist societies established ‘leisure’ as the prize to be won. As a consequence, a substantial body of Marxist theory presents the question of value, surplus and agency, as contestations over time. ¹ Of particular note here in the South Asian context is the work by the Raqs Media Collective (2014), especially their exhibition, Asamayavali/Untimely Calendar, held at the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, in 2014. The exhibition and accompanying publication feature the work of Raqs with labour unions in Faridabad as well as their own video installations responding to Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (2015). ²

Alienated workers seeking leisure through consumption or the commodity fetish, leads to leisure being constituted as a residual practice, in ‘the time left over when the necessities of life have been taken care of’. ³ Thus, leisure as the ‘time off from work’, free to be used at one’s discretion, relates to the Marxist understanding of individual freedom, which, as Marx notes, begins ‘where labour determined by necessity and external expediency ends’ (1976 [1894], 959–60). Building on Marx’s idea of leisure as a precondition for freedom, Herbert Marcuse (1964) points towards the accelerated rate of technological change blurring the demarcations between labour and leisure, or freedom and bondage, in post-industrial societies. These blurred distinctions generate new forms of sociality and media literacy.

Our research focused on a demographic previously overlooked in similar investigations within South Asia and intended to study how the everyday work and lives of migrant workers are impacted as they navigate their informal setups using mobile phones. Through ethnographic evidence, the study sought to demonstrate the emergence of a distinct digital subculture within this demographic, which is characterised by interconnected social spheres, blurred boundaries between work and leisure, and a merging of the public and private domains. It presents observations from two field sites: the Gemini Towers Construction site and the Mellow Hookah Bar in Bengaluru. ⁴ Located in the state of Karnataka in Southern India, the city has a long history of migration, which has intensified in the last few decades. Large-scale migration started in the nineteenth century when the British army brought in skilled labourers and traders from the Madras Presidency to build and sustain the Cantonment area and work in British-owned businesses. From the 1940s onwards, the numerous public sector undertakings attracted highly skilled immigrants, and the most recent influx since Y2K or the new millennium has been of technology sector workers. ⁵ Alongside, a large number of semi-skilled or ‘unskilled’ workers have migrated to the city, finding jobs as gig workers, or in the manufacturing and service industries, as well as in the infrastructure sector as construction labourers for roads, buildings and the infamous Bangalore metro. The two field sites discussed in this article profile migrant communities from different parts of India: one from Bihar and Odisha and the other from West Bengal and Assam—who work under very different conditions, and yet, their use of mobile phones generated surprisingly similar results, which we reflect upon in the concluding section of the article.

Portable Dreams: Mobile Phones, Pastime and Aspiration

It is a hot and humid day in March 2021 at the Gemini Towers construction site in Yelahanka, North Bengaluru. The property is planned to be spread across three acres, housing 168 apartment units in two building blocks. A small manual lift is ferrying sacks of cement and silica to the second storey, with labourers loading materials in the middle of fine dust that surrounds them. The only protective gear that shields them are fluorescent orange gloves and thin cotton towels wrapped around their heads. The generator makes a loud shuddering noise which resonates across the entire site. The construction started in June 2019 with a brief break for a month during the pandemic when the work was completely halted. ⁶ The construction sector relies on migrant labourers from across the country, outsourced through hardened contractors, whose job is to ensure that the supply chain remains undisrupted through the entire duration of the project. The workers employed on the site are mostly men from the eastern states of Bihar, West Bengal and Odisha along with a small group of labourers from Northern Karnataka, who have migrated for work with their families.

The site is relatively calm for a Monday morning on 29 March 2021, with plastering work in progress in one of the blocks. A labourer is busy smearing powdered cement on the walls, ready to be smoothened by another worker holding a rectangular sponge block. A young worker ferrying cement blocks pulls out his smartphone, sits on the blocks for respite, briefly scrolls through something and resumes work again. The sound of the generator is overpowered by the noise from the pit service van, which makes weekly visits to clear human waste from the make-shift bathrooms, which are commonly used by men, women and children working and living on the construction site. An unbearable stench now surrounds the air. Two very young workers sitting by the hoisting machine (used to ferry building materials to upper floors) chat about something they are sharing via their smartphones. The entire construction site is resonant with the ubiquitous presence of mobile phones, characterising everyday life and affecting the dynamics of workplace relationships among migrant labourers: recruiting, finding work and networking.

