Censorship

Context

The histories of technology in general and the internet technologies in particular, are riddled with debates of censorship, freedom of speech and expression, and the rise and fall of various political movements around the same. The history of cyberspaces in India has given rise to dense debates which have emerged in the popular as well as the academic spheres.

Moreover, with the State’s outsourcing of digital technologies and responsibilities to the corporate sector through the increasing public-private partnerships, there are several agencies of censorship which were not so visible or authoritative in the history of technology. There has been a severe demonisation and criminalisation of the ICTs, by State and other proto-Statist organisations who have, in its brief history, demanded extreme censorship, boycotting, banning and blocking of various cyberspaces.

A narrative of the critical moments of demands for and attempts at censoring cyberspaces, brings to the fore extremely intriguing questions about the relationship between language, power, expression and freedom. The issue of censorship touches, perhaps the most widely, different aspects of human behaviour and living—from consumption to sexuality to interpersonal relationships to practices of the self. It has become imperative to unpack the sheer inertia that censorship as a force imposes on the dynamic and often transient world of cyberspaces and the way the inherent anarchism and fluidity of the digital cyberspaces challenge the existing legislation, regulation and debates around censorship and freedom.

Research Agenda

1. In the fluid and decentralised mammoth nature of cyberspaces, what is the need and value of censorship? What does censorship enable and what does it bring to attention?

2. Instead of focusing merely upon the act of censorship, can we look at the larger contexts and crises, and the censorship as a critical symptom of the same?

3. Within digital narratives, where the sense of the text, the author, the body and the self are all conflated, can we look upon censorship, not only as a restrictive force but also a creative force that shapes and enables certain kinds of practices and ideas?

4. What are the objects of censorship online? How do these objects get created?

5. The cyberspaces have long been celebrated as spaces of free speech and a site where the new public spheres can be traced. How do we understand censorship in relation to this popular idea? What are the invisible and often hidden forms of censorship that are a part of being online? Can we go beyond censorship on content and look at the very modalities of technology and the regulation that surrounds it?

6. Censorship is geared towards a very specific ideal. How do we deconstruct the various attempts by the State and other State-like agencies at censorship, to look at the aspirations and objectives of censorship? What are the many freedoms that acts of censorship online are seeking to curtail and shape?

7. With the onus of making meaning and consumption being transferred to the individual user online, the traditional notions of censorship as emerging from limited centralised sources are lost. How do we reconceptualise censorship in its many forms as a part of digital inter-personal relationships and transactions? What happens when the citizen becomes, not only an object of censorship but also an enfranchised source of censorship? How do such communities and networks of censorship operate and proliferate?