Centre for Internet and Society

," Let There be Geometry"

anirudh — 2014-07-01T08:36:10Z

This is the first blog in the series to view perfect Mathematical objects in the postmodern world and see if the centrality of these objects can be or has been subverted by language and the technological. In this preliminary blog, we will explore a particular phenomenological philosophy of mathematics by Edmun Husserl in "The Origin of Geometry" and closely read the implications of ontological and methodological lens' we are offered. We will do this with the help of Derrida's critique/ introduction to the essay and see if the phenomenological origin of ideal objects comes within the grasp of Derridean differance.

I’m writing this piece in the wake of having speculated on the collapse of systems, objects and logos of extreme power and centrality to our species, that governed and defined meaning to human civilizations. We explored the possibility that language has taken the place of iconotypes and archetypes in constructing meaning through differance and supplementarity and then wondered if this had happened in the sciences. We observed the melting down of paradigmatic grand assumptions about the world in the culture of science yielding to a certain kind of chaos of discovery facilitated mainly by machinistic intelligence. It is now time to bring the last horizon, the spiritual pole in the cathedral of ideality; mathematics into question. It is a culture that, for most of the history of its practitioners, from Plato onwards, believed it was a process of discovery, forming the tools to view the eidos; ideal objects. Indeed, many schools of mathematical philosophy have rejected the notion of mathematical objects that numbers and geometrical shapes pre-existing human consciousness in an a priori form. Jan Brouwer [1],Leopold Kronecker[2], Bertrand Russell[3] and others have attacked the issue in various ways showing how mathematical truths are constructions of the mind and not eternal, unchanging, non-causal and non-spatiotemporal. In this blog, we shall attempt to look at this issue through phenomenological investigations of the ideal mathematical objects by Edmund Husserl in the ‘Origin of Geometry’ (OG) and Derrida’s critique of his essay.

There are many political consequences of these assumptions about mathematical objects. The Greeks, for example, believed that 1 was a unit of arbitrary length and didn’t believe there were true numbers. Hippasus[4], a disciple of Pythagoras, is said to have discovered irrational numbers; the and the incommensurability of a square’s diagonals with their edges. This feat caused such a fundamental reversal in Greek philosophy of ideality that Hippassus was drowned for his heretical ideas and disturbing the Pythagorean order of the world. To understand the scale of the idea being questioned, let us not imagine, but consider the idea of infinity or to invoke Euclid, the floor upon which you sit, stand or sleep extending infinitely in all directions. According to Husserl, to truly consider this as we are all capable of doing outside of imaginative and sensory experience, it would require a transcendental consciousness[5]. To imagine the ideal object of infinity, one would have to follow the Husserlian steps of “ruckfrage” or reactivation. There is the original object in its ideal and objective form, then the primordial sense of the object, followed by sedimentation (erosion of absolute form, linguistic and cultural pollution) of this original sense and the subsequent attempts to reactivate the original form by working through language to reach the horizon. Historicity, in the phenomenological sense, is the constituting of an intended object and in the case of geometric objects; this process would be its historicity.

This operation of consciousness, turning perception into an impression happens in what Husserl terms the living-present (“the consciousness of succession that makes possible the apprehension of a succession of consciousness”). There is the primal impression of an object, the retention and the protention. Think of a ball being thrown towards you. The mind perceives temporality differently from the register of the moment. We perform retention, in that we retain the previous points of the ball beyond the sense’s perception of the moment to understand the present place of the ball through its trajectory. At the same time we also perform protention in that we anticipate the next location of the ball in the trajectory. This protracted consciousness of temporality is necessary for any intentional historicity of geometric objects. The question then arises as to whether the ideal objects exist as the transcendental signifier outside the influence of language and hence history or if it is merely a guiding force. Derrida compares this dilemma with the fate of another transcendental signifier:

“The fragments which mention God are marked with the same apparent ambiguity. God is no longer invoked, as for example in Ideas I, only as the exemplary model and limit of all consciousness of impossibility in the proof of an eidetic truth…God is no longer designated as the transcendent principle…of every universal factual teleology , either of Nature or the spirit, i.e., of history. Divine consciousness, which reveals the intangibility of constituted essences is a fictional content and the directing Telos for the real universe. As such it is a factuality. The reduction of God as factual being and factual consciousness sets free the signification of transcendental divinity, such as it appears in the last writings. The ambiguity we announced a moment ago concerns precisely the relation of the transcendental Absolute as divinity and the transcendental Absolute as historical subjectivity. In its transcendental sense, God is sometimes designated as the one toward which "I am on the way" and "who speaks in us," at other times as what "is nothing other than the Pole.” At times the Logos expresses itself through a transcendental history, at other times it is only the absolute polar authenticity of transcendental historicity itself.”

If we think the former, that the logos in mathematics expresses itself through history or that it is the product of a transcendental history, then it would be derived from experience. The infinity, in other words, would unfold itself in a historical discursiveness. If we were to think the latter, that the logos is the impossible limit, then the concepts borrowed from the idea of infinity, for example, can only be metaphors that don’t affect the original purity. To settle these contending views, one would have to risk the bewilderment that Plato warns of, and go into the light.

What is the origin of the ideal objectivity of these objects that differentiate them from other entities in the lebenswelt, the life world? Are they historical or ahistorical? Husserl seems to contend with this question of objectivity by saying the object at its origin must already have objectivity for it to be recognized by the inventor. Otherwise, (we know this now after the fact) her invention was only ever hers. Derrida says, “the sense of the constituting act can only be deciphered in the web of the constituted object”. Therefore, only after the object has been constituted can we make statements about its primordial sense of objectivity and recognizability so in a way, intentionality has been forced by the objectivity (we must remember the omnitemporal nature of the living-present and not be limited by our impulse to causation to consider this proposition).

The means by which we come to sense this ideal objectivity is then language. In bound, real world objects, there is the word’s ideal objectivity which can only remain objective in a factual sense. The word “lion” is factually in the English language but sensually doesn’t have such a unified signification. Similarly, the objectivity and unity of sense that Husserl calls “expression…to the intentional content” can be grounded and fixed by the identity of the object. However, the object itself, (the lion) is neither the expression nor the sense. Every person perceives the sensible lion differently; there is neither an absolute nor universal understanding of the lion so it is bound by empirical subjectivity. When it comes to geometrical objects, however, the ideality is not located in the expression or the intended content, but in the object itself. L²+W²= H²in a right angled triangle, or better known as the Pythagorean Theorem is unbound by language for its expression and remains true across all cultures. Here, the object and sense of the object are distinguished at the level of the very possibility of language in the object.

Derrida says, at this point, that there seems to be a paradox. Ideal objectivity of the geometrical object is revealed to us only through language, something that they purport to transcend in order to remain universally true. According to Husserl, the geometrical object doesn’t live in a “topos ouranios” (heavenly plane), so it comes as an Idea in the inventors mind. The living present’s internal dialectic of retention and protention allows for the object’s intrapersonal communication. It is useful to imagine that without the immersion into language, and hence into history, the idea would remain imprisoned in the inventor’s mind. It is the “one and the same world” that we live in and our consciousness of this fact that allows for the universal language of mathematics, making the vehicle for objectivity transcendental subjectivity.

The transcendental historicity or the intentional constitution of the ideal object occurs through the living present in the inventors mind and through writing in the community. Therefore, writing “sanctions and completes the existence of pure transcendental historicity” as it gives the sense of non-spatiotemporal objects the ability to become non-spatiotemporal pushing humans into a transcendental community.

Constituted object ---> objectivity---> constituting act---> inventors mind---> idea---> intrapersonal language---> interpersonal writing---> community

Now we come to the essential question posed earlier; the origin of the ideality. It could be that geometrical ideality is based on the morphological idealities of imagination and sense, that we all imagine and sense the same way. We have already discussed that Husserl rejects the notion of platonic idealism. There is a middle ground that Husserl locates in the pre-scientific life-world which is the non-imaginative and non-sensible realm of pure thought. We are forced to examine the Idea in the living-present again. The idea exists in a unity of past (primal impression), present (retention) and future (protention) and it is not constituted but merely thought and experienced in time. The difference is between imagining the morphological roundness and making a “higher, absolutely objective, exact and non-sensible ideality occur- the circle.” This is Kant’s notion of idea, an ideation or an intuition of essence where facts and descriptions are forgotten and an ideal object is created. Basically, we work around the axioms and postulates of geometry to its original objects. Therefore, Derrida speculates “must we not say that geometry is on the way toward its origin, instead of proceeding from it…that pure ideality is announced in bound ideality” I think here Husserl would say this leap draws its support or appeal from the sensible ideality, for example, “roundness”. Therefore, the Idea allows for ideality’s origin eventually and it is eternal yet historical because eternity is just a mode of historicity; of constituting an intentional object.

Being, or living in the tradition, Derrida says, “is silently shown under the negativity of the apeiron”. The infinity, the absolute origin to come is always deferred for anything to appear in the living present. He says, “ and thought’s pure certainty would be transcendental, since it can look forward to the already announced Telos only by advancing on (or being in advance of) the Origin that indefinitely reserves itself…to learn that Thought would always be to come”. John P. Leavey says, “an origin, an absolute Origin, must be a differant Origin- the never-yet-always-already-there as the “beyond” or “before” that makes all sense possible.”

Once within the realm of differance, through language at the origin of ideality and through the anteriority/ posteriority of the absolute origin, the pure mathematical object loses its negative theological status. In fact, when asked by an audience member at one of his lectures that if “differance is the source of everything and one cannot know it: it is God of negative theology”, Derrida replied “it is and it is not.” As opposed to the negative theological place of mathematical objects as something supereminent and yet concealed and ineffable, differance is always deferred from entering the present. With the Origins of Geometry so precariously placed at the poles and hence the limits of historicity, they are “but a quasi-transcendental anteriority unlike the supereminent, transcendental ulteriority” of God as John Caputo puts it. This is the essential philosophical difference which then leads to the political decentering from the first cause or transcendental signified yet not quite to the realm of other discarded signifiers.

The shared nature of the same world allows for universally acceptable truths even within this imagination of mathematical differance. According to Husserl, science is the exemplary, unique and archetypal culture precisely because it doesn’t produce culturally-specific truths and aims at a completed state or telos as every culture does. The labor within this culture that has decentered its mathematical transcendental logos can be imagined in wildly different ways. It can be thought of in a constructivist school that only admits mathematical entities which can be explicitly constructed to mathematical discourse. It can be thought of in an intuitionist school of Jan Brouwer that believes that “there are no non-experienced mathematical truths”. This would engage machine labor in the mathematical enterprise in interesting ways as it has already done by using concepts of the Turing Machine to fill gaps within it. Automated Theorem Proving is the just the beginning and many more vehicles for ruckfrage will emerge. We will continue to explore the validity of constructivism, intuitionism and other attempts to bring mathematics into the world of the post, dominated by ghosts, machines and monsters. Until then, however, while seeking the phenomenological origin of geometry, we may have cast the diamond cubic crystal lines around the poles of its historicity, reining it within the vast web of language.

References:

[1] Franchella, Miriam . "L.E.J. Brouwer: Toward Intuitionistic Logic." ScienceDirect: n. pag. Web.

[2] Boniface, Jacqueline . "Leopold Kronecker’s conception of the foundations of mathematics." Philosophia Scientiæ: n. pag. Web.

[3] Principia Mathematica

By: Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell.

The University Press

[4] Metaphysics

By: Apostle, Hippocrates George.

Indiana University Press

1966

[5] Derrida, Jacques, and Edmund Husserl.

N. Hays ;

1978

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/let-there-be-geometry

Binary Code Invades the Universal Problematic

anirudh — 2014-05-27T05:35:03Z

This essay looks at language as an archive and posits, through a reading of Foucault, Derrida, Saussure and Jakobson that the means of perceiving language in the digital has changed. Communication requires community and the large networks made possible by the binary code, an added layer of linguistic units, changes the way we are able to communicate online. Big Data has further changed the way we interact with language and the world. The way the machine perceives language, through selection rather than combination with access to the “complete” archive allows it to make predictions and decisions through mere correlation rather than the causational mode of science hitherto conducted by human beings.

The above is a familiar image to everyone reading this blog. In fact, I’m willing to wager my internet connection that anyone reading this must have come across this image and that they all would assume the same for anyone else cohabitating the digital world. The Google search, for many is the internet or at least one of the first images that come to mind when one mentions internet though I will not presume solitariness or principality in good faith to the impending argument. Before the digital era, if I had read the words “the-order-of-things” in a book by a French philosopher, I would have read it in a manner completely different to the way I read things or the order of things in the digital on Google search, for example. The implications of this rupture, I contend, redouble the way in which we interact with the world from perceiving data online to analytical operations on an astronomical scale such as big data but they have their beginnings with the humble binary code that poor Leibniz thought would preserve his Christianity.

In this blog I will look at binary code as a hidden architecture that has decentered the centrality of deconstructed language. I will explicate the proposition by exploring the structuralist linguists like Saussure and Jakobson, find a resolution in Foucault’s Order of Things and continue to view the conflict through Derrida’s Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences. We have been exploring in my previous blogs about what Derrida meant when he said that language has invaded the universal problematic and the transcendental signifiers (God, Man) of yore have been ousted by the successive, contaminating, perpetually replicating influence of language. We will now explore language, for the purpose of this blog through the antiquated view as a first order code and as the archive or a self-imagined whole.

If we want to pose the problem of structural language before deconstruction with an added layer of code, then we will quickly end up with a number of propositions absolutely contradictory in relation to the status of discourse in post-structural language. Therefore we must begin where Foucault began and work our way to the world we live in now, which was probably still in the conception in 1966, forming and gestating as the unnamable was proclaiming itself as it is again now, while the birth was in the offing, only under a species of the non-species, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity that has become the digital. I don’t look upon it with fear or anguish, but it is needless to say that Foucault would have been caught off guard by the alien integer outside the natural set that was complete and contained, wreaking havoc upon our vision of everything that could neatly sit within a category.

Failing to avoid the cliché of mentioning Borghes’s Chinese Encyclopedia in the analysis of the Order of Things, I will enumerate the mnemonic list at the centre of his raucous laughter. The list of all animals that exist: [1]

a) Those that belong to the emperor

b) Embalmed ones

c) Those that are trained

d) Suckling pigs e) Mermaids (or Sirens)

f) Fabulous ones

g) Stray dogs

h) Those that are included in this classification

i) Those that tremble as if they were mad

j) Innumerable ones

k) Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush

l) Et cetera

m) Those that have just broken the flower vase

n) Those that, at a distance, resemble flies

Central to his flummoxed observance of this completely alien list is the paradox in the letter (h): those that are included in this classification.

“The central category of animals 'included in the present classification', with its explicit reference to paradoxes we are familiar with, is indication enough that we shall never succeed in defining a stable relation of con-tained to container between each of these categories and that which includes them all: if all the animals divided up here can be placed without exception in one of the divisions of this list, then aren't all the other divisions to be found in that one division too? And then again, in what space would that single, inclusive division have its existence? Absurdity destroys the ‘and’ of the enumeration by making impossible the in where the things enumerated would be divided up. Borges adds no figure to the atlas of the impossible; nowhere does he strike the spark of poetic con-frontation; he simply dispenses with the least obvious, but most com-pelling, of necessities; he does away with the site, the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed.” [2]

This seems, at a surface level to be an epigrammatic rendering of Russel’s paradox in set theory, but when applied to the notions of reified knowledge structures that are presented to us, it leads us to question the notions of everything and difference. That is to say, history, language or the archive are imperially established upon us as a totality of information rather than a unit or a part of a whole that cannot be known or escapes comprehension. Within this notion of everything, that actually is only a part, the archive sets divisive rules for itself, creating taxonomies of things that allow containment and comprehension. There is a moment when we move from the culturally imposed orders to the scientific or philosophical modes of order that reflect upon order itself when we escape the membrane of order and experience it in its pure form. This moment of anagnorisis when Neo awakens outside of the Matrix is when the order is destabilized and relegated to its rightful position in letter (h) and rules of experience and decision making are no longer applicable, or at least necessary. That is to say, if we construct the archive with this imagination, to endure the ordeal of this consciousness, we can have a space that has everything with everything without these artificial taxonomical boundaries.

Language, as Foucault understands it, is a system of exchange predicated on the notion of difference. [3] It is something that burst onto the scene of human evolution in one fell swoop as Levi-Strauss puts it, as an event.[4]

If the notion of attaching meaning to objects by assigning an unnatural or artificial sign that has no inherent connection to the former was arrived at, it automatically forms the whole matrix of language, a spontaneous tabula is formed where everything meets and “the spark of poetic confrontation is met”. Thus, language makes science possible by the artificial separation of things, which allows for the study of causation. Tracing a trajectory of eras of the role of language in this way, Foucault says:

“In this way, analysis has been able to show the coherence that existed, throughout the Classical age, between the theory of representation and the theories of language, of the natural orders, and of wealth and value. It is this configuration that, from the nineteenth century onward, changes entirely; the theory of representation disappears as the universal founda-tion of all possible orders; language as the spontaneous tabula, the primary grid of things, as an indispensable link between representation and things, is eclipsed in its turn; a profound historicity penetrates into the heart of things, isolates and defines them in their own coherence, imposes upon them the forms of order implied by the continuity of time;” [5]

After characterizing language in a structuralist notion, he claims that it is eclipsed for something else. This is the locus of conflict between Foucault and Derrida’s conception of language. Derrida teasingly says

“It would be possible to show that all the names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center have always designated the constant of a presence… transcendentality, consciousness, or conscience, God, man, and so forth.” [6]

(italics mine)

He suggests that the enlightenment center or centrality of the conception of Man can be or has been replaced, only to later suggest that language has invaded the universal problematic, but is different from God and Man in that it is imbricated within the fabric of life, perpetually manifest in speech and hence subject to its influence. Foucault agrees with the assumption of the substitutable transcendentality of man when he says

“It is comforting, however, and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” [7]

However, he believes language, at least in its structural form disappears or is eclipsed with an event.

In order to fully participate in this disagreement, we must formulize what the structuralist understanding of language really is.

-Language is a first order code where the addresser encodes and the addressee decodes. A first order code implies that there can be second order codes. Levi-Strauss in The Raw and the Cooked says “Since myths themselves rest on second-order codes (the first-order codes being those in which language consists), this book thus offers the rough draft of a third-order code, destined to insure the reciprocal possibility of translation of several myths” [8]

and so on. -In the process of encoding (combination of linguistic units), there is an ascending scale of freedom. I have to combine c o m b i n e to form the prior word for it to have meaning but I have more leeway to combine words to form sentences and so on in different contexts.

Decoding involves

a) combination: a message involves constituent signs that are combined with others. “This means that any linguistic unit at one and the same time serves as a context in a more complex linguistic unit.” Therefore, “combination and contexture are two faces of the same operation.” Insights of Ferdinand de Saussure: combination “in in presentia: it is based on two or several terms jointly present in an actual series” [9]

b) selection: “a selection between alternatives implies the possibility of substituting one for the other, equivalent in one respect and different in another. Actually, selection and substitution are two faces of the same operation” Insights of Ferdinand de Saussure: selection “connects terms in absentia as members of a virtual mnemonic series”. [10]

Selection involves signs that are conjoined in the archive of things, the language repository itself but not a direct relation to the message at hand whereas combination involves signs connected through the message. We can therefore imagine the addressee as perceiving a message as a combination of constituent signs in the context of the larger sign and selected from the repository or all possible constituent parts, which Jakobson calls the code and Foucault calls the archive.

Although, theoretically, this is how language still works, something untoward has happened to it. Let us take the proposition that freedom follows in the trajectory of larger composite linguistic units.

The movement of freedom occurs because of the tabula of context that one can create or define for the more complex units resting on the fixity of the previous layer in the “community”. If the meaning of the letter “b” is uncertain, then I cannot create the word bust and if the meaning of the word “bust” is uncertain, then I cannot combine as I please with other words. Jakobson says that the receiver and originator must have the same background and that communication relies on community/ commonality and subsequently influences what the community has in common.

If we were to create another space where the basic unit of communication is not the letter but a simple binary code, then it only follows that the freedom of linguistic combination increases automatically. The binary code, currently is the fundamental linguistic unit of the digital language. Its combinations can represent signs of all languages and all systems of totality in the same final tabula. The massive networks that the internet creates and the subsequent archivization of the data into 0’s and 1’s allows for a form of cultural and communitarian unification of the past “other” categories of totality into one that is not possible otherwise.

By all means, I could have said lol for laugh out loud or made sentences like ‘ima bust yo ass papi’ or written sentences in Spanish on Facebook that are punctuated with smh and omg but it would have been a private code between me and a small community of people to whom I have to communicate the vast cultural data of acronymity, parlance, foreign language etc embedded in each of those messages. You must imagine a hypothetical creation of a code or a language that has signs for every sign of every archive that facilitates an endeavor like this. It is neither humanly possible to create something like this and teach it to a group of people to create the community necessary for communication nor is it a plausible submission that individual archives that imagine themselves to be self contained systems of the whole are likely to undergo. Indeed, it is not a human that facilitates this. The machine is the monster that smashes these worlds together.

The machine is a monster which has immense capacity for memory and storage but is othered as we other the diseased. There are more elegant explanations for the nature of a digital native’s language but in true archeological, Foucauldian sense; we are mainly interested in one of the conditions of possibility. Let us now look at the operations of the addressee in conjunction with those capable by the machine. The machine’s “storage” is akin to a full cabinet of files and its “memory” is the desk upon which the employee of a company pulls up the requisite files to perform an operation. We said the addressee perceives a message as a combination of constituent signs in the context of the larger sign and selected from the repository or all possible constituent parts, which Jakobson calls the code and Foucault calls the archive. We substitute the word memory in the addressee as the faculty that perceives combination, which looks at the context, the table of the sign and pulls up grammatic rules of combination necessary to decode the sequence. The perception and the reception of selection, however, is one that requires an access to the full code as it is a virtual set consisting of all the possible synonymic, antonymic, metaphoric and subjective equivalences that can all only be contained within the total archive (storage) which no addressee has access to. It is here that Derrida would say deconstruction occurs as a sort of Joycean stream of consciousness ensues in the mind.

