Pathways to Higher Education

Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai

Larissa Hjorth and Genevieve Bell — 2015-10-24T13:41:47Z

From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.

The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition. The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and pervasive.

As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011). However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011) area of the everyday.

Locating the Mobile seeks to address this knowledge gap by undertaking close studies of locative media in three locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both developed and developing contexts.

These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller & Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping new narratives of place.

Locating the Mobile seeks to collect and analyse some of the emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:

Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.
Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.
Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.
Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.

By bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art towards nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices.

Significance and Innovation

The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth 2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.

Locating the Mobile is original in its topic, method, outcomes and industry collaboration. Firstly, it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies internationally to explore locative media over time in specific locations. Secondly, it deploys a variety of methods (such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone, iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D) (Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or Eurocentric in focus. Thirdly, through multi-site analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and transnationalism. Fourthly, by pioneering the first multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual, group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of significance and innovation. We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media. In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility, migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive, the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’ generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media; the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace, the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media, ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and Shanghai—exploring locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place.

We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is, data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan University,

Locating the Mobile seeks to contextualise the research in terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies (see below for more details).

We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth 2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications (apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased accessibility to augmented
reality (AR). Instead of replacing the analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up ‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative media augment and simulate in everyday practices.

We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream, questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of ‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and consumption, the Asia-Pacific.

National Research Priorities: With the rise of smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned. And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals, communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative, cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.

Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile

Mrutyunjay Mishra - India Online: Measuring, Understanding, and Making Decisions about Internet in India (Delhi, September 01, 6 pm)

sumandro — 2017-08-29T10:18:51Z

With great pleasure we announce that Mrutyunjay Mishra, co-founder of Juxt-SmartMandate and India Open Data Association, will be the speaker for the September #FirstFriday event at the CIS office in Delhi. Mrutyunjay is a recognised expert in data-driven decision-making and a leading commentator on Indian consumer behaviour. His talk will focus on the evolution of measurement of users and activities in the Indian telecommunication and online market sectors, and will highlight the critical challenges and opportunities faced by public and private entities in reliably and timely measuring, understanding, and making commercial and policy decisions about 'India Online'. If you are joining us, please RSVP at the soonest as we have only limited space in our office.

Mrutyunjay Mishra

Co-founder, Juxt-SmartMandate, and co-founder, India Open Data Association

Mrutyunjay is a recognised expert in data-driven decision-making and a leading commentator on Indian consumer behaviour. At Juxt Smart Mandate he oversees key account management, custom solution development, new product development, alliances, and ready-to-go market initiatives.

In his career spanning more than 20+ years, Mrutyunjay co-founded JuxtConsult and successfully merged it with Smart Mandate. Prior to that, he worked in a number of leading organisations including IMRB International (Kantar, WPP), IDC India (IDG Group), Convergys India Services, Annik Systems (Quatrro) and ASHA (a rural development NGO).

At various points in his career, he headed large volume data analytics, consumer research, strategic business research, quality projects, usability studies and change management projects. He has had considerable exposure to projects in a diversity of domains – ICT, media, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), pharma, healthcare, consultancy services, government, social development and public administration. He boasts functional consulting experience in implementing dashboards and reporting solutions in enterprise resource planning (ERP) environments.

He is involved in other compelling initiatives around analytics-driven health solutions, learning over education, digital marketing, and sustainable livelihood. He is the founding member of Centre for Marketing in Emerging Economies (CMEE) at IIM, Lucknow, an academic initiative to produce original research and attract collaboration for marketing theory creation. He is also the founding member of two other open sandbox projects, India Open Data Association (IODA) a non-profit company ‘to create, incubate, support and promote sustainable open data projects’ and Janwaar Castle Community Organisation (JCCO), a unique ‘initiative around learning over education and sustainable livelihood’.

He spent his formative years in Sambalpur (a small town in Odisha) University Campus, where his father was a professor. He is a graduate in commerce and a postgraduate in advertising and marketing. He loves dogs, likes reading, is a movie buff, collects stamps and matchboxes, enjoys being a weekend cook and likes travelling.

Twiter: @M2Od

RSVP

Location

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/firstfridayatcis-mrutyunjay-mishra-india-online-measuring-understanding-and-making-decisions-about-internet-in-india-delhi-sep-01

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

The Rules of Engagement

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:48:54Z

Why the have-nots of the digital world can sometimes be mistaken as trolls. I am not sure if you have noticed, but lately, the people populating our social networks have started to be more diverse than before.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on October 29, 2012.

Oh, sure, we are still talking about a fairly middle-class hang-out that happens largely in English and is restricted to people in urban environments who have the economic and cultural capital of access. But if you browse through your friends’ lists and compare it with, say, the network from five years ago, you will realise that the age demography has changed quite dramatically. I am not suggesting that the Web was only the realm of the young – let us face it, the people who actually created the infrastructure of the Web were not tiny tots. However, with Web 2.0 at the turn of the millennium, we have had an extraordinary focus on young people online.

But as the networks grow to include more people, there are now a lot of people online, who might not be the 16-year-old BlackBerry-wielding digital native, nor be in the “business of internet” but are finding a space for themselves, tentatively and steadily negotiating with this new space. Some of it might be because, those of us who were new kids on the block in the Nineties, are now older by a decade and are still on the block, but replaced by newer kids around the block. Some of it might be because there is an ease of access as portable computing devices grow more personal and get more people to use their smartphones as a gateway into the online worlds. But a lot of it is actually because the fold of the Web is expanding. The digital spaces of conversation are being integrated into our everyday lives and practices, replacing older forms of media and information structures and processes of social and cultural belonging.

And so, even though the penetration of the interwebz is not as rapid in countries like India as one would have hoped for, we do see a wide age group of people coming online, forming networks, and entering into conversations. I hadn’t really realised this, even though I was adding them to my social networks, that the digital immigrants are now here, and they are here to stay. It suddenly surfaced in my thoughts, because I recently heard a few narratives which made me dwell on the effort and the learning that one takes for granted but is a prerequisite for belonging to these new social spaces.

One of the first complaints I heard was about a hostility that many digital immigrants face when they start engaging with the social media. They follow the manuals. They read the FAQs. They look at patterns, and learn. And yet, even when they seem to be doing what seems to be exactly what everybody else is doing, they are often told that they got it all wrong. This is bewildering for many, because they cannot really see the difference. And the reason is that the social web is governed by a whole lot of unwritten rules and codes, which clearly are the rites of passage into the online world. These are not things that can be taught. These are not written in a guideline that tells you how to behave on Facebook or how to sift through the live-streams on Twitter. It is a fiercely guarded set of dos and don’ts which clearly distinguish between the digital natives and the digital immigrants, reinforcing exclusivity and exclusion. And when the digital immigrant violates these rules, they are often faced with a sneer, a sarcastic comment, or a dismissal as “not with it”.

The second thing I have repeatedly noticed is “calling troll” to people who do not always know these rules. Trolling is not new to the world of the internet. People who disrupt conversations and discussions by posting provocative or tangential information, by voicing hateful opinions, by passing harsh judgments, or sometimes by willfully breaking the rules of the communities, in order to seek attention and interrupt the flow of conversations are called trolls. Trolls are universally frowned upon and trolling wars often take up epic proportions because people get emotionally invested in them. Trolls are often shamed publicly, their mistakes brought into an embarrassing spot-light and ridiculed in back-channels or even in public discussions.

