Centre for Internet and Society

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa

alok — 2012-10-09T05:02:16Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Maesy Angelina, an independent researcher from Jakarta, Indonesia was the first speaker with her presentation "Subversive Banality: Global Celebrities and Citizenship Practices on Twitter". Angelina first draws our attention to the way we tend to celebrate social media outlets like Twitter as being a site of political and activist resistance (Arab Spring). However, the reality of the situation is that the highest trending topics on Twitter throughout the world are about celebrities. Twitter users, including those in Indonesia where Angelina’s research focuses, are not tweeting about contemporary violence in society (at least directly). While some scholars have suggested that this is indicative of the mindlessness of the masses, Angelina wants to complexify this narrative and offer that perhaps the masses have different tactics to contest notions of citizenship that are not intelligible from a traditional 'activist' or 'academic' schema.

Angelina focuses on a series of protests and debates about international pop sensation Lady Gaga performing in Indonesia from March - June 2012. In reviewing the tweets generated during this time, Angelina finds that most of these messages have nothing to do with Lady Gaga and often include perspectives on culture, nature, and other topics pertaining to citizenship. For example: "Music is universal, but gyrating moves and revealing clothes are not". Angelina argues that the (international) celebrity presents an opportunity, a site by which Indonesian people are able to contest notions of citizenship. She presents the ‘banality’ of this celebrity discourse as actually subversive. She images this discourse as a way of the masses asserting agency.

Angelina’s presentation sparked an important conversation. Most notably, participants were concerned with what it means to view Twitter as a legitimate network by which to make these claims? Is Twitter really representative of the appropriate network to analyse these topics? Conceptual and methodological challenges arise here: what tools do we use to analyse new forms of media when we currently do not have the apparatus and training methods to do so? Participants also noted a serious need for historicity in these types of analyses. While we tend to fetishise the ‘digital’ or ‘social media’ ‘turn,’ we have to acknowledge histories — including fan culture in this case — that shape and structure the advent of these new discourses. Participants called for Angelina to ground her claims within histories of models of citizenship — particularly citizenships based on consumption.

I found Angelina’s presentation and notion of banal subversiveness quite provocative. However, I think we have to all think more critically about what it means that many of these international celebrities that initiate this dialogue are white and American. Considering that citizenship is already a fraught and contested category within formerly colonised areas, how do we incorporate an analysis of (neo)imperialism within our frameworks? How is the (racialised, gendered, etc.) body of the ‘foreign’ celebrity different to that of the ‘local’ celebrity? While it is important to acknowledge the increasing instability of these dichotomies and concede the interconnectivity of global system(s), fundamental questions of power, inequality, and colonialism cannot be neglected in this discussion.

Oliver Lerone Schulz from the Post Media Lab in Lueneburg, Germany spoke next. Schulz’s approach to theory is unique due to his history in traditionally non-academic spaces which generate and approach theory in fundamentally different ways. He is committed to a conception of media that is not fettered by technological media. At its core, Schulz’s presentation sought to assert a conceptual schema, an epistemology to address questions of the visual. He reminds us how questions of the image and the visual have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary theory and have come to represent an unsolved problem or anomaly. Schulz utilises a paradigm of globalisation to grapple with this dilemma.

Schulz asks us how is globalisation visualized? What does it mean to map out globalisation? Schulz reviews relevant literature on the visual domain establishing that a visual is a representation of something that cannot be represented in the first place without efforts to visualise it. Following this, we can recognise that globalisation is presented as a diagnosis of our times, but it is also the object which is being diagnosed. His project is an attempt to locate and establish a visual politics which is not only visual to map, characterise and critique globalisation. He draws the audience’s attention to a series of images and asks: to what extent can you see globalisation?

Schulz’s presentation raises important questions on the efficacy of visual analyses and frameworks. Participants agree that the visual turn is in crisis, and yet why do we still insist on reading the visual? Nishant and Akansha pushed the debate further suggesting that globalisation can be viewed as a series of images. More than the visual itself, it is the stack of visuals that are important. As Nishant reminds us, we need to de-stabilise the visual as the only form that needs to be read. We must read it, but not see it as central.

The most important point that emerged from Schulz’s presentation is that like any other network, globalisation is a diagnosis of the contemporary, but it is also the malady and the cure.

