Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 6) - Lhadon Tethong

purba — 2013-08-01T09:54:46Z

CIS interviews Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist, as part of the Cybersecurity Series

"In authoritarian states, and in this case, in Tibet, I think that every person that we can teach and pass knowledge to, that can help them stay out of jail, stay in the streets, for one, two, three days longer, one week longer, that is a valuable time of time and resources. And I think we cannot rely on only tools and technology solutions to protect people. I think we can't just rely on government policies at the highest levels, and on export controls... the approach to digital security has to be comprehensive and we have to engage citizens. And not just in cases like the Tibetans or for activists or for people living under repression, but for people in free and open societies too." - Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its sixth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS interviews Lhadon Tethong, Tibetan human rights activist. Lhadon is the Director of the Tibet Action Institute, where she leads a team of technologists and human rights advocates in developing and advancing open-source communication technologies, nonviolent strategies and innovative training programs for Tibetans and other groups facing heavy repression and human rights abuses.

Link for Tibet Action Institute: https://tibetaction.net/

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-6-lhadon-tethong

IT and the cITy

nishant — 2009-09-18T10:45:27Z

Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.

Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself, trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces, that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it, becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the City.

A cursory glance around you, perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements, live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying, schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same – either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars to the fluid geography of the city.

If you happen to stand on the magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address. No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected, mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a paradigm of its own.

And so strong is this seduction of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai, always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial), and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and speed. So that the historicity in PuXi becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?

It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social change can be built.

This blog, in its ten different entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful discourse.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity

China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai

nishant — 2009-09-21T14:09:16Z

Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY

The Making of an Asian City

nishant — 2012-08-10T08:33:48Z

Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.

The Promise of Invisibility: The Making of an Asian IT City

Abstract: This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material (re)construction of the city:

1. Built Form of the City: The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies.

2. Governance and Administration: The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the state.

These changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse, through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently – in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question as central to the phenomena.

Context

The 21^st Century has seen accelerated urbanisation and spatial restructuration of cities in emerging information societies around the world. These cities are created as global hubs that shall not only house the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, but also embody the aesthetics, politics, practices and lifestyles that the global cultural revolutions are bringing in. The technologies are significantly involved in the production of the dominant, the hegemonic and the coercive, all under the rubric of economic growth and development, and have affected domains of life, labour and language (Foucault,1998) in different contexts. It is easy to trace the ways in which lifestyle, cultural expression (Bagga, 2005), texture of social interaction and mobilisation, and political and administrative reorganisation (Roy, 2005) have changed in emerging contexts like India and China.

The efforts at creating ‘global countries’ (Kalam, 2004) that can harness the powers of ICT, have lead to three distinct forms of changes. These changes can be seen in the built form of the city, in structures of governance and administration, and in attitudes and Imagination of technologies as they emerge in popular discourse and cultural production. Each of these changes is articulated and explained through the tropes of Transparency and Access. The paper has a specific interest in looking at sites of dislocation and migration, to illustrate the arguments it seeks to make. The paper relies on secondary and tertiary literature (often in translation), unstructured interviews and participant observation to make an argument about how the aesthetics, mechanics and political [i] imaginaries of technology are a part of the physically changing and transforming IT cities in Asia. In order to make the argument, however, a brief context that explains the material signification of these three kinds of changes, is necessary to be explicated.

Beyond the Blogosphere

There has been an equal amount of optimism and scepticism when it comes to talking about the new public spheres that emerge with the Internet. Clubbed under the short-hand ‘Blogosphere’, both the evangelists and the critics of the blogosphere, have explored the Habermassian notion of the engaging public that is crafted with the emergence of new technologies of literacy, expression and participation. In many ways, the governance structures that have been discussed earlier, also endorse the positions taken by these interlocutors. However, much of the discourse, understands the blogosphere as contained in the digital domains. While a cause-and-effect model is often posited, the chief interest and focus remains on the new public, new voices and new spaces within the virtualities of the World Wide Web. This paper challenges such narrow definitions of the public sphere, and in fact, goes back to Habermass to locate technologies and public spaces within a certain historical context. In fact, this paper proposes that the increasing need for the faith in the blogosphere and the clamour that surrounds it is symptomatic of how the physical and built public spaces, in most Asian IT cities, is slowly diminishing.

In Shanghai, it is the loss of a political public space of socialist capital and industry that marks the beginning of this disappearance. 20 years ago, the announcer on every passenger train entering Shanghai would introduce the city as “the largest industrial city in China.” When W. E. B. Du Bois, an African-American writer, visited Shanghai in 1959, he was particularly invited to visit the balcony of Shanghai Mansion, which sits at the mouth of the Suzhou River and was the tallest building of its time, to catch a bird’s eye view of the new urban socialist landscape and the innumerable factory chimneys that speared the sky (Zhang, 2002).[ii] Indeed, an abundant number of factories, warehouses and dockyards cropped up in the three decades after 1950, and, together with the existing industrial constructions, made Shanghai a “new metropolis.” Some of them were clustered in suburban areas, more were scattered in the city area. Some were even squeezed into Longtangs (the narrow alleyways of old Shanghai). The industrial constructions include not only factory buildings but also workers’ residential buildings in factory-concentrated areas. The workers’ residential buildings were targeted primarily at the senior or skilled workers among the industrial population. Life in the residential buildings became an extension of factory life since neighbours were most probably co-workers in the same factory. It is precisely the great number of old and new industrial constructions and the rhythmic life going on in them that composed the socialist industrial space of Shanghai. Needless to say, it was the fastest growing space in the forty years after 1949.

