The book ‘Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India’, edited by Sandeep Mertia, delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.
In this CEO’s mind, as in many others, Aadhaar’s data constituted an emergent condition of plentitude organised around storage, curation, analysis, consultation, and of course, rocketing revenue through data. But start-ups like these were not the only ones to read this emergence of data. Five years later, I found myself at a public event where a senior bureaucrat from Karnataka dangled a data bait in front of a retinue of tech company representatives to the tune of 3300 million data points, which she specified was demographic information of the people of Karnataka based on a survey that her department had conducted. A votary of ‘Open Data’ (a subject that chapter 10 of the book under review discusses at length), this bureaucrat has now started a program allowing ordinary folk to work on government-collected data under departmental supervision.
Clearly, this fetishisation of data is both a ‘fix’ for capitalist growth and an emerging condition of the government, which does not simply use information to further pre-determined ends (as the colonial and post-colonial state once did) but is ontologically constituted by it. Such a proposition requires us to come to terms with the beast.
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India edited by Sandeep Mertia. Publisher: Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam.
Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India, edited by Sandeep Mertia and published by the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, 2020), picks up that challenge and delivers a fantastic range of meditations on how data lives, and more importantly, how we, as individuals and collectives, are shaped by it.
The book’s remit is to “track the intricacy of the lives of data in theories and practices of human and natural sciences, technology, media, governance, and politics to better understand emergent computational cultures in India and South Asia” (pages 9-10).
As the media theorist, Ravi Sundaram, at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in New Delhi, says in his forward to the book, it illuminates ongoing questions pertaining to the modes of sovereignty in India, through a new focus on “emerging calculative infrastructures… atmospheric shifts and technical affordances” (7).
To give data sentience is to recognise, as Mertia does in his introduction, that data lives through its relations. Data is inherently social; it is produced through recognition and is always ascribed with forms of value. If raw data is an oxymoron – as Lisa Gitelman says, a media theorist and one of the two stellar names whose blurb is on the book– so are terms like data intelligence and data analytics, as data can only be born in layers of meaning.
The book opens to us the many lives, the many meanings within which data finds its feet, now and in the past. In these chapters, data stagnates because of presumed biases (chapter 14), data talks through interpretive design (chapter 6), data breakdowns and calls for repair (chapter 8) and data straddles communicative genres (chapters 12 and 13).
Each chapter uniquely forays into a specific career of data pushing us to re-think our assumptions about computational data. Just like big data is not always big in a quantitative sense, computational data in some contexts is constituted by the analogue and is intermittently linked to those very processes it is called upon to outmode.
Many times these connections break, which is when we begin to experience data through forms of repair. This is another counterintuitive revelation of the book: for many among us with broken data, failed biometrics to access rations, for instance, the responsibility of repairing this tenuous arrangement for welfare is off-loaded onto us, and is not anymore the responsibility of the state (see chapter 8). The political significance of this shift is far-reaching: the marginal and the most vulnerable among us maybe experiencing citizenship as unending repair.
While data’s connivance with practices of state surveillance has been given due attention in the book, it is refreshing to see that it does not over-determine the themes of the book.
Post-Aadhaar, there has been a deluge of speculative warnings about the realisation of an Orwellian state in India. While we may do well to heed these cautionary tales, the ensuing discourse has left little space for lived accounts of the precise ways in which big data works or falters to meet its purported ends.
The book is a truly multi-disciplinary account of the plural present, not only because it brings a bouquet of scholars from Science, Technology and Society(STS); Anthropology; Information studies; and Communication and Media Studies to bear on the topic at hand but also because it nurtures an emerging object of study that no discipline really owns. #KhabarLive #hydnews