When I searched for the order of things on google search, however, the machine entered into its storage, its archive, and performed a version of selection and substitution with an access to the whole as only the monstrous machine can and birthed its deconstructed offspring. This access to the whole, off course, is made possible by the binary code that allows such vast networks to form. The othered element of this monstrosity is in the way we other the diseased as Foucault explores in History of Madness and specifically aphasiacs in The Order of Things. In Jakobson’s “The Linguistic Problems of Aphasia”, he says one of the types of the condition is “contexture-deficient aphasia, which…diminishes the extent and variety of sentences. The syntactic rules organizing words into higher units are lost; this loss, called “agrammatism,” causes the degeneration of the sentence into a mere “word heap””. [11]

However, this type of aphasia has the capacity to select and substitute and the google search, and indeed most means of gathering and perceiving data on the internet is performed through selection and substitution ungoverned by the government of grammar or what is “correct” combination. The aphasic google search does not play by the taxonomical boundaries and rules while it interacts with the archive and thus recalibrates and imbricates the text trapped in the archive’s imagination. The result then leaves the reader with that very deconstructed offspring.

I see in the result “the order of things” as something to do with Foucault, colleges, fashion and Canadians. Even between the two results shown from amazon.com, I see that the book is in the context of “cultural studies > history of ideas” and “philosophy> History and surveys”. The free play of word association that the engine performs based on an alogarithm that functions on truly arbitrary levels of preference like statistical percentage of keywords, webpage hits or something of that ilk that results in a constantly mutating, multiplying context makes the perception of context closer resemble that of selection. That is to say, because the reader is simultaneously processing many contexts, what was a temporal process of combination perception in presentia is now in absentia in the virtual mnemonic series, conjoined merely in the code but not in the actual message, selected from something resembling a repository of all that is possible. What you see and read in the digital is therefore a myth and by the time you perform a third order deconstruction upon what is perceived, language has traversed such a distance in space and time that comparing it to Saussure’s encoding and decoding a message is like comparing Facebook to the tin-can telephone.

I grant that everyday life may not seem to have changed by much for the average user of the internet or consumer of digital data. There doesn’t seem to be a seismic change in the way we interact with the world after this invasion. In order to make this change more acute and feel the pungency of its impact, we must move now to a larger picture than you and me reading philosophy online. Let us take a look at how Big Data functions. When a particular reading of data is required, the machine memory extracts, transforms and loads (ETL) data from the various archives in the archive and combines them on the staging table where it is all converted into the same format, the machine level language or the binary code and travels back to the memory where the function is performed.[12]

For example, if we were to research an unauthored text to determine its authorship, then we might rely on intuitions of style and propositions’ falsifications based on an incomplete surveying of an incomplete set of texts. We will read a particular text, judge its combination based on a variety of contexts that exist in our memory, then judge its selection and substitution, which is the vertical axis of style based on a stream of consciousness comparable to the one engendered while reading another known author. Even if the research is thorough by academic standards, it still yields an inadequate, imprecise result that nonetheless is enough to fit into the taxonomical categories of history, our conception of genius and culture that we require to comprehend our world. Big data, on the other hand, has warped this disposition by making possible a real stylometry. Stylometric analysis has thus ruthlessly destabilized canonical and structural notions of authorship and genius like the vertical axis of Shakespeare in the history of Western literature, who it appears collaborated with Marlowe and Fletcher in his works.[13]

The digital has, at least in the humanities taken us down a chimerical road that we thought would lead to a Utopia, but has lead to a heterotopias.

“Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy 'syntax' in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to 'hold together'...heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.” [14]

If this machinistic sterilization of the cultural, literary and social archives seems to almost lead to the scientific, then that connection has already been made. Steve Lohr of the NYT writes “Mr. Jockers, for example, called his research presentation “Computing and Visualizing the 19th-Century Literary Genome.”

Such biological metaphors seem apt, because much of the research is a quantitative examination of words. Just as genes are the fundamental building blocks of biology, words are the raw material of ideas.

“What is critical and distinctive to human evolution is ideas, and how they evolve,” says Jean-Baptiste Michel, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard.”” [15]

Jean-Baptiste, echoing Herbert Spencer in the 18th century who said that sociology is the study of evolution in its most complex form [16] , is inadvertently pointing to a revolutionary change, perhaps the last revolution in the practice of science explored at length in my previous blog. Chris Anderson posits succinctly the condition of science in the big data regime. “The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years. […] But faced with massive data, this approach to science—hypothesize, model, test—is becoming obsolete. […] There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: ‘Correlation is enough.’ We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.” [17]

Big data thus “challenges the way we live and interact with the world”, as Mayer-Schonberger and Cukier say in “Big Data”, “most strikingly, society will need to shed some of its obsession for causality in exchange for simple correlations.” [18]

Causation, after all, was the baggage that came with the invention of a Universe. A language that identified things, everything, through their differences. A basic logic instated in language that required the human to see a combination of units based on difference while relegating the perception of true selection, a connection of different things, impossible to the mind. The machine has moved us away from that world of difference to a world of universal networks and sameness and follows it at the level of its memory that functions through selection with an access to the archive that humans do not. It then mutates our perception of combination, destroys primary context, rendering free-play, association and connection where there was merely difference before.

Sure, taxonomy was an evolutionary adaptation to see causation to make decisions better. And the data we have stored in the archives now are but a mere fraction of the totality of information that exists. However, with the current trajectory of information storage increase, we are fast approaching a world where enough information will exist to make decisions based on correlation alone. In other words, “between the encoded eye and the reflexive knowledge there is a middle region which liberates order itself…it is more confused, more obscure and probably less easy to analyse” but it “relinquishes its immediate and invisible powers, frees itself sufficiently to discover that these orders are perhaps not the only possible ones or the best ones”. [19]

This new monstrosity is, however, giving us the ability to make better decisions using just the selective faculty of language, through correlation alone and it is all done by data collection reaching the level (alas Leibniz is not alive today) of the mind of “God”. The simulacra are latching on to all information; the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave are being consumed by the outsiders and from the vast atomic network of 0’s and 1’s, Laplace’s demon is rearing its ominous head.

[1]. Foucault, Michel. The order of things: an archaeology of the human sciences. New York: Pantheon Books, 19711970. Print.

[2]. ibid

[3]. ibid

[4]. Strauss, Claude. The raw and the cooked. [1st U.S. ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. Print.

[5]. See Citation 1

[6]. Derrida, Jacques. "Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."Writing and difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. . Print.

[7]. See citation 1.

[8]. See citation 4.

[9]. Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in general linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library, 1959. Print.

[10]. ibid.

[11]. Jakobson, Roman, and Linda R. Waugh. On language. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Print.

[12]. nberger, Viktor, and Kenneth Cukier. Big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work, and think. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013. Print.

[13]. Neural Computation in Stylometry I: An Application to the Works of Shakespeare and Fletcher Matthews RAJ & Merriam TVN Lit Linguist Computing (1993) 8 (4): 203-209. doi: 10.1093/llc /8.4.203.

[14]. See Citation 1.

[15]. Lohr, Steve. "Dickens, Austen and Twain, Through a Digital Lens." New York Times 26 Jan. 2013, sec. Technology: n. pag. Print.

[16]. Perrin, Robert. "Herbert Spencer's Four Theories of Social Evolution." JSTOR: n. pag. Print.

[17]. Anderson, Chris. "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete." Wired Magazine 23 June 2008: n. pag. Print.

[18]. See Citation 12.

[19]. See Citation 1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/binary-code-invades-the-universal-problematic

The Machinistic Paradigm Collapse

anirudh — 2014-04-15T17:03:22Z

Looking at the example of the scientific practices surrounding protein folding study, this blog explores the modern relevance of Thomas Kuhn’s conception of a paradigm. This blog posits that because of the heavy reliance on computational technology and simulation, the philosophical basis of Kuhnian scientific paradigm has ceased to exist and hence science, along with the Digital Humanities has moved into a post structuralist age.

One of the great scientific challenges that have ridden along the furrowed brows of all three branches of natural science’s practitioners is of understanding protein folding. This, to the uninitiated as I am, is the process by which newly synthesized proteins or new born proteins, as random coils are given their biological destinies by their amino acid sequences through folding in three dimensional space into their secondary, tertiary or quaternary structures. [1] It helps me to think of a paper rocket that is a plain sheet of paper, a trapped 2 dimensional figure, limp and physically impotent as if in Abbot’s Flatland until it is introduced to a 3-dimensional space and itself becomes a 3 dimensional entity which can then travel particular distances, velocities and directions based all on the precise folding. Proteins, straying from their destined path of structure, even by the slightest can become toxic, cause allergies and many neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and prion. [2] This immediately places the uncovering of the precise folding pathways in the interest of the whole modern medical enterprise. Indeed, this old scientific problem dates back almost a century to the experiments of Anson and Mirsky in the 1930’s. [3]It is also quite possible that the story of protein folding, in which machine vision replaces theory and mathematics, unveils another story; the erosion of the scientific paradigm itself.

Thomas Kuhn, in his 1962 book called the “Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, gave the word paradigm its contemporary meaning. At a mere definitional level, Kuhn describes the paradigms as “universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of practitioners.” [4] In terms of methodology, a paradigm governs what is to be observed, what questions are asked, how they are asked, how the data is interpreted and how the experiments are conducted. However, Kuhn had a greater vision for a paradigm when he characterized it as an emergent system from a revolution which means it is a change in the world order itself. Or to camber the previous sentence, paradigms order the world around them. Commenting on the scientists world view, Kuhn says “in so far as their (scientists) only recourse to that world is through what they see and do, we may want to say that after a revolution, scientists are responding to a different world…what were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards”.

My previous blog on the collapse of the semiotic sphere of capture spoke about the substitution every epoch of the center of the sphere or transcendental signifier that lends meaning to the world upon which it reigned. It, however, (as a consequence of Derrida’s concentration on results more than process) did not lay down the steps that led to the replacement of the center of meaning with a different set of signifiers leading to a different vision of the world. Kuhn, on the other hand, adumbrates the exact process by which this paradigmatic transformation in scientific world order takes place. As a non scientist and a denizen of a post metaphysical age, I’m at a severe disadvantage when trying to comprehend what it must mean to have these seismic shifts in the way the mind is ordered and perceives the world so I tried to meditate De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (on the revolutions of the heavenly sphere) through the Renaissance Astronomer Copernicus to try to understand the process. [5]

[6]

The Ptolemaic earth centric model, his astronomical system, was first developed during the time of Christ. This system worked admirably in the prediction of changing positions of both stars and planets in the ancient world, far outstripping any other system. However, over the fifteen centuries leading upto Copernicus, many holes and problems, what Kuhn refers to as anomalies, started appearing in this system. It could not account for certain planetary positions, equinoxes and these problems kept compounding as astronomical observation became more sophisticated as the theoretical basis grew more antiquated. Almost the whole enterprise of astronomy was involved with the mitigation and reduction of minor discrepancies by adjustments and tweaks made to the Ptolemaic system of concentric circles. Kuhn explains this as a process of resilience where scientists play a game of Whac-a-mole and as the apparatus of discovery complicates the science much further than the accuracy allowed by the existing paradigm, the theoretical stereotypes within the paradigm are loosened to accommodate the discrepancies so much that they bring about their own collapse. As Karl Popper says in “Science as Falsification”, the strength of a scientific theory, or any theory, is its falsifiability or is directly proportional to its prohibition of certain observations. He warns that when a theory, or in this case, a paradigm, has been refuted, its adherents attempt ad hoc auxiliary modifications or reinterpretations of the theory to rescue it from refutation by what he calls a conventionalist twist.[7] This rescuing is possible, but it comes at the price of destroying its scientific status and moving it into the metaphysical or mythical realm. By the time Alfonso X came about in the thirteenth century, looking upon the Ptolemaic model as a scandal, he was claiming that if God has consulted him when creating the universe, he would have received better advice. [8] Finally, in the 16th century the painful process of denial ended with Copernicus’s rejection of the Ptolemaic paradigm in favor of his own heliocentric paradigm as in the diagram above.

One could look to paradigm shifts in the humanities and social sciences and draw parallels to the scientific ones with the birth of deconstruction in the evolution of the text as explored in the previous blog but that would be across purposes as Kuhn himself prohibits this application. In the preface of his book, he explains that he concocted the concept of a paradigm precisely to distinguish the social from the natural sciences. Some like M.L Handa have attempted this concomitance but that sort of endeavor will be beyond the scope of this blog.[9] The windows of the laboratory will, for the most part, be shut out from the outside world in this blog. This argument was, perhaps easier to make under past paradigms as Bertrand Russell, when he sought to disprove the Natural Law argument in “Why I’m not a Christian” says “that (natural law) was a favorite argument all through the eighteenth century, especially under the influence of Sir Isaac Newton and his cosmogony. People observed the planets going around the sun according to the law of gravitation, and they thought that God had given a behest to these planets to move in that particular fashion, and that was why they did so. That was, of course, a convenient and simple explanation that saved them the trouble of looking any further for any explanation of the law of gravitation. Nowadays we explain the laws of gravitation in a somewhat complicated fashion that Einstein has introduced…you no longer have the sort of Natural Law that you had in the Newtonian system, where, for some reason that nobody could understand, nature behaved in a uniform fashion.”[10] Science may have inherited its ontology from philosophy which inherited its ontology from theology in the past but those dendrites in the past neurological connections seem to have been excised in the present.

Kuhn says that the striking feature of doing scientific research is the attempt to discover what is known in advance, hence identifying the scientific hypothesis as the locus of the human imagination in the scientific praxis. Popper, in “Science: Conjectures and Refutations”, says “At the same time I realized that such myths may be developed, and become testable; that historically speaking all--or very nearly all--scientific theories originate from myths, and that a myth may contain important anticipations of scientific theories. Examples are Empedocles' theory of evolution by trial and error, or Parmenides' myth of the unchanging block universe in which nothing ever happens and which, if we add another dimension, becomes Einstein's block universe (in which, too, nothing ever happens, since everything is, four-dimensionally speaking, determined and laid down from the beginning).”[11]

If we do run the hypothesis through a philosophical treatment, then as C.S Pierce observed, it is a form of abductive reasoning unlike the deductive and inductive reasoning that may play a more dominant role in other stages of the scientific praxis. Abductive reasoning takes the form of a guess where the scientist looks at a particular phenomenon in nature like a parched, dead tree and ventures a hypothesis that there was no rainfall.[12] While β (the result; i.e the dried up tree) could have been due to a host of causes a (eg forest fire), the scientist decides to propose a cause, α, based on the economy or likelihood of explaining power which is also called the Occam’s razor principle. Pierce said that abductive reasoning is "very little hampered" by rules of logic…Oftenest even a well-prepared mind guesses wrong. But the modicum of success of our guesses far exceeds that of random luck, and seems born of attunement to nature by instincts developed or inherent, especially insofar as best guesses are optimally plausible and simple in the sense of the ‘facile and natural’, as by Galileo’s natural light of reason.”[13]

It is precisely at this juncture that the scientific consciousness, ordered by the paradigm of an age escapes the laboratory and is subject to governance of the transcendental signifier potentates atop the Olympus of the outer world. The Occam’s razor principle of parsimony itself is premised on the theological notion of its time that the simplest explanation conceivable by man is likely the best one because man is made in the image of God. Popper further explicated on Pierce’s postulations in his hypothetico-deductive model in the twentieth century when he called the hypothesis just “a guess”.[14] The guess that the dead tree was brought about by a drought is then one that comes from the epoch of Being in which non-scientists live.

We must remember that a paradigm is a universal belief of scientists that permits the very selection process of the pursuit. The guess that eventually becomes the hypothesis is one that is made robust as many abductions are rejected and modified by better abductions. Although the eventual hypothesis could be one rising solely from the hermetically sealed paradigm, one cannot ignore this process happening behind the scientific consciousness. Methodologically distinct though the paradigm remains from cultural pursuits, its ontologies remain the same. Derrida, while analyzing Levi Strauss’s Elementary Structures: The Savage Minds says “On the one hand, he will continue in effect to contest the value of the nature/culture opposition. More than thirteen years after the Elementary Structures, The Savage Minds faithfully echoes the text I have just quoted: “The opposition between nature and culture which I have previously insisted on seems today to offer value which is above all methodological.” And this methodological value is not affected by its “ontological” non-value…: “It would not be enough to have absorbed particular humanities into a genera humanity; this first enterprise prepares the way for others ... which belong to the natural and exact sciences: to reintegrate culture into nature, and finally, to reintegrate life into the totality of its physiochemical conditions””[15]

If then there is this neurological connection that exists as a fast multiplying parasite that is a different species by the time it enters the laboratory then it must be true that the paradigm is vulnerable to extinction when that mutated parasite, the postmodern idea, comes from an alien world of no ontological or transcendental fixity. In other words, along with the collapse of Gebser’s integral sphere of semiotic capture, the structure of the scientific paradigm as Kuhn saw it should have also collapsed. Kuhn preempts this thought, unintentionally perhaps when he says “Once a first paradigm through which to view nature has been found, there is no such thing as research in the absence of any paradigm. To reject one paradigm without simultaneously substituting another is to reject science itself.” This is evocative of Heidegger when he laments that with the end of the metaphysical age where there are no more universal structures of consciousness, comes the death of real art. To test the validity of Kuhn’s challenge, we come back to our initial foray into the world of protein folding discovery.

Recently, there was a multi-player online game called Foldit where players have to collaborate and compete to create accurate protein structure models. Foldit player solutions started to create waves in the scientific community when player solutions began to outperform the most state-of-the-art methods including the other computational methods. Two particular “recipes” became particularly famous and a paper on this discovery called “Algorithm Discovery by Protein Folding Game Players” says “benchmark calculations show that the new algorithm independently discovered by scientists and by Foldit players outperforms previously published methods. Thus, online scientific game frameworks have the potential not only to solve hard scientific problems, but also to discover and formalize effective new strategies and algorithms.”[16]

This is not a typical example of a state of affairs but an extreme example illustrative of a larger technological shift in the business of science. As Pierce said about the “attunement to nature by instincts” the computer game is a case of this instinctual visual acuity being harnessed by machine intelligence. This mode of scientific production, I would posit at a fundamental level, is completely incompatible with the Kuhnian conception of a paradigm.

The paradigm is not merely a set of rules and shared assumptions but a rigid system of inherited dogma that draws the horizon of exploration universally but is limited in scope and precision at its inception. Therefore normal science (science conducted at non-revolutionary times within paradigms) is a mop-up operation or “an attempt to force nature into the pre-formed and relatively inflexible box that the paradigm supplies”. Normal, non-revolutionary science is a relatively linear, cumulative process whose horizon is defined by the inherited beliefs, theories, methods and the mental labor of the mop-up crew. The moment when computer modeling began to provide the fineness of observation that it currently does, it replaced the physical, dynamical modus vivendi of mathematical science and started to determine the horizon of the scientific endeavor.

Dr. Bengt Nӧlting’s book, Protein Folding Kinetics: Biophysical Methods, begins with a quote from Faust, which in my opinion is innocent, if not naïve.

Then shall I see, with vision clear,

How secret elements cohere,

And what the universe engirds,

And give up huckstering with words.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

He says, with the advent of computational modeling and experimental advances in technology, “the pathways and structures of early folding events and the transition state structures of fast folding proteins can now be studied in far more detail…which… allows fast processes that would normally be hidden in kinetic studies to be revealed.”[17] He is then able to see, with vision clear, how elements cohere on screen, he thinks. However, if we are to recall Kuhn, seeing in science is a sense given by the paradigm that allows the scientist to observe nature but truly see it in coherence with the paradigmatic ordering of her world view. Therefore, Nӧlting is not really seeing at all (unless he programmed the computer simulation which brings him a little closer). He merely has “the notion that the quantitation of kinetic rate constants and the visualization of protein structures along the folding pathway will lead to an understanding of function and mechanism and will aid the understanding of important biological processes and disease states through detailed mechanistic knowledge” (italics mine). “Beyond this, protein structures along the folding pathway can now be visualized at the level of individual amino acid residues in nearly any biologically relevant time scale. This detailed mechanistic knowledge will further aid the understanding of biological processes and disease states, and will eventually help us to find rational ways for re-designing biological processes, and to find cures for diseases.”

In “Protein Folding, Misfolding and Aggregation Classical Themes and Novel Approaches”, Victor Muῆoz furthers the notion of science’s boundaries being drawn by technology when he says “prevailing views about the mechanisms of protein folding have closely followed the idiosyncrasies in the catalog of available proteins and experimental approaches.” Although computational simulation is distinct from experimental techniques, one can interpret this statement, based on the rest of book, that the approaches include predictive simulation. The history of the development of protein folding study has been a technologically determined one of serendipity. When new experimental data on folding and unfolding rates emerged, Muῆoz says that “theoreticians immediately saw this avalanche of new experimental results as an opportunity to test results from theory and computer simulations, leading to the first de facto connection between the worlds of experiment and theory in protein folding.”[18] Therefore, the world of experiment and theory, a process that was previously mediated by the paradigm is now mediated by computer simulations. The structure of scientific pursuits is now determined by the randomness of programming and computer engineering.

This phenomenon of computational capabilities exceeding the mathematical conception is not contained to the world of biophysics but extends to material sciences like nanotechnology, ecology and many others. As was postulated in my previous blog, this is probably another symptom of the techno-capitalistic regime that demands to be spoken to through images rather than the esoteric language of mathematics. When Fred Whipple’s wanted to test his “dirty snowball” theory, he proved it by pointing towards Haley’s Comet, when Einstein wanted to prove his theory he pointed again to a light dance in the heavens. When the cosmic magic shows can no longer enthrall the science funding entity, computer simulations are all that are left in the midden heap. Remember that the success of a paradigm rests in its propagation and its appeal to future generations of scientists. Therefore, even if the atypical scientist is still carrying out research under a dogmatic rubric, it cannot gain the fervor and universal sense of order when big pharmaceuticals fund only the technological science and the Intellectual Property regime spurs the individual scientists to work at breakneck speeds allowed only by computers.

According to David Berry in “Understanding Digital Humanities”, one of its main objectives is to use computational methods to answer existing questions or challenge theoretical paradigms to generate new questions.”[19] The emergence of the non-human computational methods in the business of natural sciences has certainly generated new questions around an observation; meaning in the sciences has eerily followed on the destructive path of the Digital Humanities, slaying the Kuhnian paradigm in a twin collapse with the integral sphere of semiotic capture.

[1] Nolting, Bengt. Protein Folding Kinetics Biophysical Methods. Berlin: Springer, 1999. eBook.

