Re-thinking Digital Cultures and Divides: The Case for Reflective Media
Ramesh Srinivasan
Research exploring the means by which new media technologies can shape development within marginalized communities worldwide has began to move away from discussion limited to technical and infrastructural to consider the interactions, beliefs, and values of local communities. Yet most projects continue to focus on enabling communities to access external information, rather than the possibility of using media to catalyze community reflection and thereby developmental activity from within. This paper shows how this promise can be actualized by providing an overview of an experimental project that made available a set of video cameras to a carefully selected group of community members in a ritualized, largely non-literate village in Andhra Pradesh, India. It concludes that policymakers, researchers, and practitioners would benefit from considering the possibilities that reflective media hold to generate collective action and consensus-building, and that these possibilities can synergize with the need to develop scalable projects.