media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Law


  • Call For Abstracts – The Act of Media: Workshop on Law, Media And Technology in South Asia

    The Sarai Programme invites submission of abstracts for ‘The Act of Media’ workshop. Abstracts should not exceed 300 words, and should be sent to dak@sarai.net by 15th October, 2015, with the subject heading ‘Proposal for The Act of Media Workshop.’ Authors of the selected abstracts will be notified by 1st November 2015.

  • Video Workshop Report

    The arrival of video ushered in a new logistics of access, circulation and production of audio-visual forms. Analog video introduced new infrastructures and legal contests for film circulation and viewing cultures, set new terms for amateur and professional practices in home videos, documentary and commercial works, pedagogical practices and civil society activism, and has been…

  • Law’s Role in Development of the Internet

    In this post, Smarika Kumar, one of the researchers who received the Social Media Research grant for 2015, introduces her proposed work. As the internet begins to pervade our lives in increasing ways, the clamour to regulate it has heightened. Be it viral posts on social media urging violence, the easy availability of sexual content…

  • Video Workshop, February 21-22, 2015

    The Sarai Programme is organising the Video Workshop, which will be held at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies on February 21-22, 2015. Registrations Please pre-register here if you are interested in taking part in the workshop. Do note that we have a limited number of seats for participants (who are not presenting…

  • Call for Abstracts – Video Workshop

    The arrival of video ushered in a new logistics of access, circulation and production of audio-visual forms. Analog video introduced new infrastructures and legal contests for film circulation and viewing cultures, set new terms for amateur and professional practices in home videos, documentary and commercial works, pedagogical practices and civil society activism, and has been…

  • 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. The workshop will…

  • 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)…

  • Decoding the Big Indian Sting

    I revisit the inaugural moment of Tehelka’s Operation Westend. Journalists Mathew Samuels and Anirudh Bahal, posing as arms dealers from a fictitious London-based company called West End International hawked a non-existent Defense product called ‘hand-held thermal cameras’ to the Indian government by bribing several ministers and top-level bureaucrats… This post also contains excerpts of interviews conducted with … [technicians] to outline common technical practices the ‘industry’ follows in carefully constructing and packaging sting operations.

  • Hashtag #StingOp: Truth, Low-Resolution and Post Social-Media Transparency

    This project begins by considering the various (ever-mutating) physiognomies that have been deployed for the manufacturing of these video documents. It sketches the techno-material history of the production of the sting – from the changing optical devices used beginning with the large camcorders concealed in satchels used during earlier stings like Operation Westend, Gujarat riot stings etc. right up to the latest high-resolution spy-cams disguised in eye-glasses, diaries, calendars, ear plugs and various other innocuous seeming subjects to the complex processes in post-production. I am deeply interested in the careful technical packaging of the sting video … [and] the various post-production effects often deployed to accentuate the sense of authenticity/truth to the sting footage.