Ravi Sundaram Senior Fellow,
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi.
Revisiting the event: Postcolonial life after new media
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/a-z/camri/seminars/camri-seminar-calendar/2013/revisiting-the-event-postcolonial-life-after-new-media
2 October 2013
14:00-16:00
Room A7.3, University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, London (tube
station Northwick Park)
Participation is free. Please register at latest until Sunday, Sep 29 by
email to [log in to unmask]
Abstract
The last two decades have seen the massive proliferation of media
infrastructures in India and many postcolonial societies. These include
large media industries like those of television and cinema, as well as
thousands of informal sites like greymarket bazaars, small video
cinemas, and cable networks that are run by local operators. Around 700
million Indians have cellular phones that now also produce text, video,
and digital images. After the cellular phone, a growing section of the
population is now the source of new media produced, - that in turn links
to online social networks, mainstream television (through ‘citizen’
journalism), and peer-to-peer exchanges of text, music and video. These
massive expansions of the older media infrastructures have thrown the
old control models of the regime into disarray. In a situation of media
porosity, the information ‘leak’ from the state is widespread: leaked
audio surveillance, secret documents. This post-digital leak feeds into
the media ‘event’, and as such calls for a new reflection.
All this takes place in an Indian context where the call for
‘transparency’ through new technologies cuts across activists, judges,
elite managers and liberal modernizers. Transparency, once associated in
urban debates with modernist discussions on surface (glass, steel), has
now emerged in public discourse as ethical filter through which new
media infrastructure is made visible.
This presentation sets up the secret and the transparent as force fields
to excavate a remarkable post digital environment in India.
Biography
Ravi Sundaram is currently a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the
University of Westminster's Faculty of Media, Arts and Design. a Senior
Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS),
Delhi. In 2000 he founded the Sarai programme along with Monica Narula,
Jeebesh Bagchi, Ravi Vasudevan and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. Sundaram has
co-edited the Sarai Reader series, The Public Domain (2001), The Cities
of Everyday Life(2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media(2004),
and Frontiers (2007). He is the author of Pirate Modernity: Media
Urbanism in Delhi (Routledge, London 2009). No Limits: Media Studies
from , (Oxford University Press, Delhi:2013) . Sundaram’s currentwork is
on contemporary fear after media modernity.
He has been a visiting Professor at the School of Architecture and
Planning, Delhi, and also taught in Princeton University, Johns Hopkins
University, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of Oxford
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