SELF PORTRAIT:
NEW VOICES IN COMMUNICATIONS RESEARCH

        Periodically, the Newsletter will include a semi-autobiographical essay by young researchers discussing how their place and path i in the world affects their work.  This first self-portrait is by Akash Kapur.

        In recent years, India has been bitten by a serious case of information technology (IT) fever.  Every metropolis seems to be promoting itself as the next Bangalore; hardly a day passes without mention in the press of some new software millionaire.  In a nation desperate for heroes—I write this amid the depths of World Cup despair—staid businessmen like Narayan Murthy, the CEO of Infosys, have become our icons of success.  Politicians, too, have been quick to jump on the bandwagon, promising to use IT to alter the face of government and to lift the nation from poverty.  As in much of the world, there has been considerable optimism about the potential of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) to spur economic and social development.¹  Last year, I interviewed Chandrababu Naidu, the cyber-savvy Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh who has been drawing attention—and imitators—for his success in luring high-tech investment to his state.  “I want to make this the new Silicon Valley,” he told me.  “I want to develop a knowledge society here.  If we are outdated, how are we going to develop this country?”

        This IT boom, and the attendant optimism displayed by people like Naidu, is the context for my research into the role of new media technology in India.  But the boom tells only part of the story.  As with almost every aspect of Indian life, new media and ICTs are emerging upon a contradictory and uneven terrain.  Simply put, a multimedia computer does not mean the same thing in Bangalore as it does in the fishing village of Virapatnam (one of the sites of my investigation, and of which I will write more later).  What does computer literacy mean in a nation with 30 percent basic illiteracy?  A recent study of primary schools in India found that only 41 percent had access to drinking water; 23 percent had libraries.²  Meanwhile, governments and aid agencies are pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars to equip schools and villages with computer-based information systems.

        I am not suggesting that computers have no role to play at the so-called grassroots level.  (I think this report presents much evidence to suggest just the contrary.)  But I am suggesting that an adequate research program must pay attention to the unevenness of the “field site.”  I think it is important to maintain a dual perspective, to pay as much attention to Bangalore as to Virapatnam.  This is not simply a matter of naïve ideological commitment to some subaltern cause.  For one thing, it points to a very real debate in India itself about the role of ICTs⁴—a debate whose outcome is likely to affect the course of future media policy.  Furthermore, paying attention to the contradictory terrain of new media policy in India is simply sound methodology; if I am to paint an accurate portrait, then I have to paint a whole portrait.  All of this is particularly relevant in the context of a transnational or comparative project, since the practical difficulties of gathering data in several locations pose a danger of, as it were, thinness—of focusing on the macro- or national perspective, thereby overlooking the heterogeneities within each nation.  As the anthropologist George Marcus, long a proponent of transnational ethnography, has suggested, there is the possibility in this type of research of “forsak[ing] the perspective of the subaltern.”⁵   For such reasons, I like to think of my research as being comparative along regional, rather than national, lines; and in what follows, when I speak of a comparative project, I am referring to comparisons between different locations and social strata within India.

        In many ways, I am in an ideal position to conduct this type of comparative project.  For the past several months, I have had a double engagement with new media in India.  On the one hand, I have been a consultant at a largish corporation (henceforth The Company) that does a significant amount of export business.  I was hired by The Company to develop its web site, to set up a corporate intranet, to streamline its communications systems, and to use the potential of the Internet for The Company’s international marketing efforts.  This has been a part-time engagement, and I have spent much of the remaining time researching and working at a local NGO that has set up a number of rural Information Centers—small offices in the South Indian countryside, equipped with cell phones, computers, and modems.  Needless to say, the contrast between both positions has been great, and in many ways I have been living the contradiction that is inherent in the terrain of new media research in India.  In what follows, I identify some of those contradictions, and discuss certain methodological issues raised by them.

I.     Differences in Information Requirements

        Perhaps the most obvious distinction between both field sites has been in the different types of information that are considered useful.  For The Company, the Internet has been a gold mine. I have spent hours downloading commercial information—databases of potential distributors, addresses of trade offices—that would have otherwise been inaccessible.  I think it is fair to say that the Internet has enhanced The Company’s marketing position.  At the rural Information Centers, on the other hand, there is little need for the type of information that is widely available on the Internet.  Although the farmers and fishermen and other villagers who visit the centers do have access to the Internet, the material they need is far more localized.  Accordingly, rather than simply providing access to the Internet, the NGO constructs (and updates on a frequent basis) databases of local information, usually in Tamil.⁶   The information maintained includes the price of vegetables in the surrounding markets (which farmers use to determine where to sell their produce); the addresses of doctors; local bus timings; and a host of data on government welfare schemes (which are technically available to anyone, but in practice require negotiating a great deal of bureaucracy).  I asked one volunteer at the Information Centers if his visitors ever downloaded content of an international flavor.  His wry response:  sometimes they come looking for cricket scores.

