India’s Dalits Search for a Democratic Opening in the Digital Divide

View Sample PDF

Author(s): P. Thirumal (University of Hyderabad, India)and Gary Michael Tartakov (Iowa State University, USA)
Copyright: 2013
Pages: 20
Source title: Digital Literacy: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Information Resources Management Association (USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-1852-7.ch044

Keywords: Digital Literacy / Human Aspects of Technology / Information Science Reference / Library & Information Science

Purchase

View India’s Dalits Search for a Democratic Opening in the Digital Divide on the publisher's website for pricing and purchasing information.

Abstract

This chapter seeks to recognize and read the marginal presence on the Internet of India’s most oppressed and stigmatized community, the Dalits, simultaneously as acts of resistance and acts of constituting both self and community. It is an exploratory exercise in writing the social history of technological media in general, and the Internet in particular. The medium of Internet, unlike most associated with script and print that preceded it, offers emerging users access without the censorship of either established authorities or canons of authoritative formal regulation. More significantly, it provides the Dalit community, heretofore excluded from all but the most marginal voice in civil society, with an entrance into the national discourse. And quite as important, it furnishes them with their first meaningful media platform for a nationwide internal discourse, which they have previously been denied.

The IRMA Community

Research IRM

India’s Dalits Search for a Democratic Opening in the Digital Divide

Purchase

Abstract

Related Content

IRMA Sponsors