A nuclear cyberia: interfacing science,culture and ‘e-thnography’ of an Indian township’s social media

The reconstitution of the cultural

After India’s second series of nuclear tests at Pokhran in the Rajasthan deserts in 1998, BARC’s security status was upgraded, since the centre was now deemed the prime stake in India’s bid to be recognised as a nuclear weapons state. Due to a combination of heightened concerns about national security, detailed ethnographic studies where the researcher had sustained access to the residences of nuclear technocrats in the subcontinent are not available. Those studies on nuclear communities that exist are ‘west-weighted’ in that they are invariably located in Europe and the United States (e.g. Gusterson, 1996, 2004; Masco, 2006; Zonabend, 1993). If nuclear scientists from the global south are considered, they are more often than not seen through the lens of mimicry, mediocrity and/or inferiority. Hugh Gusterson’s (2004) examination of neo-Orientalist assumptions as prevalent in the United States in response to the 1998 nuclear tests by India and Pakistan is one case in point that underlines Eurocentric perceptions of the irresponsible, child-like and irrational premises of South Asia’s nuclearisation, and in so doing, highlights the arrogance of nuclear technocrats located in the west.

Conversely, scholars of South Asian political science, history and sociology portray subcontinental nuclear scientists not as saturated in ‘too much culture’ but, rather the contrary, as acultural technocrats kowtowing to developments in the fetishised West (see Abraham, 1998; Anderson, 2010; Nandy, 1988; Perkovich, 2000). In Sankaran Krishna’s (2009) term, they are a group that play ‘the game of Western modernity’ (p. 81). Ashis Nandy (1988) comments on the scientific temper manifest among Indian scientists, nuclear included: ‘Both [scientists and their political patrons] like to define the “temper” as the spirit of technology and the instrumentalism which is an inescapable part of that spirit’ (p. 6). Achin Vanaik (2004) elaborates on the path of professional scientists leading to the internalisation of values to do with the increasing functionalisation and specialisation of knowledge. Such observations follow in the scholarly tradition of Weberian notions of the scientist as bureaucratic functionary (Weber, 1968). According to this template, nuclear technocrats are a category of professionals firmly removed from vernacular culture, sharing a normative rational outlook with other scientists wherever they are located. Indian scientists then become emissaries in the national effort to catch up, retrieve and capitalise upon a denied scientific enterprise under the former colonial regime (see Anderson, 2010).

While trends towards bureaucratisation are discernible among Indian nuclear scientists, there is, however, also a significant counter-narrative in which there is a reconstitution of the cultural. This counter-drive implies a cultural distinction both from the west and from the larger Indian populace under the irrepressible influence of a post-1990s liberalised political economy. The technocrat is encultured or, in other words, appears to be rewired and plugged into a reconstituted and distinctive culture. The enculturing phenomenon among Indian nuclear technocrats is not then a tender for alterity, cultural relativism or, indeed, neo-Orientalism correlate with notions about irrationality or technical incompetence. Rather, it is about considering a constituency allied with socio-cultural phenomena and perspectives that are only partially concerned with the antinomies of a hyperreal west, the idealised font of modernity and all that it entails and influences (see Chakrabarty, 2000: 27). Technoscientific cultures of the south cannot be simply seen through a postcolonial lens in terms of north–south tensions over the global political economy or merely through a developmentalist paradigm and the import of technoscience. There are more complex and illuminating territories with which to appreciate such cultures through the eyes of their protagonists (see Fischer, 2007).

Below, the reconstitution of the cultural will be considered in terms of two interconnected areas as manifest on the nuclear technocrats’ online social media: first, with a view to developing a community of consensus, ethical conduct, spiritual, physical and social instruction, and selfless service. Second, the argument extends to the environmental realm where a concerted belief in raising awareness about carbon-based pollution and rising sea levels becomes another means with which to inform township residents’ behaviour while also serving to underline the importance of the nuclear industries to national cultural welfare.

