Centre for Internet and Society

Activism: Unraveling the Term

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:25:05Z

After discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about how they relate with the very term of activism.

Youth's Popular Imagination of Activism

As a start, I need to clarify that ‘activism’ is not a concept that the participants are generally concerned with. For a majority of them, the conversation we had was the first time they thought of what the term means and reflect whether their engagement with Blank Noise is activism. Regardless of whether one identifies Blank Noise as a form of activism or not, all participants share a popular idea of what activism is.

Generally speaking, at an abstract level all participants saw activism as passionately caring about an injustice and taking action to create social change. At a more tangible level, all participants mentioned three elements as popular ideas about doing activism. The first is the existence of a concrete demands as a solution to the identified problem, such as asking for service provision or state regulations. Since these demands are structural, activism is also seen dealing with formal authority figures in the traditional sense of politics, the state. The second is the intensity and commitment required to be an activist, for many participants being an activist means having prolonged engagement, taking risks, and making the struggle a priority in one’s life. In other words, being an activist means “... being neck-deep, spending most if not all of your time, energy, and resources for the cause” (Dev Sukumar, male, 34). The third element relates to the methods, called by some as ‘old school’: shouting slogans, holding placards, and doing marches on the streets – all enacted in the physical public space. This popular imagination of activism becomes the orientation for participants in deciding whether Blank Noise is a form of activism and whether they are activists for being involved in it.

Activism as the Intention and Action

“I have an idea of what activism is but not what it exactly looks like.”

(Apurva Mathad, male, 28).

For those who think that Blank Noise is a form of activism, there was a differentiation between the idea at the abstract level and how it is manifested at a more tangible level. The definition of activism is the abstract one, while the popular ideas of doing activism do not define the concept but present the most common out many possible courses of actions. Blank Noise is fulfils all the elements in the abstract definition: a passion about an injustice, having an aim for social change, and acting to achieve the aim. Hence, Blank Noise is activism, but the way it manifests itself does not adhere to the popular imagination of doing activism. The distinction between Blank Noise’s methods with popular ones was emphasized, along with the difference in articulating goals.

Interestingly, not all participants who share this line of thinking called themselves as activists for being involved in an activism. Again, it must be reiterated that no participants ever really thought of giving a name to their engagement prior to the interview. Instead of saying ‘I am an activist’, they said ‘I guess I could be called an activist’ for the fact that they are sharing the passion and being actively involved in a form of activism, albeit in an unconventional manner.

Those who would categorize Blank Noise as activism but not call themselves activists related with a particular element on the popular idea of doing activism, which is getting “neck-deep”. They were helpers, volunteers, idea spreaders, but not an activist because their lives are not dedicated for the cause or their involvements were based on availability. On the other hand, these participants all said that Jasmeen is an activist for being completely dedicated to Blank Noise from its inception until today.

Activism as Particular Ways of Doing and Being

“What are the repercussions if activism is so fluidly defined? It can mean not questioning

privilege... not seeing the class divisions and still call yourself activist.”

(Hemangini Gupta, female, 29).

Most participants did not consider Blank Noise as an activism. Generally, this can be explained by the discrepancies between Blank Noise and the popular imagination on the tangible ways of doing activism. Blank Noise does not propose a concrete solution or make concrete demands to an established formal structure nor did it march on the streets and make slogans. However, the underlying attitude to this point of view is not of a younger generation finding the ‘old’ ways of doing activism obsolete. Rather, there was an acknowledgement that the issue itself causes the different ways of reading an issue and taking actions to address it.

Furthermore, there is an appreciation to the achievements and dedication of activists that deterred them from calling themselves activists. These people referred to their occasional participation and the fact that Blank Noise is not the main priority in their lives as a student or young professional despite being a cause they are passionate about. As reflected in the opening quote, being an activist for some participants also means deeply reflecting on their self position in terms of class, acknowledging their privileges, and putting themselves in a position that will enable them to imagine the experience of people who are also affected by the issue but has a different position in the society. In other words, being an activist is not just about doing but also about critically reflecting on one’s position in relation to the issue and how it influences the way an issue is being pushed forward. Thinking that they are not up to these standards, these youth choose to call themselves ‘volunteers’, ‘helpers’, or ‘supporters’.

Youth: The Activist, the Apathetic, and the Everyday

“Blank Noise is a public and community street arts collective that is volunteer-led and attempts to create public dialogue on the issue of street sexual violence and eve teasing.”

(Jasmeen Patheja)

“... a group of people against street sexual harassment and eve teasing.”

(Kunal Ashok, men, 29)

“... an idea that really works.”

(Neha Bhat, 19)

As clarified before, the participants did not use the words ‘movement’ and very few used ‘activism’ during our conversations. Instead, the terms they used to describe Blank Noise are represented in the quotes above: collective, community, group, project, and even as an idea. These phrases do not carry the same political baggage that ‘movement’ or ‘activism’ would; they also do not conjure a particular imagination that the other two terms would. These phrases are de-politicized and informal; they imply fluidity, lack of hierarchy, and room for manoeuvre.

The implied meanings in the terms reflect the debates on the average youth and political engagement. For the past decade, various youth scholars criticized the dichotomy of youth as either activists or apathetic in explaining the global trend of decreased youth participation in formal politics. The activists are either politically active Digital Natives engaged in new forms of social movements influenced heavily by new media or sub-cultural resistances, which only account for a fraction of the youth population that are mostly completely apathetic. This dichotomy ignored the ‘broad “mainstream” young people who are neither deeply apathetic about politics on unconventionally engaged’ (Harris et al, 2010).

These mainstream young people actually are socially and politically engaged in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism (Harris et al, 2010). Internet and new media technologies are credited as an enabling factor, being a space and a medium for young people to express their everyday activism.

All of the research participants, perhaps with the exception of Jasmeen as the only one who has constantly been the driver Blank Noise its entire seven years, are these everyday makers, people who were involved with the Blank Noise either on a daily basis as a commentator, one-time project initiator and leader, or people who were active when they are available but remain dormant at other times. Blank Noise is a space where these individual forms of engagement could be exercised while remaining as a collective. The facilitation is not only by the flexibility of coming and going, but also the lack of rigid group rules and the approach of allowing Blank Noise to be interpreted differently by individuals. Considering that the mainstream urban youth are everyday makers who would not find ‘old’ or ‘new’ social movements appealing, this can be the reason why Blank Noise became so popular among youth; however, I would also argue that the fact that Blank Noise is the first to systematically address eve teasing is a determining cause.

The implications of this finding, together with other concluding thoughts, will be shared in the next and final post in the Beyond the Digital series.

This is the ninth post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf

Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, Young Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32

Image source: http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/tweet-now-feb-17-27.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term

Across Borders

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:55:41Z

A friend and I were at a cafe in Bangalore the other day, when an acquaintance walked in. After the initial niceties, and invitation to join us for coffee, the new person looked at us and asked a question that sounded so archaic and so unexpected that we had no answers for it: How do you two know each other? This innocuous question threw us both off the loop because we didn’t have an immediate answer.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on July 5, 2012

How do we two know each other? My story would begin with Livejournal — a community-based blogging platform that was popular in the early Noughties and was the first large-scale digital network I belonged to, and where I spoke with and befriended people writing in that closed social network. My friend probably pins it down to Twitter and how our blogging-friendship solidified through the charms of 140-character direct messages. There is another story somewhere, that we discovered later, when we added each other on Facebook and realised that we have a few close friends in common. Over the last many years, we have also worked together on a couple of projects, have caught up IRL (In Real Life) whenever we visit each others’ cities — Mumbai and Bangalore — and have thought of ourselves as friends, without trying to form a narrative that identifies the point of origin.

When you compare this state of being, which is increasingly the default mode of being for many young people who cement their relationships through digital connections, with how we used to get to know people even two decades ago, we know that things have changed dramatically. For the longest time, the act and fact of knowing somebody was to find physical, material and communitarian similarities — filters that allowed us to hobnob with others like us. Of course, we were always progressive and cosmopolitan, but a quick sweep of any social circle would show that we were mostly confined to people who shared common stories with us. Sometimes these stories were of material proximity, we grew up in the same neighbourhoods, went to the same schools, etc. Sometimes these stories were of class and affordability, we belonged to the same clubs and hung out at similar places. Sometimes these stories were about an imaginary sameness, of religion, community, family etc.

If there is a truly democratising principle that the digital revolution brought to the fore, it can be seen in this destabilising of an older world order, where we are quite comfortable in coexisting and embracing those who are unlike us. I do not mean this to be a celebratory moment where the flat, non-discriminatory and inclusive societies are finally being built. Indeed, the digital networks have their own set of filters that eventually allow us to connect only with people of the same ilk. If you are online in India, you are necessarily talking to people who speak in a particular language and speak it in a particular way. Grammar, diction, fluency, references to global cultural icons and productions, consumption-based lifestyles, all betray the different locations (physical or otherwise) that people come from and serve as extremely strong filters to determine who we connect with.

This, sometimes, even translates into gadget snobbery. For example, a young friend told me that she finds it impossible to connect with people who don’t have a BlackBerry phone because she doesn’t know how she can sustain relationships without being constantly in touch through the BlackBerry Messenger. Similarly, the celebration of social applications like Instagram, which were available only to iPhone users, warns us that there are severe economic, social, cultural and political prejudices that abound in cyberspaces.

However, in the middle of these complications, digital natives are not only a mobile-wielding generation, but also a mobile generation. They are fluid, not necessarily tied to the geographies of their origin, and often imagine themselves, as travelling across different networks and systems, like the information traffic on the internet. This dislocation of the fixity of where we are from and who we are, is one of the most exciting results of the digital turn. The fact that we are able to not only step out of these older networks, which are often entrenched in old-world politics that perpetuate mindless discrimination, but also fabricate new communities and collectives that bring together a diversity, for me, is heartening. While these new social forms will have their own set of problems — gendered, social, linguistic and class-based — they are also the new forms of our socio-cultural being. And there is hope that as the physical translates into the digital, there is a possibility of reconfiguring our pasts and recycling them for more collaborative and shared futures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/across-borders

A.I. Hype Cycles and Artistic Subversions

sharath — 2016-01-01T07:52:20Z

Gene Kogan will give a talk on "A.I. hype cycles and artistic subversions" on Friday, January 22, 2016 at the Centre for Internet and Society office, 6 pm - 8 pm.

Mona Lisa restyled by Egyptian hieroglyphs, the Crab Nebula, and Google Maps. Style Transfer. Gene Kogan.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of popular interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence, as emerging methods have set new scientific benchmarks and introduced classes of neural networks capable of imitating human behavior, among other impressive feats. More importantly, the study of these algorithms is rapidly crossing over into mainstream culture and industry as AI applications begin to inhabit more of our daily lives. Numerous initiatives have appeared, attempting to demystify and make these previously obscure research tracks more accessible to the public. Open source software like Torch, Theano, and TensorFlow have equipped amateurs with the same software which is achieving state-of-the-art results in industry and academia.

This talk will examine the most recent wave of artistic projects applying these methods in various cultural contexts, producing troves of machine-hallucinated text, images, sounds, and videos, demonstrating a previously unseen capacity for imitating human style and sensibility. These experimental works attempt to show the capacity of these machines for producing aesthetically meaningful media, yet challenging and subverting them to illuminate their most obscure and counterintuitive properties.

A recent article by the speaker about this: From Pixels to Paragraphs: How artistic experiments with deep learning guard us from hype.

Relevant projects by the speaker that will be presented include: Style Transfer, A Book from the Sky 天书, Learning to Generate Text and Audio, and Deepdream Prototypes.

Gene Kogan

Gene Kogan is an artist and programmer who is interested in generative systems and applications of emerging technology in artistic and expressive contexts. He writes code for live music, performance, and visual art. He contributes to numerous open-source software projects and frequently gives workshops and demonstrations on topics related to code and art.

