Centre for Internet and Society

Click to Change

nishant — 2012-01-03T09:35:56Z

From organising political protests and flash mobs to uploading their versions of Kolaveri Di, people brought about change with the help of the internet, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 1 January 2012.

2011 was a year of connections. At the turn of the last decade, there were many qualms that we are all becoming “alone together”. There was fear that digital webs are building societies of isolated individuals. It was presumed that as cellphones become ubiquitous, broadband becomes affordable, and the digital realm emerges as a significant arbitrator of our everyday life, human connections will lose out to digital connectivity. However, the course of the year has shown that the wide and democratic access to digital and internet technologies has led to creative forms of connections between people. Researchers have proved that the social web has decreased the social gaps between people — the six degrees of separation is now reduced to 4.7 degrees of distance.

Here is a look at five areas that changed dramatically in 2011 as digital proximities shaped closer human relations.

The Political: From the Arab Spring and the iconic gathering of people at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, to the unprecedented mobilisation of people who came out in support of Team Anna’s anti-corruption campaign in India, to the Occupy movements across the world, people reshaped themselves as citizens in 2011. The ability of social networking sites to pass messages, and to share ideas and inspire people to take to the streets has changed the world as we know it. Instead of being passive observers of political protests, thousands of people took to the streets, demanding their rights and expressing their opinions on the politics of their countries.

The Social: This was also the year of the flash mob. After the first excitement in 2003, when the first flash mob was orchestrated in Mumbai, the idea had fizzled out, facing legal opposition and social disinterest. However, in 2011, the flash mob came back with a vengeance — from the ‘slut walks’ which addressed public sexual harassment in our cities, to the organised and ‘permitted’ dance performance at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. Planned and executed through viral media, social web and cellphone messages, flash mobs allow people to explore new relationships with malls and roads.

The Cultural: Bollywood took to the digital world this year, with celebrity blogs and tweets about their personal lives (remember the craze around the Bachchan baby), professional relationships and upcoming movies. Movies like Ra.One experimented with social media integration, producing gaming platforms and interactive environments for fans. However, it was all eclipsed by the rage that asked the simple question: “Why this Kolaveri Di?” What started off as a promo for an upcoming film became one of the most shared videos of the year, leading to thousands of people uploading their versions of the song, recorded with cheap digital video devices.

The Economic: Perhaps one of the most dramatic changes has been the way corporate houses have started harnessing the power of the Web to go beyond just selling. While advertorials and commissioned bloggers are still going strong, there is a clear recognition that the social web might be one of the ways to influence people towards becoming more responsible citizens. Big Cinema’s magnificent “silent” national anthem that captures children with speech and hearing disability performing to Jana Gana Mana stole our hearts at the beginning of the year, and was followed quickly by Aircel’s campaign, Save Our Tigers.

The Personal: 2011 was a year of crises: natural disasters that destroyed cities in the US, Thailand, New Zealand, the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima prefecture in Japan, or the bomb blasts in Mumbai and Delhi. No matter where, netizens emerged as heroes. They created Facebook pages to mobilise resources, built Twitter hashtags to offer help, organised information mashups to keep people updated and offered help to those who needed it. People of the year, this year, were people, who showed how their spaces of leisure and entertainment are also spaces through which they can reach out to strangers online.

If 2011 has shown us anything, it is that technologies in themselves are neither the problem nor the solution. It is the people who use them and inhabit them that shape the futures of our technology landscapes. And we might be spending more time behind an interface but that seems to make us only more human.

Read the original published by the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/click-change

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer

nishant — 2011-12-31T12:15:10Z

In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding? Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography is now out in the Biblio and is is available online (after a free registration) as a PDF.

And how do you stitch it together around a person so iconic that he was always larger than life? Steve Jobs, the authorised story, that Steve Jobs never got to read because of his death to cancer on 5th October 2011, captures the tension between being a biographer and a historian that marks Isaacson's ambitious project. As a biographer, he hasn't yet achieved enough critical distance with the subject at hand, and hence, instead of engaging with Jobs to give us inroads into his mind, we get a history that dons the mantle of objectivity and accuracy, to create a eulogy that would fit Steve Jobs' journey from Apple II to Apps.

Written lucidly in a fairly conversational style reminiscent of Isaacson’s time spent with the Time Magazine, Steve Jobs is a story stitched together with love, care, rigour and honesty, to look at the times, people, places and circumstances that created the megalith icon Steve Jobs. Isaacson, whose earlier works include biographical histories of Benjamin Franklin (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Albert Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2008), confesses to his love of exploring the intersections of technology and humanity. He establishes Steve Jobs as a worthy successor in the series, using Jobs’ own description of himself – “I always thought of myself as a Humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics” – as the springboard for writing this ambitious history.

Like a good historian, Isaacson refuses to take Jobs at face value, well aware of his ‘Reality Distortion Field’ that sucks you in even if you are aware of it, making reality appear in morphed forms. With a rigour that befits the project, he sets out in search of the historical truth using over a hundred interview sources comprised of influential people in Jobs’ life, an exhaustive riffling through the public discourse around Apple and its poster boy, a shrewd hand on the economic and technological pulse of the late 20th century and an uncanny ability to read between the lines. The result is a biography filled with tales that we know, stories that we speculated about, anecdotes about what we suspected.

In one of the most memorable interviews in the book, Isaacson interviews Debi Coleman, one of the early managers at Apple, who says, “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You ---hole, you never do anything right.’ ... Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” Isaacson traces
this peculiar power that Jobs had over people in his life, to make them feel special and worthless at the same time, to Jobs’ own early knowledge of his adoption and of his oscillations between feeling “Abandoned. Special”. Isaacson shows how Jobs’ own life constantly referenced these two positions – from his dysfunctional relationships with women (the short story of how he got his girlfriend pregnant at 23 and then abandoned her, even denying paternity), to his long travels to India in search of spiritual belonging, and the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, who he hero-worshipped only to later realise that he was “smarter than him” — the adoption and its effects on his young mind, come up repeatedly. It serves as a way of understanding his abrasive attitude to authority, his rude and insensitive behaviour with colleagues and friends, and his strange fads at self improvement that ranged from fruitarian diets to extreme purging and fasting.

Steve Jobs offers a wide range of examples of his awful behaviour – the bullying, the belittling, the lying – till you are numbed by them. At the same time, there is a fanboy who takes us gleefully through the history that preceded the world of iPod, iPhone and iPad, with backstories of the known, the presumed and the plausible. The book quenches the thirst for information about one of the most private public figures and confirms the polarity, not only of Jobs’ dealings with the world, but also his own life and how he saw it. There is an explosion of facts – unknown facts – that entice you into reading the book, but facts alone do not a good biography make.

What is missing from the book, is insight. Throughout the book, while Jobs’ own dramatic life choices sustain your attention and interest, the author does not work too hard at either creating his own impressions of Jobs or at giving insight in more than the surface. There is no doubt that Isaacson is an expert historian— the most enjoyable parts of the book are when he looks at the histories that came together to create Jobs. Using his rich knowledge of the ’70s and the ’80s in the USA he portrays an enchanted universe of the hippy lifestyle, rebellious attitudes to authority, reforming education system, the transition from the analogue to digital technologies, and the heyday of creative experimentation enjoyed by a plush economy.

The layers of enchantment start fading when Isaacson lets go of the mantle of history and starts talking about the person he is studying. It is almost as if after having done his research on Jobs and then failing to invest in him as an author, he sought respite in writing history rather than giving us more of the person involved. Which is why, after reading the first half of the book, going through a series of strategic beginnings, looking at a wide range of people like Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Andrea Cunningham, Daniel Kotke and Mike Markkula, one gets a feeling that you know more about these people than you know about Jobs. While each one of these characters, even in their cameo appearances, bring flavour, variety, complexity and emotionality to the tale, Jobs remains the “enlightened but cruel” person who, even as he grows and transforms, remains tied to that description. Jobs becomes an organising principal for making sense of the jumbled influences behind the making of Apple rather than a person we can know more about. He is often named as an enigma but there is very little effort put into actually exploring his mystery. The historian wins over the biographer in getting you more interested in the time-space continuum rather than in the person.

I don’t want you to go away with the idea that there is not much substance to Isaacson’s writing. With a fine pen (which could have done with a little reflexive editing — and I am sure this would have happened had the book been released as planned in January of next year instead of being brought forward to fill the void created by Jobs’ death), Isaacson does lead us into Jobs’ universe (if not into his head) in interesting ways. He paints little sketches of the past — like Jobs’ run-in with Bill Gates, like Apple’s rivalry with IBM, like Apple’s ‘stealing’ of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) ideas and technology from Xerox PARC, like the first Mac advertisement that posited Apple as the rebel against the ‘thought police’ in George Orwell’s dystopian epic 1984, or even in the parting of ways between the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). Isaacson knows how to tell even an oft-told story well and takes you through a simple but intricate narrative of how Jobs became the poster-boy of the company he founded and his eventual ousting from it as a result of his obnoxious behaviour and the obsessive compulsive personality that was affecting the productivity and business of Apple.

However, the second half of the book, separated with some poignant and memorable pictures from Jobs’ life, makes it clearer than ever that Isaacson’s interest in Jobs is not as a biographer but as a historian. It deals with Jobs’ ousting from Apple, his near bankrupt status as both Next and Pixar fell to bad days, and the eventual return of Jobs to the Apple empire not as the prodigal son but the ascendant angel. In pithy prose, Isaacson captures the turmoil, frustration and chaos that emerged when the brightest star of the computing industry almost collapsed in his own overambition. We get a sense of the ruthlessness, the hard heartedness and the short memory of a technology industry that is simultaneously unforgiving, forgetful and hinged on a business ethic of capital and market expansion. If Isaacson notices the irony of Jobs’ own firing of “B grade players” from his Macintosh project and the abrasive dismissal of “shitheads” that Jobs regularly engaged in, to feed his own sense of power and control, he doesn’t dwell on it.

The most dramatic rags-to-riches fairy tale of Jobs’ rise to power and his subsequent emergence as a tech superstar who changed the world as we know it with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, in a quest to make his mark in history, is a lacklustre effort. The narrative is slow and sluggish, often making you want to skim through the page and move on. There is also a repeated emphasis on how Jobs was a visionary, was brilliant, was a man who, as he grew, was getting to deal with his life better, instead of an analysis of the different events that have marked Jobs’ public and personal life. The historian, when faced with the present just rushes through it to complete the book. Yet, the last interviews with Jobs, where he refers to himself as a machine, “one click, and it is all gone” are rich in emotions and texture. Isaascon does justice to Jobs’ belief in his being good “at making people talk”. There is a sense of closure that comes with angst, grief, pain and the feeling of loss that Jobs’ death must incite.

The discontent I am left with is that in what is being read as a homily to the man, there is very little of the man in it. I knew Steve Jobs, through the legends and stories that surround him, as an abrasive and arrogant whizkid who manipulated everybody around him ruthlessly to execute his own visions and dreams. I knew Steve Jobs, through the public discourse and rumours, as a flawed man who could be at once the best and the worst thing that could happen to you, using people as gods when he needed them and shattering them when he no longer needed them in his new visions. I knew Steve Jobs, through the grapevine and the gossip as a man who was obsessed with control and as one who sought spirituality in design and salvation in a good sale. I knew Steve Jobs as a bundle of contradictions and contrariness and while this book explains in fascinating ways the confluences that created this legend, it gives me very little in terms of understanding the man behind the mask.

The interwebz are already abuzz with the debates for or against Steve Jobs. There is surprise at how Isaacson waters down some of the personal and professional scuffles, often bordering on the unrelenting and the unethical, in his rendering of Jobs’ life. Speculation is rife about some of the more controversial decisions that Jobs took and whose side Isaacson is on. The book captures, comprehensively, so much of Jobs’ life that it is bound to lead to infinite discussion and critique. However, I would recommend that you read the book not as a biography but as a history. If you read it as a history where Steve Jobs features prominently, because, after all, histories are written by those who win, you will be rewarded richly. It is a history that offers innovative ways of looking at technology, one that maps one of the most crucial transitions of the 20th century from the analogue to the digital and shows how a handful of people have shaped the information age we live in. However, if you approach Steve Jobs as a way of understanding Steve Jobs, chances are you will feel short changed.

Read the original published in the Biblio VOL. XV NOS. 11 & 12, NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2011

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/historian-wins-over-biographer

Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities

nishant — 2011-12-30T10:15:12Z

There can be no refuting Michael Edwards’ claim that the world we live in is not only thick with problems, but that the problems that we are collectively trying to address are ‘thick...complex, politicized and unpredictable...complicated and contested’.

This is what he calls the ‘magic bullet’ approach to accounting for the work we do in a language and framework shaped by neo-liberal and corporate productivity in the age of late-capitalism. It is also difficult to disagree with the fact that the solutions we work with, are often too thin, fetishising enumeration of impact more than actual systemic change in areas of intervention.

His call for significantly transforming ‘existing systems of knowledge, politics and economics’ reminds me of another moment of crisis that Michel Foucault was addressing when he called for a systemic change in conditions of ‘Life, Labour and Language’ as a means of restructuring the human condition. I find Foucault’s formulation as a direct complement to Edwards’ triangulation because in his design of the futures, there is an inspiring prominence given to affect, affection, belonging, cohesion, and happiness – things which are often lost in the world of ‘quantiphilia’ that accompanies the ‘quick-fix cost efficient’ alternatives that are gaining centrality in contemporary development discourse..

I find myself nodding vigorously at Edwards’ fine critique of technocratic social innovation that is being offered as the panacea that shall cure all our problems from authoritarian regimes (as in the case of the Arab Spring) to poverty and mortality (as being supported in Asian and African countries to counter unemployment and AIDS).

In the knowledge collaboration on Digital Natives with a Cause? with Hivos, we have increasingly found that it is necessary to think of technology, not as a tool of mediation and arbitration (or of mobilisation and organisation) but as a condition of living. The extraordinary focus on granting access and facilitating inclusion in the digital world often misses out on the need to build social, cultural, political, intellectual, financial and emotional infrastructure that allows for a new kind of collaboratively formed action to come into being.

Instead, following the battle cries of an almost redundant ICT for Development (ICT4D) warrior, governments, NGOs and civil societies are obsessively building physical infrastructure without taking into consideration the quality of access, life, safety, responsibility and change that these technologies bring in. A concentration on these technologies as benign tools (much as a hammer is, till it comes and hits you on the head) obfuscates the complicated, or to use Edwards’ term ‘thick’ reality of technology ecology (politics, power and culture) and instead produces ‘thin’ solutions which are generally one-size, and fit nobody.

These thin solutions also, often depend on heroic individuals rather than Everyday Digital Natives who can actually produce change from the bottom-up, in ways that might be outside the scale, scope and understanding of traditional NGO work.

And yet, I have some reservations in the futures that Edwards conjures for those of us who work with, at, within and through INGOs towards a collective vision of global human development. I shall try and work through them, deeply appreciative of the provocations that Edwards sets forward in this thought-piece and recognising this as building upon his ideas - more a dialogue than an irresolute conflict. And to map my arguments, I am going to fall upon 2 metaphors that I have been thinking through in the last few months.

Surrogacy: Quickly defined as a process where One takes the place of Another, I offer Surrogacy as a way of problematizing Edwards’ rather persuasive metaphor of ‘bridging’. While the essay insightfully looks at the problem of INGOs as a product of their times, and their need to radically restructure their form and practice, the idea of bridging does not offer enough departure from the very points of origin that are being critiqued.

The imagination of an INGO of the future as mediating, arbitrating, managing, making interventions still strongly adheres to the idea that the INGO is essentially a surrogate structure that stands in for the State, the Community, the Society, the Individual, in the furtherance of its goal.

This surrogate structure has been at the centre of most rights based and development design in the last half-century and has led to many problems that fail to address questions of sustainability and longevity. If, we were to rethink the role of the INGO in the future, they cannot be merely about acknowledging different local movements and political happenstance.

We need to look at what happens when the surrogate structure of peerage, patronage and protection is dismantled to initiate change.

One possible solution is to look at the INGO – like I was arguing with technologies – not as actors or agents of change. The ambition might be to imagine the INGO as producing conditions within which change happens, thus looking at a wider investment within different sectors and actors of change, which goes beyond merely capacity building or short term thin solutions.

Temporality: The commonsensical understanding of the contemporary is something that belongs to its own time. We use the idea of the contemporary to refer to simultaneity of events. Martin Heidegger, in his brilliant treatise on ‘Being and Time’ suggests that the Contemporary does not refer to 2 things happening at the same time but actually refers to 2 things that do not belong to the same time, happening together.

It is a powerful way of proposing a Heterotemporality or diverse times within which different geo-political contexts and socio-cultural movements exist. There seems to be a unified future that we are talking about when we look at the notion of our collective futures. However, it might be more fruitful to realise that there are various futures which might actualise at different times and that there has to be a way of accounting for this temporal diversity, which does not yet reflect in our plans for the future.

The Heterotemporality demands different languages, concepts, pasts and practices to come together to form specific and flexible futures for the people we work with. If the century of development work has taught us something, it is the fact that imagining false futures for people who live in different temporalities often create great conditions of precarity, danger and violence for them.

Maybe it is time to first ask the question, “whose future are we addressing, when we talk about a future of the INGOs?” and start a new set of conversations about selective histories, visible presents and imagined futures that inform our discourse and practice in contemporary times.

Photo credit main picture: A connection between past and future, by Gioia De Antoniis

Read the original published in The Broker here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen

nishant — 2011-12-24T08:58:13Z

Digital cinema, especially the kinds produced using mobile devices and travelling on Internet social networking systems like YouTube and MySpace, are often dismissed as apolitical and ‘merely’ a fad. Moreover, content in the non-English language, due to incomprehensibility or lack of understanding of the cultural context of the production, is labeled as frivolous, or inconsequential, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009.

Contextualising new digital cinema through Kuso[1]

Deploying the aesthetic framework of kuso as political engagement, this essay analyzes how its ‘aesthetic’ form of expression offers spaces of political participation and negotiation for the ‘Strawberry Generation’ digital natives in Taiwan. This paper draws from various youth phenomena like the emergence of the ‘BackDorm Boys’ as iconic representations of flawed stardom, the adoption of kuso lifestyles and the consumption/distribution cycles of cinema on the web to see the possibilities they offer for political engagement and participation through cultural expressions and productions, that are otherwise dismissed in contemporary discourse.

New digital technologies, initially developed for surveillance and strategic communication, because of the proliferation of the internet/s and the cyberspaces, have now become freely available at very inexpensive rates around the world. The easy availability of these technologies enables new conditions of production of hitherto privileged art forms. The new globalised circuits of un-contextualized distribution lead to the imagination of a deterritorialized community of consumers who share common systems of making meaning and receiving these objects. As has been noted in earlier cybercultures studies, objects found on the internet/s – the people and the narratives that they produce - are often consumed as outside of time and geographical space. William J. Mitchell (1996) in his now much critiqued conception of the ‘Infobahn’, conflates all geographical distinction in his imagining of the larger neural circuits of digital information and economy. Similarly, in his extraordinary book. Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007), explores the role that digital dissemination and distribution (as also storage and archiving) play in evolving a new miscellaneous form of sorting and classification, thus deconstructing established coda of knowledge determination. Weinberger, despite the keen insight into the importance of metadata and user-based personalised galaxies of information, is unable to talk of the entire range of phenomena as rooted in particular geo-political contexts. In fact, as Gasser and Palfresy (2008) make evident in their book Born Digial, whenever a body is referred to within cybercultures studies, it is the body of a white, upper class, masculine body; whenever a place is evoked, it is unequivocally the economic centres of the North-West; Time, which is an affiliate of the space and the body, is also then the linear and historical time determined by these concrete referents.

The West, with its wide consumer base and widespread proliferation of new digital technologies, often becomes the hegemonic legitimising authority as objects produced elsewhere are understood through ‘foreign’ aesthetics and logistics. Imagining the internet/s as residing outside of the time-space continuums, allows for a cyclical re-assertion of the Western paradigms as credible and authentic, and other forms as parodic or derivative in nature. New forms of cultural expression and narrativisation, received outside of the context of their production or the circuits of distribution and reception, are often mis-read and interpreted to fit the existing modes of making meaning.

This paper is an attempt to look at a specific form of new digital cinema in North East Asia that challenges the west-centric modes of understanding these objects. New digital cinema is a category that needs to be more sharply defined. In the last three decades of extensive technological advent and deployment in the fields of cinematic production, many different forms have claimed the space of new digital cinema. Post-celluloid cinema,[2] production of movies augmented by technologies, studio house experiments in animation and 3D technologies, distribution of movies and the networks of piracy that come into being with peer2peer networks,[3] conditions of reception and movie watching with digitally owned copies of movies,[4] the emergence of multiplex cinema and conditions of consumption,[5] etc. have been looked upon by different theoreticians and practitioners as new digital cinema.

I use the term ‘new digital cinema’ in the rest of the paper in a very specific sense of the phrase to make a very clear point of departure from the aforementioned approaches, which, though exploring the possibilities that digital technologies offer, still, often, stay with contained and unquestioned understanding of the established cinematic practices of production, authorship, distribution and spectatorship. New digital cinema is located in the new wave of cinematic forms produced by people who are enabled to do so by the easy availability of conditions of production and distribution that are framed by new digital technologies. Instead of looking at movies being produced by ‘film-makers’ or ‘film-studios’, maintaining the distinctions of authorship, readership and distribution circuits, I explore movies which are produced by people who are otherwise relegated to the realm of spectatorship and consumption. For the scope of this paper, new digital cinema refers to the cheaply produced cinematic forms, shot through inexpensive and slowly-becoming ubiquitous camera enabled devices. Geared towards an almost obscene abundance of details and demanding an untiring self-narrativisation,[6] these sites of social networking and expression have led to the production of videos and distribution of the self in unprecedented ways. These videos are further marked in their distribution through cyberspatial forms like YouTube, MySpace, and Google video, Television based reality shows based that run on user based programming consisting of personal videos, personal webcam sites, and MMS forums, to millions of users who enter into an interaction that is no longer limited to spectatorship.