The social network

Predominantly, the social media users are high-caste men ranging from trainees, scientists, engineers to established members of management who I refer to collectively under the umbrella term, ‘technocrat’, combining the scientist with the bureaucrat while appreciating their specific differences. A year after the network was set up, there were more than 1100 subscribers to the Anushakti Nagar virtual community, with a stated average of two to three new people enrolling as members per day. The social network site comes with the following motto: ‘Think, Express, Educate, Socialise and Update Yourself – The one and only one interactive social networking site of Anushakti Nagar, giving you the full Freedom of Expression and Power of Thought’. Each member has a profile page with space for an image, personal details and an ‘about me’ section, which is filled by subscribers to varying extents. The online site has several other facilities: a photo gallery on which members have put up photographs of their residence, family, birds, animals, Indian film and sport stars among other images reflecting their diverse interests. There is a blog ‘to express your thoughts, your feelings, your suggestions and so on’ included within which were topics ranging from the principles of spiritual literature and philosophical ruminations to sharing recipes for malai kofta using a microwave. There is a twitter-like ‘microblog system’ called the Wire for posting short messages. A video page shows liked YouTube clips and digital film clips recorded by members themselves. A questions page allows members to pose queries to which others respond: they can cover any topic, ranging from the practical, such as a ‘list of baby sittings and play school’ [sic] and classical music tuition, to the philosophical, such as metaphysical musings on the meaning of life. There is the additional option to create a ‘friends circle’ and community groups, and ‘The creative Mad-House of Anushakti Nagar Networking site’ that acts as a forum to discuss the site’s features and its further development with the inclusion of a public chat room; the ‘market’ to post advertisements in order to buy and sell second-hand goods and other services; a news and announcements page; and a facility to send gifts and e-cards.

While the site professes to provide a space for personal expression, it is also conjoined with a regulatory, collectivist aim. The refrain of service to the community appears repeatedly on the online. One member was proud to describe himself as ‘Person of selfless character, credibility, words, and high values’. Another notes, ‘Working in BARC and staying in Anushakti Nagar. Everybody asks what I get from this site: a big ZERO (nothing). This is my service to a place where I love to stay and work’. Individualist pursuits were derided in favour of social deference. Another elaborates in his profile:

I am very influential and can do anything I wish in Anushaktinagar … I never get irritated. Never say wrong words to other. When I see people suffering from sorrows and pain, I believe that it will never happen to me. I never meet with an accident like others do. When I see a death, I believe, it is far away for me … I always insist that others do what I wish. All around me is made for me, just to make me happy.

Then the member goes on to add, ‘If you think this is what I think of myself, you are wrong – but many I met think the above about themselves’. Parodying people’s self-centred drives, he is keen to undermine the effects of individualism that could come with a singularly technocratic disposition, a phenomenon that was also seen to have characterised India’s latter-day turn to a hedonistic and consumptive ethic characterised by ‘a morally debased materialism’ (Van Wessel, 2004: 106). The networker here styles his aggrandised submission in such a way that it obliquely seeks to make a referential point in a counter-intuitive manner, using parody as its main driver. Inordinate individualism is deemed the bane of modern life, something that needs to be eliminated from township life. As another member puts it, ‘Life is not an i-pod to listen to ur favorite songs … it is radio, u must adjust urself 2 its frequency n enjoy whatever comes in it [sic]’. The techno-mobility associated with a consumptive and individualist ‘iPod culture’ gained little esteem in this highly statist ‘radio-active’ regime.

Another active contributor describes herself as ‘Running a happy married life with my loving husband and 9 month old’. Her public identity as a scientist is fused with her role as a caring wife and mother, a point that is underlined with an accompanying photograph of her alongside her husband. Despite her professional role, her posts underline her domestic interests as wife, mother and only then as a scientist. In one post, she elaborates on 8 important manners one should teach their little ones. In what could be a Victorian textbook on etiquette, this list implores parents to teach their children to say please and thank you; nurture good table manners; to be respectful of others; to be mindful of their language; to instruct them not to be mean; and guide them about things that they should not talk about in public including ‘genitals, poo, nose picking, and all the other gory things that amuse kids!’ (28 May 2011).

