Digital Politics and Culture in Contemporary India
Digital Politics and Culture in Contemporary India

Author: Biswarup Sen

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-01-08

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1317355822

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The relationship between information and the nation-state is typically portrayed as a face-off involving repressive state power and democratic flows: Twitter and the Arab Spring, Google in China, WikiLeaks and the U.S. State Department. Less attention has been paid to those scenarios where states have regarded information and its diffusion as productive of modernity and globalization. It is the central argument of this book that the contemporary nation-state, especially in the global South, is far from hostile to the current informational milieu and in fact makes crucial use of it in order to develop adequate modes of governance, communication and sociality in a networked world. This book focuses on India – an emerging country that has recently witnessed a "software miracle" – to highlight the critical role informatics has historically played in the national imagination and to demonstrate how the state, private capital and civic society have drawn upon and engaged the precepts and protocols of the information age to fashion an "info-nation."

Image-Making-India
Image-Making-India

Author: Paolo Silvio Harald Favero

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-11-25

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1000182037

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Image-Making-India explores the evolving meaning of images in a digital landscape from the vantage point of contemporary India. Building upon long-term ethnographic research among image-makers in Delhi, Mumbai and other Indian cities, the author interrogates the dialogue between visual culture, technology and changing notions of political participation. The book explores selected artistic experiences in documentary and fiction film, photography, contemporary art and digital curation that have in common a desire to engage with images as tools for social intervention. These experiences reveal images’ capacity not only to narrate and represent but also to perform, do and affect. Particular attention is devoted to the 'digital', a critical landscape that offers an opportunity to re-examine the significance of images and visual culture in a rapidly changing India. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of visual and digital anthropology and cultures as well as South Asian studies.

Global Digital Cultures
Global Digital Cultures

Author: Aswin Punathambekar

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2019-06-06

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 0472125311

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Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption.

Digital Queer Cultures in India
Digital Queer Cultures in India

Author: Rohit K. Dasgupta

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-03-16

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 1351800574

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The work argues that new media, social networking sites (SNS), both web and mobile, and related technologies do not exist in isolation, rather they are critically embedded within other social spaces. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of gender studies, especially men's and masculinity studies, queer and LGBT studies, media and cultural studies, particularly new media and digital culture, sexuality and identity, politics, sociology & social anthropology, and South Asian studies.

Digital, Political, Radical
Digital, Political, Radical

Author: Natalie Fenton

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2016-09-26

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1509511709

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Digital, Political, Radical is a siren call to the field of media and communications and the study of social and political movements. We must put the politics of transformation at the very heart of our analyses to meet the global challenges of gross inequality and ever-more impoverished democracies. Fenton makes an impassioned plea for re-invigorating critical research on digital media such that it can be explanatory, practical and normative. She dares us to be politically emboldened. She urges us to seek out an emancipatory politics that aims to deepen our democratic horizons. To ask: how can we do democracy better? What are the conditions required to live together well? Then, what is the role of the media and how can we reclaim media, power and politics for progressive ends? Journeying through a range of protest and political movements, Fenton debunks myths of digital media along the way and points us in the direction of newly emergent politics of the Left. Digital, Political, Radical contributes to political debate on contemporary (re)configurations of radical progressive politics through a consideration of how we experience (counter) politics in the digital age and how this may influence our being political.

The Politics of Digital India
The Politics of Digital India

Author: Pradip Ninan Thomas

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-07-11

Total Pages: 160

ISBN-13: 0199097852

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Transforming India into a digital state has been an objective of successive governments in India. However, the digital, by its very nature, is a capricious, multi-dimensional entity. Its operationalization across multiple sectors in India has highlighted the fact that the digital compact with publics in India is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, devices such as mobile phones have enabled access and efficiencies, and on the other, they have increased the scope for surveillance capitalism and the expansion of governmentality. The digital is at the same time a resource, commodity, and process that is absolutely fundamental to most if not all productive forces across multiple sectors. As a part of the Media Dynamics in South Asia series, this volume explores the making of digital India and specifically deals with the contradictions of an imperfect democracy, internal compulsions, and external pressures that continue to play crucial roles in the shaping of the same. Mindful of the key roles played by political economy and context and based on conversations with theory and practice, it makes a case for critical understanding of the digital embrace in India.