There are three dialectic processes around the ‘personal’ videos broadcast on such sites of digital social networking and sharing, that need to be mapped in order to understand the impulse of this paper as well as to look at the dialectic reconstruction of earlier categories as understood by non-digital, pre-internet cultural forms. The first trope of dialectic comes in the form of continuity. Histories of technology taking the When Old Technologies were New (Marvyn, 1988) approach, often produce these digital moving images as bearing a relational value with the emergence of earlier technological forms and the use of these forms to produce personal narratives – print, camera, video, to name the three most influential forms of self expression and narrativisation. Such a historical narrative, unless carefully inflected with the growth and development of indigenous technologies and the indigenisation of these technologies, reads both, the technological development as well as the cultural forms thus produced, only through a West-centric paradigm of aesthetics, glossing over the differences that might be present in the very process and methods of reading such technologised forms. This non-disruptive, uninterrupted historicisation, while it is fruitful in questioning some presumed categories in the process of cultural production,[7] still reinforce these digital moving images as merely a new form of old cinema.

The second tension that needs to be mapped out occurs in the form of carefully maintained distinctions between the Sacred Cow of originality and the much maligned miasma of derivative, plagiarised, copied (left, right, centre), forms that have been facilitated by the proliferation of copy-paste digital technologies and internet networks. In the public as well as the theoretical discourse around these digital moving images, there is almost a Universal original (generally Western, otherwise canonised by the Western gaze in other geo-political contexts), to which everything else has a relation that is either praodic or uniformly derivative in nature. Even within the West, these videos on youtube and myspace are easily dismissed as plagiarised or unoriginal, often leading to a wide range of public controversy and exchange.[8]

The third dialectic is in the blurring of the pre-digital accepted terms of producers, spectators and processes of reading that these digital moving images produce. It is necessary to realise that the context of not only the production but also that of the reader is crucial to understanding the aesthetics of cyberspatial forms. The author in the digital world is as digital and ephemeral as the object itself. The tension between the corporeal and the digital has been effectively resolved by conceptualising the ‘interface’ – the space between the two conflicting and tense oppositional ideas- as the bearer of thought, idea, meaning and intention for digital objects. Such a complex structuring challenges the earlier crystalised practices authorship, spectatorship, distribution and reception, thus marking new digital cinema as not merely a cinematic practice augmented by technology but as a new form of cinema that challenges, quite radically, the earlier cinematic forms, in very much the same way that, in another historical and cultural moment, the print did to the manuscript.

This paper locates itself in these three dialectical flows to explore new digital cinema as a form of popular and cultural expression in Asia, specifically in Taiwan. It hopes to dismantle the myth of the universal/accessible/west-centric view of new digital cinema and demonstrate the need to assert the geo-socio-cultural contexts of their origin through exploring the aesthetics and genre of Kuso.

Knowing Miso from Kuso

Kuso, though it is a relatively new term, is highly popular in describing the new cybercultural forms that emerged with the proliferation of the internet/s. Anime fans are familiar with Kuso as an expletive or an interjection, used as the English equivalent of ‘Shit!’ Though Japanese in origin, it was made popular as a word, an aesthetic and a lifestyle in Taiwan around 2000, subsequently spreading to Hong Kong and China. Now, Kuso, along with other N.E. Asian products like Hentai,[9] and Manga, is a popular way of identifying cybercultural forms. The wikipedia mentions that

[t]he roots of Taiwanese “Kuso’ was Kuso-ge’s from Japan. The word Kuso-ge is a portmanteau of Kuso and game, which means, quite literally, “shitty games.” The introduction of such a category is to teach gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality – such as appreciating the games’ outrageous flaws instead of getting frustrated at them.
(Wikipedia, 2006)

It was an attempt to not only identify or locate flaws but to celebrate them and encourage an active production of them. Kuso, for the younger generation in Taiwan (and the thousands of fans all around the world, who subscribe to Kuso Bulletin Boards and discussion forums) is not just a cursory form of parody but a lifestyle. A Taiwanese artist, Yeh Yi-Li, in her solo exhibition, seems to suggest that as well. Her introduction to her exhibition titled ‘KUSO – Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower’ says

In Taiwan’s pop culture, internet subculture and video gamers’ communities, it (Kuso) became a trendy term that suggests “making fun of anything, playing practical jokes on everything.” KUSO subverts conventional values and turns things into garbage. It has no limits, history, agendas or logic. Like an amoeba, it is a subculture phenomenon that has no rules. (Yi-Li, 2006)

Making a list of characteristics of what might be Kuso is futile. As Yi-Li seems to suggest, Kuso, on the surface, is located on the ‘fun’ and ‘hilarity’ of an object. However, Kuso actually resides in the processes of subversion and resistance. Kuso not only makes ‘things into garbage’ but also, by logical corollary, turns ‘garbage into things’. It started as a subculture phenomenon but is now highly popular in mainstream cultures – on reality TV on youth oriented channels like MTV and Channel V, in local performances and spectacles, and in Stephen Chou movies. Kuso seems to refer to not just the discourse around a particular object but a subjective mode of representing the self into different narrative conditions enabled by new digital technologies. Kuso is about the ability to create fluid and transitory spectacles of the self as a trope of social interaction and communication. While Yi-Li might look upon Kuso as without ‘limits, history, agendas or logic’, she forgets that Kuso has been the way for organising political protests, flash mobs and social awareness collectives in many part of Asia.[10] It is in this very ‘free’ and ‘excessive’ structure of Kuso that one can locate the politics and processes by which New Digital Cinema can be understood.

In her Kuso exhibition, Yi-Li created the ‘Worm-man’ that

drags its body and slithers in the ever-changing world. In different kinds of worlds, the Worm-man develops into different phases. As phenomena are happening, it is also transforming. The Worm-man has multipe possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.
(Yi-Li, 2006)

While Kuso is often understood as parody, trash culture or camp humour, and is even attributed to MTV style movies by enthusiasts, for the large section of Kuso consumers, it is the governing principle for social interaction, dressing and appearance, hair and accessories, consumption of products and modes of expression. Kuso seems to be a way in which they produce themselves as parodic forms of themselves – producing themselves in conditions of constant transformation with ‘multiple possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.’ As Yi-Li suggests in her art, Kuso is not just about producing parodies and mimicking popular art forms but it is also a way of producing the spectacle of the self. It is not surprising then, that Kuso emerges as an aesthetic with the proliferation of technologies and tools which allow for a narrativisation of the self for distribution and consumption in the public.

Contexualising Kuso

I look at two specific instances of Kuso to understand and frame the concept in this paper. The first emerged out of my own involvement with some of the students and their scheduled performances at the annual sports day.[11] My Chinese language teacher Mandy Hua, who is an undergraduate student at the NCU, is also a professional hip hop dancer. For her annual day performance at the university, Mandy chose (with some inputs from me) a popular Bollywood song that was creating raves in India at that time.[12] Mandy chose the song, edited the audio to make it tighter and shorter in duration and started the practice. Along with a flock of dancers from other schools on the campus, Mandy replicated an ‘Indian’ aesthetic for the song, doing elaborate costumes which included a lot of flowing skirts, veils, sequins and shimmer – the kind that was shown in the song. The female performers were in a state of erotic relationship – not only in their imitation of the seductive postures and movements of the dance sequence in the original movie song but also in presenting themselves as eroticised objects of glamour and desire to a young audience made primarily of students. The expected reactions of cat calls, of hooting, of lascivious laughter and of gasps of wonder and awe were all present in the crowd. However, a brief minute into the performance, their narrative of seduction, eroticism and obvious parody-imitation was disrupted and somehow harmoniously irrupted by a group of boys, wearing glasses, their bodies far from the perfectly sculpted eroticised bodies of the female performers, wearing clumsy looking ill-fitting karate dresses and making unrehearsed animal movements around the female performers.

It was the introduction of these dancers that completely displaced the element of parody within which I understood the performance. The male performers, who were completely unfamiliar with the original song, were imitating the female dancers on the ground. They were not interested in replicating either the movements of the female dancers or the sequences they were following. They were more interested in undermining the very aesthetic that the female dancers were trying to replicate or produce. Their movements were jerky, unpractised, bordering on the ridiculous. Their half naked bodies were un-sculpted and uneroticised. These were not the college hunks or super jocks coming out to parade their masculinities but the ‘geeks’ or the ‘dorks’ who were ravelling in their un-eroticised status and celebrating it with gusto.

What was more interesting was the way in which the audience was receiving these male performers. In spite of the engaged erotic relationship with the female performers, the audience was extremely appreciative of the male performers’ attempts at overthrowing the female performers’ spectacle. The audience was egging them to constantly be more ridiculous, be more flamboyant, be more self mocking, guiding their movements and actions, leading to a final mock chase sequence, where the male performers chased the female performers off the ground, stripped themselves to their shorts, flexed their un-muscled bodies and made their exit among huge cheering and applause. They were obviously the star attraction of the performance. Such a response was puzzling. It was the women who had put in hours of practice to produce themselves as erotic objects of consumption. The audience, in the beginning had engaged with them at that level. And yet, it was this bunch of slightly ‘with an L on my head’ guys who emerged in their buffoonery and antics as the heroes of the minute.

My first impulse was to read in it, the dynamics of a gendered space and a certain mock valorisation of this hyper masculinity. While gendered readings of the performance are indeed valuable and might offer an entry into looking at the construction of eroticism, desire, spectacle and the performative self, I am going to focus on the Kuso in this performance. My own gendered impulses were quickly overshadowed by the repeated use of the word Kuso that the members of the audience were using in order to explain the male performances. It was obvious that these male performers, in spite of their actions, were not really clowns but some sort of heroes and embodying this peculiar word – Kuso.

When I started asking around for Kuso, people pointed at several different objects, from Stephen Chou movies to Reality TV on Channel V, from personal videos to popular Kuso shows where people engaged in a set of ludicrous, often bizarre performances to make a public spectacle of themselves. The more I encountered these Kuso forms, the more difficult and incomprehensible it became to understand either the appeal or the aesthetic of the form. It looked like cheesy camp or an extension of a certain MTV aesthetic as a result of vulgarisation of technologies. When I crawled on the web looking at discussion forums that were devoted to Kuso, I found a huge number of people sharing my incomprehensibility and raised eyebrows at the Kuso objects, trying to figure out what it was that was attracting thousands of users to produce and consume Kuso with such dedication.

Especially in the context of Taiwan, Kuso belongs to the realm of what is called the ‘Strawberry Generation’ (Tsao-Mei Yi-Dai). The Strawberry generation in Taiwan refers to the people born between 1981 and 1991, and, despite its suggestions in English, carries negative connotations with it. The three most popular characteristics of the Strawberry generation – a phrase that has huge currency in popular media – have been severally explained. Rachel, who writes on the National Central University’s (Taiwan) website, explains:

In Taiwan, the Strawberry Generation refers to those who were born between 1981 and 1991, ranging from the 22-year-old university students to the 12-year-old junior high school students. This generation is labeled as “strawberry” due to two reasons: first, this generation of youth was raised in a better environment, as strawberries grown and nourished in a greenhouse, than the earlier generation. Second, strawberries are known for their beauty, delicacy and high price, suggesting that the young people can not withstand pressure, difficulties, and frustration as they grew up in a nice and comfortable environment and are able to get almost whatever they ask for.
(Rachel, 2008)

Henrry (2006), a student who also belongs to the Strawberry Generation, writes in his classroom assignment, ‘People of this generation are said to be fragile when facing pressure, just like the strawberries.’ He further goes on to suggest that the problems of the Strawberry Generation are largely economic in nature and might lead to serious problems for Taiwan’s economy. Myr Lim (2006) also looks at the economic and political instability of this generation and describes them as ‘Like the fruit, they look extremely good and sinfully juicy, who wouldn’t want one? But they have a very limited shelf life.’ Built into this criticism is also the understanding that the Strawberry Generation is also in a state of political disavowal.

And yet, when introduced to the different manifestations of Kuso, there was a very clear idea of resistance, subversion and mobilisation. A local incident, which made temporary heroes of two teenage boys who stripped in Public, on a university campus, was read as a sign of resisting the University’s attempts at regulating dress-codes for the students.[13] Other videos which were made for internet circulation had the digital natives refusing the Western models of masculinity or heroism and producing buffoon-like images to correspond with the glorified pop icons from the West – often producing infantile and juvenile forms of behaviour to exaggerate the effect. Other Kuso manifestations were in consumption, as different objects which were seemingly ‘cute’ (se-jiao) or ‘innocent’ were invested with sinister or often ludicrous intent.[14] The same kinds of aesthetics were also seen on the ‘LOL Cat’[15] and ‘All your base are belong to us’[16] internet memes which have gained currency online. It is while browsing through these worlds that I was introduced to a Kuso phenomenon which was garnering huge media and popular attention globally. This was a phenomenon which has now popularly been dubbed as the Backdorm Boys.

BackDorm Boys were three graduate students, two of whom became instant celebrities – Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei - from the Guangzhu Academy of Fine Arts in China, who shot to instant fame when, in a state of boredom, they made a lip-sync cover version of popular Backstreet Boys singles, using nothing more than cheap digital cameras on their computers, in the restrictive space of their dormitories, and distributing them through video sharing spaces like YouTube, MySpace and other blogs (The Full Plate, 2008). These weren’t, at a first glance, very different from the ‘funny’ videos that one encounters online all the time – cheaply produced, shot with a webcam mounted on the screen, an almost unedited, uninterrupted full frontal frame, and an exaggerated attempt creating a certain Kitsch video that have gained popularity in the past. However, within my own contexts, the BackDorm Boys had strong resonances with the earlier dance performance I described. Once again, the three students in the videos were not the hyper eroticised masculinities that the boy bands like Backstreet Boys have embodied in popular cultures. Given the Confucian model of academia and studentship, students are not easily granted such erotic value to begin with. These were also not students who were particularly talented at singing. In fact, they were not singing at all, they were lip synching the songs in their videos. The videos did not involve any attempts at shooting but were in the full-frontal, almost pornographic frames of spectacle where the camera was mounted over the screen and the two performers were being caught in that frame. Dressed in identical clothes, the two main performers sang with extraordinary histrionics, the otherwise mellow and slightly cliché ridden love ballads that the Backstreet Boys had made their signature. In the background, one of their other dorm mates, played a Kuso-ge called Quaker throughout the video. He occasionally simulated the actions of a music mixer or a DJ or sometimes helped them with props.[17]

There was, at the first glance, nothing spectacular about the Backdorm Boys. As one of the responders on a blog dedicated to the Backdorm Boys very succinctly puts it:

Let’s face it: it doesn’t take a lot of talent to make faces. They didn’t write the song, didn’t sing the song, didn’t play any musical instructions, etc. Their sole accomplishment is they made faces at a camera. That’s not talent, man!!! And if they weren’t Chinese—i.e., didn’t have the freak factor of Chinese boys lip-synching to Backstreet Boys songs—NOBODY will notice this.
Da Xiangchang 2005

And yet, the Backdorm Boys, apart from cults developing around them and various internet memes devoted to them,[18] were featured live on NBC and both dropped out of their academic programmes to become hugely successful brand ambassadors and spokespersons for some of the largest mass media brands in China. They have both acquired a celebrity status and are role models and now popular media persons on TV channels, hosting their own shows.[19] In trying to understand these Kuso products in the realm of parody one starts asking the wrong kind of questions: where is the talent? Several respondents, including Da Xiangchang very pointedly pointed out that ‘it takes very little talent to make a fool out of yourselves.’ The more interesting question to ask would be the question that Yi-Li asked in her exhibition: How does Kuso manage to make garbage out of things? And further, is it possible, to read into Kuso, a new politics which guises itself as ‘fun’ or ‘hilarity’.

Differentiating between parody and Kuso

The Western gaze will only allow Kuso to be understood in a relationship of parody. However, looking at the contexts within which Kuso emerges and its ability to ‘make garbage out of things’, Kuso changes the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘discursive’ objects. parody, as a literary and a narrative form, resides more in the object being parodied (original) rather than in the parodic creation (discursive). To understand, appreciate or enjoy the discursive object, it becomes necessary to be familiar with, sometimes at a very intimate level, with the original object. The chief aim of a parody is to invoke the original object by introjecting it into new frames of references and meaning making, establishing a tenuous relationship of invocation between the original and the discursive objects. Parody seeks, not to replace the original but add to the ‘aura’ of the original object. Legends, myths, cult-stories and folklores can be understood as parodic in nature as they add to the understanding of the original or the core object. In the case of cinema especially, parody is not simply a process of poking fun at an earlier cinematic form or object but is an effort to evoke the original as a way of making meaning and seeking sense in the narrative.

The relationship between the original object and the discursive object is one of invocation where the parody invokes, glorifies and seeks justification for its existence through the original object. parody also resides in a certain historical reading of cinema as it produces often unintentional but present residues of earlier forms. parody can be looked upon as enabling a certain genealogical reading of cinematic narratives and forms. In the non-linear consumption patterns of cinema reception, especially with cable television and global distribution, the boundaries between the original and the discursive are often blurred and reconfigured. Often the audiences and consumers encounter the discursive before they get familiar with the original and hence they change the way in which the original object is understood or received, often mis/reading it through the lens of the parody instead of the other way round. Cinema also makes more visible, the ways in which the parody can also work through different genres and media – be it in the production of books that try to appropriate the cinematic language of telling stories or in the production of movies that are based on books or sometimes try to deploy the narrative conditions of books in the cinematic narratives. The only way to talk of parody is to read it in the cinematic object itself and in the invocations that it produces with the imagined or the real object. The concept of an original is necessary to the understanding of the parody.

It is exactly this relationship between the original and the parody that Kuso disrupts from the within. Kuso does not produce the definitive terminal points of the original and the discursive objects that parody requires. In the instance of any Backdorm Boys video, there is no presumed knowledge of either the Backstreet Boys videos or the kind of globalised consumption that they can be contextualised under. While there are many references – almost at the level of invocation, in the clothes that they wear, in the choices they make in songs etc. – they are not necessarily the frameworks through which their videos can be made meaning of. If it was merely a question of parody of Backstreet Boys, their subsequent videos where they also ‘Kuso-ed’ other performers and local artists would not have worked for their fans.

Like a network, the relationship between the original and the discursive objects of Kuso is masked so that each constantly feeds back into the other. Hence, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, if you tried to understand their work as simply a Chinese/Asian parody of a Western form of popular culture, you end up bewildered, unable to account for the huge popularity and success. However, if we place their production as Kuso, it allows us to realise that the objects being parodied in the videos, are not American popular cultural forms or specifically Backstreet Boys videos. What is being parodied is the original self of the performers.

Instead of the framework of parody or intertextuality, we can locate the Backdorm Boys Kuso videos as embedded in a particular lifestyle choices and consumption of cultural forms, accessories, appearances, class differences, language and most importantly the conditions made available by technologies. The original object is the three boys and their ‘real’ or ‘original’ status in their lived practices. The discursive object is also the three boys and their projected selves or desired selves which they are expected to either appropriate or wish for. The Kuso is in exaggerating the differences between these two and celebrating the obvious flaws in them and making them available as a public spectacle. While I shall steer away from discussions of talent, it becomes more evident that Kuso allows for us to recognise the aesthetics, politics and proliferation of these new digital cinema artefacts which earlier notions of parody did not.

Kuso establishes more non-linear, sometimes disruptive relationships, between different objects that it refers to in its production. The relationship between the various objects is not invocative but evocative in nature. The Kuso narrative does not presume specific knowledge of some other object being invoked. Instead, it produces a redolent relationship where the different objects mutually explain each other. Like any cyberspatial form, Kuso seems to produce a system of self-referential, almost cannibalistic meaning making where a range of objects seem to co-exist in improbably frames of non-real and in-credible, each forming a node through which the others are understood. The references Kuso makes in its narrative, are not to the other, original object in a wistfully reconstructed or imagined past but to the other back-tracking objects present in the narrative itself. This produces an almost infinite chain of inter-referencing objects that justify each others’ existence. Kuso thus disrupts the more linear and historical constructions that parody (and the subsequent attempts to read parody as a relationship between new digital cinema and Cinema) establishes. It is located in the materiality of the object, its reception, its manipulation, its distribution, its transformation and its ability to escape the more effective-causal circuits of meaning making.

While parody seeks to reaffirm the similarities between the original and the discursive objects, Kuso emphasises the inability of the original to explain the discursive, thus producing a relationship of difference rather than one of similarity. While parody deals with the questions of representation, Kuso enters into conditions of simulation. It is this evocative relationship that allows me to locate Kuso as an aesthetic of understanding New Digital Cinema in Asia and to materialise it as a lifestyle and as a condition of reception in the body of the Asian consumer.

Politicising Kuso

An uncontextualised notion of Kuso only allows for a relationship at the level of the Parodic. Hence, the discussants of the Backdorm Boys were always in a condition of unintelligibility about why these slightly clownish characters would become imitable heroes for a particular generation. Given the highly polarized nature of political orientations in Taiwan, it has been the despair of many educators and practitioners that the Strawberry Generation, which is also the largest subscriber base to Kuso, has no apparent interest in politics. It is a generally lamented as a generation that is unashamedly devoted only to having fun. I propose, in my reading and understanding of Kuso objects and Kuso as an aesthetic, that the participatory and performative nature of Kuso paradigm, offers space for negotiation and expression of political intent. I shall demonstrate this particular argument at two levels – the level of the body and the personal, and at the level of the public and the national.

