Centre for Internet and Society

Chutnefying English - Report

nishant — 2009-08-27T06:03:23Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/hinglish

Call for participation: Conference @ Bangalore - 'WikiWars'

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:43:41Z

Call for Participation: Conferences and Reader on critical insights and experiences on the Wikipedia

CPOV - Critical Point Of View : WikiWars

Call for Participation: Conference and Reader

CPOV (Critical Point of View) Context: The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to produce a critical Reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a Reader that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.

WikiWars Conference: The first conference to be held in Bangalore, called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view. WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority, verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences, experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:

Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document Wikipedia based art practices or debates
Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on the Wikipedia
Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage, production and participation on the Wikipedia
Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on Wikipedia etc.
The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and ideas
Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities around the Wikipedia

For detailed information on each theme, please go to http://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Who Should Apply: The conference in Bangalore aims to bring together an interesting mix of diverse voices from different cultures, geo-political spaces, and context-based practices from around the world, to start consolidating the approaches, experiences, and impact of the Wikipedia:

Students and Wikipedia users who belong to different local chapters or have editorial/contribution experiences on the Wikipedia,
Academics and publishers who are exploring the changes caused by Wikipedia, both in classroom pedagogy and in knowledge production systems,
Researchers and theoreticians, practitioners and proponents, artists and social activists, who are interested in Wikipedia cultures and their socio-political conditions, should be attending this conference.

How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following information by email to infowiki@cis-india.org by the 15th of October, 2009. 1. A note of interest (450 - 700 words) detailing your ideas and possible contribution 2. Your updated resume 3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)

Conference time-line:

Announcement of short-listed proposals – 21^st October, 2009.

Sharing of Detailed Proposals with all participants – 15^th December, 2009

Announcement of Conference Schedule and Logistics – 30^th December 2009

Online Registration for non-presenting participants – 3^rd January 2010

Conference Dates – 12^th, 13^th January 2010

Travel support: Travel support is available for some of the conference participants (national and international). The selected participants will be provided with the basic travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the conference from their home-countries/cities to travel to Bangalore for the conference. If you are applying for travel support, please indicate clearly in your “Note of Interest” any of these three options: 1. Full travel support required. 2. Partial travel support required with estimate. 3. Travel support not required. Travel support will be provided by the conference organisers on a case-by-case basis.

Conference Organisers: Sunil Abraham (Sunil@cis-india.org) and Nishant Shah (Nishant@cis-india.org ), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. If there are any queries regarding the WikiWars conference please write to us.

Research and Editorial Team: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikiwars

CPOV: Critical Point of View

nishant — 2009-07-13T09:07:42Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) seek to bring together ideas, experiences and scholarship about Wikipedia in a reader that charts out detailed user stories as well as empirical and analytical work to produce.. The organisations will jointly host two separate conferences aimed at building a Wikipedia Knowledge Network and charting scholarship and stories about The Wikipedia from around the world.

CPOV: Critical Point of View

Wikipedia and the Politics of Open Knowledge

Proposal for a research network, two conferences and a reader

Organized by Centre for Internet & Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Introduction: It would be no exaggeration to state that Wikipedia is at the brink of becoming the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. The highly visible clashes amongst opinion leaders, university professors, Web 2.0 ‘evangelists’ and publishers over accuracy, anonymity, trust, vandalism and expertise only seem to fuel further growth of Wikipedia and its user base. In this respect, what does it mean to now say that Wikipedia has become “mainstream”?

The accelerated growth and scope of Wikipedia as a knowledge reference of universal ambition is unheard of. The Google search engine gives preferential treatment to Wikipedia in an attempt to beat search engine optimizers and to provide a more fruitful experience to its users. Apart from leaving its modern counterparts Britannica and Encarta in the dust, such scale and breadth places Wikipedia on par with such historical milestones as Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, the Ming Dynasty's Wen-hsien ta-ch' eng, and the key work of French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie.

