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Sarai Reader 03: Shaping Technologies

by Ravi Vasudevan, Ravi Sundaram, Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta [Sarai], Geert Lovink, Marleen Stikker [Waag], Eds.
The Sarai Programme, CSDS, Delhi + The Waag Society for Old and New Media, Amsterdam, 2003
382 pp. Paper, $15.00
ISBN: 81-901429-3-3.

Reviewed by Aparna Sharma

Aparna31S@netscape.net

With the intention to transcend commonplace binarism that characterizes much discourse on technology in South Asia and to open a qualified space that takes into account the mutual imbrication of technology, society, culture and politics, the Sarai Reader 2003, Shaping Technologies, covers vast territory. The collection comprises contributions from scholars and practitioners that make for an intense exchange between multiple impetuses. Shaping Technologies is the third in Delhi-based research collective, Sarai’s annual publications. In the introduction to the edition, Sarai’s editorial collective states that technology, which had figured importantly in previous readers, "has taken center-stage [in this edition] as a multi-faceted constellation of ideas, images, reflections, debates, histories and provocations" (vii).

Though the reader contains informative accounts of technology-dumping and its impacts on health and environment in urban spaces, its contribution really rests in mapping how commonly held polarities of the "native," "rural," and the "modernising" meld. Divided into nine sections that examine specific facets of the technology/society interface, it indicates technology as being constituted in an unsettling manner, entailing the interruption of indigenous forces along with new and emergent technology/ies: constituting a matrix of contingent and disparate forces that interact without negating or subordinating some in favour of others. Debate around technology is extended in the notion of "disruptive innovation," summarised in Chennai-based research scholar Nimmi Rangaswamy’s comment: "that existing mainstream markets are not starting places for waves of growth, and there is need to "incubate technologies from ground up rather than introduce top down" (170).

Specificity, particularly in terms of communities, is crucial to most research contained in the reader. The notion of community takes on board intricacies and inter-operability of factors such as socio-cultural patterns and practices, language, and environment. Without being an essentially materialist or localized description, the reader examines these factors not only to reflect better the re-appropriation of technologies but also to highlight how the process is persistent, responding to varied, concurrent stimuli. Two comprehensive and cogent arguments are Vikram Vyas’s overview of an IT-based drought-proofing model for water management and Rangaswamy’s study around the introduction of the internet in rural districts of the south Indian state, Tamil Nadu. Both emphasize grass-roots research and activation for enhanced possibilities in relation to development; and note the reciprocity between communities and technology.

Shaping Technologies
does not examine contemporary technologies only. Disruption is traced in the participation with earlier technologies, as discussed in the section "excavations." In temporal specificities such as those of say the colonial moment, one finds that the interjection of the native instils particular tensions in the usage/s of technological devices and the practices emanating from them. Particularly engrossing is Sabeena Gadihoke’s study of women’s domestic and amateur photography at the turn of the century in which she posits the photographic camera not only as the means for access to the "outside" from within a confining and restricting social order, but as imbued with the pulls between that order and women’s conflicts at that moment of nationalist upsurge. Similarly by describing the "selective adoption" of "naturalist" techniques in the commercial imagery of the bazaar, Kajri Jain’s paper identifies friction and resistance between two differing scopic regimes, wherein techno-rationalist devices are employed to preserve and continue the "messianic" or the sacred with overtones of the cult and devotional.

The reader is replete with such dialogue and has achieved a wide geographical palette that extends outside India. The writings offer reconstitutive insight not only at an immediate level, but more subtly in relation to politics as well, countering much cynicism that surrounds technology as being either "apolitical" or exploitative. The disjunctive and inter-subjective nature of the technology/society interface emerges as exerting pressures on the boundaries of what constitutes as "political" and opens alternate theatres for contest, which may not coincide fully with popular modes for struggle or be equally explicit or articulate. These throw a gauntlet before anyone even vaguely examining technology and stress its import not only as a means towards elevated levels of economic development, but as a drive in the construction of the social and political realms. Chicago-based anthropology student, Biella Coleman, addresses this aspect most pointedly in her paper that identifies the embedded politics of transgression in the practice of hacking.

One of the most impressive and poised statements is the translated version of Nobel Laureate, Rabindranath Tagore’s essay, "Airborne." A record of thoughts from his first air flight, it profoundly identifies the agenda for the interface, then at its most nascent. Though referring to the imperial mode (the essay was written in 1932), Tagore’s characteristic vision emphasizes an "intimacy," a situation "in the totality of space and time" for creativity to manifest. This emphasis is echoed through the reader, opening new territories and introducing reflective approaches that restore the technology debate from slipping along common trajectories that oscillate between the extremes of either techno-fetishism or phobia. The reader thus accomplishes injecting necessary complexity and rigour into discourse.

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Updated 1st March 2004


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