Calling somebody a troll presumes that the user is conversant with the rules of the game and is then breaking them, working with the idea that if you are online, you are naturally a digital native. The digital immigrants often create noob mistakes that can appear troll-like but are not intended to be so, and are often on the receiving end of a community’s hostility. And it is time, now that our online networks are growing, for us to realise that our presumptions about who is online need to change. If we are looking at an inclusive Web, we need to stop imagining that the person on the other side of the interface is necessarily like us, and develop new networks of nurture, which allows the digital immigrants safe spaces to experiment, make mistakes, and learn like the best of us. The next time, before you call somebody a troll, see if it might just be somebody learning the tricks of the trade. If they are doing something wrong, just politely point it out to them. And remember, acceptance is not only for people who are like us, but about people who are markedly unlike us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement

Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World

praskrishna — 2013-03-21T10:32:40Z

This conference to be held from March 27 to 29, 2013 is being organized by Trans - Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National university of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University.

Click to read about the conference published on the website Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute

Nishant Shah will be participating in this event as part of our collaboration with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies consortium, to launch a new research cluster around trans-cine-media in the global context along with Kim SoYoung and Earl Jackson. He will speak on "The Asian Intercourse : Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ In networks".

The conference is a response to what we see as a new epistemic shift, a new possibility for the reading of Korean cinema and Korean media texts. The previous “discovery” or “acceptance” of Im Kwon-Taek at Cannes, and the ambivalent Japanese obsession with “Winter Sonata” are moments in a recognition of Korean textual achievements that, at best, maintain a hierarchical (and highly circumscribed) “tolerance” of Korean cultural production. The subsequent achievements of other directors such as Pak Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk deepened and expanded the hermeneutic situation internationally – a tendency that has continued in recent European conferences dedicated to Korean auteurs and most recently, Kim Ki-duk’s receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Moreover, Korean transformations of Japanese media texts have advanced a new kind of alchemical conversation across media that engages both the present and the past in new, multi-vocal ways. Beyond these mass-media events that can capture the attention of journalists, is the years of work of the scholars involved with the decentering of film history and canon in the work of scholars such the late Paul Willemen. And in addition to the “external” legitimation of the international film festival circuit are the internal developments within Korean cinema – namely the recent resurgence of a vital and engaged independent cinema – in both fiction documentary films. These events create an environment in which we can return anew to Korean cinema- past, present, and future – to read and realize in ways not-here-to-fore possible.

These readings will include taking Korean cinema seriously on its own terms, but also to set Korean cinema in dialogue with other East Asian Cinemas in a global context.

The outcome of the conference will be contributed to the project entitled as “A Compendium of History of Korean Cinema” sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea.

Click to download the full program.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts

Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:54:21Z

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.

THE CULTURAL LAST MILE

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

The Argument:

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 policy designed for local implementation actually reaches its intended beneficiaries without distortion. The immense link between communication theory and democracy thereby defines not only the Indian state’s historic dependence on technologies 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.

One consequence is an evolutionary 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).

The Research Project

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.

The project is split into three parts:
(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.
(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.
(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.

References:

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1990), ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 19 (May): 33–52.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1999), ‘The Judgement: Re-Forming the Public’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 32–33 (April)

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.

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1

The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T10:55:07Z

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.

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.

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.

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:

PDF
Word

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem

Production Sprint — A Public Exhibition at CIS

praskrishna — 2015-10-24T14:23:30Z

The Making Change project invites you for a public exhibition of stories of change from all over Asia, where the first of its Production Sprints will take place. The exhibition will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) office in Bangalore on June 7, 2014 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Download the event flier [PDF, 402 Kb]

What does 'Making Change' mean to you? What are the processes of change? The infrastructure of change? The actors of change? A round-table discussion and exhibition by 23 change makers from 15 countries in Asia, at the Centre for Internet & Society, Saturday, 7th June, 5 - 7 p.m. Please do come.

The Making Change project questions traditional understandings of change –where change is employed in the name of power, reduced to a ‘spectacle’ by global media and goes largely unquestioned in the public discourse- and aims to build more adequate frameworks to address the idea of change in the context of common knowledge, networked media and information societies.

Making Change is hosting focused, intensive, and production-oriented workshops called Production Sprints to facilitate the convergence of actors and ideas.These will be spaces of knowledge exchange between change-makers around processes, narratives and experiences of change and of experimentation with multi-modal forms and formats of knowledge production (text, image, sound, etc). Participants will be asked to group around four topics: concepts, crises ecologies and networks of change. These visions and practices, we hope will produce new ways of thinking about change.

During the Bangalore production sprint, we will document the various knowledges acquired through the pre-production stage and the 5 day intensive sessions on formats, storytelling and visual presentation modes; and we will close with an exhibition of the resulting narratives of change. We invite you to come and participate in the exhibition.

Date: June 7th, 2014
Time: 5pm- 7pm
Location: The Center for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis

January 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2017-03-01T06:00:37Z

Welcome to the January 2017 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Dear readers,

We are pleased to bring you the Centre for Internet & Society's January newsletter. Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPD) Act, which was passed in December 2016, seeks to give effect to the rights and obligations enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities, which India signed and ratified nearly a decade ago. Nirmita Narasimhan in a blog entry has summarized the key provisions of the Act relating to digital accessibility. The latest judgment in the matter of Super Cassettes v. MySpace is a landmark and progressive ruling, which strengthens the safe harbor immunity enjoyed by Internet intermediaries in India. CIS was one of the intervenors in the case, and has been duly acknowledged in the judgment. Meena Gayathri became the first South Indian Wikiwoman to complete 100 Wikidays challenge. The challenge required Wikipedians to create one new article per day for one hundred days in a row. Gayathri's contribution and passion towards Telugu language and culture have transcended into a "knowledge revolution". The Committee on Digital Payments constituted by the Ministry of Finance and chaired by Ratan P. Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog, submitted its report on the "Medium Term Recommendations to Strengthen Digital Payments Ecosystem" on December 09, 2016. The report was made public on December 27, and comments were sought from the general public. CIS submitted its comments. The comments were authored by Sumandro Chattopadhyay. ICANN sought community input on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy on 7 November 2016. In response to this CIS submitted its comments. The comments were authored by Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda. The eleven sessions selected for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) to be held at the IIIT Bangalore campus during March 3-5, 2017 has been announced. The conference is being organised by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore and CIS.

CIS in the news

India’s Digital ID Rollout Collides With Rickety Reality (Gabriele Parussini; Wall Street Journal; January 13, 2017).
Millions of Indians move from cash to digital payments. But some ask whether it’s safe (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; January 14, 2017).
Sunil Abraham on Aadhaar's misuse during demonetisation (Economic Times; January 14, 2017)
The soon-to-be launched Aadhaar Pay will let you make purchases using your fingerprint (Indulekha Aravind; January 15, 2017).
Lost your phone? Here's how you can make your mobile theft-proof (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; January 16, 2017).
The Dangers Of Aadhaar-Based Payments That No One Is Talking About (Mayank Jain; Bloomberg; January 17, 2017).
Supreme Court issues notice to WhatsApp, Centre on data privacy (MJ Antony, Ayan Pramanik and Apurva Venkat; Business Standard; January 17, 2017).
Demonetisation: Cost Vs Benefit (NDTV; December 24, 2016). Sunil Abraham took part in the Big Fight programme aired by NDTV. The video was published on January 17, 2017.
For India’s complaints department, visit Facebook Live (Amy Kazmin; Financial Times; January 23, 2017).

