"Dr. G," as her students affectionately know her, brings a track record of success to Acropolis. I met Dr. G when I was privileged to be a guest of Amity University Dubai in 2019. She was then founding head of the law school there. Before Amity, Dr. G was founding head of the law school at Chandraprabhu Jain in Delhi and chief learning officer in law for LedX.
In Dubai, Dr. G graciously invited me to join her media law class and arranged introduction of my wife, a law librarian, to her counterparts. The enthusiasm of Dr. G's students for their study under her tutelage was palpable, and it was a memorable joy to spend time with them.
As promised, on February 24, I joined a panel of "INBUSH ERA World Summit 2022," an international business and policy conference organized by Amity University, India, through its flagship campus at Noida, Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi.
I delivered remarks arising from my paper, "Communication Policy as a Factor in Post-Pandemic U.S.-India Business Development," available on SSRN. Here is the abstract.
For better and worse, we live in the age of the transnational
corporation. That corporate landscape is dominated by a very few actors,
namely the five-trillion-U.S.-dollar oligopoly of Amazon, Apple,
Meta/Facebook, Alphabet/Google, and Microsoft. That market dominance has
proven to be counterproductive to countless priorities, including
social and economic development, civil rights, and environmental
sustainability. And the problem of Big Tech’s market dominance was
dramatically exacerbated by the pandemic. Now national governments are
trying to figure out what to do. Today, in the context of a program
about how the United States and India can move forward together to
facilitate transnational business development after the pandemic, I
offer observations in two dimensions. One dimension is the
jurisdictional relationship of the United States and India. The other
dimension is the nature of the legal challenges in the global
post-pandemic business environment. These challenges range from the
broad level of the competitive marketplace to the narrow level of the
information ecosystem, and, en route, pass through the problem of
communication regulation, which is my own area of research.
The hosts generously presented me with an "Amity Global Academic Excellence Award."
The annual world summit "INBUSH ERA 2022" will be virtual this year, February 23 to 25, and host Amity University is maximizing the advantage of the digital platform with a truly global program.
This year marks the 22nd installment of the International Business Summit & Research Conference (INBUSH ERA). The year's theme is "Nurturing People, Purpose, Partnerships, Planet & Performances for Creating Sustainable World Class Organizations." Host Amity University is a prominent network of private universities in India, and the conference will be online and hybrid, based at the university's flagship campus at Noida, Uttar Pradesh, near Delhi.
Yesterday I had an organizational call with my colleague Professor Marut Bisht, who is elbow deep in planning academic components of the conference. I look forward to offering a perspective on transnational communication regulation on a U.S.-focused panel beginning on Thursday, February 24, at 1330 GMT. The same panel will recognize and welcome remarks from:
Prof. Srikant Datar, Dean of the Faculty, Harvard Business School
Dr. Sam Pitroda, Indian engineer, business executive and policymaker, and ex-chairman of the National Knowledge Commission
Prof. Pradeep K. Khosla, Chancellor of University of California
Prof. Andrew D. Hamilton, President of New York University
Mr. Sabeer Bhatia, Co-Founder at ShowReel
Dr. Punam Anand Keller, Senior Associate Dean Innovation and Growth at Dartmouth College
Dr. Jagdish Sheth, Charles H. Kellstadt Professor of Business, Goizueta Business School, Emory University
Prof. Supriya Chakrabarti, Director of the Lowell Centre for Space Science and Technology, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Prof. Gurpreet Dhillon, Farrington Professor of IT and Decision Sciences at University of North Texas
Prof. Raj Mehta, Vice Provost for International Affairs, Director University Honours Program, Professor of Marketing, Carl H. Lindner College of Business, University of Cincinnati
Prof. Yahya R. Kamalipour, Professor of Media and Communication, Department of Journalism & Mass Communication, North Carolina A&T State University
Dr. Shailesh Upreti, Chairman iM3NY, New York
INBUSH ERA 2022 also incorporates a "Happiness Conference" with speakers including Ben Smith, head of research and innovation for the Chelsea Football Club.
Citizen and participatory journalism through digital Media
Digital media economy
Digital media and political communication
Future of journalism in the digital age
Social media as source of news
Digital media laws and censorship
Digital media literacy
Journalistic ethics in digital media
Data journalism
Mobile and multimedia journalism
Artificial intelligence in journalism
Author guidelines and the official CFP are at the journal website. Manuscripts, preferred length of 3,000 to 5,000 words, are sought no later than April 30, 2021, and will be peer reviewed.
The information flow in digital societies has been discussed and analysed for more than a decade with close watch on social media networks. The shift from traditional forms of communication to social media enables users to gratify their daily needs of information digitally. The current paper builds on narrative analysis of selected social media active users and their digital social engagement to understand how a user and a network of users engage with information. To understand the role of social media literacy, the current paper interviews the users and correlates the findings with contemporary literature on social media. The results show that social media literacy becomes a pillar of information system, but it works in micro-level of societies at crossroads of online and offline spaces.
The authors survey digital media users to analyze the efficacy of efforts by social media platforms to enhance digital literacy to combat misinformation. The paper concludes that the efforts are less than efficacious because they derive from a holistic vision of society and politics rather than an understanding of the literacy deficiencies of individual users.
They gave me the latitude to talk about my nascent theoretical framework for analyzing legal responses to the problem of media misinformation / disinformation —colloquially if ambiguously termed "fake news," or unambiguously, as I prefer, in Spanish, desinformación. My rubric ranges from non-responses, what I call "the Wild West" approach, to authoritarian responses.
The best of the conference of course came from what I was able to learn from my colleagues of such far-ranging experiences, backgrounds, and focuses of study. I'll comment on some photographic highlights here, though this testimony will not express how deeply this program enriched my experience in comparativism.
Top paper honors went to Abdulla Saad of Amity Dubai. I was fortunate to serve as a judge on his panel, and his presentation was a favorite of mine. A mass communication scholar and proclaimed leading world expert on karak chai, Abdulla is researching online humor in the face of the gravest of circumstances, such as oppression and war.
Interdisciplinary presenters brought perspective to problems in mass communication. Social media researchers Fathima Linsha Basheer and Sudha Bhattia are considering the implications of this factoid: ten minutes' tweeting yields 13% oxytocin increase in brain. Oxytocin is also known as "the love hormone."
"Dr. G.," Dr. Geentanjali Chandra, is the head of the law school at Amity Dubai. Amity Dubai is the only school outside of India accredited to allow its graduates to sit for the bar in India.
Dr. G. kindly invited me to talk to a law class. Students studying at Amity Dubai are surprisingly diverse. The UAE creates a curious dynamic: Indian migrants--already an intrinsically diverse population--make up some quarter of the population of the Emirates and have established multi-generational households. Yet they remain Indian citizens. As a result, the young generation has a unique global identity.
Amity Dubai studded the scholarly program with creative contributions from the range of student talents fostered at the university, including fashion, dance, and film. Film students spent just one week creating a short-film horror project titled, "Out of Order." I'm getting in the ground floor as a fan of up-and-coming director Ruslan Baiazov.