From day one of the conference, the contradictions and paradoxes already emerge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-globalising-lady-gaga

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T04:38:04Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop hopes to generate dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become the visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

The Habits of Living Thinkathon took off today with an introduction by Wendy Chun, who led us through a critical review of the relevant academic theory on networks and network analysis to help us understand how ubiquitous networks have become as a method of conceptualizing and understanding the world around us.

But why networks? What is the explanatory power of networks?

Networks enable us to map the unmappable, to trace the complex, unimaginably big structures that post-modernism left us with, and to be able to define our own unique existence. However, what becomes apparent is that we seem to be forever mapping, but we are no more able to realize our place within the capitalist society we live in, much less escape it. Rather than resolving them, mapping leads to the generation of more networks, and as we become more proficient at identifying and mapping networks, the more static they become. As Wendy Chun says, "We seem to be forever moving and never changing."

Continuing on, Chun asks: why has the network become the end rather than the beginning of the answer? What drives the impetus to see un-seeable networks everywhere? Chun presents the Thinkathon's theme of Habits of Living as an epistemological framework to grapple with these questions. For Chun, the 'habit' works as a particularly useful heuristic to unpack and deconstruct some of the central components of the network. A habit is something that is acquired through time and then forgotten about as it moves from voluntary to involuntary. In fact, a habit can start as something we do and become something we are. With this in mind, we are asked to think: how has the network become habitualised and what are the implications of this? What is the importance of time in the mapping and lived experiences of networks? In looking at networks from this meta-level, we can ask: why do we think networks make us forever moving but never changing?

Chun's presentation is received well, but one concern gets noted early on. This discourse of the 'network' privileges a very particular Western subjectivity, one which may not be applicable to collectivist cultures where communities have always existed with network structures. What becomes apparent is that we need to start collecting alternate discussions and input from a non-Western understanding of a network in order to truly understand what it is to live in a network society.

Following Wendy's talk, Nishant Shah continues the discussion on networks by contributing several other crucial epistemological interventions to begin our consideration of the Habits of Living. Nishant begins by asserting that we — perhaps naively — want to believe that networks have the innate ability to generate change. The way we commonly view networks, especially in a post-Arab Spring world, is with the understanding that the network is the panacea for all of our social ills. However, the body of the network is the only problem that the network can solve. That is to say, the network can only produce an account of itself; it cannot be used to create understandings of things outside of its own boundaries.

Nishant briefly reviews the recent "Northeast Exodus" from the global tech city of Bengaluru, in which the dissemination of SMS messages within various networks caused a panic. The knowledge that moved through the networks terrified people before real information on the events could be consumed. Nishant shows how events like these cause people to claim that something has gone wrong with the network, which is particularly worrying for the state, as how can they fix an issue in a network that they cannot see? Further unpacking this scenario, Nishant shows how the minute the network becomes visible, it is a crisis.

Participants expressed concern about the use of 'network' in this discourse. What actually does the 'network' describe — can it stand as a heuristic for so many different relations? Additionally, what is the truth that the network seeks to expose or reveal? Is there an actual truth that can be unearthed through the network?

Nishant responded that many of these questions will hopefully be answered over the next four days of the Thinkathon — and we are definitely looking forwards to it!

Continue to follow our live blog coverage of the Habits of Living Thinkathon for more thought-provoking discussion!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:18:59Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners. The aim of the workshop is to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Wendy Chun talked to us today about what it means to be a friend. She began with a brief overview of network theory, with a focus on the dilemmas of the constant mapping. Moving on, she asked us to think about how networks are related to habits, as habits focus us on the duration of events. This is important for the understanding of networks, as networks require the constant generation of associated events that seem stable. Wendy then asked us to think about the difference between communities and networks, and helped us to think about the extent that networks are imagined (in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the imagined). Throughout this discussion, she continues to come back to the theme of “you,” the idea that networks enable us not only to see ourselves and our place in relation to other nodes in the network, but that simultaneous access of a network, a moment of “we,” will actually cause the network to fall into crisis,

Using this “you” framework, Wendy moves onto a discussion of the internet and how it has moved from being seen as a anonymous free space to a semi-private space where freedom stems from private authentication by others in your network. It is at this point that she asks us how we understand the idea of “friend”; are friendships mutual bonds created for support in times of crisis, or are they sometimes one-way affections where the act of requesting friendship creates the connection? How much has friendship become about broadcasting our connections—our place in the network?

