Centre for Internet and Society

Whose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:47:19Z

As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.

"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."

The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: dml2013.dmlhub.net.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Whose Change is it Anyway?

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:56:47Z

This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies.

The White Paper by Nishant Shah was published by Hivos recently.

However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?

Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.

Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.

Click to download the full White Paper here (PDF, 321 Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Who’s that Friend?

nishant — 2012-11-04T06:46:10Z

If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express and in the Financial Express on October 7, 2012.

We have all received messages of this order — if not exactly this much silliness — on the various social networks that we belong to. These are messages that warn us that our security is breached, our data is unsafe, that our transactions are public, and all the sensitive information we have trusted to the different platforms on the Web, is now up for grabs.

The best of us have fallen prey to such messages of alarm, and have “shared”, “liked”, or “retweeted” them, and in retrospect felt foolish when we realised that the message was just a hoax. For those of us who are savvy with the ways of the Web, even when we are sending these messages, there is an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, but we do it nevertheless, joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists who make this world enchanting and mysterious in its quotidian banality. These messages are common, harmless and habit-forming — they spread, even when we recognise that they are not completely plausible — because we have formed habits online, which we immediately perform, before rational thought or reason sets in.

At a recent Thought Marathon on “Habits of Living”, supported by Brown University and organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, a handful of scholars, artists, practitioners and researchers examined how such habits shape the world of the digital. One of the concerns about such habits of viral dissemination is about the design of trust and the nature of friendship in our social networking systems. How do you trust information online? What is the information that uses you as a conduit, disseminating through you into the network? What role do we play in keeping these messages alive, by spreading them, by talking about them, by retracting and discussing them, giving them more value than they could muster on their own?

At the centre of all these questions is the idea of proximity, intimacy and friendship. Within the social Web, we have all become “friends”. The six degrees of separation have fallen — every lurker is a potential friend, just waiting to be authenticated by a system, tagged in a photo, connected by a weak link of interest or closeness. These friends are our social safety nets on the Net. They give us a sense of belonging and safety when we are committing our intensely personal and private data on the publically private digital platforms. Despite knowing that information we produce online is going to be archived in servers over which we have no control, in forms and formats that will outlive our social relations and indeed, our very lives, we constantly produce data that quantifies and marks our social relationships. We commit secrets and private thoughts to “friends” in the network.

However, friendship within the social network is a non-reciprocal one-way transmission of secrets. The covenant of digital friendship on Facebook is that we pass on a secret to a friend, knowing well, that the act of passing on the secret expects a betrayal of that secret. The information that we submit to somebody to show our trust, has already been witnessed, stored, archived and mapped by the code and algorithms that make that system. Which is why, we live in constant fear of our data being compromised by the “system” which is both vulnerable and fragile. Which is why, we are continually bombarded by warnings of glitches in the matrix, outside of our control, reminding us of the fearful precariousness of being on the Web.

And yet, the trolling messages and the way they spread, remind us that in the system, it is the “friend” who is invariably the person who puts us in danger. There are almost no documented cases of a system endangering the person who shares information on the social Web. The leak in the network is always done through a human actor — somebody who is close to us, somebody who we trust — who invariably passes on that secret to another “friend” in the network. Similarly, the chances of your machine getting infected by a random virus by a stranger are very low. The people who infect you are those you trust, because you receive information from them without questioning it. An attachment in the email, a link to a dodgy site, instructions asking for personal details are all safe because we are naturally suspicious of strangers bearing candy. But when these questions come from our “friends”, we drop our guards and accept viruses, share personal data, give out compromising pictures, putting ourselves in conditions of threat.

This is the fundamental paradox of the social Web — that those who we trust, are generally the primary sources who put us in danger, and yet, because we think of them as “friends”, we continue to trust them, while remaining suspicious of the systems that are far more benign than the humans in the network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend

Who Owns Your Phone?

nishant — 2016-09-18T16:18:35Z

The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 18, 2016.

We have a conflicted relationship with our digital devices. On the one hand, everything we own is cutting-edge — your regular smartphone does computation that is more advanced and powerful than the computers currently functioning on the space probe on Mars. On the other, everything that we own, is almost on the verge of becoming old — by the time you are used to your phone, a new model with a different letter or a number is in the market. The TV screen which was the crowning glory of your house now feels old because it is not thin enough, sleek enough or big enough; waiting to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.

