Ravi Sundaram
Revisiting the event: Postcolonial life after new media
October 2, 2013, 14:00-16:00
Room A7.3, Harrow Campus, University of Westminster
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/a-z/camri/seminars/camri-seminar-calendar/2013/revisiting-the-event-postcolonial-life-after-new-media
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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.

Bio
Ravi Sundaram is 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 current work 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.