[2]ibid

[3] Munoz, Victor. Protein Folding, Misfolding and Aggregation Classical Themes and Novel Approaches. The Royal Society of Chemistry, 2008. eBook.

[4] Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1962. Print.

[5] ibid

[6]Picture taken from http://tofspot.blogspot.in/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smackdown-down-for.html

[7] Popper, Karl. "Science as Falsification." Conjectures and Refutations. (1963): n. page. Web. 13 Apr. 2014.

[8] See citation 4

[9] Handa, M. L. (1986) "Peace Paradigm: Transcending Liberal and Marxian Paradigms". Paper presented in "International Symposium on Science, Technology and Development, New Delhi, India, March 20–25, 1987, Mimeographed at O.I.S.E., University of Toronto, Canada (1986)

[10] Russel, Bertrand. "Why I am Not a Christian an Examination of the God‐Idea and Christianity." England. 06 03 1927. Address.

[11] See citation 7

[12] Peirce, C. S. "On the Logic of drawing History from Ancient Documents especially from Testimonies" (1901), Collected Papers v. 7

[13] ibid

[14] Popper, Karl (2002), Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge, London, UK: Routledge

[15] Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, J Derrida, 1966.

[16] Khatiba, Firas, and Seth Cooper. "Algorithm discovery by protein folding game players." PNAS. (2011): n. page. Web. 13 Apr. 2014. .

[17] See citation 1

[18] See citation 3

[19]Berry, David. Understanding Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Web.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/the-machinistic-paradigm-collapse

Fishing is the New Black: Contemporary Art Imitates the Digital

anirudh — 2014-03-28T12:51:40Z

Marshall Mcluhan once said, “Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.” Philosophers, on the other hand, think about things in retrospect and hence, as much as Derrida’s writings about the collapse of the semiotic structures of capture and meaning say about the Digital age, Mark Rothko’s art, a generation ahead of Derrida in depicting this collapse, can say about the future that it saw in visceral and energetic forms. To understand Rothko’s paintings we must sit through a short history of the different epochs of Being and their epistemological shifts before we get to the Digital Age about which Rothko had violent and destructive premonitions.

According to Heidegger, the metaphysical age is one that lasts from Plato, where we began to explore the fundamental nature of being through ultimate, transcendental forms that show us diaphanous glimpses of themselves through earthly, imperfect forms to Nietzsche or Heidegger himself.[1]

Hans Belting, in his book Likeness and Presence talks about the transcendental signifiers during the Medieval Age as being transferred to the West by the Byzantines. These signifiers existed as iconotypes such as the Last Supper, the Resurrection, the Cross and the decapitation of John the Baptist which are not just treated as “art” by European cultures that inherited them but as objects of veneration that held in them the Holy itself.

	A whole system of beliefs, superstitions, hopes and fears and, indeed, Being, is constructed by the people’s responses to this cathedral of a semiotic structure. While God creates primordial forms, the artist in this age is a cosmocrator who imitates God and creates ideal forms of these iconotypes that anchor meaning for everybody.[2] Ranging from Da Vinci’s perfect depiction of the Last Supper, the boundaries of the Byzantine dome of meaning is depicted through Michelangelo’s interior of the dome of the Sistine Chapel. While the curtains close on the Middle Ages, they drape with them, the iconotypes of Christianity.

A whole system of beliefs, superstitions, hopes and fears and, indeed, Being, is constructed by the people’s responses to this cathedral of a semiotic structure. While God creates primordial forms, the artist in this age is a cosmocrator who imitates God and creates ideal forms of these iconotypes that anchor meaning for everybody.[2]

Ranging from Da Vinci’s perfect depiction of the Last Supper, the boundaries of the Byzantine dome of meaning is depicted through Michelangelo’s interior of the dome of the Sistine Chapel. While the curtains close on the Middle Ages, they drape with them, the iconotypes of Christianity.

With the coming of the perspectable age of art, as Gebser puts it, three dimensional space is discovered through science and Copernicus where the world is shifted into a heliocentric system, the iconotypes permanently lose their centrality and as Derrida puts it, are substituted. While the sculptors like Brunelleschi were creating three dimensional art and the interiors of the Protestant Churches were vacant of iconotypes, artists like Bernini, by clinging on so deeply to the iconotypes that were dead, infused melancholy into their swansong.[3]

According to Heidegger, the aesthetic that follows is called “World Picture” which in art is similar to Oswald Spengler’s idea of infinite space. The transcendental signifier is that of infinity and the works of Dutch painters like Hobbema depict this metaphysical center of the age through their endless skies. Then the impressionists like Manet and Van Gogh break this three dimensional space further. During the modern age, Gebser’s integral sphere of consciousness is created through the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso who painted their archetypes on what he saw as its curved walls.[4] The archetypes, in a Jungian sense, are part of the universal subconscious and hence pervasive through all cultures unlike the Christian iconotypes of the Middle Ages.

According to Heidegger, the aesthetic that follows is called “World Picture” which in art is similar to Oswald Spengler’s idea of infinite space. The transcendental signifier is that of infinity and the works of Dutch painters like Hobbema depict this metaphysical center of the age through their endless skies.

Then the impressionists like Manet and Van Gogh break this three dimensional space further. During the modern age, Gebser’s integral sphere of consciousness is created through the paintings of Cezanne and Picasso who painted their archetypes on what he saw as its curved walls.[4] The archetypes, in a Jungian sense, are part of the universal subconscious and hence pervasive through all cultures unlike the Christian iconotypes of the Middle Ages.

Mark Rothko, however, in his 1946 multi-forms, was busy orchestrating the Skywalkerian collapse of this integral sphere and taking the Jungian archetypes-myths, Gods, heroes- with him. Peter Barry argues in “Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural (1995)” that in the twentieth century, through a complicated sequence of historical and political, technological and scientific events, “these centers were destroyed or eroded”. The Great War destroys the notion of steady material progress and the Holocaust destroys the notion of Europe as the epi-center of human civilization. As a second coming of Copernican destruction of being, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity destroys the idea of time and space as fixed and central absolutes.

Rothko stopped naming his paintings because they unnecessarily curtailed the horizon of meaning so we will call it the sequence of the next three paintings, which depict the melting down of the modernist archetypes into blurred, overlapping chunks of colour.[5]

Gradually, these amorphous blobs of color congeal into squares and rectangles of intense light. These gradually intensifying shapes of light depict the semiotic vacancy and the absence of transcendental signifiers.

Rothko’s self-luminous squares and rectangles, however, perform an added function from dramatically enacting the past destruction which is to show premonitions of a future that will be dominated by the luminous screens of televisions, cell phones and digital constructions of meaning.[6]

	In the famous Seagrams Murals like the Black on Maroon, the paintings are no longer emanating light, standing as Cassandra like, diaphanous premonitions of a distant future but consist of colored rectangles engulfed by a menacing black band that gravitate the viewer into this world of semiotic vacancy, into what will become the digital world.

By the time he is commissioned to do artwork for a Chapel in Houston that is dedicated to him (Rothko Chapel), all the transcendental signifiers that anchor any sort of meaning have been deconstructed and his canvases depict a triumph of the nothingness. When Hans Belting, in "The End of the History of Art?" ponders as to why "artists today often decline to participate in an ongoing history of art at all", it is precisely because of this rupture that Rothko and Derrida after him observed.

They almost set the stage for contemporary art, which is a private art of the particular artist who constructs her own meta-narrative by taking destroyed forms, dead batteries from the debris of previously ruptured spheres and attempts to stitch them together into a temporal Frankenstein’s monster of an art form.

Art now imitates the digital space as it isn’t an activity of vision and the artist isn’t a cosmocrator. In the Digital Humanities, knowledge isn’t practiced as in old academia which is a legatee of the Romantic conception of the genius as standing on the vanguard of society. Art in the contemporary age is simply anything that is taken out of its context of banality and knowledge in the digital age is simply any data set with commentary. Big data is the unacknowledged legislator of our time and not poets, as Heidegger would lament. John David Ebert likens the contemporary artist like Anselm Kiefer or Gerhard Richter to a fisherman of forms who has to hybridize old forms and discarded signifiers and re-territorialize them into new semiospheres. Nishant Shah, in a lecture on the ‘Histories of the Internet’, said that the best characterization of the Digital he knew was that of its etymology. The Latin Digitus signifies fingers, toes and perhaps the individual phalanges that, useless on their own, come together to make up the whole appendage like the functioning of Bit Torrent which takes apart a file into hundreds of pieces which it downloads individually from seeders around the world and stitches them back together. Indeed, it seems as if the ontology of the digital itself is imitated in the ontology of contemporary art which stitches together individually discarded and functionless, archaic forms. These radical vagaries of art forms caused by the collapse of the transcendental signifiers and the semiotic vacancy, seems to also be mirrored in the multi-forms that the Digital Humanities take in the mind of the Digital Humanists who have vastly differing conceptions of what the Digital Humanities really are/is. Just as art in the contemporary age is not anchored in a metaphysical center of meaning, Digital Humanists also lack an ontological fixity about their discipline which leads to the larger issue with digital humanities as a domain itself, wherein there is a concern about the rather diffused nature of the space, an invisible or missing locus; a critical or political standpoint.

[1]. Art after Metaphysics, John David Ebert, 2013

[2].Ibid.

[3].Ibid.

[4].Ibid.

[5].Ibid.

[6].Ibid.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/fishing-is-the-new-black

Structure, Sign and Play in the Digital

anirudh — 2014-03-28T08:49:07Z

I have come to realize, in my research, that I have been looking for and staring at the various entry points of the Digital Humanities by looking at the primordial lighting arrangements and formative forces that are in play in it. So far, there have been some clear emergent patterns like the fact that the Digital Humanities is the story of the University itself and a condition of the socio-political and economic forces shaping our education system.

In the previous blog post, we inferred from Derrida’s comparison of the University to a language act that the Digital Humanities are a mere reorganization of the Humanities faculty to curate more power in a self serving way.

I’m going to now push further in the direction of Derrida’s treatment of language and take it a few steps back to his ideas on semiotics (signs and meaning) itself in his Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (SSPDHS). In this paper, Derrida is just beginning to lay out his deconstructive ideas of play and sign in language. To understand this work one could turn to Terry Eagleton, who explains in “Literary Theory: An Introduction (1996)”, “Western Philosophy…. has also been in a broader sense, ‘logocentric’, committed to a belief in some ultimate ‘word’, presence, essence, truth or reality which will act as the foundation for all our thought, language and experience. It has yearned for the sign which will give meaning to all others, – ‘the transcendental signifier’ – and for the anchoring, unquestioning meaning to which all our signs can be seen to point (the transcendental signified’).”

Many philosophers have attempted to explain the phenomena of changing epochs in humanity’s construction of meaning and given these structures of consciousness (as Jean Gebser calls it) or Beings (as Heidegger calls it) different names. Peter Sloterdalls this structure a macrosphere and Jean Gebser calls it an integral sphere where semiotic capture occurs. Derrida, in SSijk cPDHS starts off by talking about a center that has always existed through the ages as eidos (essence), arche (first cause), telos (ultimate purpose), God, Family, Democracy, the World Spirit and so forth in these structure of consciousness that have been the transcendental signifiers of all the meaning that was signified. However, since each of these concepts founded whole systems of thought, language and consciousness, they were never themselves part of the matrix of meaning that its metaphysical presence engendered and remained untainted by the play of linguistic differences. These concepts alone were always indisputable so ultimately ended up limiting the amount of free play that could exist. We can think of the idea of the Resurrection as being an iconotype in the Middle Ages at the center which allowed many meanings of ascension and mythic stories to be constructed around the metaphor but the Resurrection itself was never something that was immutable, remaining the “point at which substitution of contents, elements and terms was no longer possible”. However, until now this center always got displaced at the end of an epoch to be replaced by a different center or set of transcendental signifiers. Derrida says "the entire history of the concept of structure must be thought of as a series of substitutions of center for center."[1]

He, however, speaks of a rupture that happens in fin-de-siècle and early 20^th century thought where there is a break in tradition. He says "From then on it was probably necessary to begin to think that there was no center, that the center would not be thought in the form of a being-present, that the center had no natural locus, that it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of non- locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play. This moment was that in which language invaded the universal problematic; that in which, in the absence of a center or origin, everything became discourse-provided we can agree on this word—that is to say, when everything became a system where the central signified, the original or transcendental signified, is never absolutely present outside a system of differences. The absence of the transcendental signified extends the domain and the interplay of signification ad infinitum." This collapse of the previous structures of consciousness marked by the assimilation of all signifiers into the domain of what Derrida calls "play" essentially makes the word sign itself obsolete and thus begins to lay out the architecture for the digital (non) structure. When the digital humanities attempt to infuse meaning into the world, they do so in networks of information that don’t have one central source and travel freely, unfettered by coagulations of immutable signifiers. The digital space of meaning construction is essentially the archetypal domain of Derrida’s free play. Without authority, it is a domain where knowledge is created by the self, collaboratively and from peer to peer. In this semiotically vacant world, the walls of Gebser’s integral sphere have collapsed and even the virtual walls that once existed among archives and libraries are broken by the digitization of materials. Through the quantum quarks and leaps of the free play between the signifiers and the signified (which are constantly interchanging roles) there is a cluttering of the digital space of forms appearing through a mish mash of interdisciplinarity, multi-institutional, multi-stakeholder learning and teaching and openness which includes several age groups and socio-economic groups previously left out of these semiotic praxes.

Derrida says in SSPDHS about new discourses in the human sciences that "since these concepts are not elements or atoms and since they are taken from a syntax and a system, every particular borrowing drags along with it the whole of metaphysics." This recent rupture, however, has produced new forms in the Digital that is disconnected with the whole of metaphysics through a process that he calls "supplementarity". "This movement of the free play, permitted by the lack, the absence of a center or origin, is the movement of supplementarily. One cannot determine the center, the sign which supplements it, which takes its place in its absence-because this sign adds itself, occurs in addition, over and above, comes as a supplement." Basically, the absence of the center is compensated by infinite substitutions in the movement of play which do two mutually exclusive things:

Replace the absent center
In doing so, add new things to the structure itself.

Derrida says that the field, or lets supplant Digital Humanities where he is talking about ethnology, is a finite one, but because of the founding nature of the absent centre, it allows for infinite substitutions, leaving us with a "superabundance of the signifier, its supplementary character, is thus the result of a finitude, that is to say, the result of a lack which must be supplemented." Put differently, the interdisciplinarity, the blogosphere and the many headed countenance machines of the digital space leave us with a skewed ratio of signifiers. Wikipedia is a great example of this phenomenon where the lack of a semiotic centre that exists allows infinite substitutions by various signifying entities (editors, both man and machine) and things are added in the process to the structure itself making it a great example of supplementarity in a new discourse. Through the concept of hyper-links, it forms a sort of infinite structure of freeplay in a (non) structure that has no beginning or end. This is indeed only possible because of the vacancy at the centre of our consciousness. If we were to look at something like Conrad Gesner’s Bibliotheca Universalis in 1545[2]to contrast, it was only ever able to list all known books ever printed within the semiotic structure of the day and didn’t perform a supplementary act in quite the same way.

Another point of departure is in Derrida’s reading of Levi-Strauss’s analogy of the Bricoleur. Bricolage is a skill which involves taking bits and forms that exist and refashioning them to create something new. Derrida says, "the elements which the ‘bricoleur’ collects and uses are ‘pre-constrained’ like the constitutive units of myth, the possible combinations of which are restricted by the fact that they are drawn from the language where they already possess a sense which sets a limit on the freedom of manoeuvre… The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth." In the Digital Age, the myth of the engineer is resurrected, to borrow an iconotype. Using a programmatic language of her own, the engineer creates customized spaces of knowledge production and learning like MOOCs or Knowledge Commons that house discourses that are remotely connected to the other world and sometimes as Ian Bogost[3]states, even find the connection undesirable.

Although there has clearly been a rupture from the metaphysical age, there will exist a constant need to look back at our history for philosophical answers about the digital as we are still using the same tools (language, semiotics) of the past to explain a break with the past. Indeed, "the quality and the fecundity of a discourse are perhaps measured by the critical rigor with which this relationship to the history of metaphysics and to inherited concepts is thought."

[1]. Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences, J Derrida, 1966.

[2]. Print Culture and Enlightenment Thought, Elizabeth Eisenstein, 1988.

[3].http://dhpoco.org/blog/2013/05/10/open-thread-the-digital-humanities-as-a-historical-refuge-from-raceclassgendersexualitydisability/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/structure-sign-play-in-digital

Digital Humanities: The Ecto-Parasite

anirudh — 2014-03-12T13:04:28Z

This blog entry, exploring Jacques Derrida's Mochlos can be read in three ways. The numbers below refer to the cells which should be read in the specified order. A.) 1-3-4: This essay views knowledge and the University as a technology and asks whether the Digital Humanities under this framework is unnecessary and elitist. We analyze the elitism through Kants attempts to distinguish the University's duties of truth and action and then find out why Derrida thinks this distinction is impossible to make because of the nature language. B.) 1-2-4: This essay starts off the same way but goes into the devouring margins of the University, whether its possible to safeguard against intrusion if the University is viewed as a language act and flips the question to see if the University is a parasite on the outside world and uses the Digital Humanities in this negotiation of power. It goes further to see if this parasitism is inevitable where there is language. C.) 2-4: This is a subset of the previous essay but stands alone as a commentary on a different kind of effect of capitalism on the University from the one explored in the previous blog.

1.) As the breathing pod opens to show us a scarred skull being covered by a black helmet, we are for the first time in Star Wars reminded that Darth Vader is both human and machine, sick flesh and well metal, temporal visage and permanent facade. Now assume this melancholic disposition as a condition of the University and you immediately have many entry points into Jacques Derrida’s Mochlos which is his meditation on the remains of the University since Kant wrote his Conflict of the Faculties. If we were to begin at the beginning, then Kant’s pre-inaugural vantage point suggests a natural birth of the University. In the very opening of the Conflict of the Faculties, Kant says of the University,”this is not a bad idea”. Commenting on this seemingly flippant remark, Derrida says “And, with his well-known humor, abridging a more laborious and tortuous story, he pretends to treat this idea as a find, as a happy solution that would have passed through the head of a very imaginative person, as the invention, in sum, of a fairly rational device that some ingenious operator would have sent to the state for a patent”. Just as with Vader, though, there is nothing natural about the nature or origin of the university or its internal structures, which seem to be based on principles, but are actually the effect of non-university agencies, be it the Prussian bureaucracies in the time of Kant or the hyper capitalized society today. The nature of the synthetic origin story, however, goes to a more fundamental level than any social influences, to the technological birth of knowledge and the technology that runs on and runs for knowledge; the University. It is a permanent façade like a screen that has always been invisible to the movie-goer even when it was silver. On the essence and destination of the Western University, Derrida says it “tries to ponder its essence and its destination in terms of responsibility, with a stable reference to the one idea of knowledge, technology, the state and the nation, up to the very limit at which a memorial gathering of thought makes a sudden sign toward the entirely-other of a terrifying future.” This synthetic vision of the University is essential to achieve a resistant reading of Kant who viewed the University as a largely analytic and non-synthetic (in the chemical and the Kantian sense) entity in its essence and destination. The creation stories of knowledge, from the cave paintings to the printing press to the University are not just incomplete without technology but self-effacing. What do I mean by this? We look to one of Derrida’s modern University responsibilities for the answer. “In the ties of the university to society, in the production, structure, archivization and transmission of knowledges and technology (of knowledge as technologies), in the political stakes of knowledge, in the very idea of knowledge and truth, lies the advent of something entirely other.” (bold mine) We have to now begin to think of knowledge itself as a technology, as a tool to transmit thought efficiently by bundling it, chronologising it and indeed as a technology that re-organizes itself through other technology, sometimes in the form of a University, in order to make its transmission more efficient. Derrida, however, mistakenly proceeds to characterize the techno-political structure of knowledge as a modern condition as having evolved out of the industrial age and evolved past political and juridical ethics. “Given a certain techno-political structure of knowledge, the status, function and destination of the university would no longer stem from the juridical or ethico-political language of responsibility.” Here he makes the case for an observed change in the state-of-affairs so fundamental that the ‘what’ and the ‘to who’ of the University’s responsibility changes. When the archivization and the transmission of knowledge uniquely and radically changes as a result of a techno-politico-capital agency then the exigent pre-matter in the University attempts to form a discipline to countenance this, not unlike Digital Humanities. If our previous understanding of technology and knowledge remains true, then a discipline called Digital Humanities (which can only be formed by pre-supposing the latter proposition) remains pre-mature, if not misguided. This is a second entry point for the Digital Humanities after the one hypothesized in the last blog entry which involved a propitiation of the humanities to capitalism.	2.) The Conflict of Konigsberg explored the extent to which the modern university is plagued by the influence of capitalism. Although Kant’s writing is animated by external threats he perceives to the University, he refrains from referring to the industrial influences on the University as slurs or view them as a complete disaster. He did not, for instance, fear the influence of competing institutions, social structures, ideas of knowledge and education within the University. Today, however, “there can be very serious competition and border-conflicts between non-university centers of research and university faculties claiming at once to be doing research and transmitting knowledge, to be producing and reproducing knowledge.” These non-academic entities are often placed in the university because certain research styles and practices or even types of research are deemed by the politico-capitalist regime to escape the academic elements of the university. The regime calculates that data banks maybe the best forms of storage and non-scholars, albeit trained in the universities, that become government agents, diplomatic aides and other instruments of power are better users of the data. Suddenly, the scholar is no longer the ideal university researcher, the library is no longer the ideal type of archive and the university loses its centrality. “It feels menaced in certain places around its own body; menaced by the development of the sciences, or, a fortiori, by questions from science and on science; menaced by what it sees as a devouring margin. A singular and unjust menace, it being the constitutive faith of the university that the idea of science is at the basis itself of the university.” The scene in the breathing pod above is the first time we see Darth Vader in a position of vulnerability as the framing of the shot suggests a murky margin between a normal human and what he has become. He is a host to parasites on his body that perform functions of survival better than he, allowing the world to believe that he is the parasite and the machine is the soul. Kant, on the other hand, did not accept this and wanted the legitimate and legal power to exclude parasiting. To this, Derrida responds, “Now the possibility of such parasiting appears wherever there is language, which is also to say a public domain, publication, and publicity. Wishing to control parasiting, if not to exclude it, is to misunderstand, at a certain point, the structure of language acts. (If, therefore, as I note in passing, analyses of a deconstructive type have so often had the style of theories of ‘parasitism,’ it is that they too, directly or indirectly, involve university legitimation.)” Here, the University is a language act when he runs it through a hermeneutic treatment and renders it as a system of infinite negotiation and interpretation where the language exists in service of itself. When translated to the University, he explains the inevitability of parasitism by viewing the University itself as a self-serving system that is parasitical on the exteriority which it sanctimoniously claims to resolve. It is interested in self-organization and the curation of power similar to the behavior of language and knowledge itself, meaning that the University, at a philosophical level, occupies the same space as elements it saw as parasitic to it. This is applicable to the faculties and disciplines as well since they are also language acts. If faculties also acquire the same properties as language, then the Digital Humanities can be seen as merely a form of survivalist self-organization of faculties like the humanities whose margins are threatened in the techno-capitalist regime. It is also the digital curation of power that seeks to re-emerge as the ideal type of archive and, indeed, the ideal technology of knowledge.
3.) Prematurity and being misguided, even if excusable in a tradition that has phrenology and eugenics in its history, are followed by the elitism. Elitism is observable at an empirical a posteriori level in Kant’s lower faculties[1], especially of the humanities and philosophy, because of the commercial untranslatability and resulting class difference in enrollment. The digital humanities under this lens is therefore a discipline that sustains an even smaller cross-section of society not based on privilege of intellect which celebrates the ability to employ both hemispheres of the brain but the privilege of means. However, it travels deeper than that to a deontological level. The elitism is a necessary and even intentional part of the lower faculties based on Kant’s logic of the University’s duty. To understand this, you will have to recollect from the previous blog post that Kant thought that the lower faculties should act as opposition parties from the left side of the parliament of learning. In other words, “One would have to imagine today a control exercised by university competence (and, in the last instance, by philosophical competence) over every declaration coming from bureaucrats or subjects representing power directly or indirectly, the dominating forces of the country as well as the forces dominated, insofar as they aspire to power and contribute to political or ideological debate. Nothing would escape it — not a single position adopted in a newspaper or book, on radio or television, in the public pursuit of a career, in the technical administration of knowledge…” You will have to imagine a hypothetical world in which every usage of public knowledge will be subject to the ‘censorship of the faculties’ as Kant puts it. Though this conjures up the image of an almost celestial tyranny, the University in this world remains a force for good because the power of judging is in the ultimate service of truth and the University is stripped of all executive power and means of coercion. “In effect,” Derrida says, “its power is confined to a power-to-think-and-judge, a power-to-say, though not necessarily to say in public, since this would involve an action, an executive power denied the university.” Therefore, the contradiction in existing as the left side of the parliament of learning and not acting is resolved through elitism, through passing judgment in “a reserved, intra-university and quasi-private language, the discourse, precisely, of universal value which is that of philosophy.” When the lower faculties exist, in both a theoretical and consequential silo, in an exclusive and separated condition from the rest, I for one would be very cautious before further inductions.	4.) This brings us to a discussion of the second diagram in this blog, which is the written language itself. It is demonstrative of Derrida’s statement that Kant, in the Conflict of the Faculties, speaks only of language. Kant thinks of a language of “truth and one of action, between one of theoretical statements and one of performatives”. According to speech-act theory, there is an opposition of “performative” and “constative” language. While constatives describe the world, performatives do something in the world. The first aspect of the diagram is in the final sentence of the third cell which ends in a veiled warning about the Digital Humanities through the example of a performative utterance. The second aspect of the diagram is the last sentence of the second cell, which describes the Digital Humanities in a constative utterance. Although Kant needs these statements to be separate for the boundary between truth and action, power and reason to be clearly demarcated , Derrida is thoroughly unconvinced that this is the case. This takes us back to Saussure’s linguistic signifiers and the signified. Saussure was very influential on Derrida and expounded the theory that every word and sentence has a shape and an ideational element regardless of the structure. If we go back to examine the last sentence of the second stream, then even though it is merely explaining a state-of-affairs, it sends across a clear message that makes us think of the Digital Humanities in a certain way, making it as much a performative statement as the first. While Kant strenuously explains the distinction between truth and action by arguing for knowledge against the publication of knowledge, Derrida sweeps it aside and asks where the publication really begins. He says, “Language is an element common to both spheres of responsibility, and one that deprives us of any rigorous distinction between the two spaces that Kant at all costs wanted to dissociate. It is an element that opens a passage to all parasiting and simulacra.” Indeed, the Digital Humanities continue to be parasitic and unnecessary since the University is a language act and a technology.

