New Media Studies

   

New Media Practices in India, Part 5: New Media Production

The convergence of consuming and producing digital media has been termed “prosuming” (Lim and Nekmat 2008). This practice has been democratized with the increasing availability of technology tools to (young) Indians from all socio-economic strata. While findings avenues for creative expression is at the heart of prosuming, the objectives differ depending on who is doing the prosuming. For more affluent Indian youth it is often tied to commercial ends that try to capitalize on the growing middle-class Indian youth market and its potential for technology and other companies. On the other hand, enabling poorer young Indians to produce digital media is seen as a way of giving them a voice to express their experiences and attitudes about their lives and neighborhoods. While academic research on the commercial use is entirely absent, its development counterpart has given rise to a body of literature that is primarily aimed at practitioners and is often published through development organizations, such as United Nations’ outlets.

Commercial Production

Exemplary of the use of digital media production for market and corporate ends is the Mobile Youth project, (http://www.mobileyouth.org), an international youth marketing and branding company that uses ethnographic research and street interviews as “the art behind youth marketing that is getting the real views of your customers” for paying clients such as Vodafone, Disney, MTV, Telefonica, Intel and the European Commission. The Indian section was shot by a young Indian named Amit in Bangalore in January 2009 and can be accessed on mobile youth’s utube channel (http://www.youtube.com/mobileyouth ) . Head shots of the half-dozen young men, almost always with scooters in the background, talking about their mobile phones, service providers and (dis)satisfaction with both, are interspersed with one-liners such as “By 2012, one in 5 of the world’s mobile owning youth will live in India, “There are more mobile owning Indian youth than people in the UK,” and “500 million Indian youth have yet to buy their first mobile phone.” These statements serve as a constant reminder of the size and potential of the Indian youth mobile, and by extension new media technology, market.

A slightly different example of the commercial application of digital media production is the company Electronic Youth Media (http://www.electronicyouthmedia.com/), which was started by two Indian teenagers last year. At the heart of the company is a ‘productive networking’ web site called youthportal, although the fact that it is still under construction does not bode well for the fate of the company. The site’s aim was to target ‘career-oriented’ Indian youth by providing them with features helping the “betterment of their future.” Once again, new media technologies are regarded by, and presented to, young Indians as a means to economic advancement and livelihood improvement. It is here where the commercial use of new media production intersect with more explicit developmental purposes.

Giving Voice

In the development area, digital media production projects are rarely pursued for their own ends, but are situated within a larger context, where they address questions of social, cultural and political relevance. One such program is Mapping the Neighborhood, an initiative of the Centre for Science Development and Media Studies and funded by the Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India. The project uses a customized GIS software for hand-held computers that allows participating children to produce community maps, and in the process gather relevant information about the locality. These information in turn inform decision-making, planning and development purposes at the community level (Asthana 2006). The aim of the project is to combine non-formal, participatory learning with community engagement through the use of ICT. Schools participating in the project have also created their own websites.

Another way to foster children’s online participation is through e-literacy story books (Arora 2008). Arora’s analysis focuses on the books’ narratives and potential for participatory development. Relatedly, there are a number of media programs that aim to give children the opportunity to express themselves, often through more traditional media such as community newspapers, radio programs and theater productions (eg. Butterflies Alternate Media http://www.butterflieschildrights.org/media.asp). The Slum Jagattu Media group publishes a monthly magazine giving young people living in slums the opportunity to make their voices heard. Thanks to a grant from the Adobe Corporation’s Youth Voices program, the group has expanded into visual media, specifically documentary video. Participating students, ranging from 15 to 21 years of age, researched the history of slums in Bangalore as compared to the image of the city as an international destination(http://media.iearn.org/ayv/sites/SlumJagattuMediaGroup).

This project was part of a the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN), which is a “global network that enables teachers and youth to use the Internet and other technologies to collaborate on projects that enhance learning and make a difference in the world” (http://www.iearn.org/). The Adobe Youth Voices videos were screened as part of iEARN’s India national conference, which brought together 130 youth and their teachers in May 2008. IEARN is only one example of a growing number of global sites that use new media technologies to encourage young people to form virtual collaborations for a better world, (see also Taking it Global (http://www.tigweb.org/). These sites combine social networking and digital media production to mobilize young people around the world, and Indian youth are involved in all of these initiatives.

