Review of Lives of Data: Essays on Computational Cultures from India by Sandeep Mertia

Since the arrival of the Internet in India a little over two decades ago, numerous academics and practitioners have written about the promises afforded by the digitization of one of the world’s largest economies. As a result, there has also been a widespread informational turn, which has included the generation of volumes of data on various aspects of everyday life and has seen the rise of several infrastructural frameworks that support data governance. The book pays close attention to the sociotechnical relationalities of data, people, and phenomena (social and mathematical) in India. This edited volume is noteworthy for the ways in which it offers a wide-ranging cross-disciplinary engagement with topics of interest to historians, anthropologists, data scientists, media studies and STS scholars. Each of the essays in this volume engages carefully with both theoretical and methodological questions that are common to studies of big data and data infrastructures in India. Altogether, the essays also engage with the question of how this informational turn has impacted broader questions of biopolitics and governmentality. The book’s focus on both the speculative and the material affordances of data allow for a sustained engagement with the numerous specific imaginaries and practices that come to be grouped under the realm of the digital. Most usefully, the volume remains continually attentive to the many pluralities and fragmentations within Indian digital infrastructures, as well as the ways in which they intersect with stark social hierarchies.