We met with Ajay in his modestly furnished, one-room pucca (cemented) shed located at the entry point of the site. Sitting on his plywood bed, he recollects having come to Bengaluru in search of work, after failing his matriculation exams in Odisha. In 2003, as a teenager, he earned ₹60 Indian (about 80 cents a day) for working eight hours as a daily-wage labourer in the construction business. The 35-year-old now works as a contractor and manages a team of young men from his home state. In the past 8 months, Anand has ordered about 18 new smartphone units for the 30 labourers working under him. The most popular ones are the MI (Xiomi and Redmi) sets, ordered and delivered on Flipkart. He explains how it was common for young men working on construction sites to spend a significant amount of their earnings on fancy smartphones and data packs:

Hum aisa koi labour ko nahi jaanta jinke paas mobile phone nahi hain. Sarey young log toh bada bada set leke ghoomte hai. Aur aisa koi din nahi jis din woh apna data pack khatam na kare. Sara din ee net pe rehte hai and aur din ka pack khatam hone pe turant top up karte hai. Kuch log toh leave leke movie dekhte hai aur game khelte hai.

(I don’t know any labourer who isn’t in possession of a mobile phone. Most youngsters own large smartphones. And there isn’t a day when they don’t exhaust their daily data packs. They are on the net all day and top up their net packs as soon as they deplete their daily consumption limits. Some people even take leaves to watch movies and play online games all day). ⁷

The relationship between income and data packs purchased did not appear to be straight-forward or dependent on affordability (as corroborated, e.g., by O’Neill et al. in their 2016 study) and requesting an advance payment to buy a smartphone immediately upon a worker’s joining a construction site was fairly common. As Anand explained, ‘Jab hum pehele wo kamai kamane ko bolte hai, toh bolenge mobile ke bina time pass nahi hota’ (When I ask them to earn their wages first, to be able to afford a smartphone, they complain of getting bored without one).

Unlike most participants of the O’Neill study which carried out a qualitative investigation into mobile phone and media-sharing practices among individuals in lower-income urban and peri-urban Bengaluru, the workers at the Gemini Towers construction site regularly found themselves needing to top up their data plans, especially during the Indian Premier League (IPL) season. ⁸ A dynamic and continuously evolving ecosystem of devices and media, sustained by new technologies, is intricately embedded into the daily habits of individual users with notable sophistication. ⁹ Cheaper data packs and a wider variety of content in regional languages (often dubbed versions) available on free video-sharing websites such as YouTube made it easier to source and consume content online with the media consumption mostly centred around gaming and entertainment. Explaining the impact of the ‘social geography of an urban slum’ on the experience of internet usage in Hyderabad’s Hafeezpet, Nimmi Rangaswamy and Srikanth Yamsani profile young users aged between 15 and 19 years, whose defining characteristic they describe as being ‘extremely desirous of always-on and perpetual internet access’ (2011, 293). As encapsulated by a teen user, micro prepaid internet ¹⁰ use is something that is likely to ‘blow one’s mind’, otherwise described as ‘mental karta hai’ (2011, 286).

Conversations with Anand led us to a group of very young workers from Odisha, who were interviewed in their three-room pucca accommodation, while they were out of work for three days due to supply shortages of construction sand on the site. Their modest lodging housed eight labourers aged between 16 and 25 years. In the complex, multi-tiered, outsourced and highly informal construction industry, the thekedar ¹¹ system keeps the migrant workers unknown to the companies employing them, complicating the manner in which labour regulations and safety norms are enforced (Weber, Shivakumar, and Sheng, 1991). Our interviews with Dhruv (22), Girish (24), Tilak (18) and Keshav (16) were conducted amidst the humdrum of everyday life on the site, with a typical ‘off day’ involving attending to phone calls, video calling friends and family ‘back home’, watching comedy films online, and playing Free Fire ¹² with competent players. As a consequence, interactions with them were always in the backdrop of workers jetting in and out of the accommodation (with many housed in adjacent sheds also joining in to escape the heat by being under a cemented roof), loud, animated gunshots from someone always playing Free Fire in the rooms, and the constant noise of video calls and voice clips playing on WhatsApp.

