eh a Me Re ELT ia! RTI ee eT

subaltern history of popular poetry, forms of satire, and a repertoire of symbolic challenges to power. These traditions
were founded on the basis of anonymity, or of the hidden and shifting claims of authorship which made them difficult to
censor. New media practitioners in South Asia have a rich precedent before them in the very ‘old ‘ media, should they
choose to recognise such a lineage. This will imply a re-appraisal of what we consider to be political in our societies,
which will involve rejecting the notion that the media, or work in them is at best an instrument for the projection of a po-
litical programme, and consider instead that the media and their usage in themselves are political questions.

Such a vision can imagine a new media and a new public culture that takes photography to the streets through large prints
made as posters, that encourages the evolution of graffitti as an urban folk art form, that transforms public spaces through
the projection of films made from within communities (as opposed to being about them) , that actively agitates for popular
cafes and liberal licensing laws for inexpensive pubs where small newspapers can be read, where poets can read and new
songs can be sung accompanied by cheap food and drink. For a series of movements to liberate the means of communi-
cations, especially radio from the stranglehold of the state and advertising. That demands that every school or college or
housing estate be seen as a potential radio transmitter, and that this demand be considered as basic and as natural as the
demand that each neighborhood have its own hand pump for clean drinking water.

it is in this context that the Internet and other new technologies of communication need to be looked at in South Asia. For
the foreseeable future, they will remain technologies available only to very few people, and these will be the cultural and
political elites. Those of us who are lucky to have some form of internet access can use the internet as a resource for in-
formation that is rapidly transformed into older ‘media’ to make it use friendly in a public context. Thus it is impossible for
us to contemplate a universe contained within the web, and to see the new media as replacements for other, not neces-
sarily only ‘older’ forms of communication. (there may be the need to think of other ‘new’ media that are not as dependent
on technology as the Internet). We can creatively and imaginatively use the Internet as the one space in which national
boundaries have ceased to matter, in which we can as of now travel form New Delhi to Lahore without the intelligence
agencies of either state monitoring our every movement. This opens out the possibility of contemplating long term joint
projects that explore common concerns, and engender new initiatives without having to fall into the trap of simply react-
ing with e mail petitions to each new political disaster that our rulers bestow upon us.

This can then gradually pave the way for the opening out of an ‘offline’ space, populated by real people, and real actions
and exchanges, where the state that we evaded so sucessfully ‘online’ can be surprised by our refusal to act on the terms
taid down by it. Where the free floating ambience of the web, where everything is up for grabs and nothing belongs ideal-
ly to no one can be translated on to a from taking over the streets and spaces of our cities. Where the net is only an online
rehearsal for an offline celebration, in real space and time of our real lives.

| would like to end by talking about a group of friends, some of the growing family of people who share and enrich our in-
ternet account. They have over many years have brought out a newspaper for industrial workers. The newspaper, a black
and white tabloid in Hindi with no illustrations is distributed free to workers in the industrial town of Faridabad, close to
Delhi and has a readership of over ten thousand people. The people working on the paper correspond almost daily with
other workers in different parts of the world, in Hong Kong, New Jersey, Tokyo, Johannesburg and Amsterdam, among other
places. Their e mail exchanges feed into their newspaper and the reports of the newspaper make their way into the e mail
correspondence. In this way workers in faridabad get to know about wildcat strikes in South Korea, or the way in which
people resist work pressures in Amsterdam. And a conversation gets started between one form of resistance and another.
Recently they have started putting publications on the web, one of which is called "A Ballad Against Work" . A collage of
instances of resistance, and a string of arguments, this text grew out of the fusion of ‘new’ and ‘old’ forms of media, of
street corner conversations while distributing the paper, and e mails that spanned continents. Today it circulates in turn,
‘offline’ and ‘online’, taking on new lives with every reader or surfer, living through every postcard and every e mail that
confirms that we will always find new and old ways of saying we have had enough with this world and want another one
instead.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta works with the Rags Media Collective. New Delhi.

THA AHH AHO FO eH

‘2 aw EEE EEeEOoELEeELEeELEeeLeree nf