        To my mind, this difference in information requirements suggests two important avenues for further research.

(a) First, I think it is important to look seriously at the possibilities—and limitations—of software and new media content in languages other than English.  This is a point that is often made, of course, and so I won’t dwell on it.  But I will say that when attention is drawn to this point, it is frequently done in the context of nationalistic or cultural-defense arguments.⁷   Around here, for example, there is much talk of developing Tamil-specific ICTs in order to preserve the Tamil language and culture.  (Hence the government’s recent scheme, which it has loudly trumpeted, of putting The Tirrukural, an ancient, and wonderful, Tamil poem on the World Wide Web).  I am not saying that these considerations do not have their place.  But I do think that there is more scope, in comparative media studies, for research into the technical aspects of developing local-language content.  Significant progress has been made toward developing software (online translators, browsers) for non-English European languages, but the development of similar tools for Asian languages is significantly more difficult.⁸.

(b) In addition to paying attention to ways of generating local content, I also think that a research program can try to find new and creative ways of disseminating existing content whose local potential has not been realized.  Let me illustrate this point with an example.  Perhaps the most successful—or at any rate, creative—instance I have seen of ICT use in rural development is in the fishing village of Virapatnam, which I mentioned above.  Several times a week, the NGO downloads data from a remote sensing satellite operated by the Indian government; included in that data is information on the location and movement of fish off the Bay of Bengal.  This information is then sent via modem to the village’s Information Center, where it is translated into navigational instructions (“Bear 40 degrees for 2 kilometers; sink your nets at 25 meters”), printed out, and posted on a wall.  By all accounts, yields are way up.

Skeptics may question the application of satellite data in a village that is still in parts unelectrified, but to my mind this is a sophisticated application of IT to information that has long been available, yet that has not been used to its potential.  I am certain that there are many other possible examples out there; and one of the tasks of a comparative approach might be similarly to bring together existing information and seekers of that information, in the process identifying hitherto unseen webs of association between different locations (the satellite data was stored in Hyderabad; it is used several hundred miles farther south).  This is a task that is particularly well-suited to comparative research, since, by the project’s very nature, the researcher will be familiar with information needs and availability in various locations, and therefore in a position to identify potential linkages.

II.     Information Does Not Exist in a Vacuum

        The differences in information requirements suggest another important contrast between the role played by ICTs at different levels of society.  For the rural users in my study, the so-called information revolution is not the open, democratic phenomenon that, by and large, it has been for much of the world (including The Company).  For The Company, the Internet represents an opportunity to sift through large amounts of data, and to make choices about the usefulness and quality of various sources of information.  The villagers do not have similar choices; they are accessing information that has been constructed—assembled by members of the NGO, and packaged in proprietary database formats.  There are no alternative sources.  The information is thus heavily mediated—not only by the NGO, but by the government, too (since much of the information used by the NGO is originally gathered from government sources).⁹

        Arjun Appadurai, in Modernity at Large, has written of the “interactive” nature of what he calls “the new ethnoscapes”—the social landscapes generated by an increasingly inter-connected world.¹⁰   The point is to emphasize the agency of those who may appear on the receiving end of, among other things, the new media structures of the Information Age.  While this interactivity may be part of the Internet experience for large numbers of people, it is certainly less so for the villagers of Virapatnam than it is for The Company.  In general, I think it is fair to say that the degree to which it is true in a given situation is likely to reflect existing social realities.  In examining the role of ICTs in rural India, I have to consider the implications of the fact that, say, the databases may have been constructed for lower castes based on the fieldwork of upper-caste volunteers.  The point is that social context is built into any media, and this context should be taken into account by the researcher.  If we are concerned about differential access to information, it is not enough simply to study the uneven distribution of phones lines or Internet access nodes that serve as biases against the use of ICTs in rural India.  Even when such hurdles to access are overcome, there may still be social biases built into the information.

III.     Looking in the Right Places

        Finally, something that has become increasingly clear to me is just how complicated is the very process of identifying information innovations.  For the researcher seeking to understand the role of ICTs in rural India, it is easy to look in the wrong places.  What I am getting at is that the notion of an “information revolution” is an idea—a cultural construct that was born in the West (particularly the United States) in the early nineties.  There is no doubt that that idea, like so much of Western culture, has today been disseminated throughout the world; arguably, it is the model for globalization in the nineties.  Indeed, like the Silicon Valley talk I identified at the start of this report, the somewhat incongruous existence of Information Centers in rural India is testament to the power and cultural valence of this idea.

