Pathways to Higher Education

Attentional Capital in Online Gaming : The Currency of Survival

praskrishna — 2015-04-03T10:46:56Z

This blog post by Arun Menon discusses the concepts of production, labour and race in virtual worlds and their influence on the production of attention as a currency. An attempt is made to locate attentional capital, attentional repositories and attention currencies within gaming to examine 'attention currencies and its trade and transactions in virtual worlds. A minimal collection of attention currencies are placed as central and as a pre-requisite for survival in MMOs in much the same way that real currency become a necessity for survival. The approach is to locate attentional capital through different perspectives as well as examine a few concepts around virtual worlds.

Virtual Worlds1 have been examined extensively for their capacities in creating simulated spaces for fun, play, and entertainment. Presently there is a trend in research studies worldwide to focus on examining questions of informational labour, production, ownership, racism, and the currencies of trade. By drawing examples from the published works of some of the leading writers in this field , I explore these questions and their connections with attention currency and the attention economy2 in gaming. I posit attention currency as a third currency in addition to virtual and real currencies in the ability in which it operates as a currency. Through the concepts put forth, an attempt is made for a reading of attentional capital, attention currencies, attention repositories, trades in attention, and the functions of attention as a currency in gaming economies besides a reading of confluences in terminologies and application and to expand them to examine attention economies in gaming. The games examined for this purpose are wide ranging, such as Eternal Duel, Rising Era from the Fantasy RPG Genre, Travian, T.K.O from the RTS genre, and select and limited readings of and around WoW. All of these fall under the MMO genre.3

Introduction

Edward Castronova is a professor at Indiana University and has prolifically written on virtual economies. His most prominent works are 'Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games' and 'Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun is Changing Reality' and has done extensive research and commentaries on the economies of virtual worlds and online games. His concept the 'Avatarial Capital' (Castronova 2005) is articulated in a similar manner as Human Capital4 , and Cultural Capital.5 Castronova's Avatarial capital is approached as a set of non-material factors such as in-game knowledge, experience, growth, skills and other character related functions. Along the same lines as human capital and cultural capital, increases in the investments in Avatar Capital proportionally increases the power of the entity (p. 41 Castronova 2005 also refer p. 110-114).

What would be ideally termed, in a broader fashion, as 'attentional capital' is articulated by Castronova as Avatar Capital in a minimalist manner, such that it can be argued that avatar capital forms an essential and basic part of attentional capital in gaming. Some concepts that are accepted as exemptions (real world problems – race, class, and gender – devoid in Synthetic Worlds) are addressed by Nakamura when she engages with questions of human capital and cultural capital in fantasy warfare games such as World of Warcraft (WoW). By examining concepts of production and segregation of production processes as well as organic systems of production and designed systems of production, an attempt is made to read racialisation of informational labour within virtual worlds in light of designed races, rather than real races and posit that other forms of racism and racial warfare exist. This in contrast to Nakamura's examination dealing with racial stereotyping of informational labour, particularly of the fourth world labour, an attempt is made to posit that racial and/or class warfare (not similar in the manner that Nakamura addresses racial warfare) is present and inevitable in any designed world that has characteristics of Role Play. I posit that such forms of racial warfare need not necessarily be examined as a proxy warfare among leisure gamers and worker gamers but as inherent in any fantasy construct that places racial choices as essential to imagining certain types of roles within the game.

Lisa Nakamura is a professor in the Institute of Communications Research and Director of the Asian American Studies program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her work revolves around questioning race, ethnicity, and identity in Virtual Worlds. Robbie Cooper who has written expansively on Avatar Identities and their relation with the real identities of gamers (and thus relevant to locating any shifts in attention trades) has been approached through secondary readings, reviews and a partial (limited preview) reading of the text, due to the availability or lack thereof of the text in question. By addressing avatar identities and their links to real world identities, connections can be made in the way attentional capital and attention currency interacts with, and between, virtual, and real world currencies. Although questions of the Virtual - Real Binary6 arise through multiple tangents, it is only examined as a part of discussing the Earth - Synthetic binary that Castronova uses. An attempt is made to clarify some of the terms which are common to this field and place them in perspective. The terms, their limitations and some binaries are juxtaposed for discussion. This is not to imply that Castronova cannot be used to read virtual worlds (or rather their economies), on the contrary his narrative becomes more central as his predictions on exponential growth and impact7 of virtual worlds (economies) are realized.8

By using these authors and their concepts, I posit that Attention can be read as a currency of transaction that enables the survival of the player in virtual gaming worlds and at most stages forms a pre-requisite often similar to real world currencies – a basic amount of which ensures human survival. Drawn from the concepts of Goldhaber who posits that attention is an essential pre-requisite to human survival, I extend his reading to virtual worlds to locate the transactions in attention and attentional capital and how they influence the flows of attention as a currency – making a collection of attention currency essential to survival in a virtual world.

In the following segments some of the terminologies, their dichotomies, and a commentary is made on the terms common to this area. The specific usage by these writers and the commentary is speculative, interpretative, and by no means a closed debate. I explore the terms and attempt to make connections with the attention economy in gaming and in the process explore the possibilities of expanding or broadening some of the terms.

Synthetic Worlds

Castronova (2005) describes Synthetic Worlds as[C]rafted places inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people. He goes on to describe Synthetic Worlds as the playgrounds of imagination being host to ordinary human activity. The only notable difference between simulated worlds in offline settings and online settings is that the latter can accommodate a large number of people. This definition basically stands for almost all online games, be they client-server, browser-based, persistent worlds,9 text based (also MUDs10),and many more where multiple users can engage with each other in an online setting, but by focusing on MMORPGs and visual superiority. Castronova in this process isolates multiple genres of games that are capable of social, political, and economic activity similar to that of graphically constructed worlds.

On developing his thesis Castronova seems to suggest an undue emphasis on worlds that are graphically represented and superior (visually well defined and designed), and such games/worlds being viable synthetic worlds. Viability can be interpreted as the immersion of the player in the game as one factor. On the other hand the economic viability of the synthethic world could be another factor, economic in that there are active gold farming (termed secondary) markets in that game. In such a case synthetic worlds as a term is applicable to even non-graphical text based constructs that run online. Julian Dibbell's documentation of the LambdaMoo community reiterates a certain complexity in the textual construction of the synthetic world, even though it is not visually or graphically represented.

On a similar note, virtual economic activity is not restricted to graphical worlds either.11 The economic activities and organizations that Castronova ascribes to these synthetic worlds are present in almost every virtual world (graphically or textually defined), where there is an aggregation of human activity and congregation of human avatars.12

The possibilities of human economic activity both within the virtual world and the real world can be connected through an examination of gold farming. Depending on attentional capital (and the attentional repository of the entire virtual world) economic activity connects to real world trade as well. Here the popularity of the game and the ability of the secondary market to generate profits is paramount. Synthetic Worlds or in an expansive definition Virtual Worlds and the attentional capital and repositories of attention are examined that support basic forms of communication, social interaction and game play.

In 'what is a synthetic world' an essay in Space, Time, and Play, Castronova, et al uses the term 'Synthetic Worlds' interchangeably with virtual worlds, the difference being a focus on the 'interconnections' between the two worlds. A reading of Castronova (2005), would suggest that his usage limited what synthetic (or virtual) worlds are capable and constitute of. By using Synthetic Worlds and Virtual Worlds interchangeably throughout this article, I intend to broaden Synthetic Worlds beyond Castronova's imposed limitations.13

When Castronova says that all synthetic worlds are MMORPGs, he has arguably limited the usage to only games that have an RPG element – furthermore, those with graphical clarity and representation. If say the Virtual World in question such as Eternal Duel were to be examined, it would not fall under what Castronova describes as a synthetic world largely because of its focus on a text based construction of Etheria. Interestingly, Etheria is not identified as a 'diasporic' homeland as much as the cities, the clans, or the game itself. In Eternal Duel, players tended towards their clans identity or the city they were based close to rather than 'Etheria' the Land itself. Unlike SL, WoW, and others where there is an identification towards the whole game 'land' such as a citizen of Lindenberg or Azeroth. Agreed that graphical constructions use visual aids to better connect with an imagined homeland, whereas the same immersive effect is restricted through text. Text based games such as these depend on the interpretative and subjective interpretations of the gamer to create, in the imagination, an idea of the homeland.

Even though Castronova (2005) states that virtual worlds as a conceptual term is closed and synthetic worlds are more open and interconnected (such that its not possible to read them as sealed and separate disconnected systems), it is possible that synthetic worlds are in fact limited in that they are applicable to certain graphically functional and visual worlds (MMORPGs according to Castronova) by express definition.

Perhaps it is relevant to look at MMORPGs as one among many other genres of online games, where there is a collection of avatars and a common synthetic world is constructed. Mizuko Ito in her documentation and usage of the 5thD project notes that the gamer and paired guide were able to construct 'micro-worlds' through narrative experiences of the real world in Simcity 2000, a city building simulation game. This construction of the micro-world was facilitated through a transfer of narrative experiences from the guide to the young gamer, through what is percieved as logical in the real world without actual knowledge of the scripts and algorithms behind the game that dictated its response. Reading micro-worlds as synthetic worlds has its own pitfalls and problems but such a reading is possible particularly when using the alone together phenomenon. Though an 'out of context' reading might be appropriate in an offline setting as well, where games have a sustainable14 capacity for immersion, the only failure, if any, would be evolution which is a predominant characteristic of virtual worlds in a massive setting.

Whereas RPG games in an offline setting do not have any types of evolution that is sustainable, this feature is resultant of the 'massive' effect in online games, such that narratives of the game are constantly rewritten and brief, even short periods of disconnections leads to a narrative disjunct in the player, which may surface as a diasporic experience. Diasporic experiences here are similar to real world diasporic displacements in that there is a severance from the imagined 'homeland' of the avatar. A severance results in the displacement of the avatar. Evolution of the world is a prominent feature in any persistent or even a temporary time-bound world, where there is an aggregation of human interest. Constant human activity, economic, social, and political create narrative disjuncts in the timeline for those players who are removed from that particular community. MMORPGs have strong evolutionary elements drawn from and often ascribed to the massive element15 such that any form of change within virtual synthetic worlds are resultant of the activities of thousands of people participating in that world including their organization, collective achievements in the achievement hierarchies and engagement in their virtual worlds.

There are often diasporic experiences faced by players on withdrawal from a community of gamers. The Uru Diaspora was one such – the diasporic effects were documented by Celia Pearce in Communities of Play. An extensive reading of identities, associations and severance of the homeland has been documented – examining concepts like the virtual homeland and association with the homeland such that there is a sense of rights and citizenship that arise out of this 'belonging', to eventually lead to a 'resurrection'. I would interpret diasporic experiences such as these as indicative of the immersive nature of the narrative architecture in an online game. Although the concept of the narrative architecture as one is largely applied to offline games, a confluence of human activity produces its own narrative, such that importing 'narrative architecture' to read into online spaces becomes possible.

Castronova's suggestion that there are possibilities of a thriving parallel economy in and through secondary markets16 makes it possible to locate avatar capital and by extension attentional capital more accurately. That is by terming avatar capital as a part of attentional capital, the outworld17 relevance of avatar capital and the possibility of attention flows functioning as a currency within virtual worlds and between the real world is made.18 It is possible to argue that Castronova implies certain attentional repositories when he posits that exploration, expansion, and advancement (p.110 Castronova 2005) are necessities to build up the player level, experience, and other intangible capital, which develops as the Avatar[ial] Capital, much in the same manner as Human Capital, Cultural Capital, and Gaming Capital (Pierre Bordieu's term 'Cultural Capital' is influential to both Castronova's 'Avatar[ial] Capital' and later Consalvo's 'Gaming Capital'). In the following sections, an attempt is made at approaching attention currency and its operations and positing attention as the currency of survival rather than the investments of either virtual or real world currencies.

Avatarial Capital, Attentional Capital, and the Repositories of Attention

Whereas Castronova places avatar skills and experience20 as 'avatar capital' alone is limiting, in that the focus is on one avatar rather than a set of avatars. This limit also manifests in the set of resources that the avatar has access to, particularly attention, which changes the accesses to resources in-world and out-world and effects the production of attention currency in its turn. Thus, it is almost cyclical in that attentional capital in repositories ensure survival, survival leads to greater activity and production in virtual worlds, which in turn gives greater accesses to in-world resources and avatarial capital and which then through the hierarchies of achievement produces more attentional capital.

Even though Castronova articulates the avatarial capital as a necessity (along with physical capital) for survival, he leaves out the relevance of ranking systems (that Hamari and Lehdonvirta (2010) posit as the achievement hierarchy) that seemingly organize a massive amount of data into statistically and graphically available information in almost every virtual world and through this activity build channels of attention. Attention then flows in often unpredictable manners21 and ensures the survival of the player or avatar character in that game. Every game has a system that organizes seemingly irrelevant information on avatars to provide a daily statistical representation on growth, (re-)investment, level, experience, amount of virtual gold, player vs player and non-player character 'kills' . In some hierarchies attemtpted attacks and successful kills are also recorded and made public with a ratio in percentage, the time aristocracy that lehdonvirta 2005, 2007 addresses can be located by this percentage represented in the achievement hierarchy, and so forth in a ranked hierarchy . Depending on the design and architecture of the game world (Synthetic Worlds), there may be detailed statistical data that provides for in-game information and players that are active, joined recently, completed a certain quest, requests assistance with another quest, etc., are news items that are filtered into general gameverse ranking, clan, community, alliance or group ranking.22 Central to the attentional capital and its flows are these gameverse23 ranking systems both internal to the game and external tools that pull data from the server to plot out potential targets for attacks, raids, and so forth.24 Metagaming, or influences on the game from outside the game and its rules, affects every scenario of gaming in some manner. Metagaming most often than not, dictates the attention of individuals and their investments in time and labour.