Perhaps the best-known digital media production program is called cybermohalla and was established in 2001 as the result of a collaboration between Sarai, the new media initiative of the Center for the Study of Developing Societies, one of India’s leading research institutes, in Delhi, and Akur, an NGO in Delhi (Lim and Nekmat 2008, Asthana 2006). Cybermohalla (hindi for cyberneighborhood) is a network of three locality labs in informal and resettlement colonies in Delhi, which over the past seven years have brought together close to 450 male and female participants, mostly dropouts, between the ages of 15 and 25. These young people work with a variety of traditional and multimedia tools to develop, capture and communicate their perspectives about the locales in which they live, which serve as metaphors for “publicness” (Asthana 2006: 48, Lim and Nekmat 2008). The young people chronicle their lives in the neighborhoods in blogs (for example http://nangla.freeflux.net/blog/). There are also three books collecting conversations, blog entries, an animation CD and post cards. The cybermohalla website has a section called Tech Conversations, where young people reflect on their encounters with technology and how it shapes their relationship with the neighborhood around them (http://www.sarai.net/practices/cybermohalla/commoning/tech-manuals). Participants also make videos using digital cameras and mobile phones, animation and animated stories using GIMP (a GNU Image manipulation program), and recordings of conversations and sounds.

Cybermohalla has been analyzed as the emergence of a cyber-public imagined community within the Indian cultural context (Nayar 2008) and as a way to teach media literacy skills through raising cultural competencies (Lim and Nekmat 2008). More broadly, it has been used to sketch a theory of new media that addresses the potential of digital technologies as “a staging space for activism and protests,” not only represented in a “de-materialized realm of free floating information” but in a very immediate and material context (Asthana 2007). While the spaces for dialogue that have been created for the young, disenfranchised Cybermohalla participants are thought to create a forum for collective action (Asthana 2006), this potential seems to be subverted by the ways in which these participants have been cordoned off from their wider society. Apparently, outsiders have been denied access to the labs because they would disrupt their creative energy (Lovink 2006), and even the larger Sarai community has not been included into the dialogue of the cybermohalla youth.

The use of digital media production as a way of giving voice to disenfrachised people can be seen most directly in the Finding a Voice: Making Technological Change Socially Effective and Culturally Empowering project by Jo Tacci and her colleagues from Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Finding a Voice examined, through the use of ethnographic action research and participatory content creation, “how creative engagement with ICT can be both effective and empowering for positive social change” in marginalized communities across Asia (http://www.findingavoice.org/). The project was funded in part by UNESCO and the UNDP and had five sites in India, ranging from public computer centers in Kerala to a TV station in Andhra Pradesh to the Gender Resource Center in Delhi and two community radio stations in Uttarakhand. The publications resulting from the project have been mainly aimed at practitioners, policy strategists and decision makers (Tacci and Kiran 2008, Watkins and Tacci 2008, Skuse et al 2007). This attention to the empowerment potential of new media production is the focus of most academic publications analyzing its use towards development ends, and can partly be explained by many of these project being funded by government and development organizations, with an eye toward achieving concrete social ends. However, emerging explorations of their potential to inform the academic discourse of new media studies provides promising examples for further research and analysis (Nayar 2008, Asthana 2007).

References Cited:

Arora, P. (2008). Instant Messaging Shiva, Flying Taxis, Bil Klinton and More: Children’s Narratives from Rural India. International Journal of Cultural Studies, 11 (1), 69-86.

Asthana, S. (2006). Youth Media: A research study on 12 initiatives from around the developing and underdeveloped regions of the world. New York: UNESCO. Available at http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001492/149279e.pdf

Asthana, S. (2007). Sketching a Theory of New Media: The Case of Cybermohalla from India. Paper presented at MiT5 conference.

Lim, S. and E. Nekmat. (2008). Learning through Prosuming: Lessons from Media Literacy Programs in Asia.” Science, Technology and Society, 13(2), 259-278.

Lovink, G. (2006), Revisiting Sarai: Five Years of New Media Culture in India.” Sarai Waag Exchange Platform. Available at http://waahsarai.waag.org/?p+71

Nayar, P. (2008). New Media, Digitextuality and Public Space: Reading Cyber-mohalla. Postcolonial Text 4(1). Available at http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/786/521

Skuse, A. et al (2007) “Poverty and Digital Inclusion: Preliminary Findings of Finding a Voice.” New Delhi: UNESCO.

Tacci, J. and MS. Kiran (eds.) (2008) Finding a Voice: Themes and Discussion. New Delhi: UNESCO.

Watkins, S. and J. Tacci (eds) (2008) Participatory Content Creation for Development: Principles and Practices. New Delhi: UNESCO.