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Digital Culture: Some Beings who Exchange Information on the Internet

By Anjali Gera Roy.

Published by The Diversity Collection

In "CyberDemocracy", Mark Poster poses the question, “What kinds of beings exchange information on this public sphere[internet]”? ) My answer to Poster’s question would be that, in addition to postmodern subjects, descendants of non-modern subjects like the jat, the Punjabi peasant, also use the internet for self-mobilizations. This corroborates that satellite television, internet and cassette technologies have put the Punjabi jat high on the international sonic map altering his position in the Indian national imaginary. I am not sure if the visibility of the jat on prime time television and the world wide web will necessarily usher “new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals”. But the jat certainly appears to be riding the digital waves in his pronounced rustic Punjabi. The exoticization of the jat in Bhangra music could be well be read within the cultural logic of late capitalism in which marginality and difference are put in the service of the celebration of a post-colonial ethic of hybridity and migrancy. How do digital technologies impact on the politics of culture? How did they alter relations of power between and within nations, classes, castes, ethnicities and regions? This paper will examine digital networks channeling Bhangra’s global flows and relocate the Punjabi harvest ritual in an economy of circulation and media convergence with the objective of introducing a disjuncture in the digital imperialism thesis.

International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities and Nations, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp.143-152. Article: Print (Spiral Bound). Article: Electronic (PDF File; 544.877KB).

Prof. Anjali Gera Roy

Professor, Teaching, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, W Bengal, India