Futures of Learning

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai in November 2008 showed the pervasiveness of new media technologies in India, as Indians flocked to sites like twitter, flickr, utube and blogs to post eye witness and other accounts of the events. CNN argued that ‘social media appeared to come of age and signaled itself as a news-gathering force to be reckoned with’ (http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/27/mumbai.twitter/), and the incident lends itself to examining to creation of an (alternative) public sphere with the help of new media technologies. In this post, I will focus on India’s social networking sites, the virtual spaces created by and around the Indian diaspora, as well as on the use of the internet for economic development purposes.

Social Networking Sites

According to a report released in February 2009, visits to social networking sites in India increased by 51 percent during 2008, to 19 million visitors in December 2008 (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=2728 ). Orkut is by far the most popular social networking site in the country, followed by Facebook. Still, academic studies of how young people use these sites are just beginning to emerge.

A comparative study of Indian and US university students showed many common communication patterns in their use of social networking sites (Marshall et al 2008). What was more interesting were the differences, however, as Indian students’ behavior seemed to be significantly more individualistic than that of US students. This was surprising to the researchers, since Americans are thought to live in a more individualistic society than Indians. Concretely, almost 70 percent of Indian students made their profile public/visible for anyone to see, versus only 28.6 percent for US students, who were more likely to make their profile visible to friends only.  Indian students were also more likely to either engage a stranger contacting them, or to tell him/her to leave them alone, which was found to be in contrast with an (Indian) collectivist ethos that is supposed to be less trusting and more evasive of strangers.  Indian students are also more likely to have online friends whom they have never met before, which shows that they use social networking sites to make and sustain friendships, something that is not the case in the US.  In sum, Indian students seem less cautious about online privacy than their American counterparts, and are more forward with strangers they meet on the site (Marshall et al 2008).

Of particular importance in the Indian youth context is the use of new media technologies as a bridge between traditional and modern forms of social networking, such as can be found in dating and marriage sites. Adams and Ghose (2003) discuss the creation and use of ‘matrimonial sites’ wherein parents and (now) individuals themselves place want ads describing their particular attributes and desires for a marriage partner. While in North American contexts, sites like http://www.match.com and other dating websites make the transactional nature of relationships more apparent, sites like http://www.shaadi.com and others have extended and (in some cases) made easier the practices associated with arranged marriages in India. By allowing young people to place their own ads, such social networking sites are enabling them to navigate the tension between arranged and love marriages, providing a sense of choice for Indian youth operating within the constraints of Indian values surrounding education, status, caste, religion and complexion (Sharma 2008).

The internet is also offering a way to express otherwise suppressed issues and desires. Some studies have shown the growth of chat rooms in suburban areas, where they are frequented by predominantly 18 – 22 year-old males who assume an online identity in order to meet new people (Rangaswamy 2007a). There is also a convergence of social networking sites with mobile platforms; recently Virgin Mobile India announced a partnership with MySpace for making its social networking services available on Virgin Mobile WAP-enabled phones in India (http://www.campaignindia.in/feature/all_about_mobile_social_networking).

In regards to blogging, in July 2008, the Indian Ministry of Human Resources and Development issued a report recommending to make blogging, community radio, robotic kits and other technology devices part of public school curricula (http://southasia.oneworld.net/ictsfordevelopment/indian-schools-to-use-new-age-technologies ). The report states that “blogs are powerful tools to support creative writing that can be published and shared not only with the teacher but also with peers and the world, alike. Spreadsheets, databases, concept maps, and hypermedia authoring tools (Web development tools) to encourage critical thinking could also be encouraged.” Blogs are indeed a good way to express critical thinking; the aftermath of the Delhi Public School scandal, described in my mobile phone post last week, led to intense online activity of young people in blogs and discussion fora. While the blogs were more racy and packed with innuendoes against school administrators, the discussion fora raised issues of privacy, freedom, morality and responsibility among the users of the cell phones, the tenor being that new media technologies are an invincible force that are here to stay. Their advance into Indian society cannot be stopped by government bans, which also resonates with the quote that ended my game blog last Friday.