Wikipedia owns a whole set of characteristics – including number and automation (bots) of contributors, regularity of updates, fluidity, ease of search, number of languages, and growing user base. In doing so, this online encyclopedia might be cited as the most visible and successful example of the migration of FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) principles into mainstream culture. Those of us who believe in pluralism, and the possibility of another world have reason to celebrate and defend Wikipedia from intellectual- property-right-maximalists and promoters of proprietary models of knowledge production and dissemination. However, such celebration and defense should contain critical insights, informed by the changing realities of the Internet at large and the Wikipedia project in particular.

The Wikimedia Foundation has recently employed its first research analyst and provides spaces for “Wikipediology”, including projects such as the Wiki Project on vandalism studies. Nonetheless, critical Wikipedia research should also be done outside the self-reflexivity of the Wikimedia Foundation and its community. There is an urgent need for quantitative and qualitative research from an Humanities and Arts perspective that could benefit both the wider user base and the active Wikipedia community itself.

More than this though, as one of the largest if not the largest self-contained general knowledge reference of our time, Wikipedia offers critical insights into the contemporary status of knowledge, its organizing principles, function, and impact; its production styles, mechanisms for conflict resolution and power (re-)constitution. New strategic and tactical operations of knowledge/power are clearly at work. The concept of the open remains ambiguous in this formation, serving as both a rallying concept and masking new agonistic encounters.

By permanently (re)formulating the open and inclusive as the guiding Wikipedia principle being formulated by the community itself, one might also look at this norm as a narrative or even call it a founding myth. For example, the demographic profile of the Wikipedia editor as a white male geek with a limited mono-cultural worldview based on Western rationality remains a concern. However, the question of (non)diversity being formulated in Wikipedia discussions needs also to be posed beyond existing stereotypes and at the general level of discourse. The question of (post)identity and representation is not necessarily resolved via the discursive construction of 'inclusion', if such inclusion may require leaving competing knowledge histories and practices at the door and if it puts a culture of editing not next to a culture of listening/hearing.

In the most material and perceptional way, every new technology modifies conditions of possibility for knowledge. The logic of technologies bleeds into the very structures and organizing principles of knowledge and today, both medium and message may reflect the ideas of the (organized) network, multitude or the Deleuzian machine. It is through a selected mix of technological and normative conditions – the distributed architecture of the net, the Wiki software platform, commons-based property licenses and the FLOSS zeitgeist – that Wikipedia as the encyclopedia of the information age emerges, both continuing and transforming the Enlightenment encyclopedic impulse or will to know.

The authors of these proposal are aware of the seemingly conflicting overarching research agenda: At one level is a philosophical, epistemological and theoretical investigation of knowledge artifacts and social, culture construction in terms of , authority and politics. At the other level the research agenda is an empirical, anecdotal, sociological investigation of the specific phenomenon of the Wikipedia. This has been done on purpose so that the learnings from theoretical research activities can inform practice oriented research and vice-versa.

Overall the conferences and reader may include the following areas inviting theoretical, empirical, practical and art-based contributions:

WikiTheory (opening session)
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production
Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century
Wiki Art
Designing Debate
Critique of Free and Open
Global Politics of Exclusion
The Place of Resistance
Wikipedia and Education
Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies
Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Descriptions of the Sessions/Fields of Interest

1. WikiTheory – Mining for Concepts (opening session)

Besides providing a general overview of the topics to come, and with an emphasis on diverse global approaches, the aim here is develop concepts that could be used in further research and that could fit into larger projects on Internet culture and the critique of the free and open. Is it possible to develop a counter-hegemony of critical practices that situates itself in the midst of technological cultures? What kind of critical lessons does Wikipedia provide in the face of overwhelming Web 2.0 hype and P2P utopianism? How can a radical Wikipedia critique be developed that does not present itself as the cynical ‘I told you so’ outsider or mimic the neo-conservatist position of Andrew Keen? What kind of insight can Wikipedia offer regarding the continuing tension between knowledge and information?

2. Wikipedia and Critical Histories of Western Knowledge Production

This session may include topics like: western vs. non/post-western knowledge production, textual vs. oral tradition, visual vs. textual knowledge, Wikipedia and language diversity, and indigenous knowledge.