The question of the body becomes central to almost all representation studies. Analysis of Kuso videos or objects lends itself easily to see how the accessorisation and the freedom to produce unsupervised spectatorial narratives of the self lead to new spaces of negotiation. There is also, very clearly, a definite deconstruction of the traditional, masculine and often imported forms of masculinity, femininity and sexuality which the videos lend themselves to. Cross dressing, excessive make-up, exaggerated actions, etc. all create a fluid world where gender structures used to define the body are dismissed and indeed, enter into parodic relationship with traditional perceptions or expectations. However, for the scope of this paper, I shall more narrowly focus on the construction of the heroic body in the Kuso videos.

The body comes to materialise Kuso through various practices and becomes the site upon which the Kuso self is enacted. As Kuso celebrates the flaws and exaggerates the imperfections, it allows for a certain masked relationship between the private self and the public politics. As is demonstrated in the case of the Backdorm Boys, Kuso, with its self referential boundaries, allows for a critical engagement with the very practices of the generation that subjects them to sever criticism. The Kuso bodies or the narratives of self are not longer in relation with the imagined body of the star or the aura of the star vehicle but in masked relationship with the larger politics of its time. The bewilderment or unintelligibility that the discussants of the Backdorm videos exhibit, is not particularly about why or how the video was created but how heroism or stardom was created by the celebration of the un-iconic or the unheroic.

And it is to answer this question that we go back to the Strawberry Generation again. The Strawberry Generation in Taiwan was not merely marked by economic transitions and infidelity. It is also a generation that has seen a severely politicised state of nationalism and national identity in Taiwan. The younger generation that grew up after the removal of the martial law has engaged in serious consumerism as a part of their national identity. As Chen Kuan Hsing (1998) points out, ‘From 1994 onwards…the cultural atmosphere was mediated through commodity structures.’ Chen further goes on to explain how the political economy and the question of the national are intrinsically linked. Given the hegemonic presence of the West in the cultural galaxy of Taiwan and the constant negotiations between the political position vis-à-vis China as well as the cultural imperialism of Japan, the Taiwanese Strawberry Generation finds itself without a particular model of national identity to follow. Along with these are the allegations of widespread corruption and the complete disinterest of the current political parties in the ill-effects of liberalisation (Asian Economic News, 2007) which contribute to a high rate of mental ill-health and suicides in the Strawberry Generation (The China Post, 2008). Given such a murky situation, the Strawberry Generation has indeed withdrawn from active political participation of fighting in the streets and has taken to new forms of expression, which, outside of the context, appear as solipsistic or merely for fun.

Kuso, as an aesthetic then, transcends the analysis of gender and sexuality, performativity and spectatorship, and becomes a site of national representation and subversion and the Kuso stars like the BackDorm boys embody these positions for a Strawberry Generation in Taiwan. The notion of flawed heroism, which simultaneously mocks the ubiquitous presence of the pop-culture from the West, the inability of the local cultural industries to produce original works of art, the apathy of the younger generation caught in the mechanisms of a liberalised globalisation, and the unavailability of spaces for political negotiations that they are built in. This is the defence that many of the Taiwanese and other Chinese speaking individuals produce on the discussions around Kuso. On the discussions on the Sinosplice blog, one of the most vocal defenders, John, who starts with calling this condition, a ‘rare talent’ goes on to say,

Have you ever tried to make a funny video? It’s much harder than you give these boys credit for. The fact that they were able to do it merely by lip synching is testament to their talent. If they’re using certain cultural expectations for humorous effect, then that’s further evidence of talent.
(John, Sinosplice, 2005)

However, John’s idea of ‘playing with cultural expectation’ remains a solitary voice. The other discussants go on to talk about how this particular series is only interesting because of the ‘freak value’ of the videos. Karen, another participant who introduces herself as a student in the West, writes

I have to reluctantly admit, as politically incorrect and offensive (sic) some of the comments may be, they are mostly valid in my opinion. I’m not saying that the “Back Dormitory Boys’” talent doesn’t play a part in why it’s so funny but the fact that the they’re Chinese with no doubt plays a huge role in the humour that that you could easily find elsewhere. How hard is it to find a few college students making goofball videos and putting them on the internet?
(Karen, Sinosplice, 2005)

The opinions that Karen and XiangChang express, resonate with the general perception of the BackDorm boys on many different discussion groups and media talks around the world. As they gained more popularity and exposure, there were more and more people exclaiming at why these antics were being heralded as heroic. However, there were no explanations which were forwarded. The interesting part is that a similar predecessor called the ‘Numa Numa Boy’ (Wolk, 2006), who also had a parodic relationship with the Romanian song, while he gained equal amounts of popularity, was not at the centre of any debate. His claim to fame was slapstick humour and very clearly complied with the Western understanding of parody. However, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, the debates continue as the existing understanding of parody as a universal value fail to account for the aura that surrounds them.

Kuso, as a way of looking at it, offers that the Backdorm Boys were not mere imitators. Imitation would have been in them trying to do a representation of the original Backstreet Boys videos. Instead, the Backdorm Boys are in a world of simulation, where they are simulating the flawed masculinities and identities that are excluded within popular cultures. In this method of simulation, they are able to produce a new and perhaps more believable ‘reality’ which needs to be dealt with in the larger context of the production.

The reason why Kuso makes garbage of things is because that is the only way to deal with the way things are – demolish them, look at their flaws, and find, within those flaws, interstices of negotiation and interaction, which are no longer available. The Kuso, refuses to identify a homogeneous way of understanding digital cinema on the web and insists on thus, contextualising the cultural products through their geo-political status. Because of the geographical origins of digital technologies – the West, and the generally assumed audience and paradigms of understanding it – the West again, most of these new digital cinema forms are looked upon as derivative or engaging in a parodic relationship with the original which is placed in the West. Kuso is a way of complicating the relationship between the two.

This is the first step in thinking about ways in which one can formulate a digital aesthetic which does not presume a homogenised community online but asserts, not only the physical bodies that are behind the production of these narratives but also the geographical boundaries and socio-cultural locations, without which the objects become incomprehensible and indecipherable. Moreover, it is necessary to rescue such ‘popular’ ‘aesthetic’ forms from discussions that confine them to the realms of performance or solipsism and look at the larger potential they have in creating new conditions of political engagement. For Taiwan’s Strawberry Generation, Kuso is a lifestyle, by which they are able to establish discursive and subversive relationships with the very actions and practices which subject them to sever criticism. The wave of new digital cinema, streaming on a screen near us, thus emphasise the need to revisit the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the one hand and the connections between the universal and the contextual on the other.

References

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China Post, The. 2008. “Disturbing Suicide Rate Among Young People”. Retrieved on 11th August, 2008 from http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan%20issues/2008/08/01/168122/Disturbing-suicide.htm
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[1].A first draft of this article was first presented at the ‘New Cinemas in Asia’ conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society at the Christ University, Bangalore. The paper owes its gratitude to S.V. Srinivas for his support both for my journey to Taiwan and for the confidence required to write such an essay on cultures and phenomena that I cannot with confidence claim to be my own.
[2]. The Jadavpur University Film and Media Lab, as recently as November 2008, organized a conference to discuss The Future of Celluloid,where, there were many engrossing presentations on what celluloid can mean in the digital age and where its futures reside. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his key-note speech, made a significant remark that the Celluloid is the original object that the digital shall always invoke in its manifestation; not merely in its aesthetics, which might change, but in the sheer capacity that the digital has to pay unprecedented attention to the moving image and reconstruct it for new meanings.
[3]. Hervé Fischer, in The Decline of The Hollywood Empire, arrives in a long line of prophets who have been announcing the demise and the end of Celluloid Cinema as we know it. Fischer announces, quite early in the book, ‘[d]igital distribution will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood Empire: Two giant steps forward for film in one fell step!’
[4]. The large undivided screen gets replaced by a small ‘Window’ on the right hand corner of the monitor which also houses various other contesting media forms that vie for the users’ attention. Sherry Turkle, in her study of MUD users also talks of how the Window has become a metaphor of our times.
[5].In a much more measured tone, Kim Soyoung, in her formulation of a trans-cinema and new public spheres simulated by Korean Cinema, suggests that ‘new digital cinema…attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution and reception modes as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the net’. She further goes on to propose ‘digital and net, cinema LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis and buses) and gigantic electrified display boards (chonkwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene.’ This paper adds to the list, the extremely personalised but virtually public and shared space of the computer monitor and portable media devices.
[6]. In another essay exploring the aesthetics of social networking and blogging (especially with the increasing implementation of Web 2.0), I make a claim at these sites being sustained through a constant and incessant production of both the virtual persona of the author as well as the body of the author that serves as an anchor to the virtual reality. I further suggest that this process of continuous translation leads to the self as being recognised and gratified only in a state of performativity over inter-looped surfaces.
[7]. Lawrence Liang, in his forthcoming essay, “The History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, examines the history of the print and pre-print cultures, to make a brilliant argument around the questions of knowledge, the authority of the knowledge, and the problems of legitimacy or authenticity that have surrounded the Wikipedia in recent years.
[8]. The anxiety around such objects primarily circulates around questions of copyright infringements and piracy. The Music And Film Independent Association, for instance, claims that due to the re-mix, unlicensed distribution, and/or re-working of their material, they are suffering a heavy financial loss, leading to ridiculous legal cases that seem to hold no legitimacy in their sense or sensibility. Lawrence Lessig looks at a recent controversy on youtube where a mother, who broadcast digital moving images of her 13 month old son dancing to Prince’s song Let’s go Crazy was accused of copyright violation by the License owners who demanded the withdrawal of the video from YouTube.
[9]. In A short History of Hentai, Marc Mclelland, defines Hentai as follows: “Hentai is a Sino-Japanese compound term widely used in modern Japanese to designate a person, action or state that is considered queer or perverse, particularly in a sexual sense. Unlike the English term 'queer', however, hentai does not have predominantly homosexual connotations but can be used to describe any sexual acts or motivations other than what might be termed 'normal' sexual relations. Indeed the loanword nōmaru (normal) is sometimes used as an antonym for hentai. Apart from this general use of the term hentai, it can also be used to designate a specific genre of Japanese manga and animation that features extreme or perverse sexual content and it is in this sense that hentai has become well-known among western fans of Japanese popular culture.”
[10]. Professor Yu-Fen Ko (2000) at the Hsih-Shin University in Taipei, locates similar receptions of the ‘Hello Kitty’ phenomenon in Taiwan. Yu-Fen Ko examines how, the larger reception of popular cultural artifacts fail to look at the political potential that these objects have in the way they reconfigure the existing relationship between the personal and the political.
[11]. This paper owes great intellectual and emotional debt to many people. Mandy Hua, who, apart from teaching me Chinese, also helped me get introduced to the intricacies of youth fashion and trends in Taiwan. Ted Cheng, who introduced me to many different Kuso objects and helped, whenever my own skills at access or analysis flailed. Amie Parry, Naifei Ding, David Barton, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Josephine Ho who made my stay in Taiwan so fruitful, providing emotional support, and listened to me patiently, correcting me when I was wrong and directing me to people and resources that helped me frame this argument and understand the entire new digital cinema phenomenon in a new light.
[12]. After much screening and watching of Indian movie songs from Bollywood, we finally narrowed down to “Kajrare Kajrare” from the movie Bunty aur Bubly, with Aishwarya Rai doing a special dance number.
[13]. The particular video can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlZaDGPEOg The original video that is supposed to make this particular kind of Kuso-streaking is the video which also shot two young men into becoming Television celebrities and can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=0caIbkYfWTY
[14]. One of the most popular icons of such consumption is in the popularity of Hello Kitty – a young female cat without a mouth (and hence without speech or the need to eat) - and has elicited much popular discourse. An example of how Hello Kitty is used as a way of also resisting the Western, Disneyfied, Barbie concepts of femininity can be seen in the video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBHPbEtfqA
[15]. LOLCat started as an internet meme which displayed a set of cat pictures, with cheeky captions, parodying ot only the internet slang known as ‘netspeak’ but also reflecting upon how central internet discussions and arguments were to the lives of the digital natives. Some of the most famous examples of LOLCat captions are ‘I can haz cheezburger’, ‘Ceiling Cat’ and then subsequently ‘Basement Cat’. More information and almost an exhaustive range of pictures can be seen at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ More interesting LOLCat phenomena also include the under construction LOLCat Bible translation project available at
http://www.lolcatbible.com/
[16]. ‘All your base are belong to us’ started as a successful parody of the obsession with UFO and space travel in the late nineties. The meme borrows this slightly cryptic line from European Sega Mega Drive Version of the video game Zero Wing, where it signified victory and total takeover of enemy territories by aliens, and specializes in putting up the caption on different familiar images taken from contemporary as well as historical times. A large collection of ‘All your base are belong to us’ images can be found at http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/
[17]. A full list of their videos is available to view and download at http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/
[18]. A quick glimpse of their popularity can be obtained on fan and internet monitoring sites like http://www.milkandcookies.com/tag/backdormboys/ and http://www.tian.cc/2005/10/asian-backstreetboys.html
[19]. This trajectory from Reality TV to popular cultural icons is not unfamiliar or new. Various popular shows like American Idol in the USA, Big Brother in the UK, SaReGaMaPa in India, and Kuso Kuso in China, have all spawned instant celebrities who have cashed their media presence and fame to bag roles in featured television programming, cinema, etc. This particular ability of making one’s self popular and recognizable, often by using the internet as a medium for the same, and then penetrating more corporatized and affluent mass media markets, is a ploy that many aspiring media professionals are employing these days.

Click for the PDF document, 297 kB (305086 bytes)
Click to read the original published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/streaming-on-your-nearest-screen

Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps

nishant — 2011-12-23T05:56:15Z

The ubiquitous presence of internet technologies, in our age of digital revolution, has demanded the attention of various disciplines of study and movements for change around the globe. As more of our environment gets connected to the circuits of the World Wide Web, we witness a significant transformation in the way we understand the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of the world we live in, says Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2010.

Traces of digital environments and internet technologies are all around us – we can see them in the rise of Digital Natives who are increasingly experiencing and living their lives mediated by digital technologies; we can see them in new forms of social interactions, such as blogs, peer-to-peer networks, internet relay chat, podcasts and so on, which are progressively becoming the primary points of information dissemination and production; we experience them in the tools and techniques of political mobilisation in large scale democratic elections and also in sub-cultural and smaller phenomena, such as flash-mobs and viral networking; we are incessantly reminded of them in the discourse around questions of safety and danger, especially with reference to activities such as internet pornography, child sexual abuse, piracy, identity theft, etc.

Internet technologies have become so intricately entwined with our daily practices and experiences that it is necessary to seriously look at these technologised circuits and the technology mediated identities thus produced. Increasingly, we see many different disciplines extending their methodologies and perspectives to include cyberspaces and digital behaviour in their purview. We already have a new breed of cyber-psychologists who are looking at the interaction between the human mind, the sense of the self and digital environments. The law, perhaps most concerned with questions of property, trade and commerce, is also examining questions of what it means to be human, with the emergence of post-human categories like cyborgs, cybrids, and genetically modified life forms. Anthropologists and sociologists have discovered cyberspace as a site that significantly influences the behaviour and thought of individuals as well as communities that come into being in the digital deliriums of the networked world. Feminism and Gender and Sexuality Studies have found great theoretical and political interest in the ways in which the internet technologies change the way we understand our bodies and practices. New disciplines like Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetiques, Cyborg Studies, etc. are slowly garnering importance and evolving as the spread of digital technologies increases exponentially. Cybercultures, a discipline (or perhaps, rather, a combination of various disciplines interested in studying cyberspaces) that comes into being because of the rise of Internet Technologies, is now already institutionalised in many universities and research spaces, concentrating on understanding the complex forms of interaction, representation and negotiation that happen in the fluid and rapidly changing landscape of digital cyberspaces.

As Internet Technologies continue to grow and become a more integral part of our lifestyles, cultural production, and forms of social transformation and political mobilisation, there are a few challenges that we face, especially when writing from and about Asia.

Following the trajectory of the development and spread of internet technologies, academic attention and research has primarily emerged in the North-West and slowly penetrated through disciplines and contexts in other parts of the world. It was only after the 1990s, once the digital revolution reached the ‘rest of the world’, that interest in and research on the phenomenon started to feature in studies in Asia. However, the initial research on and the major interest in the relationship between internet technologies and society has been dependent upon the theoretical categories, examples or ideas produced in primarily Western contexts. This has led to the production of a narrative where the digital technologies of information and communication (like the internet) are looked at as being seamlessly exported from the West to the East, without any attention given to the geo-political contexts and socio-cultural changes that accompany this penetration of technologies. There has been a blindsiding of the role that the State, educational institutions and globalised economic powers have played in the introduction, the proliferation and the acceptance of the internet technologies and digitally mediated lifestyles that have become so commonplace in developing Asia today. Research is oblivious to the context within which these technologies emerge and the kind of negotiations and interactions they have with the larger social and cultural fabric of the region.

One of the main reasons why such a narrative gains currency is that we have no vocabulary but that granted by Western scholars and practitioners to talk of the technologies and the technologised socio-cultural productions that emerge in our own local and regional contexts. With the rhetoric of globalisation and homogenisation on the one hand and the logic of the universalising nature of internet technologies on the other, there has been an un-reflexive theorising of digital identities, productions and interactions; this makes Asia more an exemplar for the existing Western ideas and hypotheses than a site where the drama of these technologies is still unfolding. This process is aided and abetted by the accelerated urbanisation that seeks to create nondescript and sterile spaces of consumption and lifestyle that subscribe to the idea of ‘Global’ or ‘Mega’ cities. Hence, across Asia, we see the mushrooming of cities and city-states – Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Bangalore – that work at actively erasing histories and producing these bubbles of consumption and globalisation that are disturbingly similar to each other.

Such theorising also reinforces the disconnect that Western Cybercultures has been encouraging between the networked worlds and ‘reality’, which, though affected and changed by the rise of these technologies, still remains strangely continuous and coherent in the midst of transformations. Moreover, it contains most theoretical and political interventions within the zones of urban consumption and change, thus producing a certain middle-class, self-referential work that concentrates on these areas, forgetting other crises and problems that still need attention. It also encourages a view of Asia as a docile, non-agential site upon which technologies are mapped, despite the fact that every year in this new century has seen Asian countries emerging as substantial stake-holders and players in production, proliferation and consumption of internet technologies. Along with the liberalisation of markets, the global digital revolution has also seen boundaries in social norms, cultural mores and political processes being pushed. We have been witness to formerly closed governments attempting to restructure themselves in the global world and to an unprecedented inflation and consumption in the developing Asian countries. We are in the middle of radical reconstruction of academic processes and market economies as public private partnerships become the norm. However, these landmark changes are often ignored or explored from a West-centric view-point, producing extreme and polarised reactions to the spread of Internet Technologies and the changes it entails.

Beyond Euphoria and Fear

Most responses to the widespread reach of internet technologies and digital forms have been grounded in euphoria or fear. There is a certain boundless celebration on the one hand, that proclaims the internet as forming the new public sphere, heralding the democratic potential and transparent structures that these networks have within them. The gurus have looked upon the internet in a ‘convergence theory’ mode where they announce, severally and variously, the death of earlier cultural productions like books, movies and music. The ability of digital technologies to aid innovation and creativity, as well as new forms of employment and entrepreneurship, has spurred the writing of many books and essays documenting the process. The roles that internet technologies have played in granting voice, visibility, and expression to many underprivileged communities, and the way they offer social and economic mobility in developing countries, have been unabashedly celebrated. Governments, civil society practitioners and theoreticians have all looked upon the internet as the panacea that will help level the landscape of social justice and political participation around the world.

Simultaneously, there has also been a construction of ‘ecology of fear’ around the rise and spread of internet technologies. Massive global alarm exists around questions of easy access to pornography and other sexual behaviours online, not only for young adults but also for mature audiences of potential behaviour addicts. Online gambling has emerged as a huge concern and has been at the centre of much debate. Cyber-bullying on social networking systems, and cyber-terrorism on a much larger scale, have shocked us as new technologies get implicated in actions that have disastrous results both at the individual and the community level. With the tightening Intellectual Property regimes, there has also been great debate around digital piracy and the ability of the internet peer-to-peer networks to encourage acts of theft and copyright infringement. As the world becomes more digitised, attacks on sensitive information by crackers and scammers are also on the increase in various forms. The internet has been looked at with growing concern and alarm by parents, educators, policy-makers and corporate entities, who are all deeply involved in assuring safety, creating opportunities and catering to the needs of citizens and consumers.

This simultaneously celebratory and pathologised approach often cripples research in the field of Internet and Society, because it constructs technology mediated practices and identities as at once universal (hence general) and unique (hence particular). Research that emerges is, consequently, confined to producing case-studies explaining what happens in each particular incident online and is unable to examine either the conditions within which the technologies emerge or the contexts that circumscribe certain socio-cultural behaviour. Such research, instead of examining the aesthetics and politics of technology mediated identities and practices, keeps on documenting the extremely fluid and rapidly changing landscape of the digital world – documenting fads, evolutions, innovations and the smaller changes therein – thus missing the forest for the leaf; the research ends up in concentrating on the ‘what happened’ rather than treating these happenings as symptomatic of larger paradigmatic changes that they often hint at.