A blog from another member lists 15 ‘brain-boosting activities’. It stresses, ‘If you don’t keep your mind active, studies show that your brain loses some of its functionality as you age, which causes memory loss, brain fog, and even Alzheimer’s’ (6 January 2011). This post suggests a ‘neural-enhancement’ programme: playing games that challenge and stimulate your mind; reading that ‘also helps with memory retention and problem solving, especially if you’re reading a mystery’; exercising that over the long-term can ‘increase brain power and even create new neurons’; meditation that ‘has been shown to increase your IQ, relieve stress, and promote a higher level of brain functioning. Meditation also stimulates the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the area of the brain responsible for advanced thinking, ability and performance’; deep breathing that ‘helps deliver oxygen to your brain’; taking fish oil supplements which ‘is literally like membrane material for the brain’; listening to music that ‘strengthens the right hemisphere of the brain and actually changes the structure of it’; sleep which ‘clears out brain clutter and reduces brain fog’; painting and drawing which is shown to be ‘an effective brain booster in that it sparks the creativity within you’; starting the day with a good breakfast which provides ‘a powerful edge, both physically and mentally’; drinking pure fruit juice that ‘contains nutrients that revitalise and refresh the brain’; and drinking moderate amounts of caffeine especially before an exam as it ‘stimulates activity in the brain, which produces better focus and thinking ability’ (6 January 2011). Reading almost like a manifesto for super-smart cyborgs, others pitched in with propositions for a healthy mind routed through a healthy body. Posts such as these highlight the hyphenated lines between actualities and ideals – whether the proposals are referential, aspirational or propagatory can be sensed but not pinned down. Through these overlapping veils or perhaps more appropriately, nets of representations, we see shimmering traces of the disaggregated, idealised as well as embodied selves.

The nuclear technocrats’ proposals echo the disciplinarity of the body also noted in Sanjay Srivastava’s (1998) study on the fashioning of modern citizenry as exemplified by pupils at Doon School, an elite private school in the northern hills of India. However, in addition to the methodology, the case study here departs from Srivastava’s in that, rather than proposing a schema for modernist rationality, the online network favours enculturing processes through transferable discourses of spirituality and indigeneity (see Abraham, 1998). Corralled with the ‘political anatomy’ (Foucault, 1995) is a regime of spirituality – a regime precisely because it connotes a rationalised realm of the spiritual that is not simply about the ‘other-wordly’ but also striated by an earthly grid of discipline. Here, it is instanced by various endeavours including an endorsement of meditation, yoga and spiritual practice, activities that serve a combination of physical, spiritual as well as ideological purposes. Yoga may be of indigenous heritage, but it is also linked to modern notions about health, science and medicine that have been testified throughout the world (see Alter, 2004). Such practices inscribe the subject into a framework that enforces not just a regulatory discipline but a disciplined culture of a postcolonial order that looks outwards as much as it does sideways and inwards to the wellsprings of indigenous traditions (see Watt, 2005). Meditation too with its roots in autochthonous spiritual practices serves the supreme purpose for the brain to perform to its full capacity, no doubt a valuable asset in nuclear research and development. It enables the stilling of the mind and a firm stance against what could be called the ‘muck of modernity’ so that the intellect could be sharpened to focus on a higher cause – spiritual, social and scientific. As one member reflects on the life of the mind in the contemporary world of constant flux:

The mind is like a body of water: choppy on the surface, silent and stable at its depth. When we experience only the ‘noisy’, surface level of thinking, difficulties abound … If we could anchor the surface mind to its vacuum state – if we could enliven the stability inherent at the depth of consciousness – we would be insulated from ‘the winds of change’. (7 October 2011)

These winds of change point to the noisy currents of liberalisation lapping away at their doorsteps. These gusts are a form of ‘noise’ in Michel Serres’ (1995) sense of the term in that liberalisation represents chaos, interruptions and therefore a threat to their familiar and cushioned worlds. While noise constitutes the idealised community as its idealised opposite, township residents cannot entirely exclude it for it also forms the basis for communication among the online community. There is always leakage, noise still seeped through the barricades (see van Wessel, 2004: 95) – even more cause for invigilated caution against undesirables currents.

