Initiatives

Critical Post-media Studies in Asia

• Objectives

This project proposes a comparative and integrated study of the post-media ecology in Asia, mainly India, Japan and South Korea. Though the conceptual terminology of ‘post-media’, proposed by Felix Guattari in the eighties, continues to influence contemporary debates, it calls for a radical reconfiguration and updating of the new media context of Asia. With the concerns regarding the deleterious effects of new media forms on youth and youth culture as the backdrop, this project shall explore the effects of new media ecology and the emergent cultural practices across three countries in the Asian context. One of the focal points of inquiry pivots on how youth can resist “turning to pulp” face to face with the intoxicating and addictive state of our technological world. The sophistication of present-day technology in its new modality of communication addresses a society in transition from the datafied milieu to an automated one with the aid of AI and algorithmic systems. Cognizant of the limitation of reducing the transnational post media ecology to any geographical spatiality of Asia, this project will be an attempt to delineate the cartography of post-media ecology from a non-European transversal perspective.

The core objectives for this research are:

To establish an open network framework for the research between India, South Korea and Japan to identify the significant shifts in developed and developing societies generated by and in the algorithmic conditions of post-media coordinate information on new impacts of post-media forms coordinate and test ideas – how is/could the forms be implemented in education? e.g. new or improved theory, model, methodology, technology or technique for post-media literacy establish in a collaborative way, a shared understanding of what is required of an ethical post-media literacy that is responsive and adequate for the post-media conditions in global capitalism.

• Background

It was at a conference in 1985 in Tokyo that Felix Guattari gave a lecture and introduced the term “post- media” to audiences; noting that “post-media era will be greatly facilitated by a concerted re-appropriation of communication and information technology, assuming that they increasingly allow for: [..] innovative forms of dialogue and collective interactivity…”. Access to information has never been easier in countries such as South Korea, Japan and India. Yet the ways in which information is organized and used by the media, and by commercial, political, educational, transport, and health industries, results in changing social behaviour and attitudes toward culture, knowledge, and communities, with radical effects. The generation of information and its meaning are the result of new technological infrastructures, where information is algorithmically governed. Post-media conditions refer to all aspects of societies governed by algorithmic digital systems and objects endowed with cognitive agency. The coming changes to aspects of security, health and media through automation by AI algorithmic systems and the implementation of quantum computation will require the teaching and learning of literacy that is adequate to express the conditions and systems at work. The scale of changes to societal infrastructures due to this shift from a datafied; computerized society into an algorithmic condition is comparative to changes the Industrial Revolution brought to all aspects of society. This political scenario becomes the backdrop of this contemporary study of the post-media ecology of Asia, especially India, Japan and South Korea.

Please visit the Facebook page of this project here.

• Publications

Gadfly or praying mantis? Three philosophical perspectives on the Delhi student protests

 Deleuze, Guattari and the Schizoanalysis of Postmedia (Bloomsbury, forthcoming)