Internet and the Convergence Theory

This is further complicated by the fact that many theorists and analysts seem to treat the internet more as a platform for convergence of old media forms in new digital packages. Such a view of internet technologies and digital cyberspaces leads to the populist descriptions of blogs as extensions of personal diaries, of digital cinema as a continuation of the celluloid image, of digitally morphed pictures as more sophisticated versions of earlier experiments with still images, of social networking systems as evolution of pre-existing social structures, of MMORPGs (Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Games) as merely complex forms of gaming. These descriptions fail to take into account that internet technologies, especially digital cyberspaces, while indeed affecting and transforming existing forms of media and cultural production, also lead to the emergence of new and interesting forms of expression, consumption and interaction.

Just as the field of Cybercultures has only a vocabulary granted by the West, it also lacks a vocabulary that is its own – most research in Cybercultures, especially in emerging information societies, relies on categories, concepts and ideas that were relevant for earlier popular cultural forms like books and movies. Transplanting categories of authorship, production, consumption, distribution, etc., and trying to map them onto the digital world leads to severe confusion and is a futile exercise. For example, if we look at the discourse around the online user generated encyclopaedia – Wikipedia - and use the earlier existing categories of an author, a reader, an editor and an institutional structure of producing knowledge, we immediately realise that the discussion cannot be sustained; the categories presuppose other forms of writing and production which are not as relevant in the digital worlds. Similarly, legal categories like possession, ownership, labour and copying are also being made redundant by the advent of the internet. As these categories fail to capture the new digital worlds, they also fail to explain the human-technology relationship that the field of Internet and Society seeks to explore. Despite investment in terms of efforts, time and money, much of the research becomes redundant because it does not have the vocabulary or the idea that analysis of these new digital spaces entails.

The imagination of the convergent multimedia internet distracts from the fact that what appear to be earlier historic forms like text and moving images are, in the context of cyberspace and the Web 2.0 revolution, actually new forms that need their own vocabulary that does not carry the baggage of earlier popular technologies. It is time to move away from talking about the Internet and its effects in analogies and to seek and create an independent and effective language that takes into account the mechanics and the potentials of the Internet revolution.

Institutional Spaces: Internet & Society

It is within such contexts and to address questions like these that institutional spaces emerge in the field of Internet and Society. As more and more disciplines start focusing on internet technologies and their intersections with areas as diverse as identity, sexuality, governance, cultural production, political mobilisation and social transformation, institutions in this space are faced with the daunting question of what to concentrate on and how to define the scope of their activities. Many global organisations and interventions narrowly define the field through their own disciplinary positions and perspectives. The Berkman Centre of Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, for example, examines the law and its intersections with the new internet technologies and practices. Sarai - a new media organisation in India - concentrates on art and cultural production as affected by digital technologies and practices. The Association of Internet Researchers builds a network of multi-disciplinary researchers and practitioners across the globe to meet annually for workshops and conferences and also share ideas through a mailing list, concentrating on existing phenomena on the World Wide Web. Several Communications and Media Studies schools also have established labs and workshops that focus on the internet technologies from their disciplinary grounding.

The Centre for Internet and Society, a newly established research and advocacy centre founded in Bangalore, India, makes a shift from these discipline-bound approaches to Internet and Society, and inaugurates a multi-disciplinary, interactive space for theorists, researchers, students, practitioners, activists, artists and the larger public to initiate a dialogue in the field of Internet and Society. Rather than adopting a disciplinary framework, it takes the model of Asian Cultural Studies, seeking to produce a sustainable scholarship and methodology to talk of the relationship between emergent Internet technologies and the changes they produce in the Global South. It sets out to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and new pedagogic practices through multidisciplinary research, intervention and collaboration, to understand and affect the shape and form of the internet and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social milieu of our times.

At CIS, we recognise the contexts within which this field has developed and emerged and have initiated many programmes, projects and structures to deal with the questions that this essay has charted. Drawing from the pedagogy and frameworks developed within Cultural Studies in Asia, the research at CIS investigates the local, the contextual, the emergent and the negotiated nature of digital spaces and internet technologies at three levels – At the national level, looking to produce models of research by examining the history, the politics, the growth and the significance of internet technologies in the context of globalised India; At the regional level, focusing on the similarities that global urbanisation and digitisation are bringing to the emerging information societies in Asia and the acknowledging the dissimilarities that need to be addressed in each of these societies; At the global level, engaging with a much larger South-South discourse that strengthens the move to approach internet technologies as integral to our ways of living rather than of foreign import. Such an approach allows us to escape the often restrictive constraints of cybercultures discourse that stays within the domains of internet technologies and produces disconnect between Internet and Society. Instead, we expand the scope of internet technologies to see their relationships with larger political, social and cultural economies, lifestyles and consumption patterns, and identity and transformation structures in the rapidly changing world. In the first two years, for example, we are investing a large part of our research energies into producing the Histories of the Internets in India – inviting different disciplines and standpoints to trace the diverse historically important and culturally significant growth of Internet Technologies in India, thus de-homogenising the internet as well as the discourse within cybercultures.

The policy and advocacy work at the Centre for Internet and Society, also contributes hugely to this localisation and narrativisation of the internet in India, by recognising the law and the State as the largest stakeholders in the growth and proliferation of these technologies. We have initiated campaigns and projects examining national laws regarding intellectual property rights regimes, piracy, e-commerce and security, accessibility and disability, to see how they are subject to modification with the growth of digital technologies. Original field work and ethnography with the consumers, practitioners, stakeholders and law enforcers about the nature of technology, its role in the larger imagination of the globalised Indian State, and the need to make sensitive and informed decisions, has already been initiated, along with dissemination platforms like workshops, seminars, meetings and conferences.

Keeping in tune with our model of collaboration and consultation, the Society Members have also helped us generate a healthy momentum by representing us and helping us find resources around the globe. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been travelling across Asia, Europe and North America, at international policy and activist forums, promoting Open Access to information and knowledge. Lawrence Liang has been involved in teaching both at the local and international levels, apart from presenting original and influential research examining the relationship that internet technologies have with questions of knowledge production, ownership and the law. Achal Prabala has been actively working with the Wikimedia foundation to facilitate user participation in knowledge production online. Atul Ramachandran has been working on developing mobile internet platforms for sharing news and information within the underprivileged communities in India. Vibodh Parthsarthy has been designing academic courses and encouraging research in the fields of internet technologies, governance and democracy.

Because these questions have a much larger regional relevance – with the increasing description of Asia as the Mecca of piracy and digital infractions – we are also in the process of starting projects that do a survey of the laws around intellectual property rights, innovation and access in the Asian region, with Sunil Abraham (Director – Policy) guiding a team of in-house researchers and external collaborators. Cross-boundary research and analysis has also been initiated in terms of dialogues and comparative study of technology, space and globalisation, initiated by my seven month residential project in Shanghai, where we are examining the conditions of technologisation that make global spaces possible, in countries like China and India. Apart from these, the team of seven people has been making interventions in international workshops, conferences and forums, to start dialogues and discussions in the field of Internet and Society.

A significant effort has been spent in starting awareness for the public – from the first documentation on our website of work in progress by our research and policy collaborators to regular contributions to local media sources to organisation of public talks and events – which is aimed at demystifying the internet technologies and giving more ownership and assurance to a larger public. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, gave a public talk on freedom, expression and the internet, citing anecdotes and examples from the phenomenal success and growth of Wikipedia. In a different media, independent film maker Jamie King screened his movies on the piracy cultures and innovation, in Bangalore, sparking conversations and debates about copyright, creative commons and the domain of cultural expression. Students and visiting artists from different countries, through the Shrishti School of Art Design and the efforts of Zeenath Hassan, came together at CIS for a discussion on fear and gender in public space and how digital technologies contribute to it. The discussion feels timely because only a month later, India saw the right wing cultural police tyrannising Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, by perpetrating acts of brutal violence against women who they saw as progressive or in defiance of the right wing codes of decorum and behaviour. CIS was an active part of the ‘Pink Chaddi’ and ‘Reclaim the Night’ campaigneering, mobilising and participation at a local and national level, as a response to these acts of regressive violence, using digital environments and platforms to garner support and ‘recruit’ people into showing their protest against such fundamental ideas and practices.

Moreover, in order to develop and establish a more accessible vocabulary and understanding both within research, higher education and practice of internet and society questions, CIS has been investing in building national and regional networks of scholars, students and theorists in different disciplines to come and discuss the area. Courses have been designed and administered for undergraduate, post graduate and research students, in the disciplines of social sciences, management and media studies, journalism and communication studies, cultural studies etc. Networking with institutional and university spaces like the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Christ University, Bangalore, Centre for Media and Culture Studies, at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. We are also in conversation with regional spaces like the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Shanghai University, The Open Source Initiative, International Development Research Centre, Hivos and the Asia Scholarship Foundation in Thailand, for extending our regional and global networks.

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, is less than a year old and has already embarked upon so many different projects, found a wide range of collaborations, initiated diverse enquiries and has received the support and interest of a varied and credible list of organisations. This warm reception and enthused interest, is as much a sign of the evolving and dynamic nature of collaboration and consultation in Asia, as it is of the need for interdisciplinary spaces like The Centre for Internet and Society, in our times. We see our rapid progress as symptomatic of a much larger need to establish more institutional spaces that can cater to the widely expanding horizon of the field of Internet and Society. While it is indeed laudable that different disciplines have already started showing interest in studying and analysing these often invisible links between Internet and Society, it is also now time, to start looking at technology as more than just an object or platform of study. We can already see how, in the foreseeable future, the internet technologies are only going to become more ubiquitous and central to the crucial mechanics of survival and living. Spaces like CIS help us look at technologies like the internet, as not merely tools and techniques, but as entwined in the politics, aesthetics and economies of the time and spaces we live in.

About the Author

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director for Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Nishant’s doctoral work examines the construction of technosocial subjectivities in India, at the intersections of digital technology, cyborg identities and globalised spaces. Nishant is the recipient of the Asia Scholarship Foundation’s grant which places him in Shanghai for a project on IT and the globalisation of Asian cities.

Read the original published by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:36:29Z

What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by HEIRA: The need for innovative curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.

Peer 2 Peer: One of the observations that was made unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become the call of the day.

Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom, rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a facilitator who builds conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship with the idea of curriculum and teaching.

Reciprocal evaluation: It was pointed out that the grade oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.

Inspired by the Badges contest at HASTAC, it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades. Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of learning.

Role based learning: Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education classroom.

We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.

These initial discussions look at the possibility of innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop

Spy in the Web

nishant — 2012-03-26T06:38:51Z

The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy.

Kapil Sibal’s recent remarks demanding that private social media companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook remove "objectionable" content from their social networks has created a lot of furore. It should not come as a surprise to us that just like any other platform of publication and content creation, several rules and regulations already regulate online content while still respecting our constitutional right for freedom of speech and expression in India.

From terms of services of the different web 2.0 products that seek to moderate "offensive" or "harmful" material to strictly defined punishable offences as defined in the Information Technologies Act, framed by the Government of India, there are various ways by which material that might incite violence, hatred or pain is systemically removed from the digital space.

Largely, this happens silently. Unless you are particularly keen on certain spurious websites, you wouldn’t even realise that there is a list of blacklisted websites that remain inaccessible to us in India. Once in a while, we realise the regulatory nature of state censorship when certain actions come to light. In 2006, the Indian government blocked Blogspot, the popular blogging platform, because they had detected "anti-national" activities by certain groups using the blog.

More recently, India’s first home-grown erotic comic series Savita Bhabhi was banned and taken off its Indian servers, without realising that in the era of cloud-computing, the comic still remains available through different containers and spaces. In both these cases, while one might be able to provide a critique of the Indian government’s attempts at censoring and regulating information, there is reasonable sympathy to the idea that some control on information is possibly a good thing.

It is in the very nature of information to be filtered. I am sure everybody will agree that censoring, controlling and regulating information of certain kinds — involving child pornography, calls for violence and vandalism aimed at insulting and offending vulnerable sections of the society — is probably in the interest of a healthier information society. And hence, one nods one’s head, rather grudgingly at some of the censorship laws (print, TV, internet, et al) and accepts that we need them, at least in principle, if not in execution.

However, what Sibal is asking for is not in the same vein. Censorship laws have always been very cautious of what constitutes "offensive" content and have relied both on the larger opinions of the community as well as the informed expertise of legal bodies to censor information. More often than not, an act of censorship is implemented when certain sections of the society, in their interaction with certain information, find it offensive or insulting and ask for a block. Pre-emptive censorship, the kinds performed by the Central Board of Film Certification, is in service of existing legal infrastructure around production and distribution of information.

Protective guidelines for censoring information, as was recently seen in the Broadcast Editors’ Association’s mandate around not intruding into the privacy of the Bachchan baby and the mother, during the birth of the child, are demonstrably for the protection of a person’s private life.

Sibal’s new calls for censorship against material “that would offend any human being” is separate from all these instances in three ways. First, while Sibal is an important political figure in this country, he is not the lord of information production. Using the power of his office to call for taking down of content that he found offensive (fortunately it did not incite him to violence and moral decrepitude) is undemocratic and possibly extra-legal (as in not within the boundaries of law, but who will bell the cat?).

To ask private companies and use his influence to bully them into curtailing the constitutionally provided freedom of speech and expression is in bad taste. There is enough regulation that could be invoked to seek arbitration between Sibal’s opinion and somebody else’s about how Sonia Gandhi should be represented online.

Second, Sibal might pretend that he is only asking for censorship of online content the way in which we have for other media, but that is a fallacy. What he is advocating is an ethos of pre-censorship, where, even before the material becomes public, it is screened through human agents who, through some divine right would know the right from wrong — read as what the powers to be want and don’t. To override existing regulation and ask for this extra layer of human scrutiny of all information being produced online is the equivalent of certain unnamed people in Mumbai, who, when Mani Ratnam was about to release his film Bombay, asked for a private screening of the film and then recommended some friendly cuts in it.

Third, is perhaps, and I write this with regret, Sibal has undermined the critical intelligence and engagement of the social media’s ardent users. He has fallen into the trap of suggesting that impressionable minds will be easily corrupted if they are introduced to "undesirable" information online, the same information that will apparently not drive human pre-screeners to prurient activities because they will be protected by the mantle of government sanction. Instead of drawing upon the wisdom of crowds, which invites communities and people to flag information that they find offensive and asks for independent arbitration, he has asked for an undemocratic and unconstitutional call for censorship which threatens the very structures of political protest, resistance and dialogue in the country.

If such draconian measures are going to be carried through, we might soon regress to a dystopia where all information is censored, filtered and reshaped only to suit the interests of those in power.

Nishant Shah, Director-Research wrote this article for the Indian Express. It was published on December 18, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web

The Digital Other

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:07:42Z

Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.

I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.

As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.

There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.

I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.

From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.

What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.

Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/

Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other

Learn it Yourself

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:08:32Z

The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.

Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past, distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive learning projects using information and communication infrastructure, have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres” envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.

These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a degree-centred approach to learning.

I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education, increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education. However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself Learning.

DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.

We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the classrooms, in informal conversations.

Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network, encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning model recognises that within the same student group, there are different rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the aptitude of the students.

Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared towards individual preferences and aspirations.

Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of the teacher and the student.

DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than their futures. And the time to change is now.

The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it

What is Dilligaf?

nishant — 2011-12-01T09:52:53Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:12:24Z

This is the first post of a research inquiry that questions the ways in which we have understood the Youth-Technology-Change relationship in the contemporary digital world, especially through the identity of ‘Digital Native’. Drawing from three years of research and current engagements in the field, the post begins a critique of how we need to look at the outliers, the people on the fringes in order to unravel the otherwise celebratory nature of discourse about how the digital is changing the world.

In this first post, I chart the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built.

The Digital Native has many different imaginations. From the short hand understanding of ‘anybody who is born after the 1980s’ (Prensky, 2001) to more nuanced definitions of populations who are ‘born digital’ (Palfrey & Gasser, 2008), the digital native has firmly been ensconced in our visions of technology futures. From DIY decentralized learning environments to viral and networked forms of engagements that span from the Arab Spring to Occupy Together, the Digital Native – somebody who has grown up with digital technologies (and the skills to negotiate with them) as the default mode of being – has become central to how we see usage and proliferation of new digital tools and technologies.

Three years ago, when the identity Digital Native was already in currency but before the overwhelming examples that are now so easily available in the post MENA (Middle East-North Africa) world, we asked ourselves the question: “What does a Digital Native look like?” When we started sifting through the literature (published and grey), practice-based discourse and policy, we started spotting certain patterns: Digital Natives were almost always young, white, (largely male) middle class, affluent, English speaking populations who could afford education and were located in developed Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) contexts of ubiquitous connectivity. These users of technology were treated as the proto-type around which digital natives in the ‘rest of the world’ were imagined. The ‘rest of the world’ was not necessarily an exotic geography elsewhere, but often was a person whose relationships with the digital were impeded by class, education, gender, sexuality, literacy etc.

Moreover, we found that the accounts of Digital Natives that were being discussed across the board were accounts of super stars. They either heralded the digital native as the young messiah who is drastically changing the world, overthrowing governments and building collaborative and participatory structures of openness. Or they feared the digital native as an unthinking, self contained, dysfunctional person who pirates and plagiarizes and needs to be rehabilitated into becoming a civic individual. Very little was said about Everyday Digital Natives – users who, through the presence of digital technologies, were changing their lives on an everyday basis.

Other Digital Natives

Based on this, we began the quest for the Other Digital Natives – people who did not necessarily fit the existing models of being digital but who often had to strive to ‘Become Digital’ and in the process produce possibilities and potentials for social change and political participation in their immediate environments. This was the first step to discover what being a digital native would be in emerging ICT contexts, where connectivity, access, usage, affordability, geo-political regulation, and questions of the biological and of living would give us new understandings of what a digital native is. This quest for the Other inspired us to work across Asia, Africa and Latin America, to talk to some of the most strident voices in the region who claimed to be digital natives, expressed discomfort with being called digital natives, refused to be called digital natives, and sought to provide critique of the existing expectations of digital nativity. The proceedings from these conversations in the Global South have been consolidated in the book Digital AlterNatives With a Cause? available for free download.

For this post, I want to look at some of the presumptions in existing understanding of Digital Natives and how we can contest them to build Digital AlterNative identities.

Presumption 1: Digital Natives are always young

Even if we go by Mark Prensky’s problematic definition that everybody born after the 1980s is a digital native, we must realize that there is a large chunk of digital native users who are now in their thirties. They are in universities, work forces, governments and offices. They have not only grown older with technologies but they have also radically changed the technologies and tech platforms that they inhabit.

It is time to let go of the Peter-Pan imagination of a Digital Native as always perpetually young. Moreover, we must realize that digital natives existed even before the name ‘Digital Native’ came into existence. There were people who built internets, who might not have been young but were still native to the digital environments that they were a part of.

Instead of looking at a youth-centric, age-based exclusive definition of a digital native, it is more fruitful to say that people who natively interact with digital technologies – people who are able to inhabit the remix, reuse, share cultures that digitality produces, might be marked as digital AlterNatives.

Presumption 2: Digital Natives are born digital

It does sound nice – the idea that there were people who were born as preconfigured cyborgs, interacting with interfaces from the minute they were born. And yet, we know that people are taught to interact with technologies. True, technologies often define our own conceptions of who we are and how we perceive the world around us, but there is still a learning curve that is endemic to human technology relationships.

Because of the ubiquitous and pervasive nature of certain kinds of technology mediated interaction, it is sometimes difficult to look at our habits of technology as learned interactions. Recognizing that there is a thrust, an effort and an incentive produced for people to Become Digital, is also to recognize that there are different actors, players, promoters and teachers who help young people enter into relationships with technologies, which can often be greater than the first interactions.

Presumption 3: Digital Natives live digital lives

This is a concern voiced by many people who talk about digital natives. They are posited as slacktivists – removed from their material realities and apathetic to the physical world around them. They are painted as dysfunctional screenagers who are unable to sustain the fabric of social interaction and community formation outside of social networking systems. They are discussed as a teenage mutant nightmare that unfolds almost entirely in the domains of the digital.

But these kinds of imaginations forget that a digital native is not primarily a digital native, or at least, not exclusively digital. Being a digital native is one of many identities these users appropriate. The digital often serves as a lens that informs all their other socio-cultural and political interactions, but it is not an all-containing system. The bodies that click on ‘Like’ buttons on Facebook are also often the bodies that fill up the streets to fight for their rights. The division between Physical Reality and Virtual Reality needs to be dismissed to build more comprehensive accounts of digital native practices.

Presumption 4: Connectivity is digitality

This is often an easy conflation. It is presumed that once one has constant connectivity, one will automatically become a digital native. Especially in policy and development based approaches, connectivity and access have become the buzzwords by which the digital divide can be breached. However, we have now learned that this one-size, fits-all solution actually fits nobody. Being connected – by building infrastructure and affording gadgets – does not make somebody a digital native.

The digital native identity needs to be more than mere access to the digital. It involves agency, choice, critical literacy and fluency with the digital media that we live with. So instead of thinking of anybody who is connected as a digital native, we are looking at people who are strategically able to harness the powers of the digital to produce a change in their immediate environments. These changes can range from making personal collections of media to mobilising large numbers of people for political protests. To be digital is to be intimately connected with the technologies so that they can augment and amplify the ways in which we respond to the world around us.

I offer these as the building blocks of looking at the ‘Other’ of the Digital Natives as we have discursively produced them. From hereon, in my subsequent posts, I hope to drill deeper to locate nuances and differences, concepts and frameworks that we need to map in order to build a digital native model that is inclusive, differential and context based.