Dhruv found work at Gemini Constructions through other people who had worked on the site and hailed from his village, Nachuni, in Odisha. It is now his third work stint at the same site (after several short and temporary visits to his hometown) and he makes close to ₹500 (6 USD) per day, as a helper on the plastering team. He owns a Samsung smartphone priced at ₹12,500 (150 USD) and recharges it with a monthly Jio pack of ₹269 (3.5 USD) that allows 42 GB of total data (1.5 GB/day), unlimited voice calls and 100 SMS/day. When questioned if it was typical to run out of daily data limits on days without work, he says, ‘Haan, lekin data khatam hone pe, doosre logon ke hotspot on karke share karte hai’ (Yes, but we switch on hotspots of other workers and share it when we run out of our daily packs).

Faster internet and better random-access memory (RAM) were the only criteria he considered while investing in his current smartphone. When questioned if that is aimed at enabling a smoother gaming experience, he says, ‘mein game nahi kehlta (I don’t play games) in a rather defiant tone. He clarifies that by a game he only means Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), a mobile game that has enjoyed a rather controversial reputation in India. ¹³ The gaming experience among migrant workers had become synonymous with PUBG, which was among a slew of Chinese-origin apps that the Indian government banned in 2020 due to escalating security concerns between the two countries. A rebranded version Battlegrounds Mobile India (BGMI) was introduced in the Indian market, to be received with hostility again, and the ban led to the generation of games like Free Fire, a similar combat game created by a Singaporean game developer, Garena. ¹⁴

One now hears repeated gunshots from what seems like a tense scenario unfolding on Tilak’s mobile phone screen. Girish explains that his friend is playing Free Fire with a bunch of friends from their native village in Odisha:

Jab koi bhi accha khel raha ho, Gujarat se ya Mumbai se, tab hum unko ID pooch ke friend bana lete hai. Chatting pe baat karke apne saath khelne ko bolte hai. Aise kahin se be log kise ke saath bhi khel sakte hai. Bada bada ghar ka aadmi bhi rehta hai.

(When we notice that someone is playing well, from Gujarat or Mumbai, we ask for their ID and befriend them. We strike a conversation on the online chat and convince them to play with us in the future too. This way anyone from anywhere can play with you. Sometimes, people from affluent families also play with us).

Several voice and chat features on gaming platforms such as PUBG and Free Fire offer shared interactive spaces that can be accessed by numerous players at once, while facilitating social play which further encourages ‘immersive gameplay’. ¹⁵ As observed in the case of the Odiya men, it began with gathering the character ID details of ‘good players’ and growing the network by adding them to a new game or initiating conversation through in-game voice and text chats. Sometimes, these initial interactions carried forward on other social media platforms such as WhatsApp and Facebook, and also blossomed into offline friendships. In a separate study, Wang and Wellman (2010) demonstrate that the formation of offline associations was more common among heavy internet users as compared to moderate or light users.

While working on the site, Girish’s phone was damaged when it was crushed by a cement brick. As a result, throughout the conversation, Girish frequently expressed anguish about having lost all his previous contacts, acquired and nurtured through his social gaming skills on Free Fire. Girish’s family has loaned an advance payment of about ₹40,000 (483 USD) for their sister’s wedding from a contractor. Hence, both he and his younger brother, Keshav, aged just 16 years, have to work on the construction site till they repay their loan and then make enough money to buy a phone. Keshav, who curiously stops by at the accommodation to see what we are all up to, smiles when we ask him about his bandaged thumb. A novice to the construction business, Keshav is still learning the tricks of the trade as a helper on the plastering team. He has injured his thumb, meaning he cannot work for a few weeks till it heals. Both Girish and Keshav now value their borrowed entertainment, especially since supply shortages have put them all out of work. He reasons out:

Woh kya hain na, mobile rehne se acche se timepass ho jata hai. Aur aise ghaar ka yaad nahi aata aur ghar ke baare mein sochna nahi hota baar baar.

