Sandeep Mertia, "Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India" (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020)

Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India (Institute of Networked Cultures, 2020) maps the historical and emergent dynamics of big data, computing, and society in India. Data infrastructures are now more global than ever before. In much of the world, new sociotechnical possibilities of big data and artificial intelligence are unfolding under the long shadows cast by infra/structural inequalities, colonialism, modernization, and national sovereignty. This book offers critical vantage points for looking at big data and its shadows, as they play out in uneven encounters of machinic and cultural relationalities of data in India’s socio-politically disparate and diverse contexts.

This episode features a discussion between Sandeep Mertia (book editor and contributing author), Aakash Solanki (contributing author) and Noopur (host and contributing author). The discussion begins with the contents of the book but moves on to a broader conversation about STS as an interdisciplinary formation in India and the global South. 

Noopur Raval is a postdoctoral researcher working at the intersection of Information Studies, STS, Media Studies and Anthropology

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