However, nine out of ten such spaces have been wiped out during the fifteen-year urban renewal project, which is perhaps embodied in the restructuring of the Bund as a space of tourist attraction, and eventually the building of the Pudong skyline that has now become the iconic face of the city (Yatsko, 1996, pp 59).[iii] Factories—let alone warehouses—within the Inner Ring Road have either closed down or been removed. With the closing of the factories, the workers also have no place to work anymore. Dr. Wang XiaoMing, in his essay on the changing public space mentions how, once the factory he worked in “had its signboard removed in 1997, the workers have no place to work anymore. The inhabitants of Caoyang New Village have thrown away the signboard off the gate a long time ago and could barely remember that the place was once called the “Workers New Village.” Large factories located on the outskirts of the city are mostly shut down and the places are as quiet as cemeteries” (forthcoming, 2010).

As Americanised industrial parks sprout up in places such as the Pudong District of Shanghai, and Kunshan and Suzhou to the north of Shanghai, the socialist industrial space is shrinking rapidly both within and without Shanghai. Another space that has significantly diminished is the public political space. One of the most important requirements socialism places on urban space is to be able to facilitate large-scale political rallies and parades (Kewen 2006 and Liang 1959).[iv]

Therefore, apart from industrial constructions, the most eye-catching constructions in Shanghai’s new urban constructions from the 1950s to the 1960s were squares and large meeting halls, which include the People’s Square, the Sino-Russian Friendship Building, the Cultural Plaza, and so on.[v] Moreover, government agencies of all levels and factories endeavoured to build conference halls of various sizes for political meetings by transforming theatre halls or building new ones. In the past, tens of thousands of people have paraded down the People’s Square to pay tribute to the officials perched high above on reviewing stands. People rallying in various meeting halls, changing slogans to express joy, and echoing the instructions from the speakers on stage, were frequent occurrences. During the Cultural Revolution, the Rebels staged the final resistance here; in the late 1980s, fervent university students had swarmed into People’s Square to turn it into a place of revelry (Feuchtwang, 2004).

In the blink of an eye, these histories have faded from the public memory and been completely erased from the city’s architectural space. Sino-Russia Friendship Building is renamed Shanghai Exhibition Center, which hosts a constant blur of Expos. After repeated segmentation, People’s Square is now only a nominal square with a long and narrow driveway and most of its space has been occupied by new buildings such as the majestic Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum, the sunken commercial street and a parking lot. Cultural Plaza was first transformed into a large flower market which was later torn down and pushed to a corner to make way for the new “Music Plaza.” With mass meetings completely eradicated from the life of Shanghai’s residents, the numerous assembly halls and meeting places of various sizes have naturally been restructures for other purposes. People participate with zeal in large assemblies such as concerts, performance competitions, and so on, which have nothing to do with public politics. It is even possible to say that the audience’s shrieks in the stadium symbolize the massive decrease of the public political space in both architectural and spiritual sense (Tang, 2009, pp 327).

Another cluster of spaces that have significantly disappeared are the gossip centres concentrated in areas such as the mouth of NongTang, Lao Hu Zhao [vi], variety store and lane. It is a cultural given that the Shanghainese like to strike up a conversation with strangers and to engage in gossip; this is indeed one of the city’s hallmarks. The Shanghainese can always spare time for gossip: no matter how busy the atmosphere is, there are always some people who loiter around with hands in pockets; even the working class who work from dawn to dusk like to exchange a few words with their neighbours after work. It so happened that the living space was very cramped for the Shanghainese after the 1950s.[vii] The rich can idle away their time in places such as cinemas whereas the low-income people can only manage to find a free space of leisure near their residences. The first choice is the mouth of NongTang adjacent to the footpath, from which all the comings and goings of residents and the traffics on the streets could be perceived. There will always be a Lao Hu Zhao near the mouth of a big NongTang, where you can sit for a whole afternoon and exchange hearsays with neighbours coming for hot water over a cup of tea; or there is a family-run variety store whose female boss is quite fond of trading rumours and gossip with customers across the narrow counter. In times of local or national crises, this is always the first place where the news is spread and gets distorted.

Things have now changed. Lao Huo Zhaos are gone. Variety stores are quickly replaced by different kinds of convenience stores (Huang, 2004, pp 49-50). Although many similar or even smaller family-run variety stores are opened at the newly-formed district bordering the city, a stable communication space cannot form in these stores since the male or female boss is mostly “non-native population”[viii], who not only is unable to blend in with the local residents but also may move away at any time. Although being one of the hallmarks of old Shanghai houses, the nongtangs have been pulled down in large numbers. Those narrow, winding streets have been either diverted, or straightened and widened. Shabby houses on both sides of the streets have disappeared. Also gone are the hustle and bustle, the interfusion of public and private space, and street gossips, which have been replaced by heavy traffic with exhaust gas and noise. With the increasingly neat arrangement of construction space within the city, the influx of transient population, residents increasingly accustomed to shutting doors to the world and to their neighbours, the overwhelming clamour in the media, and the young people’s addiction to internet and game bars, the space where rumours and gossips are spread via mouths and pointing fingers is naturally contracted (Yeung, 1996, pp. 78-84).

These old spaces of early Shanghainese modernity are quickly replaced by three new built forms. The first are the various above-ground, underground, and overhead expressways. Intersecting and intertwining together, they make the whole city look as if it were trapped in a python’s nest. The second thing that comes to the mind is commercial space.[ix] Shopping malls[x] line both the sides of the streets in downtown Shanghai, whereas hypermarkets cluster at the periphery of the city (Diao, 2006)[xi]. With the speedy expansion of space (Li, 2006)[xii], the style of constructions are increasingly uniform: nearly all of them name themselves “squares”; shopping malls are lined with chain stores on every level; chain supermarkets create mazes of different sizes with dense goods shelves; in office buildings, glass doors and plastic boards partition the office into many honeycomb-like cubicles, making the people working in them increasingly look like worker bees; the hospitality industry is overwhelmed with chain hotels of similar facilities and styles, even customers often forget which hotel they stay in last time (Fulong, 1999). The accelerated standardization process in Shanghai’s space highlights a tendency to obtain the standard outlook of the imagined “international metropolis” and an urgency to erase the distinct features inherited from the past.

