Everyday Disjunctions: Public Expression After the Mobile Phone Ravi Sundaram

Ravi Sundaram’s keynote presentation, Everyday disjunctions: public expression after the mobile phone, is both a broad look at significant changes in the social and political landscape after the proliferation of the mobile phone (specifically in India), and a focused study of how the messaging service WhatsApp operates in times of crisis. Taking a series of sensitive examples of crowd formation around public violence, Sundaram’s work suggests the advent of the mobile phone has shifted how we think abut, and can analyse, the production of collectivities. As he suggests, our idea of collectivity has changed in the media saturated landscape; contradictory drives – often exploited by right wing –are harnessed by online and device led attachments, producing changes in understanding the collective, displacing older phenomenologies of publicity.

Now that everyone carries a camera with them, that is also able to transmit images and information immediately, there has been a significant transformation of audio visual sensibility. Opening up, or democratising, the media landscape, value is now generated by user’s experience. At times of national or local crisis, personal images circulate just as much, and perhaps even more so, than “official” media images. In practice, the sensory infrastructure has opened up new modes of circulation, shifts in post-colonial subjectivities and calls into question the older model of “the public”.

This important transformation of contemporary publicity after mobile media has opened up new questions of sovereignty. As Sundaram explores in this presentation, public affects of visuality and circulation intervene in the modes of governance and sovereignty design – how do we account for rapidly circulating visual affect when everyone has access to, can produce and circulate, these images? The mobile phone has challenged the fundamental landscape of post colonial design, as unregulated media rapidly circulates, producing a visceral archive from all walks of life, what model of sovereignty emerges?

This presentation wants to understand how these particular problematics operate in time and space, as the speed involved in the circulation of these images transforms the temporal aspects of receiving and passing on information. The event is transformed, appearing in short bursts of video, captured by member of the public. There is a constant capturing process at play, privileging participation and blurring the boundaries between public and private. This produces, for Sundaram, a significant shift in the political landscape, changing out ability to intervene in affective infrastructure, where value comes from multiplication. The question arises about the capacity to manage populations and design governmental rationalities when the circulation of images over ever expanding whatsapp groups, combining people and technology in novel ways, produces such sets of unstable negotiations between individuals, groups and the forces that attempt to control them. Sundaram calls this the flickering disjunctive nature of data publics.