CIS members wrote the following articles:

Cashlessness Needs Connectivity (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017).
Digital Native: The Dream of the Cyborg (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 8, 2017).
Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently? (Zeenab Aneez; London School of Economics and Political Science; January 16, 2017).
Digital native: Back at it Again (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 22, 2017).

Jobs

Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)
Internship - Application accepted throughout the year
Survey Participants for Research on Musician Livelihood

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Accessibility & Inclusion
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India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here.

Blog Entry

Digital accessibility in the Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act 2016 (Nirmita Narasimhan; January 23, 2017).

Participation in Event

Workplace Solutions Champions Consultative Workshop (Organized by Enable India, January 21 - 22, 2017; Ecumenical Christian Centre, Bangalore). Nirmita Narasimhan attended the workshop.

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Access to Knowledge
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Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

►Copyright and Patent

Blog Entry

Super Cassettes v. MySpace (Redux) (Anubha Sinha; January 16, 2017).

Event Organized

Seminar on Rethinking Copyright and Licensing for Digital Publishing Today (Organized by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, and CIS; New Delhi; January 23, 2017). Anubha Sinha attended the event.

►Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

WikiSangamotsavam 2016 (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Hyderabad Book Fair (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Rajahmundry Book Fair (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).
Mini Workshop on Tools: Wikipedia Monthly Meetup, Hyderabad (Manasa Rao and Pavan Santhosh; January 18, 2017).
Meet Telugu Wikipedian Surampudi Meena Gayathri – the first South Indian Wikiwoman completing 100 Wikidays Challenge (Ting-Yi Chang; January 23, 2017).

Event Organized

Odia Wikipedia and Orientation Training Programme (Organized by CIS-A2K team; Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal; January 31, 2017).

►Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Participation in Event

CBGA - Consultation on Opening Up Access to Budget Data in India (Organized by CBGA; January 27, 2017; New Delhi). Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a speaker.

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Internet Governance
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As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

►Privacy

Submission

Comments on the Report of the Committee on Digital Payments (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Amber Sinha; January 12, 2017).

Blog Entries

The Design & Technology behind India’s Surveillance Programmes (Udbhav Tiwari; January 20, 2017)
Workshop on ‘Privacy after Big Data’ (Amber Sinha; January 27, 2017).

Events Organized

Discussion on Ranking Digital Rights in India (India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi; January 7, 2017).
Rankathon on Digital Rights (CIS office, New Delhi; January 8, 2017).

Participation in Events

Global Governance Futures 2027 - Session 3 (Organized by Global Public Policy Institute and supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung; New Delhi; January 17, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay joined Ankhi Das (Facebook) and Arun Mohan Sukumar (Observer Research Foundation) to discuss the "data governance" scenarios developed by the GGF 2027 Fellows.
CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection) 2017 (Organized by Privacy International; Brussels, January 26, 2017). Amber Sinha participated as a panelist.

►Big Data

Blog Entry

New Media, personalisation and the role of algorithms (Amber Sinha; January 2, 2017).

Participation in Events

Training programme for Chairs, Convenor and Experts for International Standardization Work (Organized by National Institute of Training for Standardization, under the Bureau of India Standards; January 19 - 20, 2017; NOIDA). Udbhav Tiwari attended the training programme.
Seminar on Understanding Financial Technology, Cashless India, and Forced Digitalisation (Centre for Financial Accountability; New Delhi; January 24, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay spoke on the emerging architecture of FinTech in India.

►Free Speech & Expression

Submission

Comments on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy (Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda; January 13, 2017).

Blog Entry

Social Media Monitoring (Amber Sinha; January 13, 2017).

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Telecom
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CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:

Article

Cashlessness Needs Connectivity (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; January 5, 2017).

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Researchers at Work
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The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Event

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selected Sessions (Organized by Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy and CIS; IIIT, Bangalore; March 3 - 5, 2017). Eleven sessions have received 10 or more nominations.

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

► Follow us elsewhere

Twitter: http://twitter.com/cis_india
Twitter - Access to Knowledge: https://twitter.com/CISA2K
Twitter - Information Policy: https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy
Facebook - Access to Knowledge: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k
E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
E-Mail - Researchers at Work: raw@cis-india.org
List - Researchers at Work: https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers

► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2017-newsletter

Digital native: Back at it Again

nishant — 2017-02-02T15:04:46Z

The Indian digital landscape has put us in a loop of hashtags and outrage, a space where we have mastered the art of shame.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 22, 2017.

Writing a regular column is daunting. One of the things that I constantly have to check is that I am not repeating myself. At the same time, in the digital age where all memory has become storage, and all that is stored is quickly forgotten, I also hope that what I write has life beyond the first few clicks, the Sunday morning coffee, the shares and likes that mark the beginning of the end of digital information.

However, as I write the column this new year, I find myself in a strange situation where I am repeating what I have done the last three years at the beginning of each new year, and where I am desperately wishing that things I had last written became dated. Three years ago, while commenting on the Indian digital landscape, I had written about the rage, the fury, and the almost deafening battle cry that had captured the national imagination, when, at the turn of the year, a young woman we named Nirbhaya lost her life to violent sexual abuse on a moving bus in Delhi. #NeverAgain, we tweeted. #AlwaysRemember, we chanted. We called her #OurBraveheart and, in that moment of national outcry and dialogue about gender and sexual abuse in our public spaces, it seemed as if the digital landscape was reflecting a pivotal change in the fabric of the country.

The year after that, as we struggled to find ways in which law can keep us safe, the apex court in India re-criminalised homosexuality, reverting the judgment of the Delhi High Court which had given life and dignity to same sex and queer couples. The legal system proved that it is not only blind but also susceptible to mass populism that denies the rights to consenting adults to live their lives in dignity. That was the year when we hashtagged our solidarity with #NoGoingBack, making it trend so that umpteen number of people came out in support of homosexuality in the country. Support to the queer community came from unexpected quarters, like the generally reticent Bollywood celebrities who supported #Scrap377, and even religious and political representatives who recognise that the continued abuse of queer communities is a violation of our constitutional rights.

While the struggles for gender and sexual equality continue in the country, and tireless activists and civil society advocates persist in their demands of justice and protection, here we are, waking up to yet another year of public shame and private grief, as reports came of the aggressive sexual abuse that women had to endure on the streets of Bangalore. The incident unfolded with all the trappings of victim blaming, slut shaming, and a sentence that should never be allowed — “She was asking for it.” On the digital social web, in the meantime, some sanctimonious men, indignant at the thought of being accused of patriarchal silence and misogynist privilege, decided to take attention away from the victims and decided to steal the spotlight with a hashtag that says #NotAllMen. These tweeters, who have no problem in enjoying the benefits of an abusive sexist social order — they might not actively go out to inflict gendered violence, but they are complicit in enjoying the privileges of that system — had a problem with taking responsibility for that system. They would not be shamed. Not even when an overwhelming number of women wrote back with #YesAllWomen, would they concede their grounds.