In another post, the irrepressible forces of liberalisation become aligned with the ‘gluttonous buffet system’ of modernisation, presumably when compared with the Indian ‘thali [tray] system’ of moderation – that is, when one only eats as much as the body requires. This subscriber elaborates on a view endorsed by the Universal Spirituality of Mankind, a mission that advocates a rationalised spirituality headed by the former scientist, Shri Datta Swami:

In buffet system, if one takes extra food in his plate by over ambition and ignorance for a moment, he returns back immediately before starting eating. Veda says that you must return back the extra money for the God’s work if taken by ignorance. In the buffet system if you eat the extra food, you will suffer from diseases. Similarly, if you enjoy the extra money, God will punish you in several ways … [sic], (13 June 2011) ²

Sampling from the buffet system constitutes ‘wrong knowledge’; it is deceptive and ultimately eviscerating. Such admonitions come equipped with a critique of the purposeless pursuit of knowledge and, by extension, self-centred knowledge as it appears to have developed in the west and threatening to engulf post-liberal India itself. Borrowing from a Times of India spiritual editorial by Dada JP Vaswani from the Sadhu Vaswani Mission in Pune, another online networker writes, ‘Intellect has developed but reverence is lacking … Knowledge without sympathy does more harm than good. It makes us suspicious and cynical’ (20 October 2011). ³ The solution to the ‘cold’ effects of fetid intellectualism is to go back to the past to seek a ‘warm’ moral compass for the present: ‘Ideals that inspired education in ancient India must be rediscovered and introduced in our educational institutions, if we are to make our contributions to civilisation and to the freshness of human life’ (20 October 2011). The subscriber continues by endorsing: ‘A new type of education … an education which will not merely develop brain power, but an education which will give a triple training of the head, hand and heart’ (20 October 2011). The triangulation of training is the ideal way in which technocrats could advance in leaps and bounds in what has become a common ruse of principled distinction: while the brain had to be fully developed, the heart acts as a safety valve for the alienating, objectivist and individualistic impulses that might accompany intellectual growth.

It is at such points that the disaggregated self of the networker is made most piquantly evident in the computational potentials of actualities and fantasies that an e-thnography can highlight without over-determination – one where the premises for realist reference is all-pervasive but where ideals about daily practice, intellectual growth and faith may well remain an unfulfilled dream, a manifesto in the making, on the part of the subscriber. Where actuality ends and idealism starts is a part of the slippery hyphenated terrain of e-thnography as it constantly changes in tune to the postings and interactions of the subscribers, creating realities of a different order that Moebius-like both wrap around and are tangential to the contexts of their physical production.

The magnanimity of a fully rounded character, rather than the linearity of a self-obsessed personality, continues to be the operative model, in which the nuclear technocrat stands at odds from the post-liberal pantheon of ‘heroes’ – fashion models, rock and VJ (Video Jockey) stars, executives and other entrepreneurs particularly associated with new knowledge industries and enterprise cultures to do with call centre workers, ‘media turks’ or information technology (IT) sophisticates (Mirchandani, 2004; Mitra, 1997; Patel, 2010). This is not to say that the values that the technocrats endorse are particular to the nuclear township for other studies of India’s middle class also note this turn to spirituality (see Kent, 2004; Nanda, 2011). However, in comparison, the nuclear employees and their families are bulwarked by the fact that they are physically and collectively insulated from the excesses of consumerism in their securitised and well-catered townships, a place where the regime of spirituality becomes more enhanced. In this cushioned ‘nuclear cyberia’ lies an idealised land where the consumptive cyborg could be retemporalised and encultured as the trans-cyborg in what one member describes as an ‘Ancient Indic guru-shishya parampara [that] was a beautiful blend of discipline and emotion’ (20 October 2011). The Brahmanic guru–shishya tradition encapsulates a methodology of holistic learning where the guru, the teacher, is revered by the obeisant student, shishya. The instrumental functionality of mere information exchange is considered ‘dead knowledge’ and has no standing next to ‘true education’ or vidya that promotes an ethically informed culture which ‘pulsates with life’ in the ‘search for the “spiritual centre of life”’ (20 October 2011). In the vicinity of this modernist ashram at least, the singularity of IT becomes the roundedness of VT or Vidya Technology, another manifestation of not the cyborg, but the trans-cyborg ethos where composite bodies and technologies are saturated in the rivulets of culture.

