Subject to technology: internet pornography, cyber-terrorism and the Indian state

Nishant SHAH

Abstract:

The Indian state, when it announced the opening of its borders – physical and imaginary – to globalisation, also embraced new digital technologies of telecommunication and transportation in its attempt to reconfigure itself as a global player in the world market. The neo-liberal economic policies and the restructuring of the State had immediate and far reaching impact on the question of citizenship. The technologised State posited the need for a technosocial subject – a subject that was not only a consumer/user of technology but also subject to the different technological networks instituted towards a new-modernism. The fetishisation of such a technosocial subject entails a new regime of discipline and containment that produces certain glorified non-legal subject positions which challenge the efforts of the State to create a homogeneous sanitised cyberscape. This paper is an attempt to examine the production of illegalities with reference to cyberspace, to make a symptomatic reading of new conditions within which citizenships are enacted, in the specific context of contemporary India. Looking at one incident each, of cyber-pornography and cyber-terrorism, the paper sets out to look at the State’s imagination of the digital domain, the positing of the ‘good’ cyber citizen, and the production of new relationships between the state and the subject. This essay explores the ambiguities, the dilemmas and the questions that arise when Citizens become Subjects, not only to the State but also to the technologies of the State

Author’s biography

Nishant Shah is a final year Ph.D. student at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, India. Along with his research he also works as an information architect and cybercultures consultant for various companies and independent organisations. Nishant has interests in questions of technology, identity, gender and sexuality, globalisation and citizenship.

Contact address: B-9, Omsurya appartments, Besides K.P. hostel, Gulbaitekra, Ahmedabad: 380006, Gujarat, India.