Banner image credit: AFSC Photos http://www.flickr.com/photos/afscphotos/6266795673/

This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/in-search-of-the-other-decoding-digital-natives

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:57:08Z

In this peer reviewed article, Nishant Shah explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The article was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2008. [1]

Download the paper here.

Read the original paper published by Taylor & Francis here.

I, the cyborg

The cyborg, a combination of hardware, software and wetware, stands as one of the most visible figures of the cybernetic age. A portmanteau of two words: cybernetic and organism, the term cyborg refers to a biological being with a kinetic state that can be transferred with ease from one environment to another, able to adapt to changing environments through technological augmentation. The first living Cyborg to find its way into the human family tree was a rat. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline – two astrophysicists, in 1960, thought of a ‘hybrid-organism’ system (a rat with an osmotic pump) that provided biological stability to an organism in response to its constantly changing environment. In their paper in Astronautics they wrote:

For the exogenously extended organizational complex ... we propose the term ‘cyborg’. The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. (Clynes and Kline, 1960: 1)

Notwithstanding this, the cyborg is most commonly thought of in a futuristic vein, escaping the confines of the physical body and recreated through various digital forms like databases, networks and archives.

With the emergence of the WorldWide Web, the cyborg has strategically evolved in our imaginations as a metaphor of our times.We are already in the age where the ‘first living cyborg’ (Warwick, 2000: 15) has announced his arrival. In his autobiography I, Cyborg, Stephen Warwick, a professor of cybernetics and robotics, unveils how he became the first human cyborg through a series of path-breaking experiments. He begins his narrative by saying, ‘I was born human. But this was an accident of fate – a condition of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change’ (Warwick, 2000: 5). Cybercultures theorist David Bell, on the other hand, especially with the proliferation of new digital technologies, in his preface to The Cybercultures Reader, locates the cyborg in ‘the crucial mechanics of urban survival’ (Bell, 2000: xxi) that produce everyday cyborgs through digital transactions and technologically augmented practices. Sherry Turkle, looking at the experiments in genetic engineering and reproductive practices, traces the processes of ‘cyborgification’ in the production of ‘techno-tots’ (Turkle, 1992: 154) – a new generation of designer babies who have been augmented by technology to have the perfect genetic composition.

In this paper, I seek to explore the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator, who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat– machine’, ‘digital–physical’, ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. What does the cyborg as a translator add to our understanding of the processes of translation? If we were to examine the formation of a cyborg identity embedded in the digital circuits of the World Wide Web, what is the text of translation? What are the translated objects? Who performs these translations? Is the user the omnipotent translator who brings to this site, her special knowledge of distinct systems to make meaning? When inflected by technology, does the process of translation, performed by the cyborg, enter into realms of incomprehensibility which get translated as illegality? How does the figure of the translating cyborg enable an analysis of the cyborg as materially bound and geographically contained, rather than the earlier ideas of the cyborg as residing in a state of ‘universal placelessness’ (Sorkin, 1992: 217)?

Configuring the cyborg as a translator

The cyborg, as fashioned by science fiction narratives, cinema and cartoons, conjures images of human–machine hybrids and the physical merging of flesh and electronic circuitry. Different representations of the cyborg abound in science fiction narratives in print, film, animation and games, from reengineered human bodies showcasing fin de millennia nostalgia for large robotic machines of power and strength to sleek and suave microchip-implanted silicon-integrated human beings who work in their artificially mutated enhancements. The cyborg has covered a wide imaginative range from looking at a happy human–machine synthesis to a degenerate human body made grotesque by machinistic implants to a rise of a potent cyborg community that threatens to overcome the human world of biological certainty and mortality. Some of the most famous instances of cyborgs in popular narratives illustrate this wide spectrum; from Maria the robot in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) to Lara Croft in the The Tomb Raider series (Toby Gard, 1996); from Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) to Mr Anderson a.k.a. Neo in The Matrix Trilogy (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999–2003); from Johnny Quest (Hannah-Barbara Cartoons, 1996–7) in the eponymous animated series to avatars created on social networking sites and MMORPGs [2] like Second Life.

However, with the popularization and democratization of new digital technologies of information and communication (ICTs), we see a certain evolutionary production of the cyborg as an increasing number of people interact with digital spaces and sites and adopt mobile gadgets of computation and information dissemination as an extension of their bodies. The cyborg, as imagined within the digital realms of cyberspace, is imagined differently from the more hyper-real, hypervisible constructs within the fictional narratives.

Arjun Appadurai (1996), in his formulation of post-electronic modernity, explores how electronic media offer new everyday resources and disciplines for the imagination of the self and the world. He argues that the individual body and its ownership are wedded to the logic of capitalism and the notion of ownership that characterized most of the twentieth century. Appadurai suggests that the body becomes a site of critical inquiry and contestation because a capitalist state grants the individual the rights to his/her body and the choice to fashion that body through consumption patterns. When talking of Technoscapes [3], Appadurai posits the idea of a technologically enhanced sphere of activities and identity formation that defy the processes of capitalism and produce new instabilities in the creation of subjectivities.

Cyberspace has become such a site where the individual body, marked in its being (genetically, biologically, socially and culturally) and circumscribed by the (physical, reluctant and cumbersome) space, can free itself from the relentless materiality of a capitalist set of reference points, to create a truly global self and a universally accessible space. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, in their comprehensive history of the origins of the web, mention how in 1968 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider and Robert Taylor, who were research directors of the United States of America’s Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and who also set in place the first online community (ARPANET), prophesied that online interactive communities ‘will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location but of common interest’ (Hafner and Mathew, 1996: 44). This prophesy was realised by the end of the twentieth century, as scholars announce the construction of the ‘discontinuous, global agoras’ (Mitchell, 1996: 27) and the arrival of the new commons shaped within the technoscapes of the internet. The imagination of the internet as the new public sphere of communication, interaction and collaboration also brought into focus the skills that a cyborg requires in order to materially exist on the intersections of various domains. Donna Haraway, in her seminal essay ‘A cyborg manifesto’ (1991), posited one of the most influential imaginations of the cyborg as residing in the ‘optical illusion between social reality and science fiction’ (Haraway, 1991: 151) Haraway’s cyborg hints at the possibility of imagining the cyborg as a translator:

The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.
(Haraway, 1991: xxii)

This cyborg, in the blurring of the public and the private, in the diffusion of the physical and the virtual, and in the yoking together of economic practices and social identities, becomes an agential subjectivity that translates one system into another, using the referents of meaning making and processes of knowledge production in one system for deciphering and navigating through the other system. Haraway’s cyborg is a willing and conscious extension; an illustration of what Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter (1993) calls the ‘performative’, thus infusing the figure of the cyborg with the ability to negotiate with its immediate environment and shape it through the material practices it engages with. The cyborg as a translator, thus has an interesting role as a mediator between the two systems. The cyborg no longer makes the distinction between an original and a translated text – the two systems occupy equal and often contesting zones of reality and authenticity for the cyborg.

Sandy Stone, in her anthropological study on technosociality – the technologised social order that emerges with ICTs and the social order of the technologised communities – emphasizes this very critical role of the cyborg:

In technosociality, the social world of virtual culture, technics is nature. When exploration, rationalisation, remaking, and control mean the same thing, then nature, technics, and the structure of meaning have become indistinguishable. The technosocial subject is able successfully to navigate through this treacherous new world. S/he is constituted as part of the evolution of communication and technology and of the human organism, in a time in which technology and organism are collapsing, imploding, into each other.
(Stone, 1991: 81)

Stone’s idea of the cyborg as collapsing the binary between the organism and technology is indicative of how the cyborg, in its processes of translation, reproduces both the worlds, and in fact allows for a dual process of translation between the two so that systems implode to form a complex set of references that determine the meanings of the text. This dual process of translation produces a critical episteme to revisit the notion of translation where the skills of the translator and the figure of the translator are generally looked upon as residing in a nuanced and close reading of the original text and the interpretative techniques by which it is reproduced in the ‘new’ or translated text, making sure that the original gets suffused with the meaning and ironies of the other language. Stone also adds to Haraway’s conception of the cyborg as she recognizes another distinction that the cyborg as a translator blurs in its being – the distinction between technique and the structure of meaning.

The cyborg as a translator, because it produces its identities through the same techniques that it produces the translated texts, internalizes the very techniques of translation. However, this process of internalization, instead of making the techniques invisible, foregrounds them as essential to the comprehension and understanding of the meanings which have been produced in this dual process of translation. The next section of this paper does a close reading of an instance of particular cyberspatial form – the social networking systems – to illustrate the dual processes of translation and the textuality of the texts involved.

Lost in translation

Both Haraway and Stone imagine the cyborg in a process of self-authorship through the interaction with the digital technologies. However, both of them only deal with the conceptual category of the cyborg and do not really examine the specific practices that this cyborg produces. Within cyberspaces, social networking systems, blogs, MMORPGs, multiple user dungeons (MUD), discussion boards, media sharing platforms, p2p networks [4], etc., all create different conditions within which the physical users, through their digital avatars, interact with each other and form complex models of social networking and personal narratives. In this section I look at the notion of this self-authoring cyborg, embedded in the social networking system of ‘Orkut’, to illustrate and examine the discussions in the preceding section.

Orkut, a Google project, is one of the most thriving social networking systems that allows people to reacquaint themselves with people they have known in the past – friends, colleagues, acquaintances, family – who might be distributed across geography and lifestyles. Orkut also enables people with similar interests to form communities and interact, network and form new relationships with strangers in an unprecedented fashion. Orkut follows the AmWay [5] Economic model for its social networking, whereby an individual person inherits the friends of friends, thus often connecting themselves down more than 50 levels of friendship. Such a connection, such possibilities of networking, and the overall feeling of belonging to a dynamic, ever-growing network, gives the users a heady rush of emotions, using Orkut for various personal and professional reasons – from dating to holding meetings, from public performances to professional networking.

Most users within Orkut find themselves members of communities which are created around themes, hobbies, issues, ideas, movies, heroes, idols, books, religions, universities and schools, organizations, institutions, subjects, disciplines and music. One of the pre-requisites for using the various services on Orkut to their full potential is the creation of a profile. The profile, unlike a personal ad, is a concentrated effort at translating the ‘physical’ self of the person into ‘digital’ avatars that refer to the ‘original’ user behind the profile. Because of the pseudonymous nature of cyberspatial interactions, there is also an extra effort at making these avatars more verifiable, more real and more trustworthy. As an increasing number of users use social networking systems to find friends, to connect with partners and form communities that often translate back into the physical world, they spend a lot of effort on their profiles, trying to simulate (or translate) their personal identities and ideas into the digital world.

Most users put pictures of their face, along with populating their own virtual photo album with pictures of their pets, partners, friends, family and places they have visited. Profiles often change, adding ‘new pictures uploaded’ as a caption, to invite friends to visit their space and find out what is new about their virtual lives. Users can also keep track of all the changes that the people in their networks are making to their profiles, thus giving the sense of a fluid and a changing persona rather than a static description. Applications which allow the users to track birthdays, special dates, online calendars and the important events in their friends’ lives, add to the nature of communication and interaction. Most profiles have a fairly detailed narrative, using poetic imagery, exaggerated style, witticisms and pop philosophy to translate the person behind the screen. The profiles are also filled with their favourite activities, TV shows, music and books. This process of mapping a virtual body and producing texts of the physical body is the first level of translation that the users perform. The model of cyborgs that Haraway and Stone posit look upon the possibility of role playing, of fantasy, of adaptation and of authoring the self, in this process of cyborgification, as extremely liberating and subversive.

The social networking system and the related profiles also draw our attention to the dynamic interactions of the translated self within the digital domains. Through a metonymic process, the digital profile – the translated self – comes to stand in for the bodies of the users who not only create the translated self but also mark it with desires and aspirations. The translated self is largely under the control of the physical body. And yet, there are several ways in which the translated self does not allow for the physical body to emerge as the original, the authentic or the primary self within the dynamics of this site. On the one hand, it is the physical body of the user that authors the digital self, and hence it should be looked upon as the primary or the authentic text. On the other hand, the interactions that happen within the social networking system are interactions of the authored/translated self. The responses that the profile receives, the way in which the self is represented, the techniques used to engage with more people or invite strangers to communicate, are all the practices of the digital self.

Within Orkut, the profile of the person is bound to the physical body of the user behind the profile. While it is of course necessary to invoke a virtual avatar, because of the nature of social networking with people one already knows or has known, there is a certain disinvestment of fantasy within Orkut. Several users select pseudonyms which allow them to remain totally anonymous, but most of them have a visible face which tries to approximate their real-life persona online. Unlike the circuits of blogging or role playing games, Orkut emphasizes the need to be a ‘real’ person, thus validating its unique feature of ‘scrapping’. By employing it, users are encouraged to publicly perform their intimacies and relationships, which can be easily documented and tracked by others outside the one-to-one interaction. Thus, there seems to be a specific need to narrativize the self though the profile and the various functionalities available on Orkut. Members of the Orkut community are encouraged to think of themselves as part of a larger database – transmutable, transferable sets of data which they have authored for themselves – and can mobilize their virtual self across different networks to enhance their sense of social interaction and networking.

Also, the digital self is not translated solely by the physical user. Orkut has a feature of testimonials where the people in the networks of the translated self, also author opinions, observations and endorsements for the profile. Moreover, the public nature of communication and the archiving of this, add to the meaning and the functioning of this translated self. This production of the meta-data introjects the translated self into a circuit of meaning making and producing narratives that is beyond the scope of the physical body. Thus, there is a strange tension between the physical body of the user and the translated self that the user produces, which leads to the emergence of a cyborg identity. The cyborg is neither the physical body nor the translated digital self. It resides in the interface between the two, each constantly referring to the other, creating an interminable loop of dependence. The cyborg, because it is produced by the very technologies of the two systems that it is straddling, makes these techniques or the technologisation of the self synonymous with the processes of producing the narratives or making meaning.

This production of narratives of the self through different multimedia environments is not simply a process of writing biography or making self-representations. The users on Orkut (as well as other social networking sites like MySpace or blogging communities like Livejournal) are authoring avatars or substitute selves which are intricately and extensively a part of who they are. These translated selves do not live independent lives, but are firmly entrenched in the physical body and practices of the users. While there is a certain flexibility in the scripting of the avatar, the projections are more often than not premised upon the possibility of a Real. The avatars are also scripted as engaging in extremely mundane and daily activities to create verisimilitude and to map the physical body on to the avatar. To leave status messages like ‘stepped out for lunch’ or ‘Working really hard’ or ‘I am bored, entertain me’ is common practice for the users. As increasingly more users stay connected but are not always present on these digital platforms, they also let the avatars ‘sleep’ or ‘eat’ or ‘go away for some time’, synchronizing the avatar’s actions with their own.

A look at many other similar sites like blogging communities on ‘Livejournal’, or dating communities like ‘Friendster’, can give us an idea that the first stage in authoring a cyborg rests in creating these profiles, or avatars. Users spend an incredible amount of time trying to create for themselves the best avatars, which will be continued projections of the self. These tend to rely mainly on the visual component, as in games like ‘Second Life’ and chatting platforms like ‘Yahoo!’, but they can also rely on a combination of visual and verbal elements. Thus, the cyborg starts a process of translation whereby both the physical body and the translated self are distilled into data sets that get distributed across different practices and platforms, changing continuously and feeding into each other. Thus, just the first step of translation – the translation of the physical body into the digital avatar – is already a complex state, where we it is not as if the cyborg exists ex-nihilo and then translates from one system to the other but that the cyborg is produced in this very process of translation. Moreover, the translated text is not simply the sole authorship of the cyborg but has other players, who are a part of either of the systems, adding meanings and layers to the text.

The second step in this process is a reverse translation. Even within role playing games, where the alienation of the avatar from the body reaches its highest levels, there is an invested effort on the part of the gamer to provide physical and material contexts to the imagined bodies which they have created. Mizuki Ito (1992), in her work about online gamers, looks at how, with an increased investment in the digital lives, users tend to shape their own physical selves around their projected avatars. Many chronic users of cyberspaces have their language, their social interaction and even the way they dress and behave affected by their practices online. Sherry Turkle, in her analysis of the MUD world in Life on the Screen (1996), points out that an increasing number of users start looking upon their screen lives as a constitutive part of their reality rather than an escape from it.

A computer’s ‘windows’ have become a potent metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple and distributed system. The hypertext links have become a metaphor for a multiplicity of perspectives. On the internet, people who participate in virtual communities may be ‘logged on’ to several of them (open as several open-screen windows) as they pursue other activities. In this way, they may come to experience their lives as a ‘cycling through’ screen worlds in which they may be expressing different aspects of self.
(Turkle, 1996: 43)

In another essay, titled ‘Playblog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace’ (Shah, 2005), I illustrate how the process of ‘reverse embodiment’ takes place in the lifecycle of bloggers. This process entails a mapping of the translated avatar on to the physical body of the users. This process of reverse translation often leads to the users abandoning their avatars, cutting down on their public presence or sometimes actually committing ‘digital suicides’, killing their own selves to start new identities and networks. Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated essay, ‘A Rape Happened in Cyberspace’ (1994) looks at the dynamics of this reverse mapping or inverted translation as well. Dibbell was witness to one of the most popular cases of ‘digital violence’ in the late 1990s, when in an MUD, a particular user called Dr Bungle, devised a ‘voodoo doll’ on the Lambda MOO MUD, which gained control over two of the other users, making them enter into a series of involuntary sexual acts of deviousness and perversion, in a public ‘room’ where all the other users could see them. What might be looked upon as a simple gaming aesthetic of a more powerful player taking over the avatars of two players with lesser power became a topic of huge discussion as the physical users behind the translated avatars complained of feeling violated and ‘raped’. This claim had very serious consequences because it no longer allowed for a linear notion of the physical body being translated into a digital avatar but insisted that the translated avatar is always, because of the users’ emotional involvement but also because of the practices that the avatar initiates, mapped back on to the body of the physical user. This is a process of reverse embodiment where the presumed ‘original’ is now re-shaped and re-configured to suit the translated object. Such a phenomenon is perhaps possible only in the domains of the cyberspace. Also, the cyborg, generally presumed as residing in the physical body, is now relocated in this two-way process, at the borders where it not only facilitates meaning but also realizes itself in the process of facilitation.

The digital transactions in which the users within such spaces engage have huge social, economic and cultural purport. The authoring of these selves, of these digital avatars, leads to the idea of the cyborg as not simply a synthesis – a site upon which the synthesis happens – but as a dynamic situation in which all subjects participate, producing and supporting its own identity. The cyborg exists in the interstices of the different oppositions of the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital, the temporal and the spatial, the biological and the technological. Moreover, the cyborg does not reside simply within the digital domains but becomes and embodied technosocial being, with a material body that enters into other realms of authorship and subjectification. It is necessary to recognize that the cyborg is not simply a self authored identity but is also subject to various other realms of governance. These material cyborgs, then, assert the need for the body as central to their imagination.

This bounded cyborg is also subject to the territories that it resides within. The last section of the paper looks at the State as a critical part of the production of these material cyborg identities and analyses how the incomprehensibility of this particular identity reproduces it in a condition of illegality, rescuing it from the boundless universal imagination and reasserting the geographical and the territorial boundaries that the cyborg exists within. In this particular analysis, because of my own familiarity with the context and also because new digital technologies are still emerging and unfolding into new forms in India, I shall speak specifically of the Indian State but hope that the particular case that I analyse shall have resonances for other geo-cultural and socio-political contexts as well.

The state of the cyborg

The cyborg, thus residing on the interstices of so many different paradigms, can no longer be limited to aesthetized representations and narratives, but is becoming a part of everyday practices of global urbanism. The range of human–machine relationships is diverse and increasingly varied. We might not be complete cyborgs but we do deal with ‘intimate machines’ (Turkle, 1996: 142) and live in ‘cyborg societies’ (Haraway, 1991: 179). The cities where we we live constantly remind us of the machinations we are dependent on; sometimes they blind us of our dependence on the technology, sometimes they make it starkly visible. Different organizations like the Military, Space Studies, Medicine, Human Research and Education are using new forms of organism–technology interactions in the increasingly urbanised world. Just like the interactions of the translated avatara and the physical users, David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, in their introduction to The Cybercultures Reader, look at the interactions with various different technologies of communication and transport, and posit the notion of an ‘Everyday Cyborg’ that gets produced in everyday practices:

Taking Viagra, or [using] a pacemaker, or riding a bike, or withdrawing cash from an ATM, or acting out [our] fantasies as Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider game or as a Nato bomber pilot blitzing Kosovo, or anyone watching footage from Kosovo live on the late-night news.
(Bell, 2000: ix)

In their list, the authors are more interested in looking at human–machine interaction and making historical continuities to the production of a technosocial identity or a cyborg self. This ‘naturalized’ cyborg robs the cyborg of its criticality or importance. It seems to posit the cyborg as simply a coupling of organism and machine, and hence a benign cultural formulation which can now be decontextualized and analysed in the digital domains. The cyborg as a translator – initiating a complex and intricate set of relationships between the different systems of meaning making that it

straddles – questions this trvialization of the cyborg and instead helps produce the cyborg identity as an epistemological category which needs to be analysed to see the processes that produce it and the crises it produces in the pre-digital understanding of text and textuality.

It is with these questions that I begin the analysis of what has popularly been dubbed as the ‘Lucknow Gay Scandal’ in India. In India, under the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, as a part of larger ‘Unnatural Sex Acts’, homosexual activity is a punishable offence [6]. However, the reading of this particular act has always been invoked in dealing with the act of same-sex sexual behaviour and not to punish a particular identity. However, when the queer rights and gay collectives started gaining momentum because of the rise of digital technologies (Singh, 2007), the production of the queer cyborg produced an anxiety about the fantasies, the digital avatars and the material practices of the users behind the avatars. In January 2006, policemen in the city of Lucknow, masquerading as gay men, registered with a popular queer dating website called ‘Guys4men’. Explicitly a gay dating site, it allows users to create their profiles, add pictures and text, translate their personal data in a scripted space, exchange messages and chat. Like the earlier discussed social networking sites, Guys4men also allows users to search and befriend each other, encouraging public discussions and arranging for physical encounters at a personal or a collective level.