As it occurs so often on the Interwebz, the conversation that demanded both a private reflection and a public dialogue, devolved into personal name calling and collective anger deflected from the problem at hand. In the midst of the sensationalism that passes off as discussion in populist media channels, I want to think of something else. If all these voices in our public discourse were to be heard, it would feel like gendered and sexual safety are national preoccupations and bipartisan concerns. The customised expressions of our personalised media abound with anger, shame, critique, and analyses of why our country is increasingly becoming unsafe for certain bodies to walk through it. Social media accounts are producing a spectacle of concern for safety so effectively that it would seem these questions will be resolved immediately.

And yet, even as I look at my biographical history of writing this column, I realised that I have revisited these discussions over and over again. This is a debate that now occurs regularly, each time, giving us the chance to identify a problem, go online and make a lot of noise about it, and then settle down, with a smug smile on our faces of having done our public performance, without ever translating it into action. On the digital web, we seem to have mastered the art of shame without guilt. We continue to hashtag, like, tweet, share, and click our ways, using prepackaged formulae of expression without translating it into personal reflection or collective action. And the digital seems to be enabling this where having an opinion seems to matter more than actual transformation, and spectacles of shame seem to acquit us of the responsibility of action.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again

Combinations and Competition: Why the draft DCB must account for digital mergers and acquisitions

Abhineet Nayyar and Isha Suri — 2024-08-08T07:47:01Z

Authored by Abhineet Nayyar and Isha Suri, reviewed by Nishant

“It is better to buy than to compete”

Mark Zuckerberg (Meta CEO, 2008)[1]

Mergers and Acquisitions (collectively, M&As or Combinations) have been a common practice in industry consolidation for many years now. In fact, as Zuckerberg’s infamous quote suggests, it might be one of the central pillars of today’s internet economy. The recently announced $1.5 billion merger between Reliance Industries and Disney, which, among other things, aims to combine their streaming services – Jio Platforms and Hotstar, respectively – is just another instance of this growing trend.[2] Data on market activity suggests that far from being an outlier, M&As are becoming commonplace in the Indian technology ecosystem as well - a trend likely to continue and increase unless market regulators intervene.

Built on direct and indirect network effects, digital markets are susceptible to concentration in the hands of a few dominant platforms. In addition to potentially anti-competitive practices that these platforms are likely to engage in such as deep discounting, they often use ‘strategic investments and partnerships’ with their competitors or other firms in their supply chains to further consolidate their position in the market. Examples include but are not limited to Facebook’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion, its 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion, or even its 2020 investment of $5.7 billion in Reliance Industries’ Jio – a partnership that positions itself at “bringing together JioMart, Jio’s small-business initiative, with WhatsApp”.[3][4][5][6] Through similar transactions, dominant players are in a position to foreclose competition and further entrench their position as market leaders.

In 2022, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on “Anti-Competitive Practices by BigTech Companies” also highlighted ‘killer acquisitions’ in India’s digital markets as one of the many concerning anti-competitive practices.[7] As per the Standing Committee, in the choice between ‘Build versus Buy’, “large platforms tend to pick the latter, thereby disallowing smaller firms to grow beyond a certain limit.” [8] However, the Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL), specifically formed to look into competition-related concerns in digital markets, chose to exclude this particular anti-competitive practice from the ambit of its proposed Digital Competition Bill (Draft DCB). Moreover, the CDCL explains this choice by pointing to the Competition [Amendment] Act, 2023, which theoretically allows the Competition Commission of India (CCI) to review more M&As.

But this justification is only partial.[9] While the 2023 Amendment tries to answer the question “Are the right digital M&As being regulated by CCI?”, it ignores the more pertinent “Are the right principles being deployed to review digital M&As?”.

In this context, the first section of this article provides an overview of conventional M&A regulation in India and underlines prominent trends in the process. This is followed by an inquiry into the evolution of digital combinations in India, and their treatment by CCI. We conclude the piece by recommending CCI incorporate more accurate and relevant theories of harm for digital mergers – a practice that competition authorities have incorporated in other jurisdictions such as the EU’s Digital Markets Act, the UK’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Bill and the 2022 guidelines released by Singapore’s Competition and Consumer Commission.[10]

Reviewing Combinations for Anti-competitiveness

M&As, including digital mergers, are governed through Sections 5 and 6 of the Competition Act, 2002 [Act] and the Combination Regulations, 2011. The Act lays out many key elements in this respect, including defining ‘Combinations’ - referred to a sub-group of M&As that qualify certain threshold values and are required to notify CCI about their existence.[11] In addition, the Act also empowers the CCI to evaluate and adjudicate on these combinations.[12]

Typically, a qualified combination – including a merger, an acquisition, or an investment that meets the threshold criteria – must notify the CCI of the relevant transaction.[13] Following this notification, as per the rules, the Commission conducts a thorough review of the anti-competitive effects of the proposed combinations. Once complete, the CCI is empowered to either approve or reject the transaction. Overall, the CCI primarily assesses the combination based on its effect on the competition structure of the relevant market. In cases where the CCI is satisfied that such adverse effects can be eliminated by suitable modification, it may approve the combination with modifications. Conversely, the Commission might also pursue an investigation against a combination that has failed to notify it of the relevant transaction.

It is important to note that not every M&A requires notification and approval from the Commission and depends on whether that particular transaction qualifies the threshold values set under Section 5 of the Act.[14] With massive digitisation underway across all sectors of the Indian economy, concerns about how these threshold values affect scrutiny of digital mergers – which usually didn’t qualify – have drawn focus in recent years.[15] Deals such as Facebook’s 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp, which evaded the regulator’s scrutiny since it failed to meet the qualifying thresholds, have also uncovered the need for newer ‘theories of harm’ that can be used to govern such combinations adequately [more on this later].[16]

Digital M&As and Limitations of the Status Quo

According to data released by CCI in its annual reports, the Commission reviewed 99 combination notices in 2022-23, an increase from 90 during the previous year.[17] Out of these 99, the Commission approved 92 such combinations in 2022-23, up from 89 in 2021-22.[18] However, it is pertinent to note that none of these combination notices were rejected by the Commission. In fact, CCI has not rejected any of the 400+ combination notices filed with it in the last five years.[19]

Furthermore, research undertaken by Deloitte suggests that there were more than 160 mergers or acquisitions in India in 2022-23.[20] This disparity between CCI’s figures and market estimates can largely be attributed to the threshold requirements under the 2002 Act. Taking into account that over 36% of these 160+ M&A deals are estimated to be in the ‘Technology, Media and Telecommunications’ industry, it is reasonable to assume that ‘asset-light’ digital combinations continue to escape the Commission’s scrutiny.[21] This is a risk because despite failing to meet the threshold values set under the 2002 Act, many deals are still significant in their scale. For example, Reliance Industries group, which also owns the telecom giant Jio, single-handedly accounted for eight (8) digital acquisitions in 2019.[22]

The Commission’s high approval rate, coupled with its inability to appropriately scrutinise such digital M&As, led to the government seeking modifications to India’s competition law.[23] In 2023, following the recommendations of the 2019 Competition Law Review Committee, the Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023 [or ‘the 2023 Amendment’] was passed.[24] Among other changes, the 2023 Amendment included “value of transaction” as one of the threshold measures for triggering the notifying clause.[25] This meant that even if a merger did not satisfy the ‘asset’ or ‘turnover’ threshold values, it could still be deemed a combination if the value of the transaction exceeded ₹2000 cr.[26] However, the impact of the 2023 Amendment on CCI’s future rulings is yet to be seen.