He is a contributor to openFrameworks, Processing, and p5.js, an adjunct professor at Bennington College and NYU, a former resident at Eyebeam Art & Technology Center, and a former Fulbright scholar in Bangalore, India, 2012-2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/ai-hype-cycles-and-artistic-subversions

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T05:06:46Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the second among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

The 'digital turn' has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. DH has emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technologies and the human being or subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the DH discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. It has been variously called a phenomenon, field, discipline and a set of convergent practices – all of which are located at and/or try to understand the interaction between digital technologies and humanities practice and scholarship. DH in the Anglo-American context has seen several changes – from an early phase of vast archival initiatives and digitisation projects, to now exploring the role of big data and cultural analytics in literary criticism. Some of the early scholarship in the field illustrate the problems with defining and locating it within specific disciplinary formations, as the research objects, methods and locations of DH work cut across everything from the archive to the laboratory and social networking platforms. Largely interpreted as a way to explore the intersection of information technology and humanities, DH is grown to become an interdisciplinary field of research and practice today. However, DH is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

The Problem of Definition

The question of what is DH has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of DH – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the 'digital' itself as integral to humanistic enquiry [1]. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions for the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s of digital humanities. Dave Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that "what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities." (Parry 2012)

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in this report. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested threads or modes of thought, which will also inform larger concerns of the DH work at CIS:

The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the Nature of the book, "any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another" (Johns 1998:3). The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this 'technologised history' of the humanities. Can DH therefore be an attempt to uncover such a history and bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here?
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with DH practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core DH concerns, they are not all 'digital humanists' or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not DH – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most DH research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in DH– where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno-social subject [2] as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.
Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and DH. This comes with the perception of DH being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities disciplines to reinvent themselves to remain relevant in the present context, and one way to do this is by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. DH has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not or even need not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching DH as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of DH in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying DH works with and tries to address this particular formulation of the field.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of DH is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on DH still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says "Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others." (Latour 2002)

DH then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates DH from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of DH. There are several questions therefore for DH - in terms of what it means and what it could do for our understanding of the humanities and technology. However the questions of DH still need to be made explicit. This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of the above thoughts a little further. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and DH. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

The Problem of the Discipline

Much has been said and written about DH as an emergent field or domain of enquiry; the plethora of departments being set up all across the world, well mostly the developed world is testimony to the claimed innovative and generative potential of the field. However as outlined in the introduction the problem of definition still persists and poses much difficulty in any attempts to engage with the field. While the predominant narrative seems to be in terms of defining what DH or to take it a step back, what the ‘digital’ allows you to do, with respect to enabling or facilitating certain kinds of research and pedagogy, a pertinent question still is that of what it allows you to ‘be’. DH has been alternatively called a method, practice and field of enquiry, but scholars and practitioners in many instances have stopped short of fully embracing it as a discipline. This is an interesting development given the rapid pace of its institutionalisation - from being located in existing Humanities or Computational Sciences and Media Studies departments it has now claimed functional institutional spaces of its own, with not just interdisciplinary research and teaching but also other creative and innovative knowledge-making practices. The field is slowly gaining credence in India as well, with several institutions pursuing research around core questions within the fold of DH.

So is the disciplinary lens inadequate to understand this phenomenon, or is it too early for a field still considered in some ways rather incipient. The growth of the academic discipline itself is something of a fraught endeavour; as debates around the scientific revolution and Enlightenment thought have established. To put it in a very simple manner, the story of academic disciplines is that of training in reason [3]. Andrew Cutrofello says "In academia, a discipline is defined by its methodological rigor and the clear boundaries of its field of inquiry. Methods or fields are criticized as being 'fuzzy' when they are suspected of lacking a discipline. In a more straightforwardly Foucauldian sense, the disciplinary power of academic disciplines can be located in their methods for producing docile bodies of different sorts" (Cutrofello 1994). The problem with defining DH may lie in it not conforming to precisely this notion of the academic discipline, and changing ideas of the function of critique when mediated by the digital, which is of primary concern for the humanities. DH has in many spaces also emerged as a manifestation of increasing interdisciplinarity and the blurring of boundaries between traditional disciplinary concerns.

However a prevalent mode of understanding DH has been in terms of the disciplinary concerns it raises for the humanities themselves; this works with the assumption that it is in fact a newer, improved version or extension of the humanities. The present mapping exercise too began with the disciplinary lens, but instead of enquiring about what DH is, it tried to explore what the ‘digital’ has brought to, changed or appropriated in terms of existing disciplinary concerns within the humanities and more broadly spaces and process of knowledge-making and dissemination. This thought stems from the premise that if we have to posit the digital itself as a state of being or existence, then we need to understand this new techno-social paradigm much better. Prof. Amlan Dasgupta, at the School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University in Kolkata sees this as useful way of going about the problem of trying to arrive at a definition of the field – one is to understand the history of the term, from its inherited definition in the Anglo-American context, and distinguish it from what he calls the current state of ‘digitality’ – where all cultural objects are being now being conceived of as ‘digital’ objects. In the Indian context, the question of digitality also becomes important from the perspective of technological obsolescence - where there is a great resistance to discontinuing or phasing out the use of certain kinds of technology; either for lack of access to better ones or simply because one finds other uses for it. Prof. Dasgupta interestingly terms this a ‘culture of reuse’, one example of this being the typewriter which for all practical purposes has been displaced by the computer, but still finds favour with several people in their everyday lives. The question of livelihood is still connected to some of these technologies, so much so that they are very much a part of channels of cultural production and circulation, and even when they cease to become useful they have value as cultural artefacts. We therefore inhabit at the same time, different worlds, that of the analogue and digital, or as he calls it 'a multi-layered technological sphere'. The notion of the 'digital' is also multi-layered, with some objects being 'weakly digital', and others being so in a more pronounced manner. The variedness of this space, and the complexities or ‘degrees of use’ of certain technologies or technological objects is what further determines the nature of this space and makes it all the more difficult to define. DH itself has seen several phases in the West, but has seen no such movement or gradual evolution in India, where these phases exist simultaneously.

This is also true of most technology in underdeveloped world. This further complicates the questions of access to technology or the 'digital divide' which have been and still are some of the primary approaches concerning the pervasiveness of technology, particularly in the Global South. The need of the hour therefore is to be able to distinguish between this current state of digitality that we are in, and what is meant by the ‘Digital Humanities’. It may after all be a set of methodologies rather than a subject or discipline in itself– the question is how it would help us understand the ‘digital’ itself much better, and more critically, and the new kinds of enquiries it may then facilitate about this space we now inhabit. This, Prof. Dasgupta feels would go a long way in arriving at some definition of the field.

One of the important points of departure, from the traditional humanities and later humanities computing as mentioned earlier, has been the blurring of boundaries between content, method and object/s of enquiry. The ‘process’ has become important, as illustrated by the iterative nature of most DH projects and the discourse itself which emphasises the 'making' and 'doing' aspects of the research as much as the content itself. Tool-building as a critical activity rather than as mere facilitation is an important part of the knowledge-making process in the field (Ramsay 2010). In conjunction with this, Dr. Moinak Biswas, at the Department of Film Studies at Jadavpur University, thinks that the biggest changes have been in terms of the collaborative nature of knowledge production, based on voluntarily sharing or creating new content through digital platforms and archives, and crucially the possibility of now imagining creative and analytical work as not separate practices, but located within a single space and time. He cites an example from film, where now with digital platforms and processes ‘image’ making and critical practice can both be combined on one platform, like the online archive Indiancine.ma [4] or the Vectors journal [5] for example, to produce new layers of meaning around existing texts. The aspect of critique is important here, given that the consistent criticism about the field has been the ambiguity of its social undertaking; its critical or political standpoint or challenge to existing theoretical paradigms. Most of the interest around the term has been in very instrumental terms, as a facilitator or enabler of certain kinds of digital practice. While the move away from computational analysis as a technique to facilitate humanities research is apparent, the disciplinary concerns here still seem to be latched onto those of the traditional humanities. Questions about the epistemological concerns of DH itself therefore remain unanswered.

While reiterating some of these core questions within DH, Dr. Souvik Mukherjee at the Department of English, Presidency University and Dr. Padmini Ray Murray, at the Centre for Public History, Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, speak of the problem of locating the field in India, where work is presently only being done in a few small pockets. The lack of a precise definition, or location within an established disciplinary context are some reasons why a lot of work that could come within the ambit of DH is not being acknowledged as such; conversely it also leads to the problem of projects on digitisation or studies of digital cultures/cyber cultures being easily conflated with DH . Related to this is the absence of self-claimed ‘digital humanists’, which makes it all the more difficult to identify the boundaries of their research and practice. More importantly, the lack of an indigenous framework to theorise around questions of the digital is also an obstacle to understanding what the field entails and the many possibilities it may offer in the Indian context. This they feel is a problem not just of DH, but in general for modes of knowledge production in the social sciences and humanities that have adopted Western theoretical constructs. One could also locate in some sense the present crisis in disciplines within this problem. Sundar Sarukkai and Gopal Guru explicate this issue when they talk about the absence of 'experience as an important category of the act of theorising' because of the privileging of ideas in Western constructs of experience (Guru and Sarukkai 2012). This is also reflective of the bifurcation between theory and praxis in traditional social sciences or humanities epistemological frameworks which borrow heavily from the West. DH while still to arrive at a core disciplinary concern seems to point towards the problem of this very demarcation by addressing the aspect of practice as a very focal point of its discourse.

Dr. Indira Chowdhury, oral historian and director of the Centre for Public History, who is also a faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore sees this as a favourable way of understanding how the field as such has emerged and what its various possibilities could be in terms of different disciplinary perspectives. She is uncertain that of its emergence as a response to a ‘crisis’ in the humanities as such. She recalls an instance of one of her students who went on to work on hypertext in Canada, several years ago, which for her seemed to be the first instance of something close to DH. The IT revolution in the early 2000s was a significant change, and there were several things that it enabled people to do, in terms of concordance, cross-referencing and getting around texts in certain ways. However, whether key questions in the humanities really changed, whether they were taken any further, is something yet to be explored because it is still such a new field, and one can only be speculative about it, she feels. It perhaps pushes for a new level of interdisciplinarity, and a different kind of collaborative space that the digital enables. What is significant and exciting for her as a historian, however, is that if history has to survive as a discipline, in schools but in terms of public spaces and discourse, it should actively engage with the digital. This not only presents significant challenges, in terms how to represent the past in the digital space, (in short problems with method) but also opens up new possibilities, for example with oral history and the advent of digital sound. The definition of the field will also evolve, as people define it from different spaces of practice and research, which Dr. Chowdhury feels is crucial to keeping it open and accessible by all.

Even from diverse disciplinary perspectives, at present the understanding of DH is that it facilitates new modes of humanistic enquiry, or enables one to ask questions that could not be asked earlier. As Prof. Dasgupta reiterates, it is no longer possible to imagine humanities scholarship outside of the ‘digital’ as such, as that is the world we inhabit. However, while some of the key conceptual questions for the humanities may remain the same, it is the mode of questioning that has undergone a change – we need to re-learn questioning or question-making within this new digital sphere, which is in some sense also a critical and disciplinary challenge. While this does not resolve the problem of definition, it does provide a useful route into thinking of what would be questions of DH, particularly in the Indian context.

Notes

[1] For a more detailed overview of the different phases of DH, see Patrik Svensson in 'Landscape of Digital Humanities,' Digital Humanities Quarterly, Volume 4 Number 1, 2010, http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html.

[2] For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial Subject: Cities, Cyborgs and Cyberspace, Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository @ INFLIBNET, http://hdl.handle.net/10603/8558.

[3] This is rather simple abstraction of ideas about discipline and reason as they have stemmed from Enlightenment thought. For a more elaborate understanding see Conflict of the Faculties (1798) by Immanuel Kant and Discipline and Punish (1975) by Michel Foucault.

[4] See: http://indiancine.ma/.

[5] See: http://vectors.usc.edu/journal/index.php.

References

Cutrofello, Andrew, Discipline and Critique: Kant, Poststructuralism and the Problem of Resistance, State University of New York Press, 1994.

Guru, Gopal, and Sundar Sarukkai, The Cracked Mirror: An Indian Debate on Experience and Theory, New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 2012.

Johns, Adrian, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Latour, Bruno, 'Morality and Technology: The End of the Means,' Trans. Couze Venn, Theory Culture Society, 247-260, 2002.

Parry, Dave, 'The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism', Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, University of Minnesota Press, 2012, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24.

Ramsay, Stephen, 'On Building,' 2010, http://lenz.unl.edu/papers/2011/01/11/on-building.html.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-question-of-digital-humanities

A Question of Digital Humanities

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:47:27Z

The emergence of digital humanities as a new field of interdisciplinary research enquiry has also seen growth in literature around the problem of its definition. This blog-post lays out some of the conceptual frameworks for the mapping exercise taken up by CIS to look at digital humanities in India.