For instance – Travian which is a popular MMORTS25 has an array of scripts, tools, paid services, external data aggregators – i.e., external to the game - that assist in finding other players/alliances and groups for warfare. Although the game itself has sufficiently developed communication and social interaction systems26, players ranking 1-150027 most often use a variety of external tools and IM programs to support their gameplay.28 Skype or MSN29 becomes preferred means of communication, coordination, and policy30 discussion – and this is not limited to one game server (Travian) whose example I am citing. The number ranges that have been chosen select players whose achievements ranking is comparatively in the top 10 – 20 per cent in terms of activity, presence, and by extension, economic activity, in an international server this number would be a maximum of 1500-2000 whereas on regional servers which witness lower members the number ranges of active gamers with a reasonable growth rate are fixed at around 500-1000. These players have sufficient amount of attentional capital invested in their game to join larger groups based on common cultural symbols and perceived commonalities, which may amount to social commonalities.

Attentional Capital, though it draws from avatarial capital, is broader than just in-game related ranking.31 Attentional capital (and attentional repositories, which makes attention the basic currency of survival) would ideally encompass a larger sphere including real life associations as well as virtual world associations and experiences32 Avatarial capital limits itself to the collection of intangible non-material capital within gaming worlds alone, there is very little discussion (by Castronova or Nakamura who uses avatarial capital) on the extent to which avatarial capital can be streched. If the term is indeed limited to single virtual worlds, a concept of consolidation of avatars (naturally avatarial capital), which occurs at multiple points should also be articulated in light of attentional repositories which allow for the aggregation of attention to reach the threshold required for survival (and thus trade, activity, and so forth). This is not constant but almost always in flux, a lack of investment for a short period would mean death gradual or instant, and depends entirely on the disposition and design of the game in question.

Advancement and progression of an avatar is addressed by Castronova (2005) as the accumulation of the various forms of avatar capital within a virtual world enabling the 'avatar' greater access to the virtual world and the systems of production within the virtual world, defined or rather limited by a requirement for progression. If the avatar grows, more accesses to the game's systems become available, stagnation on the other hand limits these accesses. In a collective sense the growth of a lot of avatars (in an MMORPG) collectively denotes the growth of a synthetic world. Thus, essential to the aggregation of Avatarial Capital as well as attentional capital is the evolution of a synthetic world. Evolution that may be incorporated into the design of the game but is also in a state of constant change and extremely dynamic. A stagnation in the growth of avatars (in a collective) has repurcussion s in the exchanges of attention, exchanges of virtual currencies as well as the collective attention that resides in a synthetic world.. Stagnation even in markets inflicts attrition that destabilizes the virtual world – a lack of attention could well mean the stagnation and eventual decay of the virtual world – this effect can be attributed to Illusory Attention and the decay of attention – for more refer Goldhaber (1997, and 2008). The evolution and advancement could be rapid such that a break from this world for even a short duration, may result in minor diasporic effects. A loss of contact with a community that has developed and evolved in absentia of the player-avatar and non-investment, either of time or resources by the player makes the narrative disjunct more pronounced.By narrative disjunct, I imply that the narrative of the player and the narrative of the community is not in tune, such that diasporic yearnings may be present even without the closure of the game world which is what transpired in Uru – The uru diaspora is documented very well by Celia Pearce and Artemesia in “Communities of Play: Emergent Cultures in multiplayer games and virtual worlds”, 2009 MIT Press. This narrative growth and subsequent disjunct captures the essence of persistent worlds and evolution within them most appropriately. Thus, Synthetic Worlds as a conceptual term is limiting rather than liberating as Castronova (2003, 2005) implies, even with its conceptual failings at achieving a state of 'inter-connectedness'34 with the Real World, Virtual World is a conceptually anchored term to articulate human activity in online gaming spaces, perhaps broader than synthetic worlds.

Avatar capital can locate the influences of attentional capital. Castronova (2005) describes “the accumulated experience points and skills and attributes [as] avatar capital ”, which is the advancement through specific actions resulting in the growth or increment of non-physical capital of the avatar. What are the non-physical capital of the avatar? Non-physical capital is dependent on the design and genre of the game or MMORPG oriented games will have forms of character development that as represented as levels and stages, which when attained allows for further progression in gameplay. Some of these include but are not limited to the attributes, the skills, experience points, all depending on the design and model of the game world concerned. Empire building games on the other hand would design a different set of avatarial capital altogether.

Avatar capital enables further progression in the game world and makes accessible quest lines36, virtual goods linked to those quest lines, and higher growth, ability to gain more from attacks and so forth (The Sway of the stars as a Elvish37 race weapon grants additional gold income and experience points with each kill – largely for NPC attacks, i.e., Non Player Character attacks, other weapons38 are preferred for PvP {Player vs Player} attacks). At this stage the attempt is not to examine the 'real' value attached to the weapon in a fashion that Castronova et al (2008) does, but to locate the attentional capital that is generated by the possession of such a virtual good which enhances avatar capital. Thus, an almost cyclical progression, I extrapolate this further when examining production. So, its possible to articulate avatarial capital as a small part of attentional capital and its collection in what I would term as attentional repositories.

Whereas the Physical Capital is juxtaposed as the virtual money or goods/items and rewards that the avatar earns as part of gameplay (and subsequent reinvestment of rewards), and is the distinguishing link between real and virtual currencies. The time that is invested in production of virtual goods and the subsequent investment in attention (as a currency) and attentional capital (as the non material investments – such as expertise and the abstract concept called experience) can be located in the growth in what Castronova terms as the Avatar Capital.

Castronova et al (2009) examines the virtual world/synthetic world EverQuest and attempts a mapping of its economy. The authors attempt to read macroeconomic behaviours using real world definitions and attempt an economic mapping quite similar to how real world economies are mapped, the research concludes that real world patterns are present in virtual worlds and in the ways and means that virtual goods are traded. They examine the 'reality' of a virtual sword [Footnote: Please refer page 686, New media and society, 5, 11, 2009, the examination of the reality of the sword, similar to the painting 'this is not a pipe' points to reality of value associated with that object, an object that is considered unreal, non exitent in many terms, Michel Foucault also comments on issues of perception, reality, and the painting and its paradox of Rene` Magritte's painting “the Treachery of Images” 1929-30 – Foucault's focus on representation and simulcura is not necessary to interpreting castronova et al's reading of virtual reality and the real value associated with a virtual good. ] . Are they 'really real'? Castronova et al notes through their study that virtual goods often follow real world patterns and thus can be mapped with real world usages and affordances. Items are classified and graphically represented as furniture, food, clothing, accessories, collectibles and so forth. Castronova et al (2009) by noting that all virtual goods had certain real world categories, armour - clothing, food – what avatars ate and drank, furniture – solid items avatars kept in their huts (homes, etc), and so forth, locate the relevance and psychological value of virtual goods, even if they serve no 'real' purpose. They also noted that virtual worlds scarcely held items that had “no real world uses or affordances”. This is incidentally reiterated to some effect in the AVEA report, which also notes that the demand for virtual goods are a result of the designed spaces (Hamari and Lehdonvirta 2010). The attempt by Williamson et al (2010) and Castronova (2003, 2005) have been locating the shifts in 'Real Life' towards 'Avatar Life'. Castronova himself dictates that such a shift towards virtual worlds is inevitable and as discussed earlier, and although speculative, has materialized and noted by none other than Consalvo (2007) and Nakamura (2009).

Returning to the discussion, the authors note that currency is representational (The value of the paper currency we use is backed by gold from the treasury of the government), thus items and in-world currencies also serve the representational purpose and in trades against real currency indicate the investment of time and labour. Such that the value of a virtual good, or in some extreme gold farming cases the value of an avatar and character, are dependent on the time and effort that has been invested in its development and the level that it holds in the ranking statistics. A virtual good such as a sword may then indicate value associated with the time it would take to develop the sword. For instance: Race levels in the fantasy text-based browser game Eternal Duel require opals to gain race experience, Opals as a gem acts as any other gem in the game except that it cannot be traded and has to be earned through grinding, farming, mining, and similar other means that would require an investment in a great deal of time. Higher race levels bring higher access for each of the six races that are available in the game – the game in question is Eternal Duel [henceforth E.D.] and Rising Era. The elf39 race gets a higher healing rate after each activity related to production such as mining and attacks, whereas the human race gets a higher gold bonus, increasing the chances of each race to develop in its own course. The higher the experience level, the higher the chances of earning opals in attacks. Race weapons and armour provide added advantage in that any other activity of production would return higher returns for the investment of time. Thus, in the end, the value that is assigned to virtual goods where real money trades come into effect are:

That they denote an investment in time and labour which is saved in the means by which most virtual goods in gaming are acquired, and
The investment in the focused cognitive resources termed as attention transacts as real value and by extension as currency. This would be one method of locating attentional capital.

Attentional capital when it performs the functions of a currency is also representational in that the value of the item (the virtual good – including any virtual item that can be traded including avatars) depends on the market listings, the time (invested in development of that virtual good) and associated 'illusory attention' (a term borrowed from Goldhaber to situate attention and its potential and capacity to act as a currency), which is traded against real money. This form of trade saves the time that is otherwise invested in the production of this item, thus saving the purchasing party a considerable amount of time, which is transacted for real currency. Such gold farming trades are also called as RMT (real money trades – noted by Nakamura p.5 who cites Consalvo p.149-150, also refer lehdonvirta 2005, lehdonvirta and hamari and lehdonvirta 2010), the AVEA report classifies MMORPGs as the first genre of RMT. Why is the representational aspect of currencies necessary? Very simply if real currencies are representational and 'acquires' (however, that may be interpreted) a certain amount of 'reality' such that value associated with the currency and the item can be balanced and traded. It is clearly possible to interpret attentional capital having similar potential to 'acquire' real value and then emulate the functions of a currency that can be transacted for goods. But is attentional capital the same as attention currency (or for that matter attentional repository)?

I posit that Attentional Capital and by extension Attentional Repositories are dependent on the construction (visual and textual) of the avatar, in-group or out-group racial, ethnic, cultural, and other means of identification, symbolic associations with a particular identity or group, or a perception of a common shared culture, this is similar to constructing communities and Derek Lomas (2008) uses Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Community' to explore notions of associations (through self-representation) that can locate attentional capital in social networking.40 Lomas (2008) examines attentional capital that is built and developed through the elaborate constructions (including self representation) of profiles, through which there is an accumulation of attention (which is what I posit as the attention repository – a collection of attentional capital). The attention repository can be construed of as independent – associated to a player, or as a complex network of repositories that feed into each other through association, expression, and representation – as in a collective or a small group. Thus, the known/recognizable group identification of a particular player would mean a larger repository of attentional capital than a player with little or a lesser known group identification, even though that player may have a higher level of avatarial capital and physical capital to match. The repositories of the group would then feed into the attentional capital of the player, making identification (in-group, out-group, and so forth) easier and granting a certain amount of attention to the profile, which later results in an increased activity (and therefore, survival) in the concerned virtual world. On the notion of survival Goldhaber (1997) states thus:

“[P]ractically everyone must have some money to survive, so attention in some quantities is pretty much a prerequisite for survival, and attention is actually far more basic.”

In a similar manner, Goldhaber locates the relevance of currency (money) as 'the' essential pre-requisite for survival and suggests that attention is as relevant (if not more), I posit that attention in gaming (in all its capacities discussed earlier) is required minimally, as a pre-requisite amount, or what I would articulate as a threshold in the repositories for ensuring survival. This is where I propose that a threshold exits, which can be achieved or realized by the collection of attentional capital when there is

a certain amount built in the repository through what Castronova terms as Avatarial Capital42, and
the threshold limit is achieved through other associations or connections to other repositories.

This is where the discussion earlier on the connections of attention repositories comes into clearer focus. These associations43 have their own repositories (not necessarily unintended when represented in player profiles)44 and often these associations are capable of feeding attention into the players own repository.

The repositories of attention that I have explored and mentioned here are situated outside of the player avatars in other synthetic worlds, which is to say that there are – in some instances – multiple points of consolidation of avatars (and their repositories) to result in this threshold of survival being realized earlier without the collection of Avatarial capital. This is complex to articulate as well as demonstrate largely because it requires an in depth analysis, the data for which is nearly inaccessible (although, it is true that Castronova and his team were granted full access by Sony into their EverQuest Databases).

The multiple points of consolidation of avatars implies the consolidation of their attentional repositories of multiple avatars in multiple similar or different (in terms of genre) virtual worlds. In gold farming practices most trades are dependent on this threshold for survival as well as trades, for the threshold limit in the attentional repositories also implies the point at which trade can take place.45

For instance, avatar A is present on server 1 46 but has in earlier periods taken part in other servers 1-'n' and these avatars would be A1-A'n', where n is the identifiable version of the avatar in any synthetic world regardless of classification.47 Server 1 being a new game, avatar A will have a very short threshold of attentional capital and avatarial capital – assuming that, as yet, there has been no or minimal investments of time and labour in the development of the avatar that results in avatarial or physical capital.

The repository of avatar A at this juncture will be minimal in that particular synthetic world. For transactions of A1 avatar (that is gold farming for that avatar as a 'virtual good') there has to be an aggregation of attentional repository, which should ideally realize a threshold. This is achieved either through association or inter-connectedness of social viral networks, such that there are higher chances of survival, and in the case of gold farming higher chances of trade. In the event that there is minimal avatarial capital aggregation in A1, the possibility of avatarial consolidation at multiple points still exist. The pre-requisite threshold is achieved not by investments in A, but the investments made earlier in A'n' which feeds into the repository of A1 and survival is ensured. The repositories A1-A'n' would have a consolidated repository that enables avatar A1 to either initiate trade (a real world trade) or equally ensure survival rests in this consolidated repository, which has achieved a certain threshold. Note that this theory of multiple points of consolidation of avatars is not a common occurrence and is largely noticed in successful gold farming trades, and prominent players in any game server that incorporates avatar self representation through profiles, much like social networking profiles. The consolidated repository would mean that the threshold is reached at an earlier stage, than if the normal route of game play were to be taken where avatarial and non physical capital are built up.