(The thing is, mobile helps us kill time. This way we don’t have a longing for home and we are not reminded of things back home repeatedly).

Though Tilak had chosen to play with friends from his village that day, what came across in several instances was the consistent desire for erasing social barriers (gender, class and caste) in the forming of friendships, and the manner in which video gaming became a performative site for this. ¹⁶ A typical user among the young boys from Odisha was mostly male, multilingual and likely to be a school dropout before matriculation. Nonetheless, they were equipped with sophisticated digital literacy skills and were keen on leveraging media infrastructures to experience aspirational mobility, seeking social relations outside the customary bounds of kinship and locality. The workers used mobile phones as an essential part of surviving labour-intensive jobs in large and unfamiliar cities, to stay occupied, entertained and combat loneliness. Like the teenage users of Hafeezpet, they walked the tightrope between ‘affordability and aspiration, public and private usage and stringent cost and rising desire’ (Rangaswamy and Yamsani 2011, 294). However, this did not necessarily mean they continuously innovated to cut down spending on data packs or found shortcuts to source vernacular media content. Instead, they kept up with the changing trends of media ecologies, built social connections that collectively helped them navigate life in the construction industry and depended on common sense, experimentation, on-the-go learning and personalisation as ‘mediated life hacks’. Hence, practices such as hotspot sharing, on-demand knowledge transfer and smaller daily data recharge packs were all central to how resources and know-how were exchanged among young workers on construction sites. The aspirational ways in which the young boys from Odisha were using gaming platforms such as PUBG and Free Fire are also indicative of how the dense assemblage of media infrastructures, which were built through the first quarter of the twenty-first century and popularised through rapid uptakes of smartphones in developing nations, shrink the distance between the rural and the urban in unexpected ways, expanding the scope of the ‘media sensorium’, as a uniquely urban phenomenon. ‘Kisko kuch sikhane ki zaroorat nahi hai, sab ko sab kuch aata hai. (‘There is no need of teaching anyone anything, everyone knows everything.’) says Dhruv, when asked about peer learning of gaming skills and other social media hacks.

Steven Graham and Simon Marvin (2001) use the term ‘splintering urbanism’ in attempting an interdisciplinary analysis of the complex interactions between infrastructure networks and urban spaces. Referring to it as the ways in which infrastructures—including information and communication technologies—can fragment the experience of the city, the geographers argued that this phenomenon is not isolated, but is part of a broader global process of rapid urban transformation occurring in the contemporary period (Graham and Marvin 2001). Building on this work, Ravi Sundaram (2009) argues that modern urban living can no longer be defined apart from the media experience:

The dramatic ‘live’ experience brought about by flickering film, television, advertising and mobile screens also disperses space, giving birth to new clusters that often bypass linear networks of cultural and technological exchange. (2009, 5–6)

We contend that the dense assemblage of media infrastructure that has been built through the first quarter of the twenty-first century further shrinks the distance between the rural and the urban, and Sundaram’s formulation of the ‘media sensorium’ may not be a uniquely urban phenomenon any longer. The recalibration of distance and closeness, in terms of both time and space, has a significant bearing on the manner in which media consumption and production rearticulates concepts of labour and leisure, as we further explore through ethnographic observations and critical analysis, in the section that follows.