These policemen created profiles and listed themselves as gay men, to start interacting with the members of the site. They solicited sex and meetings and finally invited five men to come and meet them in a public garden in Lucknow. When four of the five men turned up for the rendezvous, they were arrested on charges of obscenity, of soliciting sex in public and engaging in homosexual fantasies. The media reported this as ‘Gay Club Running on the Net Unearthed’ (The Times of India, 5 January 2006). The website was looked upon as a physical space where people indulged in ‘unnatural sex acts’.

The four men were punished, not for anything that they did in public or in the physical world but for their projected fantasies online. They were publicly humiliated, exhibited to the media as a ‘homosexual coup’ and put under arrest by the police. While a large part of the political society in India erupted in fury at the gross violation of the human rights and the punishment of fantasies, leading to a raging court case which still has not found resolution, what this paper hopes to glean from this particular case are four interesting points. Firstly, three of the four men, in their physical existence, were married and had children. They were not suspected to have homosexual inclinations by their family or friends, to whom this came as a huge shock. The evidence of the material practices of their physical bodies was not looked upon as strong enough to acquit them. Secondly, the policemen who were luring these men towards a homosexual encounter were themselves projecting similar fantasies. However, as theirs were sanctioned by some high authority, they gained validity and were not to be punished. It was almost as if the fantasies and the avatars that the policemen had were legitimate, sanctified translations of their selves, which made them different. Thirdly, while the men were caught in the physical meeting space, the charges against them were all based on their online activities. What was being produced was not even the act of translating their physical bodies into digital avatars. What was at stake in the particular case was the fact that, in the processes of translation, a reverse translation was also set into place, where the digital avatars and the circuits of consumption and interaction that these avatars entered into were mapped on to the physical bodies, reconfiguring them and marking them as queer. The men were punished not because they claimed a queer identity or because they had fantasies online which did not subscribe to the State’s directive. These men were being punished for the production of a cyborg self – a self which on the one hand was contained by the physical bodies of the users, thus subject to the processes of governance and administration applicable in the geography that they are located in, and on the other hand produced by the imagined selves – the translated avatars which reside outside of the geo-territorial regimes. It is this production of the queer cyborg, residing on the boundaries of sexuality, of nationality and subjectivity that was sought to be punished in this particular case.

On the whole, this case seems to prove that there is a very definite move, on the part of the State, towards the recognition of online avatars as not only extensions of the self but as more powerful identities than the physical self. The State imagines the users of cyberspace as ‘real’ cyborgs and conceives their online activities, fantasies and role-plays as punishable offences. The State also recognizes their translated selves – their datasets that they authored – as verifiable proof of their existence and actions online. The story of the Lucknow incident brings to the fore the possibility that there might also be reluctant cyborgs. The notion of the translator is always somebody who is in a conscious condition of deploying knowledge in order to bridge the gap between different paradigms. However, as the digital world becomes more democratic and becomes a part of our daily transactions, an increasing number of users enter into conditions of translation which they might not recognize as translation. It is also imaginable that a large number of users might resort to the cyberspace to reach a particular aim, without wishing to produce any elaborate narratives of themselves. They might be completely unaware of the processes of reverse translation which follow. However, because of the State’s investment in digital technologies and its infrastructures, individuals get authored as cyborgs, having to take responsibility for their actions and fantasies online, against their will and outside of their knowledge.

The implication of the State or other State-like bodies in the production of these cyborg identities and texts makes us aware of the fact that processes of translation are not simply about the intention and the effort of the translator, but are also severely embedded in the techniques used for translation and the contexts within which the translator and the translated identities are produced. In earlier discussions of testimonials and scraps on Orkut or commentating and editing on blogging platforms, we had already looked upon how the translated text, even when it is a self-narrative, on the digital interfaces, is already a product of multiple authorships and can no longer be attributed to a single individual translator. Similarly, the cyborg identity that is produced in the processes of translation – the cyborg as a translator – is also not a product of individual desire or intention but is often brought into being through the various other players within the internet as well as within the physical contexts of the users.

Why cyborg?

The everyday embodied cyberspace cyborg thus becomes subject to the state as well as the technology. People who enter the digital matrices are made accountable for their actions and travels in cyberspaces. There is an increased anxiety around monitoring these processes of translation, of reverse translation and production of translated cyborg identities that are becoming such an integral part of cyberspatial platforms.

The virtual avatars are re-mapped onto the body of the user, thus reconfiguring the notion of the self and the body. The state, through its efforts, becomes a major player in the authoring of the cyberspace cyborg. Other surveillance technologies like Close Circuit Television (CCTV) for instance, also produce unwilling or unwitting technologized narratives of the users caught under the camera. It is possible to use CCTV in public spaces and capture users in different actions which they can be held responsible for later. However, the cyberspace cyborg differs significantly from this model because the users of cyberspace are willing participants of the spaces which they occupy.

The positing of the cyborg as a translator and as an identity that emerges out of translation practices defines a clearer role for translation and a larger definition for translation as it gets inflected by digital technologies. Instead of the universal hyperreal agent, the cyborg as a translator emphasizes one of the fundamental principles of understanding translation – the context of the translator, the agential negotiations of the translator with the original text, the processes by which the self of the translator get produced and the importance of the technologies within which the translation occurs. The collaborative nature of digital technologies and cyberspatial forms illustrates how the process of translation is not singular and that the relationship between the presumed original and the translated text also need to be re-visited. However, more that anything else, the cyborg as a translator makes it clear that the translated text is not produced in isolation or by a single author. There are various contributions that emerge from the networks within which the cyborg translator operates and from the different technologies of governance that the cyborg translators as well as the translated texts are subject to. On the other hand, to the body of cybercultures which has sustained interest in the production and imagination of the cyborg, the cyborg as a translator offers a different way of locating the cyborg identity – not as an identity produced through cyberspaces, but as an embodied cyborg that emerges as an epistemological category to explain the processes of collaboration, sharing, collective authoring and possession of the new digital spaces.

Notes

[1] This paper owes huge intellectual and emotional debt to Rita Kothari who first invited me to contribute to this issue, helping me formulate the germ of the idea and to Elena Di Giovanni who has been an extremely patient editor, guiding me through the many drafts that gave shape to this final version.

[2] MMORPG – Massively Multiple Online Role – playing game is a genre of gaming in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. The MUDs that Sherry Turkle studied can be looked upon as the direct antecedents to MMORPGs like Second Life and War of Warcraft – two of the most popular gaming platforms in current times.

[3] Technoscapes are the landscapes of technology. They refer to technology as both high and low, informational and mechanical, and the speed at which it travels between previously impassible boundaries. Appadurai uses the idea of Technoscape to imagine a fluid and transmittable topography of technology, where the different transactions and the identities formed online have material consequences in economic flows and societal formations. The cyborg thus produced actively chooses and negotiates its identity. Identities are no longer solid, but become fractured, in that we no longer have to choose the identities or accept the ideas of the local community. We are actively choosing our programming based on that which is available to us. While the cyborg may choose to act in a manner most appropriate or relative to the cultures and geographies it is embedded within, that is no longer the only programming option available to it and many are choosing to look beyond their own cultural arenas.

[4] P2P networks – peer-to-peer networks – inherit the cyberspatial aesthetics of decentralized networks; of nodes being distributed across the circuits of the internet and talking to each other, collaborating in projects, sharing information and exchanging digital material. The p2p networks have been under severe focus because they allow for unmonitored piracy and exchange of information

[5] AmWay emerged in the 1960s as the first of its kind of multi-level marketing company where the individuals inherit each other’s customers and profits through a simple system of multi-directional networking.

[6] The Wikipedia entry for IPC Section 377 reads: ‘Homosexual relations are technically still a crime in India under an old British era statute dating from 1860 called Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalises ‘‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature.’’ Since this is deliberately vague in the past it has been used against oral sex (heterosexual and homosexual), sodomy, bestiality, etc. The punishment ranges from ten years to lifelong imprisonment’. The relevant section reads: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine’.

References

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/material-cyborgs-asserted-boundaries-formulating-the-cyborg-as-a-translator

Once Upon A Flash

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:23:52Z

It was a dark and stormy evening. A young man in a dark blue Adidas jacket, collar turned up, eyes under green-black shades, hopped off a motorbike, tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his low-slung retro jeans and surreptitiously made his way through a road thronging with rush-hour traffic and irate pedestrians yelping on their cellphones. He skipped across death traps with skilled ease: leaping over potholes, jumping over halfdug trenches, avoiding the occasional pair of doggy jaws that longed to mate with his ankles, ignoring the bikers who were using the pavements as new lanes for driving towards a honking traffic jam bathed in an orange and red neon that made the road look like a piece of burnt toast with dollops of vicious jam on it.

After five minutes of brisk walking, he slowed down as if he had reached just where he wanted to be – nowhere in particular. On his left were the large Acropolis buildings, towering over the world from their gated existence, structured in pompous Greek columns and facades of granite, stone and marble. On his right, on the other side of the road, if you looked over the metal head of the traffic, you could see the small roadside restaurant that announced fresh fish at cheap rates, sitting cosily under a starved-looking tree, happily encroaching upon the pavement, forcing the pedestrians to disembark, navigate the traffic and then come back to the relative safety of the footpath.

Caught between these two ironies, he stayed put for a while, glancing at his chor bazaar Rado model that flashed on his left wrist. He headed towards the mall that rose in glass and neon, false curves and studious lines across the quickly staining sky of a Saturday evening. As he walked into the mall, the automatic doors that sensed his corporeal presence opened up for him and the girl in a polka-dotted blue-and-red dress threw him the smile that desk attendants save for strangers. The gush of cold airconditioned air and the noises of window shoppers greeted him to ease; mannequins in windows, draped in the latest fashions and various states of undress, winked at him; the smell of freshly brewed coffee came and enveloped him. He headed with ungrim determination towards the round performance area in the mall centre. Like many other hangers-out he too loitered without apparent intent around it, just another boy out on a Saturday evening.

Suddenly his cell phone buzzed. His alarm sounded in loud tones to blend with the Britney Spears playing on the mall sound system. He fished out a bright bumblebee-yellow bandana and tied it to his head. As he did that, the performance area turned into a sea of people wearing varied shades of yellow, blasting their cell phone alarms at full volume till all you could hear was a grating disharmony that would have caused comment on a railway station in India. The phones soon faded and a group of about 70 people formed a human ring, holding hands, their heads swathed in yellow, and sang at the top of their voices the first two stanzas of Hum Honge Kamyaab – the Hindi rendering of the famous song We Shall Overcome. Once the song sank into a bewildered silence, the people in yellow bandanas fell on their knees, raised their hands towards heaven and roared with laughter before quickly pulling off their headgear and dispersing, leaving an empty space and a gawking audience who just had their first dose of a ‘flashmob’ – a group of people who assemble together, suddenly, in a public place, perform an unexpected sets of choreographed actions and disperse without as much as a by your leave or with your leave.

Flashmobs trace their history to the early 18th century industrialisation, when a group of women working in the labour shops[1]in Australia used coded messages to meet and discuss the problems they had in their workplaces. These meetings were organised at random, and the women used the very technologies of production that they engaged with at work on a daily basis to fight the oppression and the injustice of the people at the top. The first modern flashmob, however, is attributed to Bill Wasik, editor of Harper’s Magazine, who, after the first failed attempt (May, 2003), managed to pull a successful flashmob where 200 people swarmed over the mezzanine floor of the Manhattan departmental store Macy’s, pretending to buy a ‘love rug’ for their commune where they supposedly all lived together; they left a bewildered audience and a bemused store staff behind them (3rd June, 2003).

Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. A polymorphous set of people are brought together through the commonality of subscribing to similar technological interfaces or gadgetry. Random e-mails, short messages (sms) on cell phones, discrete messages embedded in public works of art or media, blogs and wikis have now been successfully used to conjure these tenuous group formations that temporarily transform the space that they arrive at – flash sites – into something that neither the audience they perform to nor the state can comprehend, thus producing that space in a condition of social and physical illegality.

In The Name of Fun

One of the most overarching icons of a globalised economy has been the credit card – virtual money that has changed the way we think of money, capital and transactions. Visa Power, as the advertisement goes, is looked upon as the quintessential rhetoric of economic globalisation, where the power to change and to create is manifested through the processes of consumption. While technology has been heavily implicated in the creation of this new invisible money, it has remained on the background. The swiping of the card – the physical act of buying without ‘paying’ has become such a naturalised event that the technology it adopts or the networks it creates are not very visible... Flash mobs, in their construction, execution and ramifications, foreground technology as one of the most powerful tools of creating new formations of grouping and networking that, through their deliberately devised unintelligibility, transform the spaces they occupy.

This is the story of the first flashmob in India, and how it can be understood through the tropes of illegality, enchantment and transformation. The story starts a little before the flashmob itself. In the year 2000, a shopping mall in Mumbai created a furore amongst the public. It was the first ‘genuine’ shopping mall in India. The first space that claimed mallhood was in Bangalore – Kemp Fort, but it was more a large shopping store rather than a mall. This first all American shopping mall – Crossroads, with its promises of unlimited pleasure and brand-tagged shopping – attracted the largest crowd in its opening week. Everybody wanted to see what the mall was like. Everybody was curious about this space. Everybody wanted to be a part of this exclusive zone that clearly demonstrated that modernity and progress had finally come to us. Then everybody found out that they were not allowed to enter the mall. As the director of the mall pointed out in his interview with The Times of India, (23rd August, 2000), “Crossroads is not meant for everybody".

In those days when cell phones were still a novelty and definitely a curio for the upper classes, and when pagers were still struggling for a mass market, Crossroads passed a stipulation which restricted people not carrying a cell phone or a credit card from entering the mall. If you were still eager to enter the space, you paid extra fees of Rs 50 per head and thus made amends for not carrying a cell phone or a credit card. This was the first time a ‘public’ space made it very clear that the public it was looking for and attempting to effectively create was not “everybody”. The issue was talked about, shouted about, screamed at and criticised by all wings of the media, who passionately analysed this instance of discriminatory practices based on socioeconomics. Later, a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was filed against the mall; it lost, and had to throw its doors open to “everybody” who had been clamouring to get in ever since they found out they were not allowed to enter.

On 4 October 2003, the mall again came into limelight in a manner it had not accounted for. This time it was initiated by an e-mail. About 5,000 original mailers went off to people all around Mumbai and even beyond the city, asking them to have a look at a new blog for Mumbai flashmobs. The blog posted a form asking for name, e-mail address and mobile number. On 3 October several cell phones rang, asking people who had submitted their details in the form to check their inboxes. The eager participants glided to their accounts to find a mail that agonisingly chalked out the time and space of the meeting venue – a flash site. The information was also sent by sms to all members who had volunteered. And then at exactly 5 pm a group of about a hundred participants entered Crossroads. They screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares belonging to Reliance India. They performed the garba. In the middle of dancing they all froze. And then without so much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving a trail of bewilderment and confusion, as an audience of over a thousand watched with their jaws on the floor.

This was India’s first recorded flashmob. A large crowd of people who did not know each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend the flashmob contact into relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads, thus marking it as the first flash site in India. Ironically, the group that converted the mall into mayhem consisted of whom Anne Balsamo calls the hyperreal people – people whose identities are created by the hypervisual and extra physical aesthetics of the digital technologies that they deploy - who were once the only legitimate owners of the space of that mall. This first flashmob sparked off many others all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces such as multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flashsite.

Bill Wasik, the creator of the first flashmob in Manhattan, in a recent interview,[2] looked upon the flashmob experiment as a study in behavioural psychology of people he called “hipsters” – people who would join ‘new’ or ‘cool’ things for no reason or investment but to be visible in the new trends and social fads. To a large extent, Wasik’s surface analysis seems to hold true. While flashmobs have been used as a political weapon by several groups and activists in many areas of human rights, queer rights, feminism, political democracy, etc., flashmobs fundamentally exist, like pre-Raphaelite art, for a solipsist reason. Bijoy Venugopal, who produced one of the most celebrated accounts of the Crossroads flashmob[3], mentions how it was all about having some “serious fun”. Increasingly, the flashmob organisers in and around the country have disavowed any ideological moorings for the gathering, and forcibly shelve it into the realms of entertainment or leisure. Following the banning of flashmobs in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore (Mid-day, 9th oct. 2003), even though they have invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression, the organisers and the participants have largely produced justifications by claiming to have no political agenda or inclinations in the construction or execution of flashmobs.

In this repeated disavowal of the political, one can read the desire for re-enchantment that flashmobs and mobsters bring with them. Flashsites, defined by the organising of the flashmobs, are usually sites of globalised consumption – an enchanted world of brand names and designer lifestyles that can make you feel as perpetually disoriented as Alice in Wonderland. These sites serve as the symbols of enchantment in the logic of the city.[4] The new urban enchantment and mode of fantasy is located in the circuits of consumerism where, with plastic money and unlimited credit, the consuming citizen can buy all that the heart desires. However, flashmobs, outside these networks of consumption, and constituted by the same people who fit the bill of the citizen as imagined and promoted by the state and the market as they embrace globalisation and its technologies, demand a re-enchantment of the city. They force us to acknowledge the need for such public spaces to be accessible to all, and provide a strong critique of the easily accepted globalised dream in which the state is so heavily investing. Flashmobs become a manifestation of how tenuously networked, fragile communities, their collaboration inspired and enabled by cyberspatial technologies, can contest the very forces that promote and proliferate these technologies. Flashmobs become a site upon which the drama of globalisation, consumption, state and space is discursively and recursively enacted.

In The Name of The Law

That flashmobs are in a condition of illegality is perhaps one of the easiest claims to prove. The very fact that the Mumbai Police, after the first series of flashmobs, invoked Section 37(1) of the Bombay Police Act in the name of security and safety, clearly states how flashmobs are considered outside the law in the most literal sense of the word. The then Mumbai Police Deputy Commissioner of Police, Amitabh Gupta, contacted Rohit Tikmany, organiser of the first flashmob and moderator of the flashmob blogging community (http://www.mumbaimobs.org/), asking him to shut down the site and stop all further attempts at organising flashmobs. Following the ban in Mumbai, cities such as Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi have enacted similar bans within the city limits. These censoring forces look at flashmobs as potentially destabilising elements that can be ‘misused’ for violent acts such as riots and bombings by fundamentalist organisations.

However, of greater interest is the way in which flashmobs manage to reproduce flashsites in conditions of social and physical illegality by creative deliberate structures of transient unintelligibility. The leisure infrastructure of malls and multiplexes, cafes and large shopping complexes, gaming zones and commercial roads of consumption, are all aimed at the new citizenry that comes into being with these new urban economies falling into place. These spaces are not only legitimate spaces of self-expression through consumption, but also authorised spaces of public assembly and gathering. They promote an ethos of incessant consumption where the individual is also installed as a consumable product that relates to others in the processes of consumption. They are the locations where brands, accessories and lifestyles all come together as the figureheads of a sanitised economy which strives to make opaque the surrounding subcultures of piracy, theft, copying and distributing that emerge around such nodal points.[5] To belong to the space of a mall or a shopping complex, one needs to almost automatically endorse the original, the authentic, the expensive, as a way of making a conscious statement of style and lifestyle. These potential flashsites become the spaces that the state legitimises as the most visible and sanitised form of urbanisation in contemporary cities.

However, flashmobs definitely subvert the sanctity or the sanity of such spaces by compelling them to suddenly introject disruptive conditions of unintelligibility. Flashmobs force the other participants of the space to enter into a narrative of confusion and chaos; of turbulence, thus rendering the space of consumption incomprehensible for the short time that the flashmob unfolds. Moreover, flashmobs do not fall under globalisation’s rhetoric of consumption, and do not require any special access powers or consumption rites, thus defying the discriminatory protocols that such spaces put in motion under the uneasily hovering sign “Rights of Admission Reserved”. Flashmobs, by rejecting the very use and expectation of the space, in spite of the heavy surveillance, state opposition and hi-tech policing, are able to distort the formulaic narratives of the space, thus creating alternative structures of resistance, of transformation, of transition. State apparatus gets completely paralysed when faced with such a radical reconfiguring, and thus goes out of its way to put a special ban upon flashmobs in a city where even a small defeat in a cricket match, or various emotional events such a public mourning or celebration, bring together crowds much louder, more aggressive, tenuous and destructive than conventional flashmobs. The transient illegality that flashmobs produce is not only at the level of the law but also at the level of legibility and comprehension.

"What do the mobsters do when they come together for a flashmob?" is a wrong question to ask. While the actions of the mobsters might be bizarre and lacking in meaning, often uninformed by any obvious ideology, flashmobs do produce new modes of signification and networking patterns, unprecedented in modern history. The ephemeral nature of the flashmobs, the improbably pseudonymous identities of the participants, the technologically mediated communication and networking patterns, all hint towards a certain notion of technosociality, where the social world around us is profoundly affected by the technologies that we adopt. In these unexpected eruptions, flashmobs create a new relationship between actors, audience and the spaces that they inhabit, including all the three into the circuits of digital technologies. As a form of radical localised performance, flashmobs offer a way to question the hierarchical intentionality of the spaces that they transform; they embody new ways in which technologies interface with our daily life, producing new forms of technosocial living.