The ‘digital turn’ has been one of the significant changes in interdisciplinary research and scholarship in the last couple of decades. The advent of new digital technologies and growth of networked environments have led to a rethinking of the traditional processes of knowledge gathering and production, across an array of fields and disciplinary areas. The digital humanities have emerged as yet another manifestation of what in essence is this changing relationship between technology and the human subject. The nature and processes of information, scholarship and learning, now produced or mediated by digital tools, methods or spaces have formed the crux of the digital humanities discourse as it has emerged in different parts of the world so far. However, digital humanities is also clearly being posited as a site of contestation – what is perceived as doing away with or reinventing certain norms of traditional humanities research and scholarship. As a result it has largely been framed within the existing narrative of a crisis in the humanities, highlighting the more prominent role of technology which is now expected to resolve in some way questions of relevance and authority that seem to have become central to the continued existence and practice of the humanities in its conventional forms.

The question of what is digital humanities has been asked many times, and in different ways. Most scholars have differentiated between two waves or types of digital humanities – the first is that of using computational tools to do traditional humanities research, while the second looks at the ‘digital’ itself as integral to humanistic enquiry. However as is apparent in the existing discourse, the problem of definition still persists. As a field, method or practice, is it a found term that has now been appropriated in various forms and by various disciplines, or is it helping us reconfigure questions of the humanities by making available, through advancements in technology, a new digital object or a domain of enquiry that previously was unavailable to us? These and others will continue to remain questions for the digital humanities, but it would be important to first examine what would be the question/s of digital humanities. David Parry summarises to some extent these different contentions to a definition of the field when he suggests that ‘what is at stake here is not the object of study or even epistemology, but rather ontology. The digital changes what it means to be human, and by extension what it means to study the humanities.’[1]

Some speculation on the larger premise of the field, with specific reference to its emergence in India is what I hope to chart out in a series of posts over the next couple of weeks. This is not in itself an attempt at a definition, but sketching out a domain of enquiry by mapping the field with respect to work being done in the Indian context. In doing so these propositions will assume one or the other (if not all three) of these following suggested frameworks, which we hope will inform also larger concerns of the digital humanities programme at CIS:

The first is the inherited separation of technology and the humanities and therefore the existing tenuous relationship between the two fields. As is apparent in the nomenclature itself, there seems to be a bringing together of what seem to have been essentially two separate domains of knowledge. However, the humanities and technology have a rather chequered history together, which one could locate with the beginning of print culture. As Adrian Johns points out in the ‘Nature of the book’, ‘any printed book is, as a matter of fact, both the product of one complex set of social and technological processes and the beginning of another”[2]The larger imagination of humanities as text-based disciplines can be located in a sense in the rise of printing, literacy and textual scholarship. While the book itself seems to have made a comfortable transition into the digital realm, the process of this transition, the channels of circulation and distribution of information as objects of study have been relegated to certain disciplinary concerns, thus obfuscating and making invisible this ‘technologised history’ of the humanities. Can the digital humanities therefore be an attempt to bridge these knowledge gaps would be a question here.
The distance between the practice and the subject. How does one identify with digital humanities practice? While many people engage with what seem to be core digital humanities concerns, they are not all ‘digital humanists’ or do not identify themselves by the term. While at one level the problem is still that of definition and taxonomy – what is or is not digital humanities – at another level it is also about the nature of subjectivity produced in such practice – whether it has one of its own or is still entrenched in other disciplinary formations, as is the case with most digital humanities research today. This is apparent in the emphasis on processes and tools in digital humanities – where the practice or method seems to have emerged before the theoretical or epistemological framework. One may also connect this to the larger discourse on the emergence of the techno -social subject[3] as an identity meditated by digital and new media technologies, wherein technology is central to the practices that engender this subjectivity.
Tying back to the first question is also the notion of a conflict between the humanities and digital humanities. This comes with the perception of digital humanities being a version 2.0 of the traditional humanities, a result of the existing narrative of crisis and the need for the humanities to reinvent themselves by becoming amenable to the use of computing tools. Digital humanities has emerged as one way to mediate between the humanities and the changes that are imminent with digital technologies, but it may not take up the task of trying to establish a teleological connection between the two. The theoretical pursuits of both may be different but deeply related, and this is one manner of approaching digital humanities as a field or domain of enquiry; the point of intersection or conflict would be where new questions emerge. This narrative is also located within a larger framing of digital humanities in terms of addressing the concerns of the labour market, and the fear of the humanities being displaced or replaced as a result. Parry’s objective of studying the digital humanities works with or tries to address this particular formulation of the digital humanities.

Locating these concerns in India, where the field of digital humanities is still at an incipient stage comes with a multitude of questions. For one the digital divide still persists to a large extent in India, and is at different levels due to the complexity of linguistic and social conditions of technological advancement. It is difficult locate a field that is so premised on technology in such a varied context. Secondly, the existing discourse on digital humanities still draws upon, to a large extent, the given history of the term which renders it inaccessible to certain groups or classes of people in the global South. Another issue which is not specifically Indian but can be seen more explicitly in this context is the somewhat uncritical way in which technology itself is imagined. In most spaces, technology is still understood as either ‘facilitating’ something, either a specific kind of research enquiry or as a tool - a means to an end, and as being value or culture neutral. However, if we are to imagine the digital as a condition of being as Parry says, then technology too cannot be relegated to being a means to an end. Bruno Latour indicates the same when he says “Technology is everywhere, since the term applies to a regime of enunciation, or, to put it another way, to a mode of existence, a particular form of exploring existence, a particular form of the exploration of being – in the midst of many others.”[4]

The digital humanities then in some sense takes us back to the notion of technology or more specifically the digital realm as being a discursive space, and a technosocial or cultural paradigm that generates new objects and methods of study. This has been the impetus of cyber culture and digital culture studies, but what separates digital humanities from these fields is another way to arrive at some understanding of its ontological status. At a cursory glance, the shift from content to process, from information to data seems to be the key transition here, and the blurring of the boundaries between such absolute categories. More importantly however, does this point towards an epistemic shift; a rupture in the given understanding of certain knowledge formations or systems is also a pertinent question of digital humanities.

This mapping exercise will attempt to explore some of these thoughts a little further and with a focus on the Indian context. Through discussions with scholars and practitioners across diverse fields, we will attempt to map and generate different meanings of the ‘digital’ and digital humanities. While one can expect this to definitely produce more questions, we also hope the process of thinking though these questions will lead to an understanding of the larger field as well.

[1]. Dave Parry “The Digital Humanities or a Digital Humanism”, Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Mathew K. Gold, (University of Minnesota Press, 2012 ) http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/24

[2]. Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) pp.3

[3]. For more on the nature of the technosocial subject, see Nishant Shah, The Technosocial subject: cities, cyborgs and cyberspace Manipal University, 2013. Indian ETD Repository@Inflibnet, Web, March 7, 2014.

[4]. Latour, Bruno . "Morality and Technology: The End of the Means." Trans. Couze Venn Theory Culture Society . (2002): 247-260. Sage. Web, March 4, 2014 URL> http://www.brunolatour.fr/sites/default/files/downloads/80-MORAL-TECHNOLOGY-GB.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/a-question-of-digital-humanities

A lifetime of five years on the internet

praskrishna — 2013-05-20T09:04:28Z

Centre for Internet and Society observes its fifth anniversary on Sunday.

The article by Subir Ghosh was published in DNA on May 19, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted in this.

Five years is a long time in the internet space. The past five years, certainly, has been. And so has it been for the Centre for Internet and Society that completes five years here.

When a group of citizens got together to come under a platform called CIS five years ago, they had wanted to work on policy issues about the internet that had a bearing on society. They, in fact, still do; except that the new media space itself has undergone a metamorphosis. Five years ago social media was just starting off, few people had smart phones, and online speech was not a burning issue.

Sunil Abraham, executive director of city-based CIS, affirms this, and goes on to assert: “Five years ago, privacy was not a mainstream concern. Today, many different actors and stakeholders are interested in the configuration of the draft Privacy Bill. We first warned the public about the draconian measures in the IT Act during the 2008 amendment. Four years later, many more people are familiar with problematic sections and are adopting various strategies to amend the Act and it’s associated rules.”

Likewise, five years ago, people dismissed “shared spectrum” as a pipe dream; today “shared spectrum” is mentioned in the National Telecom Policy. CIS usually thinks ahead, and works on a range of issues.

“For internet adoption in India to grow dramatically from the dismal statistics today, we need to ensure continued access to cheap devices and affordable and ubiquitous broadband,” says Abraham.

“With Ericsson suing Micromax for Rs100 crore, the mobile wars have come to India. If we have to protect innovation in sub-100 dollar devices, we need to configure our patent and copyright policy carefully.”

But since CIS works primarily on policy issues, shouldn’t it have been based in Delhi rather than in Bangalore? “We do have a small office in Delhi. But we are headquartered in Bangalore because we need to keep learning from technologists and the technical community,” explains Abraham.

When an organisation calling itself the Centre for Internet and Society (www.cis-india.org) observes its fifth anniversary, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that many of the activities related to the anniversary celebrations (May 20-23) have precious little to do with the internet, and is more about society itself. And yes, an entire evening is devoted to Kannada. There’s a talk by Chandrashekhara Kambara on ‘Kannada in the modern era,’ and another by UB Pavanaja titled ‘From Palm Leaf to Tablet – Journey of Kannada’.

“We are looking at the complete eco-system. For instance, during the digitalisation of TV in India, what will happen to the internet? Do TV promoting policies undermine the growth of broadband? On the second day we look at the connection between another older technology - cinema and the Internet.”

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dna-india-may-19-2013-subir-ghosh-a-lifetime-of-five-years-on-the-internet

A Compilation of Research on the Gig Economy

Aayush Rathi, Ambika Tandon, Sumandro Chattapadhyay — 2020-05-19T08:20:20Z

Over the past year, researchers at CIS have been studying gig economies and gig workers in India. Their work has involved consultative discussions with domestic workers, food delivery workers, taxi drivers, trade union leaders, and government representatives to document the state of gig work in India, and highlight the concerns of gig workers. The imposition of a severe lockdown in India in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 has left gig workers in precarious positions. Without the privilege of social distancing, these workers are having to contend with a drastic reduction in income, while also placing themselves at heightened health risks.

On gig economy during the COVID-19 pandemic

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

Along with Tandem Research, we spoke to leaders of four unions that represent gig workers across the country about the risks and vulnerabilities that they are having to contend with in the face of the COVID-19 crisis. Zothan Mawii (Tandem Research), Ambika Tandon, and Aayush Rathi share key reflections in this essay published on The Wire. (link).
Based on the discussion, a charter of recommendations was prepared with contributions from participants, and was shared with public and private stakeholders. (link)

On domestic workers in the platform economy

Supported by Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) and funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)

We discussed our ongoing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India with domestic workers, union members, and representatives from the Karnataka Labour Department in November 2019. Tasneem Mewa documented the rich discussion from this consultation. (link)

CIS worked with members of the Domestic Workers Rights Union to conduct field research on the lives and challenges of domestic workers in the platform economy. The following essays published on GenderIT capture their experiences of doing this research:

Parijatha G.P. writes about a “gated society management app,” MyGate, and the experiences of surveillance of migrant workers in Bengaluru. (link)
Radha Keerthna writes about the similarity in the conditions of domestic workers in the traditional and platform economy, particularly the precarity and invisibility of labour. (link)
Sumathi, a union leader, reflects on and her experience as an activist-researcher interacting with domestic gig workers through the course of our study. (link)
Zeenathunissa shares the difficulty of speaking to domestic workers in the gig economy, especially when workers undergo constant surveillance by employers and companies. (link)

On economic, algorithmic, and affective vulnerabilities of gig workers

Supported by Azim Premji University

CIS commissioned a set of four field studies of platform workers delivering food and driving taxis for platform companies in Mumbai and New Delhi. The researchers involved wrote a series of essays that were published by Platypus blog of CASTAC:

Anushree Gupta explores women’s presence as workers as well as passengers/customers in the ride hailing platform economy in Mumbai and related concerns of safety and risk mitigation. (link)
Sarah Zia highlights how algorithmic management of work and revenue targets of gig workers impact their everyday lives and plans for the future. (link)
Kinship networks are a critical source of safety and security for workers in the gig economy. Simiran Lalvani writes about the network among transportation workers in Mumbai, also reflecting on implications for those who are excluded. (link)
Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav describe the unregulated and exploitative temporal structures of gig work, and how work-time of gig workers get configured by customer-facing promises of platform companies. (link)
The four researchers, led by Noopur Raval (co-PI for the project, held a roundtable discussion to reflect on methods, challenges, inter-subjectivities and possible future directions for research on the gig economy and its workers. (link)

The consultants - Noopur Raval, Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia and Simiran Lalvani - involved in this project on mapping digital labour in India’s platform economies (in Mumbai and New Delhi) gathered in Bengaluru on July 19, 2019 to share their preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. Watch the livestream from this discussion here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-compilation-of-research-on-the-gig-economy

‘Future of work’ or 21st–century oppressed labour?: Findings from an AIGWU survey with 50 Urban Company housekeeping workers in Bengaluru

Nihira Ram — 2024-05-16T15:29:58Z

n this essay, Nihira Ram shares findings from a survey done by the All India Gig Workers Union with more than 50 migrant workers living in a slum in Bengaluru. The workers primarily provided cleaning and domestic services on the platform, Urban Company (previously UrbanClap).