The persistence of almost buried master-narratives: The Western tradition of Enlightenment tends to permeate both common and official understandings of knowledge on Wikipedia. Mirroring the Enlightenment itself, Wikipedia both offers a very particular type of knowledge and simultaneously makes claims upon the universal - e.g. in the formulation of visionary goals, structure of articles, author positions, writing style, categorization of entries, conflict resolution models and so on. The ways in which such ideals persist and continue to bear their mark on the present in often subtle ways requires further attention. Indeed, the 'grand narratives' of the Enlightenment that Jean-Francis Lyotard claimed had retreated with the emergence of 'computerized societies' continue to inform the popular imaginary in ways largely untouched by the deconstructive moment. Frederic Jameson once referred to this as the 'persistence of buried master-narratives', a 'political unconscious' that guides decisions irrespective of philosophical status. Likewise, this resonates with Foucault's urge 'to reveal a positive unconscious of knowledge' as that which performs the task of subjugation but operates beyond contention. What matters here is not truth or belief, but operation.

The predominance of textual or even linguistical cultures: The current system of Wikipedia citation prejudices textual systems of knowledge over oral and visual systems of knowledge. This under-values the knowledge systems of cultural memory and related technique such as mnemo techniques or oral poetry on the one hand, and illiterate populations on the other hand.

3. Encyclopedia Models-- from 18th to 21th Century

The word made durable: In this session we want to give an overview of various attempts to create a collection of global knowledge. In order to get a better understanding of the cultural specificity of the underlying code on which Wikipedia is built, this topic seeks to dig further into the histories of the encyclopedia. D' Alembert's Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedie is often described as the most succinct statement of European Enlightenment, and the Encyclopedie itself as the material project of Enlightenment. It is through the Encyclopedie that the Enlightenment becomes durable, tangible and disseminated. What can be learned by examining such historical precedents?

Encyclopedias have been said to be sources of national images and stereotypes of the self and the other within Europe. In Wikipedia image construction tends to be both disembogue and masked in favor of a cosmopolitan, global self-understanding. This session might interrogate to what extent knowledge production’s construction of national images is shifted from a discursive to an automatic georeferencing system of construction.

As machines think (or maybe Knowing Machines or The Machinic Intellect): This session may also look to historical attempts to revolutionize knowledge through the creation of new technologies and to what extent these alternate histories resonate with Wikipedia specifically and the technologies of the Net as driven by knowledge imperatives more generally. Examples include the Mundaneum, the Memex, the Galactic Network and project Xanadu.

4. Wikipedia Art

Art at the gates: Wikipedia Art is understood both as artwork and intervention. Taking place largely on Wikipedia itself, the project Wikipedia Art was considered controversial and was quickly removed (see recent debate on nettime-l). What does this project reveal about this type of knowledge production? What is the threshold of legitimacy for this type of knowledge and how are the boundaries policed? What is at stake in the rejection of art?

5. Models of Disambiguation and Designing Debate

May include topics like: Dissent made visible, After Talk / Alerts / Mailing Lists, the role of forum software, technical opportunities for discontent, barnstars/award culture.

The paradox of neutrality: The Neutral Point of View policy of Wikipedia does not always accurately depict the state of debate on topics: The view held by a corporate lobby, using funded research, will find equal space as the opinions of thousands of disadvantaged persons who might be impacted by the actions of the corporate lobby. Would it make sense to replace the NPoV policy and think about Wikipedia as a space of open political agonality; as a battle for meaning underpinned by the desire for reason?

New crises of authenticity: As Wikipedia gains the status of default reference for other printed textual knowledge artifacts – there are emerging challenges of representation; longevity born digital references; digital manipulation of sources; and circular referencing. Shuddhabrata Sengupta of CSDS/Sarai says “Wikipedia encouraged in its community the active exercise of a critical and skeptical attitude towards any received form of knowledge”. In this context the evolving notions of authenticity has to be further interrogated given the rise of peer-produced knowledge and the diminishing cult of the expert.

