Conversations under the Banyan Tree
India and the West in the New Communication Era

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Introduction

Despite the wide gulf in economies between what is termed as the first and the third world, communication technologies normally associated with the West exist with the starkness of life in many parts of the developing world. These technologies range from what one would consider older forms such as radio and television to new age technologies such as the Internet, information kiosks, mobile phones, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth etc. As these technologies leave the desk and enter our lives, we are increasingly wrapped in a steady flow of new emerging “pervasive” technologies, both in our private and public lives. Whether we are members of online virtual communities or commuters in a train in London or Mumbai, we are part of ever-increasing electronic networks. These networks – physical and virtual – subvert traditional territorial formations, deconstructing and recomposing them in more complex ways. In the process, established forms of urban community, culture and sensibility are altered.

The response to these swift transformations of the technological landscape range from the foreboding to the utopian. Some talk of a nightmarish world lost in an overload of information technologies. Others proclaim the liberating potential of this technological revolution. But rather than propagate a simplistic vision of good or bad, it may be more appropriate to look at these technologies as functioning in a complex cultural, social and economic milieu. This would enable us to see how varying attitudes and values emerge depending on different geographical, social and cultural contexts.

I propose to look at how these new emerging information and communication technologies function in strikingly different regions such as ‘advanced’ Western countries and a ‘developing’ country like India. It would also be interesting to see how these technologies influence human experience and communication within the Indian context itself, where stark differences exist between the urban and the rural, the haves and the have-nots.

In various approaches to understanding communication processes, technology has come to mean more than the tangible mechanical or electronic processes that we now identify it with. So in order to understand the complexity involved in discussing emerging technologies of communication, one would also be looking at how technology itself is understood in its cultural and social dimensions.