Thirdly, the office space of governments and state monopolies expands in a unique sense: although the floor area has increased significantly[xiii], it is the upgrading and the move towards luxury that marks the change. Since the early 1990s, luxurious office buildings with halls paved with marble floor, central air conditioning system, shiny wood floors, CEO office suite with separate bathroom, were built first by banks, then revenue departments, telecommunication agencies, newspapers offices, television stations, courts, and police stations of different levels, and at last governments of municipal, district and even lower levels.[xiv] Not only the connotation of “work” has been enriched, but also other business spaces outside the office have expanded with restaurants, coffee bars, official reception hotels, training centers and vacation centers located in the office buildings or on the outskirts of town or other cities (Leaf, 1997, pp. 156-159).

The changes in the built form of the new IT City that has emerged, are particularly important because they signal the ways in which certain kinds of populations are made redundant in the city as it grows physically more hostile to their life in it. The erasure of histories, of public spaces, of spaces of political negotiation is symptomatic of the new ideologies, policies and dreams that Shanghai-Pudong embody. Most of the studies that look at these changes, concentrate only on the physical and material aspects of it, and ignore the aesthetics, politics, and changes that Internet technologies are bringing in, not only in the imagination of what constitutes a city, but also in the material and lived practices of the people in it (Appadurai, 1990). Government policies that ignore technologies, come to dead-ends in their intervention, as they fail to recognise the new geographies and terrains that the technology users navigate through. Interventions by the Development Sector or the Civil Society Movements often fail to recognise the structures of governance as informed by internet technologies, thus perpetrating the very evils that they fight against. Dislocation and Migration, which are complex issues, get reduced to only geography and physical places – leading to a simplified structure of rehabilitation, largely propelled by the vocabulary of the market and the state. Remunerations, economic rights and livelihood are the only questions addressed. In the process Community rights, structures of communication and networking, relationships within families and societies, ineffable ties and bonds that keep the communities coherent – these affective categories which are dislocated and forced to migrate because of the presence of technologies, fail to register either in the scholarship or in the practices in these areas.

This is where the blogosphere needs to be located – as not merely producing a new space of engagement, but helping in recovering the lost spaces of public participation and community communication. The blogosphere is not merely the invention of a technology marked digital native or the discovery of groups seeking alternative narratives. It is recognition of the fact that the regular mainstream public discourse, interacts with the social transformations and politics of our time and depend on the sustenance of public spheres for the socio-cultural categories like communities, neighbourhoods, public space, etc. to survive. The blogosphere, in the quickly changing, hyper-real landscape of Shanghai-Pudong’s geography is the new variety store, the new location for the Lao Hu Zhao and the space that the labyrinthine networks of nongtangs are mapped on.

e-Governance and its discontents

The change in the physical reorganisation of the city is not only a pragmatic decision. This disappearance of the public space of gossip, information dissemination and distortion, of informal conversations and deliberations tied in closely to the three levels of government in Shanghai – district government, street office and alley office – being able to increasingly control the leisure life of the Shanghainese through administrative planning and organisation (Zhang, 2004). There is a clear link between the government’s imagination of its own territory, the notion of the citizen who is to occupy these spaces, and the material practices that happen in these technology marked spaces (Feuchtwang, 2004). While it is an acknowledged fact that the Chinese government does not follow the structures and paradigms that a North-Western Democratic Liberal ideology that has produced the category of Nation-State in most contemporary discourse, there are still two specific forms of technology inflected governance structures which China seems to share with other contexts which might be geo-politically different.

The e-Governance models, which find resonances in most emerging contexts in the Global South, seem to develop two simultaneous and often ironically related approaches towards citizenship and administration, especially in the context of China. With its already forked governance policies, which treat HongKong – its colonial success story – differently from the rest of Mainland China (and the added complication of Taiwan) the governance structures are marked by technology in significant ways. These structures are suffused with irony, because of the tropes of transparency and invisibility that they use to articulate their rationale and processes.

The first is the approach of Rural Development through ICT networks, positing an access based model of participatory citizenship (Tarlo, 2003) and continuing the Development rhetoric of uplift and reform of the deprived citizen. This particular kind of governance structure re-imagines the beneficiary of state/government processes as existing in a condition of invisibility, and outside of the folds of technology. The particular emphasis on e-government, while it is located in the urban settings, is actually intended for reaching the citizen in the remote parts of the country, who does not have any engagement or direct interaction with processes of governance. Despite China’s three tiered government structure, the imagination of e-governance hold a strong currency because it makes visible, the people, practices and communities which otherwise exist in the subliminal and grey areas which were hitherto not in the focus of the government. Fuelling the rhetoric of e-government is the premium on information dissemination and transparent administration in order to enhance the domains of life and labour in the rural parts of the country.

This approach draws its strength from the Development agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’. However, the valourisation of transparency goes hand-in-glove with the production of the invisible (but cognisable) citizen who needs to be reproduced within the paradigms of technology. The peasant, who has been at the back-bone of China’s socialist political ideology, under this new articulation of transparency, becomes invisible – robbed of the historicity, the cultural iconoclasms and the empowerment that such policies earlier provided. Instead, the peasant becomes a worker who needs to be rehabilitated into the changing geographies of Pudong, the new IT city that requires a worker equipped with new skills and lifestyles. This approach draws its strength from the Developmental agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’ (Jaswal, 2005) and offers ICT enabled development as the panacea for the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, chronic poverty, etc. This approach is made manifest in the establishment of Telecentre kiosks, rural BPOs, e-literacy schools and mobile vans, setting up of mobile and internet technology centres, digitisation of the state’s resources, digital access centres to important data-sets, initiation of projects like ‘One Home One Computer’, the e-literacy campaigns, and the building of special economic zones (SEZ) and IT Corridors under the aegis of e-governance (Hawks, 2009).