Gaming in the Digital Age: Online and Offline Dynamics

It is a weekday afternoon in early November 2021 and the relaxed environs of the Mellow rooftop cafe and hookah bar in Koramangala are almost empty. There is just one table occupied by a couple of customers, and the place is dotted with several young waiters in black uniforms standing by, in the high-ceiling cafe which occupies the rooftop on the fifth floor of a posh, corner building on Hosur Road. The building is very close to the landmark Forum mall (renamed ‘Nexus’ in 2023), Bengaluru’s first full-fledged retail shopping mall, established in the year 2004. Pramod, 29 years of age, is among the most experienced waiters at the cafe with over a decade’s experience in the hospitality sector. Pramod left his hometown near Darjeeling in West Bengal, at a young age, to find a job paying decent wages in Bengaluru. He shares his accommodation with four other colleagues from Mellow, where Pramod and his friends enjoy the benefits of a Wi-Fi connection, the cost of which (approximately ₹900/11 USD a month) is split equally between them. Pramod and his colleagues are part of a popularly recorded wave of internal migration in India, of young adults from the North Eastern Region (NER) ¹⁷ to Bengaluru. In a paper titled ‘Job-Seeking Behaviour, Employment, Labour Employability Skills, Dissatisfaction and Job Mobility: A Study of North-East Migrant Workers in Bengaluru’, Marchang Reimeingam (2021) used a mixed-method sampling technique to collect primary data from 255 North-East migrant workers employed in different areas across Bengaluru. The study noted some important findings: (a) It was the dearth of employment prospects in NER and the abundance of opportunities in Bengaluru that motivated youngsters to move into the city; (b) a majority of these workers worked in the retail sector and depended highly on their social networks to find jobs and (c) they tended to find work within shorter periods due to employability skills such as communication and flexibility. Clearly, the North-East migrant workers at the hookah bar were in a more advantageous position than their counterparts in the construction sector. They exhibited higher educational qualifications and literacy levels, with most of them having completed matriculation. Additionally, they enjoyed regular monthly wages, contrasting with the task-based compensation prevalent in the construction sector. Their employment patterns were also favourable, as possessing strong soft skills (language, dressing style and manners related to guest relations) was considered an advantage in the hospitality sector.

At work, Pramod uses his Jio prepaid pack to access the internet through the MI phone that he has been using for three years. When asked why he bought this phone, he instantly replies: ‘PUBG khelne ke liye toh bada RAM wala phone ki zaroorat hai, madam’ (One needs a phone with a large RAM to play PUBG, madam). Battle royale games such as PUBG are known to be bigger online games that are loaded with heavy and high resource-intensive graphics; they do not operate smoothly on devices with a RAM of less than 3 GB. The mobile hangs, graphics get jittery, and with continuous gameplay, there is a chance for the mobile to heat up as well; these were some of the reasons given by the workers at the cafe. Pramod shares with us that he plays BGMI (the Indian version of PUBG) for a couple of hours every day. On his weekly off, this easily doubles up, he says. Sharan, a 27-year-old who has been with Mellow for 5 years, left home for Bengaluru following a disagreement with his parents. According to Sharan, his day felt incomplete if he did not spend at least an hour playing PUBG.

To serve his gaming needs better, Pramod intends to buy soon a new phone with 6 GB RAM and a good camera. Pramod’s friend and coworker, Pranav, expresses this desire to constantly update and keep up with changing phone trends. A gaming enthusiast himself, Pranav puts it across as ‘kam budget mein zyaada features (more features for a lesser budget)’. Pranav found work at Mellow through Pramod and has been working as a service staff for 5 years now. He has a Xiaomi POCO F1 handset, which has 6 GB RAM, enabling better play while supporting other applications running in the background. There is a tinge of honesty mixed with caution when he articulates his PUBG gaming experience:

Week off pe anjaan logon ke saath khelta hoon. Jhooth nahi bolunga lekin agar voice aur DP se pata laga ke ladki khel rahi hai, toh uske saath flirt karne ki khosish bhi karta hoon.

(During my week offs, I play with unknown people. I will not lie, but through the voice and DP if I find that a girl is playing, then I also try to flirt with her).

We ask Pranav if these chance online interactions with the female PUBG players ever continue and blossom offline. ‘Haan, kabhi kabaar (yes sometimes)’ comes the careful answer. Even while acknowledging the fact that relationships formed online can sometimes extend to in-person interactions, Pranav is cautious about revealing more. The trend of ‘many in-game and online relationships’ extending to the ‘out-of-game and offline worlds’ has been documented by Garry Crawford, Victoria Gosling and Ben Light in Online Gaming in Context: The Social and Cultural Significance of Online Games (2011). The authors note that ‘all gaming and internet use is socially and culturally created and located, and will have implications and consequences beyond the online worlds and in games’ (p. 30). A study by Cole and Griffiths (2007) looks into the social interactions that occur both within and outside of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) by studying 912 self-selected MMORPG players from 45 countries. Among other findings, the study concludes that players may be able to express themselves through virtual games in ways that they might not feel comfortable doing in real life due to their appearance, gender, sexuality or age.