This paper was published in Academia.edu. Click here to read the original. Download the file here. [PDF, 129 kb]

[1].These were probably the precedents to the modern day sweat shops that have characterized Globalisation in the 21st century. The ‘labour shops’ were large stone and concrete buildings which housed workers working around the clock towards incessant production. Women and children were often preferred because they were given lesser wages than men and considered more easily malleable.

[2].The transcript of the interview is available at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[3].Venugopal, himself a prolific blogger, blogged about the flashmobs at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[4]. Po Bronson, in his spectacular analysis of the Silicon Valley in The Nudist on the Late Shift, talks about how in a post-industrial city, the quantifiable icons of enchantment and progress – large factories, smoke spewing chimneys and huge barricaded stone and iron constructions have given way to small and homelike offices which are almost human and hence negligible. In his search for the new symbols of enchantment, Bronson conjures the figure of the nudist on the late shift – an eccentric double billionaire who works and lives in a cubicle and rides on the crest of the IT boom. In the case of third world countries like India, these symbols might well be these new sites of consumption that have come with globalization.

[5].One of the more exciting facets of digital technologies and globalization has been the debate over property, ownership and theft. Easy duplication of brands and bypassing the traditional circuits of distribution or sale of property have created the glorified figure of the pirate who straddles the worlds of the legal and the illegal, the digital and the physical, the ephemeral and the tactical with great ease. Within the sanctuarised spaces of malls and shopping complexes, these referents to the other world of cheap duplicates and mobile consumables hang uneasily. There is a constant attempt at establishing the original and the legitimate over the fake or copied replicas which are available in the grey markets that emerge around them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/once-a-flash

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:24:05Z

The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Moving Images, Number 8, December 2009.

The idea of the single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube. The recent state of controversies around YouTube, has foregrounded the question of authorship in collaborative conditions. Questions of who owns the particular videos and what is the role that the large communities of authorship play have not been resolved as the debaters have concentrated only on single videos and singular notions of authorship, dismissing the (this paper proposes) collaborators as jesters, clowns and pranksters, without recognizing their contribution to the videos.

Introduction

I shall begin by misquoting and possibly violating copyright regimes by invoking Dostoyevsky, to say that all dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. Every technological innovation, but particularly innovations affecting authorship and the role of the author, brings with it a new set of anxieties and concerns. David Stewart, in his engrossing book on the history of technology and communication, for example, talks about how in the early years of postal service there were debates around who was the author of the mail that was being delivered. Through a particularly fascinating case that looked at a Lord in London holding the post office responsible for some objectionable mail delivered to his daughter, Stewart traces the origins of techno-neutrality and regulation to look upon technology as merely a bearer of knowledge – in this case, the mail – and the original author, this primordial figure that sits and writes or shoots or sings, as the only person upon whom the responsibility and hence also the credit can be placed.

Mark Joffe, in his movie The Man Who Sued God, introduces us to the case of Steve Myers, an ex-lawyer in Australia, who sues God because his boat is struck by lightning and his insurance company refuses to pay, claiming it to be an act of God. By claiming to be God’s representatives on Earth, the Christian churches and the Jewish synagogues are held to be the liable party, putting them in the difficult position of either having to pay out large sums of money, or prove that God does not exist. But more than anything else, it is the attribution of responsibility to one particular, identifiable entity that lies at the centre of the movie. Even in the pre-Internet world, one of the biggest sources of anxieties has been determining authorship and putting into place a knowledge apparatus that reinforces the need for such a condition. The question of authorship, while it surfaces in a number of contexts – copyright infringements, intellectual property right regimes, plagiarism, crediting and referencing industries, etc – is perhaps most interestingly manifest on video sharing social networking sites like YouTube and Myspace.

Rather than addressing what constitutes digital cinema or the future of celluloid, I would instead like to locate the emergence of the idea of authorship, through a historical examination of an ‘old media’. I will be looking at the early history of the book and the print revolution to argue that the condition of authorship that one presumes for the book, and subsequently, through a different trajectory, for cinema, is not something that was inherent to it; and in fact the early history of the book is filled with conflicts around the question of how you could attribute the book as an artefact to one individual author. By examining the conditions that enabled the establishment of the book as a stable object that can be linked to the author, I hope to return us to a different way of thinking about Youtube videos and the debates on authorship that surround it.

YouTube and the question of authorship

The world of YouTube stakeholders can roughly be divided into two camps: People who swear by it and people who swear at it. The camp has arisen mainly because of differences of opinions on who owns a YouTube video and the content therein. The critics of YouTube – largely recording companies and movie studios and distributors – argue that platforms like YouTube are killing their businesses, emptying their coffers, and are a direct threat to the sacred cow of all cultural productions – the livelihood and the integrity of the creative artist. They make claims that a site like YouTube infringes the copyright regimes because videos get published by somebody who has ripped it from another source, and often does no crediting. Also, that the sales of the music or the movies or television serials go down because of such activities.

One of the most recent infamous example that can be cited is the case of the Let’s Go Crazy Dancing video case, were the world literally went crazy. In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” [1] Lenz wanted her mother to see the film so she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.

Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. YouTube sent Lenz a notice that it was removing her video. She wondered, “Why?” What had she done wrong? Her questions reached the Electronic Frontier Foundation and then started the battle, where on Lenz’s behalf, the EFF lawyers sent a ‘counter-notice’ to YouTube, that no rights of Universal were violated by Holden’s dancing video. Lenz as the author of the video was concentrating on her son’s dancing and that the presence of Prince’s song was negligible and definitely fair use. Yet Universal’s lawyers insist to this day that sharing this home movie is wilful copyright infringement under the laws of the United States. On their view of the law, she is liable to a fine of up to $150,000 for sharing 29 seconds of Holden dancing. They specifically state that Lenz is not the ‘original’ artist who made the music and thus she is appropriating authorship and violating the rights of the artist – Prince, to be identified as the creator of the song. The notice also informed her that they were unhappy with the ‘clowning’ around of Prince’s music which might offend his fan-base.

The questions which come to the fore are very obvious and not new to the history of legal debates on cinema: What is the content of the video? Who is the author of the video? Who watches the video? What are the intentions of the video? The supporters of the ‘Free as in Beer’ access movements and also of YouTube clearly point out the farcical condition of this battle. As Lawrence Lessig very eloquently points out in his essay on the ‘Defence of Piracy’.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? “Let’s Go Crazy” indeed![2]

In another instance, which is a competition on YouTube between two videos to reach the coveted “first video to be seen 1 million times” status, brings again these question of the author and the pranksters. Avril Lavigne fans, on the release of her recent Single ‘Girlfriend’, started campaigning to make that video the first to be viewed 1 million times on YouTube. They put it in direct competition with the then most viewed video – ‘History of Dance’ – and started activities that violated the Terms of Service for YouTube. They embedded the videos in many sites and started websites which played the videos automatically. They even created a website which auto reloaded the video every fifteen minutes and encouraged fans to keep the website opened, abusing the power of broad band, while they are browsing, surfing, or even sleeping. The efforts paid off and Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’, in July 2008, became the first video to be watched 1 million times in the history of YouTube. One would have thought that such publicity is what a distributor’s wet dreams are made of. However, just after the video reached the 1 million mark and entered the heights of popularity, YouTube received a notice from Times Warner, to remove the video because it was a copyright violation. They also demanded that all the other compilations and samplings which included the song be removed from YouTube. The supporters of the move, condemned the Lavigne fans as ‘pranksters’ or ‘jesters’ who were in for the cheap publicity, because they were not really creators of the video or the authors. In a startling Op-Ed titled ‘How Avril Lavigne Killed YouTube’ in the New York Times, a spokesperson for Times Warner suggested.

This is not respectable fan behaviour. A fan is somebody who loves and worships the author and not somebody who pretends to be the author. The avrilelavignebandaid group just turned out to be a group of pirates who passed off Lavigne’s video as their own and went on to promote it, forgetting the fact that they were using a democratic platform like YouTube for activities which can only be called theft!

Predictably, the debate on the question of authorship takes place in a rather somber tone, whether it is the zealous claims of monopoly of production and authorship that the established industries claim for themselves, or the passionate defenses of the YouTubeians. What remains constant through the entire process is the fact that the idea of a singular, identifiable author remains stable and unchallenged. I would like to take a slightly different track here, and try and see how we can think the question of the “production of the author” by revisiting the history of the book and of early print culture, and look at the manner in which the idea of the author emerges.

There is often an unstated assumption about the book as authored by a single person and authorship is spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would be useful to situate the condition of authorship within a historical moment, where authorship is not seen to be an apriori condition but a constructed one, and one whose history is located in specific technological changes. The technology of print and paper brought about a set of questions around the question of authorship, and in the same way, the domain of Internet video sharing and collaborative authorship raises a set of questions and concerns.

The construction of author/ity

In many ways, the debate on authorship and knowledge is similar to the older debate in philosophy between body and self. Critics of self, such as Foucault, demonstrate that the notion of the self has often stemmed from very particular experiences in the Christian West, which were then posited as universal experiences. However, doing away with the notion of the self does not do away with the question of the body. In fact, Foucault goes on to explore the technologies of the self and how it informs our understanding of the body. In a similar vein, while the proponents of the Web 2.0 revolution (sometimes unknown to themselves, echoing debates that happened in print about a 100 years ago) announce either the death of the author or the availability of open licensing, fail to recognize that the question of authorship (and hence authority) are rooted both in particular practices as well as in technological forms. Hence the debates take familiar shapes: author versus pirate, digital versus celluloid, collaborative versus single author, etc.

It is especially when posing the question of authorship in absolute terms that the cultural producers/consumers on YouTube get reduced to pranksters, jesters or clowns. The debate also excludes the temporal framework of the debate and forget that the Internet is still a work in progress. Even though an Internet year is akin to seven pre-digital years, and time is now experienced in accelerated modes, it is necessary to realize that the domain of collaborative online sharing and production of videos is a relatively new one.

It may be more useful to think of the post-celluloid world as an extremely ambiguous and fluid period, undoubtedly marked by immense possibilities, but we have not reached any settled phase yet. So if we are to make comparisons, then it is more useful to compare the contemporary period with another moment in history, and the emergence of a cultural form other than cinema, which was marked by an equal fluidity. It is here that I go to the early history of print culture or ‘print in the making’[3] and the conflicts over the question of authorship, to demonstrate that the condition of authorship question is an important one, but it is not a question that is unique to YouTube or the Internet. And an examination of the conditions under which authorship came to be established may help us get over our anxieties about authorship, and better understand it with certain lightness – through pranks, jests and clowning around.

What’s in a name? – The author and the book

For us to understand the idea of print in the making, we need to understand some of the practices that preceded the idea of print. They also enable us to understand the specific nature of the disputes around the question of authorship, and more importantly rethink disputes over authorship as productive disputes. Lawrence Liang in his ‘A brief history of the Internet in 13th and 14th Century’ takes up the example of Chaucer, the father of English poetry. He demonstrates, through different readings, “how the structure and the form of the Canterbury Tales reflects, interestingly, the question of approaches to the idea of authorship as well as the conditions of the production of the Canterbury Tales itself.” Liang looks at the manuscript cultures and the ways in which authorship and rights were understood.

Borrowing from Mark Rose, Liang shows how, in the Middle Ages, the owner of a manuscript was understood to possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right that could be exploited, as it was, for example, by those monasteries that regularly charged a fee for permission to copy one of their books. This was somewhat similar to copyright royalty with the crucial difference that the book-owner’s property was not a right in the text as such but in the manuscript as a physical object made of ink and parchment. The value provided by the monastery and the reason for their charging for their copy fee did not emerge just from the existence of the copy alone, but also from the fact that each monastery also had their unique elements in the form of the annotations, the commentary, corrections, which only the particular monastery’s copy might contain. The very act of copying and possession made you the author of that text and also the owner of the book.[4] The author was not only the reclusive solitary figure that coins the first word but the various scribes, writers, annotators and litterateurs who offered changes, as well as helped in distribution and copying.[5]

So, while the popular account of preprint cultures is of slavish copying by scribes, the story turns out to be slightly more complicated. Acting as annotators, compilers, and correctors, medieval book owners and scribes actively shaped the texts they read. For example, they might choose to leave out some of the Canterbury Tales, or contribute one of their own. They might correct Chaucer’s versification every now and then. They might produce whole new drafts of Chaucer by combining one or more of his published versions with others. And these were all legitimate, acceptable and engaged forms of authorship. While this activity of average or amateur readers differs in scale and quality from Chaucer’s work, it opens us to new questions of the relationship between author, text, and reader in the Middle Ages, and also what it may mean to understand contemporary practices of knowledge and cultural creation.

Scribes and readers responded to Chaucer, Langland, and others, not by slavishly copying, canonizing, or passively receiving their texts, but by reworking them as creative readers. In doing so, they continue and contribute to the great layers of intertextual conversation that made the work of these now canonical authors relevant, interesting, and, fundamentally, possible. Similar debates surround the attribution of authorship to William Shakespeare for his work. Literary historians have periodically made claims that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the then court poet Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Christopher Marlowe, who is considered to be his arch enemy, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by another man named Shakespeare, and not the Shakespeare we think we know. At the basis of these arguments was the idea that the plays were designed not to be written but be performed and that in the lively rendering of the play, between different actors and producers, the original text changed. Interestingly, the Shakespearean technique of ‘asides’ and ‘taking the audience into confidence’ was actually a way of inviting the audience to not only receive the story but to read it differently, and edit it with their response to it.

This invitation was accepted by late Elizabethans who took great pleasure in seeing the same play multiple times to see how it has changed in the performance. Moreover, as multiple copies of the same manuscript started appearing in the living public, along with the actors and the producers, the readers also took great pleasure in creating copies of the takes that drastically cut, expand, edit and otherwise Shakespeare’s plays.[6]

This activity goes beyond the mechanics of audience reception and looks at the plays as a collaborative effort which gets glossed over in the making of the authoritative folios which looked upon all such interventions as anomalies to the text. Before the fixity of text, there was a possibility to think of the text not as a finished product but a work in progress that elicits new responses, meanings and forms through its engagement with the audience. Moreover, the audience, in their rights of consumption, also seemed to possess the right to edit, change and circulate the text. They were the original jesters, pranksters and clowns, who, in their playful response to the text, constructed it to respond to their contexts and traditions. This sounds a lot like the debates we are experiencing on YouTube videos where the readers respond in kind to the poetics of reading and composing within which the YouTube videos operate.

Conclusion

Thus rather than speaking about authorship as something that is intrinsic to either a particular mode of authorship or intrinsic to any technological form, it might be more useful instead to consider the variety of knowledge apparatuses which come into play to establish its authority. In the case for the history of the book, it was clear that the establishment of authorship depended on the arrangements, classifications and kinds of assemblage that make it possible, maintain it as well as critique it. The conventions, for instance, by which the title and author of a work are identified play very specific functions in preparing for knowledge, as do the several kinds of documentation, attribution, citation and copyright.

The preconditions for authorship cannot easily be made into the object that we identify as author. It is a matter of making evident (making known) the structures of authorship which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability and ambiguity of the authorial position. To speak of the productive nature of conflicts over authorship is then to recognize that any author – either exalted or dismissed - is constructed in a condition of potential collaboration and revision. The question thus centres on how we use the notion of authorship, how we bring it to light and mobilize it today to understand cultural forms differently. The way the authorship debates take place, there is almost a theological devotion to an exalted idea of author, without a consideration of the apparatus that was established to construct that condition.

The point is not to do away with the question of the author or construct another catch-all retainer that accepts all forms of engagement as authorship, but to recognize it not as something that is intrinsic or a given but something that is always transient, and to locate it, in the case of digital cinema, within specific practices and technologies. To return to the question of YouTube videos and the future of celluloid image; we are now faced with new questions about authorship and the very form that the digital cinema embodies: If the image itself is no longer made to bear the burden of meaning and intention, can we locate new forms of authorship – sometimes in incidental intertextuality, sometimes in creating conditions (as is in the case of DVDs or digital video sharing sites) narratives, meanings, interpretations and paraphernalia that simultaneously re-emphasize the sacredness of the image while deconstructing the apparatus that establishes a fixity of authorship over that image? Can we look at not only novel forms of interaction and consumption of the celluloid image but at a playful engagement with the image to create a galaxy of responses – sometimes as reciprocal videos, often through comments, embedding mechanisms, using the video not as an object unto itself but as a form of complex referencing and citation to a larger community of artists and authors?

The future of celluloid, especially if we are locating it in the realm of the Digital Moving Objects of Web 2.0 technologies, is going to have debates which were relevant also to the making of the book. However, this is not to say that the challenges faced and the problematic that emerge are redundant. Indeed, the celluloid frame and its overpowering capacity to incorporate technology, content, response and remixes, to produce the spectacle of watching, posit certain challenges to the Web 2.0 celebrations while simultaneously expanding its own scope of production. YouTube debates around infantile abuse of video/cinema technologies to make dancing babies and furry animals popular need to be read as symptomatic of a much larger question of authorship, authority and the conditions of cultural production rather than signalling the death of celluloid. An escape from the authority question also allows for an escape from the celluloid-digital binary and posits a more fruitful engagement in looking at how celluloid technologies (and the constellation of factors therewith) inform our understanding and analysis of the DMIs that are slowly gaining popularity.

This research was originally published in the Journal of Moving Images.

See the research paper in Academia.edu.

References

[1].Holden Lenz’s YouTube debut, that probably made him the most popular baby on the Internet is still available for viewing at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ> retrieved 12:14 a.m. 22nd January 2010.

[2].The essay is available for open access at <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html>

[3].I am grateful to Lawrence Liang for this methodological framework where he looks at the emergence of Wikipedia and the pre-print cultures, to look at the similarities and differences between the two. “A Brief History of the Internet in the 13th and 14th Century”. Forthcoming 2010.

[4].See Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. 1990. New York: Penguin Books.

[5].Daniel Wolf, in Reading History in Early Modern England. 2005. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, explains in great detail how the reader as well as the author were imagined, constructed and recognized in the early days of print.

[6].See Molly Abel Travis’s comprehensive account of the debates in Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. 1998. Illinois, Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/jesters-clowns-pranksters

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:11:33Z

Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant Shah. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia, 2009, at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

As an increasing population in Asia experiences a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young Digital Natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the Digital Natives across emerging information societies are so entrenched in the rhetoric, vocabulary and practice of consumption, that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and are often contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilization and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production, as trivial or often unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the youth's consumption of globalised ideas and usage of digital technologies, has led to a new kind of political revolution, which might not subscribe to earlier notions of change but nevertheless offer possibilities for great social transformation.

Context: Techno-Social Identities

It was the beginning of the 1990’s that ushered in the digital globalisation in Asia and emerging information societies were experiencing a moment of significant socio-political and econo-cultural transition. Many countries in South and East Asia restructured their developmental agenda to accommodate the neo-liberal paradigm that opened their economic and cultural capital to the globalised world markets (Roy; 2005). Unlike in the West, especially in the United States of North America and North-Western Europe, where the internet technologies developed in hallowed spaces of academic and government research, conceptualised in an idealised ethos of open source cultures, free speech and shared knowledges (Himanen; 2001), the emergence of digital ICTs were signifiers of a certain economic mobility, globalised aesthetic of incessant consumption, availability of lifestyle-choices and a reconfiguring of the State-Citizen relationship.

As different countries in Asia invested in the physical infrastructure of ICTs and widespread access to cyberspatial technologies, they also posited the figure of a techno-social citizen-subject who was caught in a double bind: On the one hand, these new subjects were the wealth of the nations, providing a base for outsourcing and back-processing industries, using their skills with digital technologies to aid the State’s aspirations of economic progress and development. With the digital technologies appearing as the panacea for the various problems of illiteracy, population explosion and ethnic/regional conflicts that have marked many Asian countries in the second half of the Twentieth Century, these new subjects were looked upon as the pall-bearers who would usher in the much desired economic development and socio-cultural reform in these emerging information societies. On the other hand, the ability of these techno-social subjects to transcend their local, to circumvent State authority and regulation, and adapt to a new era of economic and cultural consumption, posited a huge problem for these States that strove to contain the spills of an economic decision into the domains of the social, cultural and the political (Bagga, et al; 2005).

Among the populations who were actively (or, as is often the case, unwittingly) embodying these changes, were the Digital Natives – younger children and youth who have embraced digital technologies and tools as central to their every-day lives and sense of the self – who used (and abused) these technologised spaces in unpredictable and creative ways beyond, and often against, the authority of the State (Shah; 2007) . This particular identity has raised a lot of concern from different authorities like the government, the educators, the legislators and policy makers, and even civil society practitioners and theorists. Most governments had their initial responses to these Digital Native identities as rooted in paranoia and pathologisation. The cyberspatial matrices are looked at with suspicion as creating a world of the forbidden, the dirty and the dangerous. Public debates over pornography, obscenity, need to control and censor the unabashed fantasies that the cyberspaces were catering to, and a call to govern, administer and contain these spaces (and consequently, the people occupying them), have riddled through information societies around the globe.

The many anxieties that have surfaced from parents, teachers, interventionists and policy makers, have led to a global industry that is aimed at keeping the children and youth safe from the ‘ill-effects’ of being online. The responses have been varied and diverse: Radical measures from heavy censorship and regulation of all information accessed through the digital spaces to opening up de-addiction and rehabilitation centres; Strong anti-piracy and pornography drives to forming strict legislation on digital crimes; Extraordinary steps to educate the young people about the perils and pit-falls of internet usage to actual policies dissuade internet usage by regulating the physical spaces of access and the promise of dire punishments for ‘abuse’.

