Fellowships

#KashmirFloods: Communication in the Times of Deluge

In second week of September, when floods created havoc in Kashmir, thousands outside the Valley wanted to know whereabouts of their dear ones – family, friends and acquaintances. However, there was no way to communicate. With no communication network and no access, there was no news about the majority of the Valley. Concerned, a group of Kashmiris in Delhi and many well-wishers decided to meet at Nehru Place in South Delhi. Meanwhile, back in the Valley, a few of those whose cellphones were still functional, were working 24×7, receiving calls from all over the world from concerned people…
Toward a History of Consumption and Circulation of Media Content – Part Two

In this post, I map out major practices of consumption and circulation of video to arrive at the contemporary moment of its consumption and circulation via mobile phones, flash drives, SD cards, etc. among the users of limited technological access and economic means. My objective in mapping this history is to show how socio economic dynamics of access changed with the arrival of each media technology and form, and how the techno-social practices associated with the reception of each media form fed into and fused with the emergent practices to constantly change the social profile of media consuming public.
Writing, Reading, Digitising, Interviewing: Postmemorial Engagement with Histories of Partition

I am interested in reversing the gaze to explore the importance of ‘our’ personal subjectivities – the stories of the writers, researchers, artists, digital archivists and volunteers working on Partition – in order to further complicate our understanding of the postmemories of Partition. The myth of distance from our topic of interest that has traditionally been used to signify the objectivity of the writer has always been problematic, especially when the topic in question is a traumatic event that has shaped modern South Asia…
Social Media Research Workshop, October 11, 2014

Since March this year, seven short term research fellows have been involved with The Sarai Programme and carried out various studies on digital and social media. On Saturday, October 11, we are organising a research sharing workshop for the fellows to present and discuss their works with a selected group of discussants.
Santosh Pandit Hate Groups and Memes: Online Ethnography of Social Media

In the interaction with members of hate groups, what became evident was that memes served multiple purposes, depending more on the viewer’s prior knowledge of the person/event spoofed.At the same time, no one identified the term “meme” or “meming” (a relatively new term for many of my respondents) in our conversations. On the other hand, they described the act of meming as an extension of their everyday Facebook activity where it featured as what they called padam (picture) with “dialogues”… The intensity of circulation of these memes was such that even the fan’s groups widely shared memes brought out by the hate groups…
On Public Secrets, Forensics, and the Sting Fearing Virus

Corruption as many have pointed out, is a classic template for the ‘public secret’: that which insists on being commonly coded but cannot be enframed within official public narratives. The video sting short-circuits this logic – by hyper-playing the secretive act/gesture in loop ad nauseum across media platforms. The mundane act of corruption, otherwise part of one’s everyday, gets immediately recharged into an active moment of desecration. Institutions that aren’t routinely sacred suddenly get charged and re-sacralized when faced with the crisis of defacement. It is this ‘drama of revelation” that activates outrage (and subsequently the media event)…
Toward a History of Consumption and Circulation of Media Content – Part One

…I want to highlight (right at the beginning) the importance of services and repair shops and the figure of ‘technician’ in such shops as a connecting thread to weave together different experiential accounts into a coherent story. From the days of radio and sound systems, technicians played a key role in facilitating media consumption. From public transmission of information to setting up of required apparatus to reach out to a large gathering during political speeches, staging of plays and other cultural events, technician and his support team were instrumental in producing any media experience in those days…
The Function of the Interface

There are however, two interesting differences between the Interface and other mediums like cinema and comic. Interface is neither produced, nor consumed linearly. It may use techniques from storytelling but it behaves very similar to Architecture. It has a structure and structure is more often hierarchical. A user navigates this structure based on their motivation towards visiting the site… This brings me to the Second point, which is the power equation between the media and its consumer.
Revolution YouTube

Azaan Javaid, now a journalist, was a student in 2008. With a handicam at home, Azaan began recording videos of protests along with his cousin, who had recently come from the US. It was his cousin’s idea that these videos be uploaded on YouTube. The duo started one of the earliest YouTube channels from Kashmir regarding the protests. And, as these videos spread, the confidence of the protesters grew. At the same time, a few ‘communities’ had sprung up in the Google-owned Orkut. Facebook was still not very popular…
Rural Social Media – A Meta-Digital Divide

Of all the progenies of contemporary technological development, Digital Divide fascinates me the most. Its iatrogeny — problem inducing ways of problem solving — and capacity to reinvent is matched only by a few other problems of our age. Many scholars have tried to reconceptualise digital divide as a socio-technical problem, by pointing out the continuum of gradations between the information haves and have-nots, still there are several nuances left to be grasped…