My project looks at two contemporary phenomena in the Kerala mediascape — the emergence of “internet celebrity” Santhosh Pandit, and the recent reality TV show, Malayalee House, both of which have been amplified by the digital-social media’s potential to unsettle intended trajectories and uses of media circulation. In corollary, these have also inaugurated new ways of thinking about what it is to be a “media celebrity” in Kerala.
Users access the web through the interface generating an event, captured as a log in the server. Millions of these events get parsed through filters to be analyzed on dashboards, another interface. Dashboards then optimize the user facing interface to streamline and increase the number of events happening… I was interested to find out if there were more ways in which an interface mimics the camera.
While the problems of technological determinism, digital divide and the larger politics of knowledge and development are multifaceted and evoke extreme opinions ranging from technophilia to dystopia, there are some key ideas like interpretive flexibility of technology and context sensitive appropriation and access, which could help us engage in a nuanced debate on the relationships of society and technology. In case of ICTs, the interpretive flexibility is further problematized by their ability to liquidate space and time.
This project tries to understand the changing socio dynamics of access to media content in India with the spread of mobile phones, and intends to trace the new techno social networks of users and other actors that form to gain such access. The research focus will be on users and user groups with limited technological means and access (such as security guards, auto drivers and vegetable vendors etc).
The Call for Proposals for the Short Term Research Projects in Social and Digital Media attracted over 80 applications from all over the country, and it took a careful scrutiny of all the applications to reach our decision. We got applications from scholars as well as practitioners, young researchers and older, and proposals looked at a wide range of themes. Please take a look at the excerpts from selected proposals for this year’s Short Term Research Projects in Social Media.
Sarai-CSDS invites you to a lecture on The Metadata is the Message: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Online Activism by Elizabeth Losh.
Elizabeth Losh delivered a lecture on The Metadata is the Message: Social Media and the Rhetorics of Online Activism on 4th September 2013.