To substantiate with a real world example, SARSteam48 is present on at least 2 of the 10 Travian international servers and is familiar with 8ag.49 Both having served in common and prominent alliances in multiple Travian servers for a considerable period of time, such that each ensure the others protection, if and when, by chance, they are present in nearby strategic locations in any server. In any new server 50 a chance encounter would mean that either player would list a PNAP51 in their profiles naming the other. This connection takes place regardless of actual contact and negotiation for a PNAP and ensures that the other multitudes of players planning an attack are made aware of strategic connections that the player possess to his advantage thus enabling a further exchange of attentional capital against illusory attention. Players viewing the PNAP and alliance markings, tags, and so forth will cease offensive strategies. As Goldhaber (1997) states there is always an exchange of illusory attention in such cases52, attention may be seen as flowing in both direction when in actuality attention flows are unidirectional compensated by Illusory attention. Lomas (2008) suggests that attention flows are regulated by self representation through profile pages and in the gaming context the same is true. Self representation is deliberative (also noted by Lomas 2008) and by representing selective information an attempt is made at controlling the attentional flows from that profile. For instance, in E. D. listing a mine's quality in the profile page might enable other players to invest their time and labour at mining so as to make a profit and to 'mine out' the mine and thus also make a profit for the owner.

In both the instances above, the focus is on one or two players and in such an out of context state, attention repositories and the threshold of trade and survival do not seem relevant, add to this the sheer numbers of an MMO and viral connections in an ever increasing spiral and attention repositories and the threshold becomes an essential part of survival in gaming and trade in gold farming.

Markets and Synthetic Worlds

In this section an attempt is made to read into trading and markets for virtual goods in synthetic worlds and outside of it thereby attempting to place secondary markets and their assumed or presumed legality and/or some form of incorporation into the regular internal market of the game. This would make reading production and segregation of production more accessible later on. Castronova (2003, 2005) does not directly engage with describing the secondary market in Synthetic Worlds, although the market activities that he points out – such as selling game goods on online auction sites (p.16), GNP of Norrath (the country in EverQuest – Sony) being higher than the per-capita income of India and China (p.19) – are activities that connect the internal game markets to the external ones, namely the secondary market, or more commonly known and accessible as the gold farming markets. Are gold farming markets the same as secondary (as external) markets , how are they different from the primary (internal) markets? Almost all secondary markets are external auction markets such as Ebay, or more formalized gold farming trade markets such as Virtualeconomies.net, agamegold.com, myMMOshop.com, gamegoldcentral.com and many others collectively form the external trading markets and economic organizations in the real world that profit from virtual labour and investment (in time and real money). Gold farming also takes place through listings in from forums to social networking sites and gold farming in India largely thrives through such listings. Dibbell (2006) notes the emergence of brokers, traders, and a multitude of intermediaries in the professional transactions of virtual game gold. The AVEA report corroborates thus:

[It is] now possible for any player, no matter how experienced or inexperienced, dedicated or casual, to obtain high-ranking avatars and possessions simply by purchasing them from a website. Virtual goods were commodified.

- AVEA report 2010 p.11

The core feature(s) of synthetic worlds as Castronova puts it would be applicable to any immersive environment such that his definition is applicable to most games particularly the ones recently released such that those functions are no longer limited in Online Gaming but contributes to the Alone Together phenomenon as well. Castronova states these worlds as "worlds—the fact that they are radically manufacturable places that can be shared by many people at once." The manner of sharing of worlds from a distanced perspective makes it possible to read some synthetic worlds as offline games that are shared in online spaces not directly with other players but as hinted earlier through the achievements hierarchy that is constructed online, even though actual gameplay is strictly offline. For instance, the recent release of games such as Mass Effect, Dragon Age, The Witcher, and many more allow for a certain type of alone together phenomenon which takes place through forum posts, player profiles, and discussions. Note that although there is no online gameplay, similar effects of online gameplay are reflected in the statistics that appear online and create an achievement hierarchy regardless of online activity. Although attentional capital plays a role in such spaces, there is very little connections to survival and team play that it results in.

Immersion and Immersive Environments - A Different Perspective

Immersive environments can be considered as emotionally invested spaces, spaces where there is a investment in the character as well as the synthetic world. Ethnographic interviews point to immersion being a key motivator for role playing games. Role Play or games that implemented certain elements of role play.

Immersive environments are often described as the emotional investments that the player makes in the character or the game environment. Turkle (1995) describes role play as the practice of pretending to be someone else within a fictional space.

The reinvestment of virtual physical and non physical capital enables the avatar better access to production and production capacities. This is manifested dependent on the design of the synthetic world and almost any item can be assigned a value. Castronova (2005) notes thus:

“The advancement system can be used to induce a player’s emotional investment in all kinds of actions. It can endow seemingly trivial and inconsequential acts—the slaying of a digital dragon—with significant personal and social consequences. Prestige shifts; alliances change; power and wealth flow in new channels; and, most important of all, people feel happier. In the historical record of MMORPGs, the willingness of people to acquire vast storehouses of truly arcane knowledge (the casting times of hundreds of spells; the order of birth of various gods; the number of iron ingots required to make a medium-quality dwarven hammer) has been demonstrated over and over. Advancement mechanisms turn the synthetic world into a place where value can be assigned to anything, and behaviour directed accordingly. ”

The emotional investment that Castronova notes through the investment of virtual and real resources in advancement, is probed into by Williamson et al. (2010, in print). Williamson et al suggest through their hypothesis that immersion may take on two (central) functions -

that of a journey for the player to discover their 'true self', through a character constructed in role play as a space for role freedom, and
as a means of escapism.

On a superficial reading both hypotheses seem very similar, Williamson et al distinguishes these two features using an ethnographic approach. Players who engage in the first central element describe virtual worlds (refer Williamson et al 2010, in print) as a space where they can express which is otherwise socially constrained offline. To paraphrase a quoted comment, a player feels they can be anything they want in role-play whereas in real life they are who they are. Another player feels that their Avatar is similar to their real life but is capable of doing or being more (flirty, casual, and outgoing) than they are in their real lives. Williamson et al support their second hypotheses on immersion, namely as a means of escapism by using ethnographic studies. Players focus on the Virtual World as something to 'get away' from real life hassles, largely all comments that Williamson et al notes are positive, as such there is no indication if there were any connotations of addiction involved with immersion. Not an avoidance of real life situations but more in terms of relaxation, rest, a break and so forth. In fact Williamson et al seem to be moving away from such connotations by making this remark. Although I do not want to address questions of addictions and violence arising out of excessive gaming, these arise out of some of the discourses I point out. More can be found in the works of Florence Chee. The article in particular can be accessed on her page. Henry Jenkins and his stand on immersion has been addressed in an earlier blog post and would be relevant when addressing immersion in role play (and RPGs) in offline games.

The Segregation of Production - Reading Nakamura and Racial Production

Lisa Nakamura provides an insight into reading racial stereotypes in virtual worlds and posits that subjects carefully avoid real world racism, and racial references shifts into narratives of racial warfare in the imaginary world. Nakamura problematizes the informationalized capitalism that constructs Asian players as informational labourers and outsiders to the aesthetic integrity of the world of warcraft that the beauty of the game has somehow been polluted or tarnished by third world and fourth world informational labourers.

Nakamura addresses the informational dispossession of fourth world workers and gold farmers in particular and the real world racism that is inherently present in the caricaturisation that follows informational labour. She compares Consalvo and Castronova to discuss racialization, among other social evils, which as far as Castronova (2005) describes is ideally exempt from virtual worlds.

A strong focus on racialization in the real world being imported into virtual spaces and the connotations that accompany farming or for that matter how race becomes a derogatory insult in communities that have farming cultures is present. This takes the form of (almost) imagined racial warfare in virtual worlds and Nakamura attempts to locate this in light of Chinese (and Korean) informational labour and gold farming. The derogatory connotations associated with Chinese (and Korean) players as stereotypical farmers, and thus contaminated where the aesthetic integrity of MMO worlds are concerned (Nakamura substantiates using Consalvo, p. 6). Gold farming except for legally accepted modes are considered as cheating. Consalvo points out that cheating need not be approached as a flaw or weakness in the game design that is exploited or circumvented by players, rather cheating is an inherent part of gaming culture and is a necessary element that contributes to sustained immersion.

One problem would be the actual produsage of virtual goods that are dependent on racial factors that often separate production and consumption. This form of segregation of production on racial and accumulated avatarial terms would lead to a more nuanced reading of production on racial factors. Produsage is a term recently used in the New Media and Culture Journal to locate the production and simultaneous consumption on the Internet in the larger picture. In the virtual world produsage can stand for the production and consumption patterns of virtual worlds – a detailed report on the same has been recently published by the Advanced Virtual Economy Applications Project in conjunction with the Helsinki Institute of Information and Technology.

Is produsage similar to prosumption, the convergence of production and consumption in social media? Whereas produsage is limited to examining the dissemination of content and the engagement with creative, collaborative, and often adhoc content, prosumption is more applicable in the virality of that content through the networks that it flows through. I would interpret the former as being form and style specific and the latter architecturally informed in that the structures of technology through which content flows rather than the form of the content is given more weightage.

An examination of avatarial capital and its influences on racial production leads to the flows of attention that influence production processes. Influencing production in a systematic manner, attention as a currency dictates the prosumption of virtual goods. The AVEA report notes MMORPGs as the first genre in RMT (Real money trades). Although the AVEA reports literature focuses on 'Game Time' investments in grinding, mining, and farming – repetitive tasks that produce avatarial material and non material capital. A distinction should be made that the Game economy is not dependent on time factors alone, such that the investments of virtual and real money does not always translate into time spent in the acts of virtual production. Attention often mediates this process, such that the flow of attention would effectively enhance a player of low net worth (materially) and disenfranchise players who have invested time, effort, and money in the game and have a higher net worth in material functions. Virtual material wealth and non material wealth plays very little role in the enhancement and disenfranchisement of players and their respective investments in the virtual worlds. This is not to suggest that this is a common norm, production inevitably draws attentional capital in the automated ranking and listings that showcase this 'achievement', which also results in contest and conquest over command on virtual commodities. The AVEA report and works by Lehdonvirta (Ville) and Hamari (Juho) interpret the achievement hierarchy that those who have worked, deserve the fruit of their labour.

Avatar rights53 and the Declaration of the rights of avatars are tied into the concepts of this achievement hierarchies that Hamari and Lehdonvirta uses and their materialization, if you will, in real value. Production and time are classically linked through labour and effort and to import that reading into a virtual space devoid of certain nuanced reformulations would be regressive. This is reflected in the AVEA report findings, although their trajectories are ideologically motivated. To posit that early MMORPGs had an achievement structure through which players steadily climbed the backbone of social and economic structure destabilized by the emergence of secondary markets is highly problematic. Firstly for it locates an evolutionary trajectory, the idyll (almost echoing of a Christian pre-lapsarian) state followed by the fall, so to speak, or destabilisation of the idyllic aesthetic beauty and 'integrity' by secondary markets or gold farming markets and resellers – Nakamura (2009) reiterates this perceived violation of 'western' aesthetics by eastern guest works and informational labourers. Secondly it locates all investments as a simple matter of time investment (which flows in either/both way), and to locate the connections between real and virtual currencies as simple matters of produsage or prosumption linked to time (whichever term seems more appropriate, i.e., depending on the form of content or the structure that enables its flow – naturally please read content also as virtual content, digital content, and so forth inclusive of virtual goods and services) is limiting and problematic. The problematics are not the input of time and effort but the flow of attention that dictates most gameplay formation54 and strategy in any game that has a massive environment with a PvP structure. In intense-PvP-character focused MMORPGs such as Eternal Duel the avatarial capital are a) different parameters central to role play and character development and b) dependent on racial choices that allow for different progression pathways.

Nakamura notes that “China-men” are often equated with NPCs or non-player characters whose only role in the game is either grinding, or providing information and equipment. Grinding is a repetitive task, largely of killing monsters again and again to gain items, currencies, and experience in-game. By equating NPCs and Chinese players together, PvP attacks becomes nothing more than 'taking a stroll in the wilderness' and attacking 'monsters'. People who are profiled as Asian, either through their avatars or through their actions, mannerisms, associations and so forth (earlier I made an argument on in-group and out-group associations that facilitated certain forms of attentional capital flows, note that both negative and positive flows are possible). Such profiling along with informational labour dehumanizes the subjects as mere characters in a racial war. I posit that outworld racism, racist tendencies, and remarks such as that noted above and documented by Nakamura becomes only one half of racial production and game play in virtual worlds. Most fantasy genres are built on concepts of warfare with often racial connotations, such that survival, quest progression, and the accumulation of avatarial capital depends on the imaginary, constructed, and designed racial warfare in virtual worlds. All MMORPGs have some element of conflict, warfare which is often a part of design. Survival is not just a matter of survival in harsh game environment but also from other avatars. Survival also depends on the ability of the avatar to exercise command over other goods and services within the virtual world.

This ability to command better resources in the virtual world dictates the survival of the avatar and in cases of warfare (constant struggle is an element of MMORPGs and warfare is the eventual representation of that struggle) the more virtual goods that an avatar commands, the better its chances of survival. Although a commentary of Nakamura's text, an attempt is made to locate instances where attentional capital and its accumulation need not necessarily assist survival in the game.