[1] According to Kant, the lower faculties were split among historical knowledge (history, geography, philology, the humanities and the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences) and pure rational knowledge (pure mathematics, pure philosophy and the sciences)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities-the-ecto-parasite

Access to Knowledge

anirudh — 2014-05-22T04:48:41Z

Unit 4 of Module 2 discusses the right to access knowledge, patents and copyright. There is also a case study of Oxbridge Textbooks.

Introduction

In the middle of the 16th century, Queen Mary was faced with a difficult question that was brought to her by none other than most powerful publishing house in England at the time. The Stationers, like any other craft guild in the business of printing and producing books loved a monopoly in the profits of their books and terribly feared competition.[1] Therefore, they went to Queen Mary with the request of a royal charter. This charter would allow them to seize illicit editions of their books and bar the publication of books unlicensed by the crown. The Queen suddenly thought that this could indeed be a more efficient way to squash sedition and dissent through censorship by puppeteering this craft guild than previous, perhaps less subtle means like torture and death. In 1557, she granted them this early form of a copyright. Notice how the author or the creator of the work has no place in this agreement and the origins of intellectual property in English law are based on privilege, namely power and profit. This rhetoric, however, changes with the coming of the 18^th century and the passing of the Act of Anne in 1707 to one of creativity and learning. The concern for the author has a steady positivist rise after this in the tug of war over intellectual property. In the case Miller v Taylor in 1769, the author sought to extend copyright to common law. Three judges ruled in favor of this motion and two judges ruled against.[2]

A closer examination at the reasoning provided by the three assenting judges will tell us almost all the philosophical justifications of intellectual property. The first judge called upon his notion of justice and said it is just that the author control the destiny of his work as it is a product of his labor. The second judge said that extending the copyright would encourage creativity by making the work the creator’s property. The third judge said it is the authors natural right as the work wouldn’t exist if not for the mental labor of the author. Together, justice, incentives and natural rights are the cornerstones of the justifications of intellectual property.

Although history is littered with theories on property, there have been only sparse discussions on intellectual property. The question then arises, can intellectual property be accommodated within normal property. The similarity is in the fact that intellectual property is also a relationship between people but the difference lies in the fact that the object is an abstract one.[3]

This leads many to believe that it cannot be subject to the same rules of property. The first dissenting judge in Miller v Taylor, for example, said that abstract ideas cannot be occupied like corporeal objects so they cannot be property. He said the author deserves a reward which the Act of Anne provides in the form of limited monopoly but that’s about it. In fact, an idea is almost the perfect example of a resource like the air or light that is not zero sum and inexhaustible in that my use of it doesn’t take away from your use of it. Neither air nor light can become personal property which leaves ideas in a property limbo. This leaves room for very interesting discussions and debates over the existence of intellectual property and the place it should occupy in society. This discourse has largely taken two forms: the deontological and the consequentialist. Deontological justifications for IP come from a priori reasons like rights or duties which can be established in many forms. There is the ontological basis for rights which answers questions like whether rights exist and if so, where they come from. One of the preeminent figures in this discourse has been John Locke, an English philosopher whose argument for individual property as “natural rights” remains relevant even today when applied to intellectual property. Locke’s major assumptions in his claim were:

God has given the world to people in common.
Every person owns his own personality.
A person’s labor belongs to him.
When a person mixes his labor with something in the commons he makes it his property.
The right of property is contingent upon its being good for commoners.[4]

In order to extend this argument, Locke says that exclusive ownership of a resource is a precondition for production. Ideas before labored upon by people, however, are not exclusively owned which resists the cross application of his ideas to intellectual property. Another impediment in extending the natural right to intellectual property is the 5th assumption. Intellectual labor, in annexing an idea, stops it from becoming a part of the intellectual commons. If this labor, armed with the property of becoming property is doing a disservice to society, then it may not be a natural right at all. The notion that ideas are a part of the intellectual commons is also one that needed evidence and Locke found that in scripture as Judeo-Christian philosophy clearly advocates the idea of all worldly resources being part of the commons.

Hegel, on the other hand, took the route of personality theory. He argued that if individuals have claims to anything, they had to be considered an individual first. He states that in order to be individuals, people must have a moral claim to things like their character traits, feelings, talents and experience.[5] The definition of these aspects or the process of self-actualization requires an interaction with tangible and intangible objects in the world. The external actualization process requires property that includes intellectual property for Hegel as he sees the works as an extension or an establishment of the self in the external world that embody the person’s personality in an inseparable and even immortal way.

Another form is in linguistics, where we ask questions like what we mean when we say rights and property. Skinner said that in the history of intellectual property law, the social context of its use and the matrix of assumptions involved in reference is the determining factor. This is why the history of intellectual property is as important as and to the philosophical underpinnings.

The consequentialist justifications of IP assume that the specious connection between IP and creativity is fact and warn of a chilling effect on creative activity in the absence of IP. History shows us that the relationship between IP and creativity is local and contingent rather than necessary and universal. Imperial China, for example, was a creative and inventive empire that gave rise to many technologies and artistic subcultures without any promise of IP. Indeed, Marx’s historical materialism could be seen as condemning IP as a superstructural phenomenon in the industrial development phase of capitalist societies and one that a future society can function well without.[6] If one was interested in the consequentialist debate over IP, then historical empirical data would be more important than an a priori analysis.

The lack of a definitive philosophical, ethical or normative justification for the existence of Intellectual Property rights unlike those for free expression or equal treatment under the law shows us that its application needs to be tempered with other considerations. If, as Rawls suggested, we hide behind the veil of ignorance and tried to form an ideal society, then IP may not feature within it as it tends to create social stratification and further marginalizes the least advantaged in social life and democratic culture.[7] Since IP’s are liberty intrusive privileges that do not “allow the most extensive liberty compatible with a like liberty for all.” or “benefit the least advantaged.” or are “open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.”, their utilitarian claims of creativity have to answer to the injustices that manifest from them before they get a carte blanche in society.

The access to knowledge has been a yearning of society to shift and dilute the concentration of this most precious of resources because of the old adage “knowledge is power”. This concept, however, can be understood from many lenses including the sociological and the legal. At first, in order to understand the importance of the legal entities under access to knowledge, we must explore its saliency in society.

Humanity world over is at the cusp of a major shift in the production, consumption, dissemination and distribution of knowledge. This warrants changes in frameworks of looking at knowledge, information and data in the digital era at multiple levels and by multiple players including students, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers, civil society and the State. In order to understand why and how knowledge matters in the world today, we must see how it makes a difference in our world and how it materially changes the world.

Many prominent economists and social theorists have sought to claim that knowledge has affected the organization of society in a manner that is different than in previous eras though knowledge has been an organizing principle of society throughout history. How the exact time of the shift and the nature of the shift are catalogued will depend on what category the basis is. From an economic perspective, Marx said that the capitalist system depends on the constant improvement and dynamism of technology. The real understanding of the role of knowledge in our economy came when Robert Solow posited that the majority of economic growth in the beginning of the 20th century was less due to labor or capital and more due to technological changes. These advances in knowledge came in the form of new machines to new production techniques that made the production process more efficient.[8]

Fritz Machlup stated that in the 1960’s the change in the knowledge intensity of the economy was marked by “an increase in the share of ‘knowledge-producing’ labor in total employment.” The Harvard historian Daniel Bell observed in his study of post-industrial societies that 1/3^rd of the US workers were employed in the service industry at the turn of the century but by the 1980’s almost 7/10^ths of the workers were employed in the service industries.[9]

People who were employed in the industrial sectors were flocking steadily to finance, education, information technology and the cultural industry. The movements of people came as a reaction to the movement of profitability from industrial sectors to finance, biotechnology and information technology. Knowledge basically is a positive feedback loop which means that as more information and communication technologies emerge, it allows more innovation. Manuel Castell categorizes this shift in the place of knowledge as a global one even though it’s concentrated in a few wealthy countries because all the economies ultimately depend on the global one. The disparity between countries is still massive but it used to be just in terms of raw materials and manufactured goods but now at a global level, there is a huge knowledge (high technology low technology, high knowledge services low knowledge services) disparity between wealthy and non-wealthy countries. This claim may seem to imply that knowledge is simply technical and scientific, but there are obviously other important kinds of knowledge like ethical and humanities knowledge. The point here is that the enhanced ability of humans to organize and employ specific kinds of technical and scientific knowledge has created a huge shift in the global economy similar to the effect of the increase in access to knowledge from the invention of printing press. This shift in the importance of knowledge has made our health better as well. The average lifespan has increased exponentially in the past half century and it is our scientific advancement in the mechanisms of disease and medicine that has aided this achievement.

When there is so much integral societal dependence on knowledge, the non market production of knowledge is essential for equality in access to this knowledge. Yochai Benkler stated that the processing power of the modern computers linked together on the internet creates a platform that allows for new kinds of collaboration. Apart from new kinds of political activism, it also leads to decentralized knowledge production like open source/ free software and Wikipedia.

Within this context of the digital turn, openness and transparency are gaining newer significance. On the one hand emerging participatory models of openness like Wikipedia[10] are increasingly pushing us to look beyond the traditional models of the bygone century;[11] on the other hand these models are being thought of to be effective even in governance and policy making. Open data,[12] for instance is becoming a key prerequisite for the State and civil society alike in imagining better governance models. This could potentially create a pre-condition for the transformation of society into a ‘Knowledge Society’, wherein the citizen is increasingly repositioned from a ‘spectator’ to ‘spect-actor’.[13] Eventually, the distinction between a knowledge society and governance could get blurred. However, this process needs strong civil society players to catalyze and cultivate an effective knowledge society. Such work happens at multiple layers of policy coupled with advocacy, research, dissemination and infrastructure creation. The larger policy debate happens in the form of a contest between understandings of knowledge. The two sides are knowledge as property versus knowledge as a common resource. This tension is explored in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The Right to Access to Knowledge

The discourse around the access to knowledge has been around for a while as it is inscribed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which was adopted in 1948. Article 27 of the charter attempts to bring about a balance between the right of access and the protection of material interests.

Article 27[14]

Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Here, many academics and Access to Knowledge theorists posit that the right to access to knowledge is the more important right. This is because the right to material protection or rather the Intellectual Property (IP) right is ultimately for sale and transferrable so is not inalienable like the right to access to knowledge. Many right to knowledge theorists are of the opinion that the level of IP protection currently in place in the world is too much.

In 1996, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)[15] was adopted by the General Assembly of the UN. As we may expect, the right to free speech has a longer history of acceptance and positivist outlook on it. Article 19 of the ICCPR reads as follows:

“Article 19.

Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.
Everyone shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice.
The exercise of the rights provided for in paragraph 2 of this article carries with it special duties and responsibilities. It may therefore be subject to certain restrictions, but these shall only be such as are provided by law and are necessary:
- For respect of the rights or reputations of others;
- For the protection of national security or of public order (order public), or of public health or morals.” (Italics are mine)

The idea that free speech includes the right to seek and receive is something that will be discussed in the chapter on free speech but the important positive externality or reading that one can glean from this wording is that the access to knowledge becomes a right.


Above: Google books Ngram Viewer

However, as you can see in the graph, the discourse around Access to knowledge doesn’t begin to really take off until the early 1960’s when the U.S government was just starting to build a network between computers. In the early stages of the modern internet around the early 1980’s the discourse around access to knowledge becomes even more frequent. This is because intellectual property rights started to eclipse the astronomical increase in the production of knowledge and vast portions of the world’s population remained in the dark. Especially, the production of academic knowledge has increased exponentially in the recent past which has made it essential that the barriers to this knowledge are attenuated as much as possible.Now that we have explored the sociological aspect of access to knowledge and the philosophical debates around it, let us look at how it is codified in law. Specifically we will look at copyright and patents.

Patents

What are Patents?

Of all forms of intellectual property rights (IPR) patents are said to be the most restrictive, granted to inventors of devices or processes on the basis that the invention is novel, can be applied for a useful function, andinvolves an inventive step (and may not be obvious to a professional in the relevant field).

Under Indian patent law, a patent is a statutory right for an invention, giving the inventor the exclusivity to prevent others from making, using, or selling the invention—unless, of course, they are to receive permission from the right holder and pay the necessary royalty fees to do so. For this reason, a patent holder is said to have a monopoly over the invention. [16] In return for this exclusivity, the right holder must disclose a detailed, accurate and complete written description of the invention to be available for the public.[17]

A patent may be a utility patent, issued for the invention of a new and useful process, machine or product; a design patent, for a new and original design to be used in the manufacturing of a product; or a plant patent, for a new and distinct, invented or discovered type of plant.[18] Subject matter that is unpatentable in India includes an invention that is immoral, an invention which claims anything contrary to natural laws (e.g. gravity), the discovery of anything occurring in nature, and the formulation of an abstract theory.[19] That being said, a patentable invention generally must be able to result in a useful, concrete and tangible result, although restrictions of what is not patentable may vary country to country.

Patents are valid for a limited period of time; generally 20 years from the start of the term. A patent’s exclusivity is also limited to the country in which it was granted, meaning that a patent holder may not be able to exclude others from the making, using, or selling of a similar invention in a different jurisdiction that would otherwise infringe upon the their IP right.[20]

Effects on Innovation

There are vast perspectives around the adoption and application of patents, ranging from a strong opposition—by those in favour of free and widespread access to products of innovation and knowledge processes (e.g. medicines and educational materials)—to those in strong support of a more restrictive intellectual property (IP) regime, as a means of protecting the inventor and his or her inventions.

One of the underlying principles for the consideration and enforcement of a patent regime is the claim that this form of IPR serves as an incentive for innovation to take place. By offering a “reward” in the form of statutory recognition, protection, and remuneration, the granting of a patent may encourage innovation. An opposing viewpoint to such a claim, however, may argue that patents do not encourage innovation, but stifle it, by preventing others from being able to innovate through their enforcement. Just as well, a patent is granted after the fact, and the odds of one’s application being approved are quite slim—not to mention expensive!—so a patent would not be an ideal form of incentive, with remuneration only taking place when one’s patent is infringed or one’s monopoly abused.

One’s monopoly may be abused when the right holder of a patent (or thousands!) brings an industry to a standstill by shutting out others from having their new inventions reach the market. Often, patents may prevent the manufacturing and selling of innovations that are not actually relevant, but claim by the right holder to fall within the scope of the patented invention.

The effects of the excessive granting and enforcement of patents may trickle down to the level of the individual when the economic threshold for starting a new business increases, one’s business’s profitability reduces due to the payments of royalties and legal expenses, and the potential for such an entrepreneur to scale beyond national boundaries is undermined.[21]

Case Study: Pervasive Technologies
Because of these limitations placed onto others by patent holders, small-to-medium business and enterprises in India and China tend to ignore existing IPR for inventions they may use within their manufactured products due to the high costs associated to seeking permission and paying royalties to the right holder. For this reason, these businesses may only begin to develop protection and risk-mitigation strategies when they have scaled up and can afford to do so.[22] A phenomenon that has risen out of a restrictive market and resulting repeated efforts to get around such restrictions is the “gray” market, where mobile phone are being manufactured with the likelihood of infringing upon a number of existing patents for inventions used in the manufactures. Mobile phones that are entirely legal may cost well over INR 8000/- (US $120) when gray market devices generally range from INR 3000/- to INR 4000/- (US $48-60), demonstrating the high price of patents on the availability of hardware.[23] The term, pervasive devices, coined by the Centre for Internet & Society, largely refers to sub-$100 communication devices that are becoming near-ubiquitous as a result of their increased availability to reach larger demographics of lesser income brackets. Software Technologies Although software technologies are predominantly protected under Indian copyright law, in countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States, software is patentable. Unlike American companies, such as IBM which has applied for 5,896 US patents, very seldom do Indian companies apply for software patents, and instead are likely to become at risk for litigation in attempts to penetrate markets elsewhere due to the patents already existing. Most commonly, software producers from India do not own the rights to the IP they have created and instead adopt a “software as a service” (SAAS) business model, within which contracts signed require all IP developed to be signed over to the client. As international players continue to register a multitude of software patents, it becomes increasingly difficult for Indian companies to move away from this SAAS model to developing their own proprietary products due to the increased risk of litigation.[24]

Pre-Grant and Post Grant

Upon signing the Trade Related Aspects Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement, India introduced two kinds of patent oppositions, where an individual may write to the Indian Patent Office to oppose the granting of a patent. The first kind, pre-grant opposition, may occur after the patent application has been published by the Patent Office, but has not yet been granted, for the primary purpose of challenging the application’s validity before a patent is granted. One may also give notice of opposition to the Patent Office after the granting of a patent, under post-grant opposition, so long as it occurs within a year of the granted patent’s publication.[25]

Compulsory Licensing

In March 2012, the Government of India granted its first compulsory license ever to Indian generic drug manufacturer, Natco Pharma Ltd. to allow for the manufacturing of Sorateni tosylate, a treatment for advanced kidney and liver cancer. Patent Holder and German pharmaceutical giant, Bayer Corporation, had not been making the drug adequately accessible to the people of India on a commercial scale, and had not imported the drug at all in 2008, and barely in 2009 and 2010. As a result, Natso Pharma Ltd. applied for a compulsory license.

Once granted, Natco was to pay a reduced royalty fee to Bayer quarterly, was required to provide the drug for free to at least 600 needy and deserving patients per year, to sell the drug for a set fee, as specified by the Indian government.

Pharmaceuticals have been an area of fierce debate as drugs for treating serious illnesses, such as malaria, HIV and AIDS, are widely available in the West, and generally too expensive for developing countries due to being protected by patents, where outbreaks are more likely to occur. India’s first compulsory license had been a landmark decision for India, as it is an exemplary case which demonstrates the possibility of a “new” drug under patent to be produced by generic makers at a fraction of the price, compensating the patent holder through royalty payments, while at the same time, enabling access to individuals that would not have otherwise been able to receive this form of treatment.