Nihira highlights the impact that diluted rights and rising exploitation have had on the workers. The workers’ experiences show how they faced mounting costs merely to access work on the platform. Once they joined, the workers faced oppressive working conditions and stringent control by the platform, where rules and processes are designed in favour of the platform, at the expense of its workers. Not only were the workers from highly marginalised backgrounds and more vulnerable to this exploitation, a paucity of alternative jobs and their tenuous position as migrants meant that they were trapped by the platform’s unfair practices for years.

When workers join Urban Company as housekeeping services ‘partners’, they first pay INR 16,000 as ‘joining fees’. After undergoing an uncompensated training programme, which costs them INR 1,000, workers are rebranded as ‘professionals’ who are now eligible to provide the services for which they have been trained.

However, the provision of services comes at a huge cost to the workers. They have to pay INR 6,000 per month in order to receive a number of guaranteed jobs as part of the Minimum Guarantee plan (MG Plan) – or, as the workers refer to them – leads. Urban Company terms this a ‘subscription’.

In essence, Urban Company does not qualify people from whom they generate profit as workers. They consider them ‘professionals’ who are ‘subscribing’ to the platform in order to ‘market’ their ‘services’ to earn an income. Workers are cunningly portrayed as another set of ‘customers’ who buy guaranteed jobs from the platform on a monthly basis, essentially having to ‘pay to work’.

Apart from this monthly subscription, workers are made to pay GST on each job. They are required to purchase company-branded uniforms and bags costing around INR 2,000. Further, they must also buy all cleaning supplies relevant to their work from Urban Company at higher costs than those sold elsewhere (INR 10,000 per month or above). This is despite the fact that workers find these supplies to be of poor quality and thus hazardous to their safety.

The framing of Urban Company ‘partners’ as non-workers is inaccurate for a number of reasons. A majority of the housekeeping workers with whom we spoke were not previously employed in the services sector. Urban Company targeted their slum as part of its recruitment drives in 2018. Knowing that their cleaning and housekeeping services vertical faced a deficit of labour supply despite a perceived spike in demand in Bengaluru, Urban Company aggressively onboarded men from this slum to undergo their training programme and join the company as cleaning and housekeeping ‘professionals’. How, then, is Urban Company merely a platform from which pre-existing workers gain business, and not an employer hiring labour with particular skills for its supply chain?

Click to download the full essay

Contributors

Author: Nihira Ram
Images: All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU)
Design: Annushka Jaliwala
Copy edit: The Clean Copy

About the All India Gig Workers’ Union

The All India Gig Workers’ Union (AIGWU) is a registered trade union for all food delivery, logistics, and service workers that work on any app-based platforms in India.

Contact: contactaigwu@gmail.com

Connect: Twitter; Facebook

The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of their individual authors. Unless the opposite is explicitly stated, or unless the opposite may be reasonably inferred, CIS does not subscribe to these views and opinions which belong to their individual authors. CIS does not accept any responsibility, legal or otherwise, for the views and opinions of these individual authors. For an official statement from CIS on a particular issue, please contact us directly.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/future-of-work-21st-century-oppressed-labour-findings-from-aigwu-survey-with-50-urban-company-housekeeping-workers-in-bengaluru

‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India

sneha — 2015-03-30T12:48:16Z

A core concern of Digital Humanities research has been that of method. The existing discourse around the field of DH assumes a move away from traditional humanities and social sciences research methods to more open, collaborative and iterative forms of scholarship spanning some conventional and other not so conventional practices and spaces. In this guest blog post, Sujatha Subramanian reflects upon her experience of undertaking a research study on online feminist activism in India and its various challenges.

When the chance to do a research project on Digital Humanities presented itself, I deliberated over the possible topics I could explore. As a student of Media and Cultural Studies, I have on previous occasions studied digital technology and online spaces. Those studies, however, were simply “social sciences” research. I had little understanding of what Digital Humanities as a discipline entailed. While I admit that I am still unable to come up with a concrete definition of the same, the process of conducting the research and the DH workshop organised at CIS led to some clarity about the field and methods of Digital Humanities.

Before beginning the research I asked myself what could I, a feminist media scholar, learn from Digital Humanities and how could I contribute to the same. I wondered if the lack of familiarity with technological skills such as design, statistics and coding- knowledge that I saw as prerequisite to Digital Humanities- meant that I couldn’t really engage with the field of Digital Humanities. While grappling with this question, I chanced upon the #TransformDH project. At the heart of the project is the question- “How can digital humanities benefit from more diverse critical paradigms, including race/ethnic studies and gender/sexuality studies?” [1]

In a blogpost titled “Queer Studies and the Digital Humanities”,[2] the author states,

"...a lot of queer/critical ethnic studies/similar scholars also lack access to the resources that make it easier to combine digital and humanities work. That might not only mean physical access and training in technology, but also the time to add yet another interdisciplinary element to a project...my experience suggests that many, many politicized queers and people of color engaged in scholarly work in and out of the academy do use digital tools and think critically about them and even create them; they just don’t necessarily do so under the sign of the digital humanities."

As someone who used the space of Facebook to initiate conversations around feminist issues and was actively engaged in fighting the sexism entrenched in social media spaces, was I then already “doing” digital humanities? I reflected that since feminist activism finds such little space in mainstream media, a worthwhile Digital Humanities project could be to document and archive the contemporary feminist movement and the ways in which it is transforming our understanding of the digital space. As part of the project, I explored how feminist activists have revolutionised digital spaces for the creation of alternative public spheres, constituted of not just women but also other marginalised communities. The project gave me the opportunity to study the inclusions and exclusions facilitated by the digital space, with questions of gender, sexuality, class, caste and disability as central to the enquiry. The project also raised questions regarding popular assumptions of digital space as a disembodied, liberatory space free of power relations by exploring gendered and sexualised violence that these feminist activists face.

While the political vision of my project was clear, my methodological skills needed a little honing. The DH workshop organised at CIS was of great help in this regard. The feedback received at the workshop was instrumental in recognising the importance of “big data”. As a feminist researcher, life histories, personal narratives and stories remain important sources of knowledge for me. However, in studying social movements and their impact, the limitations of such methodological tools are revealed. Understanding how a feminist activist with 11,000 followers on Twitter offers important insight into public discourse is contingent on the ability to analyse such data. The workshop also helped me in realising that in my definition of activism, I had precluded many feminist engagements with digital technology, including the efforts of feminist Wikipedians, feminist gamers and feminist encounters with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). While these remain the shortcomings of my project, the workshop helped in foregrounding the scope for collaboration that lies at the heart of all our projects. A discussion of my project alongside Ditilekha’s project on LGBT Youth and Digital Citizenship brought to fore the intersections as well as the different activist strategies employed by the two movements in their use of social media. Sohnee’s project on the gender gap on Wikipedia underlines that an important aspect of working towards a feminist epistemology, and changing the relations of power that characterise technology, are issues of access and participation. Rimi’s use of a text mining tool to analyse the different patterns of language on confessions pages highlighted the value of such technological tools in socio-cultural analysis. The workshop which brought together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, helped in highlighting shared concerns of methodology, content and political visions and prompted discussions on innovative approaches to conducting research. This attempt at collaborative knowledge production- whether it is the constant communication between the research scholars through email, the workshop with the scholars and the mentors or even the dissemination of our reports on an open access site- has been the essence of my engagement with Digital Humanities. The ethos of collaboration as central to Digital Humanities is reflected in Joan Shaffer’s definition of Digital Humanities as “...a community interested in collaborative projects and sharing knowledge across disciplines." [3] This ethos of learning from fellow researchers and working together to create accessible knowledge is something that I shall carry forward to my future research endeavours.

[1]. http://transformdh.org/2012/01/

[2]. http://www.queergeektheory.org/2011/10/conference-thoughts-queer-studies-and-the-digital-humanities/

[3]. http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/members/echoln/profile/

Sujatha Subramanian is an M.Phil. Scholar at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. This research study was part of a series of six projects commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS, Bangalore as part of a collaborative exercise on mapping the Digital Humanities in India. See here for more on this initiative.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities

101 Ways of Starting an ISP:* No. 53 - Conversation, Content and Weird Fiction

Surfatial — 2016-08-03T12:47:31Z

This essay by Surfatial is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. It argues that the internet has created a space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive. It actively explores how anonymous and pseudonymous content production may offer a method for exploring and expressing the internet in India, with a certain degree of freedom, and how spam-like methods may prove effective in puncturing filter bubbles.

* ISP stands for Internal Surface Provider.

Mainstream institutions for learning, as we see them, are not concerned with the substance and gravity of the present moment [B1]. The professing of experience to aid learning or skill development is largely a perverted claim. There is no actual intention of enabling, nor is there even a desire to personally experience any immersion or penetration [B2]. Added to this is the spectre of commodification of experience and learning today, where education has turned into a consumer product. The ivory tower of aloofness is too comfortable to deviate from. The institutionalisation of aloof posturing and the masks of professorships are too smugly fitting the exhausted bodies of those running the ship.

Academics are like fruit on an inaccessible tree. It is there, but we cannot eat it. The moon is spoken of by poets and lovers because it is so far away and experientially inaccessible. Love is a stream and will never be in a state of harmony forever. It will remain tumultuous and rocky like the sea into which an asteroid has just fallen.

We observe that disinterest in engaging in the immediacy of our continuing experience invariably leads us to holding on to selective bits while the rest passes. These selections then get shaped into some semblance of narratives. But how do we talk about the experience of the moment or even acknowledge the presence of what has not been selected? How does an individual’s perception and response direct to a better understanding of experiences that can harbour empathy?

When telephones get cross-connected, we hear voices that do not belong to the conversation. What if these voices were to become a part of the conversation? We can talk to strangers. We don’t really need to talk about anything in particular - we can just get used to each other’s voice.

Surfatial is concerned with knowledge production and has been exploring the format of conversations both online and offline as a space to perform personally experienced sequences of knowledge, and talk about these to others. Somewhere in this process learning emerges. We are currently seeding a platform for the sharing and dissemination of alternate pedagogies and self-woven visions of the world. This desire responds to academia's hangover with the past and its inability to instil processes and incubate practices that can help students in a continual production of content.

Narrative is processed from raw experience and so it is more easy to deal with than the complex mass of experience.

Harnessing Anonymity

The internet offers you a morphing cloak - you can be selective about your identity, you can be online with selective vision and selective speech [B3]. What do you choose to see online? What do you choose to reveal? And how much? [B4] If you wear the cloak that covers you altogether, are you truly anonymous, or could it be that your true self leaks out as you put your hands against your eyes in an attempt to hide yourself?

Think about a day when you want to say something and you feel that the Internet feels like too distant a medium. The Internet is so close to us, so intertwined in our lives that the perception of distance feels like a make-believe construct.

Anonymity has potential to offer a voice to the invisible identity, the silenced perspective, the overlooked persona, the taboo desire. Could it also be harnessed for accessing and expressing that which is experienced in the present? Could anonymity be that filter which stands with the least amount of obstruction to experiencing the present as it unfolds, does it offer that means to experience more freely?

Why are you online? What are you looking for online? What do you see? How does a visually impaired person experience the internet? What does that feel like? And then, what do you say online?

From awkwardness and discomfort as the minimum level of experience, we are moving to anger, disinterest and boredom [B5]. This social reality is being exacerbated by the manifestation of our realities on the internet. Anger is a mode of communication that rejects existing content in the pipeline and allows a relentless push mode of transmission. Disinterest is a lack of empathy that we are privileged to employ, while, at the same time, displacing and dismantling existing systems of falsehood and decay that are populating the system. Boredom is disengagement that comes from an immunity to words that don't mean anything - floating in the air, timed to music or masquerading as knowledge.

If we keep an open mic near a flock of passionate birds, will the flapping and other sounds become a cacophony to form an interesting soundscape? Do birds become conscious of an open mic?

Surfatial works for the frustrated seeker, seeking nourishing clarifying content on the internet. The internet has become a shopping mall, but this doesn't mean that we can't walk around and talk to people.

