EXPLORING DIGITAL CULTURES

In this episode we will be focusing on Music and Migrants to understand music as more than just a cultural artefact but as a carrier and capsule of that very culture from which it emerges. Music fills the landscape that lies between the memory and speech. Have you ever thought about how powerful the music can be? Well,  music as any contemporary form, has the power to re-invent itself and assimilate foreign influences. Music acts as a vehicle to tell stories and document the history. Migration has been a persistent phenomenon in the region of northern part of India for centuries. It has become an oft-repeated motif in Indian cultural forms of music, especially folk songs. Leaving their homes in northern India, migrants worked in the cities of colonial India but they were shipped to far away islands to work on colonial plantations and they carried with them their meagre belongings and their music.

In a well developed and rapidly advancing Bangalore city offers a multiplex of sounds that has a continuing narrative of different layers of experience in disseminated urban space. The term ‘Soundscape’ is coined by Michael South Worth but widely known and familiarised by R. Murray Schafer. The term elucidates a sonic environment or any acoustic field of study from deriving sounds from the physical space to recording and sampling of sounds. Sound is a time-based media with temporal involvement Particularly in any Indian city, one could definitely find a transparent appearance of sounds emphatically differing with amplification, intensity, texture and depth. Along with the varied sound waves and frequencies incorporated by traffic, construction, peoples articulation and other urban activities. When we hear the sounds in an urban area intermingled with day-to-day activities, what if we could relocate our ear in order to listen to the environment of the sound-art in city-space and form music and create new meaning to the space.

In the face of new digital laws in India and heated debates, the idea of data privacy is central. a part of you exists online and needs to have its own rights. in this episode, the onus is on the South Asian countries and how they handle cyber crimes. cyber crimes aren't new or unheard of. they are present, ready to shock anyone with their pace and brutality. so, what do we do when someone we know or us faces a threat likewise? how has the global south reacted to it? do we have enough laws that keep us protected in the digital space? welcome to the podcast where we discuss real life examples and see how the authorities handle it when danger comes knockings on our doors from our screens.

In the world of social media influencers and celebrities, hide lies of perfection. to err is to human but to not be seem perfect on social media? that is out of question. in this episode, we explore the tight ropes on which the community of content creators walk on to strike a balance between producing content and appealing to the platform's audience. thrown into the world of competition and double taps, things become harder when you are from a marginally vulnerable community. being a public figure, celebrity or influencer will make you extremely close to negativity and hatred on the platform. how do they cope with it? how do influencers get stuck in a loop while creating unrealistic standards for themselves and others? we say it all here- the good, bad and in between.

Even when a country grieves together, there is no singular way to define grief. Grief seems to have many faces, and many are the ways of bereavement. And honestly, is there even any point in defining it when all of us know exactly how it feels? in this episode we look at definitions of grief and it's resolution into continuing bond, we try to understand what are digital spaces, how are they used in relation to death, grief and create desired and undesired afterlives for the deceased. It is at times heartwarming seeing how digital spaces are used with such love in remembrance of a lost loved one and at times absolutely shocking to know that there are online cultures that feed on death.

Not just in celebration, media and technology also plays a role in the times of loss and grief. In the extremely difficult times our country is going through, so many people never got a chance to say final goodbye to those they lost and the ones who were lucky enough to get that chance had to do so over phone and video calls. In the past month, we all have come across countless posts that recount stories of loss, and grief. This is not a new phenomenon, social media platforms have always been used to share obituaries, eulogies and support. In this episode we look at in what ways death, digital media and afterlife are connected.

What is culture? What is technology? Are these two related? If so, how? In this episode, we look at culture, technology and how these two are related.