Strangely, the Next Big Thing is never really big enough for it to have longevity. The next phone that you buy, the new laptop you covet, the app that you update, will already feel temporary. Patricia Fitzpatrick, a historian of new media, calls this phenomenon “Planned Obsolescence”. It means that private corporations think of their digital products as fast-moving and ready to die. They might sell the phone with a 10-year guarantee, but the only guarantee that exists is that in 10 years, they will have discontinued all support for that phone, and you will have forgotten that you owned that device. Planned Obsole-scence is a marketing strategy, where everything that is introduced as a technological innovation has a limited shelf-life and is made to be replaced by something new.

What is interesting about this strategy is that it doesn’t mean that your device has become redundant. In fact, even as you desire the new, you know perfectly well that your existing device has many years of functionality. Hence, the companies often produce the new as path-breaking, innovative and futuristic. They want you to feel primitive or out-of-touch by introducing features that you don’t need, transforming the familiar and the habitual device with something that becomes alien, enchanting and mystical.

While planned obsolescence has its value — it propels innovation and pushes at the boundary of what is possible — it also needs to be understood as a marketing strategy that keeps us consuming as part of our digital habits. One of the best examples to understand this trend is Apple’s latest announcement that it has removed the standard earphone jack from its new iPhone7 and is presenting us with wireless earplugs that work with the new phone. Apple insists that this is the future, and in its hyperbolic presentation, announced that by removing one of the most enduring industry standard for audio hardware, they are revolutionising the future of music listening.

This comes particularly as a shock because ever since the 1990s, Apple’s iconic presence in the music industry has been the white dangling ear-bud wire against black silhouettes, marking the Apple music device as a sign of privacy, maturity, creativity, and elite affordability. By replacing recognisable image with a new one is the company’s way of signalling that every Apple device you now own is ready for trash. It is letting you know that your older Apple music player now needs to be replaced by a new one that uses the wireless ear buds. That the only way you can now listen to music on an Apple iPhone is on Apple’s own standards, so that the regular industry hardware will no longer work with this unique phone that eschews universal standards and seeks to create private monopolies.

The missing headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is a resounding testimony to what happens when we make our digital hardware subject to closed development and production. Instead of building phones that are more durable, more efficient, more connected, more affordable, and more versatile, Apple just showed us how a private company can arrogantly define the future, by turning almost every existing device into “primitive” or “incompatible” with the new phones that it is making. The capacity of companies like Apple to defy standards that work and build their own unique hardware tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices. The digital cultures scholar Wendy Chun had once sagaciously written, “the more our devices turn transparent, the more opaque they become”. And Apple’s move towards making your new iPhone seamless and without holes, mimics how the phone is being designed to both kill fast and die early, promoting corporate ambitions over public interest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone

WhatsApps with fireworks, apps with diyas: Why Diwali needs to go beyond digital

nishant — 2015-11-23T13:27:37Z

The idea of a 'digital' Diwali reduces our social relationships to a ledger of give and take. The last fortnight, I have been bombarded with advertisements selling the idea of a “Digital Diwali”. We have become so used to the idea that everything that is digital is modern, better and more efficient.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 22, 2015.

I have WhatsApp messages with exploding fireworks, singing greeting cards that chant mystic sounding messages, an app that turns my smartphone into a flickering diya, another app that remotely controls the imitation LED candles on my windows, an invitation to Skype in for a puja at a friend’s house 3,000 km away, and the surfeit of last minute shopping deals, each one offering a dhamaka of discounts.

However, to me, the digitality of Diwali is beyond the surface level of seductive screens and one-click shopping, or messages of love and apps of light. Think of Diwali as sharing the fundamental logic that governs the digital — the logic of counting. As we explode with joy this festive season, we count our blessings, our loved ones, the gifts and presents that we exchange. If we are on the new Fitbit trend, we count the calories we consume and burn as we make our way through parties where it is important to see and be seen, compare and contrast, connect with all the people who could be thought of as friends, followers, connectors, or connections.

While there is no denying that there is a sociality that the festival brings in, there is also a cruel algebra of counting that comes along with it. It is no surprise that as we celebrate the victory of good over evil and right over wrong, we also simultaneously bow our heads to the goddess of wealth in this season.