The second approach is invested in the massive restructuration of the urban spaces to create infrastructure that attracts foreign investment and ICT enabled multinational corporations. This approach uses the language of creating a S.M.A.R.T. (Smart, Moral, Accountable, Responsive, Transparent) State, modelling the new spaces and politics around the new models of capital modernity (Appadurai, 1996) like Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei. This model is nuanced by a vocabulary of ‘global citizenship and globalised economy’ (Abbas, 1997), glorifying the new economic opportunities, flows of foreign capital, enhancement of lifestyle, and the promise of hypervisibility in the globalisation networks. The building up of network-neighbourhoods (Doheny-Farina, 1996), spaces of incessant commercial consumption, post modern digitalised aesthetics of living and housing, (Mitchell, 1996) infrastructure for ICT augmented lifestyles, spaces for sculpting hyperspatial bodies, and recreational zones that offer apolitical aesthetics of living (Chua, 2000), are all a part of this restructuration.

Contemporary analyses that deploy both these approaches are often contained within the language and the universes created by these approaches. Studies on e-governance concentrate on the processes of infrastructure development, the economic parameters of efficient administration, questions of rights and transparency and impact analyses of the public private partnership which is at the basis of most e-governance projects in India. Urban restructuration has found critique from disciplines that focus largely upon the promissory implementation of State policies, on the imbalance in the urban eco-systems, the new patterns of migration in the city, the cultural and class mobility that the new economies offer, and the emergence of the new middle class that becomes the figurehead of the IT revolution (Huang, 2005). Most studies look upon technology as incidental or instrumental; a tool towards an end. The relationship between ICTs and the State, and the kind of technosocial evolution they produce are generally zones of silence in most discourse. Both these discourses produce a certain hyper-visual citizen subject who is either the champion of the new Information societies or the victim of the digital divide that has ensued.

ICTs are often posited as neutral and transparent because they allow us to look at these two kinds of citizenships on the opposite end of the digital spectrum. It can be argued that the divides of ICTs are transparent and hence it offers clearly defined spaces of intervention and uplift. The development sector around the world has accepted this as a given and hence, along with the Governments, they have also been urging a blanket development of infrastructure of access to technology for a particular section of the society, in an attempt to ‘cure’ certain long standing problems. As in the case of India, China is also fuelled by this transparency rhetoric, which allows for the production of the power-user versus the un-networked and has pinned its hopes on the transformative powers of Internet Technologies. With more than two decades of ICT development in the country, and especially in spaces like Shanghai-Pudong, behind them, China seems to be facing a moment of crisis. On the one hand is its promotion and adoption of internet and digital technologies, which encourages younger users entering in “schools, colleges, universities and workforces to transform the economic conditions” (Heng, 2006). On the other hand is the imagination of these IT forces as transgressive, uncontrollable and in need of constant supervision in order to retain existing government-citizenship relationships and power structures. In the middle of this crisis, is another factor that the obvious suspects and users of technology, who are more under the radar, are not the people who are deploying technologies for political negotiation and using technology platforms for political mobilisation. Despite the efforts at green-washing its technologies and the production of the infamous Great Fire-wall of China, there has been a sustained use of internet technologies for resistance and subversion.

The spaces for subversion rises from the fact that with the making of the IT city, there has been a complex phenomenon of dislocation and migration, as several communities were made redundant in the logic of the IT City and were removed from the city. Many people from these communities re-entered the city as the new IT workforce after going through a ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘skill building’ to not only be a part of the IT labour groups but also to support the IT industry in the construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, there has been a steady flow of anonymous ‘outsiders’ who have found homes in the older nontangs and factories, and are in the subliminal zones of regulation. As the city is re-formed to make these people invisible (Abbas, 1997), their leisure space and time shrink and they find themselves increasingly forming the new prosumers of internet in Shanghai. However, in the transparency discourse that unfolds, these populations remain invisible and find spaces of resistance and political negotiation that their invisible status provides them. The promise of Invisibility that treats them as Wetware (the biological combination of a network consisting of Software and Hardware), allows for hope in the otherwise diminishing spaces of political articulation in a growing authoritarian regime in China.

Invisibility, Transparency and the Internet

The paper ends by re-formulating the relationship between the making of an IT City and the way in which transparency as a rhetoric and technology-as-instrumental method fail to account for the different kinds of changes that accompany the restructuring of these cities. On the one hand, there is shrinkage of physical space and built form, as new forms of technology infrastructure, global lifestyle and late capitalistic economies expand to fill up the spaces which were earlier available for political mobilisation, organisation and inhabitation. On the other, there is a diminishing political landscape, where, with the integration of the government with the market, there is a tendency to establish larger regulation and censorship in order to retain the status quo relationship between the government and the citizen, in the face of massive governance transition. Both these conditions are produced by the rise and spread of Information Technologies.

In the process, there are also only two kinds of citizenships that are addressed by the e-governance structures which work on a double edge: Firstly, they make the direct access (defined either by abundance or lack of access) citizenships hyper-visual, robbing them of nuances and looking upon them as implicated only in the discursive practices of Internet technologies. Second, they render invisible, the other supporting structures in order to highlight and focus on the economic development and growth propelled by the rise of the IT industries. In other words, they make the citizens who are central to the discourse, invisible, by treating them as embodiments of the new economic markets and aspirations, removing them from their traditional contexts, histories and spaces. Moreover, they make invisible/transparent, populations who are not marked by the aura of the Internet technologies, in order to bring into focus, the extraordinary changes – both in the physical built form as well as in the realms of governance – that have been initiated and accomplished with the making of the IT City Shanghai-Pudong.

References:

Abbas, Ackbar. 1997. Hong Kong: Culture and the Politics of Disappearance. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University press.

Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "The Coming Community." In Global Culture, edited by Michael Featherstone. London: Sage.

Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2004. Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China. New York: Routledge Cavendish

Hawks, F.L. 2009. A Short History of Shanghai: Being an account of the growth and development of the international settlement. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.

Hiibbard, Peter. 2008. The Bund Shanghai : China Faces the West. Odyssey Books and Guides.

Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. 2004. Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers : Illusions of open space in HK, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Leaf, Michael. 1998. ‘Urban planning and urban reality under Chinese economic reforms’, Journal of Planning Education and Research. 18(2): 145–153.