What to do? How to act? What to produce? What should the lost and wandering tribes of the world do to express with diversity? Is there some secret pathway to knowing what to do that is only accessible to deviants?

Production means to render an output, from the flux that we encounter in our experience. We can also choose not to produce but then we end up with a mass of material and no narrative.

Does deviation from the norm guarantee some kind of clarity? Why can't ordinary people know? Why do they have to be inspired and awakened and creative to know? Is there nothing that flows in the narrow channels of propriety?

Deviation does guarantee a unique pool of content being made for us to access. But the question is how this access is setup for a kind of secondary process - one that is possible only after the ordinary has been dealt with and has led to something. Deviant content leads us further away from the sugar-coated annals of the plain world that is meant for mass-consumption.

We live in echo chambers online and off. An infrastructure needs to be in place for the flow of a lubricant [B6] within echo chambers so that the conversation in the closed loop becomes smooth enough, and when a disassociation from the self or a disparate viewpoint happens, it is less painful. The echo-chamber becomes the social space when multiple levels of echoes are able to inter-mingle in ambiguous contexts and containers.

If we were not productive beings we would not be able to deal with ourselves. We would be strangers to our own legacies.

Spaces for Speculative Content Production

Surfatial offers an online stage for self-enactment, where there can be friction without producing sparks. As a producer of assembly line infrastructure around access to knowledge, we find denial very useful. Denial of identity, denial of social constructions, denial of expected modes of speaking in conversations. We find that we create even the room for conversation around the need for alternatives after allegiances have stopped being in existence.

The internet is not a pool, it is a cesspool. Everyone who is trying to navigate the space feels stuck and lost. So we avoid navigation and jump from node to node in order to escape from the boiling cesspool that gets too hot if we remain in the same place for a long time.

When the shadows of dependencies on systemic corruptions have disappeared the real possibility of ‘being’ arises. We care about this possibility. We are making access to knowledge universal, since access based on the question of privilege and capacity sets a very low bar for conversations in terms of what is allowed to be spoken, which directions of verbal exploration are politically acceptable, and who gets to abuse whom with which epithets. We are concerned with formats that are open to every participant’s perspective equally and their individual approach to contributing to the collective voice.

The play never ends. Laugh at yourself
Seek a new denial... the shift of power is a natural process.

Anonymous and pseudonymous forms of content production offer a method for exploring and expressing with a certain degree of freedom. How free we feel depends partly on how free we are allowed to feel [B7], and depends in equal parts on the level of our own disinhibition. Through degrees in the opening up, passionate potentialities are demonstrated.

Who are you? And who are we? We do not know, we are nobody at all sometimes and then we wake from our slumber and feel like doing something again.

Anonymity is a double edged sword. Can virtual freedom of expression lead to any insight that can transfer into real life interaction? How difficult is this jump from virtual to real life? Virtuality has evolved beyond the world of simulation, where it is now possible to experience multiple mechanisms of meaningful relationships with people. We believe there is a level of balance between virtual and physical engagements that can be struck in order for bringing one closer to a semblance of self-realisation.

Why do players choose anonymity, if they do? Fake profiles sometimes are an expression of a desire to play. Those who play can succumb to joy. Joy becomes a tempting emotional state. The more joyful you are, the more comfortable you feel in any garb. This could be a liberating experience, when the blurring of identities occur.

“Putting aside the baggage of ego and identity has a freeing effect on which part of our persona we express.”
— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.

Harnessing pseudonimity

Being playful becomes possible if role-play and make-believe are accepted as valid forms of narrative ploy with a functional purpose in the everyday. The role assumed during play sometimes becomes more enjoyable than the dry person of absolute dimensions. As the rules of play are adopted, disassociation and immersion happen. The player has a choice to deny their outside-play persona and remain fully entrenched in the dynamics of play. This denial helps in the player’s engagement with our system of accessing knowledge. If the gravity and consciousness of your plain existence is lost, then communicating with you becomes easier. In short, your shadow becomes what you could never become. The being and presence of your playtime persona are much stronger than what you can ordinarily muster. In our space, you get to deny the world outside play and conversely render your world as play.

“being fictional is you without your physical being. If we take away the physical beings from this world, we are left with imagination, ideas and their interpretations.”
— Raavi Georgian, a Facebook user.

The garb of comedy allows you to listen with a certain distance. The Indian internet landscape is no stranger to this choice of presentation. Several personas dot the scene, there is Norinder Mudi, there is Gabbar Singh or the Cows of Benaras. In an era of cathartic sharing, where all manner of mental chatter finds channels of expression, comedy can be a balm for controlled experiments in taking potshots at sociopolitical power structures. Some platforms incentivise identity in order to legitimise the online experience, for instance, Facebook seems to place a premium on profile pictures by giving them a default public setting, and the user-base is advised by sundry guidelines about the “perfect profile pic” to adopt clear frontal images for maximum effect. Others have a policy of anonymity, like Reddit.

Forget who you are. Just be someone else.
And then you can be the one,
Holding the mic in your hand.

The existing mechanism of algorithms make it seem like there is free and open access to information, even customised for the user’s convenience. But this customisation in fact filters information based on working out the user’s bubble. One way to beat the bubble is to role-play. This would require receivers to adopt pseudonymous/ alternate roles to have access to content outside of their own filters. A loosening of the self can expand the algorithm.

Loosening of the self is a safe idea. The ideal is to have no cognisance of one’s identity. The network converts you into an IP - an anonymous VPN blurs your IP, nobody knows who you are. Behaviours found in the online community show that there are several aspects of blurring in identity and the presentation of information.

Harnessing disinhibition

Disinhibition is not necessarily rendered as a condition of the external ecosystem (physical and virtual ecosystems). It has more to do with the actor’s persona and how she has framed and declared her persona. What is the pitch of the actor’s voice? What does it say? What kind of response becomes necessary?

The opportunity for denial emerges from the confidence gained from play. If random social play does not cause huge rescissions of norms and contracts already in place, its extension to become a fundamental behavioural pattern changes nothing.

We will convince you that when we step on your toes and snap back at you in response to your idiotic and subservient social conduct, we are just playing. And if you accept it, then we can tell you the harshest and most unpleasant truth about you on your face and get away with it.

Surfatial designed a conversation game called flip & blip [A2] which has the objective of enhancing empathy and sociability, via role play and assuming personas. The purpose of role-play is to help people step put of themselves and play out situations through alternate lenses. In any situation, how does another feel? [B8] We are either intuitive, or we are clueless. This game opens up the space between. It uses question cards and persona cards as triggers to present scenarios to the players. The goal was to have a conversation while wearing a persona, and then to have the same conversation while being oneself. The players then reflected on the occurrence of any shifts in perspective during this process [B9].

A game is a format for play that has rules [B10]. Even while these rules are very important, sometimes it becomes possible to play with them. The extent to which we enjoy the game depends on our interpretation of these rules. Now, socially acceptable rules of conduct are considered to be good behaviour. And if our physical social lives are viewed as some kind of a game with rulesets and interpersonal protocols of engagement (a game with heavy consequences for not playing by the rules), perhaps our online lives offer that outlet for exercising freedom from this oppressive structure, and perhaps the freeing online experience can translate into incorporating playfulness into strict routine interactions?

“Human social structures built upon transactional attitudes don't have space for free expression, since free expression means disregarding façades and notions of "propriety" as well as hierarchy"
— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.

Access might supposedly require a filtration system. But we are opposed to the construction and use of filters. We are of the opinion that we need to be able to access the core content directly - no envelopes, no braces, and no reduced-sets. People fear dealing with the naked world because they fear engagement, immersion and getting overwhelmed, while at the same time craving first hand knowledge, craving a removal of gatekeepers who shield them from the naked truth using agenda-coloured filters.

Surfatial has been working with several formats for harnessing anonymous content production and for playful engagement, via our structured study groups that actively discourage the elaboration of direct personal identification. The emergence of individual identities occurs only through the exchange of perspectives during conversation [B11].

The study group derives itself from a group of individuals who are interested in remaining sharp as a group. The group’s concern will always be to aid others as well as itself by challenging every perspective that seems superfluous.

Our study groups

Our study groups [A1] are webinars hosted on Google Hangouts on Air, with a framework of philosophical questioning and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. These are structured conversations that are completely open to participation and listening, with one to three anchors. Each study group is centred around a topic, and three pre-determined questions relating to that topic are posed to the participants. The tone is detached, with not much encouragement for sharing of personal information. The conversation is fluid and anyone who has anything to say is able to start speaking. We do not follow the common conventional etiquette of introducing the guests or apologising for intrusion. Due to this it becomes rather freeing and divorced from any mode of social behaviour. The illusion we often chase is of the study group being just a set of “voices in the head”.

When an idea oversteps the terrain that it has been assigned to, it acquires the garb of being a trespasser. Ideas trespass when they uncover surprising connections. which they might otherwise not be related to in any direct way. Such connections cannot be predicted. They emerge out of the process of exploring something else. Trespass happens at perspective boundaries—one never meant to hear another’s perspective, but now that they are in a space together, one must; encroachment will invariably happen.

Study groups have anchors who stand with markers for conversation transition points. Anchors could be Surfatial members or guests. Guest anchors are invited with the intent of extending Surfatial’s sphere of engagement and to alter the threads that connect the conversations.

Anchors are not moderators. They are literally anchors for the discussion. They make sure that the discussion deals with the issues that it raises before moving onto other issues. Anchors seek out questions and figure if they have been answered. They are like accountants of a currency of ideas.

The archive of all these study group conversations [A8] is treated as a dynamic space for re-engagement in order to consistently pursue alternate methods of presenting it—through text, posters, books, soundtracks, videos and conversation games.

How messages are presented

When we start seeding a message, we feel the pull of invisible attractors. The vestiges of messages are either offered at their face value or they are so thin, light and loosely packed that they do not offer sufficient flesh to sink teeth into [B12]. The least we demand from the producers of noise and meaninglessness in our environment is that they give us sufficient depth of material to bite into and suck the juice out. Density is the key.

In compression lies our only hope. If you have to speak, speak less and mean more. If you have to produce material of any kind, make sure it is densely packed with fissile material which can all combust together to yield a message.

By packaging our formats in diverse forms they become appealing to people in different ways.

But there is a danger of package and content being divorced in the process of design. Design facilitates skimming of content by packaging its appearance as eye-candy; packaging runs the danger of dissuading immersion into content. We look to destabilise this tendency, and offer value in the packaging itself. We are interested in packages with embedded content, to save the viewer the trouble of unwrapping any external cover.

Access to free exchange is sometimes denied. Free exchange ensures that ideas get modified and challenged. They grow and so it is an essential process that is needed in order for them to be change and offer strength garnered from this free exchange.

Then what is the way? How do you get past institutional filters? If limits have been drawn, if the surfaces of knowledge are guarded, how do messages get out of the perimeter of control? Spam—unsolicited communication, yielding messages where none are requested or expected—is the answer. Spam and spam-like methods are the only tools that can get past the filters. There are no constraints which are fine enough for the fine specks of spam to be swatted out.

We are going to populate compressed messages of the whole world's knowledge onto surfaces of mass display and then circulate them like spam.

Posters [A9] are posts that linger [B13]. Posters are not just lozenges of information, they are pieces and fragments of a song that gets completed in the reader’s mind. The poster is already present on social media as a format. But not all designers use the poster in the same way. For some it is just a clever punch-line. We believe in the punch but not in the merit of clever punch-lines. We attempt a sharp contrast between the text that we write and the general experience offered by the environment for consumption of media. This sharp contrast is conveyed through our choice of the posters’ visual format as well as through the auditory means of a soundscape.

What is a song? Who is singing? A song speaks when words are weak, when humming gets through, when drumming has no beat.

Our tracks [A7] emerge out of our words and texts. We put together sounds and speech sometimes post-fact, sometimes in the moment with everyone there in the room. We believe that fragments of words and speech can be agents of perspective shifts if placed within altered contexts and rhythms. We think of our sounds as soundscapes more than music.

Conversation as Currency

To sell, one needs to be invisible. No business survives on recurrent sales to family and friends. Businesses survive and grow because they create markets within which strangers can transact with confidence. For strangers to transact with confidence, value needs to be stable and fixed into the form of the product. And for that, products need to develop an intensely tangible form. Value of the product starts and finishes with the form. The form cannot be soft or intangible. It needs to be concrete.

To fix the value for a thing, one needs to have a conversation. The price of a commodity can be arrived at through conversation. But we do not care about the price. Because once we sell, our conversation is over. We do not want to end it. Besides, we will all keep having more to say and would like others to have access to it too. These are things of value for all of us. This is what we want to exchange and so, conversation is our currency. We will only transact through conversations.