Look beyond the glossy surface of Diwali festivities, and you realise that it is exactly like the digital. Digital is about counting. It is right there in the name — digits refers to numbers. Or digits refer to fingers — these counting appendages which we can manipulate and flex in order to achieve desired results. At the core of digital systems is the logic of counting, and counting, as anybody will tell us, is not a benign process. What gets counted, gets accounted for, thus producing a ledger of give and take which often becomes the measure of our social relationships.

I remember, as a child, my mother meticulously making a note of every gift or envelope filled with money that ever came our way from the relatives, so that there would be precise and exact reciprocation. I am certain that there is now an app which can keep a track of these exchanges. I am not suggesting that these occasions of gifting are merely mercenary, but they are embodiments of finely calibrated values and worth of relationships defined by proximity, intimacy, hierarchy and distance. The digital produces and works on a similar algorithm, which is often as inscrutable and opaque as the unspoken codes of the Diwali ledger.

There is something else that happens with counting. The only things that can have value are things that have value. I don’t know which ledger counts the coming together of my very distributed family for an evening of chatting, talking, sharing lives and laughter. I don’t know how anybody would reciprocate that one late night when a cousin came to our home and spent hours with my younger brother making a rangoli to surprise the rest of us. I have no idea how they will ever reciprocate gifts that one of the younger kids made at school for all the members of the family.

Diwali is about the things, but like the digital system, these are things that cannot be counted. And within the digital system, things that cannot be counted are things that get discounted. They become unimportant. They become noise, or rubbish. Our social networks are counting systems that might notice the low frequency of my connections with my extended family but they cannot quantify the joy I hear in the voice of my grandmother when I call her from a different time-zone to catch up with her. Digital systems can only deal with things with value and not their worth.

I do want to remind myself that there is more to this occasion than merely counting. And for once, I want to go beyond the digital, where my memories of the past and the expectations of the future are not shaped by the digital systems of counting and quantifying. Instead, I want Diwali to be analogue. I shall still be mediating my collectivity with the promises of connectivity, but I want to think of this moment as beyond the logics and logistics of counting that codify our social transactions and take such a central location in our personal functioning. This Diwali, I am rooting for a post-digital Diwali, that accounts for all those things that cannot be counted, but are sometimes the only things that really count.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-indian-express-nishant-shah-november-22-2015-whatsapps-with-fireworks-apps-with-diyas-why-diwali-needs-to-go-beyond-digital

What lurks beneath the Network

nishant — 2012-08-25T07:10:38Z

There is a series of buzzwords that have become a naturalised part of discussions around digital social media—participation, collaboration, peer-2-peer, mobilisation, etc. Especially in the post Arab Spring world (and our own home-grown Anna Hazare spectacles), there is this increasing belief in the innate possibilities of social media as providing ways by which the world as we know it shall change for the better. Young people are getting on to the streets and demanding their rights to the future.

Nishant Shah's column on the North East exodus and digital networks was published in Down to Earth magazine on August 24, 2012

Citizens are mobilising themselves to overthrow authoritarian governments. Socio-economically disadvantaged people, who have always been an alternative to the mainstream, are finding ways of expressing themselves through collaborative practices. Older boundaries of nation, region and body are quickly collapsing as we all become avatars of our biological selves, occupying futures that were once available only to science fiction heroes.

To this list of very diverse phenomena, I want to add the recent tragic and alarming exodus of people from the north eastern states, from the city of Bengaluru, where I live. There might not be many connections between this state of fear which instigated thousands of people, fearing their safety and security, to leave Bengaluru and return home and the global spectacles of political change that I listed earlier. And yet, there is something about the digital networks, the social web and the ways in which they shape our information societies, that needs to be thought through. In the Arab Spring like events, which are events of global spectacle, there is a certain imagination of digital technologies and its circuits that gets overturned.

These events challenge the idea that digital networks are always outward looking—connecting us to somebody and someplace ‘out there’ in a world that is quickly getting flat—and show how these networks actually create new local and specific communities around information production, consumption and sharing. These networks that connect people in their information practices, often make themselves simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. So that the interfaces that we operate through—laptops, cellphones and other portable computing devices—become such a part of our everyday life, that we stop noticing them. They are a natural element of our everyday mechanics of urban survival, and in their omnipresence, become invisible.