Nuclear energy as a necessary, ‘clean’ energy against the tidal pull of global warming takes on a messianic role for cultural, national and planetary welfare (see Froystod, 2011). Such an orientation is vindicated by the comparisons of the energy to divine dynamics where energy becomes a fecund reservoir of transference between the scientific and divine (see Snodgrass, 2002). When it is activated, deep awareness of body, mind and spirit could be realised, as one member writes:

The word ‘Sat’, which means the absolute truth, can be used for both God and Energy but, the difference is to be realized. In the presence of God, Energy can never be absolute truth. (7 April 2011)

Elsewhere, ecological ethics are inscribed ad infinitum on the pages of the site in terms of ‘Go Green Tips’ and ‘Eco Facts’. The eco-creeds range from global concerns: ‘Melting land based ice like Antarctica is very dangerous because it raises sea levels as it melts’; to the national: ‘The average Indian emits 1.2 tons of carbon per year (1.6 tons including all the other Greenhouse Gases)’; to the particular geared specifically towards local residents: ‘Garments such as socks and undergarments do not need to be ironed, so save the energy [sic]’; and those that markedly link the global with the local: ‘International Energy Agency says that standby mode in appliances leads to 1% of world’s greenhouse gas emissions’. The intention is to ensure that the awareness of global warming and climate change is engrained in members’ consciousness and practice and that self-centred and consumerist living is kept in check by an ecology of ethics, an ecology that is both actual in terms of referring to their physical surroundings and one that is imagined in a utopic world of climate-conscious citizenship.

The anxious awareness of global warming among residents living on the edges of a land-filled peninsular city comes to a head, as one eco-fact declares: ‘The more than 3 billion people who live within 200 km from a coast will be directly affected by rising sea levels [sic]’. Perpetuating an environmentally aware lifestyle becomes so urgent that it is also endorsed in one tip as a duty:

At the next family gathering, ask for ten minutes to give a presentation about global warming and what needs to be done to mitigate it. Use the statistics and tips you have learned in this diary to give them ways to get involved.

Brahmanic sanctimony or a high-caste Hindu orientation appears to merge with environmentalist creeds, indicating both idealist and objectivist advances about their environments. One statement reads:

Stick to a vegetarian diet. The consumption of livestock leads up to 18% of the world’s greenhouse gases. If going veg is to hard of a move than make sure you at least avoid beef at all costs as this is the biggest contributor to green house gases. [sic]

Being located next to a highly polluting chemical and industrial compound in nearby Chembur could even be seen as a sign of manifest destiny: carbon-based pollution is a constant reminder of how much the nuclear industries as a whole are deemed to be in the enterprise of producing ‘clean energy’ (see Kaur, 2011). Threats to physical health are underlined by one blog entitled ‘Anushaktinagar or Asthmashaktinagar?’ in which the subscriber notes how many young children suffer from asthma in the township:

When some people blame the vegetations around (the pollens and other bio irritants) my strong doubt [suspicion] is the Rashtriya Chemical Factory [RCF] and BPCL [Bharat Petroleum Company Limited]. The cases of admission in the hospital is more when the atmosphere is cloudy, and get a smell of cooking gas in the air. The wind direction from RCF as well as BPCL is bringing the poisonous gases to Anushaktinagar … If we need to build a healthy young generation, we need to act and save our children. (20 November 2010)

Another member concurs about the foul industrial pollution coming from the neighbouring plant: ‘what you said may be right. Lets investigate by collecting air samples and analise for some harmful chemicals … (In BARC there are lots of gas Analisers installed. lets make use of that) [sic]’ (20 November 2010). This person demonstrates an objectifying impulse to physical affliction, even if it affects his own body, and expressed ambitions to collect scientific evidence for any increase in asthma in the township. But not all members sing from the same sheet. One subscriber suggests that a more metaphysical approach to human health is required:

