Other Networks: Media Urbanism and the Culture of the Copy in South Asia
Author(s)
Sundaram, Ravi
Abstract
Using Delhi’s media networks as an example, the author suggests that new domains of nonlegal networks could pose significant problems for classic strategies of incorporation and management in political society. These nonlegal domains open up new spaces of disorder and constant conflict in Indian cities that threaten the current self-perceptions of the globalizing elite. At the heart of this disorder is a widespread “culture of the copy,” which is implicated in sophisticated local and transnational networks, and which strikes at the heart of the idea of intellectual property, the mantra of the current elites. Although this disorder is acute in the Indian context, it is characteristic of the globalizing city more generally, spread by the confluence of cheap digital technologies, strain on urban governmentality and integration, and the emergence of intellectual property as a global discourse of control.