This invisibility or naturalisation of the digital technologies, often make us forget the intricate and inextricable way in which they are woven into our basic survival strategies. Especially with the younger generation that has ‘grown up digital’, the interface, the gadget and the network is the default space that they turn to for their everyday needs. We develop intimate relationships with these technologised circuits, making them such a part of our quotidian existence that we often forget that these technologies are external to us. Which is why we come across articulations like, “I love my computer because my friends live in it,” or “I feel amputated when you take away my cell-phone”. These are ways in which we naturalise and internalise the digital technologies that we live in and live with. However, in times of crises, we suddenly realise the separation, as the technologies make themselves present, unable to sustain the new conditions of crises. It would be fruitful to see then that the eruption in our seamless connection with the digital technologies is a sign of an external crisis –something that we have seen in the Arab Spring or the Anna Hazare campaign, where these networks became visible to signal towards an external crisis. The emergence of networks into public view is a symptom that there is something that has gone wrong and so we see the separation of the digital ecosystem from its external reality and context.

The unexpected visibility of the network indicates that the regular information ecologies have been disrupted, the contexts which support community interaction at the local level have been changed, and those changes need to be accounted for and addressed in order for the network to become the transparent infrastructure of new urban communities again. In many ways, it resonates with the science fiction logic of the Matrix Trilogy where, if you can see the matrix, it means that something has gone wrong in the fabric of reality and it needs to be fixed.

The exodus of the north eastern people also needs to be examined in this context. In an immigrant city like Bengaluru, the sense of belonging and community is often deeply mediated by the digital ecologies of information sharing. Beneath the veneer of a global city that is to connect with the external world, there is also a huge network of local, specific and invisible practices that do not become a part of the global spectacle of digital technologies, and operate in a condition of relative invisibility. However, when the logic of a migrant city gets disrupted because the conditions of its work force get threatened, these networks go into an overdrive. They become gossip and rumour mills. They become visible and suddenly create conditions of fear, danger and crisis that were unexpected. And so, without a warning, over-night, a huge number of people, who were a part of these networks, decided to abandon their lives and head home, because the larger social, cultural and political threats transmitted through these local networks before they could become global spectacles that we could consume.

A large part of the people fleeing the city had already crowded the trains and left their lives behind, before any attempt at regulation or control could be made. All kinds of post-facto theories about the real or perceived nature of the threat, the actual cases of violence, and the conditions of life in the IT City have emerged since then. However, in all these theories is a recognition that the crisis which led to this phenomenon lingers on and cannot be addressed. There is no particular person to hold responsible. The few scattered incidents of attacks, violence or intimidation have been recognised as strategic and opportunistic interventions by local regressive groups. All in all, we have a condition where something drastic and dramatic has happened and there is no real or material person or group of people who can be blamed for it. And so, instead of addressing the crisis and the conditions which led to the exodus, we have committed an ellipsis, where we have made technology the scape-goat of our problems.

And we have done this repeatedly in the history of technology and crises in India. In the early days, when the notorious Delhi Public School MMS clip that captured two under-age students in sexual activity, became hugely visible, instead of addressing the problem at hand, we eventually set up a committee to regulate the conditions of cultural production and distribution online. During the horrifying bomb-attacks in the trains in Mumbai, we tried to block Blogspot and curtail information online as if technology was the reason that these acts were made possible. Last year, Dr. Sibal’s attempts at establishing a pre-censorship regime on information on the social web, because he encountered material that was disrespectful to the Congress party leader Mrs. Gandhi, sought to regulate the web rather than look at the political discontent and dissent that was being established through those articulations. Because there was no way by which the local situation could be controlled or contained, technology became the only site of regulation, inspiring draconian measures that limit the volume of text messaging and try and censor the web for lingering traces of the information mill that catalysed and facilitated this exodus.

This is a remarkable ellipsis where the actual problem – the conditions of life and safety in our global cities – is hidden under a perceived problem, which is the sudden visibility of a digital information ecosystem which was not apparent to us hitherto. And while there is no denying that at the level of tactics, for immediate fire-fighting this kind of regulation is important, nay, necessary, we also need to realise that at the level of strategy, these kinds of knee-jerk regulatory mechanisms are not a resolution of the problem. These laws and attempts at censorship are neither going to correct what has happened, nor are they going to be potent enough to curb such networked information sharing in the future. They are symbolic tactics that are trying to correct the crisis – the feeling of fear and danger – and in that, they do their job well in establishing some sense of control over the quickly collapsing world. However, we need to look beyond the visibility of this network, and realise that the crisis is not its emergence or its functioning but at something else that lurks behind the facade of the network.

