Web Cultures

This cluster focuses on questions arising from the social, political, and material dimensions of the web-based interactions, communities, and cultures. Our interests range across the topics of digital activism and practices and discourses of social change, forms and norms of online communities, experiences of body and intimacy, structures of violence and affect, and device cultures and materiality of interfaces.

Projects

Publications

Digital Activism in Asia Reader edited by Nishant Shah, P.P. Sneha, and Sumandro Chattapadhyay
Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen
Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator by Nishant Shah
Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report by Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham
Digital Natives with a Cause? Thinkathon: Position Papers edited by Nishant Shah, Josine Stremmelaar, and Fieke Jansen
Digital Natives without a Cause?, a book series edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen

Recent Posts

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2 — by Denisse Albornoz — last modified Oct 24, 2015 02:30 PM: This post compares the method of storytelling with performances. To illustrate this, we explore the narratives of the Blank Noise project and The Ugly Indian, two civic groups from Bangalore making interventions in the public space. Part 2 looks at the role of actors and the stage in performances to explore the role of agency and the public space in storytelling.
Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 1 — by Denisse Albornoz — last modified Oct 24, 2015 02:31 PM: This post compares the production behind a performance with the process of storytelling. To illustrate this analogy, we explore the stories of the Blank Noise project and The Ugly Indian- two civic groups from Bangalore making interventions in the public space. This post looks at the stages of pre-production and the screenplay to explore methods and narratives in storytelling.
Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects — by Wendy Chun, Kelly Dobson, Matthew Fuller and Eivind Rossaak — last modified Oct 24, 2015 01:38 PM: “Networks” have become a defining concept of our epoch. From high-speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like Facebook that transform the meaning of the word “friend,” from blogs that foster new political alliances to unprecedented globe-spanning viral vectors that threaten world-wide catastrophe, networks allegedly encapsulate what’s new and different.
Interface Intimacies — by Audrey Yue and Namita A Malhotra — last modified Oct 24, 2015 01:40 PM: Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together, talked about how the digital technologies, replacing interface time with face-time, are slowly alienating us from our social networks. There has been an increasing amount of anxiety around how people in immersive and ubiquitous computing and web environments are living lives which are connected online but not connected with their social and political contexts.
Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai — by Larissa Hjorth and Genevieve Bell — last modified Oct 24, 2015 01:41 PM: From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.
We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human — by Asha Achuthan — last modified Oct 24, 2015 01:42 PM: The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.
Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator — by Nishant Shah — last modified Oct 25, 2015 05:57 AM: In this peer reviewed article, Nishant Shah explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The article was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2008. [1]
Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism — by Nishant Shah — last modified Oct 25, 2015 05:58 AM: In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

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