Craig Ryder: Influence as Resistance during Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya

The Global Digital Cultures Research Group in the Department of Digital Humanities at KCL hosts Dr. Craig Ryder's talk: 

Influence as Resistance during Sri Lanka’s Aragalaya
In this talk, Craig Ryder will present three case studies based on his 18 month ethnographic study of social media and political participation during Sri Lanka 2022’s Aragalaya—a grassroots political movement that ousted the corrupt Rajapaksa regime. First, he will introduce the people of his study as ‘information influencers’. Broadly, he argues that in a nation beleaguered by ethnic tensions and state-led disinformation, impactful activism requires exerting influence on social media and, therefore, the adoption of influencer tactics, whether by deliberate choice or tacit mimicry. Second, Craig will analyse an image of Elon Musk’s bedside table that he encountered in the field in Sri Lanka. Via this image of firearms and empty cans of Diet Coke, he connects various vaguely related things, including Buddhism and the Californian Ideology, to demonstrate how decentring visual digital culture away from a Western gaze can affect internationalised perspectives on how digital technologies and communication are reshaping societies and cultures across Asia and beyond. Finally, Craig will introduce the term “affordance folklore” to consider the discursive constructions and practical strategies that help Sri Lankans make sense of complex sociotechnical events such as internet shutdowns. When the Sri Lankan government pulls the plug on the internet, vernacular knowledge about what is possible to achieve with social media emerges, strengthening the potential of digital communications upon their return. Taken together, the three case studies aim to demonstrate the benefit and ethnographic capaciousness of long term fieldwork when studying global digital cultures.

Dr Craig Ryder is an interdisciplinary researcher with expertise in social media, emergent applications of AI, and digital research methodologies. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) on the ERC-funded SMALL PLATFORMS project, investigating extreme speech on fringe social media in the UK. His PhD in Anthropology at SOAS, University of London, focused on social media and political participation in Sri Lanka. He is also the founder of the Digital Studies Collective (DiSCo), an interdisciplinary network of researchers that curates the DiSCo Journal—an experimental publication exploring digital art, culture, and methods.