Nishant Shah is director (research), Centre for Internet and Society, Bengaluru

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/down-to-earth-org-nishant-shah-aug-24-2012-what-lurks-beneath-the-network

What is Dilligaf?

nishant — 2011-12-01T09:52:53Z

On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over.

“Leetspeak” or “L33t” (derived the word “elite”), for example, incorporate numbers in words, giving geeks their own language. One that they use to bypass firewalls and filters trained to recognize certain words – so in “l33t”-speak, porn becomes Pr0n, and onwards moves mankind.

These mutations are not permanent: Like organisms, they grow to form new constellations of words and expressions demanding that users keep pace. And while purists have bled their hearts out, lamenting the savage attack on the language and grammar that digital technology has spawned, there is also a recognition of the fact that these linguistic developments are not merely experiments – they capture the spirit of a democratized knowledge system and the opening up of the information highway. User-generated content sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and Tumblr embody these acronyms and attitudes, where any attempt at regulation, control or imposition of authority is usually met with the reply – DILLIGAF (Do I Look Like I Give A F***)?

DILLIGAFers – people who live a significant part of their lives online – might scoff at older forms of institutional control, but they don’t necessarily live in a space of anarchy, either. For example, academic credentials, institutional affliations and geopolitical location might not bear the same weight on Wikipedia as while writing a book, but there are other ways in which digital rank can be pulled. Your overall Internet experience, editing history and ability to garner mass support for your views are more important in determining your place in Wikipedia’s hierarchy. Any attempt at pulling rank with assets like money, influence or name are casually discarded with succinct exclamations like WTF (What The F***) and BFD (Big F****ing Deal).

One of the defining characteristics of the DILLIGAF generation is their fiercely independent spirit. While they’re constantly connected and incessantly sharing information, they are also terribly alone. When it comes to searching for information, finding people or exploring the web, personal skills with different digital tools and platforms makes one independent. In fact, one of the deterrents for the less technically inclined to join online communities is the idea that they’re supposed to find their own way as they tread unknown digital paths. Hence, DILLIGAFers often resort to acronyms like RTFM (Read The F***ing Manual) for people (read: the rest of us) who ask for information that can be easily found. And with the rapid Googlization of the world, an obvious question is met with an obvious answer – RTFG (Read The F****ing Google).

Geeks have invented many interesting and creative acronyms to make their voices heard, and while some of the acronyms predate the Internet, they often capture the irony of online and offline existence. SNAFU (Situation Normal: All F***ed Up), an acronym that supposedly emerged in America during the Second World War, often finds its way into describing the complexity of our lives. The dramatic nature of interactions, the struggle to establish trust and the complex structure of experiences all find voice online. FML (F*** My Life), an acronym as well as a popular networking site, is a sterling example of such a space, where people share stories of how things went wrong for them, allowing other users to rate their stories on a sympathy meter.

One of the most delicious ironies of the online space is that while irreverence might find a way into acronyms, unnecessary profanity is looked down upon. If you go around swearing on discussion pages, you will immediately be ostracized, and quite possibly asked to STFU (Shut The F*** Up).

This article by Nishant Shah was published in GQ India on September 4, 2011.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/what-is-dilligaf

What I learned from going offline for 48 hours

nishant — 2019-03-14T16:21:29Z

A weekend without the internet shows just how much control we surrender to online chatter.

The article was published by Indian Express on February 24, 2019.

In one of those blue-funk I-need-to-digitally-detox modes, I went offline for 48 hours. It was interesting to just turn the internet off — putting all the devices on flight mode and doing other things — and spend an entire weekend away from screens and home assistants. The world felt a little empty and silent without the constant chatter of all my smart devices.

When I woke up on Monday morning and brought the internet back into my life, my phone vibrated for five minutes flat as all the different apps woke up to the sweet smell of connectivity and started downloading information in an apocalyptic frenzy. Every notification sound that has ever been set on my phone and other devices, competed with another to ring the loudest and announce the world waiting at my doorstep.

