The Last Cultural Mile
https://cis-india.org
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.
daily12011-11-01T20:52:56ZThe Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem
<b>Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem research project by Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The ‘last mile’ is a communications term which has a specific Indian variant, where technology has been mapped onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which have propelled communications technologies since at least the invention of radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the ‘last mile’ has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has provided rationale for successive technological developments, and produced an assumption that the final frontier was just around the corner and that Internet technologies now carry the same burden of breaching that last major barrier to produce a techno-nation. The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour.
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<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.</p>
<p>Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.</p>
<p>The monograph has emerged out of the "Rethinking the Last Mile Problem" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:</p>
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<li> <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/leap-of-rhodes" class="internal-link" title="Last Mile Problem">PDF</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rethinking-last" class="internal-link" title="Rethinking Last">Word</a></li></ol>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 30 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem</a>
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No publisherpraskrishnaResearchers at WorkHistories of InternetInternet Studies2015-04-03T10:55:07ZBlog EntryA provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton
<b>In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.</b>
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<p>In its classical
form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage
of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer,
and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable
television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian
variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram
Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two
major challenges India has faced, of <strong>linguistic diversity </strong>and <strong>geographical distance</strong>,
and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the
early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later
to this posting).</p>
<p>This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto
developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant
characteristic of communications technology since at least the
invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that
means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where
connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship.
It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive
technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable
transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual
revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of
Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series,
and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable,
fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point
the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was
just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would
breach a major barrier, once and for all.</p>
<p><strong>What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to
argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on
fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge
constitutes. </strong>Further, that these apprehensions may have been
derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first,
an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and
second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes
as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I
succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:</p>
<p>1. It has been difficult to include <strong>human resource</strong>
as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly
technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen
historically as <em>also</em>, and even perhaps <em>primarily</em>, a
human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that
keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation<a href="http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/#_ftn1">[1]</a>,
with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the
broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the <em>sender</em>’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that <em>technology </em>can
aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the
need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces
the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is
sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how
previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones
where <em>recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model </em>both as peers and, even more significantly, as <em>originators </em>as well as <em>enhancers </em>of
data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even
in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the
movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).</p>
<p>2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way
debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the
beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to
come up against a bias written into standard communications models –
and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend
to underplay what this paper will call the <em>significant sender/recipient</em>.
While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of
peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile
communications, it has been a common problem that unless <em>either</em> a clear focus exists on geographic areas <em>or</em>
significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models
inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low
frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information
capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in
broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as
much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information
requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough
to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively
small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of
broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to
make up for the wasted energy.</p>
<p>This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in <em>ideological </em>commitment
to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The
technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different
systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types
of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a
one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out
different <em>synergies </em>between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.</p>
<p>This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer
and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a
component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the
present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be <strong>community radio</strong>, <strong>low-power transmission-reception systems </strong>(most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various <strong>internet-based networking models</strong>.</p>
<p>3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore
critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have
been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the
attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory
Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for
keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to
themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper
alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the
uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr.
Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would
bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and
broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135
million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs
to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would
the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their
capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?</p>
<p>In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the <strong>community</strong>, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s <strong>movie fan</strong>, internet’s <strong>blogger</strong> and <strong>networker</strong>, solar energy’s <strong>barefoot engineer</strong>, software’s <strong>media pusher</strong> and television’s <strong>citizen-journalist. </strong>A specific focus for study will be the models of <strong>participatory learning</strong> in the classroom, using <strong>film</strong>, the <strong>vinyl disc</strong>, the <strong>audio cassette</strong>, the <strong>radio</strong>, the <strong>television</strong>, the <strong>web </strong>and now the <strong>mobile phone</strong>.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/definiton</a>
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No publishernishantA copy of this post is also available on the author's personal blog at http://culturallastmile.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/1-what-is-the-cultural-last-mile/ICT4DDigital GovernancePublic AccountabilityInternet GovernanceCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:57:07ZBlog EntryRethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1
<b>This research project, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s history for what has in recent years come to be known as the ‘last mile’ problem. The term itself comes from communication theory, with in turn an ancestry in social anthropology, and concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. Exploring the intersection of government policy, technology intervention and the users' expectations, with a specific focus on Internet Technologies and their space in the good governance protocols in India, the project aims at revisiting the last mile problem as one of cultural practices and political contexts in India.</b>
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<p>THE CULTURAL
LAST MILE</p>
<p>Ashish
Rajadhyaksha</p>
<p><u>The Argument</u>:</p>
<p>Mapped onto
developmental-democratic language since at least Independence, this concept,
further mapping concrete benefits with the delivery of the message, has come to
define the classic model by which the Indian state attempts to ensure that <em>policy</em> designed for <em>local implementation</em> actually reaches its <em>intended beneficiaries</em> without <em>distortion</em>.