6. Critique of Free and Open

May include topics like: the parasite model of free culture (“You work for free, others will make the money from your free labour.”), governance, the role of developers, economy of Wikipedia, the beliefs of the founders as the political foundation of Wikipedia, critical interrogation of knowledge in relation to 'the open'.

Vacuous collaboration: Master concepts like freedom and openness are at constant risk of remaining empty or constituting an ‘empty signifier’. The failure to fill such concepts has lead to many descriptions of Wikipedia as 'collaborations' or even 'ad hoc meritocracies' (Alex Bruns). Both these second-tier notions also tend to mask the reconfiguration of the political and new forms of closure.

Paid and voluntary community manipulation: Many Wikipedians hold strong opinions on range of sensitive areas including identity, religion, science, politics, culture, and use sophisticated techniques such as astro-turfing on Wikipedia. Additionally, some states, corporations and organized religious groups sometimes pay specialists to engage in astro-turfing in order to remove critical opinions and rewrite information from Wikipedia.

7. Global Politics of Exclusion

May include topics like: non-western, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks.

Tyranny of the connected: In societies which are compounded by digital and participation divides, the connected usually always win over those who don't have access and time to spare.

Gendered Knowledge: While women are strongly represented among readers, globally, they are hardly represented among contributors. In offlist chats, women express that they do not feel comfortable when contributing to Wikipedia conversations. They even felt silenced by the perception of Wikipedia as a masculine tech culture. Some women have already created an alternative space of discussion at wikichix.org. Does the separation of discussion spaces and the marginalization of domestic issues and social impacts on Wikipedia turn back time?

Morality laundering: Moral standards that exist in one country are being exported to other countries via Wikipedia. For example, photo-realistic images of human bodies on pages dealing with sexuality and anatomy are being replaced with drawings. Does this type of common denominator approach undermine the pluralism of global sexuality? The call and eventual refusal of image censorship for the entry on Mohammad represents a similar scenario.

Language diversity: Despite the self-imposed normative claim of language diversity and the self-description of Wikipedia as a truly multi-lingual project, English is the Lingua Franca in translingual meta projects and policy discussions. Also, on the level of content, is the English Wikipedia the 'Leitmedium' in terms of (content) synchronization. In what other ways does the language divide operate on Wikipedia?

Global governance: Governance of Wikipedia has evolved and become increasingly sophisticated to match its phenomenal growth and the attention it has garnered. While these changes in governance have managed to sustain the growth of Wikipedia and prevent its credibility from being undermined, there is a need to understand the impact that various governance mechanisms have on the different incarnations of Wikipedia throughout the world. Such analysis should consider separately (and compare) different national chapters, plus extend beyond Wikipedia projects to the governance of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Form and format: As the Wikipedia becomes a standard of documentation and knowledge archive, it becomes important to focus on traditional, oral and ephemeral knowledges which might die because of the limitations of technologised platforms to capture them. Oral histories, community knowledges, incipient systems of documenting personal and collective memories, etc. start getting lost as the logo-centric, ‘objectively verifiable’ structures of knowledge production come into being. Rather than a critique of Wikipedia, analysis needs to concentrate on ways by which such knowledge systems are not lost and further tools which need to be developed in order to make them accessible and visible.

8. The Place of Resistance

Why do people resign from Wikipedia? Are critical voices silenced by the majority of the mass? Does the exclusion of the Wikipedia Art project reveal that within Wikipedia is no place for contesting forms, repertoires, styles that go beyond linguistic approaches? Rituals and mechanisms of exclusion offers critical insights into the contemporary status of resistance formation in an paradigmatic age of diversity and inclusion. Going beyond and extending the thinking of social movement scholars such as Touraine or Melucci the study of Wikipedia might inform culture and identity approaches of social movement studies and vice versa.

Can Wikipedia said to be a social movement and/or how do social movement actors appropriate the Wikipedia to built alternatives?