In the scenario where a government feels a patent holder is abusing one’s monopoly over their patented invention by excessively limiting others to access—and when it could otherwise substantially benefit the public good—a government may grant special privilege to another to use or manufacture such a patented product without the consent of its owner. This is called a compulsory license, and does not take the rights away from the patent holder, but limits them, as to enable increased access. A license fee or royalty payment is still to be paid to the patent holder; however this rate may be negotiated by the government, contrary to a statutory license, where this rate is fixed by the law.

Copyright

Copyright refers to the protection granted, in law, to the expression of some ideas. It is to be noted that the idea itself is not protectable. For instance, if I were to tell you about an ‘idea’ that I had about writing a story about a cat and a mouse, and, a few days later, you wrote a story about a cat and a mouse, the copyright of that story would vest with you, despite the fact that the ‘idea’ for the story was mine. This concept is called the idea-expression dichotomy.

The ‘expression’ that is eligible for protection could be in various forms, including literary, artistic or dramatic works.

Components of Copyright

Copyright recognises the concepts of ownership and authorship of work, and the fact that these might vary in specific instances, when various persons could be involved in the creation of a work. Some may have provided creative input (the author of the book or the director/screen play writer/story writer of the movie), and some may have provided monetary input (the publisher of the book/producer of the movie).

The moral right of ‘attribution’, that is, the right to be recognised for the work vests with the authors. Economic rights associated with copyright vest in the owner of the copyright. The owner could be different from the author. For instance, in case of the book, the owner of the copyright could be the publisher, and in the case of the movie, it could be the producer. In some instances, copyright may be jointly owned as well. Copyright vests in the owner of copyright. It grants the owner the right to exclude all others from making use of/exploiting the work in question commercially. This would essentially prevent others from adapting, copying, distributing, or making any other use of the protected work, unless authorised by the owner.

Copyright and the Law

Copyright law is territorial in nature, that is, copyright granted by law in one nation state is only enforceable in the said that grants the right. One aspect of territoriality could be the term of copyright. Generally, the term is the lifetime of the author (creator/owner) (plus) fifty to hundred years from the death of the author. Anonymous works, or works owned by corporations have a fixed term of copyright, usually between fifty and hundred years. The exception to this general rule of territoriality is if the state in question has entered into any international agreement to the contrary.

Other aspects of copyright regulated by law include subject matter of protection, requirements of registration, term of protection and associated rights. Internationally, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, 1886 is the key instrument. Additionally, some other important international instruments include the WIPO Copyright Treaty, 1996 and the WIPO Performers and Phonograms Treaty, 1996.

While the general rule is that all copying and distribution of the copyrighted work has to be done with the express permission of the copyright holder, some exceptional circumstances allow for this requirement to be dispensed with. These are known as fair use/fair dealing (depending on the jurisdiction).

Case Study: The Oxbridge Textbooks[26]
The Broad Issue: The issue of copyrights when it comes to academic purposes has always been one that has sparked debates and very compelling arguments on both sides. While research that is published in scientific journals is carried out with the pure intent of spreading knowledge that will ultimately lead to broader scientific inquiry and research, in the past few decades it has transformed into a product of “ruthless capitalism” whose profit margins are far too high. The question then arises that how research that is carried out mostly with government funded public money be made available to the general public across the world at reasonable and affordable rates? Don’t students in the developing world have equal rights to access a level of education and research that would enable them to compete with their affluent counterparts? But this issue isn't just a cause for concern in the developing world as one of the world’s richest schools,Harvard University released a memorandum in mid-2012 that the cost of its journal subscriptions has become prohibitively expensive. This forces us to take a moment and think about the world of academic publishing, the accessibility of knowledge, and the flow of information when the richest academic institution on the planet cannot afford to continue paying for its journal subscriptions? According to Thomes and Clay’s report, commercial publishers within the last twenty to thirty years have taken control over many publications that had been controlled by non-profit academic and scholarly societies. The shift took place during the 1960’s and 1970’s as commercial publishers recognized the potential for profitability in acquiring journals from the societies. This has resulted in publishing houses now commanding hefty profit margins up to 40%. The Broad Solution: The Indian Copyright Act, Section 52, provides for a wide educational fair use exception for academic purposes. Yet the publishing houses, demand for the purchasing of a Blanket License under the IRRO (Indian Reprographic Reproduction Organization)[27] which costs Rs 24,000 per annum for 20 copies of a single publication and not more than 10% of each copy being photographed. This clause can be challenged on the grounds of “fair use exception” under Section 52. The cancellation of these licenses is a fair demand as the risks of purchasing the license and complying to the publishing houses norms have many repercussions. Due to the business model of the publishing industry, a steep increase in prices has been seen for the past decade, the Harvard letter being just the tip of the iceberg. In 2012, over 12,000 researchers have signed a statement promising to boycott any publication published by Elsevier (a publication house accused of pocketing 40% of the profits). The increase in the prices of academic works in the international market has a steep impact on the budget of children who attend public universities such as Delhi University where the annual fees is Rs. 5000 per annum. Specific Issue at Hand: The specific issue here is a lawsuit filed by the Cambridge and Oxford publication press against Delhi University and a small photocopy shop for copyright infringement. The store, who they accuse of creating photocopied “course packs” in agreement with the University that include content from their textbooks, is selling these bundles for much cheaper than the original books. The presses are demanding more than US$110,000 in damages. On one hand we have powerful international publishing houses and on the other students who do not have access to study material from these houses due to their impoverished backgrounds. It is unlikely that the publishing houses’ revenues would increase post this suit, as most students cannot afford to purchase the study material unless the university foots the bill. It is also important to note that a previous lawsuit that Cambridge publication house lost was due to the defendant using only 10% of the book. In this case we have: Average percentage of entire book copied = 8.81 %. The breakup of the amount of material used per book can be found here.[28] Out of the 23 books in question, only 5 extracts exceed the 10% threshold(these have been marked in red in the document). To suggest that the photocopy shop and Delhi University should have to shell out Rs. 60,00,000 in damages for this case, is a case of publishing houses flexing their muscle power over students in the developing world who deserve equal access to academic material.

[1]. Peter Dravos

[2]. Ibid

[3]. Ibid

[4]. Ibid

[5]. For more on intellectual property see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intellectual-property/

[6]. Supra note above.

[7]. For more see Darryl J. Murphy “Are Intellectual Property rights compatible with Rawlsian principles of justice?, Springer, available at http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10676-012-9288-8

[8]. For more see Ashish Rajadhyaksha, “The Last Cultural Mile”, Centre for Internet and Society, available at http://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf, last accessed on February 1, 2014.

[9]. See citation above.

[10]. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz, Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, published by CIS and Institute of Network Cultures, available at http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/%237reader_Wikipedia.pdf

[11]. The Access to Knowledge (Wikipedia) team from CIS has held several workshops and produced more than 50 blog entries in nearly 10 months.

[12]. See Pranesh Prakash, Nishant Shah, Sunil Abraham and Glover Wright, “Open Government Data Study: India” published by Transparency & Accountability Initiative, available at http://cis-india.org/openness/blog/publications/open-government.pdf

[13]. A term coined by the Brazilian theatre practitioner Augusto Boal in the context of theatre. This formulation of spect-actor is very useful in reimagining the citizen in the digital era that has created preconditions for the citizen to effectively participate in governance. For more on Spect-actor see Augusto, Boal (1993). Theater of the Oppressed. New York: Theatre Communications Group.

[14]. For more see Article 27 available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml#a27, last accessed on January 31, 2014.

[15]. Read the full Covenant at https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%20999/volume-999-I-14668-English.pdf

[16]. Stephan Kinsella, “Against Intellectual Property”, Journal of Libertarian Studies 15, no. 2 (Spring 2001), available at http://www.stephankinsella.com/publications/against-intellectual-property/, last accessed on February 1, 2014.

[17]. See “Inventing the Funture: An Introduction to Patents for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, World Intellectual Property Organization”, available at http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/freepublications/en/sme/917/wipo_pub_917.pdf , last accessed on January 31, 2014.

[18]. See “Types of Patents”, available at http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/patdesc.htm , last accessed on January 31 , 2014

[19]. See “Inventions not Patentable in India”, available at http://www.cazri.res.in/itmu/pdf/Inventions%20not%20Patentable%20in%20India.pdf, last accessed on January 31, 2014.

[20]. Supra note 62 above.

[21]. See Research Proposal on Pervasive Technologies available at http://cis-india.org/a2k/pervasive-technologies-research-proposal.pdf , last accessed on January 31, 2014.

[22]. Ibid.

[23]. Ibid.

[24]. Ibid.

[25]. See Tech Corp Legal http://bit.ly/NBRg1F

[26]. Ariel Bogle, Cambridge & Oxford University Press sue Delhi University for copyright infringement — over course packs, March 18, 2013, Melville House, available at http://www.mhpbooks.com/cambridge-university-press-oxford-university-press-sue-delhi-university-for-copyright-infringement-over-course-packs/,last accessed on January 29, 2014.

[27]. http://www.irro.in/about.php

[28]. Book-wise Percentage Analysis (DU Photocopying Case), available at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AnUBa-WkvhlOdDItVENnYkpZZ1ZYYTYwRGVycXVtZ1E#gid=0, last accessed on January 29, 2014.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/access-2-knowledge

The Conflict of Konigsberg

anirudh — 2013-12-17T05:57:40Z

Immanuel Kant’s “Conflict of the Faculties”, written in Konigsberg was a daring publication under the censorious watch of the Prussian totalitarian state. In it, he argues for open argument and mutual respect among the state endorsed and free reigning faculties in the University. This blog will explore a modern day conflict among the faculties under the clutches of a different kind of regime. Although the organization has radically shifted, the conflict has escalated to a battle (much like the one that tore Konigsberg apart during World War II) and the regime overseeing it may be more insidious than before.

Max Weber said that “all sciences of culture are doomed to eternal youth.” R. Aromⁱ said that “sociology seems to be marked by an eternal quest for itself”.ⁱⁱ Sciences of culture or the application of scientific principles to the study of humans and their behavior in societies have been constantly passed around in a game of hot potato while the music of scholarly history has been stopping and playing. Today we have reached a stage of atomization and animosity between the humanities and the sciences in which the latter has clearly won. However, the current landscape of academia doesn’t accurately represent their trussed and humble existence in early university organizations.

Immanuel Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties which was published in 1798 depicts a world of radically different organization and power structures in academia while projecting relationships and debates that remain salient today.ⁱⁱⁱ Only 50 years ago, professors of science were paid twice as much as their counterparts in the humanities. At places like Berkeley University today, the division between STEM fields and the humanities has tripled.^iv The impacts of this division are varied and problematic in three important ways. Kant said that the free reigning and critical element of the philosophy faculty was necessary to question and check the static faculties of theology and the law that claim immense authority through their mass appeal and state patronage. A possible united front of Wissenschaft against the anti-intellectual forces in society today that attack as a hydra of Kants higher faculties of theology and the law is greatly undermined by the shaft that is wedged between the sciences and the humanities. ^v

Secondly, the success of the modern day sciences is based on a utilitarian pitch of hedonistic and economic benefits which appeals to the same baser elements of humanity and mirrors the success of the higher faculties in 18^th century society just entering into the enlightenment. The people, as Kant speculated, wanted to know how to live like scoundrels and get the 11^th hour ticket to heaven, break the law and still win the case and abuse their body and still live a long life which led to the mass propitiation to cassocks, suits and white coats.^vi The answers to these desires are mostly fulfilled by science and technology today and hence their promotion from the lower faculties. The principles of ranking therefore remain eerily similar. Take the principle behind ranking medicine as a higher faculty for example. The rules of the medical practice, from the Hippocratic Oath to the principle of fiat experimentum in corpora villi were pre-conceived and imposed by a body of pre-approved knowledge.^vii Its existence, proliferation and direction remained immune from the scrutiny of the lower faculties because of its imposing power dynamic. Similarly, the modern day study of engineering remains extraordinarily doctrinaire in its pedagogy and its raison d’être remains far beyond the reproach of the humanities. When Kant answered “was ist aufklarung?” he probably did not foresee that after 200 years of scientific progress, man would still not have emerged from his “self-incurred immaturity”.

Finally, while totalitarianism ensured the faculties that allowed the King to be divine, his laws to be edicts and his labor force to be healthy were the higher faculties before, Capitalism today has similarly elevated the STEM fields while marginalizing or co-opting disciplines and value systems that are alternatives to it. The markets have brought education to its feet by forcing it to operate based on its model of success, thereby producing nations of employees instead of citizens. Teaching, or the imparting of knowledge can only have arisen and continue to be a pillar of human societies if it leads to the development of autonomous human beings that develop and broaden their judgments to become better political animals who are capable of seeking what betters us and subverting what worsens us. The fact that this process produces skilled labor can only ever be secondary or even incidental, to that primary purpose.^viii

According to Kant, the lower faculties were split among historical knowledge (history, geography, philology, the humanities and the empirical knowledge of the natural sciences) and pure rational knowledge (pure mathematics, pure philosophy and the sciences).^ix Though the fissure between the humanities and sciences in this organization is deeper than the tenuous connection, there is a long history of enlightenment thinkers who have tried to establish a kinship between the two. Notice how the connection in the Conflict of the Faculties is in a form where the natural sciences are viewed from a humanities perspective similar to a history of science department we find today. An important byway of the enlightenment, however, has been the effort to apply scientific methodologies and tools to social studies.

Howard Jensen once said that the “historian of sociology can focus on the development of the scientific method of investigating social facts.”^x When Giovanni Vico first read Bacon’s scientific method, he decided that it would be possible to apply the scientific method to the study of human societies and history. In Principles of a New Science, Vico says “The nature of things is nothing other than that they come into being at certain times and in certain ways. Wherever the same circumstances are present, the same phenomena arise and no others.”^xi Many before had observed causation in the natural world, but he said “the social world is certainly the work of men; and it follows that one can and should find its principles in the modifications of the human intelligence itself.”^xii His model of determinism, however, was cyclical so he was still a medieval thinker in that his ideas hadn’t fully submitted to the progressive nature of the enlightenment.

Montesquieu, writing more in the blooming fervor of the enlightenment in Spirit of the Laws, said “I began to examine men and I believed that in the infinite variety of their laws and customs they were not guided solely by their whims. I formulated principles, and then I saw individual cases fitting these principles as if of themselves, the history of all nations being only the consequence of these principles and every special law bound to another law, or depending on another more general law.”^xiii The sciences had been observing and analyzing phenomena from an understanding of laws that govern them but social phenomena were merely documenting observations. However, Montesquieu tried to change that by lobbying for the shift from appearances to principle and diversities of empirical shapes to forming forces. For example, he believed that Republics rest on civic virtue, Monarchy depends on honor and Despotism on fear.^xiv These aren’t universal but ideal types which form the principles that allow us to study these forms. Louis de Bonald later corroborated this idea when he wrote that all forms of knowledge are essentially expressions of the society which produces them.^xv He saw literature arising from the moral aspects of society and art as a collective product thereby positing a social genesis of ideas as Montesquieu did and viewing the individual as a part in the machinations of a physically, socially and technologically determined universe.

During the Scottish Enlightenment, David Hume said “there is a general course of nature in human actions, as well as in the operations of the sun and the climate. There are also characters peculiar to different nations and particular persons, as well as common to mankind. The knowledge of these characters is founded on the observation of an uniformity in the actions, that flow from them; and this uniformity forms the very essence of necessity.”^xvi He also thought it was impossible to know the essence of any entity, but only to know its features. If we don’t come to know the things themselves but only of the ideas that people have about them, the study of human nature rises violently in the ranks of importance. Indeed, Scottish Enlightenment thinkers were all in agreement that the science of human action deserved the same status as the natural sciences. We must keep Irving Zeitlin in mind as we exit the 18^th century as he said “the 18^th century thinkers began more consistently than any of their predecessors the study of the human condition in a methodic way, constantly applying what they considered to be scientific principles of analysis to man, his nature and society.”^xvii

During the 19^th century, as branches of science like biology were entering into a phase of revolutionary progress, the methods of entry for the humanities became more sophisticated. Herbert Spencer, writing in the Darwinian era of biology, posited that the study of sociology is the study of evolution in the most complex form and that sociological behavior was more subject to the cutting edge of natural selection in advanced civilization than physical aspects.^xviii The radical progression in the coadunation of the humanities and the sciences, marked interestingly by a sharp elevation of the humanities in an age of unprecedented scientific progress is probably why sociologists are less interested in their discipline’s history than other disciplines are in theirs. Much of what exists in its history has now been appropriated in terms of content by other disciplines like economics. This emergent trend in sociology is another point of coincidence with science in that the latter is also interested in its history only for facts.

These grandiose prognostications of the importance of the humanities in the past stand vindicated today in that they have done more to actively incorporate members of the historically disadvantaged than the STEM fields. The “studies programs” such as women’s studies, LGBT studies and black studies are a salient example of this. Though they have tackled the chaotic, dangerous leftovers of the quantitatively governed sciences, the humanities still exist physically and theoretically on the periphery.^xix David Hollinger^xx says “The human sciences are at the borderlands between Wissenschaft and opinion, between scholarship and ideology. Here, in the borderlands, the demographic and cognitive boundaries of the entire academic enterprise have been the least certain; here it is the greater challenge to act on the great Kantian imperative to dare to know, to have the courage to actually use one's understanding instead of running from all that messiness back to less risky inquiries.”^xxi

While the invisible hand of Adam Smith holds STEM high and close in society, their salaries are higher even in academia despite their market value outside and their ability to earn from the market simultaneously.^xxii The scholars of humanities, destined forever to the towers of higher learning are left behind when this kind of devotional loyalty has morally earned them more just desserts. The humanities are slowly adapting to this now trite ‘crisis of the humanities’ by entering the technology realm with the advent of the digital humanities. However, apart from such few commensal attempts at rising in social standing the way they have risen in intellectual circles, there hasn’t been much vinegar in their fight. In the recent report of the Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences to buoy the humanities, it referred to itself as "a source of national memory and civic vigor, cultural understanding and communication, individual fulfillment and the ideals we hold in common."^xxiii This is a serious step backward from Hume’s or Spencer’s reasoning of the importance of the humanities.

As a society, we need to transcend the habit of ranking faculties on their baser lure and develop more capacious visions of life and grandeur in our pursuit. The modest pitch (albeit transgressive in the deictic sense) of the Conflict of the Faculties was for the lower faculties to keep the conflict going forever from the left side of the parliament of learning to prevent the divined wisdoms and vested interests from establishing a position of unquestioned athanasia. The humanities would do well to listen to these formative dictates of the Aufklarung today.

i Raymond Arom was a French philosopher, journalist, sociologist and political scientist. He shared a lifelong friendship with Jean-Paul Sartre.

ii Ringer, Fritz. Max Weber's Methodology: The Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences. Harvard University Press, 2000. Web.

iii Kant, Immanuel. The Conflict of the Faculties (Der Streit Der Fakultaten). University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Web. <https://webspace.utexas.edu/hcleaver/www/330T/350kPEEKantConflictFacNarrow.pdf>.

v See citation 5

vi See citation 4

vii See citation 4

viii See more at http://harpers.org/archive/2009/09/dehumanized/4/

ix See citation 4

x Jensen, Howard. DEVELOPMENTS IN ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL THOUGHT. 1957. Print. <http://www.unz.org/Pub/BeckerHoward-1957-00035>.

xi VICO, GIAMBATTISTA . PRINCIPLES OF NEW SCIENCE CONCERNING THE COMMON NATURE OF NATIONS. 1744. Web. <http://www.rlwclarke.net/courses/lits2306/2011-2012/10BVico,TheNewScience.pdf>.

xii See citation 12

xiii Montesquieu, . The Spirit of the Laws. 1748. Web.

xiv See citation 15

xvi Hume, David. SECTION I.: Of liberty and necessity. - David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739. Web.<http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=342&chapter=55187&layout=html&Itemid=27>

xvii Zeitlin, Irving. Ideology and the development of sociological theory. Prentice Hall, 2001. Web.

xix See citation 5

xxi See citation 5

xxii See citation 9

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-conflict-of-konigsberg

Accessibility

anirudh — 2013-12-06T07:09:44Z

In the current day scenario, it would be impossible for anyone to conceive of a world without the internet. From being the easiest source of news and information to becoming the medium for communications ranging from personal to commercial, to becoming a place for social connectivity and virtual hangouts, the internet has been woven into the fabric of general society.

While the internet seems to be a one-stop shop for all solutions, persons with disabilities find themselves excluded from it due to their inability to either see the screen, use the mouse or keyboard, inability to access content or unfriendly user interface as many of the websites can still be navigated only by using a mouse, most of the audio visuals are not captioned for the use of persons with hearing impairment and web developers use graphics instead of using text, making them unreadable for screen reader users. The internet, however, is a most convenient medium for persons with disabilities as it has made it possible for them to independently access information, transactions and entertainment without having to wait for someone to provide them with the same. While discussing the reach and power of the internet, accessibility is one of the topics that need to be addressed. Even though there are many measures for accessibility currently available, they are not being addressed and worked on aggressively to bridge the gap. In the digital age where the internet is ubiquitous and a platform where more and more economic activity is happening, the lack of initiative and accessibility policy is leading to exclusion.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is a measure of the extent to which a product or service can be used by a person with a disability as effectively as it can be used by a person without that disability.[1]

For example, an elevator can be fitted with audio outputs and buttons that also have Braille notations, thus making it possible for persons with visual impairment to use it on their own. Similarly, buildings and public places can be built with ramps along with stairs, making it possible for persons using wheel chairs to access them. When a product or service is created such that it is completely usable by persons with disabilities without external support, the product or service is called accessible. In circumstances when only some of the features are usable for persons with disabilities, or when the product or service is usable by persons with certain types of disabilities, while it is not usable for persons with other types of disabilities, they are termed as partially inaccessible.

The Need for Accessibility

Over a billion of the world’s population has some form of disability. They are the world’s largest minority. This figure is on a constant increase due to increase in the population as well as the medical advances that have decreased mortality due to old age. Studies show that the world’s population is increasingly becoming older and at least one billion people belong to the older aged category. It is expected that older people may acquire certain disabilities due to age related conditions. Making resources and information accessible to persons with disabilities is of great importance in this scenario as more and more people will start requiring accessibility.

