ABSTRACT
In this opening chapter, an extensive, though not exhaustive, theoretical account of the growth of Internet platforms as a tool of alternative communicative space and the linkages of such theories with Indian realities, particularly by people on the social margins, is documented. The focal argument is that as a liberating metaphor for people on the social margins, Internet must be looked after beyond the traditional instrumentalist and substantive agenda on social studies of technology. However, humanistic documentation of technological transformation of state and politics in India from academic points of view has not been an easy one, and its full implications are still unclear. Social Science in general and Political Science in particular are still diffident to view technology as worthy of discourse in Indian academia. Very few efforts were furnished in the past, that too with little public attention. In this background, this chapter makes an introductory approach to locate Internet as a site of discourse beyond the traditional empirical and instrumentalist perception of Internet. While doing so, the chapter does not altogether assume that Internet is not without negative repercussions, nor it proposes that technology is panacea for all the ills facing India. Internet is a bigger social house, which reproduces all the social architecture outside it such as caste, class and gender into the digital formats; it also intensifies its emancipating attributes to the people, at least the underprivileged. In this chapter, this position towards technology is extensively analysed based on three currents of technology discourse – dystopia, utopia and infotopia – which address the question of how to look at the trajectory of Internet and the underprivileged in the context of an extensive kaleidoscope of literary survey. This question is central to this chapter and probably the upcoming chapters.
