Histories of the New

On to the next keynote: "Histories of the New". Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and the Raqs Media Collective makes the start. He speculates on 'the remains of tomorrows past', the antiquity of new media practice in South Asia.

He points out the history of communication as an emerging discipline. Of course such histories are often written from a Western, Euro-Anglo perspective and tend to miss out on some very important issues. Also, history is problematic when dealing with supposedly 'new' media. When does the new become old?

Besides, history writing over-focusses on causes and origins and overlooks the more general cultural environment of new media and technological developments. Shuddha references various conceptions of networks from the ancient buddhist image of Indra's net to fractals to Tim Berners-Lee's ideas for the WWW - these represent history better than traditional hierarchical structures. He argues for a concept of intercausality.

He draws an analogy here between current new media and an earlier form of new media, the telegraph - here, there are interesting parallels between experiments by Willian O'Shaughnessy Brooke in Calcutta and Samuel Morse. They didn't interact directly, and Morse denied gaining anything from Indian-based experiments, but the simultaneity is striking. (The Indian telegraph - produced and deployed using local materials - later became instrumental in quashing the mid-1800s uprising, incidentally. Nonetheless it was later replaced by foreign-produced systems, in the name of interoperability with international telegraphy.)

Another Indian discovery (of insulating resins) was instrumental in enabling the laying of undersea cables. This then led to the development of a globally networked world. Shuddha calls these connections and cross-connections 'dependent origination'.

And further, there were also experiments with wireless transmission in India which may have influenced the young Marconi. Indian pioneers often worked outside the regime of intellectual property, and therefore don't show up in historical records - it's only when the Morses and Marconis register and exploit their further developments based on such original ideas that new technologies emerge into public and official view. And IP, of course, remains a hot topic, even if free and open software approaches as well as the creative commons have begun to offer alternatives.

In new developments within new media, Indian and other South Asian countries are amongst the innovation leaders, especially also because of their special needs (e.g. through different languages and alphabets) and the sheer size of their markets. Mobile and wireless uses more so than the traditional PC are what will likely connect huge swathes of the world's population to the Internet. How will such developments affect the new media development of the future - and will Indian and other non-Western contributions to these developments once again be overlooked until the Nokias, Sonys, Ericssons of the world adapt and adopt them?