So its official now: we are currently working on a book for Routledge India where me and Soum (with guest star Angad Chowdhry) will co-write a chapter on the work we do.  While I really have no idea at this point how the chapter will be organized — I increasingly believe in improvisation and semi-random iteration when generating new ideas — momentary closure was nonetheless achieved on the note that had to be sent to the publishers.  Can we use genetic algorythms as new metaphors for thinking?  What is the use of literary narratives of time such as sideshadowing and foreshadowing for understanding the future of technological development?  Though perhaps a bit academically dry for my tastes, I thought I’d like to share these here.

Theory:Praxis in Emerging Digital Technologies and Cultures in India
Angad Chowdhry | Soumyadeep Paul | Matti Pohjonen

Emerging digital technologies and cultures pose many challenges for traditional research.  For one, the classical academic method is based on a reflexive and critical distance from your object of study. But how do you research something that does not allows the luxury of distance because of the sheer speed of change that is taking place? The moment you slow it down for dissection, it has already changed, moved on to become something else.  Secondly, how do you research something that does not even perhaps exist in the traditional sense but is rather always-already one step in the future: a project under construction, a vision, an idea being developed?  What methods are best suited for such an amorphous and fleeting object of research? What theories are best suited to understand the complex narratives of time, change and becoming presupposed by contemporary digital technologies and cultures?

This chapter will look at emerging digital technologies and cultures in India — mobile phones, MMS, MMORPG, social networks, hacker culture, virtual realities — and the problems, challenges and opportunities these place for research today. It will argue for practice-based research as one possible methodology for better understanding these digital technologies and cultures today. Using examples of the three authors actively involved in working digital technologies and cultures in India, the chapter will look at some of the theoretical and practical problems that get raised when the boundaries between research and practice are blurred and the roles between the academic and professional often reversed?  What might be
the benefits and risks of such an approach?  What new ways of thinking and insights might these experiments engender?

The book itself, tentatively titled “Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change” will look at the recent changes in Indian media from a various perspectives and will combine some academic biggies (Laura Mulvey, Mark Hobart, Annabelle Sreberny) and some young gun researchers.  I will be also co-writing the theoretical introduction to the book on the theoretical complexity of understanding change in media and technology as well as co-editing the book so - I guess - I get to write and edit myself and go properly schizo?  The book description goes as follows:

Indian Mass Media and the Politics of Change: Concept Note – Draft 0.1.

Rhetoric about India’s rapid economic growth and burgeoning middle classes suggests something new and significant is taking place. Something is changing, we are told: India is shining, the elephant is rising and the 21st century will be Indian.

Arguably, one key loci where such re-imaginings of India’s contested future take place is in its mass media. Yet much of the analysis on contemporary India has overlooked the complex role media has in articulating India’s economic and cultural landscape. The proposed book “Indian Mass Media and Politics of Change” aims to be an intervention towards empirically-driven yet theoretically-nuanced analysis of the politics of change taking place daily across the cinema halls, TV screens, newspapers and computer monitors in India today.

But what do we mean by change? French philosopher Gilles Deleuze once remarked that research should look at two things. The first is that the abstract does not explain anything but it instead must be explained; the second is that the aim of research is not to rediscover the eternal or the universal but instead is to find the conditions under which something new is produced (ie how things change). Similarly, the aim of the book is to provide a systematic analysis of the broader issues that underlie this abstract and often muddled notion of change.  What do these articulations tell us about the broader questions of tradition and modernity played out in the media in India today? How can it help us understand the problems of history, teleology and how the future is talked about? And how are these articulations of change ultimately implicated in wider political projects of development and progress?

The different chapters of the book provide snapshots from Indian media today where the articulations of change are refracted in myriad and different ways. By doing so, it provides the opening towards a more systematic analysis of the role the mass media has today, both in India and globally, in articulating the politics of change: this elusive boundary between the past, the fleeting present and the constantly re-imagined horizon of our open futures.

In any case, this can potentially be rather interesting because quite a lot of the work we do at BCG works at the boundary, the breach between different discplines and technologies — the transversal movement between academic research, artistic experimentation, old and new media, tactical technology and commercial design and development work, I suppose, is where the goodies and candies can increasingly be found.