All Blogs
Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha
The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.
Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction
The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop hopes to generate dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become the visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.
The Five Monkeys & Ice-cold Water
The Indian government provides leadership, both domestically and internationally, when it comes to access to knowledge.
Accessibility of Government Websites in India: A Report
The Centre for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the publication of a report on the accessibility of government websites in India. The report is published in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Nirmita Narasimhan, Mukesh Sharma and Dinesh Kaushal are the authors.
An Introduction to the Issues in Internet Governance
That the internet cannot be governed was a central conviction of the early architects of the internet. In many ways it proved true when a majority of nation-States were kept off interference with the functioning of the internet. However with growing popularity of the internet, countries of the world are increasingly vying for control over it. This has become especially significant with the involvement of developing nations into the power struggle.
Indic Language Wikipedias – Statistical Report: January – June 2012
The following is a compilation of the statistical update of the Indic language Wikipedias from January to June 2012. The author provides perspectives on the health of various Indic language communities as well as the state of various Indic language Wikipedias during the period.
Kannada Wiki Workshop at Tumkur University
Tumkur University, Karnataka hosted a Kannada Wiki Workshop on September 15, 2012. This was the first Kannada Wikipedia workshop at Tumkur.
Analyzing the Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism and Rioting Edition) Part II
Snehashish Ghosh does a further analysis of the leaked list of the websites blocked by the Indian Government from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 (“leaked list”).
Pervasive Technologies: Access to Knowledge in the Marketplace — CIS’s Upcoming A2K Research Initiative
Pervasive technologies have flooded the Indian market and are changing the ways in which the average Indian accesses knowledge but very little is understood about these technologies, particularly when it comes to their legality. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) plans to begin a research project that aims to understand how pervasive technologies interact with Intellectual Property laws and what can be done to protect these technologies from being labelled “illegal” and eradicated from the Asian market.
One. Zero.
The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak. So sophisticated is this network of digital infrastructure that we forget how our languages of connection are constantly being transcribed in binary code, allowing for the information to be transmitted across the web.
Changing Our Game
Adopting 'co-ordination models' like the Stag Hunt could reduce contention and improve outcomes.
SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech
If you could text just one or two people in a day, who would you choose? Many of us have had to make this choice thanks to the order limiting us to five texts a day. Short Message Service (SMS) is not used primarily to send staccato messages like the telegraph was.
India's Internet Jam
As authorities continue to clamp down on digital freedom, politicians and corporations are getting a taste for censorship too. Pranesh Prakash reports.
To regulate Net intermediaries or not is the question
Given the disruption to public order caused by the mass exodus of North-Eastern Indians from several cities, the government has had for the first time in many years, a legitimate case to crackdown on Internet intermediaries and their users.
Social media, SMS are not why NE students left Bangalore
I woke up one morning to find that I was living in a city of crisis. Bangalore, where the largest public preoccupations to date have been about bad roads, stray dogs, and occasionally, the lack of night-life, the city was suddenly a space that people wanted to flee and occupy simultaneously.
What lurks beneath the Network
There is a series of buzzwords that have become a naturalised part of discussions around digital social media—participation, collaboration, peer-2-peer, mobilisation, etc. Especially in the post Arab Spring world (and our own home-grown Anna Hazare spectacles), there is this increasing belief in the innate possibilities of social media as providing ways by which the world as we know it shall change for the better. Young people are getting on to the streets and demanding their rights to the future.
Censoring the Internet: A brief manual
Blocking websites on the Internet should be proportionate to harm they intend. However, the government of India's approach is against the principles of natural justice.
Analysing Latest List of Blocked Sites (Communalism & Rioting Edition)
Pranesh Prakash does preliminary analysis on a leaked list of the websites blocked from August 18, 2012 till August 21, 2012 by the Indian government.
The Perils of 'Hactivism'
Civil disobedience includes accepting the penalty for breaking the law. Untraceable hackers are far removed from this ethic.
Decision Analysis for Interest Rates - II
India needs to make practical choices that prioritise growth. This is the second column. The previous column was published in the Business Standard on July 5, 2012. It explained how lower interest rates could improve growth by increasing net profits.
