Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Revised Pages Global Digital Cultures Revised Pages Revised Pages Global Digital Cultures Perspectives from South Asia ASWIN PUNATHAMBEKAR AND SRIRAM MOHAN, EDITORS UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS • ANN ARBOR Revised Pages Copyright © 2019 by Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publisher. Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid- free paper First published June 2019 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication data has been applied for. ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 13140- 2 (Hardcover : alk paper) ISBN: 978- 0- 472- 12531- 9 (ebook) Revised Pages Acknowledgments The idea for this book emerged from conversations that took place among some of the authors at a conference on “Digital South Asia” at the Univer- sity of Michigan’s Center for South Asian Studies. At the conference, there was a collective recognition of the unfolding impact of digitalization on various aspects of social, cultural, and political life in South Asia. We had a keen sense of how much things had changed in the South Asian mediascape since the introduction of cable and satellite television in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We were also aware of the growing interest in media studies within South Asian studies, and hoped that the conference would resonate with scholars from various disciplines across the humanities and social sci- ences. As it turned out, the conference exceeded our expectations and it became clear to us that a volume of essays on digital media and culture in South Asia could, in fact, contribute to a broader academic and public conversation about digital cultures worldwide. This would not have happened without the encouragement and support of Farina Mir. As the Director of the Center for South Asian Studies at Michigan, Farina has created a brilliant and generous community of scholars and students. We have learned a great deal from our interactions with a wide- ranging group of South Asianists at Michigan, and while we cannot name everyone here, we are particularly grateful to Will Glover, Matthew Hull, Ram Mahalingam, Madhumita Lahiri, and Mrinalini Sinha for their advice and encouragement. This book is also part of a larger project on ‘Global Digital Cultures’ that we are coordinating through the Global Media Studies Initiative housed in the Department of Communication Studies at Michigan. We are grate- Revised Pages vi • Acknowledgments ful to the International Institute for supporting our efforts through an Enterprise Grant, and current and former chairs of the Department of Communication Studies—Susan Douglas, Robin Means Coleman, and Nojin Kwak— for their enthusiastic support. The conference itself would not have been a success without stellar panel chairs, respondents, and note- takers. We would like to thank Madhumita Lahiri, Ram Mahalingam, Ken- taro Toyama, Joyojeet Pal, Lia Wolock, and Vishnupriya Das in particular. This project benefited greatly from the sharp insights and advice of colleagues including Katherine Sender, Megan Ankerson, Dan Herbert, Sarah Murray, Pavitra Sundar, Amanda Lotz, and Jean Christophe Plantin. Draft versions of the book’s introductory chapter were also discussed at the Media Studies Research Workshop, and we are thankful to Amanda Lotz and Annemarie Navar-Gill for launching and sustaining this crucial forum. Finally, we would like to thank Mary Francis and her colleagues at the University of Michigan Press for their enthusiastic support, engagement, and editorial care. Revised Pages Contents Introduction: Mapping Global Digital Cultures 1 Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan Part One: Infrastructures one: Politics of Algorithms, Indian Citizenship, and the Colonial Legacy 37 Payal Arora two: Digital Television in Digital India 53 Shanti Kumar three: Imagining Cellular India: The Popular, the Infrastructural, and the National 76 Rahul Mukherjee four: Bridging the Deepest Digital Divides: A History and Survey of Digital Media in Myanmar 96 Daniel Arnaudo Part Two: Platforms five: Dating Applications, Intimacy, and Cosmopolitan Desire in India 125 Vishnupriya Das six: Anomalously Digital in South Asia: A Peri- Technological Project for Deaf Youth in Mumbai 142 Shruti Vaidya and Kentaro Toyama Revised Pages viii • Contents seven: The Making of a Technocrat: Social Media and Narendra Modi 163 Joyojeet Pal eight: Twitter as Liveness: #ShamedInSydney and the Paradox of Participatory Live Television 184 Sangeet Kumar Part Three: Publics nine: The Remediation of Nationalism: Viscerality, Virality, and Digital Affect 203 Purnima Mankekar and Hannah Carlan ten: Clash of Actors: Nation- Talk and Middle- Class Politics on Online Media 223 Sahana Udupa eleven: Private Publics: New Media and Performances of Pakistani Identity from Party Videos to Cable News 245 Mobina Hashmi twelve: The Man on