Centre for Internet and Society

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

A Large Byte of Your Life

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:35:34Z

With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage. We commit to storage to free ourselves from remembering.

The article was published in Indian Express on April 3, 2016.

This is the story of a broken Kindle. A friend sent a message to a WhatsApp group that I belong to that she is mourning the loss of her second-generation Kindle, that she bought in 2012, and since then had been her regular companion. It is not the story of hardware malfunction or a device just giving up. Instead, it is a story of how quickly we forget the old technologies which were once new. The friend, on her Easter holiday, was visiting her sister, who has a six-year-old daughter.

This young one, a true digital native, living her life surrounded by smart screens, tablets, phones, and laptops, instinctively loves all digital devices and plays with them. In her wanderings through her aunt’s things, she came across the old Kindle — unsmart, without a touch interface, studded with keys, not connected to any WiFi, and rendered in greyscale. It was an unfamiliar device. But with all the assurance of somebody who can deal with digital devices, she took it in her hands to play with it.

Much to her dismay, none of the regular modes of operation worked. The old Kindle did not have a touch screen operated lock. It wasn’t responding to scroll, swipe and pinch. It had no voice command functions. As she continued to cajole it to come to life, it only stared at her, a lock on the digital interface, refusing to budge to the learned demands and commands of the new user. After about 20 minutes of trying to wake the Kindle up, she became frustrated with it and banged it harshly on the table, where it cracked, the screen blanked out and that was the end of the story.

Or rather, it is the beginning of one. As my friend registered the loss of her clunky, clumsy, heavy, non-intuitive Kindle, and messages of grief poured in, with the condolence that the new ones are so much better and the assurances that at least all her books are safe on the Amazon cloud, I see in this tale, the quest of newness that the digital always has to offer.

If it has missed your attention, the digital is always new. Our phones get discarded every few seasons, even as phone companies release new models every few months. Our operating systems are constantly sending us notifications that they need to be updated. Our apps operate in stealth mode, continuingly adding updates where bugs are fixed and features are added. Most of us wouldn’t know what to do if we were faced with a computer that doesn’t “heal”, “backup” or “restore” itself. If our lives were to be transferred back to dumb phones, or if we had to deal with devices that do not strive to learn and read us, it might lead to some severe anxiety.

The newness that the digital offers is also found in our socially mediated lives. Our digital memories are short-lived — relationships rise and fall in the span of days as location-based dating apps offer an infinite range of options to choose your customised partner; celebrities are made and unmade overnight as clicks lead to viral growth and then disappear to be replaced by the next new thing; communities find droves of subscribers, only to become a den of lurkers where nothing happens; must-have apps find themselves discarded as trends shift and new must-haves crop up overnight. Breathless, bountiful and boundless, the digital keeps us constantly running, just to be in the same place, always the same and yet, always new.

We would be hard pressed to remember that magical moment when we first discovered a digital object. For millennials, the digital is such a natural part of their native learning environments that they do not even register the first encounter or the subsequent shifts as they navigate across the connected world. Increasingly, we tune ourselves to the temporality and the acceleration of the digital, tailoring our memories to what is important, what is now, and what is immediately of use, excluding everything else and dropping it into digital storage, assured in our godlike capacities to archive everything.

This affordance of short digital memories is enabled partly by the fact that we are subject to information overload, but partly also to the fact that our machines can now remember, more accurately and more robustly than the paltry human, prone to error and forgetfulness. With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage, and the more we commit to storage, the more we free ourselves from the task of remembering.

The broken Kindle is a testimony not only to the ways in which we discard old devices but also our older forms of individual and collective memory — quickly doing away with information that is not of the now, that is not urgent, and that does not have immediate use value. My friend’s Kindle got replaced in two days. All her books were re-loaded and she was set to go. However, as she told me in a chat, she is not going to throw away her old broken Kindle. Because she wants to remember it — remember the joy of reading her favourite books on it. She is scared that if she throws it away, she might forget.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-april-3-2016-nishant-shah-a-large-byte-of-your-life

10 Ways to Say Nothing New

nishant — 2015-04-14T13:17:52Z

The rise of the listicle, a safe, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on January 19, 2014.

I Always Like to begin the New Year with a self-fulfilling prophecy, assured in the fact that like New Year resolutions, it will quickly be forgotten in the attention deficit times that we live in. Nevertheless, it is always a fun exercise, to play Cassandra, and utter ominous things about the time to come. I am looking at my fasterthan-byte feeds online and trying to figure out the new trend that is going to be the absolute death of us in 2014. I did some research (Google search), consulted some experts (asked friends on Facebook),analysed critiques (trolled on Twitter), and looked at current trends (followed funny Tumblrs) and finally have the answer. The thing that we must brace for is the list — or rather the listicle (an article that is written like a list).

