media, information, the contemporary

Tag: Video


  • Acts Of Media: Law And Media In Contemporary India

    Acts of Media seeks to consolidate a field of multidisciplinary work around media technologies that intersects with legal scholarship. This volume brings together contributions from leading academics, lawyers, researchers and policy experts about contemporary India and Sri Lanka. This volume brings together contributions from leading academics, lawyers, researchers and policy experts about contemporary India and Sri Lanka…

  • Pirate Modernity & Hypersocial Networks: Ravi Sundaram + Tiziana Terranova: Dialogue

    Recursive Colonialism, Artificial Intelligence & Speculative Computation 2020 Episode   09 Thursday, 10 December Pirate Modernity & Hypersocial Networks 5 pm CET / 9:30 pm IST / 11 am EST Dialogue: >Ravi Sundaram (CSDS, Delhi) >Tiziana Terranova (Università degli Studi di Napoli L’Orientale) Chair: Ezekiel Dixon-Roman [The event will be hosted on Zoom. Please click here…

  • Culture, Conflict and Cyberspace: Towards a Bodo Digital Identity

    The Death Valley (2012) is a multilingual short film by Rajiv Saikia that aims to capture the 2012 ethnic conflict between the Bodos and Muslims, highlighting how innocent civilians from both sides are caught in the crossfire. This fictional account tells the story of a Bodo man and a Muslim man who are on friendly terms. Their peaceful existence is disrupted when ethnic conflict erupts. The Bodo man is chased by a group of Muslim men before being brutally murdered while his Muslim friend is killed as he tries to save him. Afterwards, the women of the two families leave with their children because of the unsafe environment…

  • The Quest for Bodoland: Social Media in the Time of a Separatist Movement – Part Two

    This is the second part of my two-part exploration of the Bodo community and its engagement with social media and the online world. This post builds on the first part where the focus of investigation was on the insurgency and the presence of reports, pictures, discussions, videos on social media pertaining to this.[1] This post will explore the presence of Bodo entertainment content, VCD films and music videos on websites like YouTube, and shared via social media. The focus will be on the kind of content that is shared as well as on specific content, exploring the links and connections that go into the production of a Bodo identity through the medium of the Internet, and the ways in which media today aids in the scattered explosion of such ideas and beliefs…

  • Idiot Box to Smart TV? – Televisual Aesthetics in the Digital Realms

    In 1974, when Raymond Williams was formulating the concept of “flows” in television broadcasting, he thought of them as “the defining characteristic of broadcasting, simultaneously as technology and as a cultural form” (80). Dismissing the notion of commercials as “interruptions” in between televisual content, he was, instead, mesmerized by the seamless “flow” of American TV that weaved in programmes and advertisements into a rhythmic structure. Speaking of broadcast TV, John Ellis emphasized the significance of “flow” through “segmentation” and considered it as a distinctive aesthetic form of TV programming…

  • The Quest for Bodoland: Social Media in the Time of a Separatist Movement – Part One

    In the first part of this two-part post, I aim to give a brief political history of the Bodoland movement which lays the ground for the rise of social media that has come to both inform and participate in the political situation in the region. The growing role of social media, as I see it, continues to reach out to a larger audience who take an interest in the movement for numerous reasons. Popular social media websites like Facebook and YouTube, which I focus on, have become points of dissemination for various types of news and information, thereby making it a multi-purposive platform…

  • Unbundling the Bundle: Distribution of Televisual Content via Broadband Services

    In a stylistically treated advertisement of the Indian Premiere League (IPL) 2016, a group of youngsters in various environments like that of an office, college and home are hooked to their smartphones for latest cricket updates. The advertisement ends with the tagline “screen chhota hai toh kya hua, dil bada hai yaar” (what if the screen is small, we have a big heart). Furthermore, the tagline of IPL 2016 on hotstar is “jab jab cricket, tab tab hotstar” (Think cricket, Think hotstar). This commercial, that attempts to dismantle the television-cricket relationship and draws an association between cricket and hotstar…

  • Digital Identities: The Online Circulation of Bodo VCD films and Music Videos

    The demand for Bodoland, a separate state from Assam, has garnered national attention in the last few decades because of the violence and insurgency that has ensued in its wake. In recent times, the Bodo agitation has become an important component in the political discourse of Assam, and remains a complex and emotive issue.[1] There has been considerable focus within the Bodo community on this issue that is linked with questions of identity, culture and language. Additionally in the last two decades, there has been an emergence of locally made low-budget productions due to the availability of affordable digital technology…

  • Short Term Research Projects in Social Media: Selected Proposals 2016

    The Sarai Programme is committed to developing a public architecture for creating knowledge and creative communities. In keeping with this commitment, we seek to develop a community of scholars, writers and practitioners who are motivated to make the materials and outcome of research available for public access and circulation, with the understanding that an imaginative…

  • Social Media Research Workshop, November 06, 2015

    Since March this year, short-term research fellows have been involved with The Sarai Programme, on themes that relate to digital and social media. On Friday, 6th November 2015, we are organising a workshop for the fellows to present and discuss their research with a select group of discussants. The workshop will be held at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Civil Lines.