Cyber friendship, especially in the Facebook understanding of “friend,” becomes a method that we can use to understand our strange relationship with safety on online spaces—we desire security, and want to trust and authenticate our relationships with friends, but by pursuing this we can often put our friends into danger, or at least into realms that may not always be seen as “safe”, which now is often interpreted as “private.” For example, by “liking” a friend’s link on Facebook, we create tangible information for Facebook to collect and use about both our friends and ourselves. This method of capturing data only works when you are enmeshed in a network of friends. If our need for safety/privacy is what places in danger on the Internet, it is not security that tames networks by personalizing them that will help us; instead, we need to understand and accept that intimacy and danger in online spaces go hand-in-hand.

As a finishing note, Wendy describes to us a phishing attack that she suffered. After clicking a link sent to her by a friend on Facebook, she sent phishing spam to all of her friends—all of the members of her network. This event created a moment of understanding for her, as she realized that her spam messages reminded her friends that they were part of her network, and that she liked them enough to put them at risk.

Participant discussion began with a focus on how theory becomes implicated into networks, and how networks can be used to give oversights of theory. Participants asked: what does theorizing networks do to the networks, and the members in the networks? Can Facebook be seen as theory, particularly in the ideas of the existence of events without witnesses and how friendships are created and understood?

Participants also pointed out that it is wrong to be suspicious of organizations like Facebook, because it is not Facebook that betrays you but your friends. This is the implicit agreement of Facebook friendship—the agreement to be friends implicates the transmission of secrecy/vulnerability. Machines cannot betray, but humans, friends, can and often do, even in ways that may be involuntary.

Further discussion focused on both how friendships and application suggestions give us the ability to understand how we are building and presenting ourselves. This two-way communication with technologies that implicate networks puts us into a state of permanent crisis where we must continue to be active to connect, as connecting becomes the main activity of becoming and staying networked. This moved into a discussion on the creation of traces of networks that are constantly in motion, and constantly on the verge of disappearing.

Wendy’s discussion of friendship as an often one-way activity, particularly on Facebook where one member must request friendship with another, was a completely new way of thinking about the essence of friendship for me. How much does this cyber, “Facebook” method of creating friendship through the declaration of association cut into the real world? Are nonhuman agreements of friendship (i.e.: Facebook friends) reflections of significant real-world events, in the sense that they are often a nonhuman promise to pursue future friendship in the physical world that is made real through its broadcast on the network? What does this mean for real-world meetings that don’t cumulate in “friending”? What happens to the structure of real-world friendship if the promise of friendship that was broadcasted is never followed through? What does “defriending” mean? What does defriending do to networks?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-wendy-chun-on-friends

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Namita A Malhotra on Amateur Pornography

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:23:05Z

We found Namita Malhotra’s presentation on amateur video porn to be particularly stimulating. However, she begins her discussion not with porn but with the Sumeet Mixie, the first mixie made for Indian food. At the time that the Sumeet Mixie had its heyday, it was largely inaccessible to most Indians, even those in the mid-level middle class. The mixie, Namita claimed, was a representation of a crisis of the middle class in India in the 1980s, a representation of the progress that was promised to them through Nehru’s development programs that was still largely out of reach for the average Indian. Namita draws parallels between a picture of her father, a young engineer, with Nehru and the famous picture of Nehru with the Santhali tribal girl, who, at some point after the famous shot of her inaugurating a dam, placed a garland around Nehru and was subsequently ostracized from her village on the grounds that she had become married to him. Namita’s father’s life was also heavily influenced by Nehru and his call for engineers, as he was pressured to become an engineer when he had little interest in doing so.

Both the lives of her father and the Santhali girl were changed by the actions that they were asked to perform for the good of the country. Indians across the country were pushed to change their life, their dreams, and their habits in return for progress, for development, especially that of the Western kind. The reward was liberalization and a move towards consumerism, a duty that was placed upon the middle class as an activity of their earned progression but remained largely impossible. This struggle between the expectation to consume as a function of their hard-earned middle class status and their inability to do so was just one of many crises of the 1980s Indian middle class. Namita describes this period using two iconic phrases: “Life was hard and slow” and “a long afternoon of underdevelopment.”

Moving on from discussions of Nehru and the middle class, Namita presents to us her work, jointly titled: Nehru’s Technologically Enabled Future or It Could Be Me. She enters into the discussion of amateur porn in India by showing us a 2-3 minutes video clip of the women’s section of a bus. The women are standing or sitting, and their activity barely changes over the period of the video. The eroticism, she suggests, could be in the suggestion of activities that could take place. It is the seemingly non-erotic images in India that have become some of the most defining features of amateur porn in India, both currently and in the past.