As per the World Bank estimates included in the 2011 “World Report on Disability”, 20 % of the poorest people in the world are disabled and occupy the most marginalized and disadvantaged sectors of society. Furthermore, due to discrimination or incapacity to perform certain work, people living with disabilities have a difficult time finding employment, with unemployment rates reaching 80% for disabled people in the working age group.[2]

Persons with disabilities are experiencing a lack of access to technologies due to visual, hearing, mental, and/or other impairments that make it difficult to operate various devices. Other groups facing accessibility issues are illiterate and elderly populations. According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) study in 2010, there are 796 million adults in the world that are illiterate, most of whom reside in the developing world.[3] This population faces barriers to text based communication. Elderly persons are also marginalized from access to technologies much the same way as persons with disabilities due to problems of physical access and marginalization.[4]

It is these groups that would most benefit from technological innovations and solutions that can empower and enhance societal inclusion and participation through providing access to knowledge and information, a medium to make one’s voice heard, as well as access to business and administrative processes within the state.[5]

International and Regional Frameworks on Accessibility and Development

Beginning in the 1990’s, accessibility concerning people with disabilities has been prioritized within the global policy framework. The United Nations General Assembly recognized the importance of providing equal opportunities for disabled individuals in the context of development. In 1993, the UN General Assembly adopted the Standard Rules on Equalization of Opportunities for Persons with Disabilities. Along with this measure, a five-year review and appraisal of the World Programme of Action concerning Disabled Persons (1982) was initiated in 1997, 2002 and 2007.

Access to ICT’s is essential for full citizen participation in all the aspects of society and is increasingly becoming essential for the achievement of many development goals. The Biwako Millennium Framework (BMF) and Biwako plus Five, which cover Asia and the Pacific region, have made ICT accessibility one of the seven priority areas as included in its regional policy frameworks adopted in 2003 and 2007 respectively. Under these frameworks, many initiatives to increase ICT accessibility and promote equitable development for persons with disabilities throughout the region have been undertaken.

The global recognition of the right of people living with disabilities to partake fully in all aspects of society, access to ICT’s being an integral part of this right, was further advanced with the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2006. The Convention entered into force in 2008.[6]

Important Points from the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Article 1 of the convention defines who is included in the UN category of persons with disabilities, stating that "Persons with disabilities include those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others."[7]

The first section of Article 9, which outlines accessibility priorities of the convention, puts responsibility on the state to ensure that persons with disabilities, along with other essential services and systems, have equal access to "information, communications and other services, including electronic services and emergency services". Section 2 of the article further puts onus on private entities that offer facilities and services to the public to make them accessible to disabled members of the public. Access to information, information technologies and systems, in particular the internet, is also included in this section.[8]

Freedom of expression and opinion, and access to information is covered under Article 21 of the convention. The section recognizes that the said freedoms begin with access to appropriate mediums of communication. Information intended for the general public must be accessible to persons with disabilities through accessible formats and technologies in a “timely manner and without additional cost”. The mass media, including internet content providers, have the responsibility to ensure that their services are accessible to all members of society.[9]

Accessibility Policies in India

In India, about 60 million people are disabled and 42.5% of them are women while 75% of people with disabilities come from rural areas. In India, there is a confluence of barriers to accessibility with inaccessible and unaffordable technologies, inaccessible websites and unsupportive laws.

The right to full participation in society and equality of disabled individuals in India was recognized through the Persons with Disabilities (Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation) Act which was enacted in India in 1995. India is also a signatory to both UNCRPD (2006) and Biwako Millennium framework towards an Inclusive, Barrier-free and Rights-based Society for Persons with Disabilities in Asia and the Pacific (2002).[10]

While there is no specific legislation in India which ensures the right of disabled persons to access ICT’s, The National Telecom Policy 2011 strategizes the need to recognize "telecom and broadband connectivity as a basic necessity like education and health and work towards ‘Right to Broadband’."[11]

The need for accessibility – both in the physical environment and in the use of information technology – is accentuated by the increase in consumption among the general public. As more and more persons with disabilities start utilising public marketplaces, products and services, a demand is generated to make these accessible to be able to reach out to a group of untapped consumers.

This holds true also for the internet. The penetration of the internet has caused many businesses to offer their products and services through the online medium in order to gain a longer reach. However, a 2003 survey on the impact of disabilities on computer technology conducted by Forrester Research found that: approximately one in four (25%) computer users have a visual difficulty or impairment; nearly one in four (24%) computer users have a dexterity difficulty or impairment; one in five (20%) computer users have a hearing difficulty or impairment; and about 16% of computer users have a cognitive difficulty or impairment. It becomes imperative for organisations offering their businesses online to make their facilities accessible to persons with disabilities to be able to tap into a large base of potential consumers.

Key Concepts

While making a case for accessibility and stressing the importance of making all products and services open to the public accessible to persons with disabilities, it is of great importance to understand some of the key concepts attached to accessibility.

Universal design: It is simply a technique of designing a product or service in such a way that it is equally usable by persons with disabilities as well as persons without disabilities. Universal design eliminates the need to create multiple products or services to cater to the same requirement of people belonging to different categories. This is highly useful in not only creating accessible systems, but also curtailing expenses and reducing redundant efforts.

For example, public transport systems such as buses and trains can be modelled keeping in mind wheel chair users. Buses may be created with ramps such that a wheel chair user is able to board and alight from the bus without any inconvenience. Similarly, trains can be constructed such that the door is on the same level with the platform and the door is wide enough to accommodate a wheelchair to enable passengers using wheelchairs to be able to enjoy the public services on par with other passengers.

Reasonable Accommodation: This is defined as the changes and modifications that can be made to a place, system or a process so as to enable persons with disabilities to enjoy the facilities provided without causing undue hardship to the provider of the facilities or to the other users. This could be in the form of changes to the physical environment to accommodate the independent mobility needs of persons with disabilities, or modification in the procedure of performing a task to ensure that a person with disability is able to enjoy equal opportunities.

An example of this would be an organisation employing persons with visual impairment providing them with screen reader software to enable them to work productively. Likewise, employees with disabilities could be granted extra leave in addition to their regular days of leave for attending health care sessions or training camps related to managing their disabilities.

Accessibility to the Physical Environment

One of the major requirements of physical accessibility is the availability of a barrier free environment for persons with disabilities to experience equal opportunities. This includes constructing new buildings and modifying old buildings and other public places with ramps, lifts and accessible signages for persons with disabilities. Accessible physical environment also includes transports and transport systems as well as roads being made accessible for persons with disabilities. This could be done by constructing roads with properly defined sidewalks, ramps at proper intervals for wheelchair users, engraved zebra crossings, beeps at traffic signals and accessible signages at road directions. Public transports such as buses, trains and other applicable options could be modified to allow persons with disabilities including wheelchair users to enter and exit them comfortably through ramps, broad doorways, etc. Places such as railway stations, airports and bus stations should be made accessible by provision of ramps, lifts, accessible signages and accessible enquiry services.

E-accessibility

For the ease of understanding, Persons with Disabilities (PWD) are broadly categorized as:

Persons with visual impairment – includes people with blindness, low vision and colour blindness
Persons with hearing impaired – includes persons with deafness and various degrees of hardness of hearing
Persons with motor disabilities – includes inability to use a mouse, slow response time and limited fine motor control
Persons with cognitive disabilities – includes learning disabilities, distractibility, inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information.

Contrary to common belief, adapting the user interface, content or designing of the internet to suit the needs of users with disabilities is a fairly uncomplicated process that can be managed even while retaining the look and feel of a regular webpage. Also, adaptations benefit not just persons with disabilities but other users also as everyone enjoys well organised content, easy navigation and clear illustrations. Videos with captions benefit not just people with hearing impairments but can also be beneficial to those watching the video without audio or those who find it difficult to follow the accent or voice of the narrator.

Assistive Technology to Aid Accessibility

Assistive Technology has made it possible for persons with disabilities to operate and utilise products and services along with other users without disabilities. To enable universal accessibility, it is important to recognise the key role played by assistive technology and create products and services such that persons using assistive technology are able to make equal use of the facilities provided.

Briefly explained below are some of the technological and non technological solutions that are being utilised by users with disabilities to access the web.[12]

Vision

Problem: For blind and visually impaired people, visual data is not accessible. Therefore, they require audio based solutions, high contrast, magnification and the like. These technologies come in the form of hardware and software.

Hardware
Refreshable Braille Display: This is an electro-mechanical device that displays text outputs while using a computer. It can be used along with speech synthesizers or on its own.

Mobile Features
Screen Readers: These are used by persons with visual impairment. Screen readers are softwares that convert text into synthesized speech, enabling users to listen to the web content. They make it possible for users to access information and navigate through the web by listening and responding to the audio signals. Some of the popular screen readers are JAWS, NVDA, Window Eyes and Home Page Reader.

Software
Screen Magnifiers: These are used by persons who have low vision. This technology enables users with low vision to zoom in on a small portion of the screen and magnify the content so as to be able to read it clearly. Some of the popular screen magnifiers are ZoomText and Magic.

Mobile Features
Tactile Markers: These markers allow the users to orient themselves on the keypad which includes things like a raised dot on number 5 for navigation.

Audible cues: These are specific sounds that indicate things like low battery, caller waiting or missed calls.

Apps
Look Tell Money Reader: This app immediately recognises the currency and speaks the denomination enabling persons with visual impairment to use money quickly. The app supports 21 currencies including the US Dollar, Australian Dollar, Bahraini Dinar, Brazilian Real, Belarusian Ruble, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro, Hungarian Forint, Israeli Shekel, Indian Rupee, Japanese Yen, Kuwaiti Dinar, Mexican Peso, New Zealand Dollar, Polish Zloty, Russian Ruble, Saudi Arabian Riyal, Singapore Dollar, and United Arab Emirates Dirham. The app does not require an internet connection and is available for IPhone 5, 4S, 4, 3GS, IPod Touch 4th Gen, IPad 2 & 3 and Mac OS X.[14]

Hearing

Problem: Those who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can’t communicate via telephone or hear automated electronic messages.

Technologies:

Assistive listening devices (ALD): They amplify audio output from other devices like the TV or radio to hear clearly in environments.
Teletext: This offers a range of text based information.
Hearing loop systems: This uses electromagnetic energy to transmit sound. It can be worn on the head like a headpiece.
Mobile Features:
Vibrating Alerts[15]
Visual or tactile indicators on the keypad: Lights or vibrations after actions have been performed or buttons being pushed is a useful indicator.
Captioning: Some phones support closed captioning, open captioning and subtitles for videos.
Apps:
MobileSign: This is a British sign language lexicon that provides information on more than 4000 signs. It is available on both Google Play and Apple Store and is a very useful tool for communication for persons with hearing impairment.[16]
ASL Dictionary: This is an American Sign Language dictionary with more than 4800 signs. The app allows the videos to be slowed down and looped for easier learning. It also has signs for common phrases, idioms and symbols.
My Smart Hands – Baby sign language dictionary: This app has been designed for parents of children with hearing impairment. This app has more than 300 videos of the most common signs for children with verbal description of the motion to ensure that the parent is signing correctly.
Tap Tap: This app is designed to vibrate and flash whenever there is any sound. It has been particularly created for persons with hearing impairment as it would alert them to important sounds in their surrounding such as sudden screaming and shouting or the buzz of the smoke alarm.[17]

Motor Disability

Problem:[18] People who have no or diminished motor capacity will not be able to press buttons or physically navigate through most technology.

Technologies:

Mouth Stick: Though not a technological device, a mouth stick is one of the most popular devices used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating a keyboard. A mouth stick is a hard stick that is held in the mouth by the user and used to type on a keyboard. Some users who have better control on their mouth sticks can also use it to manipulate a track ball mouse.
Head Wand: This device is similar to the mouth stick and is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands for operating keyboard or mouse. The head wand is strapped to the head and the person moves his or her head to type on the keyboard or navigate through web documents.
Single Switch Access: People who have very limited mobility use this type of device. If a person can move only the head, for example, a switch could be placed to the side of the head that would allow the person to click it with head movements. This clicking action is usually interpreted by special software on the computer, allowing the user to navigate through the operating system, web pages, and other environments. Some software facilitates the typing of words by using an auto-complete feature that tries to guess what the person is typing, and allowing the person to choose between the words that it guesses.
Sip and Puff Switch: Similar in functionality to the single switch described above, sip and puff switches are able to interpret the user's breath actions as on/off signals, and can be used for a variety of purposes, from controlling a wheelchair to navigating a computer. The hardware can be combined with software that extends the functionality of this simple device for more sophisticated applications.
Oversized Trackball Mouse: A trackball mouse is not necessarily an assistive technology—some people without disabilities simply prefer it to the standard mouse—but it is often easier for a person with a motor disability to operate than a standard mouse. Someone may, for example, use a trackball mouse in conjunction with a head wand or mouth stick. It is relatively easy to manipulate a trackball with these devices and much harder to manipulate a standard mouse. Someone with tremors in the hands may also find this kind of mouse more useful because once the person moves the mouse cursor to the right location, there is less danger of accidentally moving the cursor while trying to click on the mouse button. A person with tremors in the hands could also manipulate the trackball mouse with a foot, if there is enough motor control in the feet.
Adaptive Keyboard: In cases where a person does not have reliable muscle control in the hands for precision movements, an adaptive keyboard can be useful. Some adaptive keyboards have raised areas in between the keys, rather than lowered areas, to allow the person to first place the hand down on the keyboard, then slide the finger into the correct key. A person with tremors, or spastic movements could benefit from this type of keyboard. Keyboard overlays are also available as an adaptation to standard keyboards, which achieve the same results. In some cases, adaptive keyboards come with specialized software with word-completion technology, allowing the person to type with fewer keystrokes, since typing can be rather laborious and slow otherwise.
Eye Tracking: Eye tracking devices can be a powerful alternative for individuals with no control, or only limited control, over their hand movements. The device follows the movement of the eyes and allows the person to navigate through the web with only eye movements. Special software allows the person to type, and may include word-completion technology to speed up the process. These systems can be expensive—usually in the thousands of US dollars—so they are less common than the less sophisticated devices, such as mouth sticks and head wands.
Voice Recognition: This software is used by persons with disabilities who are unable to use their hands to type or navigate through the web using a keyboard. This software allows a person to control a computer through speech.
Apps:
Wheelcrowd: This application helps in searching for wheelchair accessible places such as restaurants, facilities etc. around a neighbourhood. This application is available for both IPhone and Android users. This application is currently developed to provide information in Germany.[19]
City Rollers: This free app is specifically made for wheelchair users to assist in navigating through cities on wheels. It allows users to locate, add and rate important places such as rest rooms, public transportation, restaurants and wheelchair supply and repair shops. Version 1.0 of this app provides support for select American cities. It is compatible with IPhone.
Fast Mall: This free app provides directions to wheelchair accessible routes in malls especially to elevators and rest rooms in malls and shopping districts. It functions even while offline. It is optimised for IPhone 3 and above.
Local Eats: Upon keying in the location, this free app provides information on the local restaurants and indicates whether they are wheelchair accessible. This is optimised for IPhone.[20]

Cognition

Problem: People with cognitive disabilities find it difficult to navigate through normal functions of technologies and hence need technologies that are simpler to compensate for things like diminished analytical skills, reading skills etc.

Technologies:[21]

Predictive text: This makes it easier to compose messages.
Prompting: External cueing systems are useful for people with memory and organization problems as it prompts the next steps of a task and send reminders as in the case of built-in schedule reminders

E-Governance

In 2007, India ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD). The convention says that “State Parties shall take appropriate measures to ensure to persons with disabilities, access on an equal basis with others, to the physical environment, to transportation, to information and communications, including ICTs and systems and to other facilities and services open or provided to the public.” When a party to a convention ratifies it, it means that they have to have domestic legislation or policy passed by the legislative body making it law within the country. Many countries who are signatories to the UNCRPD have also ratified it to ensure equality for those with disabilities. The Indian government as well has recognized that electronics and ICTs are important enabling mechanisms to mitigate the barriers faced by disabled people. In October 2013, the Union cabinet approved the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility[22] that among other things mainly recognizes the need to eradicate discrimination against the disabled and to foster equal access to electronics and ICTs. Various stakeholders including NGOs commented on it and the policy was prepared after incorporating them. The policy attempts to facilitate access to physically and mentally disabled persons as well as local language support thought universal access to electronics and ICT products. The plan of action for this policy is:

Creating awareness on universal electronics accessibility and universal design.
Capacity building and infrastructure development.
Setting up of model electronics and ICTs centres for providing training and demonstration to special educators and physically as well as mentally challenged persons.
Conducting research and development, use of innovation, ideas, technology etc. whether indigenous or outsourced from abroad.
Developing programme and schemes with greater emphasis for differently abled women/children.
Developing procurement guidelines for electronics and ICTs for accessibility and assistive needs.

Under the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, there is a Department of Disability Affairs. In 1995, the Equal Opportunities, Protection of Rights & Full Participation Act[23] (a.k.a The Persons with Disability Act) was passed as one of the Acts under this department. The Act calls for the education, employment, creation of a barrier free environment, social security and other areas of discrimination for the disabled.

It provides for the evolution of policy in that directly benefits people with disabilities.
It calls for the implementation of the laws and policies of the Act.
It also calls for monitoring the implementation process and the redressal of grievances.

As we can see, there is a dearth of Acts and legislations relating to accessibility in India when compared to other countries in the west and even Asia. It is an even more unfortunate state of affairs that the Acts that are already in place are still not being implemented to the full effect. Even the participation of industries is lacking in terms of web accessibility. On a scale of 10, with 10 being the high quality accessibility, the following chart shows examples of industrial efforts in this matter.


Above: Participation from some prominent companies like TCS, Infosys, Yahoo, etc.

[24]

Websites

The age of the internet has had many unintended consequences in the field of accessibility and most of them have been in terms of information dissemination. There have also been intentional consequences in terms of web based services that help serve the disabled communities. In terms of general services, the internet opens windows for people in professional, educational, consumer, economic and government service aspects. In the social sphere, there is the ability to do social networking, form interest groups, video and text communication. In order for these avenues of living to be accessible to disabled people at the same level changes have to be made in various ICTs so that they accessible when they are released. The guiding principle is that if every ICT or service is made inherently accessible, then no changes need to be made specifically for PWDs. When this isn’t possible, then reasonable accommodation has to be made. When adaptations are required, there are third party accessibility softwares that have to be used. According to the ITU, websites, as the theatres of accessibility have a greater socio-economic and educational impact than any other ICT with the exception of mobile phones for independent living.[25] It is also easy to make websites inherently accessible so there is a great potential for accessibility here.

The different disabilities require different technologies to facilitate access to the internet. People with visual impairments could use a range of technologies from a screen reader, screen magnifier to glasses. People with motor impairments use one handed key boards and the deaf can use cochlear implants. However, the main space for accessible design has to be the websites themselves.

User Interface and Design Considerations for Better Accessibility

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) brought out by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) covers a wide range of recommendations to make the web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content more accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movements, speech disabilities, photo sensitivity and combinations of these.[26]

The WCAG 2.0 guidelines can be broadly categorised as:

Perceivable:

Provide text alternatives for any non text content so that it can be changed into other forms people need, such as large print, Braille, speech, symbols or simpler language
Provide alternatives for time-based media
Create content that can be presented in different ways (for example simpler layout) without losing information or structure
Make it easier for users to see and hear content including separating foreground from background.
Operable:
Make all functionality available from a keyboard
Provide users enough time to read and use content
Do not design content in a way known to cause seizures
Provide ways to help users navigate, find content and determine where they are understandable:
Make text content readable and understandable
Make web pages appear and operate in predictable ways
Help users avoid and correct mistakes
Robust:
Maximise compatibility with current and future user agents including assistive technologies.

Here is an example of how the WCAG standards of accessible websites has been applied in various countries:

Criteria	US	EU	Korea	Philippines	Australia	Thailand
Type of Policy	Legislation	Council Resolution + Action Plan	Legislation	Working group currently formulating policy	Legislation + Advisory Notes	Policy + guidelines
Effective From	1998, 2010	2002	2007	N/A	1992, 2002, 2010	Not available
Scope of Coverage	Web and other infrastructure as well	Includes other electronic infrastructure	Web and other infrastructure as well	N/A	General legislation with web specific advisory notes	Web accessibility guidelines
Compliance with WCAG	Partly	Yes	Yes	N/A	Yes	Partially compliant with WCAG 1.0s
Applicability	Only Federal Department and related agencies	Public Sector Websites of the Member States	Both private and public sector gradually by 2015 as per the current roadmap	N/A	Any individual/ organization creating a web page (Government & Private)	Guidelines targeted at both the private and public sectors
Signatory to UNCRPD	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes, signed and ratified	Yes and also signed and ratified the optional protocol	Yes, signed and ratified

Accessibility of Content

Accessible content is the most vital aspect of e-accessibility. Content that is present directly on the web and that is shared electronically need to be accessible to persons with various disabilities and thus with varying accessibility requirements.

Screen reader users, for example, would not be able to access content in graphical or image format. This is also true for documents in pdf formats as not all content in pdf is accessible through screen readers. While pdf documents that are tagged are accessible through screen readers, those documents that are structured, unstructured or secured are still inaccessible. Document formats that are accessible are listed below:

HTML
MS Word Document
Text Document
Daisy
Epub
Pdf

Content in audio format is inaccessible to persons with hearing impaired. This applies to not only audio files, but also to videos as they usually are accompanied by audio outputs. Additionally, videos are also inaccessible to persons with visual impairment. In order to make audio files and videos universally accessible, videos should be accompanied with narration while both audio files and videos should have captions and sub titles.

A critical step that needs to be taken to make content accessible is to formulate a binding policy that would require all web content developers to ensure accessibility of their content. A good example of this would be the enactment of the Copyright Act, as the various provisions under it made it possible for printed books to be converted into accessible format for persons with print impairment. This in turn made it possible for millions of people to be able to access information that had remained inaccessible before. The World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) agreed on a Treaty for the Visually Impaired that aims at making millions of printed books and other material available to persons with print impairment by converting them to alternate accessible formats.

In order to make it compulsory for web developers in India to design websites that comply with the requirements for e-accessibility, there is a need to put in place a policy that would mandate strict adherence to norms. The Government of India, through the Department of Electronics and Information Technology, set up a process to formulate a national policy to ensure accessibility of websites and ICT products and services In August 2009. This policy requires that all government websites comply with WCAG 2.0 and with other international accessibility standards for all electronic information and products and services delivery. However, a study conducted by CIS in August 2012 in which 7800 websites were tested, it was found that close to 25% of the websites did not open. Almost all the remaining websites had accessibility issues. The study also highlighted shortcomings of many websites to meet the set accessibility requirements.

