Working with new media in the part of South Asia that I come from is
something like crossing a tightrope on a bicycle. The bicycle which could
have helped me along were I on my way on flat ground makes the crossing
that much more precarious. Consider the bicycle to be the single computer
and the internet connection which I use along with at least seventeen
other people, friends, colleagues, neighbours and complete strangers.
An infinitesimal fraction of the South Asian population has access to
internet, and this is likely to be the case in the future even at the most
optimistic projection. Computers are few and when we get them, we tend to
spread them thin by sharing them out. Computers, modems, internet accounts
- these are expensive things and a lot of people sharing the costs, and
the phone bill makes sense in a context where the rent, the absence of any
form of social security, and the price of vegetables and the lack of work
are important concerns. This means that not everyone gets the luxury of
privacy, or unfettered usage. It makes for a crowded bicycle, but as we
say often in other crowded situations, in trains, buses or even in living
spaces : 'never mind, we'll adjust' The tightrope is made up of three
intertwined strands : the failing electricity supply, the soggy and
overloaded telephone line and the server that crashes every other day. I
am never quite sure if the message that I typed and sent actually reached
it's destination until I get a reply. The sent-mail box in my e mail may
be full, but that doesn't really mean anything. I might have just got into
my favourite anarchist archive on the net, but a little click sound will
tell me that the system crashed again, for the twentieth time within half
an hour. Surfing the web in New Delhi is a lot more like trying to climb
up a slippery mountain face that never lets you get to the next foothold.
And yet India is amongst the highest exporters of software professionals
in the world. Large multinational corporations in London, Brussels and
Chicago tap into India's growing labour market of cheap, skilled,
anglophone, software professionals via dedicated internet lines every
working day. While they sleep each night, half the world away, in another
timezone, somewhere in New Delhi, or Bangalore or Hyderabad, reports are
typed, spreadsheets drawn up, software created, graphics designed in a
virtual sweatshop by workers seated in assembly lines glued to keyboards
and screens. Fifty people get laid off in one place, another five
sweatshops open their virtual windows in another. The sweatshops have
their own electricity generator, leased phone lines and dedicated internet
connections that don't collapse every five minutes. The grease of the
global digitized workplace makes sure that everything runs smoothly, that
deadlines are stuck to, and that the modems hum in tune with the music of
production schedules.
My fragile internet connection, riding on pirated software (the only kind
I can afford, on an assembled computer that was made in an anonymous 'grey
market' workshop) beeps and crackles along side the drone of a giant
economic engine as it cavorts on a new virtual playground. Can my beep and
crackle, and the beep and crackle of others like me challenge the digital
drone of power?
My reasons for hope in this regard, few though they are are based
partially on the fact that South Asian cultures have shown a remarkabely
high ability to absorb new expressive and communicative technologies and
and transform them in keeping with local needs. If you look at the rapid
ways in which the printing press, the cinema and photography spread in
South Asia, giving rise to new and varied expressive forms, and new
constellations of audiences and performers, then perhaps there is some
hope for a yet-to-emerge internet and new media culture. But this new
media culture will depend crucially on the way in which it's protagonists
shape their space, and the content of their work, vis a vis existing
communication structures, both hegemonic and otherwise.
But before we go on, I want to briefly examine what I consider to be a
missed opportunity. A case of the forgotten 'old' medium of the radio for
which I have a certain affection, even though I am a filmmaker and it is
television, not radio that pays for my bread. I am referring here to the
mysterious lack of any interest in the creation of an alternative radio
network. Radio has a long history in india, it is also the cheapest and
most ubiquitous means of communication in india. Even the remotest hamlet
in the interiors of India, will have radio sets, and the radio, like the
bicycle is the one form of technology that everyone can afford and access
because it is cheap. One would have thought that such a scenario would
have prompted a widespread alternative radio culture based on low cost
transmitters, intially set up as pirate stations and then battling for
legitimacy through public actions. I find this even more surprising given
a recent Supreme Court judgement that declared the airwaves to be public
property, and situated them as a public resource independent of the
control of the state and market. Thus the situation is in a sense ripe for
the mushrooming of local radio stations run by anybody who pleases, that
can flood the airwaves with any manner of subversive content. If the state
wishes to crack down upon them, then the ground is ready for a protracted
legal battle that bases itself on the right to freedom of expression and
the fact of airwaves having been declared public property by judicial
fiat, thus contravening existing laws that controls access to
broadcasting, (the infamous and draconian Telegraph Act of 1885).
But unfortunately, this is precisely what does not happen. Debates on the
autonomy of the media continue to rotate around the sterile question of
corporate versus state ownership of the media. Few years ago, when a
group of independent film makers and media practitioners to which I
belong, the Forum for Indiependent Film & Video, attempted to initiate a
debate on public access to broadcasting as a fundamental right they were
either thoroughly ignored , or told off for stirring up trouble. On a
number of occasions I personally have been told by respectable
left-liberal intellectuals and NGO activists that free access to the media
would only mean that fundamentalists would open radio and television
stations and disseminate fascist and communal propaganda. The possibility
of a libertarian culture on the airwaves is perhaps too threatening for
the South Asian cultural elite, which is why the bugbear of 'opening the
fascist floodgates' is such a handy and convenient excuse. Meanwhile the
spectacle goes unchallenged except by exhausted and token protests. The
spectacle lives and breathes in the hardsell of a new consumer culture on
satellite television, in the cardboard mythological on state television,
in the violent nationalism of commercial cinema, in the political circus
of slick current affairs and news shows and in the proliferation of
fundamentalist sermons and communal propaganda in the name of religious
programming on cable channels.