Racial production or what I would posit as the production of virtual goods dependent on race in MMO Fantasy RPGs is dependent on the attentional shifts that are regulated by the games own internal market ranking systems. What the AVEA project report terms as the achievement hierarchies, for the hierarchy or ranking is not singular but varied and distributed across multiple aspects of development in a game. These hierarchies also facilitate shifts in attentional capital and its flows (other than self representation through profiles and avatars) and locate racial characteristics of an avatar and achievement hierarchies linked to race. For instance, ED ranks players based o their race choices, for all six races in the game with race trophies being awarded to the first three in the list. The trophies are much sought after for the bonus-benefits that they provide. This leads to a form of racial warfare, within the races - for the race trophy, and outside the races for higher achievement ranking. Quests which require the collection of one soul from each race for access to higher capability weapons have players in a constant state of warfare. Attentional capital here dictates the production, often racial production in that the high level weapons, armour, and other virtual goods that are produced are race specific. Often players tend to speculate and buy race weapons only to resell in the internal market after making enhancements to it, even though the weapon or armour itself is quite useless in terms of race compatibility. A look at the top seven race weapon internal market listings in ED and comparison with the players character profiles and race choice will show that four out of seven players have listed weapons they cannot use or equip. Race armour and other weapons have similar statistics in the internal markets in that most are not items of use by players but for speculation general compatibility armour on the other hand has very few players investing in major enhancements. Their efforts at producing these weapons and enhancing them is to speculate on the market and on possible players who will need them as they progress to level 300, and thus make a considerable profit by selling it, or renting it out through an in-game contract system.

In conclusion I also introduce the concept of class production and game world race production of virtual goods and items, such that character race plays a relevant part in imagined racial warfare but not so much in the production of virtual goods, which is driven by market demand and supply. Attentional capital and avatarial capital plays pivotal roles in the systems of production and I have made an attempt to locate them from different perspectives. I posit that attentional capital flows through the self representation in profiles and the ingroup and outgroup identitification along with associations to race, class, and identity which are not necessarily outworld alone. As Nakamura (2009) notes there are no real world races in virtual worlds but the image of the farmer has been associated with real world Chinese and Korean players such that it forms a basic dichotomy between leisure players and worker players, worker players who are dehumanized subjects similar to non player characters run by the artificial intelligence of the game. Attentional currency through many of these perspectives performs the role of a currency that facilitates or enables further progress and survival. Trading in race weapons and armour and virtual goods, that are of no other interest to the game character than pure profit, assists the collection and expansion of other forms of material and non material avatarial capital.

References

AVEA Project Report. (2010). The Advanced Virtual Economy Applications Project, Helsinki Institute of Information Technology, Accessed June 12th 2010. <http://virtual-economy.org/files/AVEA%20Project%20Final%20Report%208%20June%202010.pdf>.
Castronova, E. (2003). On Virtual Economies, in Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. Vol 3. Issue 2.
Castronova, E. (2005). Synthetic worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Castronova, E., James J. Cummings, Will Emigh, Michael Fatten, Nathan Mishler, Travis Ross and Will Ryan. (2007). What is a Synthetic World? In Space Time Play Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism: the Next Level. Birkhäuser Basel (p. 174–177).
Castronova, E., Dmitri Williams, Cuihua Shen, Rabindra Ratan, Li Xiong, Yun
Huang, and Brian Keegan. (2009). As real as real? Macroeconomic Behavior in a Large-scale Virtual World. New Media & Society. 11. 685. Accessed 22 April 2010. <http://nms.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/11/5/685>.
Consalvo, M. (2007). Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Cooper, R. (2007). Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators. London: Chris Boot.
Dibbell, J. (2006). Play Money. New York: Basic Books.
Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2000). Getting the attention you need. Harvard Business Review, 78(5), pp. 118-126.
Davenport, T. H., & Beck, J. C. (2001). The attention economy: Understanding the new currency of businesses. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
Goldhaber, M. (1997). The Attention Economy: The Natural Economy of the Net.
Hamari, J., and V. Lehdonvirta. (2010). Game Design as Marketing: How Game Mechanics Create Demand for Virtual Goods, in Journal of Business Science and Applied Management. Vol 5. Issue 1. Accessed 21 May 2010.
Lehdonvirta, V. (2005) Real-Money Trade of Virtual Assets: Ten Different User Perceptions. In: Proceedings of Digital Arts and Culture (DAC 2005), 52-58. IT University of Copenhagen: Copenhagen.
Lehdonvirta, V. (2007) MMORPG RMT and sumptuary laws. Virtual Economy Research Network. <http://virtual-economy.org/blog/ mmorpg_rmt_and_sumptuary_laws>.
Lomas, D. (2008). Attentional Capital and the Ecology of Online Social Networks. In M. Tovey (Ed.), Collective Intelligence, (pp 163-172) Oakton: EIN Press.
Nakamura, L. (2009). Don't Hate the Player, Hate the Game: The Racialization of Labor in World of Warcraft, in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Vol 26. Issue 2. Accessed 12 Feb. 2010 <http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/15295030902860252 >.
Simon, H. A. (1971). Designing organizations for an information-rich world. In M. Greenberger (Ed.), Computers, communications and the public interest (pp.40-41). Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press.
Williams, D., T. Kennedy & R. Moore (2010, in press). Behind the Avatar: The Patterns, Practices and Functions of Role Playing in MMOs. Games & Culture.

The Virtual Worlds Research Project {VWRP} has conducted extensive studies and workshops on defining virtual worlds – three main prominent characteristics of which are depiction, space and analogic – for more please refer their report published and freely available.
The Attention economy was first implied in the works of Simon H.A (1971) who focuses on the exchange of attention as a relevant factor in the information economy – that the resource that is made scarce is not information but attention expended in its consumption is one of the seminal points made by Simon H. A. The term although was popularized by the writings of Davenport and Beck 2000, 2001 and Goldhaber 1997, 2008. For more details for the “attention economy hypothesis in brief”.
Three kingdoms online is a merger of MMORPG and MMORTS with a focus on Real Time Strategy similar to Travian. World of Warcraft is a classical Role Playing Game Set in the Massive Environment where millions of players can join in a game – Which is what is termed an MMORPG. Eternal Duel and Rising Era are Text Based MMORPGs that have a smaller base and depends entirely on textual and not graphical representation.
Although similar to Peirre bourdieu's (Bourdieu and Passeron 1973) concept of human capital, it involves the examination of non material gains that are linked to an avatar, such as in-game experience, in-game knowledge and so forth.
Refer Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron "Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction" (1973).
The Virtual - Real Binary has been addressed in many disciplines in different capacities, concerning identity, presence, production, and labour. Here I skirt the actual binary but use it to lend credence to the virtual currency and by extention also the attention currency.
What Castronova would like to term as part of 'the exodus'.
Nakamura and Consalvo note this limitation in different manners and points to the realization of Castronova's speculative predictions.
Either browser- or client-based.
MUDs stands for Multi-user Domain.
The term graphical worlds may be misleading, I use the term to denote the visually superior worlds that Castronova seems to imply as Synthetic Worlds, his main case study being Sony's EverQuest. Doing this I also posit that text based virtual worlds are active economically, even if not as much as graphical worlds, and the term synthetic worlds can be expanded to include the text based genre as well.
As against NPCs or non player characters.
And thus subjective in nature.
By sustainable I suggest that immersion (emotional or otherwise) in the game world does not face massive disjuncts or breaks. A game that has a cohesive narrative architecture (please refer Jenkins works on narrative architectures) could be immersive.
The 'massive element' is used to locate some central points of departures between RPGs and MMORPGs, evolution being one of them.
Also defined as gold farming markets, there are some questionable problems is definitions due to legality, concepts of cheating and so forth. Mia Consalvo (2007) approaches cheating as part of gaming culture and admits that even EULAs do not sufficiently address what activities and circumventions maybe regarded as cheating and how exactly that affects some players. Some players have the ability to pay for farming services, but that does not necessarily mean its cheating, since he is still investing labour (through a process of outsourcing of that labour) into the game.
This term is not common, I use this term outworld synonymously with out-game, and as a antonym to in-game and inworld. The term implies activities within the game and its impact, influence, or some other variable that is outside of that game mostly in the real world. Thus, although technically, these terms are not synonymously cohesive - for the purposes here is used as such.
Although Castronova urges that there is an impact of synthetic economies on real world economies, I believe locating the attentional capital and its function as a currency within virtual worlds and its shifts and flows effected through real world stereotypes, uses, and affordances (as Castronova himself notes that there are very almost no virtual goods that do not have some form of real world categorization and uses and/or affordances), can be located through gold farming as a trade practice.
Can attentional capital also be read as linked to “all” non-material capital?
Presuming that they are obtained within the game and not through metagaming, Castronova does not examine metagaming in this manner except to locate gold farming practices that he terms as secondary market activities.
Considering that social and viral networks and their effects can be often hinted at but rarely predicted beforehand. Without sufficient avatar capital, there may be very little attentional capital and trades in attentional capital that ensure survival in any game. As such predicting outcomes based on possible attentional capital can be unproductive.
Depending on how communities and groups are organized in the game world. They could be limited to 60 as in Travian, or above 200 as in Eternal Duel, depending on certain circumstances membership is also often limited, a reason why attentional capital of high performing groups stay well above the threshold of survival. Almost all groups will have internal communications, IGM – In-Game Mailing/Messaging, internal or devised chat functionality – for instance Travian has a server chat that accommodates players of the clan but is rarely used, Skype is preferred and if not Gtalk and Msn is preferred means of communication and strategizing as well. This is noticeable in International .com servers and the English .in servers, as for other servers this may not hold true. Eternal Duel also has chat functionality but is not clan specific. Both games have their own internal forums for the clan pages as well as game support forums internationally and regionally.
Also termed Metaverse where factors external to the game influence the game – practices that are termed as metagaming.
Although at this juncture Bots and their usage should be explored, it might derail the argument on attentional capital flows. Automated programs are forms of circumventions that are often banned in the TOS and EULA of the game, but still used by many players. Multihunters or staff of the game working specifically on detecting circumvention arose out of modding and circumvention. Consalvo explores cheating to a fair amount and places cheating as a part of game culture, such that it allows players who are stuck at certain points to bypass the narrative requirement to complete a certain quest, do a certain activity and so forth. Therefore, she places cheating not so much as loopholes in design exploited by circumvention rather an essential part of a game in its ability to maintain, or sustain immersion.
Massively Multiplayer Online Real Time Strategy is a subdivision of games that focus on Empire building in a persistant or resetting massive environment.
Technologies that facilitate communication and interaction are necessary for any forms of trade and activity to develop online. An ingame messaging system, a contract system, in-game chat functionality make up for synergized communities that can strategize better in such games.
This ranking range depends entirely on the server and the number of people playing the game. The range denotes the highest investors in the game, in terms of activity, presence, and production. These number ranges are applicable for the international .com travian servers. The numbers would be much lower compared to Indian or other regional servers. A report can be obtained on Travian World analyzer but is limited to server resets – every 300 days for normal servers. http://travian.ws/ - note that this is not the original travian site or in any manner supported by travian or their staff, but an external site that aggregates travian data for assistive gameplay.
Gathered from the Travian Forums and Strategy guides. The exact tools are numerous including user scripts and is not elaborated further.
Both are Chat and Instant Messaging Clients.
Policy here implies in-game production - From basics such as War and Peace to profit sharing, production sharing, resource collection for common growth and so forth.
Avatar capital is largely represented in the player profile page or in the in-game ranking system or external tools that pull data off the server to provide ranking and player search functionalities. One such case would be the extensive in-game ranking systems in Eternal Duel a text-based fantasy MMORPG, another instance would be Travian Servers which run on time bound resets and has extensive external tools to locate, plan, and strategize ideal locations, attack maneuvers, defense, farm finders and so forth. These systems act in the ways attention flows from particular activities that avatars undertake.
Attentional currency as the currency of survival is part of the paper currently in a draft version and will be linked on my personal blog when published.
Avatrial death naturally.
Castronova suggests that the term is more appropriate as it indicates an interconnected relationship that is not part of the real- virtual binary.
Quest lines would be particular pathways that a player character/avatar can choose for development depending on racial attributes experience points and so forth. For example, the Sway of the stars in a High eld RW1 (Race weapon 1) which is available after crossing a certain level (indicated by experience points gathered). Note that all of this is dependent on the virtual world and the design and plot of the world concerned. The example is taken from Eternal Duel.
Quest lines would be particular pathways that a player character/avatar can choose for development depending on racial attributes experience points and so forth. For example, the Sway of the stars in a High eld RW1 (Race weapon 1) which is available after crossing a certain level (indicated by experience points gathered). Note that all of this is dependent on the virtual world and the design and plot of the world concerned. The example is taken from Eternal Duel.
The game does not name the weapon as elvish, rather it is just termed as a high elf race weapon. The word Elvish is not particularly popular either for some reason.
Which are also virtual goods. In the paper macroeconomic behavior in large scale virtual worlds, the authors attempt to locate if the virtual 'sword' can be considered as having 'real' value.
or the Elven Race, one of the race choices when building a character. Race choices in character building has benefits including race weapons, race specific growth benefits and so forth, all of which are tied into the production of avatarial capital and indirectly attentional capital.
His study is on social networks, particularly Myspace.com, but can be used to read into attentional capital in gaming.
And hints at the reduction of identities into interests where self representation is concerned.
I would choose to expand this concept and make it broader so as to make it applicable to other social networks and is not limited to gaming.
Such as ethnic, cultural, racial, to form an in-group or out-group association, or through common cultural symbols and so forth as mentioned earlier.
I quote a recent debate with a few colleagues who suggested that I seem to suggest through my writing that the formation of these repositories are resultant of vague unintended actions on part of players and argued that the associations noticeable in the profiles of players are not always unintended but in most cases calculated and placed with deliberative intent. Without going into too much detail, I should clarify that that there might be the influence of the smart cow syndrome (for the lack of a better term for articulating this), where prominent groups have players who game for attention so as to be able to enter these groups (again I suggest that this would be a tactic for survival) failure to be associated with the group and other high level players often imply certain death (virtual avatar death that is). In such a case arguably there is deliberation and contemplation before networking or creating associations through profiles. For instance, a low level player would choose group A or group B – Z dependent on their position and the assumed allegiance and loyalty of the group portrayed through their own profile pages and thus their own repositories (yes this is illusory attention at work), and capabilities of the group to ensure survival of the player – this is deliberative. To return to my point there are often other messages and profile tags that the player uses to denote either strategy or tactics employed by the player and this I posit is unintended, a Gual character posting a Roman slogan on the profile, or some message indicative of strategy. So many troops killed in the first few weeks, so many players farmed and so forth, are unintended but assists in the inter-connection of these repositories perhaps a little more than group identities which are in constant flux (in worlds like travian from which this example is sourced).
assuming that it is non coercive and profitable.
Thus represented as A1 avatar on server 2 would be A2 and n number of servers to indicate A'n'.
For instance SARSteam on Travian interbational severs would be A1 and A2, and on ED servers would be A3 and so forth provided that avatar is linked or recognizable to SARSteam, or any of its members.
SARSteam is a prominent avatar of a player in Travian.
The authors Travian Avatar.
Travian servers reset after approx 300 days, where the endgame is the successful completion of a Wonder of the World.
A PNAP is a personal non aggression pact regardless of alliance affiliations, such that in the event that two players are in opposing and competitive alliances a PNAP would mean that either alliance would consider non aggression on the listed player regardless of alliance stand on other players. Applicable mostly unless in the event of war when PNAPs are suspended. The notion of the PNAP is similar to the NAPs forged between alliances, except its between a few players. Alone together phenomenon occurs to some extent in such cases.
Goldhaber (1997) places Illusory attention in perspective with that of a speaker and an audience. Through a reading of Lomas (2008) I posit that a similar situation is present in the self representation in player profiles.
Avatar rights are interesting concepts that question notions of property and copyrights and ownership.
By formation, I imply how game play progresses and forms dependent on attention flows towards a particular strategy in the game.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/gaming-and-gold/attentional-capital-online-gaming