Access to physical environment and information is not a privilege but a right. The national policy is the need of the hour, one that is likely to make adherence to accessibility standards a compulsory requirement and in turn make the internet more accessible for persons with disabilities.

As we have seen, accessibility stretches out like a universe and for the purpose of brevity; we will be concentrating on accessibility in the context of ICTs. More specifically, we will be looking at the electronic infrastructure that is most ubiquitous and hence automatically become the objects of accessibility concerns. This will include websites from various interfaces like mobile phones and computers and television. Before we begin looking at the particular technologies, let us look at the administrators and ministries that are responsible for helping the disabled.

Government Websites

Policies like the Electronic Delivery of Services Bill, 2011 coming forth from the government are attempting to completely transition from manual to electronic delivery of services. In the implementation of all the e-governance goals of the Indian government, website inaccessibility is one of the biggest barriers. In India, there are many groups that don’t are usually marginalized in the mainstream of websites like the illiterate, rural, only fluent in vernacular or the many disabled and website design by the government becomes crucial in the actuation of its services and a marker for the efficacy of its governance. Being an essential interface between the government and its citizenry, websites thus become the lowest hanging fruit in attaining a better democracy. It is rather unfortunate, therefore that when a study was conducted testing 7800 government websites, 1985 of them didn’t even open. [28] Most of the remaining 5815 websites has some accessibility problem. This shows that the government has a long way to go before it can claim to provide services online because even if the services are being shifted, they are not being used by many marginalized demographics in the country due to accessibility issues with the websites themselves.

Mobile Devices

In the gallery of ICTs we have discussed mobile phones are the most crucial to persons with disabilities for independent living, which is the cornerstone of accessibility. At a basic level, the ability to make phone calls and send SMSs ensures that emergency services, personal aides and family members are merely a few buttons away. Added to this, the pervasiveness of mobile phones has made it the most ubiquitous ICT platform in the world with more than 4 billion subscribers. The potential of mobiles goes deeper with the advent of smart phones which can be used to aid the physical, sensory and cognitive needs of the disabled. Hearing aid compatibility is starting to become a mandate in many countries in smart phones like the FCC HAC mandate in the U.S.[29] There are screen readers built into mobile phones along with adjustable font settings, predictive text and voice recognizers that can make mobile phones more accessible.[30] The main feature of a mobile phone that increases independence is the fact that it is small and portable unlike a laptop and can be accessed quickly and from anywhere in the network. Many accessibility technologies are high cost and cumbersome to handle physically but mobile phones are often operator-subsidized, easily customizable and much cheaper than computers. In the current app market, many phones come with built-in accessibility systems and easily downloadable apps. The W3C has a set of standards called Mobile Web Application Best Practices.[31] The goal of these standards is to aid in the development of rich and dynamic mobile web applications by listing out the relevant engineering practices that enable a better user experience and warn against some practices that may be counterproductive or even harmful.

In the evolution of mobile accessibility consciousness, there have been three major factors:

The increased processing power coupled with creative software has lead to useful user interfaces with features like voice recognition or text to speech.
An increased effort on the part of regulators, activists and users to rectify hearing aid compatibility and visually inaccessible handsets.
In many wireless markets that are saturated, the realization has dawned on operators that the disabled and elderly represent an untapped market.

Television and Radio

In the past two decades, the newer ICTs like mobiles and computers have become the primary means of social inclusion and accessibility. However, the older ICTs like TV and radio are not yet obsolete and can play an important role in accessibility. Traditionally, the radio has been an indispensible source of information for the visually impaired and now, the digital radio remains relevant in keeping the visually impaired informed. Whatever the type of radio being used, the listener has to navigate through a range of hardware (displays, dials and buttons) and software (menus, schedule guides, etc) which makes it challenging to use for persons with disabilities. People with visual impairments will probably need labelled buttons that can be read through touch, display settings that can increase the size and different brightness options. People who use internet or mobile radio will need the applications or websites to be compatible with the other assistive hardware and software that they use for along with their computers or mobile devices.[32] The Research Institute for Consumer Affairs, UK (RICA) conducted a consumer study and identified the radio model ‘Roberts RD-8BW Duet’ as user friendly for blind and partially sighted persons.[33]

It has a good reception; it has separate rotary dials, 5 large illuminated presser buttons and a large display.

Even the TV and traditional broadcasting remains relevant as they provide visual, audio and textual information through closed captioning. Digital TV allows for the option of sign language interpretation and voice over audio channels in the signals that are broadcasted. The internet is, however, usurping many of the functions of the TV and the Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is an example of that. This is a system through which traditional television services are delivered using the internet instead of the old terrestrial, satellite signal or cable television formats. Time shifted television (catch up TV) and video on demand (VOD) are examples of IPTVs. To make this clear, for cable, satellite/ terrestrial television, the equipments involved are televisions, a separate receiver called ‘set-top box’ is used sometimes and a remote control. For internet or mobile television, the equipments involved are PCs or mobiles with internet access. Here as well, like in the case of radios, regardless of the type of television being used, there needs to be a constant engagement with hardware ( screens, buttons, cables) and software (menus, programme guides, pause/rewind function etc) which can prove difficult for people with sensory and physical disabilities. Accessible equipment is required to use the television itself which is a huge barrier. The second layer of accessibility comes from the content of the television programmes which remain opaque to the visually or hearing impaired. Captions, audio descriptions of video content and sign language are necessary in order to make the content accessible. The ITU-T has been spearheading the standardization in IPTV and has worked out some standards for IPTV accessibility.

Secure
Reliable
Accessible
Open
Green
Global
Interoperable

Additional Reading

Mobile Web Application Best Practices: http://www.w3.org/TR/mwabp/

[1]. http://bit.ly/19kYbjc

[2]. http://bit.ly/1cprnKn

[3]. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Adult and Youth Literacy: Global Trends In Gender Parity, UIS Fact Sheet, September 2010, No. 3.

[4]. http://bit.ly/ITXg3i

[5]. Accessibility in Policy Making-need for an International Perspective by Nirmita Narasimhan, see http://bit.ly/1hBBujb

[6]. http://bit.ly/1bLI9VG

[7]. http://bit.ly/1d0wrCY

[8]. http://bit.ly/1gJ1aXZ

[9]. http://bit.ly/ITXTtM

[10]. See note 5 above.

[11]. http://bit.ly/18H95p6

[12]. http://bit.ly/IH4sif

[13]. See more at http://bit.ly/1gJ1rKI

[14]. See more at http://bit.ly/1hBBVKi

[15]. See reference 13.

[16]. See more at http://bit.ly/1f1Knih

[17]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBoHt

[18]. See reference 13.

[19]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYI5C

[20]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb27F

[21]. See more at http://bit.ly/ITYRpU

[22]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLJ8VT

[23]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bkBGOG

[24]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUpvZP

[25]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[26]. http://bit.ly/1bkLuov

[27]. See more at http://bit.ly/1eUqh91

[28]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLaVP

[29]. See more at http://bit.ly/1ceb9Ae

[30]. See more at http://bit.ly/1bLLKD1

[31]. See more at http://bit.ly/19l18R0

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/accessibility

Internet Governance Forum

anirudh — 2013-12-03T10:29:30Z

Anirudh Sridhar provides an analysis of the creation of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), its structure, and the importance of IGF in this unit.

Introduction

IGF can be best described as the Forum which brings "people together from various stakeholder groups as equals, in discussions on public policy issues relating to the Internet. While there is no negotiated outcome, the IGF informs and inspires those with policy-making power in both the public and private sectors. At their annual meeting delegates discuss, exchange information and share good practices with each other. The IGF facilitates a common understanding of how to maximize internet opportunities and address risks and challenges that arise.

The IGF is also a space that gives developing countries the same opportunity as wealthier nations to engage in the debate on Internet Governance and to facilitate their participation in existing institutions and arrangements. Ultimately, the involvement of all stakeholders, from developed as well as developing countries, is necessary for the future development of the Internet."[1]

Creation of IGF

As it has been mentioned, IGF was first conceived in the Tunis Agenda. Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda laid the foundation of IGF. Article 72 lays down the mandate of the IGF. It asks the UN Secretary General to put in place an open and inclusive process and to convene a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue which would be known as IGF.

Past IGFs

The first IGF was organized in 2006 in Athens. Since then it has been held each year in various locations. In has been held in Rio de Janerio in 2007, Hyderabad in 2008, Sharm El Sheikh in 2009, Vilinius in 2010, Nairobi in 2011 and Baku in 2012. The IGF in 2013 is to be held in Bali.

Overarching themes at IGFs so far:

2006 and 2007 – Internet for development"
2008 – Internet for All
2009 – Internet Governance and creating opportunities for all
2010 – Developing the Future together
2011 – Internet as a Catalyst for Change: Access, Development, Freedoms and Innovation 2012 – "Internet Governance for Sustainable Human, Economic and Social Development".

The 2013 IGF has found strong support for two themes, "Building Bridges" and "Enhancing Multi-stakeholder Cooperation for Growth, Development and Human Rights".

Apart from the over-arching themes, it focuses on certain themes which have been discussed across all the IGFs:

Human Rights/ Freedom of speech
Security, Cybercrimes
Spam
Data protection and privacy
Consumers Rights, Network Neutrality
Intellectual Property Rights
Development (issues related to digital divide)
Open Standards
Capacity Building
Issues related processes and principles
E-commerce and e-governance

Structure of the IGF

The Secretariat of the IGF is based in the United Nations. The main function of the IGF is to coordinate with and assist the work of the Multi-stakeholder Advisory Group (MAG). The MAG was first set up by Kofi Annan, Secretary General of UN in 2006. The main function of the MAG is to decide upon issues and themes which need to be addressed in each IGF. The MAG comprises of representation from all stakeholders and all regions.

The forum organizes and accommodates plenary sessions, workshops, open forums and best practices forums.

Dynamic Coalitions: The concept of dynamic coalitions was conceived in the first IGF in Athens, which are informal and issue-specific. It comprises of members from different stake holder groups. Currently there are ten active dynamic coalitions, for example, Dynamic Coalition on Accessibility and Disability, Internet Rights and Principles, and Child Online Safety, etc.

Importance of IGF

One of the main critiques of the IGF is that the outcomes of the IGF do not have any binding effect on the participating governments, industry, non-governmental and inter-governmental organizations. But such a process is said to discard the involvement of multi-stakeholder through use of coercive power which is the main feature of government regulation. In this regard, Jeremy Malcolm notes:

"The IGF’s output is explicitly “non-binding,” which means that the participation of states in the IGF process does not involve the use of coercive power as is a typical feature of government regulation. In fact since the process is to be “multilateral, multi-stakeholder, democratic and transparent” with “full involvement” of “all stakeholders involved in this process,” governments do not, at least in principle, enjoy any position of pre-eminence in policy formation through the IGF. Neither should they, if the IGF’s legitimacy and effectiveness are to be assured."[2]

[1]. What is Internet Governance Forun available at http://bit.ly/IIwXNu.

[2]. Jeremy Malcolm, Multi-stakeholder Governance and the Internet Governance Forum, Terminus Press, 2008 at pp. 3.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-governance-forum

World Summit on Information Society (WSIS)

anirudh — 2013-12-01T03:12:27Z

The United States had the control over internet resources and its administration was controlled by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. This was the principle agency in the US dealing with telecommunication and information policy and the ICANN managed the internet domain names and IP addresses.

ICANN and indirectly the US government having control over the domain name system and the internet registry was an issue of concern for the rest of the world as well international organizations. The proposal for the WSIS by the United Nations was the reaction to such a concern.

Origins of the WSIS

The World Summit on Information Society was first proposed by the International Telecommunication Union in 1998. The main focus of the WSIS was to address issues related to the global digital divide. However, the scope of the WSIS was broadened later to include internet related public policy issues. The UN General Assembly approved the Summit in 2001[1] which was to be held in two phases. The first phase was held in Geneva from December 10-12, 2003 and the second phase was held in Tunis from November 16-18, 2005. The main aim of the Geneva Summit was to lay down a road map to building an information society accessible to everyone. The Tunis Agenda was more on the lines of developing a mechanism or framework which would be effective in dealing with management of the internet public policy issues.

Main Goals of the WSIS

At the beginning the main objective of the WSIS was to discuss issues on building better telecommunication and information infrastructure in the developing nations to bridge the digital divide. The self adopted purpose of the WSIS was, "to harness the potential of knowledge and technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration."[2] However, during the meetings the focus of the WSIS was broadened and it covered not only issues related information infrastructure but also various issues related to communication and other public policy issues such as freedom of speech, privacy, etc.

Geneva Summit

The Geneva Summit saw overwhelming participation from the government, civil society, industry, international organizations and media. Nearly 11000 participants attended the Summit. The Geneva Summit of WSIS was supposed to mainly focus on principles and the Tunis Summit was envisioned to deal with implementation of principles and follow-up mechanisms. Though the Geneva Summit failed in reaching a consensus on the issue of the future of internet governance, there were two major outcomes of the Summit; the Geneva Declaration of Principles and Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG).

Geneva Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action

The Plan of Action focused on information and communication infrastructure and recognized it as the essential foundation of the information society. It also emphasized on the importance of access to knowledge, capacity building and building of an enabling environment. It was also cognizant of cultural diversity and identity, linguistic diversity and development of local content.

One of the key features of the Geneva Summits was that it recognized the principles of multi-stakeholderism. The Geneva Declaration of Principles while recognizing the principles of multi-stakeholderism stated,

"Governments, as well as private sector, civil society and the United Nations and other international organizations have an important role and responsibility in the development of the Information Society and, as appropriate, in decision-making processes. Building a people-centered Information Society is a joint effort which requires cooperation and partnership among all stakeholders."

The Geneva Declaration of Principles also laid down principles related to role of ICT in development, access, human rights and international and regional cooperation.

WGIG

The main functions of the WGIG included:

To “develop a working definition of Internet Governance
Identify the public policy issues that are relevant to Internet Governance
Develop a common understanding of the respective roles and responsibilities of governments, existing international organizations and other forums, as well as the private sector and civil society in both developing and developed countries.”

The final report of the WGIG divided issues related to Internet Governance in four sections:

Infrastructure
Privacy, security and safety on the internet
Intellectual property and international trade
Development

Tunis Summit

The Tunis Summit resulted in the agreement on the Tunis Commitment, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society and the birth of the Internet Governance Forum. The Tunis Agenda and Tunis Commitment were the consensus statements at the Tunis Phase of WSIS whereas the Internet Governance Forum was created as a multi-stakeholder platform for policy dialogue on internet related public policy matters.

The Tunis Commitment confirmed the agreement on Declaration of Principles among the stakeholders as well as reaffirmed the Plan of Action.

Tunis Agenda

The Tunis Agenda recognized the need to, "move from principles to action, considering the work already being done in implementing the Geneva Plan of Action and identifying those areas where progress has been made, is being made, or has not taken place."[4]

It also reaffirmed the, "commitments made in Geneva and build on them in Tunis by focusing on financial mechanisms for bridging the digital divide, on internet governance and related issues, as well as on implementation and follow-up of the Geneva and Tunis decisions."[5]

The two other important parts of the Tunis Agenda were sections on:

Financial mechanisms for meeting the challenges of ICT for development
This part of the Tunis Agenda generally focussed financing infrastructure and equipment for providing better access to the internet in the developing areas.
Internet Governance
The section on Internet Governance dealt with management of the internet in a multilateral, transparent and democratic process with full involvement of governments, the private sector, civil society and international organizations.

Article 35[6] of the Tunis Agenda reaffirmed that the management of the internet shall take place in an inclusive and consultative process.

The third and the most important outcome of the Tunis Summit was the creation of the Internet Governance Forum. It was set up under Article 72 of the Tunis Agenda. The next section will deal with the Internet Governance Forum.

[1]. UN General Assembly Resolution 56/183 (December 21, 2001) available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/background/resolutions/56_183_unga_2002.pdf

[2]. See more at http://www.itu.int/osg/spu/wsis-themes/UNMDG/index.html

[3]. Château de Bossey, Report of the Working Group on Internet Governance at pp. 3 available at http://www.wgig.org/docs/WGIGREPORT.pdf

[4]. Introduction, Tunis Agenda for the Information Society, WSIS-05/TUNIS/DOC/6(Rev. 1)-E, November 18, 2005 available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs2/tunis/off/6rev1.html.

[5]. "Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues. The private sector has had, and should continue to have, an important role in the development of the Internet, both in the technical and economic fields. Civil society has also played an important role on Internet matters, especially at community level, and should continue to play such a role. Intergovernmental organizations have had, and should continue to have, a facilitating role in the coordination of Internet-related public policy issues. International organizations have also had and should continue to have an important role in the development of Internet-related technical standards and relevant policies."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/world-summit-on-information-society

Internet Engineering Task Force

anirudh — 2013-12-01T02:34:23Z

The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is an open standards body with no requirements for membership and does not have a formal membership process either.

It is responsible for developing and promoting Internet Standards. Internet Standards are technological specifications which are applicable to the internet and internet access. The IETF also closely works with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and other standard setting bodies. It mainly deals with the standards of the Internet Protocol suite (TCP/IP) which is a communication protocol used for the internet.

The mission of the IETF is to, "produce high quality, relevant technical and engineering documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the internet in such a way as to make the internet work better."[1]

Structure

The IETF consists of working groups and informal discussion groups. The subject areas of the working group can be broadly divided into the following categories:

Applications
General Internet
Operations and Management,
Real-time Applications and Infrastructure,
Routing,
Security, and
Transport

The working groups are divided into, areas as mentioned above and they are managed by area directors.

IETF Standards Process

The process of developing Standards at the IETF looks simple but faces certain complications when put into practice.

A specification for a internet standards goes through a period of development followed by reviews by the community at large. Based upon the reviews and experiences, the specifications are revised and then the standards are adopted by an appropriate body after which it is published.

"In practice, the process is more complicated, due to (1) the difficulty of creating specifications of high technical quality; (2) the need to consider the interests of all of the affected parties; (3) the importance of establishing widespread community consensus; and (4) the difficulty of evaluating the utility of a particular specification for the internet community."[2]

The main goals of the Internet Standards Process are:

Technical Excellence;
Prior Implementation and Testing;
Clear, Concise, and Easily Understood Documentation;
Openness and Fairness; and
Timeliness[3]

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

W3C is a multi-stakeholder organization that involves groups from various sectors including multi nationals. W3C is also an international community dedicated to developing an open standard, "to ensure the long term growth of the web". It is led by the inventor of the web — Tim Berners-Lee.

The guiding principles of W3C"[4] are:

Web for All
The W3C recognizes the social value of the internet as it enables communication, commerce and opportunities to share knowledge. One of their main goals is to make available these benefits to all irrespective of the hardware, software, network infrastructure, native language, culture, geographical location, or physical or mental ability.
Web on Everything
The second guiding principle is to ensure that all devices are able to access the web. With the proliferation of the mobile device and smart phones; it has become more important to ensure access to the web irrespective the type of device.
Web for Rich Interaction
The W3C Standards support and recognizes that the web was created as tool to share information and it has become more significant with the increasing demand for platforms such as Wikipedia and social networking platforms.
Web of Data and Services
Web is often viewed as a giant repository or data and information but it is also seen as a set of services which includes exchange of messages. The two views complement each other and how web is perceived depends on the application.
Web of Trust
Interaction on the web has increased and people ‘meet on the web’ and carry out commercial as well as social relationships. "W3C recognizes that trust is a social phenomenon, but technology design can foster trust and confidence.""[5]

[1]. Mission Statement for the IETF available at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3935.txt

[2]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[3]. http://www.ietf.org/about/standards-process.html

[4].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

[5].http://www.w3.org/Consortium/mission

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/internet-engineering-task-force

An Interview on Internet Governance with Professor Milton Mueller and Jeremy Malcolm

anirudh — 2013-11-12T10:14:58Z

Anirudh Sridhar interviewed Professor Milton Mueller from the Syracuse University School of Information and Jeremy Malcolm, an Information Technology and Intellectual Property Lawyer, regarding current issues and debates surrounding internet governance.

Q1: The extent to which civil society can participate at the proceedings of WCIT’12?

Professor Mueller: I did not attend WCIT-12. Civil society and industry were both influential in the process. CS created a great deal of critical publicity and leaked documents that had formerly been private. Industry and CS both lobbied governmental officials. (I was the first to leak an official ITU document, and this led to the creation of WCIT leaks by some friends of mine who took the idea much farther.)

Professor Malcolm: Actually I did not attend the WCIT’12 in Dubai. I did attend the WTPF in May, but was not permitted to speak. I did distribute a briefing paper by hand and managed to speak to a few delegates. I also contributed some talking points to an intervention by the representatives of the Informal Experts Group (IEG). Undoubtedly the work of the IEG was influential, and the civil society representatives were influential within that group, but the role of the IEG was poorly articulated and its procedures and relationship to the plenary WTPF were quite arbitrary.

Since then, the organization that I represent, Consumers International, has been granted sector membership status of the ITU-T and ITU-D with a waiver of fees, so that next time we will have the opportunity to speak at any meeting that is open to sector members. This is all well and good for us, less so for civil society organisations that do not have expertise in telecommunications and hence would find it more difficult to apply for sector membership.

Q2: What were the central debates at the WCIT’12 conference?

Professor Mueller: The central debates were: 1) the relevance of International Telecom Regulations to Internet governance, 2) the ETNO proposal to have quality of service charging 3) role of the ITRs in "security" 4) to which entity do the ITRs apply (Operating entities, recognized operating entities, etc.)

Professor Malcolm: Proposals that ITU Recommendations should have mandatory status; that it should expand its mandate to include ICTs as well as telecommunications; that it should take over Internet naming and numbering functions from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers); and that Internet content hosts should share more of their revenue with the operators of telecommunications networks.

Q3: What were some good outcomes and what were some bad outcomes?

Professor Malcolm: None of these proposals succeeded, and not all even officially made it to the table. With the sustained opposition of the United States, Google and other powerful stakeholders, there was never any likelihood that they would.

What did make it through into the final treaty text are two provisions that, given that they are notionally responsible for the refusal of many countries to sign the ITRs, bear that responsibility like a dwarf wears a baggy suit. First, on security – it's worth setting this out in full:

Member States shall individually and collectively endeavor to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks in order to achieve effective use thereof and avoidance of technical harm thereto, as well as the harmonious development of international telecommunication services offered to the public.

