What does ‘information’ really mean?

“I was trying to understand what the term information brought to different sorts of initiatives that saw themselves as information focused and focused on social change and development,” says Janaki Srinivasan, whose book The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India seeks to answer this question.

“I was trying to understand what the term information brought to different sorts of initiatives that saw themselves as information focused and focused on social change and development,” says Janaki Srinivasan, whose book The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India seeks to answer this question.

“There is a sort of intrinsic value attached to information,” she says, in a recent conversation with Aditi Surie, Senior Consultant, Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Academics and Research at the IIHS, Bengaluru City Campus, pointing out that even though we question technocratic visions, we don’t question our faith in information much. “What I tried to do in this book is to denaturalize this kind of understanding of information.”

Through a detailed examination of three specific cases — the circulation of price information on mobile phones in a fish market in Kerala, government information in computer kiosks operated by a nonprofit in Puducherry, and a political campaign demanding a right to information in Rajasthan — Ms. Srinivasan argues that information does not exist in isolation but is “embedded in social materials and practices…intertwined with the rest of life.”

This is Ms. Srinivasan’s first book, the seeds of which were planted a decade or so ago, around the time she started researching how village computer centres worked in different parts of Tamil Nadu back in 2004. “I was looking at the process of setting it up, who was using it, what barriers came up and so on,” says Ms. Srinivasan, an associate professor at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIITB). “By doing that I also became immersed in the larger global community called Information and communication technologies and development (ICTD),” says Ms. Srinivasan, who holds master’s degrees in physics and information technology but admits to becoming “way more interested in how people used technology rather than building the technology.”

Part of The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India, stemmed from her PhD research at “A strange entity called the School of Information at Berkley,” she says. “It allowed me to take courses from all over the spectrum, and I think development studies and the political economy of development is something I became very interested in,” says Ms. Srinivasan, adding that she brings this perspective to everything she studies.

Indeed, many of these perspectives are deeply embedded in this book, too. “Technology is seen as a panacea to fix many issues and has been going wrong. But Janaki’s book is one of those comprehensive texts to see that the outcome of these ideas does not yield the results for everyone,” says Ms. Suri, at the event, pointing out that Ms. Srinivasan’s research is backed by exhaustive experiences, ethnographic detail, archival work and participant observation. “I learnt so much reading this book.”

EOM