by
Khetrimayum Monish Singh
—
published
May 15, 2018
—
last modified
May 15, 2018 03:35 PM
—
filed under:
National Population Register,
Infrastructure Studies,
Citizenship,
NRC in Assam,
Research,
Featured,
Researchers at Work,
E-Governance
The National Register of Citizens (NRC) exercise in Assam focuses on updating the list of Indian citizens in the state. A highly sensitive, controversial and massive exercise, the government has had several strategies to manage this project. One of the ways has been in which the government has engaged with and positioned itself, vis-a-vis the media, specifically through Facebook and Twitter, and on its own official website. This paper by Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Nazifa Ahmed is a discourse analysis of media content and user opinions on Facebook, and media responses on the NRC official website. These reflect bureaucratic practices of efficiency, transparency, trust and anxiety management; user feedback, confusion, political concerns and opinions help in accounting for and navigating through the system, and contribute to building up the NRC as an information infrastructure. We focus on how these two processes through media practices co-produce 'the sociotechnical building and maintenance' (Star and Bowker, 1999; Star and Ruhleder, 1996) of the NRC as an information infrastructure.
Located in
RAW