Li, Heng. 2006. “Behind the Spectacle of Commercial Real Estate,” Xinmin Weekly, 3rd issue (2006)

Mirsky, Jonathan. 2008. The Britannica Guide to Modern China : A comprehensive introduction to the world’s new economic giant. London: Constable and Robinson Ltd.

Diao Wenjun, “Analysis of the Present situation and Development Trend of Hypermarkets in Shanghai,” Shanghai Articles, 3rd issue (2006)

(STSN) Shanghai Times Square Newsletter. 2008. Issue No. 4. Shanghai.

Shu, Kewen. 2006. “the dynastic History of Tiananmen Square”, Life Week, Issue 11. 27^th March.

Sicheng, Liang. 1959. “Tiananmen Square”, Architectural Journal Issue 9-10. pp. 12.

SSY (Shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 1986, Shanghai Statistics Bureau, (September, 1986), p18, p412.

SSY(a) (shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 2005. Shanghai Statistics Bureau. China Statistics Press. August 2005.

Stanat, Michael. 2005. China’s Generation Y: Understanding the Future Leaders of the World’s Next Superpower. NY: Homa and Sekey Books.

Tang, Shih-che. 2009. ‘The club and the carrot of China’s globalization.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Volume 10, Number 2. Delhi: Routledge Journals.

Wu, Fulong. 1999. ‘The global and local dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’. Urban Studies, 37(8): 1359–1377.

Xixian, Xu and Xu JianRong. 2004. A Changing Shanghai. Shangai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House.

Yeung, Yue-man. 1996. Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization Under China's Open Policy. Shanghai: Chinese University Press.

Zhang, Jishun. , “The Linong of Shanghai: the political mobilization of grass-roots and the trend of national social integration (1950-1955),” Chinese Social Sciences Today, 2nd issue, 2004

Zhang, Xudong. 2002. “The Construct of Shanghai: Criticism of Urban Idols, Non-mainstream Writing and the Diminishment of Modern Myths” Literary Review, the 5th edition

[i] The project wants to emphasize that it is not attempting a historiography of the building of the IT City of Shanghai-Pudong. Instead, by drawing selectively, different ways in which the technology imaginaries (technopolises, intellectual labour, globally homogenous geographies and time-lines, bodies marked by technology in their material practices, etc ) of the Internet, find structure and form in the emerging IT cities in Asia.

[ii] Zhang Chunqiao, Secretary of the Culture and Education Department of the Shanghai Municipal Committee who accompanied DuBois to Shanghai Mansion, specially mentioned DuBois’ visit in an article entitled “To Climb the New Summit of Victory.”.

[iii] In 1994, one Shanghai government officer stated, “the government plans to remove or close down two thirds of the factories located within [the range of] 106 square kilometers from the city centre, namely, within the Inner Ring Road.”. Due to different reasons (one of the main reasons is the increase of transferee cost because unsolved problems, such as the proper placement of a large number of former workers, have been bundled with the factory buildings and factory land), some factories still remain in their original places, although most of them have already stopped manufacturing and the workers dismissed. The industrial life/space has disappeared with the disappearance of the factories. Ruins of this life/space become some sort of commodity only because the land under the ruins still has some value.

[iv] On the day (1 October 1949) of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong suggested rebuilding Tiananmen Square and making it a “grand and magnificent square.” See (Kewen, 2006). Liang Sicheng, who always insisted on preserving the old Beijing and opposed massive makeover, finally realized that the makeover was never about architecture but about politics: “As for the scale of Tiananmen Square … apart from considering the scale of man as a biological being and the scale of construction appropriate to the man’s physiology, we should also take into account the scale for the great collective requested by the political men in the new society.” Liang, 1959, pp 12).

[v] The People’s Square, transformed in 1953 from the original racecourse (which was nationalized in 1951 by the Municipal Military Control Commission), surrounded by woods, and paved with tiled and cemented floor, is the largest public space in Shanghai and can accommodate over one million people. The Sino-Russian Friendship Building, which was built in 1955 and was covering an area of 80,000 square meters, was the city’s largest building after the liberation of Shanghai and still ranks top in terms of its indoor space in today’s Shanghai. The Cultural Plaza, transformed in 1952 from the Greyhound Racecourse, had 12,500 seats and was the largest indoor hall in Shanghai.

[vi] It is a unique store that sells boiled water in Shanghai.

[vii] Shanghai’s housing shortage started in the early 20th century instead of the 1950s. The living space within Shanghai city is 16,100,000 square meters in total but 3.9 square meters per capita. During the 32 years from 1952 to 1985, 21,720,000 square meters of housing were built within the city and the registered population increased from 5,300,000 to 6,980,000. The housing shortage was still serious since by 1985, the living space had only reached 5.4 square meters per capita. (SSY, 1986). What needs to be clarified is that the statics of 1949 does not include the shabby slum houses commonly referred to as “gun di long.”

[viii] This is an increasingly popular new word in Shanghai over the last 20 years, which refers to the people who come from other provinces, especially the rural areas, and live in Shanghai but do not have permanent residence in Shanghai. According to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau’s report on March 2006, the immigrating labor population in Shanghai was 3,750,000. 2,840,000 of this population is in the manufacturing, construction, retail, and catering industry and engaged in low-income manual work. The immigrating population should be over 4 million if the large number of people (such as those in the household service business) and their children be taken into calculation.

[ix] In Shanghai, the floor area of shops has increased seven-fold from 4,030,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,857,000 square meters in 2004 and that of hotels has increased three-fold from 6,580,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,204,000 square meters in 2004. The increase of commercial space is even greater if that of commercial office buildings is calculated as well. (SSY(a), 2005, pp. 198)

[x] Take the area around Zhongshan Park for example, although it was one of the earliest developed leisure areas in Shanghai, there was only one small department store in the mid-1980s and the retail business developed slowly. However, within these ten years, with the completion of Zhongshan Park Station along the subway line 2 and light rail line 3, five multi-story shopping malls have been built, all within a radius of 500 meters. The newest among them is a 58-storey building with four levels of basement and nine levels of shopping mall.