In past decades, the consumption of porn largely took place in communal male spaces. However, the event of a somewhat non-erotic clip of a teenage couple negotiating the terms of oral sex being auctioned on a website led to what Namita calls a “moment of sexual eureka”: the realization that amateur clips could be shared online. This led to a flood of amateur porn being circulated and shared through online networks. This eventually prompted a response from the state, though the response was largely one of confusion towards who or what was really responsible—the individual, the network or the technology? The state, of course, is not afraid of the content of the clips but the networks and connections that they cannot see nor trace.

Namita then moves on to a discussion of content of much amateur Indian porn. Much of the media that is created and consumed on mobile phones is grainy and low resolution, and even higher-resolution image clips tend to be highly un-staged with little to no focus on performance. There is a creation of anonymity through the way many clips are filmed, with one participant holding the camera and focuses being placed on body parts instead of faces. Where, then, does the eroticism come from? Namita argues that the familiarity and ability to relate and be present as a viewer in these amateur videos creates its own eroticism. The same can be said about the realness of videos whose purpose is not performance of sexual acts by ideal bodies.

This creation of eroticism indicates possible discussion of surrogacy. Erotica stands in for sex, masturbation stands in for sex, etc. Surrogacy may be useful in completing this conversation about eroticism and Indian amateur porn.

Participants were unsure about the connection between Nehru’s paradigms and amateur porn, and felt that it needed a bit more fleshing out. Discussion then moved towards ideas of transgressive epistemologies, and whether or not the culture and networks situated around amateur porn where sites of transgressive practices. There was debate around what the purpose of the transgression is—recovering ground in visual culture? Gaining control over one’s corporeality? Ultimately, Namita was wary of invoking a transgressive framework around these cultures, and put forth pleasure as a more interesting and useful frame, as there is always a sexual layer involved. She felt that a transfessive framework may be limiting in the exploration of these cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-amateur-photography

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Rijuta Mehta on Militant Hindu Nationalist Networks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:34:59Z

Rijuta Mehta talked to us today about networks of Hindu militant nationalism, which she has termed “Hindutva” networks. Through her back in cultural media studies, she has become interested in the creation and existence of non-citizens as well as the interaction between the state and the stateless person. Using the larger framework of non-citizenship and the media, Rijuta has been trying to make sense of the militant Hindutva movements that are abound in India.

Rijuta argues that a good way of understanding these movements is by using a network framework, particularly one that recognizes the integral part that is played by interaction between the various networks and that these networks are characterized by the politics of non-citizenship—that is, those that are excluded from the Hindutva networks are non-citizens. Mehta asks us: What is the form of these networks, and what do they have to do with the persecution of non-citizens in India? To what extent does Hindutva make the form of the network visible in political society and political violence? How do networks of dispossession and externalism give and take form? What is the form of the Hindutva network(s)?

To help answer some of these questions, Mehta walks us through a brief history of the growth of Hindutva groups in India, and describes to us how their characterization has changed over time. Hindutva has moved from being a collection of networks of those who identify as Hindu to a multilevel movement known for its violence against Muslims and those it views as non-citizens. The Hindutva organization is characterized by many branches of networks, which has allowed for the expression of many different beliefs and ideologies within the overarching framework of Hindutva. However, though the networks may appear to be decentralized, the groups are still dependent on a hierarchal stratification of central nodes of power. This complex structure of authority allows for niches for petty/local sovereigns.

Mehta points out at this point that the public often sees networks as being emancipatory, but in the example of the Hindutva, this has to be questioned. We should expect to see networks being created in instances of mediated rule and patron-clientalism, both of which lead to the structure of civil society being characterized by the creation of multiple networks centralized around middlemen. Networked associations such as these tend to enable higher incidences of violence, and can even lead to long-term entrenched violence. Consequently, networks should not be seen as being ultimately emancipatory, as they can be the cause of more established structures of oppression.

Participants were quick to discuss the use of the word “Hindutva” when describing these networks. It was pointed out that in a Supreme Court of India ruling, Hindutva was defined as “the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos,” and that Hindutva could encompass any type of Hinduism. Discussion arose over whether or not there are non-problematic Hindutva networks. Many participants argued that though Hindutva is now associated with the militant right-wing, it may still be incorrect to called the violent or aggressive Hindu nationalist movement Hindutva because the borders between the militant Hindutva networks and various other non-militant or even non-nationalistic Hindu networks are not clear.

