Centre for Internet and Society

Rewiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan

nishant — 2009-12-17T05:19:24Z

First draft of the monograph in PDF

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringpdf

Revisiting Techno-euphoria

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:53:49Z

In my last post, I talked about techno-euphoria as a condition that seems to mark much of our discourse around digital technologies and the promise of the future. The euphoria, as I had suggested, manifests itself either as a utopian view of how digital technologies are going to change the future that we inhabit, or woes of despair about how the overdetermination of the digital is killing the very fibre of our social fabric.

Published in DML Central on July 5, 2012

A way out of it, for some of us working with young people and their relationships with (as opposed to usage of) technologies, is to think of digital technologies as a paradigm through which everyday life is reconfigured, or as contexts within which we evolve new relationships of power and negotiation. Or to put it plainly, it has forced us to think of digital technologies not in terms of tools and gadgets, infrastructure and logistics (though those are also important) but as embodied experiences that reshape the very ways in which we conceptualize our everyday life.

When we talk of digital natives in India, the immediate spaces that they inhabit conjure up images of big crowded IT cities that are transforming into hubs of international outsourcing industries and IT development. We presume that digital natives would be found in the 12% of the Indian sub-continent where broadband access is available. We often narrow our focus to look at urban, middle class, affluent, English speaking, educated youth who occupy extremely privileged positions in their social, cultural and economic practice.

However, the story* I want to share with you today comes from an unusual location in India – from the village of Banni in the desert region of Kutch, located at the North-Western borders of India and Pakistan. In this small village that is about 80 kilometers from the biggest town with amenities like hospitals and schools, almost every household has a smart phone with access to the internet. In the absence of more popular forms like radio, which are disallowed because of the proximity to the turbulent India-Pakistan borders, the Chinese-made smart phones become the de facto interface of communication and cultural production. The phones become not only the life-line in times of crises, but also everyday objects through which the villages stay connected with the world of cultural production and entertainment. The internet services on the phones allow them to access Bollywood songs and movies, images and games, popular television programming and other popular cultural products in the country. In many ways, Banni is probably more digitally connected than many parts of the larger cities in the country.

However, the strong influence of Islam in this fairly homogenized community means differential access for the people who live in it. Women, according to the village doctrines, are not allowed access to technologies for fear of corruption. Hence the smart phones are all exclusively owned by men who have complete access to the information highway whereas the women do not have immediate ownership of such interfaces. And yet, the women in the village are quite updated about the latest news, gossip, politics, information about the weather, and cultural productions like TV soaps and Bollywood movies. This discrepancy between lack of access to digital technologies on the one hand, and a fairly comprehensive access to information of their choice is perplexing at first. Till you turn your attention to the children, who, in their pre-pubertal space, are not segregated so clearly into the technology publics and privates, and hence can navigate the spaces which are otherwise so gender exclusive.

These children would not usually be recognized as digital natives because they are not particularly tech savvy and they do not have direct and unlimited access to the digital devices or connectivity. However, they become interfaces through which the information consumed by the male population permeates and travels to the female population in the village. The children become embodied interfaces, who imbibe the information from these digital devices and re-enact it for the women in their own private spaces. The village now has its own child-stars who not only pass on the local news and information, but also re-enact, on a daily basis, scenes, songs, and story-lines from the soaps and movies that are popular with the women in the village.

While the gendered politics of technology access and the creative ways in which children are able to work as embodied interfaces is interesting – and perhaps needs more space than is afforded here – what remains interesting to me is how this story disrupts the regular narratives of techno-euphoria. It cannot be explained away merely in terms of usage. It cannot be used to claim radical social change in community and gendered relationships. It is difficult to make a technology-empowerment argument though this. What is perhaps most interesting is that it shows how we need to start thinking about digital technologies as producing new ecosystems that reconfigure our understanding of who we are and the roles we play in developing social relationality. The digital natives in these stories are not merely the children – though their embodied interface produces startling insights into how personal relationships with technologies are produced. The men who have access to the phones and have mastered digital literacy in navigating through these phones, the women who become the last-mile consumers who have found creative ways of staying connected despite their lack of access, and the children who become the nodes in this technology-information infrastructure, are all digital natives of a certain kind. They might not have claimed that identity and indeed might never want to. And yet, the very conditions of everyday life, as they are mediated by the presence of digital technologies in Banni, help us understand the social structures and information relationships in ways which are more complex than theorized by our techno-euphoric attention to network visualizations which are heavily determined by usage and action.