[xi] By the end of 2005, hypermarkets measuring over 5000 square meters within Shanghai have reached 97 and 28 more have chosen their locations and would be opened soon. Because of a large number of hypermarkets and the intense competition brought about, a considerable number of them mainly profit from land appreciation rather than from retail.

[xii] By the end of 2005, the commercial real estate in Shanghai has reached a total of 2,900,000 square meters with 2.6 square meters per capita, far exceeding Hong Kong’s 1.2 square meters per capita.

[xiii] Barely 6 million square meters in 1990, the floor area of office buildings in Shanghai reached a total of 4,012,000 square meters in 2004. See Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2005. Edited by Shanghai Statistics Bureau, published by China Statistics Press in August 2005, p 198. The statistical material on the increase of floor area of commercial office building cannot be found for the present. Even if the material were obtained, it would not be enough since a large area of commercial office building has been rented by many state-owned monopoly agencies. However, the expansion of government office space is great even if it take up only one tenth of the space of office buildings.

[xiv] Such phenomenon exists not only in Shanghai but all over the country, especially in cities and towns of low economic level. The towering and luxurious government, bank, taxation, and police buildings create an ironic contrast with the low and shabby constructions close by.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper

Fill The Gap: Global Discussion on Digital Natives

nishant — 2010-01-22T10:54:13Z

More often than not people don't understand the new practices inspired by Internet and digital technologies. As such a series of accusations have been leveled against the Digital Natives. Educators, policy makers, scholars, and parents have all raised their worries without hearing out from the people they are concerned about. Hivos has initiated an online global discussion about Digital Natives. So, to voice your opinion, start tweeting with us now #DigitalNatives.

If you cannot attend Fill The Gap, you can also join us in a global discussion on some of the issues being discussed at #DigitalNatives

1. Are you an apolitical consumer, or do you have ambitions?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNatives

2. Are you a little prince or princess, who only wants to talk to like minded people or are you different?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesPrincess

3. Is Wikipedia your bible or do you really know something?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesWiki

4. Are you a digital dinosaur? They say you don’t know anything about ICT!

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalDinosaur

5. Why use the Internet, why don’t you march the streets?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesProtest

6. Plans to change the world? What do you need?

http://www.tweetworks.com/groups/view/DigitalNativesChanceTheWorld

If you are in Amsterdam, here is the information you will need to attend the event:

Fill the Gap! - 7

R U Online?

Date: 15 January 2010

Time: 12.30 until 17.00 hour

Location: Het Sieraad, Postjesweg 1, Amsterdam

The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened and put to use for a better world? Hivos, apart from cohosting the event, will be involving digital natives to hear their stories about ICT and engagement.

An Open Space event on the potential of new (mobile) media and youth in developing countries. For everyone in politics, the profit and the non-profit sectors who is interested in ICT and international development cooperation.

The use of new (mobile) technology is the most natural thing in the world for the youth of today.

Shaped by the digital era and at ease with creativeity, these innovators use new media to change the world. Just think of the Twitter revolution in Iran. What can the international development sector learn from this? How could international development cooperation use the potential power of youth to tackle development problems?

The seventh edition of Fill the Gap! is all about the power of youth and IT in developing countries. How can their skills be strengthened and put to use for a better world? The kick-off will be hosted by Jennifer Corriero, co-founder of Taking IT Global: the international platform for youth and the use of new media for a better world. Then the floor is open to discuss your own ideas with people from new media, the business world and the international development sector during the Open Space sessions. Join in: come to Amsterdam on Friday January 15th and be inspired during Fill the Gap!

Registration is free. The programme is in English.

» Fill the Gap

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/digital-natives-with-a-cause/dntweet

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 11) - Anja Kovacs

purba — 2013-10-15T15:25:07Z

CIS interviews Anja Kovacs, researcher and activist, and director of the Internet Democracy, Project as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"Having the cyber security debate become more and more important was a real challenge for civil society. I think in part because many of us who were focused on human rights aren't necessarily techies. And so, when you have a conversation with a government bureaucrat, and ask questions about the kind of decisions they decided to take, very often they will come up with a technical answer in response. And then, if you don't have that expertise, it is difficult to react. In the meantime though, I think it has become clear that this is one of the biggest issues in the internet field at the moment. It is also one of the big issues that is driving the desires of governments to have a bigger role to play in internet governance. So it is an area that is unavoidable for activists. What has happened slowly is that we have come to realize that the first thing, as in most other areas, is not the technical details, but principles, and those principles are fairly similar to how they are in many other fields." - Anja Kovacs, Internet Democracy Project

Centre for Internet and Society presents its eleventh installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

In this installment, CIS speaks to Anja Kovacs, director of the Internet Democracy Project. Her work focuses on a wide range of questions regarding freedom of expression, cybersecurity and the architecture of Internet governance as they relate to the Internet and democracy. Anja is currently also a member of the of the Investment Committee of the Digital Defenders Partnership and of the interim Steering Group of Best Bits, a global network of civil society members.

(Bio from internetdemocracy.in)

Internet Democracy Project homepage: http://internetdemocracy.in/

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-11-anja-kovacs

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 12) - Namita Malhotra

purba — 2013-11-18T10:03:29Z

CIS interviews Namita Malhotra, researcher and lawyer at Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"In a strange mix of how both capitalism and state control work, what is happening is that more and more of these places that one could access, for various reasons, whether it is for ones own pleasure or for political conversations, are getting further and further away from us. And I think that that mix of both corporate interests and state control is particularly playing a role in this regard." - Namita Malhotra, researcher and lawyer, Alternative Law Forum

Centre for Internet and Society presents its twelfth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Namita Malhotra is a researcher and lawyer at Alternative Law Forum (ALF). She has a keen interest in working on law, technology and media through legal research, cultural studies, new media practices and film making.