Thereafter in 2023, the Government of India constituted the CDCL “to examine the need for a separate law on competition in digital markets”, including a framework similar to the EU’s Digital Markets Act.[27][28] However, unlike the US, the EU, the UK, or Singapore – jurisdictions that the CDCL referred to during its deliberations – it explicitly excluded ‘mergers and acquisitions’ from the draft bill’s scope, instead relying solely on the 2023 Amendment.[29] But the intended objectives of the 2023 Amendment and the proposed DCB are entirely different. While deal value thresholds aim to address the ‘threshold value’ problem to include more deals under merger review, they provide no guidance that can help adapt the merger review process to the context of digital markets.

Adopting Accurate and Relevant Theories of Harm

Established theories of harm lie at the core of any merger review process, with the competition regulator relying on them to assess potential damage to competition. Traditionally, if merging parties are neither competitors (horizontal) nor trading relationships (vertical), their combinations are usually not subject to strict enforcement under the conventional merger review regime.[30][31] As a result, traditional theories of harm focus on the risk that the post-merger firm will ‘bundle’ or ‘tie’ the pre-merger firms’ products together. In contrast, many inherent characteristics of digital markets – such as network effects and low marginal costs – have been found to exacerbate the gaps in these outdated theories of harm.[32][33] While network effects allow first movers to access a positive feedback loop and become dominant in digital markets, they also incentivise mergers between competitors because an increase in the network of users is likely to generate further returns.[34]

Take the case of ‘platform envelopment’, for example, where a platform dominant in one market i.e., ‘the origin market’, enters another platform market i.e., ‘the target market’ – through a merger or an acquisition – and bundles its original functionality with that of its newly acquired platform in the target market.[35] As a prominent example of this theory, Google entered mobile operating systems by bundling Android with Google Search – two separate markets – to leverage the data generated by users of both. Such data was effectively monetized through Google’s online advertising platforms, thereby enabling the firm to fund its entry in a way that could not be replicated by other competitors and contributed to its eventual dominance of the mobile operating system market.[36] However, recognising envelopment and using other such theories of harm requires an understanding of platform characteristics, the impact of direct and indirect network effects, and the role of data in enabling platform monopolisation – all of which the draft DCB seeks to do.[37]

As highlighted earlier, many other jurisdictions have also updated or are in the process of updating their merger guidelines to incorporate these newer theories of harm. For instance, the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC) amended its merger guidelines in 2019 to address the competitive concerns of conglomerate mergers, especially in digital markets. This allows the JFTC to consider factors such as network effects, the value of data, and the importance of marginal costs while reviewing digital combinations.[38]

With M&A activity in India’s digital sector also bound to witness an upward trend, we reiterate that merger review for digital markets should account for many of these characteristics that are likely to amplify the shortcomings of traditional theories of harm. This requires the CDCL to modify the draft DCB accordingly or, at the very least, for the CCI to publish detailed guidelines on reviewing digital M&As, accounting for more evolved theories of harm.

[1]FTC v. Facebook, Inc, FTC Amended Complaint, 2021, p. 1, available here

[2]Reliance and Disney team up to crush Netflix and Prime Video in India, Rest of World, March 2024, available here

[3]The Inside Story of How Facebook Acquired Instagram, OneZero, August 2020, available here

[4]India seeks to tighten rules on M&A antitrust scrutiny, Reuters, 2022, available here

[5]CCI approves acquisition of approximately 9.99% of Jio Platforms by Facebook, AZB and Partners, 2020, available here

[6]Facebook Invests $5.7 Billion in Indian Internet Giant Jio, The New York Times, April 2020, available here

[7]Parliamentary Standing Committee on Anti-Competitive Practices by BigTech Companies, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, p. 8, available here

[8]Parliamentary Standing Committee on Anti-Competitive Practices by BigTech Companies, Ministry of Corporate Affairs, p. 8, available here

[9]Comments to the Draft Digital Competition Bill, 2024, Nayyar, A., Suri, I., and Bedi, P., Centre for Internet and Society, May 2024, p. 20-22, available here

[10]Singapore: Competition law fact sheet, Norton Rose Fulbright, April 2024, available here

[11]The Competition Act, 2002, Government of India, p. 8, available here

[12]The Competition Act, 2002, Government of India, p. 12, available here

[13]Combination FAQs, Competition Commission of India, available here

[14]The Competition Act, 2002, Government of India, p. 8, available here

[15]Big Data Mergers: Bridging the Gap for an Effective Merger Control Framework, Tyagi, K., May 2021, p. 34, available here

[16]India seeks to tighten rules on M&A antitrust scrutiny, Reuters, 2022, available here

[17]Annual Reports, Competition Commission of India, available here

[18]Annual Reports, Competition Commission of India, available here

[19]Annual Reports, Competition Commission of India, available here

[20]India’s M&A Trends 2023, Deloitte, 2023, available here

[21]India’s M&A Trends 2023, Deloitte, 2023, available here

[22]2019 In Review: Top 10 High-Profile Startup Acquisitions In India, Inc42, 2019, available here

[23]India seeks to tighten rules on M&A antitrust scrutiny, Reuters, 2022, available here

[24]The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023, Government of India, available here

[25]The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023, Government of India, available here

[26]The Competition (Amendment) Act, 2023, Government of India, available here

[27]Unstarred question No. 81, Government of India, Lok Sabha, December 2023, available here

[28]The Digital Markets Act Proposal of the European Commission: Ex-ante Regulation, Infused with Competition Principles, European Papers, 2021, available here

[29]Report of the Committee on Digital Competition Law, Government of India, 2024, p. 151 onwards, available here

[30]A note on conglomerate mergers: The Google/Fitbit case, Nakagawa, K. and Matsushima, N., Japan and the World Economy, Volume 67, 2023, 101203, ISSN 0922-1425, available here

[31]Executive Summary of the Roundtable on Conglomerate effects of mergers, OECD, June 2020, available here

[32]Executive Summary of the Roundtable on Conglomerate effects of mergers, OECD, June 2020, available here

[33]Tying and bundling in the digital era, Holzweber, S., European Competition Journal, October 2018, available here

[34]Horizontal mergers, cost savings, and network effects, Cosnita-Langlias, A. and Rasch, A., Bulletin of Economic Research, April 2018, available here

[35]Harnessing Platform Envelopment in the Digital World, Condorelli, Daniele; Padilla, Jorge, Journal of Competition Law & Economics, 00(00), 1-45, 2020, available here

[36] Harnessing Platform Envelopment in the Digital World, Condorelli, Daniele; Padilla, Jorge, Journal of Competition Law & Economics, 00(00), 1-45, 2020, available here

[37]Summary of Discussion of the roundtable on Conglomerate Effects of Mergers, OECD, Feb 2021, available here

[38]Conglomerate effects of mergers – Note by Japan, OECD, May 2020, available here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/combinations-and-competion

Gig and platform workers’ perspectives on worker collectives

Shaik Salauddin — 2024-08-13T02:50:05Z

This report highlights findings from a survey conducted by the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union on platform workers’ perspectives around various worker collectives, particularly platform worker unions and cooperative societies. The survey was conducted with workers working for app-based platform companies like Ola, Uber, InDriver, Swiggy, Zomato, and Flipkart.