Blogs also played an important support role after the Mumbai attacks, as individuals set them up in order to provide vital information, for example about which hospitals needed blood donations, and to help family members search for each other. Twenty-nine-year-old blogger Harish Iyer published his mobile phone number and email address on a blog he set up soon after the attacks began (http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/). In the following 20 hours, he received around sixty phone calls and 100 emails from people desperate to find loved ones (http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/27/bloggers.mumbai/index.html). It was flickr however that was the preferred medium of the ‘citizen journalists’ that provided instant and constant news feeds and updates about crisis. An article by CNN estimated that 80 tweets were being sent to Twitter.com via SMS every five seconds http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/11/27/mumbai.twitter/. However, the deluge of messages also revealed some of the shortcomings of the medium: on the one hand the lack of proper contextual information by most people sending the messages, and on the other the recycling of (sometimes incorrect) information. As blogger Tim Mallon put it, “I started to see an ugly side to Twitter, far from being a crowd-sourced version of the news it was actually an incoherent, rumour-fueled mob operating in a mad echo chamber of tweets, re-tweets and re-re-tweets.” This ability of new media technologies to spread rumors and support nationalistic and other discriminatory feelings has been commented on already in the China posts. While we have not seen the same extent in India, the BJP-Hindu Nationalist movement is starting to use the internet to spread its message (Chopra 2008).

On October 10, 2006, the Bombay High Court served a notice to Google for allowing a hate campaign against India, in reference to a community called ‘We Hate India’ created on Orkut, which initially carried a picture of an Indian flag being burned and some anti-India content (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2136970.cms). Even before the petition was filed, many Orkut users had noticed this community and were mailing or otherwise messaging their contacts on Orkut to report the community as bogus to Google, which eventually deleted the community has now been deleted, but not before it had spawned several ‘We hate those who hate India’ communities. In addition, prior to the 60th Independence Day of India, Orkut’s main page was revamped, with a stylized Orkut logo written in the Devanagiri script and colored in the Indian national colors (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orkut). This shows the extent to which new media technologies in general, and social networking sites in particular, are embedded in the offline world of its users. Much more research needs to be done on this in the Indian context. One group of internet users on which academic research is well under way are Indian expatriates.

NRIs in Cyberspace

NRIs, or Non Resident Indians, is an official socio-legal category for Indians living outside of India. There are estimated to be about 25 millions of them, living mainly in neighboring countries, as well as the US, Malaysia and the UK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Indiandiaspora.jpg). Given these numbers, it is not surprising that much of the research on Indian internet practices focuses upon the broader Indian diaspora and their use of the internet.

A recent edited volume by Gajjala and Gajjala (2008) examines the range of ways in which cyberspace helps to build bridges between India and the diaspora, which in turn builds on a 2006 special edition of the New Media and Society journal (Gajjala 2006). The various articles are focusing on the IT industry, entertainment, political movements as well as questions of belonging. What emerges from these studies is the importance of who defines and participates in internet practices in the context of an increasingly flexible global economy.

Mitra (2006) focuses on US South Asian immigrants’ use of “cybernetic safe spaces” to give voice to their Indian (immigrant) identity, which they are unable to express in other contexts. These online spaces are used to recreate cultural and religious practices of identity formation, as immigrants feel increasingly threatened by the sociopolitical and economic backlashes against them in a post-9/11 environment. Relatedly, cybershrines, virtual worship sites as well as cultural and heritage portals allow Indians abroad to access spirituality in a virtual way, and the majority of orders for products and services from these sites come from outside India (Barbar 2001). Mallapragada (2006) looks at the relationship between home, homeland and homepage in the 1990s and the creation of an Indian-American web that reflects the politics of belonging for NRIs. An important aspect of this is to access news from back home, via newspapers and other news sources, also of the ‘nationalist jingoist’ kind (Brosius 1999). On the other end of the political spectrum, Dalits and other low castes are using the internet as a means of organizing (Thirumal 2008, Chopra 2006). This suggests that the internet and other new media can provide the possibilities for establishing an alternative public sphere.

In this regard it is important to pay attention the possible reproduction of existing power dynamics, especially as access to the internet can be barred for already marginalized groups (Sreekumar 2006). Until more research on (local?) Indian participation on the internet occurs (cf. Tacchi 2006), we do not know the extent to which these discourses and practices are part and parcel of everyday Indian’s lives or the extent to which non-elites in India possess space and voice in these networked public cultures. This raises once again the question of the use of new media technologies for development purposes, which is always part of the Indian case.

