Titel: | A nuclear cyberia: interfacing science, culture and ‘e-thnography’ of an Indian township’s social media; |
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Beteiligte: | |
In: | Media, Culture & Society, 39, 2017, 3, S. 325-340 |
veröffentlicht: |
SAGE Publications
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Medientyp: | Artikel, E-Artikel |
Umfang: | 325-340 |
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ISSN: |
0163-4437
1460-3675 |
DOI: | 10.1177/0163443716643156 |
veröffentlicht in: | Media, Culture & Society |
Sprache: | Englisch |
Schlagwörter: | |
Kollektion: | SAGE Publications (CrossRef) |
<jats:p>The article’s aims are twofold – to investigate the potentials and limitations of online ethnography and to delineate the discursive dynamics of Indian technoscientific cultures as evident on a nuclear township’s online social network site. Technoscientific cultures of the south cannot be simply seen through a postcolonial lens in terms of north–south tensions over the global political economy or merely through a developmentalist paradigm. There are more complex and illuminating territories with which to appreciate such cultures through the eyes of their protagonists. I note that while Weberian trends towards bureaucratisation are discernible among Indian nuclear technocrats, there is also a considerable counter-narrative in which there is a ‘reconstitution of the cultural’ that demonstrates a strong proclivity towards reinventing particular strains of religio-cultural discourse. I illustrate these dynamics by providing an ‘e-thnography’ of the material posted on the social network site set up in 2010 by scientists who live in a nuclear township in Mumbai. In so doing, I diverge from liberal human-centric understandings of the context of media technologies to consider critical junctures where the subject interfaces with informational technologies in such a manner that notions of the centred and corporeal self dissipate, but traces of his or her embodied self remain.</jats:p> |