And on spam:

Member States should endeavor to take necessary measures to prevent the propagation of unsolicited bulk electronic communications and minimize its impact on international telecommunication services. Member States are encouraged to cooperate in that sense.

The theory, though it taxes the imagination somewhat, is that these provisions could allow ITU members to justify constraints on Internet content, on the pretext that they are merely addressing security or spam. But the ITU already has work programs on security and spam, and ITU members in turn already heavily regulate these fields, without having an explicit mandate in the ITRs.

Q4: Is the fear of the ITU’s takeover of the internet real?

Professor Mueller:

There is no sudden UN or ITU effort to take over the Internet. There is, instead, a longstanding struggle between the Net and states at the national and international level. The WCIT is just the latest episode; and compared to WSIS, a minor one.

There is no evidence of any recent enlargement of the political support for states and inter-governmental institutions such as ITU. The same players are taking the same positions. There may even be erosion of support for inter-governmentalism, e.g. Brazil’s abandonment of CIRP.

The ITU is a paper tiger. Neither WSIS nor any other international development has strengthened or approved ITU efforts to gain control of pieces of the Internet since 1996.

Professor Malcolm: No: IN THE wake of the anti-climactic conclusion to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) earlier this month, readers could be forgiven for being confused about whether all the hype about the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) staging a UN takeover of the Internet had ever represented a real threat, or had just been a beat-up by special interest groups with an agenda to push.

Q5: Does the US, through ICANN exert too much unilateral influence on Internet Governance?

Professor Mueller: Off course. There are many examples of this. For example, the adoption worldwide of policies based on the DMCA and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the seizure of domains registered to US-based registrars even if they are foreign-owned and do not infringe foreign law, and the linking of tough IP laws to trade concessions.

Professor Malcolm: Yes, the US exerts too much influence over ICANN, via the GAC and the IANA contract. WCIT (or more accurately, the ITU) is NOT the right track to solve this, because keeping the internet away from the ITU is one of the primary reasons the US exerts unilateral control. Any attempt to solve the problem via the ITU will fail.

Q6: Are there any serious alternatives to ICANN?

Professor Mueller: It is inconceivable that IGF will ever evolve into a body that negotiates binding treaties. Its entire mission and purpose is to be an alternative to that. It is also an extremely weak and poorly funded institution.

Professor Malcolm: There are no longer any alternatives to ICANN that anyone seriously thinks are better. The only argument that people are making nowadays is that oversight of ICANN should become multilateral. Nobody (no longer even the ITU) is seriously suggesting that any other body than ICANN should be making these decisions. At most, the GAC wants more say, but even the GAC is still part of ICANN.

Q7: Can we have a multi-stakeholder process that is truly democratic with legal force?

Professor Mueller: To reconcile legally binding authority with MS, you would need some dramatic institutional changes at the global level that would create new forms of representation. These new institutional forms would have to find some way to represent all the world's people and organizations, not states. Because states are unlikely to give up this power on their own, some kind of revolutionary action would be required to bring that about, roughly analogous to the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century.

Professor Malcolm: In the far future, yes. In the near future no, but we still need to start talking about it, because the future starts from now. Mechanisms of multi-stakeholderism are still not well enough developed that they can substitute for the legitimacy of the nation state. But nation states do not properly overlap with those who are governed by transnational rules about the Internet, so eventually change must come.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/interview-with-milton-mueller-and-jeremy-malcolm

Bengali eSpeak Aids in Disaster Management

anirudh — 2013-11-07T09:21:07Z

Software developed on the eSpeak was deployed in Bangladesh and helped its citizens for disaster management.

The Bangla e-Speak text to speech synthesizer which was developed as part of a project funded by The Hans Foundation and executed by CIS in partnership with other partner organizations from the Daisy Forum of India was recently deployed in Bangladesh during cyclone Mahasen to read out messages which were sent during the emergency. A lot of organizations are working on TTS and their usefulness has already been established by Mahiti when they developed the Bangla Bol eSpeak. The text-to- speech (TTS) software is a very important technology for the visually impaired in that it gives a voice to text, enabling access to a whole host of information.[1]

Currently, a lot of proprietary TTS programmes are available like Balabolka, and Ultra Hal TTS reader but this TTS is an inexpensive alternative for the visually impaired.[2] This is because eSpeak is an open source compact software speech synthesizer. It is currently not available in many local Indian languages but it is possible to add new languages and even new dialects. The Bangla TTS project converted speech into Bengali.[3]

This programme was used in an innovative and useful way by applying it in disaster situations. In the case of a disaster, whether natural or national security related, the news media do not provide information in an accessible format. It is extremely important in these situations for the visually impaired to have clear access to ongoing events, get updates about things like rescue plans. The main work in order to be useful in these scenarios involved integrating national Geographic Information System (GIS), mobile phone networks and fax for the different stakeholders that need to interact before the disaster and for the responses after the disaster.[4]

The Bangla TTS was also integrated into the National Disaster Response system in Bangladesh, a country that is geographically vulnerable to many natural disasters like floods.

In order to integrate the TTS into the National Disaster Response system of Bangladesh, within the framework of the established philosophy, the entire disaster management system was built on an open-source stack. The automated bulk outward calling provision that was built for alerting people about an impending disaster had to broadcast the messages of which the text-to-voice conversion also had to be automated. During the process, many open source tools were tried but eSpeak was finally tried as it has a really low memory footprint and is very efficient for a large scale of operation. During the cyclone Mahasen, this proved decisive as the call volumes were very high and eSpeak scaled to meet the huge demand. All the pre-emptive alerts that were sent through the disaster management system were sent through this TTS. The programme helped a large size of the population and a diverse demographic. The Entire coastal Bangladeshi population benefited from the system. During the peak load, the system handled 27,000 calls, which shows that it has the capacity to deliver in the most difficult situations.

Mahiti,along with a partner in Bangladesh, was the organization responsible for developing this software. There are currently a few Bangla Text to Speech softwares on the internet like Kathak TTS but the Bangla Bol has some unique features.[5]

It’s an eSpeak Bangla language support which is open-source and is based on the”formant synthesis" method. This method enables the integration of many languages without modifying the underlying framework. It also enables language experts with even no programming knowledge to add or improve the language supported in eSpeak which is the most important feature of eSpeak. eSpeak was not just chosen because of its technical strengths, but also because it’s a part of a project to develop and integrate into a Non-Visual Desktop Access (NVDA) open-source project which aims to enable computer desktop accessibility (screen reader functionality) to the blind. This is so that it can be used in many local Indian languages. Bangla was part of the first set of four languages that was completed by Mahiti (Hindi, Telugu and Malayalam were the remaining three). Therefore, while the far reaching consequences of the development work under this project being carried on in India to benefit its own marginalized populations and that of neighboring countries was never in doubt, this recent usage in Bangladesh adds fresh impetus to the work and underscores the criticality of this work.

[1]. Sen, Prasanjit. "Reading without Seeing: Mahiti's work on eSpeak." Mahiti Blog. Mahiti, 27 08 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

[2]. Alam, Firoj , and Mumit Khan. "Text To Speech for Bangla Language using Festival." BRAC University, Bangladesh . (2007): n. page. Web. 8 Oct. 2013.

[3]. Sen, Prasanjit. "Mahiti launches 'Bangla Bola' eSpeak (Bengali Speaking eSpeak) ." Mahiti Blog. Mahiti, 28 08 2013. Web. 2 Oct. 2013.

[4]. "Our Work- mproving National Disaster response."Mahiti.org. Mahiti, n.d. Web. 2 Oct 2013.

[5]. See footnote 2.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/bengali-e-speak-aids-in-disaster-management

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Cyberspace

anirudh — 2013-10-04T11:24:00Z

This blog post explores what authors of various stripes have to say about the digital sphere. Directly or indirectly, it looks at the commentary that authors provide on raging debates and contentions within the Digital Humanities.

John Irving, while giving a talk on the role of authors in American society remembered a quote: “Writers are the engineers of the human soul”. After rummaging through his memory for the source, he recollected that Joseph Stalin had said that right before executing 13 writers for espionage and treason. Jonathan Franzen and Azar Nafisi shared his opinion that writers are no longer given this kind of attention or importance, at least in American society.[1] There was a time in the 60’s and 70’s when American writers, unlike British writers at that time, were sought after as the leading public intellectuals and thinkers on issues even on the periphery of their immediate craft. The most plausible explanation of this curious double standard looked at America then as a young country that was still wondering what it was; a society of immigrants; Italians, Jews, Germans, Brits, or a country with an identity and a soul. Subliminally at least, they knew that it would be the writers that answered these questions.[2] On the other hand, England is the land of Shakespeare and they had already lived that process hundreds of years ago, and didn’t need telling who they are from writers. If America was in a youthful process of self-discovery requiring writers to countenance its soul until recently, then the new Digital World with its Digital Natives is certainly at an infant stage, still affected by the cutting edge of Freudian formation. Therefore, we must turn to our writers to tell us what this world is and who the people in it are.

The Digital Humanities claim to be a post structural, post gender, race, class space where the nondiscriminatory HTML, SGML and XML potentates are beyond racism, sexism and heteronormativism.[3] If the first claim is true, then the digital sphere can not only be understood as a changed society but as an avenue for social change. An impartial technological government can allow people to progress regardless of the identity that may have encumbered them outside its jurisdiction in the ‘real world’ which lends them agency in the real world nevertheless. If a Tamilian in 1975, frustrated with the Sinhalese medium schools decided to get an education elsewhere and moved back to Sri Lanka afterwards, then the Tamilian may be discriminated against but remains educated. The second claim made by the digital humanities goes further and states that a discussion about identity politics isn’t even desirable in the Digital Humanities. Ian Bogost writes that a blind focus on identity politics can divert from the technical nature of the field.[4] In fact, Stephen Ramsay divides the digital humanities into two categories: Digital Humanities 1 which deals with text encoding, archive creation and text analysis and Digital Humanities 2 which deals with the reaction of the humanities to a technical event horizon.[5]

Basically, that the group concerned with the technical aspect is distinct from the humanistic inquiry into cultural aspects that have something to do with the digital. Drawing upon this distinction, Rafael Alvarado says that the machine ought to be the horizon of interpretation and not the political as type 2 theorists claim. According to Hobbes, identity and politics are another kind of discourse emerging from a special kind of machine; society.[6] In this paper, I want to look at what writers in the age of the digital tell us about these individual claims of the digital humanities through their narratives.

Writers tell us about the world they inhabit not only from what they write about but how they write it. The much heralded multi-media experience of the future story and narratives is exemplified by the computer game form. Studying computer games are essential for understanding Digital Nativity because the modern cyber denizens glean much of their assumptions from game tutelage or at its least subliminal messaging.[7] My game savvy friend was recently telling me about why I should come gaming with him and he curiously said, “I’m not saying it’s amazing (though it is), but it’s inevitable”. Indeed, Sherry Turkle states about video games that “Video games are a window onto a new kind of intimacy with machines that is characteristic of the nascent computer culture. The special relationship that players form with video games has elements that are common to interactions with other kinds of computers...At the heart of the computer culture is the idea of constructed, “rulegoverned” worlds. I use the video game to begin a discussion of the computer culture as a culture of rules and simulation.”[8]

Games are not a just limp space where anything goes, but a place which, although time travel and interplanetary warfare is possible, is governed stringently by rules and thus form narratives that can inform and teach. They represent modern epistemic shifts and as Turkle states it, “Some of them begin to constitute a socialization into the computer culture: you interact with a program, you learn how to learn what it can do, you get used to assimilating large amounts of information about structure and strategy by interacting with a dynamic screen display. And when one game is mastered, there is thinking about how to generalize strategies to other games. There is learning how to learn.”[9]

In this paper, we are less interested in the narratives of early video games like Space War or Pong because of the cost and size of manufacture which made them very esoterically available or limited by the incipience of programming in general that defined the narrative. Pong basically consisted of a blip or a square ball (which was easier than having a round ball) that bounced back and forth on the screen that crudely resembled Ping Pong. Space War, on the other hand could be played only in research environments like MIT. The designers’ dream was to create visually appealing games that demand a diverse and challenging set of skills. Turkle encapsulates this goal when she says “the ambition is to have the appeal of Disneyland, pinball, and a Tolkien novel all at once.”[10]

Games such as Joust didn’t have the ability to engender an imaginative identification with characters like real narratives in literature do. They instead relied heavily on a common pool of fantasies about medieval characters that players would have.[11] Therefore, the games we should be looking at for narratives are unfettered virtual world video games that are usually Massive Multi-player Online Games (MMOG) that tell their own stories and are not dependant solely on the player’s imagination for narrative.

TuurGhys has studied 4 different historical strategy games that have such narratives that we can explore: Age of Empires, Empire Earth, Rise of Nations and Civilization IV.[12]

In these games, the hierarchical visual representations of the possible sequences of upgrades that the player can take (better known as the tech tree), seems to be a forced sequence in the narrative that the writer takes. Basically a technology tree is a structure that controls and enables progression from technology to better technology allowing the players also to obtain better facilities. In all of these games, technology is depicted in the narrative as the sole enabler and progenitor of social changes within the political landscapes and eras and civilizations are thus determined by the kinds of technology they use.[13] Rob Macdougall, having studied the Civilization 4 technology tree observes that “the Civtech tree offers a range of choices but is basically linear in the end, and the fact that you really need certain technologies to win the game makes it more linear still.” [14] Due to this seemingly inert yet subliminally charged historical pedagogy, Tuur comes to the conclusion that the writers in the genre facilitate change through hard technological determinism[15]

This messaging coming through from the narrative is important as it helps to understand the implications of its prevalence in such an influential medium. Tuur Ghys says, “Determinism is more than a pitfall in historical thinking, when embodied in a mechanism like a tech tree it can form a script that influences the design and content of popular culture.”[16]

Technological determinism that is narrated in these stories has many implications on the player’s understanding of social progress and by extension; the humanities. Sally Wyatt states that “Even if STS analysts look upon technological determinism as an inferior model, it should be studied and treated seriously because it is the common belief by most actors.”[17] In describing this phenomenon, Karl Marx, in “The Poverty of Philosophy” said "The Handmill gives you society with the feudal lord: the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist".[18]

The idea that technology develops suomotu, void from social forces is one aspect of technological determinism and other aspect is that technology regulates and is the organizing principle of society and social change. Technological determinists believe that societies lack the autonomy to change in accordance with their self interest and evolving moral consciousness. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul posits that technology, through the potency of its efficiency, works in a Darwinian process of technological selection.[19] Technology allows those social systems; morals and philosophies to advance that promote it, leaving the Luddite ideas to the ashen tray of history. This leads the people who get their assumptions about society from pop culture and especially these games to ascribe to the second claim of the Digital Humanities. In this line of thought, Bruno Latour attempts to restore the place of technology from the place of mere means to what he claims is its ontological dignity by describing the ways in which it forms detours in our final actions from our original intent.[20]

“Indeed, the routine of habit must not prevent us from recognizing that the initial action, this famous ‘plan’ which is supposed to stand in for the programme materialized by the simple implementation of technology, has deﬁnitely mutated. If we fail to recognize how much the use of a technique, however simple, has displaced, translated, modiﬁed, or inﬂected the initial intention, it is simply because we have changed the end in changing the means, and because, through a slipping of the will, we have begun to wish something quite else from what we at ﬁrst desired. If you want to keep your intentions straight, your plans inﬂexible, your programmes of action rigid, then do not pass through any form of technological life. The detour will translate, will betray, your most imperious desires.”[21]

Without technology, humans would be on a contemporary level with their actions and thus limited to their proximate interactions. Latour thus comes to the conclusion that “Technologies belong to the human world in a modality other than that of instrumentality, efﬁciency or materiality. A being that was artiﬁcially torn away from such a dwelling, from this technical cradle, could in no way be a moral being, since it would have ceased to be human – and, besides, it would for a long time have ceased to exist.”[22] Apart from possibly shutting down moral deliberation before the invention of a new technology, absolving us from any responsibility of the technologies we invent and being a self fulfilling prophecy in that this perception favours the ones making the new technology, this idea has another important consequence. The contention that technology arbitrates and facilitates individual moral decision making and society’s collective consciousness means that even in the digital realm, the horizon of consideration for the humanities should be defined by technology and not identity politics, thus vindicating Alvarado’s claim.

While geography and climate may have been the ancient factors, modern historical video games thus essentially posit that technology is now the raison d’être of social change. Taken to the logical extent of Civilization IV’s technology tree, [23] that mysticism leads to robotics and that the civics of the nation is unlocked by technology (Bronze working allows slavery) it marks a vindication of Stanley Kubrick’s nightmare vision of technology in 2001: A Space Odyssey. If technology, as these games claim, is one big HAL 9000, monitoring our urges, lobotomizing social movements then the humanities can no longer consider the digital space as a laboratory where social change is orchestrated. We can thus conclude that this narrative shows that the digital humanities cannot consider the digital space as an arena for identity politics to have its day, not because of critiques like Martha Nell Smith’s that the creators of tools bring in their philosophical stances and that the digital is dominated by English which is imperial in nature.[24] It is because technology will decide the nature of the arena and what will come into play there.

Let us now move to what more traditional narratives tell us about the digital space. Woody Allen, in the late 1970’s wrote a short story about a shy middle aged professor who longs for romance and finds a book into which you can be transported to any page.[25] The Professor, on choosing Madam Bovary enters Emma’s world and has a raging affair with her while simultaneously introducing us to an interactive novel. Michael Ende, the German novelist later wrote The Neverending Story which tells a similar story of a book called The Neverending Story, which was later adapted into many screenplays.[26]

One of the writers whom I’ve read who brings this narrative into his meta-narrative is Mark Danielewski. He engages in games of typography and layout in his first post-post modern novel ‘House of Leaves’ that is far outstripped by his latest Joycean riot; ‘Only Revolutions’.[27]

Though Joyce was a trickster and a prankster with his allegorical vortex, Ulysses, constantly subverting the implicit contract between the author, text and the reader, he did not possess the digital tools that Danielewski does. This novel tells the story of two characters, Sam and Hailey, whose stories have to be read in 8 pages each from front to back, back to front, up to down and upside down respectively. This architecture of a novel is only possible in the digital age. He writes two epic narrative poems of two individuals whose lives meet at the middle (literally) of the book and continue on their individual path, thus forcing the read to participate in the alienation of the characters. Danielewski set up a discussion board online before writing the novel where he asked his cult followers of ‘House of Leaves’ to tell him their favorite car, animals they respect and favorite historical events which he meticulously slipped into the final work.[28]

The question of where the novel ends and begins and where the writer ends and the reader begins is nebulous in this work. Danielewski seems to be showing us through his craft what ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ tried to tell us: We live in a constant flux between what is, what we want it to be and what will be. This narrative clearly tells us that technology can be subordinated for greater human participation in the digital realm. The idea that people can, and more importantly anyone can (regardless of their identity) participate in an online discussion thread and determine plot motifs and details while actively participating in the characters’ destinies moves us closer to the first claim of the digital humanities. This means that the digital realm can be an oasis for the stating of and thus the interpenetration of identity politics and a nexus for social change. Regnant in this narrative is the idea that though it depends on a technological event horizon (e-books, chat rooms etc), the change is determined less by technology and more by the hardware of the human brain and an operating system that makes the ioS7 look like a game of Pong; the human consciousness.

These conflicting visions of society, the humanities that countenance it and our role in shaping the future from different kinds of authors show us that we should be observing what they say very keenly. The digital humanities seem to exist in a primordial soup of pre-morphological uncertainty and the writers could be the involuntary torchbearers.

[1]. Monroe, Colin, dir. The Role of Writers in American Society. Perf. John Irving, Jonathan Franzen, and Azar Nafisi. Connecticut Forum Book CLub , 2011. Web. 30 Sep 2013.

[2]. Hughes, Mark. "Martin Amis: Britain doesn’t have enough respect for writers." Telegraph [London] 25 June 2012, n. pag. Web. 3 Sep. 2013. <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/9352559/Martin-Amis-Britain-doesnt-have-enough-respect-for-writers.html>.

[3]. Martha Nell Smith, “The Human Touch Software of the Highest Order: Revisiting Editing as Interpretation.” Textual Cultures: Texts, Contexts, Interpretation, 2(1):2007, 1-15.

[4]. Bogost, Ian. 11 05 2013. POSTCOLONIAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES, Online Posting to OPEN THREAD: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A HISTORICAL “REFUGE” FROM RACE /CLASS /GENDER /SEXUALITY /DISABILITY?

[5]. Ramsay, Stephen. "DH Types One and Two." Stephen Ramsay. Disqus, n. d. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[6]. Alvarez, Rafael. 12 05 2013. POSTCOLONIAL DIGITAL HUMANITIES, Online Posting to OPEN THREAD: THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A HISTORICAL “REFUGE” FROM RACE /CLASS /GENDER /SEXUALITY/DISABILITY

[7]. Turkle, Sherry. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984. 64-92. eBook.

[8]. See note above.

[9]. See note 7 above.

[10]. See note 7 above.

[11]. See note 7 above.

[12]. Ghys, Tuur. "Technology Trees: Freedom and Determinism in Historical Strategy Games." Game Studies. 12.1 (2012): n. page. Web. 3 Sep. 2013.

[13]. See note 12 above.

[14]. MacDougall, Robert. "Technology Grows On Trees." Old is the New New. N.p., 18 03 2009. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[15]. See note 12 above.

[16]. See note 12 above.

[17]. Wyatt, Sally. Technological Determinism is Dead; Long Live Technological Determinism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. eBook.

[18]. Chandler, Daniel. Technological or Media Determinism.Aberystwyth: Aberystwyth University Press, 2000. Print.

[19]. See note 18 above.

[20]. Latour, Bruno. "Morality and Technology The End of the Means." Sage Journals. 19. (2002): 247-260. Web. 30 Sep. 2013.

[21]. See note 20 above.

[22]. See note 20 above.

[23]. See note 12 above.

[24]. See note 3 above.

[25]. See note 7 above.

[26]. Ende, Michael. The Never Ending Story. Dutton Children's Books, 1979. Print.

[27]. Poole, Steven. "O how clever." Guardian [London] 30 09 2006, n. pag.Web. 3 Sep. 2013.

[28]. See note 27 above.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/hitchhikers-guide-to-cyberspace