The pages in Proust's long novel describing a first-ever telephone call are often admired for their rare sensitivity to the experience of a new technology. It has no equivalent in any contemporary fiction I know when it comes to an account of a first email read, or first social networking profile posted. Even so, it can't tell us much about what we may really wish to know about technology: never mind losing your virginity what is it like to live with someone?
Backstory:Â From âPartly Unfreeâ to âFully Unfreeâ? The New IT Rules Could Hasten the Slide
A fortnightly column from The Wire s public editor.
Photo: Athul Cyriac Ajay/Unsplash
Tech13/Mar/2021
The two Union ministers, Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar, who had jointly unveiled the Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, at a press conference on February 25, are today hard at work trying to defuse the blowback.
Barely had the import of their exertions sunk in within the country, when uncomfortable news flowed in from without. In early March, the US-based Freedom House report lowered Indiaâs rank from a âfreeâ to a âpartly freeâ country followed by Swedenâs V-Dem Institute, that had once ranked India as the âworldâs largest democracyâ, now considering it an âelectoral autocracyâ. The decline in the standards of media freedom in India was a major para