This story from Banni is layered and needs unpacking at many different levels. However, it shall always remain, for me, a catalyst to re-think the focus and framework of our technology discourse, and talk about digitally mediated identities (digital natives or otherwise) in a vocabulary that moves beyond usage, infrastructure and access. It emphasizes, for me, the idea that the gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital -- which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.

Read Nishant's last post here
Link to the picture here

* I am greatly thankful to my friend Rita Kothari at the Indian Institute of Technologies, Gandhinagar, for first introducing me to this context and its peculiar technology ecosystem.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria

Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:54:21Z

This research project, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s history for what has in recent years come to be known as the ‘last mile’ problem. The term itself comes from communication theory, with in turn an ancestry in social anthropology, and concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. Exploring the intersection of government policy, technology intervention and the users' expectations, with a specific focus on Internet Technologies and their space in the good governance protocols in India, the project aims at revisiting the last mile problem as one of cultural practices and political contexts in India.

THE CULTURAL LAST MILE

Ashish Rajadhyaksha

The Argument:

Mapped onto developmental-democratic language since at least Independence, this concept, further mapping concrete benefits with the delivery of the message, has come to define the classic model by which the Indian state attempts to ensure that policy designed for local implementation actually reaches its intended beneficiaries without distortion. The immense link between communication theory and democracy thereby defines not only the Indian state’s historic dependence on technologies of communication – radio, terrestrial and satellite. It goes further, as the technological apparatus – and its variants of the classic ‘broadcast’ model of single sender-multiple receiver – comes to underpin the very definition of democratic development.

One consequence is an evolutionary definition of technology, with the last mile defined as a means of eternal purification of the message, combining content ‘corruption’ with socio-economic corruption, as newer generations of technology tirelessly eliminate distortion in both. This could well be the history of Indian state policy, from radio broadcasts representing the ‘voice of the State’ to the era of e-Governance. Such an authority is somewhat graphically in evidence in recent years in the deployment of ‘neutral’ technology such as computers within e-governance initiatives, which have, when successful , seen computer-illiterate farmers make wide use of ICT services where they ‘do not feel that there is a barrier to their obtaining information’, a ‘tribute to the grassroots staff and their training’, but also to ‘faith in the technology’ (Shaik, Jhamtani and Rao 2004: 9). The attribution of such ‘neutrality’ to modern ‘scientific’ technology has been in evidence from late nineteenth-century still photography to the use of technologies such as ‘First In–First Out (FIFO)’, a way that prevents queue-jumping, biometrics and double screens for users to view typed in matter, including touch screens (Parthasarathy 2005, VIII: 9).

The Research Project

This project assumes that, given the chronic historic failure in bridging the last mile, whether in communication theory or in the standard functioning of development projects (a key component of the relatively new discipline of disaster management) – a failure stemming from difficulties in both naming and accessing intended beneficiaries – it becomes necessary to reinvestigate the model itself, along with its historic failures.

The project is split into three parts:
(1) The conceptual argument: a historical trace of the theoretical origins of the concept ‘Last mile’ (even if not named as such), and key technical locations of its deployment: the telegraph, the ‘film trains’ in the 1920s, the radio (extended to transistorization in the 1960s), and the first experiments with terrestrial and satellite technology.
(2) It will then take three specific examples (perhaps but may be changed),(a) the SITE experiment of the 1970s with specific new field work on the well known Kheda experiment; (b) the Cable Television movements in India in the 1980s, and (c) Experiments with WLL in IIT Chennai in the 1990s.
(3) The concluding section will address locations where the last mile has in fact been bridged successfully, in the review’s estimation, and will inquire into how it came to be functional. It is at this point speculated that it worked mainly because (a) the original model was either tampered with or used contrary to stated intentions, and (b) when it worked, this happened with the connivance of the state. The project will therefore perhaps conclude with the following investigations: that historically significant occasions when alternative definitions were thrown up for the last mile worked mainly because they were dependent on error and accident (rather than seeing these as interruptions or distortions to the signal), and that they functioned more on both peer-to-peer and reverse broadcasting than on the single-sender-multiple-recipients model.

References:

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1990), ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, No. 19 (May): 33–52.

Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1999), ‘The Judgement: Re-Forming the Public’, Journal of Arts & Ideas, Nos. 32–33 (April)

N. Meera Shaik, Anita Jhamtani and D.U.M. Rao, ‘Information and Communication Technology in Agricultural Development: A Comparative Analysis of Three Projects from India’, Agricultural Research and Extension Network (AGREN), 2004.

Balaji Parthasarathy et al (ed), ‘Information and Communications Technologies for Development: A Comparative Analysis of Impacts and Costs from India’, Bangalore: International Institute of Information Technology, 2005.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1

Researchers At Work

nishant — 2012-01-04T05:27:06Z

CIS-RAW stands for Researchers at Work, a multidisciplinary research initiative by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. CIS firmly believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and Society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. The CIS-RAW programme hopes to produce one of the first documentations on the transactions and negotiations, relationships and correlations that the emergence of internet technologies has resulted in, specifically in the South. The CIS-RAW programme recognises ‘The Histories of the Internet and India’ as its focus for the first two years. Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India. The existing narratives of the internet are often riddled with absences or only focus on the mainstream interests of major stakeholders, like the state and the corporate. We find it imperative to excavate the three-decade histories of the internet to understand the contemporary concerns and questions in the field.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq

Research Programmes

nishant — 2009-01-15T12:02:51Z

The Research Portfolio at the Centre for Internet and Society seeks to develop new pedagogic practices, plural and unique knowledges, multidisciplinary perspectives, and reflexive interventions in the field of Internet and Society.

Context

We work on the premise that very little work has gone into understanding or exploring the internets in their plurality, leading to simultaneous mythification and demonisation of the internet. However, instead of trying to define what the internet means or enumerating its many manifestations, the Centre for Internet and Society is invested in producing new pedagogical devices and frameworks to analyse the various layers of the internet as it interacts with socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

Most frameworks that address questions of Internet and Society work with borrowed terminologies (of older technologies and technological forms) and institutional perspectives (arising out of traditional disciplines and interventions of earlier paradigms) that are no longer adequate for serious engagement with the complex relationship between internet and society. We recognise three dominant strains that are influential in most of the research and intervention in the field of Internet and Society.

The first is a focus on the science and technologies of the internet -- looking at innovation, experimentation and development of the technologies to build a faster, more effective and more robust web of applications and protocols. The second is a sustained philosophical engagement that explores the aesthetic and ethical implications of the digital worlds, networks, communities and identities that cyberspaces evolve. The third is an instrumental approach to technology that focuses on the effects of the internet and its growth as well as the potential it has for further development and impact.

These approaches create a schism between internet technologies and social structures, obscuring the inextricable nature of their intertwining. The focus is either on the purely technological, where the social fades into the background, or on the severely socio-cultural, where internet technologies are looked upon merely as instrumental in nature. The Centre for Internet and Society, instead of making this either-or choice, seeks to invest its energies in emphasising and excavating the processes, transactions, negotiations and mechanics by which internet technologies engage with society.

CIS Research Programmes

The Research Portfolio currently houses three different research programmes, each aimed at different audiences and researchers:

The CIS-RAW: The Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers At Work programme encourages innovative ideas and perspectives that emerge from dialogue and exchange, structured around a theme that changes every two years. The CIS-RAW is targeted at established scholars willing to engage with the specific themes that CIS is immediately interested in. It offers full financial support towards quantified academic productions. To know more about the CIS-RAW programme, please click here.
The ICT4A Fellowships: The Centre for Internet and Society recognises that some of the most innovative ideas and experiments with philosophical concepts and practice based projects are in the intersections between Information and Communication Technologies and the Creative Arts. Artists experimenting with form, shape, installations, processes and pedagogy create significant projects with high intervention and public value while forcing us to revisit the relationship between the internet and society. The ICT4A (Internet and Creative Technologies of Art) Fellowships are for artists who are interested in examining the aesthetics, politics and pragmatics of internet technologies and their relationships with different socio-cultural and geo-political phenomena. To know more about the ICT4A Fellowships, please click here.
Collaborative Projects Programme: CIS sees its role as that of an enabler and think tank for new ideas, methods and frameworks within the field of Internet and Society. Given the scope of internet technologies and the persuasive way in which they embrace various facets of contemporary life, we envision various disciplines engaging with the concerns of Internet and Society in the future. The Collaborative Project Programme is structured to provide initial head-space, ideation resources, and intellectual infrastructure to senior researchers and/or practitioners to work towards a larger project that intersects with our vision. The Collaborative Projects Programme offers CIS an opportunity to enter into a financial, intellectual and administrative collaboration for up to six months with individuals or organisations who are looking at funding for the inception work towards a project (research, intervention, or otherwise) in the field of Internet and Society. To learn more about the modalities, CIS’ involvement and the nature of support for the Collaborative Projects, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/research-programmes

Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight

nishant — 2013-01-28T04:51:58Z

I encountered the Aaron Swartz memorial the other day that helps ‘liberate’ a randomly selected article from JSTOR, as an act of civil disobedience, to commemorate both the legacy that Swartz leaves behind, but also the high-profile witch-hunt case which was a crucial factor in him taking his own life.

Nishant Shah's blog post was published by DML Central on January 24, 2013.

Much has been said about Swartz and much more will have to be said about him, and about his work, to make sure that the good that men do does not get interred with their bones. And there are people more articulate, closer to him in personal and professional capacities who will do a better job at making sure we have an archive of memories to fill up the ‘Aaron sized-hole’ that his untimely death has introduced into our lives.

So instead of attempting to write a eulogy I am ill-equipped for, I want to mark the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz by talking about causes and everyday politics. And I might have to do it through a mode of collective self-flagellation because it is a point that needs to be driven home. I am sure that almost everybody would agree that the ideals that Swartz held were unimpeachable, even though they might not always agree with his tactics. There would be a general consensus that in our rapidly growing information societies free knowledge leads to better, stronger, and more equitable societies. In fact, there is a whole generation of younger users who are so used to having unlimited and unrestricted access to digital information that they often get frustrated and infuriated when they encounter media cartels and Intellectual Property Regimes that insist on locking up knowledge -- especially publicly funded academic resources -- behind paywalls.

We have all grumbled, at different points, about the essay we wanted to teach in class, the book we needed for a research paper, the movie we wanted to remix, or the song we wanted to sample, locked up behind (often) unaffordable access systems. We recognise that in the building of this gated knowledge landscape, we are creating uneven, corrupt and corrupting hierarchies of information control and access. And yet, when it comes to actually responding to these questions of closed intellectual property, restricted information access and media monopolies exerted by information cartels, we generally have a comfortable sense of distance. These are other peoples’ problems. These are battles somebody else will fight.

Even within academia, where we have been the most active in questioning and contesting the notions of power and knowledge, there is also the highest complicity in creating these monstrous behemoths that we feed regularly with research that is more often than not, publicly funded. In our quest for tenures, careers and popularity, we have voluntarily given up our rights to private and closed access journals that in return give us the symbolic capital to gain power in the system. In the 1980s, when the Subaltern school was writing against colonial legacies and cultural imperialism, Homi Bhabha had described this condition of granted agency and borrowed power as mimicry. In his own hyphenated way, he had suggested that the new subaltern, who is often seen as engaged in critically responding to the colonial masters and their legacies, only exists in a structure of mimicry -- where he emptily gestures towards the problems of colonial inheritance, without any power to actually overthrow or challenge it. Within South Asian feminisms, Kumkum Sangari has described this status of granted agency within patriarchy -- a condition that gives us a sense of power and a space of negotiation, as long as we uphold the very structure that oppresses us in the name of our empowerment.

It is time to realise that within academia, and the social sciences and arts based academia in particular, we have now perfected the art of mimicry. Where we pull our pens instead of our swords and talk (often indecipherably) about conditions of power and geographies of inequality and the need to do something about it. We attend conferences where proceedings go into closed access journals, and publish books with publishing houses that charge us and our students exorbitant sums of money to access the knowledge in those books. We publish not to be heard but to be cited, not to create open publics but closed communities of interlocked interests. And we feel smug about being politically committed, separating the conditions of our knowledge production from the content of our knowledge, as if the two have nothing to do with each other.

In other sectors that I dabble with but am not such a rank (and hence equally complicit) insider, I see similar distances. This alienation of our intellectual work from its political content is just one of the separations we make. The other separation is between our discursive communities and everyday practice. So embedded is our description, explanation and analysis of the world, in languages inaccessible to any but the privileged few who are trained to understand it. The advice we give our students -- follow the grandmother rule: write clearly so that your grandmother will be able to understand it -- is a standard we rarely practice in our academic writing.