I was curious to know what this extraordinary traffic could be about. My work email was more or less where I had left it before I signed out, but everywhere else was chatter. I had more than a 100 notifications of birthdays, events, and important occasions that I had missed. Despite the fact that I had not produced any content, not initiated any conversations, and not engaged with any material, I had more than 400 notifications from five main social media apps, where people had tagged me, poked me and pulled me into long conversation threads that I could no longer recognise or trace back.

An equal number of friendly algorithms had curated things that needed my attention and were warning me that I might have missed out on the most life-changing moments. My personal messaging system was filled with group messages, those from family and friends who were not talking to me but making me a witness to their conversations. There were also a few frantic messages, first checking if the messages were being delivered, then wondering why I was not responding, and then going into a rage about my rudeness for not even informing them that I wouldn’t be replying to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-24-2019-what-i-learned-from-going-offline-for-48-hours

Web of Sameness

nishant — 2013-01-18T06:17:29Z

The social Web has been an ominous space at the start of 2013. It has been awash with horror, pain and grief. The recent gang rape and death of a medical student in Delhi prevents one from being too optimistic about the year to come. My live feeds on various social networks are filled with rue and rage at the gruesome incident and the seeming depravity of our society.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on January 18, 2013.

As I contemplate the event, I see that the Web has become a space for coping with pain and mitigating the horror of our lives. I feel comforted, when I go online, and see people grieving for a woman they never knew, and demanding better conditions for all. As I look at these resolves for change, battle cries demanding justice, and angry responses directed at imagined and imaginary perpetrators of these crimes, I realise that I have heard it all before, over and over again.

“Not Again!” has been the refrain of the year. If life were a musical, this would have been the persistent chorus line of 2012. From fighting against censorship and violation of privacy by government and corporations to acts of hatred, or from ridiculing the map glitches on the iPhone to seeing the growing stronghold of authoritarian forces over the social Web, we have repeatedly rolled our digital sleeves, gnashed our fingers on the keyboards and shouted in political solidarity, “Not Again!”. While this show of protest, this robust expression of change holds a promise of how things will change for the better, it is also a refrain that has lost its bite. What does it mean, this ability to repeatedly say “Not Again!” only to experience these horrors in despairing cyclic patterns?

I want to see how the social Web and the new public spheres online might offer us outlets for emotions but not necessarily platforms for action. Some of the earliest critiques of the Web expressed the fear that given the extreme customisation of social networks, we might soon reside only in digital echo chambers. In the heavily informatised ages that we live in, it is not uncommon to set up specific groups that we belong to, identify friends that we talk with, mark people we follow, set up circles we share in, and configure filters that help us receive information that is tailor-made to suit our personalised preferences. Unfortunately, this quest for selective information sampling often means that we separate the digital spaces of life from the physical ones, without even realising it. We might be seamlessly navigating these two spaces, not really caring for the distinctions of “virtual reality” and “real life”, but in instances like these, it is easy to see how we shroud ourselves in echo chambers, never allowing voices to translate into the world of action.

You are sure to have been bombarded with tweets that have insightfully analysed the conditions of safety in our public spaces. And in all of this, like me, you must have been comforted thinking that there is still hope. But for every “like” you received on your status update, for every time your tweet got favourited or retweeted, for every time you found yourself agreeing with the social experts, you also separated yourself from the reality. Because the people who gave your opinions the attention, are actually people just like you. They are already on your side of things. Talking to them, exchanging ideas with them, calling for change side-by-side is like preaching to the choir, but it gives us a sense of having reached out. The voices in an echo chamber are not just repeated ad nauseum, but they are also not heard by anybody else on the outside, thus stifling the energy and passions that might have resulted in real change.

The Web also offers an easy separation of us versus them. As coping mechanisms and as a way of distancing ourselves from these events, the Web offers us a clear disavowal of guilt. The young man, who shot those children in the school, was mentally unstable. The laws that allowed him to purchase guns are because of the politicians and the arms industry. The student, who got raped in a bus, is the responsibility of the ‘rape capital’ Delhi. If we were in charge, these things would not have happened this way. But now they have happened, and so we will be angry, we will be shocked, we will tweet “Not Again!” and then quickly shift our ever-expanding attention to the burgeoning space of information online.

And then we will wait, for the next incident to happen — oh, not the same, but similar — and we will go through this process once again.