To buy, one must be desirous. There must be a desire for change, for a perturbation of the status quo. A desire that drives motivation for the mouth to open and the hand to move towards a device that dispenses currency. All this takes a lot of effort. The seller and the buyer both have desires and motivations, but the anxiety of the approach to the final push off of the cliff-face of the mountain of the transaction must be overcome. This is the difficult part. It involves a leap of faith. Can a push be made as effortlessly as possible? Sure. We only need to find a way. Efficiency is a way. We introduce efficiency into the system by reducing steps. If we take away the step of the hand moving, we have already reduced effort. Now only the mouth has to open.

We have made the determination of value into a game, which is in the form of a Book of Conversation Triggers [A3]. In this game, we will read each sentence in our book to you and we will ask you if you agree. After we have performed all the sentences to you, we will ask you if you feel like holding on to any sentence, or if any sentence led you to experience a new kind of thought. If you think so, we will offer those sentences to you. You may if you like, in turn play this game with whomever you choose to play it with, in order to have another conversation. You owe yourself that much at least. If conversation is a currency, it wants to grow and spread like a virus. So, why not go forth and multiply?

What will you, the player, win? You win a sentence you can post on your fridge door or your Facebook wall, you win an insight you can talk about further. You win the memory of a delightful conversation you had with us, which we guarantee you will have again with whomever you choose to play with. This game will give you victory again and again. Are you game?

A poster can also be a person who posts. A post-writer is often one who reaches the point of saturation, which pushes them to producing compressed text. This act places them in a new period in the timeline of history, of being post-writers.

Publishing sans credits

We work with the idea of credit-less production. post_writer [A5] is a twitter-based monthly journal. Each issue consists of six tweets. Four by humans, one by a bot and one by a sponsor. There are only issue-wide credits but no individual credits. Which tweet is by whom is an ambiguity.

As an actor, you can choose to disengage from every story you assume you are a part of, then you deal with the anxiety of performing for free in an under-documented and under-credited fashion. When this anxiety subsides, awakening might happen.

We look to expand the study group format to have anchors interested in exploring their own questions in a nondescript manner. We are also looking at shorter capsules of study groups which will be podcast, with a question dedicated for an individual’s consideration, to capture their particular perspective of experience sharing.

We would rather model the world as a space swarming with individuals who actively produce content, rather than as a space with an abundance of consumers and a scarcity of commercially viable producers enveloped in the gloss of the culture of page-hits and celebrity [B14] [B15]. Today we have a competitive marketplace of market-validated content that goes into profiling our consumption. Our profiles are then further recycled as fodder by the market, to be fed back to us [B16]. We are not valued as producers; we are valued as consumers of products, and vessels for marketing those very products.

The current state of the world has many different sources of validation but does not have a space for the self-validated. If we choose to be blind to the sociality of the content we see, then we have nothing at all. Every package of content is socialised, everything is floating in mediated space [B17]. The isolated, untouched (by mind or hand) content has no place in the world. We are surrounded by content which has no fidelity, coils through minds at will, and yields their message to anyone who enquires. There is no knowledge personally reserved for you in this pool of content. Reading is supposed to lead to synthesis and this synthesis is meant to culminate into a development of personal perspectives and opinions. However, in a pool of commonly read content there is more likelihood for the development of cliques and clouds of common belief and little space for individualised synthesis. Some get hit more directly by some threads of content and identify the hit as a personal facet of discovery.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
— Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

To hit upon a truly personal facet of content that doesn’t belong to a popular cesspool, a flow of production has to be initiated and self-validated. Entire knowledge-systems need be constructed without any building blocks but with content generated from the knowledge of the moment [B18]. Insights gleaned from here and there come together as a granular pool of content that is personal, special and hitherto unseen in our context. A unique association between the individual and message gets formed. And this association is incoherent and unfamiliar in ways, because it doesn't belong to the popularly socialised frameworks of knowledge. This weird fiction gets overlooked and thereby remains safe from being intruded upon or being misconstrued. The obscure and the hidden breed mysteries waiting to be tapped.

Time to break [B19] from packaged commodified sound byte capsules.

A) Index of Surfatial Projects

1. Study groups on Google Hangouts on Air

Study groups with Surfatial anchors
Study groups with guest anchors

2. Conversation based games: flip & blip

3. Book of Conversation Triggers: PDF

4. Online Residency on Surfatial’s Facebook page

5. Post-writer: https://twitter.com/post_writer.

Each issue is based on public contributions

6. Interactive performances and exhibitions

7. Tracks based on our archives of text and audio: Soundcloud

8. Digital archives of games, performance and study-groups: YouTube

9. Poster: Facebook

B) References [B20]

1. Pulp - “Glory Days” - This is Hardcore (1998)

2. Pink Floyd - “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” - The Wall (1979)

3. Weezer - “The Futurescope Trilogy” - Everything Will Be Alright In The End (2014)

4. Radiohead - “How to Disappear Completely” - Kid A (2000)

5. Nirvana - “Smells Like Teen Spirit” - Nevermind (1991)

6. Pink Floyd - “Empty Spaces” - The Wall (1979)

7. Metallica - “The Unforgiven” - Metallica (The Black Album) (1991)

8. Backstreet Boys - “Quit Playing Games with My Heart” - Backstreet Boys (1995)

9. Sting - “Shape of My Heart” - Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993)

10. Kenny Rogers - “Rules of the Game” - The Gambler (1978)

11. Boyzone - “If We Try” - BZ20 (2013)

12. Bangles - “Mixed Messages” - Doll Revolution (2003)

13. Cranberries - “Linger” - Everybody Else's Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)

14. Lady Gaga - “Paparazzi” - The Fame (2008)

15. Eminem - “The Real Slim Shady” - The Marshal Mathers LP (2000)

16. Kraftwerk - “Hall of Mirrors” - Trans-Europe Express (1977)

17. Marshall McLuhan - “The Medium is the Message” - The Medium is the Message (1967)

18. Chicks on Speed - “Utopia” - UTOPIA (2014)

19. Queen - I Want to Break Free - The Works (1984)

20. DJ Shadow - “Right Thing / GDMFSOB” - The Private Press (2002)

C) Game - 101 Ways of starting an ISP: No. 54

Instructions for playing:

Click here to access the game.
On every left-click, you will receive a new poster.
If you like what you see, right-click and save as an image. (This works on the Google Chrome and Firefox browsers).
You can then choose to share the image on your Facebook or Twitter pages and tag #Surfatial. We use conversation as currency, so we will contact you and converse with you to complete the transaction process.

Authors' Profile

Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. We use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. We are concerned with enabling disinhibition through the internet, for expressing what may not be feasible in physical reality. We organise internet-based audio conferences called study-groups where we deal with philosophical questions and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. We have previously presented our work at Soundphile 2016, Delhi; play_book (in collaboration with Thukral & Tagra), Gurgaon; CONA, Mumbai, and Mumbai Art Room. Our upcoming engagement is with ZK/U, Berlin.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/surfatial

Website - http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial

Twitter - https://twitter.com/surfatial

Surfatial is Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, Satya Gummuluri, and No.55, a bot.

Prayas Abhinav

Prayas is an artist and teacher. He works on his capacity to learn through performance. He has worked in the last few years on numerous pieces of speculative fiction, software, games, interactive installations, public interventions and curatorial projects. He is the initiator of the Museum of Vestigial Desire. He has developed his practice with the support of fellowships by Sarai, Openspace, the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA), TED and Lucid. He has been in residencies at Khoj (India), Coded Cultures (Austria) and dis-locate (Japan). He has shared his work at festivals including Transmediale, 48c, Futuresonic, ISEA and Wintercamp.

Satya Gummuluri

Satya is an artist originally from Bombay currently based in Germany. She works with music, writing and photography as well as doing freelance translation, editorial and research work. She has lived in Chicago for several years, collaborating, recording, performing and traveling with musicians and dancers in Chicago, NYC and Lisbon, and has appeared with them at the Chicago Jazz and World Music Festivals, and Austin’s SXSW. As a writer and translator, her work has appeared in online and print journals such as Almost Island and SAADA’s Tides magazine. She also works with activist groups engaged with feminism and urban issues in India and the US.

Malavika Rajnarayan

Malavika is an artist based in India. Her paintings use the human figure to explore larger issues of collective consciousness. Her works have also been exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Ahmedabad in India and at the 2007 Sosabeol Art Expo in South Korea. She has presented lectures at EWHA University in Seoul, South Korea, College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, SITE art space, Baroda and conducted short workshops at NID, Ahmedabad and at non-profit organisations for women and children. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Collective Studio Baroda, The Contemporary Artists Centre, Troy, New York and at CAMAC Centre for Art in Marnay sur-Seine, France, supported by the K. K. Hebbar Art foundation and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_101-ways-of-starting-an-isp-no-53-conversation-content-weird-fiction

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

7 Ways to Con/fuse the Internet with Analogy (Intergalactic Mix) - Talk by Surfatial

sneha-pp — 2018-07-02T18:33:42Z

Surfatial, a trans-local collective that works with text and sound will talk about their essay which was recently published. The talk will also address concerns on how the internet can be used in alternate contexts including presenting work in alternative formats and using the internet for synchronous collaborative cultural production.

The talk will be held at the Centre for Internet & Society's office in Bangalore on September 26 at 6.00 p.m.

Abstract

Surfatial will present their work as a trans-local collective that works with text and sound. They will talk about their essay which was recently published on the RAW blog, as well as concerns of how the internet can be used in alternate contexts. As a continuation from their essay 101 ways of Starting an ISP: No. 53- Conversation Content and Weird Fiction they are interested in exploring alternate formats of presenting the work they produce and in using the internet for synchronous collaborative cultural production.

They structure this talk as a storytelling session and will share stories of how the internet is used on other planets. Stories of the internet on seven planets will be shared. Each story will describe its specific conditions of operation. These stories are seven ways of doing so. How will an external search engine index these stories? Will they be fact or fiction? The external archive of the search engine will be ways to con/fuse the internet with our narratives.

Speakers

Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. They use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. They are concerned with enabling dis-inhibition through the internet, for expressing what may not be feasible in physical reality. They organise internet-based audio conferences called study-groups where they deal with philosophical questions and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. They have previously presented their work at Soundphile 2016, Delhi; play_book (in collaboration with Thukral & Tagra), Gurgaon; CONA, Mumbai, and Mumbai Art Room. Their upcoming engagement is with ZK/U, Berlin.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/surfatial
Website - http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial
Twitter - https://twitter.com/surfatial

Surfatial is Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav and Satya Gummuluri.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/7-ways-to-con-fuse-the-internet-with-analogy-intergalactic-mix-talk-by-surfatial-september-26-6-pm

'Originality,' 'Authenticity,' and 'Experimentation': Understanding Tagore’s Music on YouTube

Ipsita Sengupta — 2016-07-07T02:18:12Z

This post by Ipsita Sengupta is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. In this essay, she explores the responses to various renditions of songs composed by Rabindranath Tagore available on YouTube and the questions they raise regarding online listening cultures and ideas of authorship of music.

Introduction

On typing “Rabindra Sangeet” on YouTube, one finds videos of the concerned Bengali songs in diverse visual and aural compositions. Just like for every other type of video that is put up on the site, as interesting as the videos may be, is the feedback they receive.

At the centre of this essay are such videos found on the social media platform YouTube, ones that play Rabindra Sangeet. Literally, “Songs of Rabindra(nath)”, this is a term used to identify poetic and musical pieces penned and composed in the late 19th- early 20th centuries by the Bengali writer and artist Rabindranath Tagore. The body of work has today become a genre among Indian music.

User-generated expression of YouTube makes it a medium with simultaneous individual and group dynamics. Apart from feedback as quantitative data through “Views”, “Likes” and “Dislikes”, the opinions of many users can be found in the “Comments” section.

Visuals of YouTube song videos of Rabindra Sangeet are diverse. So are renditions, with solitary or duet or band performances, and with varying rhythm and instrumental accompaniment. The set of comments below each video sometimes take the form of a conversation. Between applause and criticism, the latter is of special interest here.

Content of specific kinds seem to face disapproval: visual montages and stills from contemporary cinema, like images of urban youth, romance, longing. Some have shots of band performers and some, album cover images. Some of these renditions can be categorized as remixes because of their fast pace, bouncy vocals and electronic melody. The comments in question reflect and reveal hurt sentiments of people trying to preserve some kind of sanctity and authenticity of Rabindra Sangeet.