These are symptoms I see in other sectors that are also committed to political questioning and change, working towards building better worlds and societies. Specialised lawyers fight their battles in closed court-rooms and write in obscure law journals which are not accessible or intelligible to the common public. Activists often get bogged down into appropriating the same language to be taken seriously. Advocates of causes fear over-simplification of the complex issues, keeping the everyday person outside of these battles around information and knowledge. We have built gated politics where the threshold of investment and engagement is so high, that the only response to that is detachment.

This brings me back to talking about Swartz and his dream of liberating information from the clutches of exploitative information houses. Swartz’s crime was not that he broke the law -- I wonder if the public prosecutor has never pirated material online; statistics would suggest otherwise -- but that he didn’t find allies in spaces which profess political commitment but then mimic it in their content rather than in practice. It is not surprising that even when JSTOR, the affected party, refused to push for criminal or civil charges, the University where the ‘crime’ occurred and the federal authorities decided to pursue him as a felon. Many people have wondered about why a well-loved and popular cult figure like Swartz would feel so lonely as to take this drastic step to end his life, and we now have to take responsibility that this separation of what he believed as the central tenet to life is something that his natural allies have separated out from their work.

Swartz is a folk-hero and he shall live as an icon for the groups working around internet freedom and information openness. But maybe it is time to stop waiting for another martyr to the cause. Maybe it is time to recognise that these battles around knowledge and information are not specialised fights to be played out in sombre tones by zealots on opposite sides. These are human wars, and they affect not only our everyday sense of who we are and the societies we live in, but also who we want to become and the worlds we want to create for future generations to inherit. Swartz embodies a whole generation of digital natives who fail to understand why the ethically wrong and morally reprehensible practice of protected intellectual property, that goes against the very grain of building information societies, continues to find silent supporters rather than vocal protestors. The grief and sense of loss we have with Swartz's passing is not easy to remedy. But Swartz will also be a moniker that every digital native will have to wear, as they traverse a treacherous terrain, persecuted by IP watchdogs and punished for what seems to be a natural order of things in their information worlds.

There is a lot of growing commentary with people expressing anger, shock, and sadness for the 26 year old man who died fighting a battle that we did not even become an audience to. And that commentary is necessary because we need to cope with the fact that we live in a world where somebody who believed in the most beautiful idea of a world that has free knowledge was persecuted to an early death. But at some point, we also need to stop talking and realise that we don’t have to come to arms for a moment only once-every-heroic-death. That the last disservice we will do to this everyday battle against intellectual property regime is to wait for the next icon to be trapped in this Greek tragedy structure of being punished for doing what he felt was right. It is time to start thinking of these questions of knowledge and information in our everyday life, negotiate with them beyond the narratives of convenience, and hope that there will be no more need to produce martyrs for a cause that is not just about books and music, but about being human.

Banner image credit: Maria Jesus V http://www.flickr.com/photos/favina/8377387022/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-jan-24-2013-nishant-shah-remembering-aaron-swartz-taking-up-the-fight

Re:wiring Bodies: Call for Review

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:50:15Z

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Her work at the Centre for Contemporary Studies (IISC, Bangalore) gives a further context to unpack Internet Technologies in a larger context of Technology-Society interface. This original monograph draws from Gender studies, STS research, extand policies, empirical data, Cultural Studies and Feminist epistemological of Sciences, to build a new knowledge framework to address the Internet questions which popular cybercultures or mainstream media studies have ignored.

The monograph by Dr. Asha Achuthan, has emerged out of the "Rewiring Bodies" project which started nine months ago. The project has involved many public entries available at http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.

Word [word file, 339 kb]
PDF [PDF, 712 kb]

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review

Re:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan

nishant — 2011-09-21T07:23:44Z

First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc

Quarter Life Crisis: The World Wide Web turns 25 this year

nishant — 2016-09-16T13:25:38Z

With the unexplained ban on websites, the state seems to have stopped caring for the digital rights of its citizens.

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

The World Wide Web turned 25 this year. A quarter of a century ago, the first website went live, and since then, the world as we know it has changed. The internet is probably the fastest way a new technology has become old. There are generations who have never known the world without it being connected. And yet, it is safe to say that if put into a corner, most of us might have a tough time trying to exactly describe what the World Wide Web is, and how it operates. Like many massification technologies, the internet has quickly evolved from being the playground for geeks to tinker with and build digital networks, into a blackbox that we access through our seductively designed interfaces.