If I have to look into the future and hope that 2013 shall be the year of change, then I am hoping that the change will be from “Not Again” to a “Never Again”. We will have to learn how to use the energy, the power of the Web, the influence of the digital crowds on the digital commons, to produce a change that goes beyond the social network feeds.

I hope that the social Web matures. We have to make sure that the promise of change that the digital social network offers, does not die as armchair clicktivism that witnesses but does nothing to change the act that affects us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indianexpress-nishant-shah-january-12-2013-web-of-sameness

We Are All Cyborgs

nishant — 2015-04-24T12:00:54Z

The cyborg reminds us that who we are as human beings is very closely linked with the technologies we use.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on April 29, 2012

If you look at any illustrated history of human civilisation, you will quickly realise that it is also a history of technology. From the discovery of fire by Homo sapiens to the contemporary homo digitalis, there is no escaping that technologies of different kinds have not only changed the way we live but also helped us realise what it means to be human. Often, we treat these technologies as external to us, thinking of them as tools that we deploy to perform a particular task. However, as our technologies become more transparent, intimate and customised, we realise that we are developing relationships with the technological devices that surround us. So, if your laptop crashes, you feel crippled. There are people who proclaim that they feel amputated without their cellphone. It is quite reasonable to feel lost without the information compass of the internet.

This relationship between human beings and technologies has been very concisely defined in the idea of a cyborg. A cyborg is a human-technology synthesis which enhances our capacities to live as human beings. While it might seem like a slightly new idea, once you realise that we constantly live with technologies and often internalise them in our bodies, it is not difficult to wrap our head around it. Think of people with pacemakers or prosthetic limbs or different implants in their bodies, who experience technologies as an integral part of their everyday life. Similarly, think of the wide range of technology apparatus that you depend on to live a “regular” human life. We have also seen iconic cyborg representations in popular movies — from the absolutely unforgettable Arnold Schwarzenegger in Terminator 2 to our very own dimpled Shah Rukh Khan as Ra.One — there has been a persistent imagining of the human being as we know it, evolving to become some sort of a super man, enhanced by advancements in digital technologies of virtual reality.

There has been a growing anxiety, almost a moral panic, about how technologies are alienating us, replacing face-time with inter-face time so that we are all growing “alone together”. There is also, across generations and users, a growing separation of those who work with technologies and those who don’t. There is much concern about the human becoming corrupt because of the ubiquitous presence of the pervasive and invasive technologies around us. In the face of these anxieties, the cyborg stands as a culturally significant and timely reminder that we, as human beings, are very closely linked with the technologies that we use. And that we need to stop thinking of technologies as merely gadgets and tools that surround us. The different objects that remind us of the presence of technology are not the same thing as technology itself. Technology is a way of thinking about things, a way of relating to the world around us. The most intrinsic forms of technologies are the ones that we don’t even recognise as a part of our innate mental make up.

Do this simple experiment. Right now, while you are reading this, do not look at any clock or time-measuring device and guess what time it is. Chances are that you will be, give or take a few minutes, more or less accurate. Even if you are temporally challenged, you will at least know what part of the day it is, morning, afternoon, evening or night. The point is that we are absolutely and completely creatures of time. We cannot think of ourselves outside of it and even when we might be dramatically wrong about it, there is no escaping the fact that we are always thinking of ourselves and the world around us through time.

We experience our lives and our relationships in cyclical notions of the clock’s face, thinking of our actions as borrowed from the future, lived in the present, and relegated to the archives of the past. It then, must come as a bit of a shock (it certainly did to me, the first time I was made to realise it) that time is not natural. Time is a human way of measuring a passage of actions. Time is a technology which has now become such a potent metaphor of life that we have forgotten to make the separation of the human and the technological.

And thus, whether you might be a tech-savvy digital native or a byte-fearing luddite, there is no denying the idea that when it comes to technologies of time, you are already a natural born cyborg. This ability of technologies to become transparent and an inalienable part of who we are forms cyborgs. The process through which they become transparent is not easily accessible, but it does begin by an internalisation of the technology’s processes in our everyday vocabulary. So the next time you think of yourself as a system that needs to be upgraded, or unable to pay attention because you don’t have enough bandwidth, remember that you are engaging in a flirtatious relationship with the digital. And slowly, but surely, we are all turning into cyborgs, as the new technologies rearrange patterns of our life and living.

digitalnative@expressindia.com

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/we-are-cyborgs

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