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review

praskrishna — 2015-04-06T15:52:21Z

Pratyush Shankar's research project on "Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. His monograph explores the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space.

There has been, in the fields of design and architecture, a close link between the shape and imagination of the city spaces and the dominant technologies of the time. The study of space (architecture, public places and city form) can lead to very interesting insights into the expression of the society with respect to the dominant technologies. Manuel Castells argues that space is not a mere photo¬copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression (Castells, 2009). Fredric Jameson, in his identification of the condition of post-modernity demonstrates how the transition into new technologies is perhaps first and most visibly reflected in the architecture, as physical spaces get materially reconstructed, not only to house the needs and peripheries of the emerging technologies but also to embody their aesthetics in their design and built form (Jameson, 1991).

Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues on how the emergence of print cultures and technologies led to a structural transformation of the public sphere by creating new and novel forms of participation and political engagement for the print readers. Within cinema studies in India, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhav Prasad have looked at the 'cinematic city' — how material conditions of the city transform to house the cinema technologies, and how the imagination of certain cities is affected by the cinematic representations of these spaces (Rajadhyaksha, 2009). Mike Davis' formulations of an 'Ecology of Fear'(Davis, 1999) and Sean Cubbit's idea of 'The Cinema Effect' (Cubitt, 2005) also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

I wish to explore the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space. The issue of imagination is an important one here as much as the material realities of our cities. However, to begin with one needs to look at the very idea of cities in the Indian context. The fundamental idea of a city and that of a space becomes important here and has been explored in the chapter on cities. The issue of representation as related to ideas of 'social space' and 'abstract space' (Lefebvre, 1992) has been used as a methodological framework while analyzing cities. The social space of a city here refers to the production of space that is biomorphic and anthropological. From this perspective people and history and memory along with social economic processes play a strong role in its definition. Hence, city spaces cannot be understood as a collection of building and other material production alone but rather as an act of social production involving people over a long period of time. The appropriation and representation of cities is another important concern as it creates an imagination structure and often justifies the material transformation.

The research is primarily concerned with first creating an understanding of the cities in Indian context from the point of view of their social, technological and material productions. The ideas and representations of space therefore, become critical issues of exploration to understand the nature of imagination of space with reference to Indian cities. An empirical study of issues of spatial transformation was conducted in Bangalore and Gurgaon to find certain patterns and its correlation with the present discourses on the technology and the city. The issue of perception of lived in space, cartography and myth became important issues to understand the nature of the imagination of space and positioning of the digital space. The contradiction of a networked geography with the present spatial arrangement of cities that is the centre of a larger territory becomes important shifts to be accounted for while understanding the new geography. The patterns and possibilities in these new geographies of information technologies have been understood by studying three building programmes in the city. The question of transformation and future of cities and the position of digital space in these times then became an important one to answer. The initial study concerns with laying out a framework for examining the techno-spatial discourses in cities in general while establishing the key characteristics of its narration in the Indian context.

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. 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.

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 April 5, 2011 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/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/internet-society-space-in-indian-cities-a-call-for-peer-review

You auto-complete me: romancing the bot

sumandro — 2019-12-06T05:00:19Z

This is an excerpt from an essay by Maya Indira Ganesh, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Please read the full essay on Deep Dives: You auto-complete me: romancing the bot

Maya Indira Ganesh: Website and Twitter

I feel like Kismet the Robot.

Kismet is a flappy-eared animatronic head with oversized eyeballs and bushy eyebrows. Connected to cameras and sensors, it exhibits the six primary human emotions identified by psychologist Paul Ekman: happiness, sadness, disgust, surprise, anger, and fear.

Scholar Katherine Hayles says that Kismet was built as an ‘ecological whole’ to respond to both humans and the environment. ‘The community,’ she writes, ‘understood as the robot plus its human interlocutors, is greater than the sum of its parts, because the robot’s design and programming have been created to optimise interactions with humans.’

In other words, Kismet may have ‘social intelligence’.

Kismet’s creator Cynthia Breazal explains this through a telling example. If someone comes too close to it, Kismet retracts its head as if to suggest that its personal space is being violated, or that it is shy. In reality, it is trying to adjust its camera so that it can properly see whatever is in front of it. But it is the human interacting with Kismet who interprets this retraction as the robot requiring its own space by moving back. Breazal says, ‘Human interpretation and response make the robot’s actions more meaningful than they otherwise would be.’

In other words, humans interpret Kismet’s social intelligence as ‘emotional intelligence’...

Kismet was built at the start of a new field called affective computing, which is now branded as ‘emotion AI’. Affective computing is about analysing human facial expressions, gait and stance into a map of emotional states. Here is what Affectiva, one of the companies developing this technology, says about how it works:

‘Humans use a lot of non-verbal cues, such as facial expressions, gesture, body language and tone of voice, to communicate their emotions. Our vision is to develop Emotion AI that can detect emotion just the way humans do. Our technology first identifies a human face in real time or in an image or video. Computer vision algorithms then identify key landmarks on the face…[and] deep learning algorithms analyse pixels in those regions to classify facial expressions. Combinations of these facial expressions are then mapped to emotions.’

But there is also a more sinister aspect to this digitised love-fest. Our faces, voices, and selfies are being used to collect data to train future bots to be more realistic. There is an entire industry of Emotion AI that harvests human emotional data to build technologies that we are supposed to enjoy because they appear more human. But it often comes down to a question of social control, because the same emotional data is used to track, monitor and regulate our own emotions and behaviours...

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/maya-indira-ganesh-you-auto-complete-me-romancing-the-bot

Call for Essays — #List

sneha-pp — 2019-10-11T17:07:26Z

The researchers@work programme at CIS invites abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’. We have selected 4 abstracts among those received before August 31, 2019, and are now accepting and evaluating further submissions on a rolling basis.

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artefact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and also consumed through.

What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? How are they hegemonic or intersectional?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making? What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords their authority; what makes them legitimate information artefacts, or contentious forms of knowledge?
How and when do lists became digital, where are lists on paper? How do we understand their ephemerality or robustness; are they medium or message?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed? Who decides, and who gets invisibilized on lists?

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’.

Please submit the abstracts by Friday, August 23, 2019.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, August 30. The selected authors are expected to submit a full draft of the essay (of 2000-3000 words) by Monday, September 30. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honorarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstract (300-500 words), and a short biographic note, in a single text file with the title of the essay and your name via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of ‘List’.

Authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-list

July 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-08-09T13:50:49Z

Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for July 2019.

Highlights for July 2019
CIS presented its comments on the proposed rules 29,30,31 of the Draft Copyright (Amendment) Rules, 2019 to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Govt. of India. The comments were made in response to Notification G.S.R 393(E) published in the Gazette of India on May 30, 2019. CIS submitted that in the domestic approach to modernising our copyright legislation, we must refrain from considering distribution of born-digital/ digitised works over the public Internet equivalent to the function of broadcasting works over cable/ satellite. The Indian National Trust for Art & Heritage Pune Chapter is working with various organisations to preserve the natural heritage places like rivers in Pune district of Maharashtra, India. After the presentation of 'Project Jalbodh' by CIS-A2K in River Dialogue organised by INTACH in April 2018, several organisations have shown keen interest in collaboration. Subodh Kulkarni shares some insights in his report. ICANN has Advisory Committees which help guide the policy recommendations that the ICANN community develops while its Supporting Organizations are charged with developing policy recommendations for a particular aspect of ICANN's operations. ICANN publishes a combined budget for all these bodies under the head of policy development. CIS inquired about the financial resources allocated to each of them specifically. CIS in partnership with the Internet Society organized an event on the impact of consolidation in the Internet economy. It was divided into two roundtable discussions, the first one focusing on the policies and regulation while the latter dealt with the technical evolution of the Internet. The roundtables aimed to analyze how growing forces of consolidation, including concentration, vertical and horizontal integration, and barriers to market entry and competition would influence the Internet in the next 3 to 5 years. The report by Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover provides an insight into the developments. As part of its Researchers at work programme on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society, CIS called for abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’. Ten abstracts would be shortlisted by August 9 from the list of submissions and the selected authors would be requested to submit the full essay of their draft by September 15. Final versions of the essays are expected to be published in October. With the rise and popularity of app-based platforms such as Ola, Uber, Swiggy Zomato, and others, there is a growing public conversation about regulation of such 'gig-work' platforms and the working conditions of people who work for them. To explore this further CIS conducted a panel discussion at its Bangalore office. Researchers associated with the project presented their preliminary findings. Panelists preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. An excerpt from an essay by Maya Indira Ganesh, written for and published as part of the Bodies of Evidence collection of Deep Dives titled You auto-complete me: romancing the bot explains human relations with bots. The Bodies of Evidence collection, edited by Bishakha Datta and Richa Kaul Padte, is a collaboration between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society, undertaken as part of the Big Data for Development Network supported by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

CIS and the News

The following articles were authored by CIS secretariat during the month:

Fostering Strategic Convergence in US-India Tech Relations: 5G and Beyond (Justin Sherman and Arindrajit Basu; The Diplomat; July 3, 2019).
Fix Problems Before Complete Failure (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; July 4, 2019).
What is the problem with ‘Ethical AI’? An Indian Perspective (A rindrajit Basu and Pranav M.B; cyberBRICS; July 17, 2019).
Old Isn't Always Gold: FaceApp and Its Privacy Policies (Mira Swaminathan and Shweta Reddy; The Wire; July 20, 2019).
The worrying survival of moon landing conspiracy theorists (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 22, 2019).
India Is Falling Down the Facial Recognition Rabbit Hole (Karan Saini and Prem Sylvester; The Wire; July 23, 2019).
Why I’m not going to tell you about the dangers of apps like FaceApp (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; July 28, 2019).
The Digital Identification Parade (Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon; Indian Express; July 29, 2019). The authors acknowledge Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Amber Sinha and Arindrajit Basu for their edits and Karan Saini for his inputs.
In India, Privacy Policies of Fintech Companies Pay Lip Service to User Rights (Shweta Mohandas; The Wire; July 30, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS secretariat was consulted for the following articles published during the month in various publications:

PIB plans a fact-checking unit to counter fake news (Smriti Kak Ramachandran; Hindustan Times; July 3, 2019).
How Sai Baba Was Made To Spy On Your Phone For Credit Ratings (Gopal Sathe; Huffington Post; July 4, 2019).
Mozilla is funding a way to support Julia in Firefox (Catalin Cimpanu; ZD Net; July 8, 2019).
Deepfakes: Algorithms at war, trust at stake (Rajmohan Sudhakar; Deccan Herald; July 14, 2019).
Digital public information system design: Talk to experts, find the right way (Prachatai; July 18, 2019).
Easing the US-India divergence on data localisation (Shashidhar KJ and Kashish Parpiani; Observer Research Foundation; July 22, 2019).
For sex workers, mobile phone becomes a double-edged sword (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; July 23, 2019).
Twitter reacts to the India's cryptocurrency drama (Rajarshi Mitra; FXStreet; July 26, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

Copyright and Patent

Research on harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Submission

Comments on the Draft Copyright (Amendment) Rules, 2019 concerning Statutory Licensing (Anubha Sinha; July 11, 2019). This submission presents comments to the Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade (“DPIIT”), Ministry of Commerce and Industry pertaining to the notification G.S.R 393(E) containing the draft Copyright (Amendment) Rules, 2019 issued on 30th May 2019.

Wikipedia

Under a grant from Wikimedia Foundation we are doing a project 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.

Blog Entries

Orientation programme, Wikipedia workshop & Action Plan meeting in PAH Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; July 19, 2019).
Wikimedia Workshop on Rivers under Project Jalbodh (Subodh Kulkarni; July 30, 2019).
Re-licensing Sessions with Authors and Organisations (Subodh Kulkarni; July 31, 2019).