Have you noticed it? Almost anything that is anything on the internet lately has been presented to us as a list. There are lists for everything — of things people say, of things people do, of things people want to say about people who do things. On websites in the business of making things go viral (and slightly fermented), the listicle has emerged as the next best thing.

Now, I don’t want us to run away with the idea (10 ways to run away with ideas — coming soon on Viral Nova) that lists are new. Lists have always existed and have been one of the most basic forms of archiving, sorting and storing human knowledge and information. However, the new lists that are doing the rounds on BuzzFeed, Reditt, Viral Nova and everywhere else need attention. The listicle is an incredible performance of the strange, the silly and the deranged. Like reality TV judges, they are empty, cliché-ridden and yet seductive. They are supposed to produce profound truths, give us insights into our everyday practices, harness the wisdom of crowds and help curate overloaded information feeds to distil what is most relevant and useful. In itself, that is a fantastic ambition and for somebody who is constantly moaning about there not being enough time to follow everything on the internet (way too many videos of pandas making friends with wallabies on Vimeo these days), I appreciate the ability that listicles have of reducing read-time and giving us tweet-sized nuggets of wisdom. Bam! Our lives have changed!

And yet, as you look at these lists, you slowly start realising that listicles are significantly empty. They try to pass on the banal, the boring, the insipid and the extraordinarily common-sense as knowledge, information and wisdom. I am randomly looking at the last five listicles on my timeline — 20 reasons why a 20-something would never survive Hunger Games (right, because that’s the message of the books — get children to kill each other!), 31 insanely clever ideas to remodel your new house (a lot of them using chopped up coke bottles and toilet paper rolls for that intimate ambience), 18 ways of discovering happiness through travel (my first rule is “be very rich”), 25 universal horrors of hair removal (let it grow! Let it grow! Let it grow!) and seven ways of making a to-do list that works (get it? Get it? A list about making an efficient list. May I please say #FacePalm?)

So, snide remarks aside (10 ways to let go of sarcasm?) what does this mean for us? Why are listicles so popular? Why are the tech-savvy, educated people online, who could be overthrowing authority (all hail, Snowden) and feeding starving children in a poor country of their choice — why are they all spending the time with listicles? I am proposing that the listicle is the final death of politics, criticality and thought on the internet. We have already seen how online conversations quickly devolve into an exercise in creative name-calling and racist, bigoted bullying. The internet has already shown us that all debates end in accusations of fascism (Godwin’s law) and that anything that you say online is going to offend somebody who will then come back, like the ghost of Christmas past, and haunt you. In the hostile space that the internet has become, not the very least because everybody is not watching porn, searching for pictures of animals, or pirating music and movies, we are all trained to be the saints who were persecuted for their beliefs. There is no such thing as a bad person on the internet. Everybody is smug, holier- than-thou, and even when wrong, are saintly wrong, and thus martyrs. For a medium that was supposed to encourage conversation, unless you are in the company of people you know, the internet has become a hunting ground, where the only thing you can do safely is make a list. And hence, the listicle.

True, once in a while, there are some really cool listicles (though they might lead to mild electrocution or house burning down, but hey, no pain, no gain, right?) and they do help in visualising and transmitting information very fast. At the end of the day, listicles are the space that conversations go to die. The listicle is a safe, non-offensive, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know, confirms what we had always suspected, and gives validation to the impressive schools of thoughts like “My grandmother says so” and “I have heard that”. It is a way by which we escape deep thought or engaged talk, basking in the enchantment of our own brilliance, no longer in need of thinking anymore, because look, look how beautiful our thoughts look in the listicle, and look, how many people are sharing it! The listicle has risen and it looks like it is just going to get more popular. Maybe it is time to write a listicle about why we shouldn’t be writing listicles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-january-19-2014-nishant-shah-10-ways-to-say-nothing-new

3G Life

nishant — 2012-05-10T10:54:02Z

You can video chat, stream music and watch TV on your phone. Offering high-speed internet access, 3G would change the world of mobile computing. Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on 14 November 2010.

In the days of dial-up connections in the late 1990s, this was the procedure for downloading a picture from the Internet:
Step 1: Switch on the modem and make sure the phone line is working.
Step 2: Press connect on the dialog box and wait with bated breath to hear the sound of the “handshake” connecting the modem to the server.
Step 3: Try three-five times to finally get that connection. Increase your ability in creative swearing in the meantime.
Step 4: Hope that nobody calls on the landline while the connection is running. If somebody calls, go to Step 2. Type the URL, press Enter. Go to the kitchen. Brew a cup of coffee and come back.
Step 5: Click on the link of the picture you want to load. Go for a walk, take a long shower, eat your dinner and get back to the screen. Swear profusely because the connection went kaput in the middle of loading the picture and all you can see are pixellated patterns. Begin at Step 2, promise to be a better person who will be kind to puppies and smile at strangers.

