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Abstract

, just as copyediting for this Thematic Section began, India was made the fourth country-after the US, China and Japan-to set up a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution by the World Economic Forum (WEF), the most influential congregation of political and corporate power in our times. The WEF-website announces projects 'to be scaled across India and globally' and reports the first focus to be on artificial intelligence, blockchain and drones so as to 'tackle some of the country's most pressing socioeconomic needs, such as education, healthcare and agriculture. ' Eventually, with machine learning and the application of smart contracts, the aim is to 'boost productivity and transparency while reducing inefficiency. ' 1 In his inaugural speech in New Delhi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi projected that 'India's contribution to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be astonishing' and that 'Industry 4.0 has the strength to drive irreversible positive change in India' (The Hindu 2018b). He pointed out how, under his government (a coalition led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP), the "Digital India" program was already in the process of bringing internet connectivity to villages in an unprecedented fashion and how the country's fast advances in information and communication technologies, optical fibre-infrastructure and biometrical identification were laying the foundations to success under the motto 'Solve for India, Solve for the World' (Varindia 2018). When fine-tuning our editorial approach to this Thematic Section this acutely mediated vision-for all its conjuring of the upcoming and, by implication, "the (next) modern"-alerted us to the striking echo it finds in a "technological moment", powerfully accentuated by another Indian government over 40 years ago. As media scholars at least of earlier generations know, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment (SITE)-project was conducted in 1975-76 in the wake of the then globally emerging paradigm of space technology. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi of the Congress Party, and her scientific advisor Vikram Sarabhai, founder