Pranav is guarded in his response to our question about whether the gaming interactions shift to non-game digital platforms such as social media: ‘haan, kabhi WhatsApp pe bhi baat hoti hai, agar acchi dosti hui toh (yes, sometimes we end up connecting on WhatsApp too, if we become good friends)’. He uses a Nepali–English translator app on his phone, which he says is useful for pursuing romantic interests, even if the translations are approximations. The way in which Pranav uses the internet and online gaming is suggestive of the ‘communal nature of play’, encompassing social markers, characteristics, identities and opinions that players bring into their gaming experiences. ¹⁸ Whether Pranav uses the translation app to better interact with female players he meets online is inconclusive given his reluctant, socially measured answers. However, it is rather clear how his opinions about himself and the image he wants to build about himself, among female players who he seeks romantic relationships with, influence the way he then uses specific mobile applications.

Prior research has shown that virtual environments have the capacity to offer momentary comfort, excitement and diversion as online communication facilitates the development of computer-mediated social support (Morgan and Cotten 2003; Whang, Lee, and Chang 2003). For example, the support extended via chat rooms enhances in-game communications on gaming platforms such as PUBG. Existing literature also corroborates that MMORPGs were popularised by their in-game social and cooperative features, which are known to attract users (Griffiths, Davies, and Chappell 2004; Stenros, Paavilainen, and Mayra 2011). In ‘Gender Swapping and Socializing in Cyberspace: An Exploratory Study’, Hussain and Griffiths (2008) collected data from 119 online gamers ranging from 18 to 69 years of age using a questionnaire. As per their findings, two-fifths of the gamers said they played online to escape other things, with an additional 34% of the gamers stating that they used online gaming as a way to change their mood. Two-thirds of the participants in this study believed that online gaming had a stimulating effect on them, with reasons cited as ‘the challenging and exciting aspects of role-playing, the level of interactivity with other players, and the opportunity to meet new friends online’ (2008, 51). These studies corroborate the reasons mentioned by workers interviewed at Mellow, who in addition deal with the peculiarities enforced by secluded migrant lives away from homes and families, work conditions that allowed for intermittent free/waiting hours, the desire to escape boredom/loneliness and the need for entertainment. Their narratives demonstrate the nominal ways in which mobile media is facilitating community building amongst migrant working classes. The online/offline communities enabled by video games and digital media point to the anxious interest of the state and corporates in regulating online spaces, ¹⁹ and in a different but related vein, to debates around the ‘digital public sphere’. ²⁰

The shift timings of 24-year-old Jevan at Mellow are between 2 and 11 p.m. and, thus, he dedicates anything between 2 and 4 hours every day between 1 and 5 a.m. to give in to his gaming urges to play PUBG.

In the social world of online gaming, though some migrant workers did choose to create more homophilic bonds at micro-levels (connecting with friends of the same age, speaking similar languages, etc.), the recorded narratives strongly suggest an aspirational appropriation of the gaming platform. The observations that Rangaswamy and Arora (2016) make in the context of everyday Facebook use in urban South Indian slums, also hold true in the case of gaming applications which are ‘becoming a critical virtual setting in contesting and overshadowing handed-down versions of conventional notions of personhood, social esteem, markers of social location, communities of friendship and heterosexual love’ (p. 613).