They state in different ways that the ethics of presenting the genre have been violated, via their notation and design; either by either makers of the film in the song’s incorporation, or by the way young pop stars have been placed in particular montages.

Here are some comments below to illustrate what audiences find wrong. The video is embedded below, followed by the comments posted on the video page.

What a rubbish song! Just remember please that Rabindra sangeet is not for Band musicians ! Please do not distort Rabindra sangeet. Only idiots will try to do so. Shame on you lot !
Unfortunately these band party can never be anything like that great man....hence they should stop making fun of his creation....
This song is from Shyama and I think that the innocent beauty of a young boy falling in love with a court dancer. The arrangement does not suit the lyrics.

Who has sung this? Started well, but after a while it changed the melody on its own. Only Bengalis are so indecent to change the work of the composer while performing. But otherwise, the voice is promising.

Robindra shongoter ijjot nosto kore dise... super dislike... (“They have destroyed the dignity of Rabindra Sangeet... super dislike...”)
Henshit! rock does not suit to melody and classics. Don't fusion "Sangeet"/ folk/patriotic songs.

Rabindra sangeet is usually better off with minimum instrumental accompaniment. That is why the Kishore Kumar version is more appealing. And the maestro Hemanta Mukherji used only a harmonium and tabla for most of his superb renditions.
Simply bogus. In Bengali... Shreya r nyaka voice just intolerable (“Shreya's coquettish voice just intolerable”).

some confused experiments with a song rendered by many exponents. This singer in his misguided modernism mostly misses the target.
bhalo lagche na shunte...Rabindra Nath er gaan er opor please bekar improvisation ta korben na...onar opor churi kachi ta nai ba chalalen... (“I am not enjoying listening to this... please do not do useless improvisations on Rabindranath's songs... do not use knives and scissors on him...)
… Tomra please originality maintain kore experiment koro … (...Could you please maintain originality while experimenting...)

...Go listen to the original tagore score and then come here with some innovative posts, k?
Absolutely bogus. Very badly sung. Who the hell is the singer? It has Jhankar beats too!!! Who the hell is the music director? Shame that people of such low taste and caliber are directing Bengali movies nowadays. Maobadi der diye petano uchit eder (“They should be beaten up by the Maoists)!!!!!

THere should be a self imposing limit of Screwing rabindra sangeet.
F...king Indian Hindi speaking bas....ds

This is not to say that these voices reign supreme. The listeners who enjoy the works leave great appreciation and also debate with the naysayers. But here I am taking into account the criticism that the videos receive. They have turned out to be more descriptive than the appreciation, and because of this they open up a lot of questions. We observe them in the light of both the medium as well as some understanding of the artistic ideals Tagore aspired to in his lifetime. The complete list of URLs of videos with their comments is given in the bibliography.

The Poetic/Musical Works of Tagore and Technologies of Access

Tagore was born in 1858 in a wealthy landowning household in Bengal. In his growing up years, the household Jorasanko was a space where Western and Indian lifestyles and artistic developments coexisted. Besides his own training in musical performance, and education and cultural exposure abroad, he also grew up amidst the rich musical, literary and theatrical talent of his family members.

Tagore was impressed and inspired by all kinds of artists and musical styles, and traces of these are found in his compositions and lyrics- whether folk, the ritualistic Kirtan, the mystic Bauls of rural Bengal, or even songs native to the West. For example the Scottish song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ influenced ‘purano shei diner kotha’ and ‘Ye banks and braes’ inspired ‘phule phule dhole dhole’ (Som, 2009).

From a young age itself, the poet was uncomfortable with strict boundaries and rules, one of them being the tight-rope walk over Raaga-based notations and rhythm structures of Indian classical music. He did believe in the power of Raagas to evoke the emotion they were said to be designed for, and while placing his poetry in musical compositions, he based his tunes on Raagas depending on the mood of his verse. However, he would combine melodic characteristics of established Raagas very often- a common practice with artists resulting in “mishra”, or mixed Raagas. He even combined rhythms or Taalas, and designed new ones for his songs. He found the classical genre embellishments of Taan and Aalaap unnecessary and left them out. “He declared his songs to be his unabashed expression of modernity because in them he could escape adhering to any expected literary standard” (Som, 2009).

Tagore lived in an era when Indian classical music was being written down with notations which were intelligible to Western audiences. Though he put on paper notations for his own songs, it so happened sometimes that when he was asked to sing in a public gathering, he could not remember the exact composition he’d first created. He would improvise immediately and complete the performance successfully. There were also times when his students or family members would sing their own interpretation of his tunes. Though his contemplation on it was based on a personal judgment of how well they adapted what he'd taught and how talented they were, he realised that the other singer was “not a gramophone” and he’d have to “grant that artistic independence” (Som, 2009).

“The art with which he matched melody with each nuanced lyric or combined ragas and improvised novel musical expressions, made each song a gem to be discovered anew everytime it is sung” (ibid, 2009). We may admit this but through this thought we may also understand that every live vocal rendition is intangible, however much we stick to notations.

In the electronic age, however much we record a rendition on devices, it is stored as data taking up space. Data is a common form that text, visuals, and audio all take. Though some recordings of Tagore's voice can be found online, they are digital versions that have been converted from the analog. Besides the technical transition, today's listener is also accessing it through a device and not listening to him performing. Two dynamics could happen here: either his performances are immortalised by the technology which has collected the sound of his voice in the exact way he has performed them and audiences will form an idea of “authentic” or “original”. And the other is that the audience will understand that in his time, when his voice was recorded, effects like electronic disco beats had not been invented.

That way, the performances of Tagore's verses that we are witnessing on YouTube today are the tangible notations combining with fresh new thought processes and constantly changing music performance styles, and manifesting on a contemporary media space. It is beyond just a copy, as we will see later, and to put it in Tagore's own words, it is “not a gramophone”.

Perhaps the accompanying instruments that were recommended for the verses have been replaced in a particular video with other and/or newer sources of musical sound- like digital sound. And the visuals in the video were probably not what the author was familiar with in his lifetime- body language of human actors, their clothes, the cityscape, and the like. In the film clips and non-cinematic material of Rabindra Sangeet videos, contemporary visuals include digital copies of photographs of Tagore and his contemporaries that help us make sense of his era.

“Adapting Chion’s theorisation of Dolby sound, the aesthetics of the remix may be thought of not as a consequence of technical changes but rather as the way in which technology combines with different musics to create the remix” (Duggal, 2010). It's not that new technology like electronic beats happens to an old composition when time passes and corrupts it like fungus or dust, it is that one one applies new aesthetics to an older text to innovate.

Describing the prime place of music in the hierarchy of sound in the cultural history of the West, Kahn discussed the phobia of sound that was not “significant” (Kahn, 2003). For a long time, sounds that reproduced the world for us- such as ambient sounds or noise- and which came via machines instead of established musical instruments were not considered valid within music. His stand in this context was that “it would make more sense to experience artistic works in their own right, not how they might conform to gross categorical distinctions”.

Given the artistic spontaneity which Tagore believed in, and the changing technology, what do we mean when we say that Rabindra Sangeet is being “distorted”, or its dignity (“ijjot”) or “innocence” threatened? What is the misunderstood modern? What is this “original” missing from “experimentation”? Especially when the composer himself is not witness to the forms his songs are taking today, what is this imagination of the ideal performance that leads to the judgment that another type of performance is not acceptable?

Perhaps at this point we can also shine a tiny light on Tagore's beliefs in other spheres. “Nationalism” is a compilation of a series of lectures given around the world, which Tagore gave in the 1916-‘17. In the introduction to this compilation, Guha illustrates Tagore’s realisation that mindless boycotting of everything that the West introduced in India in the name of Swadeshi (which he used to support) was to throw out the baby with the bath water. Quoting a letter Tagore wrote to a friend in 1908, he writes, “ ‘I will not buy glass for the price of diamonds and I will never allow patriotism to triumph over humanity as long as I live” ’ (Guha, 2009).

Soon after delivering these lectures in US and Japan, the Visva Bharati University was founded in December 1918. Tagore envisioned “a synthesis of the East and the West through a healthy intellectual and cultural interaction” (Som, 2009). Ironically, Visva Bharati, for over six decades after his death, held a copyright on Tagore’s work and assumed exclusive right of approval over song recordings of how notations were to be followed.

Surely it is not only due to a lack of understanding of Tagore's ideals that some renditions are marked as wrong? Many who don't appreciate the new versions may actually be well aware of his life story or beliefs. At various instances, the beats, the voice, the performers are targeted. Can we put a finger on the problem? Does it have something to do with the means of interaction of the medium? What is this search for the authentic or the correct? Is there a xenophobia of generational shifts in lifestyle - the opposition to a lifestyle because that is the “other” of a fantasy of tradition, it is not “high culture”? Because internet access transcends boundaries of class, education, and generation?

Mechanical Reproduction and Digital Media

In the early 20th century, when Tagore was writing his songs, in another part of the world political thinker Benjamin wrote in his timeless essay that when a work of art is mechanically reproduced, when there are only copies and the “original” in a particular place and space in history loses significance, its distribution boosts its “exhibition value” (Benjamin, 1936). “The work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental.” The “social significance” (ibid.) of an art work increases with multiple reproductions of it reaching the masses because the ritual value of it goes down, and it becomes open to as much criticism as enjoyment or reverence.

On social media spaces this democracy is visible on the same page- such as the “Comments” discussion. The “aura” (ibid.) of the “original” Tagore cannot exist in the flux of digital reproductions and uploads of individual creations- how valid then is the fight over it? Or is it in fact a fear of losing in this flux a memory of something revered? Does that imagined revered have something to do with defining and maintaining a community identity in this passageway of a multitude of identities that is the internet?

One of the integral features of a social media space is the option of “sharing” the content, i.e., individuals transmit it further to other users. While YouTube’s Likes and Comments give the content a boost and analytics from YouTube automatically circulate this more “popular” content, individual users have a major role in the circulation of online content.

Besides directly sharing, they can take either the audio or visual aspects of a video piece, restructure or redesign the piece, creating as a result an all new video and circulating that. Through “appropriation and reproduction”, “the web in general, and the web video in particular intensify the culture of the copy, for it provides its users free access to an immense database of ready-to-use information” (Vanderbeeken, 2011).

Someone may download from elsewhere an audio composition used earlier in a video of “concentration music”, attach it to different visuals, and upload it back on YouTube under “relaxation music”. After all, as studies have found, the response to one’s online content through mechanisms such as “likes” give the author a sense of gratification and encourages him/her to keep checking notifications every few minutes- on various social media platforms.

In such a situation, “the original creator suddenly occupies the position of yet another spectator. Within this process, the role of transmitters is so important that they assume a vague position of authority over the works” (Menotti, 2011). Through its one on one connection with the spectator, each individual video exists as an independent entity subject to active, on the spot feedback as well as manipulation by every individual who watches it. And of course, circulation is in the hands of each viewer resulting in content originating as altogether new information.

At this juncture I would like to make an intervention using a formulation by Frith, about the fluid, transitional nature of identity. “It is in deciding- playing and hearing what sounds right- that we both express ourselves, our own sense of rightness, and suborn ourselves, lose ourselves, in an act of participation” (Frith, 1996).

Let us take for example, another type of video found on YouTube. Instrumental pieces of music with descriptions such as “music for concentration”, “study music”, and even “brain music”. If we break down the description along these lines, we have firstly, tunes of any kind and varying pace on string and wind instruments. Then colourful visuals of mostly natural landscapes, the human body, or graphical representations of the “mind”. The written word accompanies the frame, and each aspect combines to add meaning to the other two.

Just because the label says that the music will enhance concentration, does it always have that effect? Our everyday experiences with the audio-visual would have surely shown us that the design of a composition- both musical and cinematic- does not necessarily make everyone feel the same way. Moreover, the credibility of video descriptions is always subject to doubt, as discussed above.

We see thus that in case of online media, it holds true all the more that one acquires or asserts an identity in playing/listening to a performance of some sort of music and adding opinions below, as much as the performance or presentation itself. We can actually trace this to a perspective that a remixed video is a form of feedback too- to an earlier understanding of Rabindra-Sangeet by the maker who thought that the genre could be expressed this way as well. “The intrinsic relationship of ‘original’ to ‘imitation’ is weakened” (Vanderbeeken, 2011), and this is where digital media picks up from where analog technology left off.

In such an interaction, between human beings exchanging data with equal authorship over it, could YouTube be playing a role in the “production of the rhetoric of the classical and canonical” (Duggal, 2010) around a historical figure from eastern India, where some audio-visual images are acceptable to his definition and others not?