At a technological level, the internet was a standardisation protocol that allowed for distributed databases on remote computers to interact with each other using digital connections. At the heart of the internet was the impulse to share, and to share safely, new information that would lead to collaborative knowledge production and stronger network communities. The World Wide Web saw this potential of sharing information quickly as one of the most promising aspects of human futures. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in his first vision of the WWW, had proposed that the capacity to share information, without loss of quality, would create new societies of equality and equity. In this vision, the website was a way of sharing information, expression, political desire, personal longing and social ideas, thus creating connected societies that would be able to consolidate the sum total of all human experience.

That historical moment of the technological architecture and the ideological articulation of the internet and the WWW are critical because as the internet has become increasingly privatised, with intermediaries, Internet Service Providers, and content producers claiming more and more of the digital turf, we have seen continued attack on the principles of sharing. We have, in the last few years, seen draconian crackdowns on people sharing their political views on social media, arresting young people for their political dissent online. We have witnessed the emergence of paywalls that close down content, criminalising students trying to access new knowledge towards their education. We have seen the policing of online creative spaces, monitoring users who engage in cultural production, forcing them into repressive intellectual property regimes that they do not necessarily want.

Most of these attacks on sharing have been fuelled by private companies who see the economic benefits of creating media monopolies out of the internet. These attacks have been particularly vicious because they also recognise the potentials of digital connectivity to completely disrupt the extraordinary powers of crowds who can co-create the biggest encyclopaedia in the word and undermine the corporatisation of cultural objects. And yet, in the interest of profits, there has been persistent lobbying from the private owners of the public goods of the internet, to crack down on sharing and access through legal punishment.

Like many developing countries, India has been resisting the enforcing of Intellectual Property Rights promoted by private lobbyists. In doing so, it recognises that emerging geographies need more open, universal and affordable access to information and that the true potential of digitisation lies in the capacity of the web to enable unfettered access to knowledge and cultural artefacts. Despite pressure from global lobbies, the Indian state has continued to emphasise that access for public good overrides the interest of private right holders, and has favoured the digital user’s right to access material which they might not always have the economic rights for. Some scholars say that this is where the state emphasises that the moral rights of access to information supersede the legal rights that close the possibilities of access.

Or at least, the Indian state recognised the need of its still-being-connected population to have free access till recently. With the new law that enforces a block on torrent and file sharing sites, warnings of punitive action, and an unexplained ban on websites that most users have been using for knowledge and cultural products, the state seems to have buckled under private lobbying and also stopped caring for the rights of its citizens. There will always be a split vote when it comes to figuring out the pros and cons of piracy, and it is important to recognise the right of the cultural and knowledge producer to protect their economic interests. The debates have been interesting because it was difficult to take sides and required a balancing act of negotiation between different parties.

However, with this new intervention, the Indian government seems to have taken sides, and made up its mind, that for the future of Digital India, it is going to favour the corporation, the company, the private profit making entity over the individual, the collective, and the public that sought to access information through the fundamental principle of the digital web — sharing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year

Public Talk by Dr. Ian Brown on Privacy, Trust and Biometrics

nishant — 2011-04-04T07:15:29Z

Trust is hard to build, but easy to lose. What factors affect individuals' trust in new technologies? How can governments create citizen trust in biometric security tools? Can biometrics be designed to be privacy-friendly? And how did these questions lead to the cancellation of the UK's national identity scheme, after a decade of development costing tens of millions of pounds? About the speaker: Dr Ian Brown's research is focused on public policy issues around information and the Internet, particularly privacy and copyright. He also works in the more technical fields of communications security and healthcare informatics.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/ian

Public Accountability

nishant — 2008-09-22T08:02:06Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/public-accountability

Power to the People

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:35:54Z

The digital revolution has helped make NGOs and civil society more influential, independent and transparent, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on Sunday, May 15, 2011.

The rise and spread of internet and digital technologies has invigorated the voluntary sector in the country, granting them better mobility, access to resources and wider visibility through digital networks. With the rise of the internet, augmented by easy access, civil society needs to claim its stake in the World Wide Web. Visibility and presence have become the buzzwords. There is a concentrated effort to become a Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent (SMART) organisation that doesn’t operate in remote silos but reaches out to an audience and a resource base.

While NGOs in the more developed countries have taken to digital technologies more easily, there is no doubt that the digital revolution has finally come to the civil society in India and it is offering unprecedented opportunities for social change and political participation. From the Bell Bajao campaign, which brought to the fore domestic violence in the urban middle class, to the recent demonstrations for Anna Hazare, we see many examples of the ways in which civil society and NGOs can still mobilise support from the public.

