9 April, Tuesday, 10:30 am—5:00 pm,

Venue: CEP Conference Hall, DA-IICT Gandhinagar, Gujarat

It is by now generally accepted that the transition to the digital era has far-reaching consequences beyond the domains of consumer electronics and their application. Today’s digital infrastructure—with the ubiquity of the internet, free information, open data and algorithms as its tools—has transformed our political-cultural landscapes beyond recognition. Yet, we are merely beginning to take stock of the effects of these fundamental changes which continue to unfold in front of us at a breathtaking pace. While we can genuinely enjoy and delight in many of the conveniences, pleasures and potentials that the digital transformation has made possible, several devastating effects of it are also right in front of us—whether it is the ease of surveillance, data harvesting, the effects of the ‘digital divide’ or new kinds of conflict/violence. The presentations in this workshop will look to contribute to the ongoing debates on the digital transformation and its social-political-cultural implications, by focusing on three broad themes: work, education and aesthetics. Apart from the inescapable topic of the politics of Big Data and algorithms, the workshop aims to take up for debate the following pertinent question: how do we retrieve, recapture and revive some of the values that have lost their liberatory potential in their present iteration in the computational world, like decentralization, customization, accessibility, free information, im-mediacy, and transparency? In short, how do we imagine a future with computers, algorithms and the internet differently and more democratically?

Programme