Browsing by Subject "Web studies"

Digital media prevail, determine, and shape contemporary lives and experiences, serving as an all-encompassing cultural system. Shaping modes of production and reception, digital media’s publics are networked to the media’s content and to each other in unique ways. Contemporary religions writ large, and Hinduism in specific, cannot escape the dominant digital culture and must negotiate their participation in it. Hindu devotion utilizes and permeates digital networks in various forms, and the number of websites and mobile applications offering Hindu content and services is constantly increasing. This study tells the story of a growing population of Hindu devotees who live and work as part of global digital and cultural networks, wishing to adjust their religious praxis to their larger lifestyle by incorporating digital technologies and networks into their devotion. Through the case studies discussed here, devotees can be in the presence of their chosen deity, visit temples digitally, order devotional items to be delivered globally, perform domestic rituals with priests they book online, and be in an intimate relationship with their guru. Vedic Vaani, Where’s My Pandit, and iBhakti are Hindu startups led by young entrepreneurs who wish to facilitate Hindu devotion for a networked public, of which they are part. Shree Siddhivinayak Temple in Mumbai and Sri Nage Sai Temple in Coimbatore showcase Hindu temples’ utilization of digitally networked media through two very different journeys. Lastly, Sadhguru and his Isha Foundation master various digital platforms, forming and maintaining an intimate guru-disciple relationship in digital means.

Focusing on the emerging landscape of digital Hinduism, the aim of this project is to explore how devotion is dispersed, re-situated, reinterpreted, and made public via digitally networked media, and to unveil the intricate web of disparate-but-interrelated actors, which promote the use and assimilation of digital media to Hindu devotion. In order to apprehend the various apparatuses, histories, and cultures that are entangled in this process, this project draws together interdisciplinary theoretical tools and online and offline ethnographic experiences. Tracing digital Hindu networks, and considering Hinduism in itself as a network of networks, this project highlights the ways in which digital Hinduism is integrated into a Hindu Wide Web, which connects Hindu authorities, publics, commercial entities, new technologies, and the divine. Reflecting on the specificities of the digital cultural system in which we operate, this study examines how core notions of Hindu devotion shift with and through digital media, suggesting that digital networks do not stand in the way of devotion. There is no attempt to replace traditional devotional practice, but, nonetheless, contemporary technoculture generates new ways to fulfill Hindu devotion, shifting the core notions on which it is based. In that, this study emphasizes the need to rethink—in the digital age—fundamental ideas such as intimacy, agency, presence, authority, and authenticity as critical to understanding our contemporary networked mode of being in the world.

As the role of Internet Connected Technologies (ICTs) increases exponentially, and as all student populations (highly motivated or not) become increasingly composed of digital natives, it is imperative that the academy adapt to these new challenges. A university is obligated to ensure its students are adequately prepared for the Digital Age. This paper seeks to examine and evaluate the current scholarship of coding pedagogy, digital learning, and information science education, to leverage these evaluations towards the construction of a course of study which is informed by critical thought and current scholarship. It is the author’s hope to provide methods and approaches through which students who may lack an academic background in Computer Science can develop critical and analytic thinking skills alongside essential understandings of the technologies underpinning their daily lives.

The project aims to analyze, archive, and enable the powerful ways that contemporary Latinx intersectional queer activists, located in sites as disparate as Oakland (U.S.) and Santiago (Chile), use YouTube, Facebook, and other globally popular media platforms to disseminate their activist-oriented cultural productions and connect with other activists. Envisioning and theorizing liberation from intersecting oppressions, Latinx activists across our hemisphere make important contributions to queer and transgender culture that are unevenly visible because they occur in ephemeral digital spaces and are incoherent from the standpoint of the most massively circulated, received ideas about gender, race, and sexuality. My project consists of the present essay, which analyzes formations of sexual dissidence in relation to the disciplining and extractivism of academic institutions, as well as a multi-modal website. Grounded in virtual and IRL community-based participatory research methods, the digital resource accompanies the creators of Latinx sexual dissidence by using the technologies and funding I have access to in order to offer a multilingual, semi-public digital resource that supports the archiving, production, translation, and intra-community circulation of Latinx sexual dissident culture, thought, and activism.