What has also been interesting is how collectives rather than registered organisations have played an important role in the public delivery of such campaigns.

Here is a look at three ways in which engagement with digital technologies, has led to new models of making public interventions and processes of initiating change for civil society collectives and NGOs.

Birds of a Feather

With the networked effect of the digital technologies, something as simple as building a Facebook page puts out the concerns and draws the attention and resources of a larger population. NGOs need no longer confine themselves to finding people in immediate environments and are extending their support base to large online networks. The Bangalore-based Blank Noise Project that started off as a public art intervention by Jasmeen Patheja has now emerged as a large volunteer-based network that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer networks to mobilise young urban dwellers, to talk about gender, safety and urban space. Not yet a formal NGO, it uses blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mailing lists etc. in order to bring people together for public interventions as well as digital dissemination. With more than 4,000 volunteers running the project in different cities, BNP proves the power of the Web to find “people like us” for a common cause.

Beyond Patronage

With the kind of outreach and visibility afforded by the internet, NGOs are turning to public support and individual contributions to carry out their work. Take Kickstarter, for example — a site where any NGO wanting to launch a creative project, can put up a project description and a budget. They can then invite people from around the world to “pledge” money by swiping credit cards, beginning with a contribution of $5. If, within a given time-span, enough people pledge enough money to cover the project’s budget, the organisation receives the money through electronic transfers. They become, thus, accountable not to individual donors or private development agencies. Instead, they become transparent and responsible towards the larger public who, as stakeholders and supporters can now endorse, amplify and track the activities of the organisation.

Transparency Unlimited

With the rise of information technologies, citizens have started asking for more details about organisations that seek to represent them in different sectors. It has become necessary for NGOs to become accountable at two levels — one is at the level of financial integrity and the second is at the level of public responsibility. The consortium Credibility Alliance is one example by which the voluntary sector can disclose certain minimum information to its public in order to build transparent governance structures. NGOs have also become more sensitive to the politics of representation and how to involve communities they work with, in their processes rather than becoming self-appointed vanguards. The field of collaboration has opened up and we see the rise of networks rather than individual players in the field.

Digital and internet technologies amplify, augment and enhance the existing processes. In the voluntary sector, like almost any other walk of life, many of these practices already exist. What these systems of the digital age have done is provide new ways by which the everyday citizen can participate and contribute to the processes of change.

Read the original published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/power-to-people

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

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

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

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

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

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

Questioning the Question

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

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

Political as dialogue

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

Political as concern

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

Political as change

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

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

Political as Freedom

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

Political as Reticence

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

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

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

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

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

Pinning the Badge

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:34:23Z

In a world of competition, badging provides a holistic way of grading and learning, where individual talents are realised and the knowledge of the group is used.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 18, 2012.

I write this column fresh out of being a judge at the Digital Media and Learning contest on “Badging for Life-long Learning” in San Francisco. While the contest focused largely on the American education system and its future, the idea of badging that each person brings a set of skills to a study or workplace is useful to think about, in connection with India. We have now spent some time, in India, hearing about how education in the country has been ruined. There is a constant narrative of the university in shambles, where we seem to lack competent teachers, engaged students, and the resources to build efficient infrastructure for learning. This argument also positions employment as the only aim of education, reducing our humanist and social sciences legacies to skill-based information transmission.

Digital technologies emerge as a cure for the problems that contemporary education seems to be facing. The availability of resources at affordable costs for anybody online, has been one of the biggest promises of the internet, and it hopes to build a better learning environment and better learners. The condition of being connected to a much larger network of educators and learners, also offers us the possibilities of producing better and innovative knowledge structures. There is also an inherent ambition that the introduction of new digital competencies and skills will encourage both students and teachers to integrate their learning and pedagogy with their lived reality, producing responsible people and citizens. However, in all these expectations around the role of the digital technology in transforming learning, the idea of grading and evaluation remains unquestioned.

Even in the most radical restructuring of education systems, grades remain an absolute form of quantifying and measuring skills that the student is supposed to demonstrate. Grading might take up different forms — numbers, letters, percentile, etc — or it might take up different methods — continuous grading, take-home exams — but it eventually becomes the only badge that the student takes into the “real world”.

