DIY Media in South Asia

Abstract

Do-it-yourself (DIY) media in South Asia requires a renewed understanding of the relations between postcolonial politics and sensorimotor ecologies (sensoria of force, sense and value). DIY media brings out the ‘informal’, or ‘jugaad’ (ad hoc workarounds) conditions of communication today; these conditions include the political economy of an accelerating media sensoria and the value chains of globalised infrastructures, themselves in flux. The importance of DIY media production and circulation, as social syntheses of ‘glocal’ piracy value chains and jugaad practices, is highlighted by three tendencies of platform media ecologies. The first tendency of DIY media practice highlights the ‘autonomy’ of subaltern politics, as the formalised infrastructures (e.g., value and supply chains) of globalised intellectual property regimes, norms of digital and creative work, conscious attention and habituated ‘contemplation’, ‘creative/cultural/knowledge industries’ organisation are put under erasure through its distracted agencies and self-organised networks (DeLanda, 2013; Guha, 1983; Manuel, 1993; Neves & Sarkar, 2017; Sundaram, 2015). Consider a quasi-heroic and often masculinist figure that has emerged as a kind of composite case study of DIY media from my fieldwork in media ecologies in India (Rai, 2009, 2019): the lifeworld of a Dalit mobile phone repair plus digital media distributor in, say Madanpur Khader Extension in east Delhi (where I have conducted fieldwork): the acquired skill sets of the tinkerer and the technical infrastructures of a constantly transforming network of technoanimist circulation and pragmatic repurposing, themselves tied to the gendered forms of Dalit social reproduction of the home and commodity labour power, mutate across resonating series of technological interfaces, information, style, language and desire (Simondon, 2017). Thus, DIY media point to a radical political economy when, with Mukherjee and Singh (2017), we ask ‘what happens when (studies of) technocultural networks overlap with marginalized regions (subaltern studies) ... [w]hat happens when relatively marginal communities ... are studied as part of “political societies,” not necessarily in the theoretical vocabulary of negotiating welfare benefits, but as active prosumers and innovators of contemporary media technologies?’ (Chattopadhyay & Sarkar, 2005; Mukherjee & Singh, 2017, p. 135). These informal prosumer networks, feedbacked in real time unlike the serial assembly line, have both digital (platform-based and measurable) and analogue (stochastic but probabilistic affects) parameters of change. This tendency also underscores the