Centre for the Study of Social Systems
School of Social Sciences
CSSS Colloquium
Mark Allen Peterson
(Professor in Anthropology and Global and Intercultural Studies, Miami University, CAS Visiting Professor, CSSS, JNU)
Will be presenting a paper on
Digital Disruptions: The Promises and Perils of the Informatic Revolution in India
Date & Time: March 12th, 2018 (Monday), 3.00 pm
Venue: CSSS Committee Room, SSS-II
Abstract: What will Indian political communication look like in the post-truth era? Disruptions in the ways news is gathered, created, circulated, remediated and shared in the twenty-first century, and the ways these changes have transformed political communication, have led to a claim we’ve entered into a “post-truth” world in the United States, Europe and, in a somewhat different sense, the USSR. Others have claimed that the very nature of digital disruptions—the shift from radial to distributive systems, the ease of sedentary and mimetic newsmaking, and the business model of social media that rewards quantity over quality—make these trends inevitable. In this paper, the author looks at digital disruptions in Indian news media since the turn of the century, and discusses some of the real and potential consequences of those disruptions, their promises and their perils.
Bio: Mark Allen Peterson is a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University. He is the author of Connected in Cairo: Growing Up Cosmopolitan in the Modern Middle East (2011, Indiana University Press) and Anthropology and Mass Communication: Media and Myth in the New Millennium (2003, Berghahn). He is co-author of International Studies: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Global Issues (2017, 4th edition, Westview). He has published more than 40 scholarly articles on globalization and localization, modernity, and media and culture. He has conducted fieldwork in Egypt, India and the United States.