Openness

Participation in Event

Learning and Understanding the Frameworks of Rights at Work (Organized by Kai Hsin Hung; IT for Change; Bangalore; July 13, 2019). Torsha and Mira attended the workshop.

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet. As part of internet governance work we work on policy issues relating to freedom of expression primarily focusing on the Information Technology Act and issues of liability of intermediaries for unlawful speech and simultaneously ensuring that the right to privacy is safeguarded as well.

Freedom of Speech & Expression

Under a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, CIS is doing research on the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government and contribute studies, reports and policy briefs to feed into the ongoing debates at the national as well as international level. As part of the project we bring you the following outputs:

Blog Entry

DIDP #34 On granular detail on ICANN's budget for policy development process (Akriti Bopanna; July 6, 2019).

Participation in Events

13th European Summer School on Internet Governance (Organized by European Summer School on Internet Governance; Meissen; July 13 - 20, 2019). Akriti Bopanna attended the school.
ICANN 65 De-briefing Meeting (Organized by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations ; July 16, 2019). Akriti Bopanna remotely presented on the Human Rights related developments that took place at the Marrakech meeting, over the course of the 4 days.

Privacy

Under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC we are doing a project on surveillance. CIS is researching the history of privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhar. As part of our ongoing research, we bring you the following outputs:

Blog Entry

The Impact of Consolidation in the Internet Economy on the Evolution of the Internet (Akriti Bopanna and Gurshabad Grover; July 3, 2019). The blog post was edited by Swaraj Barooah, Elonnai Hickok and Vishnu Ramachandran. Swagam Dasgupta provided inputs.

Participation in Events

Digital ID Forum 2019 (Organized by UNDP; Chulalongkorn University, Thailand; July 3, 2019). Sunil Abraham was one of the panelists at this event.
BIS LITD 17 meeting (Organized by Bureau of Indian Standards; New Delhi; July 3, 2019). Gurshabad Grover attended the sixteenth meeting of the Information Systems Security and Biometrics Section Committee (LITD17).
Facebook Data for Good in Bangalore (Organized by Facebook; Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; July 25, 2019).
Roundtable with the WhatsApp leadership (Organized by WhatsApp; Mountbatten, The Oberoi, New Delhi; July 26, 2019). Will Cathcart, WhatsApp's new global head, visited India and invited Sunil Abraham for a discussion.
Facebook Data for Good in New Delhi (Organized by Facebook; University of Chicago Center, New Delhi; July 29, 2019).

IT / Information Technology

A research on the usage of systems (computers and telecommunications) for storing, retrieving and sending information as well as the IT Act:

Participation in Event

Leveraging Web Application Vulnerabilities for Reconnaissance and Intelligence Gathering (Organized by Has Geek; GRD College of Science, Coimbatore; July 5, 2019). Karan Saini gave a talk at the JSFoo Conference.

Artificial Intelligence

With origins dating back to the 1950s Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not necessarily new. However, interest in AI has been rekindled over the recent years due to advancements of technology and its applications to real-world scenarios. We conduct research on the existing legal and regulatory parameters:

Participation in Events

Roundtable Discussion on “The Future of AI Policy in India” (Organized by Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi; July 1, 2019).
Emerging AI technology in health care in India, health equity and justice: Critical reflections and charting out way forward (Organized by HEaL (Health, Ethics, and Law Institute of Training, Research and Advocacy) of FMES (Forum for Medical Ethics Society) in collaboration with CPS (Centre for Policy Studies), Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay; July 13, 2019). Radhika Radhakrishnan, participated in a roundtable discussion on "Emerging AI technology in health care in India, health equity and justice: Critical reflections and charting out way forward."

Gender

Presentation to Amnesty International on researching the Future of Work (Organized by Amnesty Interntional, New Delhi; July 18, 2019). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon made a presentation on CIS research on Future of Work.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum.

Monthly Blog

Fix Problems Before Complete Failure (Shyam Ponappa; Organizing India Blogspot; July 4, 2019).

Researchers@Work

The researchers@work programme at CIS produces and supports pioneering and sustained trans-disciplinary research on key thematics at the intersections of internet and society; organise and incubate networks of and fora for researchers and practitioners studying and making internet in India; and contribute to development of critical digital pedagogy, research methodology, and creative practice.

Event Organized

#MappingDigitalLabour - Panel discussion on platform-work in Mumbai and New Delhi (CIS, Bangalore; July 19, 2019). Watch the session recording video here.

Blog Entries

Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights (Deva Prasad M.; July 1, 2019).
#DigitalPedagogies (Ashutosh Potdar, Maya Dodd, Nidhi Kalra, and Ravikant Kisana; July 1, 2019).
#OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing (Abhishek Shrivastava, Dibyaduti Roy, and Nirmala Menon; July 11, 2019).
#RenarrationWeb (Anuja Mirchandaney, Deepak Prince, Dinesh and Shalini; July 23, 2019).

About CIS

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 CIS on:

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 CIS:

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.

Collaborate with CIS:

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/july-2019-newsletter

The worrying survival of moon landing conspiracy theorists

nishant — 2019-07-31T02:33:26Z

The moon landing deniers were the original fake news propagandists. Only, they didn’t have the internet.

The article by Nishant Shah was published by the Indian Express on July 22, 2019.

Last week, I was pretending to have a rational conversation on Reddit about vaccination. When I say “rational conversation”, I, of course, mean that this person was ranting at me for being a “stooge of science” and an “agent of insurance companies” because I was pointing out to them that vaccination is a collective ethical good and has proven efficacy at eradicating lethal and chronic diseases. After about an hour of back-and-forth, the user taught me a whole new string of profanities and ended with two particularly strange comments. He said he is done talking to “Nazis like me who are so stupid that we would even believe in the moon landing”.

While anti-vaxxers are all the rage right now, it is easy to see why, as conspiracy theorists, they are closely aligned with the moon landing conspiracy theorists and the flat-earthers, more recently. It is the 50th anniversary of human landing on the moon (“kinda-allegedly-look-there-are-grey-areas-I-don’t-know-I-wasn’t-born-then”). Even in the world of fake news, alt-right, algorithmic trolling, and a collective suspension of disbelief on the internet, it looks like the moon landing is still the reference point that all fake-news peddlers go back to.

Moon landing conspiracy theorisation used to be serious business. They conducted painstaking research, met in secret circles, and tried to convince the world that the government was out to fool us. They were thwarted by the lack of a global platform that would amplify their voice and connect the conspirators of the world together. So, they remained in hiding, and away from common sense, caught in their own bubbles.

While the social web has done much for democratising information, there is no denying that it is also the platform that was made for the moon-landing hoax investigators. Not only is the current social media amenable to the easy distribution of dubious controversies, but it has also made these conspiracy theories a vehicle for entertainment. With multiple social media celebrities relying on attention economies of click-bait headlines and controversial statements, conspiracy theories are now produced not as facts but as opinions, and as entertainment.

The moon-landing deniers were zealots. They worked passionately at producing what they thought was counter-evidence to support their claims. The current fake news peddler does not need anything more than a streaming platform, an entertaining hook, a unique aesthetic, and a personal opinion with all the gravitas of an emoji, to put forward theories that no longer depend upon fact. In the mix and stream universe of social media, they can refurbish old conspiracies, and instead of championing a cause, merely present an ambivalent “anything is possible” attitude and presto, they are influencers.

The moon landing conspiracy theorists were quite strident in their belief but they were largely harmless — the equivalent of a man on a public transport shouting that the end is near. However, the new conspiracy theorists have very real, material consequences. We have already seen how they have been able to move elections and influence public behaviour. We have been witnessing how they have normalised fake news so that when we are faced with information that is apparently dubious, we still circulate it or shrug it off without denying it, thus reinforcing its aura.

They are dangerous not just because of what they talk about — let’s face it, people who actually believe flat earth theories are not really a great loss to civilisation, and if they want to live in Discworld, we can smile at them with benign frustration. What makes these conspiracy theorists alarming is that they are gateway drugs leading to something more frightening: the world of radicalised, alt-right, internet armies that translate the militant zeal of their digital disbelief into acts of violence in real life. It is not a surprise that social media platforms have become the default spaces where real-time shooters and persons with terrorist intent publish their live videos and radical manifestos. There is a reason why the alt-right populist movements target the anti-vaxxers as their key ambassadors for the distribution of messages. It is not a coincidence that neo-Nazi groups ally with flat-earthers and encourage them into real-life violence.

Fifty years after the moon landing, if we are still dabbling in moon-landing conspiracy theories, it is not because we are fascinated with the moon — surely, Mars is our new moon — but because the internet is the platform that the moon-landing deniers had dreamed of. With the social web, without any mechanisms for verification and an infinite possibility of producing counter-narratives, we have a telling story of what happened when information became really free and the protocols for filtering and parsing information transitioned from human understanding to artificial intelligence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-july-31-2019-the-worrying-survival-of-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorists

Why I’m not going to tell you about the dangers of apps like FaceApp

nishant — 2019-07-31T02:37:09Z

Concerns about privacy, aimed solely at users, are better directed at owners of digital infrastructure.

The article by Nishant Shah was published by Indian Express on July 28, 2019.

I want to write about our data, your security, and the ever-burning question of privacy and its discontent on the social web, all triggered by the viral FaceApp challenge. Timelines have been flooded by people using this free app to see what an AI thinks they will look like 20 years from now. And they haven’t stopped at just themselves. Their friends, their families, their pets, their favourite celebrities, and stars have all been morphed by this “free” Russian-made app, which takes data, overrides all consent, and shows your future old-face.

However, I know that by the time this column reaches you, you will not only have moved on from the viral seduction of FaceApp, but will also have been admonished by every critic, activist, advocate, and woke friend on Facebook, for trading your privacy and personal data to join the mass-sheep movement that we call social apps. You are either irritated by now about people lecturing you of the risks of using apps that exploit your digital footprint to manipulate your future behaviour, or you are shrugging it off as a trade-off that you are happy to make because you have “nothing to hide”.

Any alarm or pangs that you might have felt when you first read about the potential privacy vulnerability hidden in this app have long since been assuaged by the mindless scrolling through the thousands of pictures of your social circles ageing. If you are like me, perhaps, you have gone over to the dark side and laughed at the naiveté of people who talk of graceful ageing in the face of imminent climate collapse.

So I won’t talk to you about the danger of these apps and how you must be more careful with protecting your privacy. Because, the bottom-line is that you don’t care. And I don’t mean you, the individual reader. I mean the collective, Facebook-friends-forever you, that has long since stopped caring about what happens to things that we can’t see. Data Privacy indifference is not just a new normal, but alarmingly, even after the stunning expose of data-driven manipulation and AI regulation post the Cambridge Analytica revelations, it seems that we don’t care.

It is easy to blame the users — call them ignorant, label them indifferent, chastise them for not being digitally literate, call for awareness and outreach — but that is perhaps the easiest of the scapegoats. All the people who have been smugly announcing that they won’t use this app because they don’t want to feed the machine-learning beast with more of their private data, have largely been targeting individuals for their callous agnosticism when it comes to data sharing. However, what most of these responses fail to take into account is that the user has long since been installed in a condition of precarious data mining with no way out.

We can blame FaceApp, but we have to realise that every app, platform, service, device, institution and organization involved in the digital social web ecosystem has been primarily working as a data broker, selling us all without knowledge, but with consent. FaceApp is the flavour of the week, but it is merely following in the tradition of all our digital intermediaries who have now naturalised the system of capitalizing on our private data for profits. The woke bros can go around pointing fingers towards those who did use the app, but they must surely recognise the hypocrisy of using the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on their Android and iOSphones in order to perform their digital sapience. Because we might ban FaceApp, mount a scrutiny to evaluate the vulnerabilities, and help people avoid it, but FaceApp is just one in millions of data leaks that are built as the default in our digital deliriums.

To call the user ignorant or negligent is to conveniently abdicate the digital infrastructure owners and providers of their wilful, deliberate, and designed policies that compromise user data and privacy for gain. To put the onus of using this app and leaking data on to the user is to gloss over the fact that our laws and policies are woefully inadequate to protect the individual user against this continued data extraction, correlation, and consolidation. To laugh at the user who used an app for fun is to ignore the reality that these apps are verified, promoted, and shared without impunity because it is merely doing what the social web was designed for. So use FaceApp. Don’t use it. It doesn’t matter. Your individual actions are not to be blamed or celebrated. The only real change that can come in how we manage our data privacy is going to be in collective accountability of digital intermediaries and an active responsibility on the part of civil and political societies to step out from under their influence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-july-28-2019-why-i-am-not-going-to-tell-you-about-the-dangers-of-apps-like-face-app

Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:12:30Z

The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 10, 2019.

I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.

It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.

This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.

Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.

Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.

When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.

Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.

Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward

Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:19:29Z

The day when three social-media apps refused to load.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 24, 2019.

It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.

Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.

That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.

While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?

This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.

We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.

It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.

As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down

March 2019 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-07-18T02:14:11Z

The Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) newsletter for the month of March 2019.