An older and a newer understanding of the same cultural object co-exist on one space such as the standardised video frames of YouTube. Alongside Tagore's voice are those of Kishore Kumar, Hemant Kumar, Jayati Chakraborty, Shreya Ghoshal, and many others. A sense of the “original” exists beyond Tagore's voice because everybody has not sung it fast- if its rules were to go slow. And if somebody wants to give a tribute to Rabindra Sangeet by pepping it up, he/she obviously must not have meant to “ruin” it.

Is it the anonymity of the Comments space which makes the discussions the way they are? Because one cannot see the person who has uploaded it and is confident that what they were taught was the only truth- the uploader/ content creator probably comes across as an imposter.

But maybe this search for the “correct” rendition is a search for political correctness in a world densely connected through information technology, where one's identity through a databank of online searches does not belong just to oneself but to corporations and advertisers too. Could there also be people who believe that the very act of having Rabindra Sangeet online is a mismatch of the authentic Tagore experience- because the internet is not from his time or geographical location?

Conclusion

As described earlier, when Tagore composed his music largely based on the notational arrangements prescribed by Raagas, he removed what he determined were complications of the indigenous classical music system. What he retained were what he comprehended as the moods evoked by particular Raagas, and engineered several songs on selected rules of different Raagas. In the process, he created a genre which those who were not fortunate enough to get formal training in the classical grammar of music could sing and engage in.

From the point of view of pure classical renditions being “high art”, Rabindra Sangeet thus could not fit into that umbrella. But it was popular and regarded because it spoke to the people, as a result of which it is still given a special place in collective memory after 100 years. Thus we see that “in terms of aesthetic process there is no real difference between high and low music” (Frith, 1996).

Social media exposes today that musical spontaneity has constraints in the collective memory of forms. Proving at the same time that music truly cannot be contained- since it has such diverse imaginations of the “real” at a time when the author is not alive any more. Tagore was “comfortable in the knowledge that his songs were like wild flowers” (Som, 2009), drawing from natural landscapes and human emotions. Is YouTube telling us that in this century, some consumers of his music might be narrowing down definitions of “significant sound” to identity politics around a literary figure and his homeland? Or simply trying to hold on to something familiar in an ever changing zone, resisting- perhaps unconsciously- an attempt by others to reinterpret it through their reality or sense of beauty?

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Trans. Harry Zohn. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Schocken/Random House, 2005. https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm

Duggal, Vebhuti. The Hindi Film Song Remix: Memory, History, Affect. Diss. Jawaharlal Nehru University, 2010.

Frith, Simon. “Music and Identity”. Questions of Cultural Identity. Eds. Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay. Sage Publications, 1996.

Guha, Ramachandra. Introduction. Nationalism. Rabindranath Tagore. Penguin Books, 2009.

Kahn, Douglas. “The Sound of Music”. The Auditory Culture Reader. Eds. Michael Bull and Les Black. Berg Publishers, 2003.

Menotti, Gabriel. “Objets Propages: The Internet Video as an Audiovisual Format”. Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Eds. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles. INC Reader #6, 2011.

Som, Reba. Rabindranath Tagore: The Singer and his Song. Penguin Books India, 2009.

Tagore, Rabindranath. Nationalism. Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1918.

Vanderbeeken, Robrecht. “Web Video and the Screen as a Mediator and Generator of Reality”. Video Vortex Reader II: Moving Images Beyond YouTube. Eds. Geert Lovink and Rachel Somers Miles. INC Reader #6, 2011.

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_understanding-tagores-music-on-youtube

'I feel the pain of having nowhere to go': A Manipuri Trans Woman Recounts Her Ongoing Lockdown Ordeal

Santa Khurai — 2020-06-22T11:42:39Z

"My life and work in Bengaluru came to an abrupt halt with the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown this March. We no longer had jobs and were forced to plan our departure from the city." -- As told to Santa Khurai, Manipur-based queer and Nupi Manbi activist, artist and writer. Compiled by Aayush Rathi, a cisgender, heterosexual man, and researcher with Centre for Internet and Society, India. This account is part of an ongoing CIS research project on gender, welfare and surveillance in India, and is supported by Privacy International, UK.

Originally published by Firstpost, June 20, 2020.

In 2015, I left my home state of Manipur for Bengaluru.

My name is Sarik*; I prefer to be known as Siku. I am a Nupi Manbi (trans woman).

Other Nupi Manbi had told me that Bengaluru is tolerant of transgender individuals, and that it is easy to find decent, well-paying jobs here. I contacted friends who had already moved here and relocated with their help.

Immediately, I found work at a fabric dyeing factory. The salary meant I could send some money home, my family was able to invest some of the funds in a monthly marup [revolving informal credit collective], and I was able to dream of someday having enough to buy a piece of land in Manipur.

I wasn’t to know at the time that just five years later, the happiness and hope would both prove fleeting.

***

I grew up in a small locality of Imphal East District, the youngest of three siblings. My mother had passed away, my father is a priest and story-teller, and my older brother worked as a traditional cook. As a result, our lives were fairly hand-to-mouth.

The frequent shifting of homes was very difficult for me, but I had no choice in the matter. I used to earn money by assisting other transgender friends in their tailoring works. While I worked hard in order to set aside enough money to own a small piece of land, it proved impossible with my meagre earnings.

After years of struggle, I decided to move to a big city with the aspiration to earn more.

***

My life and work in Bengaluru came to an abrupt halt with the COVID-19 outbreak and lockdown this March.

We no longer had jobs and were forced to plan our departure from the city. The Manipur government had announced measures that would allow stranded citizens to return to the state, so we began the formal process for our repatriation.

On 14 May 2020, three of us left Bengaluru in a special train that was organised for returnees to Manipur. Four days later, we were in Manipur.

When we reached Imphal, all returnees were first assembled at Modern College in Porompat, Imphal East. From there, we were sent to our respective constituencies to be quarantined. In the process, I was separated from my friends.

I was taken to Wangkhei Girl School as my permanent address falls under this constituency. At the quarantine centre, I was allocated a room shared by six other men. All the inmates were also sharing a toilet. This made me very uncomfortable; my body was undergoing changes due to hormonal effects.

In my discomfort, I reached out to transgender activist Santa Khurai, highlighting the need to set up a separate quarantine centre for transgender people. She immediately created a WhatsApp group for all the transgender people housed at different quarantine centres, keeping us updated about a separate quarantine centre for us. On the evening of 20 May, we rejoiced on seeing photos of the quarantine centre set up for transgender people. That night was the end of my terrible stay at the common quarantine centre.

***

On 21 May, I was shifted to the quarantine centre for transgender people at Ideal Blind School, Takyel. There, I was reunited with two of my friends. We stayed there for 17 days, receiving support from Santa Khurai through telecounseling. Before the quarantine period concluded, we were tested for COVID-19. We did not receive the results, but were advised to go back home. We were provided an acknowledgment in the form of a medical document. The relatives and parents of the other two trans girls had come to pick them up, but since my family doesn’t own a vehicle and it was not possible to hire on, I called a transgender friend to drop me home. I could sense some animosity in the neighbourhood, and decided not to step out from the house.

On the morning of 4 June, local governing bodies and clubs including Meira Paibi [a women’s rights group] thronged my house. A large crowd gathered in the temple shed. The club and Meira Paibi leader called my family members out and we were made to sit in the middle of a large group of people. They asked me to produce the result of the COVID-19 test, and I showed the acknowledgement given to us at the quarantine centre. People in the crowd passed the paper to each other disapprovingly, arguing that I hadn’t been declared COVID negative. One of the local club leaders called the police and doctors. The doctor who was in charge of the facility for transgender persons responded to the call, and validated my discharge from quarantine.

After few hours, even the police arrived and said that I could stay at home. However, the locals pressured the cops into taking my family — including my frail father who is in his 80s — to the police station.

***

We were finally allowed to leave the police station after several rounds of interrogation. My father, my brother (along with his wife and son) were taken back home by the police, while I was separately dropped off at a hotel in Gandhi Avenue, Thangal Bazar. I was advised to check in the hotel at around 3 pm; the charge was Rs 1,000 per day. When I asked the man who would pay for the room, he said, “Let’s see. At least you will be safe to stay here as the locals didn’t accept you coming home. You stay here until the test result come out.”

I called Santa in desperation, who consoled and reassured me. In the meantime, I had also called my sister to ask if some clothes could be brought for me. Her response alarmed and frightened me: My sister told me that my family were not being allowed to enter the house. The gate had been locked and they were instructed to stay at a quarantine centre as they were exposed to me. The news shocked me and made me desperate in wanting the test result to come out expeditiously, so that it would at least prevent any further hardships for my family.

Now I’m staying at the hotel. I fear going back to the house, the hostility of the locals, my family being attacked, my old father being forced to stay at a quarantine centre. I feel the pain of having nowhere to go. It is also infuriating to think that this could have been completely avoided had the officials not been in a haste to make us leave the quarantine centre, and had let us stay till the actual test results were received.

* Name changed to protect identity.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/a-manipuri-trans-woman-recounts-her-ongoing-lockdown-ordeal-covid19

#MappingDigitalLabour - Panel discussion on platform-work in Mumbai and New Delhi

sumandro — 2019-07-20T11:58:19Z

With the rise and popularity of app-based platforms such as Ola, Uber, Swiggy Zomato, and others, there are growing public conversation about regulation of such 'gig-work' platforms and the work conditions of people who work for them. The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) invites you to a panel discussion on Friday, July 19 in our Bangalore office, where the researchers associated with the project will present preliminary findings, and ethical and methodological challenges of studying app-based platform-work in India. Panelists Anushree Gupta, Rajendra Jadhav, Sarah Zia and Simiran Lalvani, who have conducted field studies of ride-hailing and food-delivery work in Mumbai and New Delhi, will share their preliminary field insights along with reflections on what it meant to do such studies, how they went about studying gig-work, and challenges that arose in their work. The discussion will be moderated by Noopur Raval who co-led the project. We invite scholars, journalists, and all interested members of the public to join us for the event. Tea and snacks will be served at 5 pm.

This project is supported by research assistance from the Azim Premji University.

Download: Poster and Flyer

Session Recording: Video (YouTube)

Agenda

5:00 pm - Tea and snacks in the CIS lawn

5:30 pm - Introduction to the project (Sumandro)

5:40-6:20 pm - Reflections based on field studies by the speakers (Anushree, Rajendra, Sarah, and Simiran)

6:20-6:40 pm - Speakers' responses to questions posed by the moderator (speakers and Noopur)

6:40-7:15 pm - Open discussion (moderated by Noopur)

Speakers and Moderator

Anushree Gupta is a Research Associate at Tandem Research. She is interested in studying the embeddedness of technology in society, with a focus on technical workers. Her research interests include technology mediated work, digital technologies and labour sociology. Her masters thesis examined the structure and dissemination of training in vocational education institutes (ITIs). Anushree has worked professionally on software development projects, including game development and social media analytics. She holds an MA in Development Studies from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai and a B. Tech. (ICT) from DA-IICT, Gandhinagar.

Anushree studied dimensions of platform-work among taxi drivers in Mumbai for this project.

Rajendra Jadhav is working as a research consultant, research fellow, researcher and research mentor with various non government organisations and academic institute for last 12 years. Rajendra has worked with Tata Institute of Social Sciences Mumbai as a Research Officer, as Program Director for PUKAR’s Youth Research Fellowship Program, and with National Dalit Watch - NCDHR, New Delhi as a National Coordinator for Research and Advocacy. Rajendra has pursued MA in Media and Cultural Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

Rajendra studied dimensions of platform-work among food delivery persons in New Delhi for this project.

Sarah Zia is an education reporter working with Live Mint, and has previously worked with the Times of India and has undertaken an independent study of mobility and transport in Delhi (focusing on paratransit in Delhi and the Delhi Ring Railway). Sarah has pursued MA in Mass Communication from AJK Mass Communication Research Centre, Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi.

Sarah studied dimensions of platform-work among taxi drivers in New Delhi for this project.

Simiran Lalvani is currently working as a Consultant at Microsoft Research on a Future of Work project. She has an MA in Development and Labour Studies from the Centre for Informal Sector and Labour Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

Simiran studied dimensions of platform-work among food delivery persons in Mumbai for this project.

Noopur Raval is a PhD researcher at the University of California Irvine where she studies issues of labor technology. She has also worked with the Wikimedia Foundation and Microsoft Research in the past. She is interested in questions of intersectionality, and is an avid consumer of popular culture and food.

Noopur is a co-principal investigator of this project (along with Sumandro).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platform-work-india-panel-discussion-20190719