The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India by Janaki Srinivasan

The Political Lives of Information: Information and the Production of Development in India
by Janaki Srinivasan
MIT PRESS, 2022, 276 PP. PAPERBACK, $40.00 ISBN: 978-0-262-37037-0

 

The Political Lives of Information begins by juxtaposing how a former executive secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa and a daily wage agricultural worker in south India view the role that information can play in empowering people. The UN official extols the transformative potential of information, but Palaniammal, the agricultural worker, is a lot more skeptical. By opening the book with this striking juxtaposition, author and information scholar Janaki Srinivasan nudges us to question information’s treatment and, indeed, its value as a given. Instead, we are invited to consider what makes the UN official hopeful, what leaves Palaniammal doubtful, their relationship with information, and how that relationship shapes their differing outlook toward it—that is, some of the aspects that make up what Srinivasan calls the political lives of information.

Srinivasan’s book is set against the backdrop of an important development around the turn of this century. The idea that access to information, especially through digital technologies, could transform people’s lives held sway, particularly in the economic, technological, and international development discourse of the time. Problems of poverty, unemployment, and livelihood creation were all sought to be addressed by enabling people with the right kinds of information. The resulting emphasis on the “information divide” and categories such as “information-rich” and “information-poor” belie a reframing of issues of development as problems of information. The author examines this reification of information: What is it about information that has allowed it to be adopted so widely as a tool for development? For Srinivasan, it is the ambiguity of the term “information” and its “blandness” (22) that allowed its popular adoption as a tool for development and, in the process, depoliticized information and, indeed, development itself. The Political Lives of Information challenges this depoliticization and offers crucial course correction: a theorization of information that cannot be detached from the specific social relations and material practices that shape what counts as information, what doesn’t, and how it is produced, accessed, and leveraged.

To build a rich picture of the politics that make up information, Srinivasan picked three prominent cases in which information provision and use were viewed as a means of improving the lives of low-income populations in different parts of India. In chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, through the author’s extensive ethnographic and archival research, we get a close view of the three cases: of price information circulating among fishers in Kerala, [End Page 103] information kiosks set up by a private nonprofit foundation to improve livelihoods in villages in Puducherry, and a people’s movement in Rajasthan campaigning for a right to information as a means of holding the state accountable through public scrutiny. Each case reveals the specific actors, contexts, histories, accounts of individual agency, and collective action and how they intersect with flows of resources, control, and power to influence the production and leveraging of information. In each case, we learn not only of the constitutive politics of information but also of the characterization of those politics—as nonexistent, irrelevant, or central—within the initiative.

Srinivasan resists viewing information as inherently valuable. Instead, she offers the construct of a composite information order (drawing on historian Christopher Bayly’s conception of the term) to examine an information context in a place through the interactions between the various actors—citizens, the state, markets, or civil society—rooted not only in the place but also in its information systems, laws, procedures, documents, and physical and social infrastructures.¹ The information orders of the three cases thus detailed in the book immediately make apparent that any value to be gained from information is always already shaped by politics. Much as she does with the notion of information, Srinivasan complicates the idea of politics too. She makes note of the invisible politics at play alongside more organized forms of political action, typically led by movements and unions. The invisible kind of politics refers to mechanisms of negotiation and resolution that people adopt that they might not always be inclined to make known or visible in their efforts to leverage information. This attention to the multiplicity of politics in operation seems particularly relevant in the increasingly polarized environments of information (and misinformation) we inhabit where we witness the dismissal of some kinds of information (but not others, depending on an individual’s beliefs) as too political. The information order then becomes a useful tool to reflect on the selective recognition of some kinds of politics while overlooking others.

With The Political Lives of Information, Srinivasan takes important strides in shifting theory-building to the majority world, centering the lived experiences of people and communities often underrepresented in theories of information science and technologies. In complicating how information and politics, the two core themes of the book, might be considered, The Political Lives of Information champions a theory-building that is grounded in and accounts for specificity; it rejects universalizing narratives (such as “information is power”) that disembed information from crucial context. Such universals not only obscure information’s constitutive politics but also create centers of control, locating the power to label some things as information (and not others) selectively among certain actors. This critical scrutiny of universals and analytical commitment to specificity in examining information offer valuable lessons for researchers and practitioners engaging with similarly disembedded narratives of data or, more recently, artificial intelligence.