Highlights for March 2019

The Indian Patent Office (IPO) on 1 March 2019, published a draft of the “Manual of Patent Office Practice and Procedure, Version 3.0”. CIS provided comments on patenting of computer related inventions.
The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team has submitted its proposal for the year 2019-2020 to the Wikimedia Foundation. CIS-A2K has proposed to undertake content enrichment, skill development initiatives, cement partnership with existing partners and build relationships with new ones, and activities like Train-the-Trainer, Wikisource Conference, Wikimedia Summit India, Intensive Personal Wiki Training, supporting Indic Wikimedians through request page, etc.
Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), an organisation working on rejuvenation of rivers in India, has began documentation of rivers on Wiki, especially to draw attention to and mitigate the crisis of toxic deposits facing more than 40 rivers in India. The work was started by Jal Biradari, TBS’s Maharashtra based group, in Sangli district with the help of the Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team of CIS. A report from the first pilot workshop conducted by CIS-A2K during 22-25 December 2018 at Tarun Bharat Sangh Ashram, in Alwar, Rajasthan has been published.
With the objective of connecting the open knowledge movement with design, the Access to Knowledge team at the Centre for Internet and Society co-organised the Wikigraphists Bootcamp India 2018 with the Wikimedia Foundation during September 28-30, 2018 in New Delhi. Saumyaa Naidu in a report has shared the learningsfrom the panel discussion aimed at exploring the potential collaborations between design and the open knowledge movement.
Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok co-authored a policy brief titled Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India. The policy brief has recommended changes pertaining to current legislation, policy and practice to the Government of India regarding external vulnerability reporting and disclosure.
Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla co-authored a White Paper titled 'The Localisation Gambit'. The paper was edited by Pranav M.B., Vipul Kharbanda and Amber Sinha. Anjanaa Aravindan provided research assistance. Government of India has drafted multiple policy instruments which dictate that certain types of data must be stored in servers located physically within the territory of India. The White Paper serves as a resource for stakeholders attempting to intervene in this debate and arrive at a workable solution where the objectives of data localisation are met through measures that have the least negative impact on India’s economic, political, and legal interests.
The Technology Law Forum at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR) has published the Report on Data Privacy and Citizen's Rights' Symposium.This report is a compilation of all the speakers' speeches during the panel discussion. Shweta Mohandas was one of the eight speakers at the panel and the excerpts from her presentation has also been covered in this report.
CIS in its r@w blog featured an essay titled 'Users and the Internet' by Purbasha Auddy, part of a series on Studying Internet in India (2015); and audio recording of a session titled #SelfiesFromtheField which was part of the Internet Researchers Conference, 2017.

Jobs

CIS is hiring:

CIS-A2K Finance Officer: Call for application (Only women candidates).
Internship - applications accepted throughout the year.

CIS and the News

The following news pieces were authored by CIS and published on its website in January:

Recapturing the Commons (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 7, 2019).
Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 10, 2019).
Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 24, 2019).

CIS in the News

CIS was quoted in these news articles published elsewhere:

Why entrepreneurs are wary of the new draft e-commerce policy (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; March 3, 2019).
'Website not found' pop-ups leave net activists fuming (Tushar Kaushik; Economic Times; March 6, 2019).
More urban Indian women are acting against offensive calls and text messages (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 8, 2019).
Unlike Facebook, Twitter is a ghost town for political ads in India so far (Aria Thaker; Quartz India; March 12, 2019).

Wie die chinesische Mega-App TikTok Indiens Wahlkampf beeinflussen könnte (Handelsblatt; March 13, 2019).
When laugh lines turn worry lines (K.V. Aditya Bharadwaj; Hindu; March 15, 2019).

Proposed Intermediary Liability Rules threat to privacy and free speech, global coalition tells MeitY (Zaheer Merchant; Medianama; March 18, 2019).
Now, police use apps to catch a criminal (Ketaki Desai with inputs from Sanjeev Verma; Times of India; March 31, 2019).

Access to Knowledge

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

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. We prepared the India report for the Consumers International IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty, questioned the demonisation of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Submission

Comments and Suggestions to the Draft Patent Manual March 2019 (Achal Prabhala, Feroz Ali, Ramya Sheshadri, Roshan John and Anubha Sinha; March 21, 2019).

Wikipdedia

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

Train the Trainer program 2018 (Sailesh Patnaik; March 6, 2019).
The city of Bhubaneswar is going Open (Sailesh Patnaik; March 7, 2019).
Rejuvenating India’s Rivers the Wiki Way (Subodh Kulkarni; March 7, 2019).
ಕನ್ನಡ ವಿಕಿಪೀಡಿಯ ಶಿಕ್ಷಣ ಯೋಜನೆ ಸಮಾವೇಶ ಮತ್ತು ತರಬೇತಿಯ ವರದಿ (Ananth Subray; March 7, 2019).
Design and the Open Knowledge Movement (Saumyaa Naidu; March 31, 2019).

Event Organized

Wikimedia Summit India 2019 (Organized by CIS-A2K; New Delhi; March 16 - 17, 2019). CIS-A2K team organized a two-day Wikimedia Summit event for the participants taking part in the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin.

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.

Event Organized

Talks by Richard Abisla and Kaliya Young (Organized by CIS; Bangalore; March 4, 2019).

Internet Governance

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.

Cyber Security

Research Paper

Improving the Processes for Disclosing Security Vulnerabilities to Government Entities in India (Karan Saini, Pranesh Prakash and Elonnai Hickok; March 20, 2019). This is an update to our previously released paper titled "Leveraging the Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure Process to Improve the State of Information Security in India". The full document can be accessed here.

Privacy

Research Paper

The Localisation Gambit: Unpacking policy moves for the sovereign control of data in India (Arindrajit Basu, Elonnai Hickok and Aditya Singh Chawla; March 19, 2019).

Participation in Events

Nullcon Security Conference (Organized by Nullcon; March 1 - 2, 2019; Goa). Karan Saini attended the event.
Seminar on “Evolution of communication: Social Media & Beyond” (Organized by TRAI; Hotel Radisson Blu GRT, Near Airport, Chennaii; March 15, 2019).
DSCI-Infosys Roundtable (Organized by Infosys; Bangalore; March 25, 2019). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

Free Speech and Expression

Event

Internet Speech: Perspectives on Regulation and Policy (Organized by CIS; India Habitat Centre; New Delhi; April 5, 2019).

Participation in Event

Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World (Organized by Just Net Coalition Workshop on Equity and Social Justice in a Digital World and its partners; Bangkok; March 25 - 27, 2019). Anubha Sinha participated in the event.

Artificial Intelligence, ICT and IoT

Participation in Events

RFCs We Love: Transport & Apps Edition (Organized by India Internet Engineering Society; March 2, 2019; Go-Jek; Domlur, Bangalore). Gurshabad Grover was a speaker at this event.
Consultation on Draft E-commerce Policy (Organized by Alternative Law Forum and IT for Change; March 14, 2019; Tony Hall, Ashirwad , Off St.Marks Road; Bangalore). Arindrajit Basu attended the event.
International Conference on Justice Education:Legal Implications of Artificial Intelligence (Organized by Nirma University; Ahmedabad; March 15 - 16, 2019). Arindrajit Basu attended the conference.
AI for India Summit (Organized by Facebook; Leela Palace, Bengaluru; March 26, 2019). Shweta Mohandas participated in the event.
Roundtable on Consumer Experiences with New Technologies in APAC (Singapore) (Organized by Consumers International; Google, Singapore; March 26, 2019). Arindrajit Basu participated in the event.

Researchers at Work (RAW)

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:

Blog Entries

#CollectionAndIdentity (Ravi Shukla, Rajiv K. Mishra, and Mrutyunjay Mishra; March 2, 2019).
The Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar (Sailen Routray; March 2, 2019).
Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi (Sarah McKeever; March 12, 2019).
#CampusCampaigns: User Perceptions in Pre-digital and Digital Eras (Arjun Ghosh; March 12, 2019).
Taking Open Science Offline (Shreyashi Ray; March 21, 2019).

Participation in Event

Presentation at Global Digital Humanities Symposium (Organized by Michigan State University; March 21 - 22, 2019). P.P. Sneha gave a virtual presentation of her work on digital cultural archives.

About CIS

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.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2019-newsletter

Digital Native: Three things we need to realise about what TikTok is doing to us

nishant — 2019-06-09T05:27:52Z

Fifteen seconds is all that will take for TikTok to own you.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on May 19, 2019.

If there is one thing that has been building more suspense and drama than our politicians this election season, it is the microblogging site TikTok. From complete ignominy to viral popularity, and then the dramatic ban by a high court to its resurgence offering Rs 1,00,000 daily reward prizes, #ReturnofTikTok has been trending with great enthusiasm and being embraced by the populace, who obviously think that 15-second videos are the pinnacle of human cultural production and expression. But, my friends, followers, TikTokers, I come here not to bury TikTok, but to praise it.

At first glance, TikTok appears to be just a miniaturised version of the popular social media platforms we know — YouTube, Vine, Snapchat — and merely one more step in figuring out how granular we can make our appified attention. With each video post that can only last 15 seconds, TikTok is often heralded as naturalising the new unit of attention in an informationally saturated environment. Many have looked at it as competition to the grandfathers of social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, and there is much speculation about how it will take these giants down.

However, the radical departure of TikTok is not in the smallness of its engagement — and thus the extremely low threshold for participation — or in the hashtag organisation of its social media, and the subsequent viral potentiality. What makes TikTok tick (and then, of course, tock), is its embrace of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to power the platform.

China-based ByteDance that owns TikTok, unlike any of its Big Tech competitors, is not a content production or curation company. It is invested in machine learning, and at its backend are extremely sophisticated algorithms that are using facial recognition, data correlation, and targeted customisation technologies to create the world of TikTok. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the two templates of “user-generated-content” platforms, where what we see, what we do, and what we say require us to define our social circles and connections, TikTok’s algorithms do not need us to do any social definition.

From the minute you sign up for it, giving up your personal information and data to extreme mining which bears the same pitfalls of privacy and surveillance that all other big data apps do, TikTok starts presenting content to you. This is not content created by friends, or colleagues, or randos you connect with because you couldn’t be bothered to decline their invites. Instead, this is content created by people you don’t know at all, and brought to you by algorithms that know, even without you telling them what you might like. The more time you spend tapping across the vides, searching hashtags, and going through complex tutorials to make your own 15-second fun video, the more the machine learning algorithms learn you.

TikTok is such a threat to existing social media companies because they make no apologies of the fact that their human users are not influencers, friends, followers, or connections. They are merely users, who produce content and then their algorithms go around the world, connecting us through reasons and logic that are completely opaque. With TikTok, we see the future of automated technologies, where both the content and the logic of connectivity are no longer dependent on human action or desire, but on algorithmic curation and presentation. Geared towards maximum engagement, TikTok’s algorithms have one task — to completely make us lose all sense of time as we cycle through an almost endless stream of videos that have neither content nor style, but seduce us in their short-lived flash.

TikTok as a platform might turn out to be another fad. It is already being copied and mimicked by others. It might run out of its global steam. However, what it has opened up for us are three critical things that need more attention in our digital action. First, on TikTok, you don’t have friends because your friend is TikTok, and it tells you, in an easy, gossipy way, all the things that everybody else is doing. Second, TikTok does not pretend to respect individual choice and agency, instead it trains us to accept what is presented as content. In many ways, it is the reverse Spotify — your playlist does not represent your taste in music, but the music shapes you to become the kind of person who likes that music. And, lastly, TikTok infantilises its users, embedding them in a juvenilia, which has no meaning other than the moving images that keep us engaged but distant, responsive but irresponsible, as children of all ages, ready to escape from a world that increasingly seems too complex to live in.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Time’s Up’

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us

Bahujan Digital Publishing Infrastructures

Yatharth — 2025-01-20T10:48:39Z

In this study, we look at alternative Bahujan digital publishing as sites where Bahujans can claim media representation and how a vision of an anti-caste internet is emerging through these publishing practices.

Formal knowledge production, media, and technology in India are dominated and hegemonised by elite oppressor castes (the Savarnas). The exclusion of the caste-oppressed majority (the Bahujans) from mass media systematically erases their narratives, histories, and opportunities present to them.

We study how, despite systemic challenges, Bahujan publication spaces have emerged across digital media as sites of intersectional discourse on caste, using new media such as blogs, visual art, memes, YouTube channels, infographics, podcasts, etc. Further, we look at how this has exposed casteism buried under the ‘casteless’ facade of digital technologies, which are rife with issues of caste-based hate speech, poor moderation, algorithmic bias, and inadequate platform governance. For this, we draw on qualitative interviews with ten Bahujan publishing projects across social media.

Through a caste-critical lens, we look at motivations, infrastructural needs, editorial processes, audience engagement, other challenges, and the future vision for these publishing projects. We discuss questions of identity, community, hate speech, platform censorship, mental health, and self-care that emerge in online anti-caste publishing. Finally, we try to articulate an emerging vision of an anti-caste internet.

We explore the following questions through our research:

Why do Bahujans start publishing?
What are the infrastructures of Bahujan publishing?
Who engages with anti-caste content?
What resistance do Bahujan publishers face?
How do Bahujan publishers view mainstream progressive movements?
How do Bahujan publishers think about the future of the internet?

The key takeaways from our research are:

Publishing is a socio-technical response Digital Bahujan publishers have largely started in response to shifting political landscapes within India, where caste oppression, while increasingly invisibilised, has only strengthened. Bahujan publishing uses digital tools to challenge caste oppression, fostering anti-caste discourse and community building despite limited resources and systemic barriers.

Publishing is a community effort Bahujan publishing exists primarily within online anti-caste communities. Anti-caste communities help each other navigate resource constraints to raise funds, build safe spaces to provide critical mental health support, provide safety from hate speech, and build resistance and resilience together.

Caste mediates publishing infrastructure Caste hierarchies restrict resources and opportunities for Bahujan publishers, who often precariously self-fund their work. Meanwhile, media circles and the funding ecosystem are dominated by savarnas, who gatekeep their resources and knowledge from Bahujan publishers.

Online Casteism is enabled by Platforms Social media platforms have failed to address rampant caste-based hate speech effectively, leaving Bahujan publishers to manage the hate speech on their own. This takes a severe toll on the publisher’s mental and emotional health, especially hurting Bahujan publishers from smaller towns, women, and queer folks.

The future of Anticaste publishing is uncertain The reach of Bahujan publishers varies wildly and unexplainably, which makes it difficult for them to rely on social media for audiences and monetisation. Bahujan publishers face a triple whammy: algorithms that suppress anti-caste content, social media platforms moving away from political content, and contentious legislation that censors independent political content.

