Where the Local Meets the Digital
International Seminar of the School of Media and Cultural Studies TISS.
January 7–9, 2016
http://smcs.tiss.edu/diginaka/
The advent of the digital and growing access to the Internet in
India, along with the availability of cheap devices such as mobile
phones has brought about an explosion of user-mediated creativity across
various platforms, allowing for sharing, tweaking, co-creating and
repurposing of digital media content in the public sphere. While the
digital divide reproduces and intensifies various social hierarchies of
gender, caste, class and region, one sees a simultaneous deployment of
the digital by sections of society that previously were denied access.
The cellular phone has been an important accessory in this widening
of access; its use by the urban and rural poor at individual and
collective levels opens pathways for incorporation into cultures of
consumption and political hegemony as well as for resistance and
jugaad.
The mobile phone is a platform for recording, editing and uploading
images, for accessing ‘pirated’ media content, for engaging with social
media and for resisting moral codes pertaining to age, caste, class and
gender.
Jugaad as a “pragmatic workaround” (Rai 2012)
[2] and a “frugal disruptive innovation” (Rajdou, et al, 2012)
[3]
has become a widespread mode of engaging with uncertain and fluid media
ecologies and economic imperatives not only for the resource poor of
the global South but also for corporations caught in the cusp of highly
competitive and shifting global flows. For the poor in the cities and
small towns of urban India, and increasingly in rural areas too,
engaging with the digital through the mobile has become an important
part of the everyday, a means of communication, pleasure, and identity
construction. Large informal grey markets, for hardware, software and
various services (providing films, charging, repairing and refurbishing
phones) respond to this growing engagement with the digital. The scant
regard for notions of copyright and intellectual property makes the
production and consumption of popular media content a zone of
contestation between audiences, the media industries and the state.
Along with its potential use for greater local articulation and
sharing is also the use of social media and the Internet for trolling,
harassing and stalking, particularly of those who resist dominant
political and social codes. In recent times, feminists, secularists and
activists, among others, have been subjected to and resisted hate
speech, making social media an important terrain for the playing out of
political struggles. Feminists have engaged with the idea that online
spaces can indeed be as dangerous for women as real spaces. Scholars
have also turned their gaze to the production and representation of the
online self in a variety of ways.
Apart from this individual deployment of the digital, there is
increasing use of these technologies by a range of movements, campaigns,
local filmmakers and grassroots initiatives, with mixed and complicated
effects. Ideological battles are waged on the Internet, as various
interests use this space to marginalise oppositional viewpoints. Popular
films in local dialects and idioms, made on shoe-string budgets, find
their own niche audiences and modes of commercially viable distribution.
Community radio and video are spaces not just for communication of
“development messages” but also for subverting dominant flows of power
and for granting access to voices hitherto denied media coverage.
Internet journalism, in English and various languages, covers stories
often neglected by the mainstream media, which are read, shared and have
the potential of going viral, thus countering the censorship of the
corporate controlled market. As the boundaries between content producers
and users become fuzzy, this growing subaltern and alternative digital
and online activity also compels the conventional news media and
mainstream cinema to rethink their forms, their modes of content
delivery and their revenue models, thus complicating the role of the
maker and the user, and the nature of texts. Corporate and state
surveillance, data mining, censorship and deployment of digital
technologies and algorithms for management of user behaviour and temper
these possibilities for democratisation.
This three-day international seminar will merge this year with
Frames of Reference, the annual graduate student seminar of the School.
Papers are invited, from scholars across disciplines on the following
themes, and any others that fall within the rubric of local
appropriations of digital technologies in the Indian context:
Subaltern Image-making Practices
Selfies and the Self
Regional Cinemas
Community Media Praxis
The Mobile Phone and Jugaad
Internet Censorship and Regimes of Control
Informal Digital Markets
Rethinking Copyright and Intellectual Property
Social Media as a Space of Local Articulation and Contestation
Recycling and Repurposing Media Content
Satire as a Political Practice
Digital Documentary
Social Movements and Online Spaces
Feminist Technological Re-imaginations
LGBTQIA Initiatives and the Creation of Communities
Resisting Caste Hierarchies
Crowd funding of Alternative Production
Hate Speech and the Internet
Submission of a 300 word abstract (with 3-5 keywords) and a 100 word bio note to
diginaka2016@gmail.com:
September 1, 2015
Notification of selection:
September 20, 2015
Paper submission:
November 20, 2015
Please clearly mention in your abstract if you are currently enrolled
as a post-graduate student/research scholar in any university.
Student/research scholar paper presenters will be provided with free
accommodation and hospitality for a maximum period of 4 nights. Other
participants will have to pay a registration fee of Rs. 3000 to cover
all meals and conference kit (accommodation not included). Limited guest
house accommodation is available on campus. Daily registration fee for
local participants (covering lunch, teas and conference kit) is Rs. 500.
The seminar will include invited plenary speakers. An edited volume
and a journal issue of SubVersions (
subversions.tiss.edu) are envisaged,
based on the seminar papers.
