[Reader-list] Social Media Project - Research Updates from Fellows

[The Sarai Programme]

Dear all,

In March 2013, Sarai initiated a short term research fellow program to
support researchers working on digital and social media. The program is
supported by a project grant from the Indian Council of Social Science
Research.

Over the last months, seven selected fellows have shared three rounds of
research updates. Please browse the collected links below.

*Anand Kumar Jha*

"The camera and the interface both exhibit a black box character. People
who use them know very little about how they work. That black box ceases to
exist after a point in the interaction with a human. What remains is a very
simplified/ distorted over the hood personality of the product which
exhibits a willing slave like behavior, rarely giving any idea of its
intelligence or intent it possesses. This research question looks at the
relationship of the interface-camera with the user, bringing forth the
question of agency and intent..."

- The So Far of ‘Shooting with the Interface’
<http://sarai.net/the-so-far-of-shooting-with-the-interface/>

- The Camera Membrane <http://sarai.net/the-camera-membrane/>

- The Function of the Interface
<http://sarai.net/the-function-of-the-interface/>

*Darshana Sreedhar*

"My project looks at two contemporary phenomena in the Kerala
mediascape—the emergence of the “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’s highly media saturated space which boasts of, among other
things, more than ten 24 hour news channels..."

- Digital Divide, Online Offense: Malayalee House, “Pandit Phenomenon” and
Morality Debates in Contemporary Kerala
<http://sarai.net/digital-divide-online-offense-introduction/>

- Santosh Pandit: Negative Publicity and Durablity of the “Superstar of the
Poor”
<http://sarai.net/santosh-pandit-negative-publicity-and-durablity-of-superstar-of-the-poor/>

- Santosh Pandit Hate Groups and Memes: Online Ethnography of Social Media
<http://sarai.net/santosh-pandit-hate-groups-and-memes/>

*Gowhar Farooq*

"The protests, which began in 2008, gave rise to the need for media through
which the situation in Kashmir could pierce the mountains veiling Kashmir
and reach the world. When media was gaged in Kashmir, Kashmiris became
desperate to make their voices heard. However, much of the mainstream media
in India – due to editorial policy, pressure from various quarters or
collusion – failed to meet the aspirations of Kashmir. For Kashmiris, it
was the time to look beyond the conventional. It was the time to look for
the alternative..."

- Aims and Faces behind Kashmir’s Alternative Media
<http://sarai.net/aims-and-faces-behind-kashmirs-alternative-media-introduction/>

- Alternative Media: An Agent and of Change in Kashmir
<http://sarai.net/alternative-media-an-agent-and-of-change-in-kashmir/>

- Revolution YouTube <http://sarai.net/revolution-youtube/>

*Kalathmika Natarajan*

"The advent of new media has had a profound impact on the politics of
memory, history and memorialisation. In an age where memory and media
mutually shape each other as people utilise media technologies for
‘creating and recreating a sense of past, present and future,’ social media
and digital archives becomes an integral part of this ‘mediated memory’ of
Internet users. The digital archive is the repository of multidimensional
alternate narratives that challenge the hegemony of official history and is
‘transformed, mediatized, networked, and part of the newly accessible and
highly connected new memory ecology.’ Moreover, digital participatory
microhistory, where users generate historical material by sharing their
experiences, democratise the often elitist traditional archival record that
privileges the experiences and thoughts of the elite as source material..."

- Digital Histories of Partition: Memory, Archives and the Narration of a
‘South Asian’ Identity Online
<http://sarai.net/digital-histories-of-partition-introduction/>

- Postmemories and the Digital Afterlives of Partition
<http://sarai.net/postmemories-and-digital-afterlives-of-partition/>

- Lahore is a lot like Delhi': Digital Discourse on Histories and Places
across the Border
<http://sarai.net/lahore-is-a-lot-like-delhi-digital-discourse-on-histories-and-places-across-the-border/>

*Rashmi M*

"Unlike the tech savvy power users who are equipped with high end computing
gadgets and are multiply connected through high speed broadband, peer to
peer networks and social media networks that are used extensively to
source, circulate and share media content, most of the users that I am
talking about in this project have experienced digital mainly through
mobile phones (leapfrogging computers). Their access to the Internet,
albeit irregular and infrequent, is mainly via mobile phones (packet data).
Consumption and circulation of media content amongst these users occur
largely offline and outside the social media and other platforms erected by
the informational corporate as well as tech savvy power user communities..."

- Mobile Phones and Media Consumption Practices: A Brief Introduction to
the Project
<http://sarai.net/mobile-phones-and-media-consumption-practices-introduction/>

- On that small mobile phone shop in your street corner
<http://sarai.net/on-that-small-mobile-phone-shop-in-your-street-corner/>

- Toward a history of consumption and circulation of media content – part
one
<http://sarai.net/toward-a-history-of-consumption-and-circulation-of-media-content-part-one/>

*Sandeep Mertia*

"While the state and the NGO blame the illiteracy, unawareness and
resistance to change in villages for the failure of high-tech e-governance
services, I observed the rural people – both users and non-users –
re-constructing the meanings of digital technologies and a few those who
have managed to gain access appropriating it contextually, and thus
co-evolving with a new material culture. Simply put, people in the villages
were not being objects of development which the state or even NGOs imagine
them to be, and were engaging with the new digital technologies as per
their own context..."

- Situating Social Media in Rural India
<http://sarai.net/situating-social-media-in-rural-india/>

- Rural Social Media and ‘Timepass': Theorising Non-Instrumentality
<http://sarai.net/rural-social-media-and-timepass-theorising-non-instrumentality/>

- Rural Social Media – A Meta-Digital Divide
<http://sarai.net/rural-social-media-a-meta-digital-divide/>

*Shaunak Sen*

"I am deeply interested in the careful technical packaging of the sting
video – these include meticulous breakdown of the stock footage that is to
be used (shots of parliament, police forces, bureaucracy etc), text/supers
used, the subtitles, filters used, title music commissioned etc during the
whole sting assemblage). I am also interested in the various
post-production effects often deployed to accentuate the sense of
authenticity/truth to the sting footage. This sometimes entails using
filters on the audio to make it sound lower quality than it actually is,
muffled, distant yet legible. Similarly the videos are very often given a
hazier, shakier low-resolution feel to imbue a greater a sense of
‘authenticity’ to them (stings for some reason, can never happen in HD in
India, they work superbly with 240p, but never high definition..."

- Hashtag #StingOp: Truth, Low-Resolution and Post Social-Media Transparency
<http://sarai.net/truth-low-resolution-and-post-social-media-transparency-introduction/>

- Decoding the Big Indian Sting
<http://sarai.net/decoding-the-big-indian-sting/>

- On Public Secrets, Forensics, and the Sting Fearing Virus
<http://sarai.net/on-public-secrets-forensics-and-the-sting-fearing-virus/>


Please share the links with other interested readers.

Regards,

*The Sarai Programme*
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
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