9. Media Literacy and Education

Knowing about knowing: While technologies like newspapers, television, radio and cinema have given birth to educational institutions that engage in media studies, thereby providing tools for the discerning citizen-consumer and future professional, there is still much work required to develop similar critical models for emerging projects like Wikipedia. The common institutional (non)response to warn against the ‘dangers’ of Wikipedia-like projects and discourage or ban their use seems grossly inadequate. The rise of 'prosumers' suggests a need for new 'production literacies' in addition to the traditional 'consumption literacy'. Furthermore, there is also a growing number of meta projects on Wikipedia that seek cooperation with schools and academia. But is the Wikimedia foundation and select national bodies the legitimate actors to teach media literacy or is this rather a public relations effort? What would Wikipedia literacy entail?

10. Wiki-analytics, Wikipedia as Platform and Software Studies

Possible Topics: Protocological Knowledge, Knowledge vs. Information, Cultural Analytics, Cybernetics in the present, (Un)dead labour and the posthuman bot.

Knowledge in the neighborhood of software: Can we start thinking of Wikipedia as an interplay of editors and technology, since software and notification systems are such an important part of the Wikipedia project? Indeed, whilst humans argue over knowledge statements, 'bots' do much of the dirty work and general knowledge housekeeping – a kind of (un)dead labour. The presumption here, of code as politics, is that the wiki principles themselves need to be debated from a perspective of software studies. To what extent has bot politics triumphed over vernacular expertise or lead to an empowerment of the e-tech geeks in knowledge projects? Related to this is the question of the cultural history of Wikipedia as a platform. What is the relation between policy formation and technical protocols? Is Wikipedia knowledge Cybernetic?

Wikipedia as a data set: Besides the automation participation in the form of the bot, Wikipedia is an information artifact through and through. What kind of data analysis techniques can contribute to a radical critique or illuminate network regularities beyond human interpretation? What additional anonymised data sets of edit and use history should be released by the Wikimedia Foundation to promote media literacy and education.

11. Wikipedia and Conditions of Knowledge Production

Possible Topics: Politics of knowledge production, question of authority, The fallacy of objectivity, Wikipedia and the Public Sphere.

The alarm that traditional bastions of knowledge production and consumption (like universities and publishing houses) raise against Wikipedia, brings into sharp relief, the fact that the Wikipedia is a part of a much larger knowledge production industry. With the Wikipedia’s integration into more ‘mainstream’ usage, it becomes necessary to focus on how the emergence of such a space (and the principles it embodies) also affects the much larger and global politics, aesthetics and mechanics of knowledge production. Wikipedia has substantially changed academic trends of publication, citation, classroom pedagogy and research. It has also been central to many debates about who produces knowledge and who has the ‘right’ to be an Authority on the knowledge thus produced.

Moving beyond the class-room and questions of plagiarism or teaching, there is need to investigate the pre-conditions and the contexts within which Wikipedia emerges, and the kind of questions it poses to processes of knowledge production, consumption and verification.

Production Details

Besides setting up a network for critical Wikipedia research with its own mailing list and organizing two events early 2010 in Bangalore and Amsterdam (to start with), the aim is to gather materials for a Wikipedia Research Reader that will be published in the INC Reader series around September-October 2010.

Research and editorial group: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Sunil Abraham (Bangalore), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

Contact info:

Sunil Abraham: sunil@cis-india.org

Nishant Shah: Nishant@cis-india.org

For more information on how to apply to the Bangalore WikiWars conference, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Uploads

nishant — 2009-02-24T05:53:35Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/uploads

The Future of the Moving Image

nishant — 2008-11-11T09:06:57Z

All dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. This was probably at the core of the zeitgeist at the international seminar on “The Future of Celluloid” hosted by the Media Lab at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, at which Nishant Shah, Director - Research CIS, presented a research paper. Practitioners, film makers, artists, theoreticians and academics, blurring the boundaries of both their roles and their disciplines and areas of interest, came together to move beyond convergence theories – to explore the continuities, conflations, contestations and confusions that Internet Technologies have led to for earlier technologies, but specifically for the technology of the moving image.

How Digital Cinema changes the notion of authorship...