Providing a litany of these anxieties – each made unique by the differential and contextual experience of digital technologies across regions and societies – can be a daunting and eventually a futile exercise because the landscape of digital technologies and spaces is extremely varied and fluid and each new crisis leads to the emergence of a new set of problems. However, there are certain common tensions and uncontested assumptions that run through these anxieties, which need to be understood and examined. It is the intention of this paper to extrapolate these less visible anxieties with a particular focus on the techno-social identity more popularly referred to as Digital Natives.

Misunderstood & Misrepresented

The term ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001) is slowly becoming ubiquitous in its usage amongst scholars and activists working in the youth-technology paradigm, especially in emerging Information Societies. The phrase is used to differentiate a particular generation – generally agreed upon as a generation that was born after 1980 – who has an unprecedented (and often inexplicable) relationship with the information technology gadgets. It is a phrase used to make us aware of the fact that these people are everywhere: On the roads taking pictures on their mobile phones and uploading them on their blogs and photo-streams; In public transport, in their own individually created islands where they listen to music and furiously typing text message their friends; In schools and universities, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars; In offices, glued in with equal passion on to dating and social networking sites as the geek mailing list that they moderate; In homes and bedrooms, uploading the most private and intimate details of their lives (or becoming subjects to other peoples’ online activities) on live cam feeds and audio and video podcasts; In our imaginations, sometimes cracking into our machines, at others, helping us remove that malware, and at yet others, appearing as flesh-and-body familiar strangers just a click away.

All of these are the common sense characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. These are all people born into globalised markets and liberal economies; into accelerated communication and digital representations. And they have skills (and choices) to navigate through the increasingly mediated and digitised technosocial[1] environments that we live in. Most of the stories around these Digital Natives, take on the expected tones of euphoria and paranoia. On the one hand, are the unabashed celebrations of this new digital identity and the possibilities and potentials it offers, and on the other are concerns and alarms about the lack of structures which can make meaning or shape these identities in meaningful and constructive ways which can contribute to a certain vision of democracy, equality, community building and freedom. Both these accounts often contain the Digital Native in geo-political (North-Western, developed countries) and socio-cultural (Educated, affluent, empowered), and do not provide much insight into the incipient potentials of social transformation and political participation with the rise of the Digital Native identity.

There are strident voices that knell the toll of parting day when it comes to Digital Natives. There is a general outcry from scholars that the typical Digital Native is basically dumb. Mark Bauerlein (2008) calls them ‘The Dumbest Generation’ that is jeopardising our future. He paints them as being in a state of constant distraction made of multi-tasking and gadgets that demand their attention. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell suggests that they exhibit, because of their scattered engagement with technology, symptoms that look like attention deficit disorders. The educators in class lament about how this is a copy + paste culture that refuses to read and write or even think on their own (Bennett et al, 2008) as Digital natives increasingly depend on machines and networks to do their work for them.

In 2008, China recorded its 100 millionth internet user and also witnessed the death of a 13-year-old Digital Native, who, after two days of non-stop gaming, jumped off an elevator to ‘meet another character from his game’ (China Times; 2008) – the gaming environment leading him to a state of hypnosis where he could not make a distinction between his physical reality and his digital fantasy. Immediately following this, China started its first internet rehabilitation clinics, identifying internet addiction disorder (IAD) as significantly affecting young people’s mental growth as well as their social and interpersonal skills. Dan Tapscott has announced the birth of the “Screenagers” who are unable to look beyond their need for entertainment and personal gratification, all at their fingertips as they live their lives on the Infobahn.

It is in the nature of the design of trust online (Nevejan, 2008) that the Digital Native in his/her transactions becomes the centre of his/her own universe. The recent explosion of news feeds on sites like Facebook, or the use of Twitter to create social networks, or blogging which is often contained in echo-chambers (as demonstrated by Howard Dean’s political campaign in the USA, 2004), often gives the young Digital Native an inflated sense of the self. The tools that the Digital Natives have for finding people who think exactly like them lead to a sense of intense self gratification (Shah, 2005) and also provide a dangerous outlet for violence to themselves and others, as they find validation for their actions within that group without facing any protest or conflict – what Loren Coleman (2007) calls the ‘copycat effect’. The phenomenon of younger users seeking internet celebrity status by engaging in dangerous activities like confessionals, recording and sharing of sexual escapades, bullying and exposing themselves in ridiculous situations to get attention and limelight, have raised concern among parents and educators (Gasser and Palfrey; 2007).

This list is by no means exhaustive but gives a clear indication of how the Digital Natives are contained in the matrices of the internet in their representations and are painted as irresponsible and irreverent individuals who appear as pranksters, jesters, and clowns, carrying with them, also the darker sides of cruel humour, dark deeds and sinister pranks which need to be regulated and censored – to save the society from this growing menace, and indeed, to save them from themselves.

Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns?

It is easy, from such perspectives, to not only demonise (thus enabling regulation and control) of Digital Native identities but also ignoring their new aesthetics, politics and mechanisms of participation and change as trivial or ‘merely cultural’. There have been many instances, over the years, where each new technology and technologised space of cultural production has been treated as frivolous, infantile or faddy. Let me take this discussion through three case-studies where Digital Native spaces, engagements and activities have been perceived as juvenile or foolish to examine this particular presumption of trivialness that is often pegged on the Digital Natives and their activities. Each Case-Study has been structured in two parts: the first gives a short understanding of the technologised phenomenon and space, the second provides a brief summary of the event.

Flash (Mob) in a Pan from India

Flash-mobs: Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. Howard Rheingold, in his book titled Smart Mobs, suggests that the people who make up smart mobs co-operate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighbourhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with cyberspace, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world (Rheingold, 2001). The flash-mobs, along with the now ubiquitous terms like viral-networking and crowd-sourcing are the most significant examples of the ways in which the digital networks can mobilise people towards a common cause within the digital matrices as well as in the physical world.

The story: India’s first recorded flash-mob started with a website asking for volunteers who wanted to ‘have some serious fun’. On the 3rd of October, when several cell phones rang and email inboxes found an email that briefly chalked out the time and space for a venue – a Flash site. Text messages were sent to all the members who had volunteered by anonymous agencies. And then at 5:00 p.m., the next day, about a 100 participants assembled at a mall called Crossroads.

At the Crossroads Flash-Mob, the mobsters screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares. They danced. They all froze still in the middle of their actions. And then without as much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving behind them a trail of bewilderment and confusion. This was India’s first recorded flash-mob. People who never knew each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads. This first flash mob sparked off many different flash mobs all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces like multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flash sites.

One of the most celebrated accounts of the flash-mob was by Bijoy Venugopal, a serious blogger and writer (Venugopal; October 2003), who also reiterated the fact that the intention of participation was to have some ‘serious fun.’ Subsequent experience-sharing by other members of the flash-mobs also endorsed the idea that the flash-mob was like an extension of online gaming or the tenuous digital communities which are a part of the lifestyle choices and social networking for an increasing number of people in the large urban wi-fi centres of India. The Flash-mob seemed to carry with it all the elements that digital cyberspaces have to offer – a sense of tentative belonging, a grouping of people who seek to network with each other based on similar interests, a growing sense of a need to ‘enchant’ the otherwise quickly mechanised world around us, and an exciting space of novel experiences and unmonitored, pseudonymous (except for the physical presence) fun.

The flash-mob gained huge media coverage and local buzz and was talked about and debated upon quite furiously in popular media. The organisers of the flash-mobs became instant celebrities and were questioned repeatedly about the reasons for organising the flash-mob. The answer was always unwavering – the organisers insisted that the flash-mobs were a way for them to instil fun and novelty in the very hurried life in Mumbai. On the website, Rohit Tikmany, one of the original organisers, very passionately argues:

We are not making any statement here - we are not protesting anything - we are not a revolution, a movement or an agitation. Our purpose (if any) is solely to have fun… None of us is here for anything except fun. We will not have any sponsors (covert or overt) and we will never respond to any commercial/political/religious influences. (Tikmany, 2003)

There was a particular and specific disavowal of the ‘political’. The organisers went out of their way to convince that they do not have any political cause that they endorse, that they are not affiliated with any socio-political organisations or parties in the city, and that their actions were guided only by the desire to have some fun and games. The popular media painted it as a fad that made its point about internet mobilisation but was nothing more than a flash in a pan. Initial responses to the flash-mobsters painted them as clowns – a bunch of young people having a bit of fun. It came as a particular shock, in the face of this celebratory mode of looking at flash-mobs and the composition of the crowd (largely upper class, English speaking, Educated, and implicated in the digital circuits of globalised consumption), when the flash-mobs came to be banned in Mumbai and then around the country, as ‘a serious threat the safety and security of the public’ and offering ‘unfavourable conditions of danger’ in the city.

Flash-mobs have been recorded around the globe, for different reasons and to fulfil varied socio-political ambitions. However, most of them have been explicitly for fun. Tapio Makela at the Tempare University, Finland, suggests that flash-mobs are indeed the first real-time digital gaming experience that the internet can provide us with. And yet, flash-mobs are being regulated in almost all emerging Information Societies. While the political rhetoric of unsupervised mobilisation can be understood easily, what lies beneath it is a much more interesting story. For emerging information societies in the world, the digital technologies have a much more significant role to play in economic development and creation of global infrastructure. Most governments have invested highly in the creation of techno-social skill based identities and have a clear idea of the ‘correct’ usage of technology. The flash-mobs present a situation where the ‘ideal’ citizens who should be engaging with these technologies to enhance the labour markets and augment the nation’s efforts at restructuring in global times, are engaging in apparently frivolous activities which are aimed at self gratification and fun. Flash-mobs, through their aesthetic of irreverence and fun, also present a space for criticism and political negotiation to the Digital Natives, who, while they might not be equipped to engage with traditional channels of politics, are now finding ways by which to make their opinions and expressions heard.

The Flash-mob in Mumbai, for example, builds upon a much richer contextual local history of politics and access. Crossroads, the flash-site, was also the first American Super-Mall in India. In 2001, when the mall opened, it was restrictive in its access, where it demanded the curious onlooker to either pay an entry fee of 50 Indian Rupees or be in possession of a Platinum Credit Card or a Cell phone to enter the mall. The idea was that only a certain kind of citizenship was welcome in this consumerist heaven. It was presumed that people who do not come from a class that can afford to purchase things in the mall might not know how to behave in the mall. A public interest litigation suit against the mall soon revoked these conditions of access and announced the mall as a public space of consumption. However, the lineage of the restrictive conditions that the mall opened with, resonates through the local knowledge systems. The first flash-mob at Crossroads, even though it was ‘fun’, managed to provide a critique of the new class based urban society that global India is building. Ironically, the people who constituted that flash-mob and managed to turn the mall into a place of total chaos for the brief performance were the ‘desirable’ people for the mall. Such a critique, while it might not be overtly articulated for different reasons, still manages to surface once the contextual histories of these events are produced.

10 Legendary Obscene Beasts from China

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, the reaction from those who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts, Baidu’s user base also experimented very successfully with well-formed parodies and satires, opening up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for political criticism and negotiation.[2] What is discarded or overlooked as jest or harmless pranks, are actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene legendary creatures, like the flash-mobs, can be easily read as juvenile fun and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading combined with a dismantling of the “Digital Native in a bubble” syndrome, can lead to a better understanding of the new aesthetic of social transformation and political participation – one which is embedded in the growing aesthetic of fun, irreverence, and playfulness.

A 32 Year Old Dancing Global Nomad

Context: The aesthetic of irreverence, of playfulness and of exuberant joy is perhaps the best demonstrated by the third case-study which deals with user generated content and sharing sites like YouTube and Blip TV or social networking sites like Facebook and Livejournal. With the easy availability of digital technologies of production – portable laptops and digital cameras, PDAs enabled with phones and multi-media services, webcams and microphones – and tools to share and exchange these productions, there has been an unprecedented amount of digital cultural production which has propelled what we now call the Web 2.0 explosion. There has been much criticism about how we are building a junkyard of digital information. Videos of cats and hamsters dancing, inane audio and video podcasts documenting personal anecdotes and opinions, blogs that publish everything from favourite recipes to sexual escapades, and social networking sites that map rising networks, all add to the immense amount of data that dwells in cyberspace. Questions of data mining, of data redundancy are coupled with alarms of the ‘infantile’ uses of technology have emerged in recent debates around this user generated content. Governments are also battling with problems of piracy, hate-speech, bullying and fundamentalism that have found pervasive channels through these platforms and networks.

The Story: In the middle of celebrity hamsters (Hampster the Hamster), popular dancing babies, and parodies of pop stars, there was one particular internet celebrity who is famous, because nobody knows where he is going to dance next. “Where the Hell is Matt?” is a viral video which shot to fame first in 2006, which features Matt Harding, a video game designer from America, who performs a singularly identifiable dance routine in front of various popular destinations in different countries around the world. It started off as a friend recording Matt Harding doing a peculiar dance in Vietnam became popular on the internet and became one of the most popular videos on cyberspace, with his second video released in 2008, viewed 19,860,041 times on YouTube as on 31st March 2009.

Harding has now become a celebrity, featuring on TV talk shows, guest lecturing at universities, and is brand ambassador to a couple of global brands. He is now, also featured dancing on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website under the title “Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth”, claiming that it shows humans worldwide sharing a joy of dancing. Unlike the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia instances, Where The Hell is Matt? does not have any overt political position or agenda. It has not entered into a condition of strife or struggle with any authoritative regimes or systems of conflict. And yet, what Harding has managed, through his ‘pranks’ , is to create a series of videos which have now come to embody values of cultural diversity, tolerance and universal joy. Instead of making serious speeches, petitions or demonstrations, through his prankster image, Matt Harding has become the unofficial ambassador of peace and harmony around the globe, being discussed avidly by anybody who sees him, with a smile.

One can either ignore this viral video as a short-lived meme that will soon be forgotten by the next dancing sensation. Even if it might be true, the impact that the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos have created is significant. When Matt sarcastically said at Entertainment Gathering, that his videos were a hoax, that he was an actor and the videos were an exercise in animatronic puppets and video editing, he had everybody from fans on blogs to new reporters on television responding to it – some often with outrage at being ‘fooled’ by such morphing. Harding revealed his ‘hoax about a hoax’ at the Macworld convention to great amusement. While Matt’s dancing pranks might indeed be forgotten by the next big thing, it is still a fruitful exercise to read it as symptomatic of a much larger redefinition of notions of political participation and social transformation that the Digital Natives and their technology-mediated environments are bringing about.

Digital Natives: Causes, Pauses

Running common, through all these three stories, in popular discourse as well as in academic scholarship, is the presumption of frivolity and non-seriousness that misses out on the much larger contexts of socio-political change. The youth have always been at the forefront of social transformation and political participation. The youth, traditionally, has also had an intimate relationship with new technologies of cultural production, producing influential aesthetics through experimentation and innovation. A brief look at the socio-political history of technologies, shows us that the young who grow up with certain technologies as central to their mechanics of life and living, have led to a reconfiguring of their role and function in the society. The emergence of the print culture, for example, led to the energising of the public spheres in Europe, where young people with access to education and books, could participate and restructure their immediate socio-political environments. Cinematic realism has had its heyday as the tool for political mobilisation through representing the voice of the underprivileged communities. The expansion of the tele-communication networks have led to the rise and fall of governments while changing the face of socio-political and economic activities.

It is not as if these technologies were without their own concerns, questions and doubts. However, most of these anxieties have been successfully resolved through experience, experiment and analysis. Such practices and communities have Moreover, the promise and the potential of this youth-technology engagement have always surpassed the ensuing anxiety.

With the Digital Natives, as a small percentage of the world’s population engages with technologies and tools that are quickly gaining currency and popularity, there seems to be a cacophony of alarms and anxieties which seem to have no scope for resolution or respite. And this alarm seems to be louder and more anxious than ever before because it marks a disconnect of the Digital Natives from the role that youth-technology relationships has borne through history – that the Digital Natives are in a state of apathy when it comes to engaging in processes of social transformation and political mobilisation and prefer to stay in isolated bubbles of consumerism and entertainment. This particular accusation that is levelled at the Digital Natives, if true, is not only alarming but also bodes dire fortunes for the whole world as a new generation refuses to engage with questions of politics, governance and transformation outside of the realm of the economic and the personal. This particular disconnect amplifies the other anxieties – moral anxieties around pornography and sexuality, ethical anxieties about plagiarism and piracy, intellectual anxieties about knowledge production and research – because the re-assurance that the Digital Natives will augment the processes of positive social transformation and fruitful political participation, is perceived as lost.

Moreover, unlike earlier technologies, the youth is not being guided into the use of digital technologies but are actually spearheading the development, consumption and rise of these technologies. There is a strong reversal of the power structure, where the digital migrants and settlers have to depend upon the Digital Natives to traverse the terrain of the digital environments. The Digital Natives are in a uniquely singular position where, due to the economic and global restructuring of the world, their world-view and ideas are gaining more currency and visibility than those belonging to previous generations. However, the adults who enter the world of the Digital Natives, insist on viewing them through certain misapplied prisms:

Difference without change: These stories or anecdotal data almost always gives us a sense of marked difference of identity in an unchanging world. The Digital Native remains a category or identity which remains to be understood in its difference to integrate it into a world vision that precedes them. The difference is invoked only to emphasise the need for continuity from one generation to another; and thus making a call to ‘rehabilitate’ this new generation into earlier moulds of being.

The social construction of loss: A common intention of these stories is to mourn a loss. Each new technology has always been accompanied by a nostalgia industry that immediately recreates a pre-technologised, innocent world that was simpler, better, fairer, and easier to live in. Similarly, the Digital Native identity is premised on multiple losses[3] : loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of control, loss of privacy etc. Predicated on this list, is the specific loss of political participation and social transformation; a loss of the youth as the political capital of our digital futures.

Trivialising the realm of the Cultural: The third is that these anecdotes of celebration and fear, mark the Digital Native’s actions and practices as confined to some “My bubble, My space” personal/cultural private world of consumption which, when they do connect to larger socio-political phenomena, is accidental. Moreover, they concentrate on the activities and the immediate usage/abuse of technology rather than concentrating on the potentials that these tools and interactions have for the future. They paint the Digital Native as without agency, solipsistic, and in the ‘pointless pursuit of pleasure’, thus dismissing their cultural interactions and processes as trivial and residing in indulgent consumption and personal gratification.

Such perspectives and analytical impulses are a result of the pertinent and influential research methods and disciplinary baggage within contemporary cybercultures studies. Much of the imagination of the Digital Natives carries the baggage of false dichotomies and binaries of discourse around technologically mediated identities. Within cybercultures studies, as well as in earlier interdisciplinary work on digital internets, there has been an explicit and now an implied division of the physical and the virtual. The virtual seems to be a world only loosely anchored in the material and physical reality, and almost seems to be at logger heads with the real in producing its own hyper-visual reality. These distinctions, though not often invoked, are present in different imaginations of the Digital Natives. They seem to reside in virtual worlds producing a ‘disconnect’ from their everyday reality. The alternative public spheres of speech and expression created by the rise of the blogosphere and peer-to-peer networking sites seem to reside only within the digital domain. The frenzied cultural production and consumption on sites like YouTube and Second Life are contained within digital deliriums. Similarly, when attention is paid to Digital Natives and their activities, it is confined to what they do, inhabit, consume and produce online, often forgetting their embodied presence circumscribed by different contexts.

The notion of contexts, as it is relevant and important to understand techno-social identities, is even more crucial when talking about Digital Natives. Contextualised understanding of their environments, histories, and engagement help us to realise that Digital Native is not a universal identity. Even though the technologies that they use are often global in nature, and the tools and gadgets they employ are shared across borders, the way a digital native identity is constructed and experienced is different with different contexts. As we see, in the case of the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia, the digital native, especially when it comes to social transformation and political participation, is a fiercely local and context based identity and community. It is because of this, that Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory (2005) actually makes sense – that the Digital Natives, when they do utilise digital tools for social transformation or mobilisation, will not go in search for new tools. Instead, they will use the existing platforms and spaces that they are already using to share pictures of cute cats across the globe. The idea of a context based Digital Native identity also leads me to suggest two things to conclude this paper: The first, that Digital Natives are not merely people who are using new tools and technologies to augment the ideas of change and participation that an earlier, development-centric generation has grown up with. By introducing and experimenting with their aesthetic of fun, playfulness and irreverence, they are re-visiting the terrain of what it means to be political and often embedding their politics into seemingly inane or fruitless cultural productions, which create sustainable conditions of change. The second, that the Digital Natives, while they seem to be a different generation and having a unique technology-human relationship, are not really different when it comes to envisioning the role of youth-technology paradigm in the society. What is really different, with this young generation of active, interested and engaged people, is that their local movements and actions are globally shared and accessed, thus forging, perhaps in unprecedented ways, international and cross-cultural communities of support, help and interest. Moreover, these communities subscribe to a new paradigm and vocabulary of socio-political change which is often tied to their every-day actions of entertainment, leisure, networking and cultural production, which provide the potential for the next big change that the Digital Natives set themselves to.

[1]. The term ‘techno-social’, coined by Arturo Escobar, refers to a social identity mediated by technology. It puts special emphasis that the digital and physical environments need to be seen in segue with each other rather than disconnected as is often the case in cybercultures and technology studies.

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

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

[3]Indeed, as Chris Jenks notes in his work on the construction of youth, through history, it is the function of civilisation to construct youth as not only an innocent category which needs to be saved but also a demonic identity which needs to be trained and taught into the roles and functions of civilisation. Each emergent technology of cultural production, in its turn, has been examined as potentially contributing to the notions of the youth and their role and function in the society.

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This research paper was published in Academia.edu. It can be downloaded here

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