The immense link between communication theory and democracy thereby defines not
only the Indian state’s historic dependence on <em>technologies</em> of communication – radio, terrestrial and satellite.
It goes further, as the technological apparatus – and its variants of the
classic ‘broadcast’ model of single sender-multiple receiver – comes to
underpin the very definition of democratic development.</p>
<p>One consequence
is an <em>evolutionary</em> definition of
technology, with the last mile defined as a means of eternal purification of
the message, combining content ‘corruption’ with socio-economic corruption, as
newer generations of technology tirelessly eliminate distortion in both. This
could well be the history of Indian state policy, from radio broadcasts
representing the ‘voice of the State’ to the era of e-Governance. Such an authority is somewhat graphically in evidence in
recent years in the deployment of ‘neutral’ technology such as computers within
e-governance initiatives, which have, when successful , seen
computer-illiterate farmers make wide use of ICT services where they ‘do not
feel that there is a barrier to their obtaining information’, a ‘tribute to the
grassroots staff and their training’, but also to ‘faith in the technology’
(Shaik, Jhamtani and Rao 2004: 9). The attribution of such ‘neutrality’ to
modern ‘scientific’ technology has been in evidence from late
nineteenth-century still photography to the use of technologies such as ‘First
In–First Out (FIFO)’, a way that prevents queue-jumping, biometrics and double
screens for users to view typed in matter, including touch screens
(Parthasarathy 2005, VIII: 9).</p>
<p><u>The Research
Project</u></p>
<p>This project
assumes that, given the chronic historic failure in bridging the last mile,
whether in communication theory or in the standard functioning of development
projects (a key component of the relatively new discipline of disaster
management) – a failure stemming from difficulties in both naming and accessing
intended beneficiaries – it becomes necessary to reinvestigate the model
itself, along with its historic failures.</p>
<p>The project is
split into three parts: <br />
(1) The conceptual argument: a historical trace of the theoretical origins of
the concept ‘Last mile’ (even if not named as such), and key technical
locations of its deployment: the telegraph, the ‘film trains’ in the 1920s, the
radio (extended to transistorization in the 1960s), and the first experiments
with terrestrial and satellite technology. <br />
(2) It will then take three specific examples (perhaps but may be
changed),(a) the SITE experiment of the
1970s with specific new field work on the well known Kheda experiment; (b) the
Cable Television movements in India in the 1980s, and (c) Experiments with WLL
in IIT Chennai in the 1990s. <br />
(3) The concluding section will address locations where the last mile has in
fact been bridged successfully, in the review’s estimation, and will inquire
into how it came to be functional. It is at this point speculated that it
worked mainly because (a) the original model was either tampered with or used
contrary to stated intentions, and (b) when it worked, this happened with the
connivance of the state. The project will therefore perhaps conclude with the
following investigations: that historically significant occasions when
alternative definitions were thrown up for the last mile worked mainly because
they were dependent on error and accident (rather than seeing these as
interruptions or distortions to the signal), and that they functioned more on
both peer-to-peer and reverse broadcasting than on the
single-sender-multiple-recipients model.</p>
<p><u>References</u>:</p>
<p>Ashish Rajadhyaksha
(1990), ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, <em>Journal of Arts &
Ideas</em>, No. 19 (May): 33–52.</p>
<p>Ashish Rajadhyaksha
(1999), ‘The Judgement: Re-Forming the Public’, <em>Journal of Arts &
Ideas</em>, Nos. 32–33 (April)</p>
<p>N. Meera Shaik, Anita
Jhamtani and D.U.M. Rao, ‘Information and Communication Technology in
Agricultural Development: A Comparative Analysis of Three Projects from India’,
Agricultural Research and Extension Network (AGREN), 2004.</p>
<p>Balaji Parthasarathy et
al (ed), ‘Information and Communications Technologies for Development: A
Comparative Analysis of Impacts and Costs from India’, Bangalore: International
Institute of Information Technology, 2005.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1</a>
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No publishernishantHistories of InternetResearchers at WorkInternet HistoriesDigital Governance2015-04-03T10:54:21ZBlog Entry