Social Movements, Media and Civil Society in Contemporary India
Social Movements, Media and Civil Society in Contemporary India

Author: Anindya Sekhar Purakayastha

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-09

Total Pages: 211

ISBN-13: 3030940403

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This book examines instances of transformative dissent, turning points or shifts in popular mobilisation patterns in contemporary India, while adopting a historical approach and analysing past events. Exploring the different continuities and discontinuities in mobilising patterns and dissident agency in India, the authors present a heterogeneous insurrectional pattern that pivoted around issues of caste, class, religion, land reform, labour, taxation and territorial control, with anti-colonialism movements becoming prominent in the first half of the twentieth century. The authors move beyond this to explore more recent templates of mobilisation which surfaced towards the end of the twentieth century, during India’s liberalisation period. With growing marketisation and technological advancement, unprecedented changes in social relations, growing economic opportunities and cultural transfusion taking place, the country became a ‘New India’ - one which aspired to be a global player in the wider technological public sphere. Tracing the historical trajectories of social movements in India, this book examines recent trends in digitised dissidence and explores new frontiers of protests, providing fresh insights for those researching the history of social movements, South Asian and Indian history and postcolonial studies.

Queering Digital India
Queering Digital India

Author: Rohit K. Dasgupta

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2017-11-22

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1474421199

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Combines development theory with practice through a case study of the West African community of Tostan

Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India
Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India

Author: Nishat Zaidi

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-29

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 100081470X

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This book explores the use of digital humanities (DH) to understand, interpret, and annotate the poetics of Indian literary and cultural texts, which circulate in digital forms — in manuscripts — and as oral or musical performance. Drawing on the linguistic, cultural, historical, social, and geographic diversity of Indian texts and contexts, it foregrounds the use of digital technologies — including minimal computing, novel digital humanities research and teaching methodologies, critical archive generation and maintenance — for explicating poetics of Indian literatures and generating scholarly digital resources which will facilitate comparative readings. With contributions from DH scholars and practitioners from across India, the United States, the United Kingdom, and more, this book will be a key intervention for scholars and researchers of literature and literary theory, DH, media studies, and South Asian Studies.

Understanding Digital Culture
Understanding Digital Culture

Author: Vincent Miller

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2012-08-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1446246485

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"This is an outstanding book. It is one of only a few scholarly texts that successfully combine a nuanced theoretical understanding of the digital age with empirical case studies of contemporary media culture. The scope is impressive, ranging from questions of digital inequality to emergent forms of cyberpolitics." - Nick Gane, York University "Well written, very up-to-date with a good balance of examples and theory. It′s good to have all the major issues covered in one book." - Peter Millard, Portsmouth University "This is just the text I was looking for to enable first year undergraduates to develop their critical understanding of the technologies they have embedded so completely in their lives." - Chris Simpson, University College of St Mark & St John This is more than just another book on Internet studies. Tracing the pervasive influence of ′digital culture′ throughout contemporary life, this text integrates socio-economic understandings of the ′information society′ with the cultural studies approach to production, use, and consumption of digital media and multimedia. Refreshingly readable and packed with examples from profiling databases and mashups to cybersex and the truth about social networking, Understanding Digital Culture: Crosses disciplines to give a balanced account of the social, economic and cultural dimensions of the information society. Illuminates the increasing importance of mobile, wireless and converged media technologies in everyday life. Unpacks how the information society is transforming and challenging traditional notions of crime, resistance, war and protest, community, intimacy and belonging. Charts the changing cultural forms associated with new media and its consumption, including music, gaming, microblogging and online identity. Illustrates the above through a series of contemporary, in-depth case studies of digital culture. This is the perfect text for students looking for a full account of the information society, virtual cultures, sociology of the Internet and new media.