ALF homepage: www.altlawforum.org

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-12-namita-malhotra

First Look: CIS Cybersecurity documentary film

purba — 2013-12-17T08:16:42Z

CIS presents the trailer of its documentary film DesiSec: Cybersecurity & Civil Society in India

The Centre for Internet and Society is pleased to release the trailer of its first documentary film, on cybersecurity and civil society in India.

The documentary is part of the CIS Cybersecurity Series, a work in progress which may be found here.

DesiSec: Cybersecurity and Civil Society in India

The trailer of DesiSec: Cybersecurity and Civil Society in India was shown at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali on October 24. It was a featured presentation at the Citizen Lab workshop, Internet Governance For The Next Billion Users.

The transcript of the workshop is available here: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/content/article/121-preparatory-process/1476-ws-344-internet-governance-for-the-next-billion-users

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-film-trailer

A provisional definition for the Cultural Last Mile

nishant — 2011-08-02T08:57:07Z

In the first of his entries, Ashish Rajadhyaksha gives his own spin on the 'Last Mile' problem that has been at the crux of all public technologies. Shifting the terms of debate away from broadcast problems of distance and access, he re-purposes the 'last mile' which is a communications problem, to make a cultural argument about the role and imagination of technology in India, and the specific ways in which this problem features in talking about Internet Technologies in contemporary India.

In its classical form, the ‘last mile’ is a communications term defining the final stage of providing connectivity from a communications provider to a customer, and has been used as such most commonly by telecommunications and cable television industries. There has however been a a specific Indian variant, seen in its most classical avatar in scientist Vikram Sarabhai’s contention that overcoming the last mile could solve the two major challenges India has faced, of linguistic diversity and geographical distance, and mounted as the primary argument for terrestrial television in the early 1980s. (I will try and attach the Sarabhai paper a little later to this posting).

This specifically Indian variation, where technology was mapped onto developmentalist-democratic priorities, has been the dominant characteristic of communications technology since at least the invention of the radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, that means, the last mile has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has continuously provided the major rationale for successive technological developments, from the 1960s wave of portable transistors, the terrestrial transponders of the first televisual revolution it the early 1980s (the Special Plan for the Expansion of Television), the capacity of satellite since SITE and the INSAT series, and from the 1990s the arrival of wired networks (LANs, Cable, fibre-optic) followed by wireless (WLAN, WiMAX, W-CDMA). At each point the assumption has been consistently made that the final frontier was just around the corner; that the next technology in the chain would breach a major barrier, once and for all.

What I hope to do is to provide a historical account to argue that the theory of the ‘last mile’ has been founded on fundamental (mis)apprehensions around just what this bridge constitutes. Further, that these apprehensions may have been derived from a misconstruction of democractic theory, to assume, first, an evolutionary rather than distributive model for connectivity, and second, to introduce a major bias for broadcast (or one-to-many) modes as against many-to-many peer-to-peer formats. The book, whenever I succeed in writing it, will hope to argue the following:

1. It has been difficult to include human resource as an integral component to the last mile. Contrary to the relentlessly technologized definition of the last mile, it may perhaps be best seen historically as also, and even perhaps primarily, a human resource issue. This is not a new realization, but it is one that keeps reproducing itself with every new technological generation[1], with ever newer difficulties. The endemic assumption, derived from the broadcasting origins of the definition is that it is primarily the sender’s responsibility to bridge the divide, that technology can aid him to do so on its own, and that such technology can negate the need to define connectivity as a multiple-way partnership as it reduces the recipient into no more than an intelligent recipient of what is sent (the citizen model). On the other hand, it is possible to show how previous successful experiments bridging the last mile have been ones where recipients have been successfully integrated into the communications model both as peers and, even more significantly, as originators as well as enhancers of data. Importantly, this paper will show, this has been evidenced even in one-way ‘broadcast’ modes such as film, television and radio (in the movie fan, community radio and the television citizen-journalist).

2. The one-way broadcast versus peer-to-peer versus two/multiple-way debate needs to he historically revisited. The need to redefine the beneficiary of a connectivity cycle as a full-fledged partner tends to come up against a bias written into standard communications models – and therefore several standard revenue models – that consistently tend to underplay what this paper will call the significant sender/recipient. While both terrestrial and satellite systems require some level of peer-to-peer transmission systems to facilitate last-mile communications, it has been a common problem that unless either a clear focus exists on geographic areas or significant peer-to-peer participation exists, broadcast models inevitably find themselves delivering large amounts of S/N at low frequencies without sufficient spectrum to support large information capacity. While it is technically possible to ‘flood’ a region in broadcasting terms, this inevitably leads to extremely high wastage as much of the radiated ICE never reaches any user at all. As information requirements increase, broadcast ‘wireless mesh’ systems small enough to provide adequate information distribution to and from a relatively small number of local users, require a prohibitively large number of broadcast locations along with a large amount of excess capacity to make up for the wasted energy.

This problem, importantly, springs as much from a built-in ideological commitment to one-way broadcasting formats, as from technological limitations. The technology itself poses further problems given the bias of different systems to different kinds of connectivity, and with it different types of peer-to-peer possibilities. Rather than attempting a one-size-fits-all model for all models to follow, we need to work out different synergies between broadcast-dependent and peer-to-peer-enabled platforms.

This book will eventually hope to study the history of peer-to-peer and multiple-way structures as systems where sending has become a component part of receiving. Key technological precedents to the present definition of the sender-communication ‘partner’ would be community radio, low-power transmission-reception systems (most famously the Pij experiment in Gujarat conducted by ISRO), and various internet-based networking models.

3. The need to revisit the technological community is therefore critical. The key question is one of how technological communities have been produced, and how they may be sustained. In January 2007, the attack by V.S. Ailawadi, former Chairman, Haryana Electricty Regulatory Commission, on India’s public sector telecom giants BSNL and MTNL for keeping their ‘huge infrastructure’ of ‘copper wire and optic fibre’ to themselves, when these could be used by private operators as cheaper alternatives to WiMAX, W-CDMA and broadband over power lines, shows the uneasy relationship between new players and state agencies. Mr. Ailawadi’s contention that the ‘unbundling’ of the last mile would bring in competition for various types of wireless applications and broadband services not just for 45 million landlines but also for 135 million mobile users of various service providers, also therefore needs to be revisited from the perspective of community formation. How would the new 135 million mobile users be effectively tapped for their capacity to become what we are calling significant senders?

