Instagram is a popular multimedia sharing forum and content aggregator, with around 20 crore users in India presently. What sets Instagram apart from other prominent “curators of public discourse” (Gillespie, 2010,p-347) is the central site of this study, i.e., the picture or the moving image, which is the primary kind…

Functionalism: In the initial years of what came to be called sociology, there came to be an influential school of thought, Positivism, led by August Comte (1798–1857). This paradigm (or in some ways supra-paradigm) epitomised the seeing-is-believing approach of the natural sciences, of which it considered itself a spiritual successor…

Introduction: In her account of the dynamic lives and identities of ‘Kothis’ in late-2000s Mumbai, Maya Indira Ganesh makes a powerful case against the thinking of ICTs as mere vehicles of ‘development’, and the ideas of Bottom of the Pyramid Populations as passive recipients of that ‘development’. Mobiles are not…

Introduction: In the previous essay a superficial outline of the historico-material contexts in which China came to be a nation state, had been outlined. With Deng Xiaoping’s premiership in the 70s and 80s came perhaps the most defining moment in China’s recent economic history where “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” ascended…

INTRODUCTION: At various levels the nature of the focus given and consequently the developmental contours of AI as a technology in China are very new, as they arise from a new set of opportunities and challenges. But there are also parallels with past experiences of regulating on and promoting the…

Egg Days In the early decades of the 20th century, Chinese youth were driven to find suitable models of development to restore the self-respect and dignity of a China that had been weakened consistently over centuries by self-serving, debauched, imperialism. There had been a history of brutally crushed protests (The…

Introduction: As of 6 December 2020, the Twitter account of noted journalist Salil Tripathi was taken down, apparently for tweeting a video, of a reading of a poem titled “My Mother’s Fault”. The poem, which was about the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992, and some other prominent instances of communal violence…