Right to Know — Episode 1 — Into the media dark
Welcome to Episode 1 of the four part Right to Know podcast series.
In this series, we explore the Internet’s ripple effect within India’s rural and tribal communities. These are observations of the complex challenges technicians, information communication trainers, community workers and entrepreneurs face in rural India, places that are difficult to get to, places where even the most adventurous of private enterprise have not yet reached. Moreover, there are the challenges entailed with training millions of people unable to read nor write let alone understand the myriad of services available on the web let alone comprehend what a world wide web is and how to discern fact from fiction. If you have barely grown up with radio and never seen a television what’s an Internet? What’s it for and why does everything we find online have the appearance of being “real”?
In the first episode we discover what the United Nations Development Program means by India’s media-dark, we find a broadband wireless tower made entirely from junk and children from different castes sing together on a video conferencing platform in Rajasthan.
Right to Know is an ethnographic (and anecdotal) podcast series about people coming to terms with the internet in some of India’s poorest rural and tribal districts, where many have not seen a television, or as in the ancient city of Chanderi, in early 2015 locals were still coming to terms with cars and scooters.
Research for this series was conducted on the ground from January to May 2015. Production was completed in 2018.
Presented and produced by Andrew Garton Right to Know was commissioned by the Association for Progressive Communications with support from the Digital Empowerment Foundation.
Adapted from the book Right to Know: India’s Internet Avant-garde (Garton, A 2017) and the film Ocean in a Drop (2017).
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