        Like all cultural phenomena, though, the information revolution is an idea that is subject to different incarnations in different places.  Much as anthropologists and other social scientists have learned to recognize the various cultural permutations of Hollywood and rock music, so media researchers could learn to decode the different guises assumed by the information revolution.  Thus, while it may seem to make most sense, for a study of new media in India, to examine the uses of computers and databases and modems, the actual ramifications of the information revolution may lie elsewhere.  Before the advent of these Information Centers, many of the villages included in the NGO’s project did not even have a single public phone.  For such villages, a computer and modem are almost certainly less useful than the phone line that came along simply as an accessory to the more sophisticated equipment.  Indeed, one volunteer at a center told me that while he uses his computer an average of 5-6 hours a day, the phone is busy virtually all day.  This phone line would not have been brought to the villages were it not for the efforts of the NGO backing the Information Centers; the NGO itself would not have received the money for the phone line were it not for the West’s eagerness to fund anything that is vaguely cyber.¹¹  The point is that the phone line was brought in, as it were, by accident—as a side effect of building a sophisticated multimedia computer-based information system.  So in a somewhat ironic (even sad) way, the telephone is as much a fruit of the information revolution for these villages as is the ISDN line that The Company is currently considering purchasing.

        This may be a temporary phenomenon:  over time, computers and the Internet may become more useful at the rural level.  But for the moment, the subtle mutations of cultural translation mean that the humble telephone may be Virapatnam’s version of America’s Internet.  Contrary to my initial thoughts on this matter, I am beginning to see this as grounds for optimism—or at any rate as an antidote to the cynicism that so often accompanies discussion about the potential of the information revolution to effect rural change.  Yes, it is true that the databases may be mediated; it is true that language barriers pose significant obstacles; and it is true that Yahoo! is about as useful in rural South India as the company’s clownish name suggests.  But that’s not to say that the information revolution is not bearing fruit—you just have to look into the right places.

Notes:

1. See Knowledge Societies (OUP, 1998) for an extensive discussion of ICTs and development.  It is from this book, too, that I derived the term ICT.
2.  The data is from The Public Report on Basic Education in India (OUP, 1999), an extensive survey conducted by a non-governmental organization.
3. Later this year, Naidu will be facing elections in his state.  One of the opposition’s main platforms is that, in his lust for all things high-tech, the Chief Minister has forgotten about his rural constituents.  In many ways, then, the election will be a referendum of sorts on the place of ICTs in rural India.
4. George E. Marcus, Ethnography Through Thick and Thin (Princeton University Press, 1998), 85. Arjun Appadurai, in Modernity at Large (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), has also written on the challenges of conducting what he calls a “cosmopolitan” or “multi-sited” ethnography.  He specifically addresses these issues while discussing new media structures.
5. Even local information has limited utility if it is not in the local language.  Indeed, most of the information assembled by the NGO is in Tamil.  Thus, when I speak of “local content” in this report, I am also referring to the language as well as the content of the information.
6. And not just because they are so much more different from English than other European languages. Many Asian languages are highly fragmented, and it has been difficult to agree on standards for a universally accessible computer interface.  There exist several hundred different fonts for Tamil, for example, and no equivalent of the ASCII standard.
7. The mediated nature of the information is particularly apparent when one considers the exact manner in which many of the databases are constructed.  Taking a page out of the “participatory” approach that is now de rigeur in the field of development, the NGO sends volunteers to the villages to conduct surveys; these surveys are supposed to gauge exactly what sorts of information the people need.  The intention is no doubt laudable, but it injects a great deal of subjectivity—and, potentially, social bias—Into the final content.
8. Appadurai, op cit, p. 48.
9. Like all cultural phenomena, the dissemination of this idea has been hastened by economic forces.  Much as Hollywood has spread on the wings of mass marketing, so is the idea of an information revolution supported by the financial resources being poured into the cause by Western aid agencies.  The money is not just coming from aid agencies, however; as with Hollywood, much of the money originates in corporate donations from Silicon Valley giants (Intel, for instance, is donating large sums to set up village Internet centers in India).  I think that, as part of a transnational media study, it would be interesting to trace the global trajectory of this idea.  How was India sold on Internet fever?  What were the forces driving the dissemination of that fever?

Last Updated: 10/13/99

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