Internet for Development

In the Indian context, the internet’s macroeconomic effects have been remarkable, with the rise of the country’s software and business processing industries, which have led to improved lives for a growing middle class. Acquiring computer skills are seen as crucial in joining this national destiny, and there are large numbers of private schools training youth in marketable and commercial computer skills (Biao 2007). Biao’s ethnography of bodyshops in Andhra Pradesh and Australia situates the IT business in a rich socio-cultural context, exemplary is his analysis of the increasing importance of dowry to pay the fees for IT schools.

Computers are also a compulsory subject in public schools, and as I stated in my first post, lead to increased computer and internet consumption in Indian homes. Here, e-mailing, chatting, browsing as well as computer game downloads are all subject to censorship and monitoring, especially as they are seen as distractions from learning (Rangaswamy 2007b). On the other hand, youth argue that general internet skills will help them in the work world, such as browsing for information about prospective schools, getting information for job interviews, and communicating with alumni.

Besides the campuses of the likes of Infosys and Wipro, it is call centers that have most forcefully captured the national economic imagination. Shome (2006) theorizes how the cultural politics of Indian call centers, and the global flows of information technology through them, manifest new and emerging frameworks of hybridity and diaspora. Such frameworks point to new relations of race, belonging, and colonialism and unsettle many of the prevailing assumptions through which diaspora and hybridity have been typically understood (Mitra 2008). McMillin (2008) and Mirchandani (2008) look at the ways in which working in call centers structures engagements with new media and technology, and how it affects the family and social life of middle class families.

In talking about the emergence of an (alternative) public or political sphere through the internet, it is also important to mention the many e-government initiatives that have been started in several Indian states in order to bring state and local governments closer to citizens (Sreekumar 2007, Schwittay 2008). As is often the case with the use of technology for development, high hopes and easy assumptions about the possibilities of especially marginalized groups to learn about, apply for and receive government assistance and other services online have given way to more realistic assessments. These show the ways in which new media technologies have to be embedded in people’s everyday lives, and in turn have to take political, socio-economic and cultural contexts into acccount in order to be truly meaningful and to realize their full potential.

References Cited:

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Barbar, A. (2001). Diaspora, Cybershrines and the Woman’s question in media (review article).  Gender, Technology and Development, 5, 289.

Biao, X. (2007). Global ‘Body Shopping:’ An Indian Labor System in the Global Technology Industry. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Brosius, C. and M. Butcher. (1999) (Eds.) Image Journeys: Audio-visual media and cultural change in India. New Delhi: Sage.

Chopra, R. (2008).  The Virtual State of the Nation: Online Hindu Nationalism in Global Capitalist Modernity. In R. Gajjala and V. Gajjala, Venkataramana (Eds.) South Asian Technospaces. Digital Formations, 36, New York: Peter Lang Verlag.

Chopra, R. (2006) Global primordialities: virtual identity politics in online Hindutva and online Dalit discourse. New Media & Society, 8, 187-206.

Gajjala, R. and V. Gajjala. (Eds.) (2008) South Asian Technospaces. Digital Formations, 36, New York: Peter Lang Verlag.

Gajjala, R. (2006). Editorial: Consuming/producing/inhabiting South-Asian digital diasporas. New Media and Society, 8, 179.

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Marshall, K. et al. (2008) Social Networking Websites in India and the United States: A Cross-national Comparison of Online Privacy and Communication. Issues in Information Society, 9(2), 87 – 94.

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Shome, R. (2006) Thinking through the diaspora: Call centers, India, and a new politics of hybridity. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 9 (1), 105-124.

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Thirumal, P. (2008) Situating the New Media: Reformulating the Dalit Question. In R. Gajjala and V. Gajjala, Venkataramana (Eds.) South Asian Technospaces. Digital Formations, 36, New York: Peter Lang Verlag.

Tacchi, J. (2006). Information, Communication, Poverty and Voice. Paper presented at Mapping the New Field of Communication for Development and Social Change, 5-8 July 2006, University of Queensland.