3rd ICTs and Society Meeting; Paper Session - Inequalities: social, economic and political; Paper 2: Media conver-gence and blogging in exposing corruption and fraud in India

Abstract

 The divide between the poor and the rich in India is getting wider and deeper day by day in the post globalization and privatization. It also sounds paradoxical to hear that the development whatever is happening in India is preceded by large scale corruption where the politicians and the bureaucrats in tandem and in perfect collusion are siphoning off billions of rupees meant for the rural development. But, none of these projects could escape the brunt of corruption in India. The paper deals with a few such stories of corruption as case studies that came to limelight and are placed in ‘convergent’ media either in the blogs of television channels or print media or on line web-portals such as face-book/twitter or on You Tube. The paper hypothesizes that the current level of exposure of corruption in 24x7 ‘convergent’ media is not adequate and would like to explore the ways and means of utilizing it (convergent media) more ‘socially effectively’ to totally curb/eliminate the corruption from the top to the lower level in the governance in India. This study therefore follows multiple methods of inquiry, besides the case studies, including surfing the existing web-portals/blogs for the mobilized public views on exposure of corruption through the ‘convergent’ media and conducting  interviews with the convenience sample of media experts in the field as also analyzing the secondary documents (for case studies). The study is therefore a descriptive and qualitative communication research.