Rashmi (2017) documents how low-end service workers in Bengaluru— such as transport workers, taxi drivers, hotel and restaurant staff, security guards and street vendors—use mobile phones as digital multimedia technology in their everyday lives. In ‘The Digital Others’, she sketches the working conditions of these workers, where leisure gets ‘interspersed’ with work. She argues that it is in fact the technology of ‘leisure’ that allows them to survive long inactive hours, waiting periods or (non-)work. The work settings of the service employees interviewed by her are very similar to the subjects of this study; the lives of these employees are inseparable from their work in many ways. Their occupational set-ups are marked by precariousness, exploitation, mobility and hierarchy, which are all the most obvious characteristics of metropolitan ‘immaterial labour’. ²¹

Immaterial Labour and Social Networks: Some Speculations

Immaterial labour encompasses a spectrum of tasks often overlooked as conventional ‘work’. These activities include shaping cultural and artistic benchmarks, influencing trends and consumer preferences and, notably, strategically shaping public opinion. Historically confined to the privileged sphere of the bourgeoisie and their descendants, these activities have, since the late 1970s, transitioned into what contemporary discourse now terms ‘mass intellectuality’ (Lazzarato 1996, 133).

Immaterial labour as a Marxist framework has been influential within internet studies, where it has been applied to examine digital capitalism/labour, commons-based peer production ²² and user-generated content production. ²³ Tiziana Terranova (2000) uses the term ‘free labor’ ²⁴ to denote the voluntary labour provided by internet users who are not remunerated by the beneficiaries of the labour and are, hence, exploited by capital. She writes:

The Internet highlights the existence of networks of immaterial labour and speeds up their accretion into a collective entity. The productive capacities of immaterial labour on the Internet encompass the work of writing/reading/managing and participating in mailing lists/Web sites/chatlines. (Terranova 2000, 42)

Thus, in the era of informational capitalism, user-generated content on the internet can be viewed as the knowledge that gets created and recreated in the spaces of common experience. Christian Fuchs (2010), in his influential article ‘Labour in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet’, explains how this further challenges the strict demarcation of class as capital and wage labour. He expands the notion of class in the information society to include several typologies identified by other scholars such as the ‘multitude’, as a revolutionary class that struggles in common (Hardt and Negri 2004, 104) and precarious knowledge labourers as a new class that is ‘poorly paid, insecure, untrained, deskilled’ (Dyer-Witheford 1999, 88). Further dissecting the idea of the multitude as explained by Hardt and Negri (2000), Fuchs takes into account migrants and workers in developing countries and precarious and informal workers among important subclasses that are overexploited by capital (Fuchs 2010).

According to proponents of the ‘knowledge economy’, ²⁵ the workers in the new economy defy classification as a singular class due to the extensive variety in their occupations, activities, professional qualifications, skills and knowledge. They assert that the traditional concept of the working class, characterised by a homogeneity of labour processes, skills and work content, no longer accurately applies to the diverse nature of contemporary employment (Amorim, 2014). This flexibility of interpretations enables emerging subjects of the current era, specifically economic migrants highlighted in this study, to be considered within the domain of immaterial labour, despite the fact that the type of work they predominantly engage in is manual.

From our engagement with the young workers employed in the two industries, it was clear that these users both consume and produce content concurrently, navigate different media formats and platforms, run multiple mobile applications simultaneously and switch between online and offline contexts with relative ease, all of which are characteristic of cultural convergence, various aspects of which, have been discussed by different scholars, not necessarily in the context of mobile technologies (Deuze 2007; Jenkins 2006). Another striking feature was that these users were able to cash upon what Levy (1997) referred to as the collective intelligence or the competence of users to exchange knowledge and resources, as well as collaborate on problem-solving, in online contexts. Such collective intelligence was evidently visible in peer learning of mobile media skills and on-demand transfer of any and all kinds of mobile phone-related knowledge (browsing, recharge, e-payments, sharing audiovisual content, online gaming, networking, etc). The findings of this study hint at the possibly empowering aspect of immaterial labour as well, deviating from prior literature that has predominantly characterised immaterial labour as a one-sided mechanism of capitalist exploitation in a conceptual manner. From the narratives gathered in the project, it can be indicated that certain online immaterial labour transcends into offline actions, indicating that this type of labour does not exclusively generate ‘immaterial’ outcomes (Lin and Liu 2018). Hence, additional research that accounts for ‘concrete local experiences of online group users’ (2018, p. 257) as aided by mobile media technologies is imperative to fully understand the contradictory interplay of exploitation and empowerment within immaterial labour in the contemporary digital era.