I have the solution for preventing asthma and I’ve succeeded in all cases across the ages by increasing the immunity of people in a very effortless way. My children will never be asthmatic. They are in fact disease free and drug free for the past 30 months. You can join hands with me to build a healthy young generation and to act and save our children. I share my knowledge to only those who are interested, in an interactive session on appointment. (27 November 2010)

Here, the subscriber suggests that the body be subjected to a session inspired by the indigenous science of yoga and meditation. An advocate of what could be described as rational mysticism, unknown variables about the future of their children, spirituality and what lay beyond human potentials are put towards exercises in strengthening and preparing the mind, body and spirit for whatever lay in store as the trans-cyborg supreme. Whichever way one looks at it, there were possible solutions that could overcome the vulnerability of the human body and its genetic imprint on future generations. The trans-cyborg body fused out of a computational interface suddenly appears vulnerable when it is implanted in the harsh realities of environmental hazards, but where recourse to religio-cultural sanctimony and practices appears to offer a remarkable route to redemption. The self may be disaggregated, but at points like this it appears to cohere through glimpses of, and concerns about the embodied whole.

Rewiring the technocrat-cyborg

Here, in this large township, one could aspire to live like trans-cyborg ascetics in a ‘technoscientific ashram’ dedicated to fundamental research and its application in tribute to the nation-state, away from the rapids of change that pervade the larger political economy. By concentrating on the social media site as used by Indian nuclear technocrats, a number of key points are served. First, both neo-Orientalist assumptions and nuclear technocrats’ portrayal as acultural bureaucrats kowtowing to developments in the fetishised west are undermined. Religio-culture plays a part, but it does so in a rationalised schema. Excavations of the past are not necessarily fuelled by an exclusivist Hindu nationalism as has been noted in the literature on the resurgence of Hindutva politics (Hansen, 1999; Luddens, 1996). Rather, the retro-dynamic evident among nuclear technocrats recalls a putative prior age deemed to underline the elastic ancestry of all of India’s citizens, whatever their religious background, in what is better described as a relatively more inclusivist Sanskritic nationalism even if this lineage too can be critiqued for being a liberal interpretation of Hindu nationalism. Sanskritic both relates to the recorded language of ancient texts recalled in nuclear technocrats’ narratives and, in terms of its indigenous articulations as sanskriti meaning culture that has a symbolic purchase on ‘high culture’, a civilisational rulebook of ideals rearticulated for this culture of ‘technisation’ (Elias, 1995).

Second, the online network encourages the nurturing of a visible sense of community for those inhabiting or connected to the Anushakti Nagar township but mediated via one of the by-products of those very currents deemed to erode its social fabric. The network then becomes a cyber-canvas with which to revivify older values about the ethically informed techno-civil servant combined with a Sanskritic mission to further instil the spirit of service and deferral into the township community against what is deemed to be the threat of hedonistic pleasures and the individualist pursuit of material gain. The ‘technisation’ evident here is characterised by a civilising process or ‘acquired self-regulation’ (Elias, 1995: 9) that rests upon service to society; the principle of moral, physical and intellectual instruction; a conservative commitment to the nation; a union between mind–body–soul; environmental awareness; and in the main, religiously founded values endorsed through reinvented Brahmanic ideas where, despite the township’s diverse population, Sanskritic values are normalised and applied to a variety of practices. The idea of service extends to endorsing good practice in order to reduce carbon emissions, a mission which is not averse to the ideological gains that the nuclear lobby has gained in ‘clean energy’ generation due to widespread concerns about global warming. The nuclear technocrats’ spirit of service then takes on a tangled arc of obeisance to state, nation and the environment.

