A nuclear cyberia: interfacing science, culture and ‘e-thnography’ of an Indian township’s social media

Abstract

The article's aims are twofold -to investigate the potentials and limitations of online ethnography and to delineate the discursive dynamics of Indian technoscientific cultures as evident on a nuclear township's online social network site. Technoscientific cultures of the south cannot be simply seen through a postcolonial lens in terms of northsouth tensions over the global political economy or merely through a developmentalist paradigm. There are more complex and illuminating territories with which to appreciate such cultures through the eyes of their protagonists. I note that while Weberian trends towards bureaucratisation are discernible among Indian nuclear technocrats, there is also a considerable counter-narrative in which there is a 'reconstitution of the cultural' that demonstrates a strong proclivity towards reinventing particular strains of religio-cultural discourse. I illustrate these dynamics by providing an 'e-thnography' of the material posted on the social network site set up in 2010 by scientists who live in a nuclear township in Mumbai. In so doing, I diverge from liberal human-centric understandings of the context of media technologies to consider critical junctures where the subject interfaces with informational technologies in such a manner that notions of the centred and corporeal self dissipate, but traces of his or her embodied self remain.Mumbai is not only India's primary centre for commerce, industry and media, but it is also a prominent site for nuclear institutions, and quite feasibly the nation's foremost