Survey report: download (PDF)

Press release: download (PDF)

To understand worker perspectives on diverse types of worker collectives, the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union conducted surveys with 79 workers, who had worked in the sector for a median of 5 years. 51% of the workers who were surveyed were members of TGPWU.

The survey findings highlight workers’ perspectives relating to the type and effectiveness of various union structures, priority of union demands, and their interest in joining cooperative societies.

This report highlights key findings from the survey, some of which detailed below:

Workers had a high preference for collective structures that are democratically owned and controlled by workers, with 75% of them expressing interest in joining a cooperative society.
Out of several worker support services that cooperative societies can offer, priority services that workers highlighted were healthcare services, insurance services, and educational support for children of members.
46% of workers each cited independent unions, and unions that were affiliated with another trade union as their preferred forms of union structures.
Around 40% of workers each found that both these forms of union structure were effective in terms of i) presenting worker demands to central and state governments, and ii) promoting worker representation and democratic participation.
66% of workers placed high importance on union demands that focus on both platforms and governments.

Contributors

Design: Annushka Jaliwala
Research conceptualisation: Shaik Salauddin
Research support and writing: Chetna V.M., Nishkala Sekhar, Chiara Furtado, Aayush Rathi

About the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union

The Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) is an independent, worker-led union founded in 2021 for gig and platform workers in Telangana, India. TGPWU has over 1,000 active members and has had over 10,000 registered members since its inception.

Contact: tgapwu@gmail.com; +91 96424 24799

Connect: Website; Twitter/X; Facebook; Telegram

The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/gig-and-platform-workers-perspectives-on-worker-collectives

Porn: Law, Video, Technology

Namita A Malhotra — 2015-04-14T12:43:14Z

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.

Namita’s approach brings film studies, technology studies, critical theory, philosophy, literature and legal studies into a document that reads as part literature review, part analysis, going deep, as a monograph should. Reading through this I was struck by the ways of seeing and writing, that a subject like pornography demands – and allows for. I found the structure of the entire piece well conceived, akin to 3D models of spirals rather than linear, much like the experience of watching itself, perhaps. Personally, I know I’m going to keep going back to this monograph for its rich references as much as for how Malhotra examines visual (con)texts across multiple disciplines. And, far from being a distant academic paper, I see how Namita has worked in and been informed by her own fond appreciation of diverse texts with useful and unusual departures into literature and philosophy.

The emphasis on amateur pornography is critical considering the pandemic of hysterical blindness that afflicts public conversations in India around this phenomenon in particular, and the Obscene more generally. A line from the monograph ‘pornography does ideological work’ stands out for me, as Namita shows how it (the monograph, amateur porn, pornography) effectively slices through the careful fabrications called Nation, Culture and Justice in particular; and also in terms of how porn constitutes particular kinds of knowing, speech and experience that reflect on the status quo of politics and of seeing/visuality. The deep engagement with the Mysore Mallige movie/case is an interesting and tender one, perhaps one of the first such in-depth analyses, and a great example of how amateur porn works and what it means.

Considering the appalling lack of insight in responding to the Obscene and the Pornographic, the messy rhetoric and outrage that result when the Pornographic is made public, when the law acts on the visual, on technology, Namita’s analysis is a sharp lens that provides much-needed rejoinders. The sections dealing with these kinds of past events – the moment of public outrage around the revelation of a piece of porn, it’s journey of creation and circulation, the public and institutional esponses to it, are really excellent analyses of a particular kind of moment in contemporary Indian society that have become (to my mind) increasingly difficult to talk about.

There can only be more sharing of this document, perhaps re-purposed, in parts, to become more accessible to communities engaged with commenting, acting and responding to the Obscene, the Visual and the Law (I say this from a perspective of utility and instrumentality that “activism” necessarily deploys, but within what is possible for cannibalisation. Also, because people don’t read) because there just isn’t enough thoughtful work on pornography in the current climate.

The monograph moves to examining the ‘being’ of the pornographic artifact as a digital image and how and why it, especially “video pornography provides a new model for relating to the mass-produced, one in which the body’s susceptibility constitutes both a yielding and a resistance to the hypnotic seduction of the image.”

I find this quote tantalising for it offers a critical perspective on pornography as a challenging politics rather than as ‘merely’ text, which is what this monograph attempts to do. To take this further and to explore the response between the visual and the human, the “something that takes place between the text and the person watching”, could be to move towards reception studies and studies of the experiencing of porn either as star/creator, fan or audience. There are fascinating possibilities here for inventive methodologies and formats in which this could be done, montage-ing academic text with visual ethnographies, online aggregation and collation of visual data and experiences, and so on. This next stage could be exciting in how it could really engage with the body of porn and its people.

Introduction by Maya Ganesh

Download the monograph here [PDF, 3.73 MB]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology

Platforming precarity: Data narratives of workers sustaining urban platform services

2024-10-15T02:42:26Z

CIS conducted quantitative surveys with over 800 workers employed in the app-based taxi and delivery sectors across 4 cities in India as part of the ‘Labour Futures’ project supported by the Internet Society Foundation. The surveys covered key employment indicators, including earnings and working hours, work-related cost burdens, income and social security, and platform policies and management. Findings from these surveys are presented as data visualisation briefs centring workers’ everyday experiences. These data briefs form a foundational evidence base for policy and action around labour rights, social protection, and urban inclusion in platform work.

It has been over a decade since app-based delivery and taxi sectors began operations in India, and have since expanded to several metropolitan and smaller cities. These sectors together account for the largest proportion of the platform workforce in India. Workers’ organising and collective action have long revealed extractive labour practices in the platform economy. Their demands call for the recognition of their labour rights by policymakers and platforms, an end to exploitative working conditions, and the introduction of effective policy that protects their rights and wellbeing.

In 2021-22, the labour research vertical at the Centre for Internet and Society conducted quantitative surveys with over 800 workers in the app-based taxi services and app-based delivery services sectors. Spanning four cities (Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Guwahati, Lucknow), the surveys gathered comprehensive data on the conditions of work in the platform economy in these cities, within its two dominant sectors.

The survey covered key labour indicators—(i) the conditions of work for workers, including recruitment, wages, incentive structures, and work-related cost burdens (ii) workforce management, including hours spent working for the platform, surveillance and control measures, and (iii) workers’ coverage under income security, social security and social protections, including provident funds, health and accident insurance, and pensions.

Key Findings

The generation of city-level data aimed to support policymaking and advocacy towards achieving just outcomes for workers in the rapidly platformising Indian economy. These survey findings speak to i) top-down approaches of regulatory, legislative, and judicial action through evidence-building, and ii) bottom-up approaches of mobilisation and advocacy campaigns of workers’ collectives.