the Moon: A Semiotic Analysis of Scopic Regimes in Bangladesh 261 Muhammad Nabil Zuberi thirteen: Media and Imperialism in the Global Village: A Case Study of Four Malalais 280 Wazhmah Osman Contributors 297 Index 301 Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.9561751 Revised Pages Introduction Mapping Global Digital Cultures Aswin Punathambekar and Sriram Mohan July Boys (Sonti 2006), a documentary film about a software company in Bangalore that develops content for mobile phones (e.g., games and movie clips), opens on a gleaming, high- tech office space in which five young men discuss strategy for their latest software project. We learn that the headquarters of this company, July Systems, is in Santa Clara, California, and that many of the engineers and executives leading the product development office in Bangalore have lived and worked in Silicon Valley before moving back to India. In exploring the cultural and business logics at work in this software company, the film focuses largely on the office interiors and situates the team’s work routines within a transnational network involving tech capitals in India, the United States, and Western Europe. Glimpses of the world outside the office— shots of a noisy streetscape crowded with vehicles and pedestrians— cut quickly to an air- conditioned interior with a tastefully designed break room, neatly ordered cubicles, and a gleaming restroom with a waiting area that has a comfortable couch and a television set. In this swanky interior space, one that seems completely disembedded from the rest of the city, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) Rajesh Reddy declares that people like him are “geography agnostic.” Other men working in the company also wax eloquent about entrepreneurial ener- gies being unleashed and, on the whole, offer explanations of India’s digital Revised Pages 2 • global digital cultures revolution that rest on stories of individual talents and merit. Of course, Reddy- like figures are hardly unique to SouthAsia and emerge in accounts of digital culture in China, Ghana, and other parts of the world as well.1 If this kind of narrative of global mobility, seemingly unburdened by any economic, political, or sociocultural factors reveals one imaginary of the digital, another comes into view in the American television comedy Sil- icon Valley. In an episode titled “Daily Active Users,” we get a rare glimpse into the world of click-farms located in, as one article bluntly put it, “some third world country (think India or Bangladesh)” (Edwards 2016). Toward the end of the episode, a scene of a phone conversation involving the mar- keting manager of a digital platform start- up asking for “one thousand users every day for the next week” cuts to a shot of a South Asian man waking up in a shared hostel. As he gets ready for work and winds his way through bustling streets on his bicycle, electric wires, cables, air conditioners, and other banal things that make up life in urban South Asia come into view. Just as the nameless man sits down in front of a computer and we imagine a lone user in a dimly lit cybercafe, the camera zooms out to reveal a cav- ernous warehouse filled with hundreds of men and women working assidu- ously to generate and boost the number of daily active users, clicks, likes, tweets, and impressions for global digital companies. Such starkly contrasting narratives and representations offer the dominant imaginaries for understanding digital cultures outside the An- glophone West— tech capitals, unfettered mobility, an expanding middle class, and the support of a neoliberal state, or, on the other hand, as sites for cheap and low-level software testing, call centers, pirate networks, and click- farms. Either way, geography and time seem to become irrelevant as do the historical, political-economic, and social dimensions of the media infrastructures, platforms, and varied user- practices that define digital cultures anywhere in the world today. If the jet- setting software entrepreneurs in July Boys imagine a “flat world” à la Thomas Friedman, American television’s take on contemporary digital culture conceives of the rest of the world largely in terms of immense distance and difference. Steering clear of these distressingly familiar modes of apprehending a world marked by all manner of technological, financial, and cultural flows and frictions, this book analyzes the emergence and development of online cultures and, more broadly, the unfolding impact of digitalization in South Asia as constitutive of our global and digital present. Delinking the Internet from its North Atlantic trajectory, we argue that the digital revolution marks a decidedly global shift with distinct yet connected histories Revised Pages Introduction • 3 and inevitably different trajectories, meanings, and effects depending on which part of the world one looks from.

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