Bringing it back to habits and living, discussions were brought up about the similarities between Hinduism as a lifestyle, as being part or a guiding structure to habits and living, and Christianity as a lifestyle. In many places in the USA, many people who are not orthodoxly religious still perform religious activities simply because it is part of their habit and lifestyles, and those practices are so deeply engrained into the culture and everyday life of those Americans. This is where the term Hindutva becomes problematic as simply a term to describe militant nationalist networks, as Hindutva can also be seen as a structure of everyday life for many Indians.

I thought the discussion about the use of the term Hindutva was very important, as the use of an all-encompassing term with unclear boundaries can vilify groups or individuals who do not identify with the popular understanding of Hindutva as a militant nationalist group. I also thought that the point about mediated rule and patron-clientalism is a highly interesting avenue for the research of networks and how network structures interact with the state and the political sphere, as they can influence both the development of a legitimate political regime as well as the creation of citizen and non-citizen identities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-militant-hindu-nationalist-networks

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Eivind Rossaak on Archives in Motion

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:39:46Z

Eivind Rossaak talks to us today about Archives in Motion, and how networks, especially those created though interaction with technology and social media, have consequences for the way we conceptualize the idea of the archive. He runs us through a brief introduction to archival theory to helps us understand how the purpose, structure, and function of archives and their artifacts have changed over time, and leads us into an exploration of contemporary developments and discourses on archives. Currently, Rossaak is interested in themes of counter-memory practices, software vs. memory, and whether or not social media is a form of archives in motion.

When approaching social media as forms of archives in motion, Rossaak calls on us to think differently about how we understand archival activities. Using the example of Youtube, Rossaak reminds us that we can’t just think of Youtube as a video archive or a repository of confessionary personal information, but instead we should begin to see Youtube as a platform of networked documents, and a site of network creation. Youtube videos are essentially linked; they are not just video logs, but emerge as the expressions of nodes in a complex network database.

Eivind calls upon the example of the Boxxybabe meme to help us understand this new way of being networked. The Boxxybabe video did not just go viral, it cut across many spheres of human interaction and activity, to the point where the identities and activities created by the Boxxybabe meme were experienced in both the online and offline worlds. The Boxxybabe video becomes a technological article in itself, as it testifies to multiple networks. Further, it represents new forms of associations created between objects that are both human and non-human, and motions towards a cyborg turn in the way we become human through the extension of human lives in cybernetic networks. The networks created by this plasticity between the human and nonhuman leads to new methods of social memory creation, and therefore new understandings of archives in motion.

Rossaak’s presentation prompts an ardent response from the participants. Participants discussed issues of anxiety associated with memory failure and how this leads to the desire to preserve. This leads into an exploration of what an archive really is and whether archives require institutionality or can be understood as personal. In this understanding, there is no need for counter-archives because archives are being built everywhere, all the time, and this facilitates the understanding of social media as archives. Participants agree that further study should be pursued around this concept.

Other issues are brought up around subjects that were not addressed in the summary of archival theory, mainly around ideas of locationality and objectivity in the collection of information for archives, selectivity of information that goes into archives, the labor of the archive, and the implication of locationality in the understanding and function of archives.

A large amount of further discussion is centered on the human and non-human elements of archive and network creation, and the activity of becoming human through the creation of non-human networks. Nishant Shah, our facilitator, sums up the main theme of this discussion with the following tweet: “If our idea of the human is mitigated through the non-human, then all attempts at being human will always be about being networked.”

Personally, I thought the concept of archives in motion was incredibly interesting, and I would like to push the ideas of the motion and a recreation of what it is to be human a bit further. I wonder if these structures of social memory and complex offline/online networks that are created through interaction with social media actually represent a movement not only towards our abandonment of the concept of an event or object of being rooted in time, only able to be understood and documented once it has ended (therefore allowing us, using a linear structure of time, to understand it by viewing its beginning point and end point), but also towards viewing ourselves as being in motion, as well. What does it mean to be a human in motion? Does it mean the abandonment of linear temporality? Am I able to see myself, my identity, as not rooted in time but as a node in a network of my self? Can personal conceptualizations of “self” be networked? Is this what it means to be a human in motion?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-archives-in-motion