The city-wise data briefs highlight region-specific differences and similarities shaped by histories and newer developments of labour platforms operating in the urban economy. Across the four survey cities, the data briefs reveal the ways in which precarity materialised in platform work. Workers grappled with numerous socioeconomic vulnerabilities that influenced their entry and continued employment in platform work. They faced low-wage outcomes, worsened by a reduction in bonuses, and high operational work-related expenses. Earnings remained low and uncertain despite workers putting in immensely long hours working for platforms. Worsening these burdens was widespread income insecurity that workers faced in both app-based taxi and delivery sectors.

Mapping delivery and taxi platform services across cities

The taxi services sector in all cities was dominated by two large platforms—Uber and Ola Cabs. These platforms had established a highly concentrated labour market for taxi workers. The exception to this was the taxi platform labour market in Guwahati, where the local platform, PeIndia, employed 35% of taxi workers in the city.

The delivery services sector in all cities had a high concentration of pan-India platforms. Food delivery services were concentrated by Swiggy and Zomato across cities. E-commerce delivery services had a diversity of platforms including Amazon, Flipkart, E-kart Logistics, and Shadowfax, as well as grocery delivery services like Big Basket, Dunzo, and Jio Mart.

Economic necessity and a lack of alternative employment pushing workers into precarious platform work

The pathway to precarious platform work was distress-driven, borne out of low wages in previous salaried work, or a lack of alternative employment. A large proportion of workers were previously engaged in salaried employment, who then shifted to platform work, marking increased informality and precarity in their employment status. In Mumbai, over 64% of workers were in salaried employment previously, and this also the case for over 50% of workers in Guwahati, and over 42% of workers in Delhi-NCR. In Lucknow and Delhi-NCR, pandemic-driven unemployment was a key driver for a staggering proportion of workers who joined platform work as a distress employment source. Over 30% of workers in Lucknow and Delhi-NCR were previously unemployed.

These socioeconomic vulnerabilities influenced workers entry and continued employment in platform work. Key factors for workers entering were the lack of alternative employment sources and the hope for better pay and potential job flexibility. The lack of alternative jobs was a major push into platform work for workers in Delhi-NCR and Lucknow—over 60% of workers in Delhi-NCR and over 50% of workers in Lucknow. At least 40% of workers across cities mentioned the expectation of better pay as a major reason to start platform work, while potential job flexibility was also a key reason for workers in Mumbai and Guwahati. However, as the findings below show, workers’ expectations were unmet.

Externalised joining, statutory, and operational costs

High joining, statutory, and operational costs were offloaded onto workers to access and continue platform work. This was especially the case for taxi workers who owned their vehicles, and had to incur vehicle investment costs and downpayment, as well as statutory costs that included operating permits, road tax, vehicle insurance, and fitness fee. Across all cities, average monthly expenses for taxi workers were above INR 30,000. For delivery workers, average monthly expenses mostly comprised fuel costs, and were around INR 5,500 in Guwahati and Lucknow, and around INR 6,700 in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai. These high externalised costs reveal the economic vulnerabilities inherent within platform work.

Compounding these costs, platforms in the taxi services sectors also charged commissions unevenly and in varying fee structures—ranging from 20% to 30% of the fare in Mumbai and Lucknow, and going as high as 35% in Delhi-NCR and Guwahati. It is important to note that high commissions persist despite the mandate under the Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines, 2020 to cap commissions and other platform charges at 20% of the fare.

Platforms’ offloading of costs to workers have resulted in workers’ having to rely on informal leasing, debt, and subcontracting arrangements. These arrangements were seen across all cities, where workers in the city were either renting the vehicle they were driving, paying a commission to a vehicle owner, paying off vehicle EMIs on someone else’s behalf, or were paid a fixed salary by a vehicle owner. Notably, in Lucknow, around 35% of taxi workers were engaged under these informal arrangements.

Insufficient incomes and economic vulnerabilities

Workers' experiences, across cities, highlight how a majority contended with low-wage outcomes. Earnings remained low and uncertain for workers despite the fact that they were putting in long work hours. Several factors contributed to this insufficiency and uncertainty in workers’ earnings: stringent platform requirements around high acceptance rates and ratings, which were important determinants, decreased flexibility, and high offloaded work-related expenses.

Across cities, earnings for delivery workers were considerably lower than those for taxi workers. When earnings were adjusted for standard weekly work hours (48 hours/week), over 50% of delivery workers in Mumbai, Guwahati, and Lucknow were earning less than the corresponding state-wise minimum wages. Further, over 75% of delivery workers in these cities were earning below estimated state-wise living wages. Platform work was also insufficient in meeting essential living needs for taxi workers in Mumbai, Guwahati, and Lucknow. Around 30% of taxi workers (23% in Guwahati) were earning less than minimum wages, and around 50% (80% in Mumbai) were earning less than estimated living wages. Earnings for both delivery and taxi workers in Delhi-NCR were substantially lower than minimum wage and living wage standards. 69% of workers in the taxi services sector and 87% of workers in the delivery services sector earned less than the minimum wage in Delhi. Moreover, 92% of workers in the taxi sector and 97% of workers in the delivery sector earned lower than the estimated living wage.

These insufficient incomes were particularly damaging to workers’ lives and livelihoods, considering their high dependence on income from platform work. An overwhelming proportion of workers (over 94% across all cities) were engaged in platform work as their main source of income, as opposed to part-time employment. They also faced significant economic burdens such as being sole earners in their household, having multiple financial dependents, having financial commitments to provide remittances back home, and so on. Worsening these burdens was widespread income insecurity that workers faced across all cities—for over 43% of workers (up to 65% in Guwahati), earnings from platform work were insufficient for covering basic household expenses.

Workplace risks and ineffective redressal mechanisms

Workers in both sectors were working immensely long hours in order to try and make adequate earnings while working for platforms, working several hours above standard weekly work hours (48 hours/week) typically prescribed by occupational health standards. Across all cities, delivery workers spent a median of over 60 weekly hours working for platforms, and taxi workers spent a median of around 84 weekly hours.

Alongside the adverse health impacts of long work hours, workers faced grievous workplace risks, including risks of physical assault, theft, poor road safety, and harsh weather conditions. Around 75% of delivery and taxi workers faced these issues in Mumbai and Lucknow. An even greater proportion of workers were exposed to these risks in Delhi-NCR (84%) and Guwahati (90%).

Despite several workplace risks, platforms remained unaccountable for their failure to guarantee safe working conditions. Across all cities, less than 10% of workers found that their platform took steps to improve working conditions. Workers’ overall experience with platform grievance redressal mechanisms was mixed. For instance, in Lucknow, only around 25% of workers who raised grievances did not receive a resolution. In contrast, 50% of taxi workers in Delhi-NCR did not receive a resolution, as was the case for 76% of taxi workers in Mumbai. Workers have limited recourse when their grievances go unanswered. Platforms, however, wield significant control over terms of work, making it difficult for workers to challenge unfair decisions.

Low coverage and accessibility of social protection mechanisms

Social security covered by platforms typically included health insurance and accident insurance. Workers faced significant gaps in insurance coverage, and these gaps were particularly glaring in the taxi services sector. Across cities, health and accident insurance coverage for taxi workers was below 10% (an exception was 11% of workers covered by accident insurance in Delhi-NCR). It is important to note that this low coverage exists despite the Motor Vehicle Aggregator Guidelines, 2020 mandating provision of health insurance and term insurance from platforms.