In such a situation if any group of people anywhere in South Asia had
tried to operate a free thinking, open radio station, with a small
transmitter, and supposing that this radio station would have on the off
chance also featured open debates about everyday life, reports from the
workplace, from factories and schools, letters from prisons, features
about the way in which the police was hounding Bangladeshi immigrants from
cities or terrorizing gay people in public parks, or played songs against
nuclear weapons, they would have simply landed up in prison, for
violating antiquated broadcasting rules. And frankly no one would even
know, or have given a damn.
Until and unless free and equal access to the media becomes recognized as
a political question, just as access to drinking water, or land, or
housing, or a clean environment are recognized as a political questions,
unless access to the media not just as recipients but as producers is not
seen as a question that relates to the way in which power articulates
itself in our society, this is bound to remain the case. And this
recognition cannot come from those who work with the media alone, though
they can help engender it.
In South Asian societies it will have to be demonstrated through practice
that only a participatory media culture can bring back a lost vitality
into our exhausted public spaces. In a cultural climate where all forms
of political expression and social communication are rigidly controlled
by a complex structure of mediators and representatives who negotiate the
messages that are transmitted between people and power through the forms
of representation (and here by forms of representation I mean both the
political structures of representative democracy, as well as the
'representational' function of the dominant media - holding up an
acceptable picture of the world) there may in fact be a great hidden
social urge for unmediated, direct and spontaneous expression . For
expressions that either ignore or confront power in new and surprising
ways. That reject the older forms of spectacular protest for subtle, if
low key acts of everyday resistance, that are hard to locate and identify,
and thus impossible to punish or appropriate. Traditionally, the peoples
of South Asia have had a a rich subaltern history of popular poetry,
forms of satire, and a repertoire of symbolic challenges to power. These
traditions were founded on the basis of anonymity, or of the hidden and
shifting claims of authorship which made them difficult to censor. New
media practitioners in South Asia have a rich precedent before them in the
very 'old ' media, should they choose to recognize such a lineage. This
will imply a re-appraisal of what we consider to be political in our
societies, which will involve rejecting the notion that the media, or work
in them is at best an instrument for the projection of a political
programme, and consider instead that the media and their usage in
themselves are political questions.
Such a vision can imagine a new media and a new public culture that takes
photography to the streets through large prints made as posters, that
encourages the evolution of graffitti as an urban folk art form, that
transforms public spaces through the projection of films made from within
communities (as opposed to being about them) , that actively agitates for
popular cafes and liberal licensing laws for inexpensive pubs where small
newspapers can be read, where poets can read and new songs can be sung
accompanied by cheap food and drink. For a series of movements to liberate
the means of communications, especially radio from the stranglehold of the
state and advertising. That demands that every school or college or
housing estate be seen as a potential radio transmitter, and that this
demand be considered as basic and as natural as the demand that each
neighborhood have its own hand pump for clean drinking water.
It is in this context that the Internet and other new technologies of
communication need to be looked at in South Asia. For the foreseeable
future, they will remain technologies available ony to very few people,
and these will be the cultural and political elites. Those of us who are
lucky to have some form of internet access can use the internet as a
resource for information that is rapidly transformed into older 'media' to
make it use friendly in a public context. Thus it is impossible for us to
contemplate a universe contained within the web, and to see the new media
as replacements for other, not necessarily only 'older' forms of
communication. (there may be the need to think of other 'new' media that
are not as dependent on technology as the Internet). We can creatively and
imaginatively use the Internet as the one space in which national
boundaries have ceased to matter, in which we can as of now travel form
New Delhi to Lahore without the intelligence agencies of either state
monitoring our every movement. This opens out the possibility of
contemplating long term joint projects that explore common concerns, and
engender new intiatives without having to fall into the trap of simply
reacting with e mail petitions to each new political disaster that our
rulers bestow upon us.
This can then gradually pave the way for the opening out of an 'offline'
space, populated by real people, and real actions and exchanges, where the
state that we evaded so sucessfully'online' can bew surprised by our
refusal to act on the terms laid down by it. Where the free floating
ambience of the web, where everything is up for grsabs and nothing belongs
ideally to no one can be translated on to a from taking over the streets
and spaces of our cities. Where the net is only an online rehearsal for an
offline celebration, in real space and time of our real lives.
I would like to end by talking about a group of friends, some of the
growing family of people who share and enrich our internet account. They
have over many years have brought out a newspaper for industrial workers.
The newspaper, a black and white tabloid in Hindi with no illustrations
is distributed free to workers in the industrial town of Faridabad, close
to Delhi and has a readership of over ten thousand people. The people
working on the paper correspond almost daily with other workers in
different parts of the world, in Hong Kong, New Jersey, Tokyo,
Johannesburg and Amsterdam, among other places. Their e mail exchanges
feed into their newspaper and the reports of the newspaper make their way
into the e mail correspondence. In this way workers in faridabad get to
know about wildcat strikes in South Korea, or the way in which people
resist work pressures in Amsterdam. And a conversation gets started
between one form of resistance and another. Recently they have started
putting publications on the web, one of which is called "A Ballad Against
Work" . A collage of instances of resistance, and a string of arguments,
this text grew out of the fusion of 'new' and 'old' forms of media, of
street corner conversations while distributing the paper, and e mails that
spanned continents. Today it circulates in turn, 'offline' and 'online',
taking on new lives with every reader or surfer, living through every
postcard and every e mail that confirms that we will always find new and
old ways of saying we have had enough with this world and want another one
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