In defining the last mile as to do with the recipient-as-sender, and thus the community, this paper will focus on a history of community action along specific models of connectivity. These are: cinema’s movie fan, internet’s blogger and networker, solar energy’s barefoot engineer, software’s media pusher and television’s citizen-journalist. A specific focus for study will be the models of participatory learning in the classroom, using film, the vinyl disc, the audio cassette, the radio, the television, the web and now the mobile phone.

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

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 9) - Saikat Datta

purba — 2013-08-05T05:24:35Z

CIS interviews Saikat Datta, Resident Editor of DNA, Delhi, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"Anonymous speech, in countries which have extremely severe systems of governments, which do not have freedom, etcetera, is welcome. But in a democracy like India, I do not see the need for anonymous speech because it is anyways guaranteed by the Constitution of India. So, no, I do not see the need for anonymity in an open and democratic state like India and I would be seriously worried if such a requirement comes up. Shouldn't I strive to be ideal? The ideal suggests that the constitution has guaranteed freedom of speech. Anonymity, for a time being may be acceptable to some people but I would like a situation where a person, without having to seek anonymity, can speak about anything and not be prosecuted by the state, or persecuted by society. And that is the ideal situation that I would like to strive for." - Saikat Datta, Resident Editor, DNA, Delhi.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its ninth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Saikat Datta is a journalist who began his career in December 1996 and has worked with several publications like The Indian Express, the Outlook magazine and the DNA newspaper. He is currently the Resident Editor of DNA, Delhi. Saikat has authored a book on India's Special Forces and presented papers at seminars organized by the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, the Centre for Air Power Studies and the National Security Guards. He has also been awarded the International Press Institute Award for investigative journalism, the National RTI award in the journalism category and the Jagan Phadnis Memorial Award for investigative journalism.

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-9-saikat-datta

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 10) - Lawrence Liang

purba — 2013-09-10T08:31:31Z

CIS interviews Lawrence Liang, researcher and lawyer, and co-founder of Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"The right to privacy and the right to free speech have often been understood as distinct rights. But I think in the ecology of online communication, it becomes crucial for us to look at the two as being inseparable. And this is not entirely new in India. But, interestingly, a lot of the cases that have had to deal with this question in the Indian context, have pitted one against the other. Now, India doesn't have a law for the protection of whistle-blowers. So how do we now think of the idea of whistle-blowers being one of the subjects of speech and privacy coming together? How do we use the strong pillars that have been established, in terms of a very rich tradition that Indian law has, on the recognition of free speech issues but slowly start incorporating questions of privacy?" - Lawrence Liang, researcher and lawyer, Alternative Law Forum.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its tenth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Lawrence Liang is one of the co-founders of the Alternative Law Forum where he works on issues of intellectual property, censorship, and the intersection of law and culture. He is also a fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society and serves on its board.

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-10-lawrence-liang

Collaborative Projects Programme

nishant — 2011-08-23T03:04:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and intervention. The Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP) is CIS’ platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially, and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work that CIS is committed to.

The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in the Global South.

The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences; experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage; implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas; developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies; engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of learning and participation online.

The CPP is NOT a grant making programme. However, we are interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision, please contact us and we can begin the discussions.

List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:

1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.

2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with Inclusive Planet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T10:29:26Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.

Everybody has a story to tell, and with the Internet, it is possible to tell the story and be heard. Young people around the world use digital technologies to find a voice, an expression, a creative output and a space for dialogue. Gone are the days when the young were only to be seen and not heard. In the Web 2.0 world, the young are seen, heard and are making a dramatic change in the world that we live in.

As Internet and digital technologies become more widespread, the world is shrinking, time is replaced by Internet time, we are constantly connected and intricately linked to our contexts, our people, our cultures and our networks. And you, yes YOU are a part of this change. In fact, as Digital Natives – people who have found technologies as central to their lives – you are directly affecting the lives of many, sometimes even without knowing about it.

An Open Call for Participation

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan) are calling out to young technology users to share stories about how they have tried to change things around them with the use of digital and Internet technologies. Conversely, if you feel that the presence of these technologies has significantly changed you in some way, we want to hear about that too! These can be stories where you have made a significant impact by initiating campaigns or movements for a particular cause, stories where you have used technologies to cope with problems in your personal and social life through your online persona in the virtual World Wide Web or stories where a small blog you started, or a facebook group you created, or a plurk network that you started, or a discussion group that you participated in, led to a change that has a story to tell.

The three day workshop will select 20 participants from all around Asia and in the Middle East to come and share these stories, to interact with facilitators and scholars who have worked in different countries and areas, and to form a network of collaboration and support. We will give your stories a face, a voice and a platform where they can be heard in your own voice, in your own style and in your own formats. Participants can fill in an application form (as given below) and forward it to digitalnatives@cis-india.org by 15th July 2010.

Simultaneously a website will also be hosted online where the Digital Natives will contribute to the content. Selected participants will be encouraged to document in it. Expenses relevant to the project will be granted to the selected participants.

Application Form

Name:
Gender:
Age:
Primary language of communication:
Other languages you can read and write:
Email:
Postal address:
Describe your Internet related experience / initiative(s) in 300 words. Furnish with URLs where necessary. Optionally, if images and videos are part of the description, then upload them in a high resolution version to a secure website and provide the URL.
Write in a few sentences about your expectation from the workshop.
I declare that the above information is true to the best of my knowledge.
I agree that Digital Natives will use the material I have provided for public use.

Please note that the information you provide will be kept for purposes of the Digital Natives project. Materials which you submit will be used for reporting to sponsors and for public use relevant to the project.

Dates: 16, 17 and 18 August, 2010
Venue: Taipei (Taiwan)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/open-call

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political