The narratives of young adults working in the construction and hospitality sectors serve as typical examples of a relatively young population who, as first-time users, are being onboarded onto the digital universe in India, solely through their mobile phones. Their cases are also a classic example of technology leapfrogging, whereby users tend to exploit the potential of mobile phones by skipping fixed-line technology and computers, which were originally associated with traditional forms of internet access, which would have still demanded a certain level of literacy. For example, the workers that we profiled would not have participated in or benefitted from the cyber-cafe revolution where email and chat rooms opened up new modes of sociality for an entire generation of middle-class youth in the 1990s in big and small towns. Neither would they have participated in the video game parlour culture, which would be prohibitively expensive and involve a class-consciousness and public visibility that may perhaps be intimidating. It is the private–public nature of mobile phone technology that enables greater ‘virtual adventurism’ than may be possible within the rigid social barriers of the physical world. The generalised profile of gaming aspirants that emerged through the ethnographic study underlines such young users’ newer aspirations, anxieties and desires.

Due to the highly programmable and customisable nature of mobile media, the usage, consumption and production of online content are far from being uniform. In other words, personal interests seem to dictate their choice, selection and use of mobile media applications among workers interviewed in both sectors. For example, while Pranav’s passion for music prompted him to use an app called TUBIDY ²⁶ to find and practice playing the latest Nepali songs on his guitar, Tilak’s desire to share visually appealing pictures motivated him to explore photo-editing apps like PickU. ²⁷ Hence, it is almost impossible to arrive at a sweeping proposition generalising migrant workers’ digital engagement through their mobile phones. Nonetheless, certain commonalities do arise in the way they utilise online gaming platforms to forge social connections that transcend physical boundaries. The motivation to indulge in MMORPGs such as PUBG and Free Fire remains rather similar in both sectors. Among the hospitality sector, the most commonly quoted explanations included boredom, a way of distraction to not miss home and sometimes simply the interest to play and connect with players they may or may not know. In the construction sector, supply shortages leading to forced holidays, lack of entertainment opportunities after work hours and the incentive to interact and build friendships outside the mundane realities of the physical boundaries of their workplace serve as motivating factors. The nature of work on both sites allowed for time to be snatched away in short spurts, thereby resulting in variations in how these workers utilised their smartphones on both regular working days and holidays. Based on our ethnographic observations, we found that workers at both sites tended to engage in prolonged and excessive online gaming during their off days and unexpected holidays. This study explores gaming as a social activity, investigating online and offline relationships among migrant users. The gathered evidence suggests that both groups of workers engage in ideation, innovation, skill acquisition and repurposing of mobile gaming in comparable ways to fulfil distinct aspirations. The widespread adoption of smartphones, coupled with functional, high-speed internet, has swiftly established mobile phones as the favoured and convenient platform for gaming. Consequently, recognising the social dimension is essential for a more comprehensive understanding of gaming communities within migrant working classes.

It is now a well-known fact that users are essential for generating profit in the new media economy. Hence, it is implicit that within the larger framework of informational capitalism, new media enables an abundance of production and urges users to ‘engage in organic practices of economic production, surplus-value generation, coproduction, communicative circulation, and productive consumption’ (Fuchs 2010, 191). While such an argument concurs with the Marxist understanding of capital and class theory, its implication to understand the kind of contiguity that such production or consumption facilitates is also the subject matter of an emerging body of work that examines the mobile phone as a technology of propinquity (Cabañes and Uy-Tioco 2022; Lesitaokana 2017). As observed among a few young construction and hospitality sector workers, it could be inferred that online gaming platforms serve as extensive social networks for migrant workers to interact with other gamers virtually and become the new battleground for contestations over caste, class, kinship and locality. However, further research is necessary to understand the precise manner in which social hierarchies transfer into the virtual world. Considering the ‘private’ nature of mobile phone usage, qualitative ethnography and interviews may need to be supplemented by digital ethnography as participant observers, along with the analysis of the massive digital data that are left behind by users as footprints. We hope that this article makes a modest contribution towards generating more grounded data and observations to be able to understand the nuances of emerging patterns of digital media usage in South Asia.