Notably, a focus on the online network site is distinct from other studies of mobile or cyber-technology where the new and radical or potentially revolutionary feature of social media is stressed. The site does not represent the use of new media to critique and/or mobilise against state hegemonies as has been the attention meted to anti-globalisation, post-‘Arab spring’ movements and other transgressive forces (e.g. Hindman, 2008; Juris, 2008; Kaplan, 2009; Stepanova, 2011; Werbner et al., 2014). It is not simply an example of digitalised democracy, as accompanies the discourse of development or e-governance that promises better administration and transparency (e.g. Madon, 2000; Mazzarella, 2010). And it stands apart from the techno-economic currents that accompany the aspirational compulsions of consumer-citizens as a sign of post-1990s liberalising India opening itself up to a global economy (e.g. Fernandes, 2006; Scammell, 2010). Rather with the peculiar combination of inherent conservatism and under the mantle of national security concerns, the case study here is more a throwback to the military origins of Internet technologies (Abbate, 1999) as it acts as a reminder that social media more often than not comes under the purview of state surveillance and (self-)censorship. The network indicates more a conservative retro forum, rather than a techno-futurist one (see Coleman, 2010). The site may well enable a degree of connectivity that utilises the products of technological development, but in the process, it also tries to corral the potentially feral reach of the World Wide Web for an enclave under the direct jurisdiction of a benefactor state trying to anchor itself in the turbulent waves of a post-liberal political economy. It is this feature that situates the social media on the unstable cusps of liberalisation and statism that, while promising wonderful visions of inter-connectivity, are characterised by the relatively staid and dreary aesthetic of disciplinary conduct.

Accordingly, the site represents a forum with contrary dynamics corroding away at a mediatory synthesis – poised on the tensile strands between non-religious and Sanskritic nationalism, statist and liberalist currents, and, significantly, corporeal and post-human mediation. The e-thnography of the nuclear technocrats’ online site can be said to enlighten as much as it conceals for it is not immediately discernible to what extent (self-)censorship is in practice and to what extent subscribers actually live up to the creeds recorded on the social network site. The online material is not simply providing a flat, realist canvas but is also one that encompasses ideals and ambitions indicative of multifaceted lifeworlds. Thus, the cyber-media stands at the blurry computational conflux of referential, aspirational and propagatory dynamics. Despite the disaggregation of self as mediated through the virtual interface indicating a move away from human-centric context, traces of the embodied self and actuality remain as with blogs about instructions for childrearing, emboldening the mind and body, holistic exercise and training and concerns about environmental impacts on the body if not the residential community at large. These traces on the cyber-screen cannot be said to be representational, but allude to a contextual elsewhere filtered through the computational interface in which members interact with each other as trans-cyborg bodies. The hairline hyphen in e-thnography represents a break in, but not total departure from conventional context: it is oblique, occasionally even hazy as it traverses other interleafed horizons into an unfathomable infinity.

The answer to greater understanding of the social use of communicative technologies is not necessarily more context. Context after all is a construct (see Dilley, 2002). Anthropologists have long critiqued the selective constructions of ethnographic texts and contexts posing as representative facts (Clifford and Marcus, 1986), Clifford (1986) stating that ‘Even the best ethnographic texts – serious, true fictions – are systems, or economies, of truth’ (p. 7). Their influential argument for the partiality and historicity of all texts, however, still rests on the premises that multiple contexts or truths are there, but they are filtered by subjective screens, power and institutional constraints which once rigorously acknowledged as incomplete and imperfect become more credible. Their proposal for dialogic self-reflexivity becomes another way for liberal subjectivities entering through the back door. Where I go further is to undermine the human-centric understanding of subjectivity and context as an exterior validator of technologies. Context is not just something into which phenomenon is embedded; it is not just external but also internal as boundaries between the body and technologies interpenetrate and blur, a proposal that very much alludes to actor–network theory and efforts to reassemble the social as a science of associations or an entangled composite of human and technology (Latour, 2005). Ethnographic truth may well be partial and multifarious, but, more significantly, it is mediated, ephemeral and contingent: it concatenates into a regime of validation due to often unquestioned discursive dynamics to do with liberal, human-centric context. In this respect, one could argue that all ethnography is e-thnography.