And this is only the truncated version. If your karma was on a particular bad spin, you might have other additional steps (including turning your modem or computer on and off, because it had hung) that would increase your faith in god. To all of us who grew up in those days, the arrival of broadband was an answer to the collective prayers sent by geeks across the (mother)board in the dark hours of internet despair. The world changed with broadband, as email, blogs, sharing of pictures and information, making voice-over IP calls and connecting with people from different parts of the world became a matter of clicks.

True, there were the irritations of buffering and the heartfelt angst of that slight lag between Send and Receive over IM and email, but the accelerated speeds changed our notions of time and space. Instead of Bulletin Boards, which were more like post-it notes on refrigerators, left and collected within 12-hour intervals, we moved to Instant Messaging, which was like passing notes in the classroom to see immediate reactions and responses. For us in India, the World Wide Web opened up, for the first time, not only as something we consume but we also contribute to, adding data, providing alternative perspectives and questioning the existing views. Since the arrival of broadband, geographies have shrunk, time zones have blurred, lifestyles have become homogeneous, the singular silence of solitary voices has been replaced by the cacophony of multiple presences and everybody knows just a little bit more about their neighbours than is beneficial to anybody.

What broadband did to the snail-paced but exciting world of text-based communication and slow information transfers, 3G promises to do to the burgeoning world of mobile data access. 3G, which stands for third generation, promises to change the face of mobile computing drastically. The interface of the computer has become increasingly mobile in the past few years. Smartphones and PDAs have already unanchored us from the tyranny of sitting in one position to use the Net. Mobile technologies combined with access to the internet have led to interesting ways in which digital natives have straddled physical and virtual worlds. It has also led to new forms of participation where first-hand witnesses, citizen journalism and new interaction channels have resulted in structures of good governance and democracy. Wireless networks of mobile phones also mean that remote areas with poor infrastructure are now able to get on the Infobahn to access information.

The opening up of the 3G spectrum and the easy availability of high-speed data access on devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, e-book readers, etc, promises to accelerate these advantages. With extremely high-speed internet available on mobile devices with rich browsing capacities, one of the paradigm shifts will be in how we visually relate to the internet. We often forget that cyberspace, even though it is a visual medium, is also a text-heavy medium. This emphasis on text means that it excludes a lot of people who might not be conversant with English, the de facto language for most international discussions. It also excludes people who might be visually or print-challenged. 3G is hopefully going to change the way in which we interact with information online and bring in more multimedia, audio and video elements into it. And this means that video chatting on phones is now just a dial away.

In countries like Japan, North Korea, Syria, Singapore and the US, where 3G has been rolled out, there have been dramatic changes. Content generation and cultural production have gone up tremendously. As more inexpensive devices offer internet gateway through 3G, people think of themselves as not mere consumers but also producers of online content. Citizen journalism has flourished and events that are often glossed over by mainstream media find visibility and space in an international dialogue. 3G promises easy, affordable and extensive networking possibilities to communities and people who often exist in remote and isolated areas.

Technologies in themselves do not change the world. However, there is no denying that ease of access, scope of expanse and affordability that the 3G spectrum brings is going to create populations, and eventually generations, who are one step closer to Singularity — the vision of creating perfect networks where human memories, thoughts and ideas work in synchrony with technology networks. This Diwali, when Tata Docomo offered 3G services in 20 cities, the biggest bang was in the noisy silence of data travelling at huge speeds in the ether. New service providers will transform your digital device into a magic box, combining entertainment, interaction, communication and information access to stitch you in better into the fabric of a world that is quickly becoming digital.

The ABC of 3G...
How will 3G change the way I use my phone?

3G enables you to access internet on your phone at extremely high speeds. Which means, you can play a YouTube clip on your phone without buffering; check PDF files and attachments on your BlackBerry with ease; download music and transfer files faster. Video calls from one network to another will become easier, and more popular. You can also watch television on your cellphone.

Will CDMA and GSM phones support 3G?

3G will be available to both GSM and CDMA customers, if you are on a 3G network.

Can I use my existing handset to get 3G speeds?

Only if your handset (whether a smart-phone or not) is 3G or 3.5G-ready.

How can I make video calls?