Delivery workers had a relatively higher percentage of insurance coverage from platforms, although coverage varied across cities. Health insurance coverage was low for delivery workers in Delhi-NCR (21%) and Guwahati (14%), but higher for workers in Lucknow (34%) and Mumbai (44%). In the case of accident insurance, insurance was covered by platforms for over 40% of delivery workers in Delhi-NCR and Lucknow, while a greater proportion of workers were covered in Mumbai (63%) and Guwahati (72%). Even though delivery workers were covered by platform-provisioned insurance, claiming benefits was an unreliable and time-consuming process. Workers who attempted to access benefits faced several obstacles, including poor awareness of available schemes, inadequate coverage, and little to no platform support in navigating complex claims procedures.

The inadequacy of platform-provisioned insurance was exacerbated by the exclusion of workers from government social protection mechanisms. In Delhi-NCR, Guwahati, and Lucknow, over 35% of workers in both sectors were left outside of social protection from governments. In Mumbai, over 66% of workers were excluded.

Contributors

Conceptualisation + planning: Aayush Rathi, Abhishek Sekharan, Ambika Tandon, Chetna V M, Chiara Furtado, and Nishkala Sekhar

Writing: Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Chetna V M, Chiara Furtado, and Nishkala Sekhar

Data analysis: Abhishek Sekharan, Chetna V M, and Nishkala Sekhar

Data visualisation: Sriharsha Devulapalli

Design + design direction: Annushka Jaliwala and Yatharth

Review: Aayush Rathi and Abhineet Nayyar

Survey design + planning: Abhishek Sekharan and Ambika Tandon

Survey implementation: Abhishek Kumar

Research advice: Nora Gobel and Uma Rani Amara

We are deeply grateful to the workers who participated in the surveys for generously sharing their time, experiences, and insights with us.

This work was supported by the Internet Society Foundation, as part of the “Labour Futures” project at the Centre for Internet and Society.

This work is shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

To know more about this work, please write to us at chiara@cis-india.org

Explore more of CIS’ research on labour and digitalisation at platformwork.in

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platforming-precarity-data-narratives-workers

The Bots That Got Some Votes Home

Nilofar Ansher — 2015-04-24T11:56:10Z

Nilofar Ansher gives us some startling updates on the "Digital Natives Video Contest" voting results declared in May 2012, in this blog post.

It was a hint of suspicion raised by one of our colleagues at the Centre for Internet & Society that spurred our Web Analytics team to check into the voting activity of the contest that was all about the ‘Everyday Digital Native’. And while we acknowledged and celebrated the ‘digital’ in the native (users of technology), we forgot the human part that the digital has to engage with. Following weeks of deliberations, we now have conclusive evidence that points to irregularities in voting numbers of the Top 10 contestants. We are now staring at the elephant in the room: those innocuous little automated scripts we sweetly nicknamed, ‘bots’.

Internet bots, also known as web robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey. In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots (Source: Wikipedia).

What irregularities?

You would see how a script or bot would have played a role in ‘automating’ the votes for a video. The Top 10 videos received a combined voting number of 20,000+. The discrepancy occurs at the juncture where the votes polled on the front end (the webpage where the contestant video was visible to the public) did not match with the number of hits the page received on the backend (this is the analytics part). For instance, the top polled video has some few thousand votes more than the number of people who actually visited our CIS website in the same duration. This prompted a review of the logs and the possible “hand” of a nonhuman agent acting on its human creator’s command to drive up the votes.

How was this done? The Technicalities

The following graph shows the extremely high level of voting requests just before the closing date (March 31, 2012). This would not be extraordinary except for the fact that two or three entries had an exceptionally higher vote count relative to their page views as per the analytics statistics.

Analysis of the voting against the http requests for the voting link against page views

Entry	Actual Votes Recorded (1)	Direct http requests to votes (2)	http requests for normal page view access (3)	Recommended adjusted vote count (4)
Digital Dance	268	448	198	198
Big Stories, Small Town	3	10	112	3
Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams	1113	2018	1685	1113
Deployed	191	479	195	191
From The Wild Into The Digital World	10317	11880	810	810
I Am A Ghetto Digital Native	321	365	844	321
Life in the City Slums	13	18	94	13
Digital Natives	111	328	102	102
With No Distinction	369	557	1232	369
Digital Coverage in a Digital World	9622	13650	181	181

These are the public votes displayed on the contestant’s page through the thumbs up icon
These are http requests to the voting link against each video when the user clicked on the thumbs up icon.
These are http requests which are collectively related to the video page (page view). A normal human user would browse through a page first, which downloads some other urls, such as the HTML for the page, JavaScript, images, and so on. A normal vote request would be included collectively. A direct http request to the voting link on the other hand does not do this, and only makes a specific request to vote without downloading the other parts that make up the page.
A normal human vote count should be the same or less than the number of page views. Only three videos highlighted show abnormal behaviour and it is recommended these be adjusted to the page view counts.

Are you saying contestants cheated?

While the use of programming scripts to accrue votes is no new tactic and we should, in fact, have a more robust mechanism to monitor such activity during a contest, we cannot prove the culpability of the human agents. The contestants might be innocent actors with overzealous friends or colleagues who ran the voting scripts. As of now, since there is no way to ascertain their part in this irregularity, it’s best we give them the benefit of the doubt. What comes through loud and clear is that once you do away with the scripted votes, four contestants still manage to have enough votes to maintain their positions in the final five. In the fifth position, we now have a contestant from the top ten finalists, who has secured the requisite votes (after vote adjustment) to propel him into the final five.

Recommendation

‘Digital Dance’ (Cijo Abraham), ‘From the Wild into the Digital World’ (John Musila) and ‘Digital Coverage in a Digital World’ (T.J. Burks) had additional vote url counts than page views. It is recommended that the total votes for these videos be adjusted to the page view counts, and not the actual vote counts as displayed on their individual web pages (thumbs up icon) during the voting period.

The rankings of the adjusted voting would now read as:

Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams – Marie Jude Bendiola (1113)
From The Wild Into The Digital World - John Musila (810)
With No Distinction - T.J. K. M. (369)
I Am A Ghetto Digital Native – MJ (321)
Digital Dance – Cijo Abraham (198)

Transparency at CIS

‘The Digital Natives with a Cause?’ research inquiry is shaped around concerns of transparency, equity and community accountability. In our research methods as well as in outputs of the different activities, we have always maintained a complete transparency of decision making processes as well as in depending upon the incredible people we work with to help us learn, grow and reflect openly on the concerns that we have been engaged with. We strive to follow this method and in publishing these statistics, we want to ensure that there is complete transparency about the votes that were accrued and how the final winners were selected. We also take this opportunity as a learning experience to re-think the question of the non-human actors in our networks and further about the nature of participation and reputation online. We hope that the publishing of these results will help answer any inquiries on how the process unfolded.

View Logs and Source Code

All logs from the web server for this period (24.7MB) Identical IPs are from caching server.
R script to evaluate data for table

What next?

Since we spotted the error in time, we haven’t disbursed the prize money of EUR 500 to each of the Top 5 contestants. They will now receive the prize along with a chance to participate in the Digital Native workshop-cum-Webinar, slated to be held in July 2012. The top 10 videos will be showcased in this event.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home