The future of Anticaste publishing is on independent platforms Bahujan publishers desire platform sovereignty—to own and control their own platforms and to be able to control what they put out and how it reaches their audiences—and a vision of the internet that works towards the annihilation of castes, both online and offline.

Read the full report here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/bahujan-digital-publishing-infrastructures

October 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T00:53:03Z

October 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India. Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post. Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done. Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

Highlights

CIS submitted its comments on mobile accessibility guidelines to the Ministry of Electronics & IT, Govt. of India.
Between 1 to 16 September, an online discussion took place on the creation of social media guidelines and strategy for Telugu Wikimedia handles online. Manasa Rao captured the developments in a blog post.
Padma Venkataraman in a blog entry chronologically mapped CIS’ efforts at enhancing financial transparency and accountability at ICANN, while providing an outline of what remains to be done.
Shyam Ponappa's article on NPAs and structural issues was published in the Business Standard on October 5, 2017.

CIS in the News:

Attempted data breach of UIDAI, RBI, ISRO and Flipkart is worrisome (DailyO, October 4, 2017).
Sex, drugs and the dark web (Hindu; October 7, 2017).
Ahead of data protection law roll out, experts caution that it shouldn't limit collection and use of data (First Post; October 12, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: The economics and business models of IoT and other issues (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
#NAMAprivacy: Data standards for IoT and home automation systems (Medianama; October 18, 2017).
Majority of top politicians' Twitter followers fake: audit (Furquan Moharkan; Deccan Herald; October 24, 2017).
Awards for those working on employment opportunities for disabled (Eastern Mirror; October 24, 2017).
Nibbling away into your bank account, salami attackers cart away a fortune (New Indian Express; October 25, 2017).
Nirmita Narasimhan wins the 18th NCPEDP-Mindtree Helen Keller Award 2017! (National Centre for Promotion of Employment for Disabled People; October 31, 2017).

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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.

►Wikipedia

Blog Entries

Odia Wikisource Turns 3 (Manasa Rao; October 22, 2017).
Wikimedia Workshop at Ismailsaheb Mulla Law College, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon at Dalit Mahila Vikas Mandal, Satara (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at MGM Trust's College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Aurangabad (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Orientation Program at Kannada University, Hampi (A. Gopalakrishna; October 24, 2017).
Marathi Wikipedia Workshop at Solapur University (Subodh Kulkarni; October 24, 2017).
Discussion on Creation of Social Media Guidelines & Strategy for Telugu Wikimedia (Manasa Rao; October 24, 2017).

►Openness

-----------------------------------

Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Freedom of Expression

ICANN’s Problems with Accountability and the .WEB Controversy (Padma Venkataraman; October 24, 2017).
Why Presumption of Renewal is Unsuitable for the Current Registry Market Structure (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).
CIS’ Efforts Towards Greater Financial Disclosure by ICANN (Padma Venkataraman; October 29, 2017).

►Cyber Security

Participation in Event

CyFy 2017 (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; New Delhi; October 2 - 4, 2017). Sunil Abraham was a speaker.

►Privacy

Blog Entry

GDPR and India: A Comparative Analysis (Aditi Chaturvedi; October 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Securing The Digital Payments Ecosystem (Organized by NITI Aayog; October 9, 2017).

►Big Data

Blog Entry

Revisiting Per Se vs Rule of Reason in Light of the Intel Conditional Rebate Case (Shruthi Anand; October 4, 2017).

Event Organized

Emerging Issues in the Internet of Things (CIS, Bengaluru; October 23, 2017). Andrew Rens gave a talk.

-----------------------------------

Telecom
-----------------------------------
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

NPAs & Structural Issues (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; October 4, 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:

Articles

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy (Nishant Shah; October 9, 2017).
Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer (Nishant Shah; October 22, 2017).

-----------------------------------
About CIS
-----------------------------------

► 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

► Request for Collaboration

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

November 2017 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2018-01-10T01:57:29Z

November 2017 Newsletter

Dear readers,

Previous issues of the newsletters can be accessed here.

Highlights
Anubha Sinha took part in the 35th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 13 November, 2017 to 18 November, 2017. She posed a question on the agenda 'Other Matters' on behalf of CIS on Day 5, 17 November, 2017. CIS also gave statements on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives and GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment. CIS-A2K signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Telangana Government’s IT, Electronics & Communications Department with to catalyse the development of the Wikimedia movement in Telangana and improve the state of free-licensed digital content in Telugu and Urdu. The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has published the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). Nirmita Narasimhan on behalf of the Centre for Internet & Society gave comments on GIGW. The government has already set up a Nudge unit; now, it should apply the Nobel laureate's insights on auctions relating to essential infrastructure wrote Shyam Ponappa in an article in the Business Standard on November 1, 2017. DataMeet and CIS have collaborated on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector. CIS commented on the Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on August 9, 2017. CIS published a report that compares laws and regulations in the United Kingdom and India to see the similarities and disjunctions in cyber security policy between them. CIS sent comments on TRAI consultation paper on promoting local telecom equipment manufacturing. The submission drew on research primarily done in the Pervasive Technologies project.

Highlights

Anubha Sinha took part in the 35th Session of the World Intellectual Property Organization (“WIPO”) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (“SCCR”) at Geneva from 13 November, 2017 to 18 November, 2017. She posed a question on the agenda 'Other Matters' on behalf of CIS on Day 5, 17 November, 2017. CIS also gave statements on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives and GRULAC Proposal for Analysis of Copyright in the Digital Environment.
CIS-A2K signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Telangana Government’s IT, Electronics & Communications Department with to catalyse the development of the Wikimedia movement in Telangana and improve the state of free-licensed digital content in Telugu and Urdu.
The Ministry of Electronics & Information Technology, Government of India has published the Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (GIGW). Nirmita Narasimhan on behalf of the Centre for Internet & Society gave comments on GIGW.
The government has already set up a Nudge unit; now, it should apply the Nobel laureate's insights on auctions relating to essential infrastructure wrote Shyam Ponappa in an article in the Business Standard on November 1, 2017.
DataMeet and CIS have collaborated on identifying and addressing the challenges to open up and integrate data and information in the water sector.
CIS commented on the Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector published by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on August 9, 2017.
CIS published a report that compares laws and regulations in the United Kingdom and India to see the similarities and disjunctions in cyber security policy between them.
CIS sent comments on TRAI consultation paper on promoting local telecom equipment manufacturing. The submission drew on research primarily done in the Pervasive Technologies project.

CIS in the News:

Big Data for governance (Alekhya Hanumanthu; Telangana Today; November 4, 2017).
How tech is making life easier for differently-abled (Shalini Umachandrani; November 7, 2017).
India Today Conclave Next 2017: Aadhaar was rushed, says MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar (Priya Pathak; India Today; November 8, 2017).
What You Need To Worry About Before Linking Your Mobile Number With Aadhaar (Roopa Raju and Shekhar Rai; Youth Ki Awaaz; November 8, 2017).
OPINION | Data is New Oil and Human Mind the New Battlefield. India Must Wake Up Now (Lt. General (Retd.) D. S. Hooda; News18.com; November 11, 2017).
Aadhaar seeding: benefits and concerns (Shaikh Zoaib Saleem; Livemint; November 14, 2017).
Privacy issues exist even without Aadhaar (Ronald Abraham; November 15, 2017).
Advocating for Openness: Nine Ways Civil Society Groups Have Mobilized to Defend Internet Freedom (Centre for International Media Assistance; November 15, 2017).
Govt working to set up financial CERT to tackle cyber threats (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 16, 2017).
Financial CERT to combat cyber threats, says MoS home affairs (CISO MAG; November 17, 2017).
UIDAI admits 210 government websites made Aadhaar details public (Financial Express; November 20, 2017).
India’s internet missionaries: The women Google is relying on to spread its Next Billion message (Sunny Sen; Livemint; November 21, 2017).
FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality may not impact India (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; November 23, 2017).
Indian activists slam FCC decision to ditch net neutrality (Kul Bhushan; Hindustan Times; November 23, 2017).
FCC’s plan to repeal net neutrality may not impact India (Surabhi Agarwal; Economic Times; November 23, 2017).
Why should you keep a close eye on the net neutrality debate in the US (Subhrojit Mallick; Digit; November 24, 2017).
Cyberattacks a significant threat to democracy: Modi (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 24, 2017).
Aadhaar verification at airports raises need for stricter data privacy regulations (Aman Sethi; Hindustan Times, November 27, 2017).
IDAP Interview Series: Interview with Nirmita Narasimhan (IDIA Law; November 27, 2017).
Govt releases white paper on data protection framework (Komal Gupta; Livemint; November 28, 2017).
Bengalureans to receive Helen Keller award (Deccan Herald; November 30, 2017).

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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.

Submission

Comments on Guidelines for Indian Government Websites (Nirmita Narasimhan; November 26, 2017).

►Copyright & Patent

35th SCCR: CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Anubha Sinha; November 15, 2017).
35th SCCR: CIS Statement on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives (Anubha Sinha; November 17, 2017).
35th SCCR: CIS' Question to Dr. Rostama on her Study on the Impact of the Digital Environment on Copyright Legislation (Anubha Sinha; November 19, 2017).

►Wikipedia

Blog Entry

CIS-A2K signs MoU with Telangana Government (Manasa Rao; November 8, 2017).

►Openness

-----------------------------------

Internet Governance
-----------------------------------

►Privacy

Blog Entries

A Comparison of Legal and Regulatory Approaches to Cyber Security in India and the United Kingdom (Divij Joshi; edited by Elonnai Hickok; November 12, 2017).
Counter Comments on TRAI's Consultation Paper on Privacy, Security and Ownership of Data in Telecom Sector (Amber Sinha; November 23, 2017).

Participation in Event

BIS International Seminar on Internet of Things (Organized by BIS; November 15, 2017; India Habitat Centre, New Delhi). Amber Sinha attended the event.
Internet Universality Indicators for a Safe, Secure and Inclusive Cyberspace for Sustainable Development (Organized by UNESCO in collaboration with the Ministry of Electronics and IT, Government of India; UNESCO Conference Room, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi; November 17, 2017). Amber Sinha attended the event.

Roundtable on Data Integrity and Privacy (Organized by Observer Research Foundation; November 18, 2017). The round table discussion was chaired by Shri Baijayant Panda, Hon'ble Member of Parliament.

►Cyber Security

Blog Entry

Breach Notifications: A Step towards Cyber Security for Consumers and Citizens (Amelia Andersdotter; November 14, 2017).

Event Organized

Roundtable on Enhancing Indian Cyber Security through Multi-Stakeholder Cooperation (Indian Islamic Centre; Lodhi Road; New Delhi; November 4, 2017).
Open House on Security Practices in FinTech (Organized by CIS and Has Geek; November 17, 2017).

Participation in Event

Multinational Cyber Security Forum at University of Haifa (Organized by Center for Cyber, Law and Policy and University of Haifa in collaboration with the Hewlett Foundation Cyber Initiative; November 5 - 7, 2017). Sunil Abraham participated in the meeting held in Israel.
Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace (GCSC) (Organized by GCSC; November 21, 2017; New Delhi). Pranesh Prakash participated in the event.

-----------------------------------
Telecom
-----------------------------------

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

Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler's Views On Auctions (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; November 1, 2017).

Submission

Comments on TRAI Consultation Paper on Promoting Local Telecom Equipment Manufacturing (Anubha Sinha; November 26, 2017).

Articles

Digital native: Rebellion by Google Doc (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; November 4, 2017)
Digital native: Let there be life (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; November 19, 2017).

-----------------------------------

About CIS
-----------------------------------
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

► Request for Collaboration

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

Digital native: Let there be life

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:05:37Z

The first robot citizen of the world is from Saudi Arabia, and she has the dubious fame of having more rights than human counterparts in the country.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 19, 2017.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. (Image Source: Thinkstock)

Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. While this well-calculated public relations gimmick might be positioned to put Saudi Arabia on the innovations map of the future, it does betray the fact that it now has the dubious fame of being a country where female-shaped robots have more rights than human women. In its press conference, Sophia appeared without the traditional headscarf, which is mandatory for all Saudi women to wear in public at all times. Sophia is allowed a voice, an agency and a sense of humour. It has been given the capacity and choice to talk to strangers and, in the future, the freedom to drive cars and stand up for its rights in a way that women in Saudi Arabia can’t.

Sophia, with its humanoid futures rendered in silicon and fibres, also gets citizenship in a country where tens of thousands of immigrant workers — who live in conditions of slavish exploitation — are not allowed citizenship or even permanent residence. Saudi Arabia’s laws do not allow for citizenship by naturalisation. Sophia’s honorary citizenship is yet another signal of how the future of human rights and entitlements is going to be blurred when technological artefacts and artificial intelligences start competing for similar status.

However, the most interesting part of Sophia’s new found personhood, is that Sophia, in fact, is not an individual entity. The robot might mimic human form and emotions, but, as a product of deep neural networking and machine learning, Sophia is extensively connected to multiple layers of computational data processing. There are super computers processing all its sensory input, algorithms that help it to navigate physical and social structures, distributed databases drawing from a language corpus that help it to formulate meaningful sentences; and, there are multiple artificial intelligence softwares that evolve and change Sophia’s behaviour through pattern recognition and deep learning.

Sophia is not just a thing in isolation. It is a gateway robot that opens up a series of questions of what happens when we actually interact with and invite sapient technologies into our lives. Granting Sophia citizenship also includes granting citizenship to a server situated somewhere else in the world. In fact, if you establish a connection between Sophia and your machine, and manage to merge the two computing systems, your machine could easily make claims to be a part of the extended citizenship that has been granted to Sophia.

It is important to remember that even as our machines appear more human, more personalised, they are not just a single thing. As we develop new intimacies with our neural networked devices, it is good to take a step back and remember that the rights of humans might still be worth championing over the state of machines.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life