Big Data and The Ladies Finger: Online Gods #1

Online Gods - A Podcast about Digital Cultures in India and Beyond Online Gods is a monthly podcast on digital cultures and their political ramifications, featuring lively conversations with scholars and activists. Presented by anthropologist Ian M. Cook, the podcast is a key initiative of the five year ERC project ONLINERPOL www.fordigitaldignity.com led by media anthropologist Sahana Udupa at LMU Munich, and cohosted by HAU Network for Ethnographic Theory. Online Gods represents our collective commitment to multimedia diffusion of research in accessible and engaging formats.

Online Gods is part theoretical exploration into some of the key concepts in the anthropology of media, and part research into how increased online interaction is changing the public sphere. Taking India and the India diaspora as its focal point, the podcast continues in the great anthropological tradition of bringing the global and the specific into conversation with one another as it analyses what online cultures do to political participation, displays of faith and feelings of national belonging. Each podcast will feature news, a discussion with a scholar about a key concept and a chat with an online god – one of the key players in India’s e-public sphere.

We are intrigued as to whether a podcast can produce ethnographic theory. As notions of ethnographic fieldwork continue to be reimagined in the digital age, we believe the podcasts are not just a platform that can disseminate what is already gathered, analyzed and theorized. We use podcasts as a way to communicate academic concepts, and as well engage in conversations with people who have carved out new pathways of public participation through the digital. These conversations could be yet another way to approach the mediated, interlocked and territorially eclectic fields that we, as anthropologists, are increasingly drawn into.

We believe it is possible to be both sophisticated and yet comprehensible, and that the spoken form can bring forth an accessibility that is sometimes missing from the canonical written forms. We even wonder whether academic podcasting might herald a technologically-enabled return to the centrality of oral traditions in intellectual exploration - can podcasting weaken reading's hegemonic hold on consumption of academic knowledge?

The podcast’s parent project ONLINERPOL is funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant Agreement Number 714285. Taking contemporary landscapes of digital politics in India and the Indian diaspora in Europe as the primary focus, the five year project examines how online media recasts questions of faith and nation, and reshapes political participation. At the core of our endeavor is the value of digital dignity – to study and advocate for spaces where political expression can expand in an enabling culture of contacts, without the fear of shame and intimidation.

“Online Gods” is one effort to foster an enabling culture of contacts by disseminating critical concepts that have inspired latest scholarly thinking on digital media. It is also a platform where scholars, activists and general interest publics can meet through the easy conversational form of the podcasts.

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In this episode we speak to Ralph Schroeder about Big Data and Nisha Susan about The Ladies Finger.