A new-new crowd? Digital infrastructure and the political

The Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WiSER) will host this seminar by Prof Ravi Sundaram from the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.

Contemporary digital infrastructures are widely seen as re-assembling older models of the public and political speech. Political contingency is now shaped by systems of curation and protocol; it is increasingly clear that we need to revisit the idea of the collective as a coda of the political. Anxieties about excitable mass crowds and democracy were once prominent in early 20^th Century debates. The blurring of street crowds and online agglomerations has been seen in many recent right wing populist mobilisations, generating new questions for media and social theory. Using material from ongoing research in India. Sundaram will discuss the post-digital crowd as a political imaginary, a threat and a potential. 

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