You will need a 3G-enabled handset and a front-facing camera. The person you are calling should have a 3G handset and be on a 3G network. If you don't have a front-facing camera, you will be able to watch the person you are speaking to, but he/she won’t be able to see you. If your phone supports Skype, you will be able to make free calls to another Skype user.

Is a front-facing camera a must on all 3G phones?

It is if you want to make video calls. If you are only going to use 3G speeds to access email, check Facebook, and share documents, you won’t need it.

How does 3G change entertainment options?

Worldwide, the biggest consumption on 3G networks is of television. And not without reason: there is plenty of bandwidth available and phones with 3” to 4” screens make watching TV on the go a pleasure. Most mobile TV users in 3G countries are people who use public transport. But with many urban Indians still driving to work, I don’t know if mobile TV will catch on. You can, though, check the latest news or catch one over of a Test match between meetings.

How does 3G affect the way I interact with my environment?

A friend in Singapore saves approximately $100 every month on parking fees, as his 3G connection tells him about the cheapest parking options in and around his geographical location, at the press of a qwerty key. Similarly, you can find out about places to dine out, the deals the nearest mall is offering or the location of the nearest ATM. In India, such location-based services have not taken off, though some malls and shopping centres send you information about their deals of the day on Bluetooth.

Will I need to pay separately for 3G?

Yes, there will be a subscription charge for data access, above your current voice plan. Though the operators have not revealed price plans, you should typically look at plans in the range of Rs 300 per month and upwards for 3G usage.

Will I be able to use 3G on my PC?

If your phone allows using you to tether its internet connection to your personal computer (or Mac), you can access internet at 3G speeds on your PC. Some laptops now also include a SIM card slot, in which you can slide a 3G SIM to get 3G connectivity. Devices like Apple’s iPad with a 9.7” screen, the Samsung Galaxy Tab (7”) and the Olivepad (7”) can also connect to 3G networks, letting you surf, stream music or videos, or work on the move.

Do I need 3G?

Like with each technology, there will be late movers and early adopters. I know of a lot of people like me who would like to have high-speed internet access on the move. And I also know of people who don’t want to check email more than once a day. It will depend on where and when you want to get connected.

What kind of speeds can I expect?

Depends on your service provider, but you can expect an average of 1 megabits per second download speed, allowing you to stream videos and music without buffering, as well as do high-speed file transfers. There might be a limit of 300 Kbps on upload speeds. So sending large files may still take more time, but downloading will be faster.

What tariff plan should I choose?

If you are going to use 3G mostly for video calls, choose a service provider with a good tariff plan for video calls. If you are going to use 3G to access internet services such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, and are a heavy Web user, unlimited data transfer plans make more sense.

What are the 3G plans available now?

Currently, MTNL provides 3G services in Delhi and Mumbai; BSNL offers it across the country. Tata and Reliance have high-speed USB data cards, which work on the 3G platform but provide data access to PCs, not phones. Tata Docomo launched its 3G services in select circles this month. Aircel, Airtel and Vodafone also plan to start 3G services by early next year.

Read the original article in the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/3-g-life

10 Legendary Obscene Beasts

nishant — 2010-03-05T06:27:53Z

In the second of his articles, Nishant Shah analyses a peculiar event of vandalism which has now become the core of free speech and anti-censorship debates in mainland China. Looking at the structure of user generated knowledge websites and the specific event on the Chinese language encyclopaedia, 'Baidu Baike', he shows how, in cities where spaces of political spectacle and public protest are quickly diminishing, the Internet has become a tool for producing new public spaces of demonstration and protest. The story about 'Cao Ni Ma' stands as an iconic representation of the playful processes by which young people in different contexts and cultures engage with the politics in their immediate environments.

User Generated Knowledge sites: The world of knowledge production was never as shaken as it was with the emergence of the Wikipedia – a user generated knowledge production system, where anybody who has any knowledge, on almost anything in the world can contribute to share it with countless users around the world. The camps around Wikipedia are fairly well divided: there are those who swear by it and those who swear against it. There are scholars, activists and lobbyists who celebrate the democratisation of knowledge production as the next logical evolutionary step to the democratic access to knowledge. They appreciate the wisdom of crowds and revel in the joy that in the much discussed Nature magazine experiment, the number of errors in Wikipedia and its biggest opponent, Encyclopaedia Britannica, were almost the same. And then there are those who think of the Wikipedia and other such peer knowledge production and sharing systems as erroneous, unreliable and a direct result of collapsing standards that the vulgarisation of knowledge has succumbed to in the age where information has become currency. Add to this the hue and cry from academics around the globe who lament about falling research standards as the copy and paste generations (Vaidhyanathan; 2008) in classrooms skim over subjects in Wikipedia rather than analysing and studying them in detail from those hallowed treasuries of knowledge – reference books.

