Abstract
Since 2017, India has experienced perhaps the fastest and most significant expansion of social media in the world. This expansion is quickly changing Indian society and polity in a variety of ways, not only through an “information revolution” as was theorized at the beginning of 2010, but also through avenues of organization, radicalization, and mobilization for a variety of movements. Dalits or ex-untouchables in India, who have traditionally been marginalized from the country’s mainstream informational and organizational setups, and whose position in society, while improving gradually still remains liminal, have made extensive use of social media to create mediated and radical networks on Twitter and Facebook. Using digital methods to analyse a collection of one million tweets, 250,000 Facebook posts from the “Dalit Cybersphere”, as well as extensive field interviews and digital ethnography, this paper shows how the Dalit Cybersphere organizes, mobilizes, and agitates through social media platforms, and place these changes within the broader framework of contemporary global social media activism through discussions on Internet counterpublics.
Presenters
Shantanu KulshreshthaStudent, DPhil Candidate, University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Counter-public, Social media, India, Dalits, Digital methods
