The Digitized Imagination ii (cid:63) The Digitized Imagination The Digitized Imagination Editor Nalini Rajan LONDON NEW YORK NEW DELHI First published 2009 by Routledge 912–915 Tolstoy House, 15–17 Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi 110 001 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2009 Nalini Rajan Typeset by Star Compugraphics Private Limited D–156, Second Floor Sector 7, Noida 201 301 Printed and bound in India by Sanat Printers 312, EPIP, Kundli Sonepat 131 028, Haryana All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-0-415-49286-7 Contents List of Figure and Photographs vii Acknowledgements viii Introduction 1 Nalini Rajan 1. A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century 15 Lawrence Liang 2. The Cut and Thrust of Eisenstein’s Montage 36 Sashi Kumar 3. Academics v. the Rest: Some Questions around the Issue of Plagiarism 43 Arvind Sivaramakrishnan 4. Inventive Science: The Question of Ethics 56 Vijaya Swaminath 5. Whose DNA Is It, Anyway? Expanding DNA Databanks Raise Human Rights Concerns 67 Sujatha Byravan 6. ‘Thank You for Saving Hindus’: Refl ections on Hindu Hatred in the Digital Age 75 Subarno Chattarji 7. The New Politics of the New Media 90 Yuk Hui 8. Bebo-ing the South Seas: From Tin Cans to the Internet in the Pacifi c 102 Michael Field 9. Weaving an India with Mailing Lists 115 Frederick Noronha 10. Digital Dreams 123 Baradwaj Rangan vi (cid:63) The Digitized Imagination 11. Architecture in the Era of Digital Imagination 128 A. Srivathsan 12. Technological Ruins: A Short Essay 136 Ravi Sundaram 13. Nehru Place, or Why the Whole is More than the Sum of its Parts 141 Aman Sethi 14. End of Technological Innocence 152 Subramanya Sastry 15. ‘Domasticating’ Technology 159 Subashree Krishnaswamy About the Editor 165 Notes on Contributors 166 Index 169 List of Figure and Photographs Figure 7.1: Paul Baran’s Concept of Three Forms of Network in His 1964 Essay 95 Photo 11.1: Architecture by Vijay Vivek Shankar, St Mark’s Street, Bangalore 131 Photo 11.2: The Morphogenesis Building, Gurgaon 132 Acknowledgements I owe a special debt of gratitude to Omita Goyal and Nilanjan Sarkar for giving me the opportunity to work on a sequel to my edited volume, Digital Culture Unplugged: Probing the Native Cyborg’s Multiple Locations, published by Routledge in 2007. I also wish to thank all my contributors for helping me to better understand the various dimensions of digital culture. In particular, I am grateful to Sashi Kumar for allowing me to use in this volume a slightly modifi ed version of his article which appeared in Frontline, Volume 24, Issue 24, December 8–21, 2007, under the title ‘Cinema: Lasting Images’. Nalini Rajan x (cid:63) The Digitized Imagination