As can be expected, the questions about the veracity, verifiability, trustworthiness and integrity of Wikipedia and other such user generated knowledge sharing sites (including Youtube, Flickr, etc.) are carried on in sombre tones by zealots who are devoted to their beliefs. However, the one question that remains unasked, in the discussion of these sites, is what purpose it might serve beyond the obvious knowledge production exercise.

The Story: In China, where the government exerts great control over regulating online information, Wikipedia had a different set of debates which would not feature in the more liberal countries – the debates were around what would be made accessible to a Wikipedia user from China and what information would be blanked out to fit China’s policy of making information that is ‘seditious ‘and disrespectful’, invisible. After the skirmishes with Google, where the search engine company gave in to China’s demands and offered a more censored search engine that filtered away results based on sensitive key-words and issues, Wikipedia was the next in line to offer a controlled Internet knowledge base to users in China.

However, another user-generated knowledge site, more popular locally and with more stringent self-regulating rules than Wikipedia, became the space for political commentary, satire, protest and demonstration against the draconian censorship regimes that China is trying to impose on its young users. The website Baidu Baike (pinyin for Baidu Encyclopaedia), became popular in 2005 and was offered by the Chinese internet search company Baidu. With more than 1.5 million Chinese language articles, Baidu has become a space for much debate and discussion with the Digital Natives in China. Offered as a home-grown response to Wikipedia, Baidu implements heavy ‘self-censorship to avoid displeasing the Chinese Government’ (BBC; 2006) and remains dedicated to removing ‘offensive’ material (with a special emphasis on pornographic and political events) from its shared space.

It is in this restrictive regime of information sharing and knowledge production, that the Digital Natives in China, introduced the “10 legendary obscene beasts” meme which became extremely popular on Baidu. Manipulating the Baidu Baike’s potential for users to share their knowledge, protestor’s of China’s censorship policy and Baidu’s compliance to it, vandalised contributions by creating humorous pages describing fictitious creatures, with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities, with homophones and characters using different tones.

The most famous of these creations was Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马), literally "Grass Mud Horse", which uses the same consonants and vowels with different tones for the Chinese language profanity which translates into “Fuck Your Mother” cào nǐ mā (肏你妈) . This mythical animal belonging to the Alpaca race had dire enemies called héxiè (河蟹), literally translated as “river crabs”, very close to the word héxié (和谐) meaning harmony, referring to the government’s declared ambition of creating a “harmonious society” through censorship. The Cao Ni Ma, has now become a popular icon appearing in videos distributed on YouTube, in fake documentaries, in popular Chinese internet productions, and even in themed toys and plushies which all serve as mobilising points against censorship and control that the Chinese government is trying to control.

However, the reaction from those who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts, Baidu’s user base also experimented very successfully with well-formed parodies and satires, opening up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for political criticism and negotiation[1].

What is discarded or overlooked as jest or harmless pranks, are actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene legendary creatures, can be easily read as juvenile fun and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading, shows that this is symptomatic of a new internet public in a country where physical public spaces of political protest and demonstration are quickly diminishing. In Shanghai, the iconic People's Square, once an area where thousand assembled in order to realise a political dream has already been cut down to five times its original size, to make way for the malls and hotels and multiplexes that now surround the token park in the centre. At the Bund, the presence of the paramilitary, that monitors any form of 'undesriable' activity by the native Chinese can often be frightening. As physical spaces come under abundant surveilance and places shrink to house the demands of the IT city, the young people quickly find new spaces of political engagement and the Cao Ni Ma story is about how this political negotiation is informed by the aesthetics of gaming, viral distribution, irreverence and playfulness that the Internet technologies shape.

[1] A more serious political satire that moves beyond just punning and avoiding censorship was found in the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"). An excerpt from it is included here for sampling.

Wei Guangzheng

Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival, because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most advanced state of species evolution.

Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun Kingdom characteristics, in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory." Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei Guangzheng, there would be no Sun Kingdom." Following the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom and an inevitable trend of historical development.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity4

(e)Governance by selection

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:37:21Z

The paper was presented at the Technology, Governance, Citizenship conference at the Indian Institute of Bangalore, and explores the processes of urban restructuration, positing of new digital citizenship, and the way in which technologised globalisation is implicated in the process. Looking at the instance of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad - a part of the Mega City project in India, the paper looks at the tropes of desire, ambition and aspiration as ways by which people relate and belong to circuits of technology but are often made invisible in the popular rhetoric of e-governance policies in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/governance%20by%20selection.pdf