The idea of a badge as an alternative to this particular kind of quantification oriented learning that sees the grade as a final evaluation and in some ways, a termination of the learning process, opens up huge possibilities for how we understand learning. The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for.

A peer-2-peer system of badging, which enables learners to be critically aware not only of their own interaction with knowledge, but also recognises the ways in which larger communities of knowledge — including the peers and teachers — opens up an extraordinary way of thinking about education. It disrupts the competitive modes of cut-throat modes of education systems we are building and allows us to re-think the function of education and the role of learners in educational environments. The digital systems of social networking and reputation management, already perform some of these tasks, which is why, a student who might not do well in class might be a YouTube sensation, finding thousands of followers worldwide. Or a student who might not show research aptitude in class might be editing complex Wikipedia entries on subjects that high-level researchers are engaging with. All these digital systems acknowledge the roles that people play in learning and knowledge production, and in that reward of recognition, provide incentives for learners to re-examine their role within knowledge systems.

Such a system of badging, that exceeds the static classroom, allows for students to become stakeholders in their own education, building connected communities of learning. It hints at what the future of education is going to look like. More importantly, it offers a new way of thinking about technology and its role in redesigning education, which is not merely about introducing technologies into classrooms and continuing with the traditional modes of learning through new technology skills. Instead, we have a model for what learning means, how we interact with conditions of knowledge consumption and production, and how, we can form global communities of learning which might find an anchor in the classrooms but also transcend the brick-and-mortar institutions of learning as we understand them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge

Personal Data, Public Profile

nishant — 2012-02-14T06:19:52Z

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is rapidly being Googlised, writes Nishant Shah in an article published by the Financial Express on February 13, 2012.

Apart from its core functions like search and email, we consume Google services and products around the clock and around the click—YouTube, Calendar, Docs, Google+, Google Reader, Google Analytics et al. On March 1, 2012, our increasingly co-dependent relationship with Google will reach a new stage of commitment as Google consolidates its privacy policies for the entire Google universe. If you are logged into your Google account, all your information across Google’s different platforms will be clubbed together to form a comprehensive profile of what you do online.

Google has suggested this will personalise your interactions with Google platforms. The videos you watch on YouTube might influence your search results; the links that you click on will affect the advertisements displayed to you; the mails that you read will establish proximity with your friends on Google+ ... A comprehensive profile of who you are, what you do, what you like, what you share and what you hide will be created. Google has shown unmatched commitment to transparency on user data retention, storage and usage over the years. However, a centralised profile on users rings a few alarm bells for me. There are three use-cases that immediately crop up with apocalyptic implications.

Death of anonymity: One of the biggest strengths of the internet, as a space for both political dissent and freedom of expression, is that it has allowed people to talk through their avatars without putting themselves in conditions of bodily harm. So, it was good to have a scenario where my activities on YouTube did not get mapped onto my more identifiable profile on Google+ and did not get correlated with my personal interactions on Gmail. Mapping all the actions of a user who might want a more distributed identity might lead to precarious conditions for users living in critical times.

Negotiation with governments: While Google claims that it is committed to protecting the safety of its users, we know that it is eventually subject to the rules of the countries that it operates in. In the past, say in skirmishes with China, we have seen that despite its powerful status, it is not exempt from the demands of different governments. Given the current state of negotiations around censorship that are ongoing in India, it is a little scary to think how users’ data can be abused by authoritative government officials. A multi-tiered, distributed system offers users safety which a consolidated one doesn’t.

Inter-platform repercussions: If something I do on a platform gets flagged as objectionable, does it mean that all my rights to Google World get revoked?

Hidden data collection: One of the things that a lot of people don’t realise is that Google, in its attempts at enriching our user experience, collects more data than you disclose. So, apart from the personal data that you have more control over, there is a range of other data—pages you visit, the time you spend there, links you click on, comments that you write, information you share, etc—which form a part of Google’s algorithms for you. Consolidation of this data through services like Ad Sense and Double Click might also expose you to third party advertisers who might abuse this information that is about you but not under your control.

Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies across platforms signal a new wave of information management on the web, where the earlier free-form distributed information practice is getting mapped on to the physical bodies of the users. While it might lead to better web services, it also means that we need to be more aware of our information practices and start preparing for a web that is going to demand more accountability from its users than ever before.

The author is a digital humanities scholar and Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

The original article was published in the Financial Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/personal-data-public-profile