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Histories of the Internet

by Nishant Shah — last modified Mar 22, 2012 12:57 PM
For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.

Histories of internets in India

The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.

The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.

Scope of the Theme:

We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.

We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:

  1. Rewiring Bodies - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
  2. Archive and Access - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
  3. Porn: Law, Video & Technology - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
  4. Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
  5. The Last Cultural Mile - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
  6. Using the Net for Social Change - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
  7. Queer Histories of the Internet - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College
  8. Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities - Pratyush Shankar, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad
  9. Gaming and Gold - Arun Menon, Centre for Internet & Society
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Archive and Access
The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.

Download the Monograph

Archives and Access
Sep 22, 2011 12:20 PM
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Porn: Law, Video & Technology
Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures. This monograph is not so much about a cultural product called porn as it is a meditation on visuality and seeing, the construction and experience of gazing, technology and bodies in the law, modern myths, the interactions between human and filmic bodies. And technology not necessarily as objects and devices that make pornography possible (but that too), but as history and evolution, process and method, and what this brings to understanding what pornography is.

Click here to read the full introduction.
Click here to download the Monograph.
Pornography & the Law - A Call for Peer Review
Dec 21, 2010 07:20 PM
Privacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)
Dec 11, 2009 12:45 AM
Negative of porn
Sep 12, 2009 02:55 PM
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Queer Histories of the Internet
Nitya Vasudevan (Centre for Study of Culture and Society) and Nithin Manayath (Mount Carmel College) bring forth their research and experience in queer histories of the Internet. The project will examine and theorize the relationship between queerness (Queer is largely used to imply a set of identities and modes of being that work against the narrative of compulsory heterosexuality and to indicate a shift from earlier and more distinct identities such as transgender, lesbian, gay, as a category claiming to be more inclusive and less rigid when it comes to difference.

A critical queerness as Judith Halberstram describes it, in In a Queer Time and Place (New York: NYU Press, 2005), is one that is a mixture of “strange temporalities, imaginative life schedules and eccentric economic practices.” In the work of queer theorists in the West, rather than a string of identities, it becomes a perspective or a conceptual grid through which to theorize structures of normativity and identification. Through the course of our project we seek to draw on queer theory to destabilise this reference to identity alone to include an understanding of queerness as practice, techne and experience, and also, importantly, to locate a culturally specific place for such queerness) and the Internet and address the question of technology (We start with the Heideggerian premise that the essense of technology is not technological but cultural. This view of course is rendered dominant in the case of Internet, where the discourse surrounding it is as much about engendering and sustaining cultures as much as it is about futurity and technological instrumentality) within the field of concerns it has come to generate in the Indian context, on how has the idea of the technological shift, perceived or real, changed the ways in which queer practices and identities are understood, explained or experienced and contribute to a better understanding of the question of technology being asked and answered when it comes to queer experience, practice and knowledge.

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'
Jun 17, 2010 06:25 PM
Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context
Sep 13, 2010 06:25 PM
A Detour: The Internet and Forms of Narration: A Short Note
Dec 02, 2010 08:40 PM
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Gaming and Gold
The Project, one of the first in India, aims to examine 'attention' as a conduit for material and non-material transactions within and outside of game worlds. This includes the internal market in the game world as well as the secondary market which operates outside of the game world. The possibilities of transaction in 'attention currency' and the intricacies of the attention economy/gaming economy in the game world is explored through a series of posts. These Blog entries document the study made by Arun Menon.
Attentional Capital in Online Gaming : The Currency of Survival
Aug 25, 2010 08:20 PM
The Attention Economy - A Brief Introduction
Jul 22, 2010 05:45 PM
India Game Developer Summit Bangalore 2010
Mar 01, 2010 07:35 PM
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Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities
The monograph on Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar, is an entry into debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of internet technologies. Placing his inquiry in the built form, Shankar manoeuvres discourse from architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to look at the notions of cyber-publics, digital spaces, and planning policy in India. The findings show that the relationship between cities and cyberspaces need to be seen as located in a dynamic set of negotiations and not as a mere infrastructure question. It dismantles the presumptions that have informed public and city planning in the country by producing alternative futures of users’ interaction and mapping of the emerging city spaces.

Click here to download the Monograph

CEPT to Set up Centre to Research Role of Internet in Social Development
Jun 20, 2011 02:25 PM
Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review
Feb 15, 2011 09:25 PM
Transforming urbanscapes: ATM in cities
Dec 17, 2010 02:20 PM
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The Last Cultural Mile
Ashish’s monograph follows the career of a priori contradiction, one that only mandates a state mechanism to perform an act of delivery, and then disqualifies the state from performing that very act effectively. This contradiction which he names as the Last Mile problem is a conceptual hurdle, not a physical one and when put one way, the Last Mile is unbridgeable, when put another, it is being bridged all the time.

This monograph provides a set of four case studies of the Indian State. The case studies address four technologies, television, telecommunications, networked higher education and the Unique Identity project. It also looks at Wireless-in-Local Loop (or WLL) technology that constituted the first revolution in telecommunications in the early 1990s, the arrival of satellite television also in the 1990s, the low-end IT ‘device’ with which the Ministry of HRD plans to use digitized distance education to increase enrolment of Indian students by five per cent of the overall population, and the celebrated Aadhaar.

Download the Monograph here



The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review
Dec 14, 2010 09:55 PM
A provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile
Dec 11, 2009 12:45 AM
Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument
Sep 02, 2009 04:25 PM
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Revolution 2.0?
Anja Kovacs, Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society brings forth her research and experience in development, activism and movements, social sciences theory and digital governance to assess online activism in India as it emerges. The project has larger implications for understanding the adoption, resistance to and mutation of technologies as they evolve in their interaction with social change and political movements in India and elsewhere.
What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now
Sep 10, 2010 04:15 PM
Inquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*
Jan 13, 2010 05:40 PM
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Transparency and Politics
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the concept of governance emerged in the lexicon of reform and development as a means to "repair" "dysfunctional" state bureaucracies (Anders, 2005: 37-60). Simultaneously, the concepts of accountability and transparency began to gain currency. In the context of governance (as meaning repairing of dysfunctional state bureaucracies), transparency involved making government budgets and expenditure records available for public scrutiny. By providing this information to the citizens, it was expected that the government would act responsibly and citizens would also be able to put pressure on their governments to spend public money in a more accountable manner.
Internet, Politics and Transparency
Aug 02, 2011 10:45 AM
A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India
Mar 28, 2011 07:30 PM
Of the State and the Governments - The Abstract, the Concrete and the Responsive
Sep 17, 2010 06:55 PM
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Rewiring Bodies
Asha Achuthan initiates a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. Tracing the history from nationalist debates between Gandhi and Tagore to the neo-liberal perspective based knowledge produced by feminists like Martha Nussbaum; Asha’s research offers a unique entry point into cyberculture studies through a feminist epistemology of science and technology.

The monograph establishes that there is a certain pre-history to the Internet that needs to be unpacked in order to understand the digital interventions on the body in a range of fields from social sciences theory to medical health practices to technology and science policy in the country.

 

Click here to download the Monograph [PDF, 2647 KB]
Re:wiring Bodies: Call for Review
Dec 17, 2009 01:25 PM
Alternatives? From situated knowledges to standpoint epistemology
Jul 29, 2009 03:10 PM
Rewiring Bodies: Methodologies of Critique - Responses to technology in feminist and gender work in India
Jul 20, 2009 07:00 PM
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