The concerns that emerged at the Jadavpur University Media Lab's international seminar on The Future of Celluloid, were manifold and not confined to cinema or the moving image. These are concerns that are voiced on all realms of cultural production, where the traditional forms feel stranded at digital intersections, threatened by the emergence of new cultural productions which are so much more quintessentially the form and ideal that the traditional forms aspired to.

The blog, as we saw at the “Writing the Future Conference” was seen as a threat and more fundamentally replacing the novel form. Ars electronica or digital music has long since played the swan song of traditional orchestration practices. Similarly, the digital film (often broadcast on video sharing spaces like YouTube and MySpace) or even mainstream feature films that embody digital technologies of hypervisualisation, show necessarily more than celluloid could ever capture. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, “The capacity to pay almost infinite attention to the celluloid image was made possible only with the digitisation of the celluloid image”.

Through the different presentations, this strain of thought was apparent – will we lose celluloid altogether? Is the future of cinema going to be in infantile pre-lapsarian representations of smiling/dancing/gurgling babies and furry pets made by indulgent mothers and doting pet owners? When cinema transitions from deep celluloid to shallow pixels, will the loss in depth also result in the death of meaning and processes of reading the image? And finally, the question that seems to surface, sometimes in the guise of academic concern, sometimes in the shape of alarm and anxiety, and sometimes in the form of paranoia and raging uncertainty: “Is this the end of Celluloid? “ to which Matt Hanson, who presented his open source film A Swarm of Angels, nuancedly added: "Only the end of celluloid as we know it!”

In my presentation titled ´Of Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns – YouTube Videos and Conditions of Collaborative Authorship´ I made a call to identify these questions as symptomatic of another more deep seated anxiety which makes for a fundamental revisiting of the relationship between the author, the text and the reader. Looking particularly at YouTube videos and the kind of arguments that have surrounded them – on copyright, defamation, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, remix, authorship, ownership – I proposed that at the centre of all these anxieties is the question of authorship, what constitutes it and the need to expand the scope of authorship by looking at the series of engagements that happen online.

I presented two cases to make my argument. The first was the case of 13-month-old Holden Lenz, dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s family had a digital equivalent of a Kodak moment. Her 13-month-old son Holden, pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, started moving to the addictive rhythms of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy song and Stephanie recorded him on her digicam. Wanting more of the family to share the joy, she uploaded the video on to YouTube and it was viewed scores of times. Laughs were shared, gaps were bridged, digital technologies brought families scattered across time-zones and lifestyles together.

However, the lawyers at Universal Music did not seem to share the enthusiasm or the joy. They fired off a notice to YouTube asking them to remove the video because it amounted to a copyright infringement. YouTube, fearing legal ramifications, removed the video. Stephanie Lenz approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which challenged Universal’s claims that held Lenz liable for up to 150,000 USD in fines for sharing the 29 seconds of her son dancing. While it is very easy to draw the battle-lines and look upon the well educated, highly paid lawyers of Universal as ‘idiots’ who spent probably millions of dollars in starting the legal battle, I think there is more at play here than who is right and who is wrong. What is really being debated, is not whether Lenz indulged in wilful copyright infringement or not, but the questions of who is an author, what are the mechanisms of attribution, and how do we understand these in the complex digital worlds that we populate?

Historically, the author was constructed as a communitarian figure whose work depended on and was enhanced by the collaborations and the collective knowledge of the people s/he interacted with. Chaucer, to quote the most canonical example, for instance, was recognised as the author of The Canterbury Tales only after the print industry finds its footing, thus neglecting the fact that the text was heavily distorted, enhanced, mutated, corrected, revised, edited and transformed by the various users of the manuscripts, who were not merely audience or receptors but also collaborative authors of the text. It is only with the establishment of the cultural industries, that such a fluid understanding of authorship gets crystalised into specific forms of engagement, where the author, the reader, the distributor, the consumer, the audience and the end user are all clearly defined and contained within presumed roles.

It is the blurring of these boundaries in the digital world that leads to the kind of debates that we observe around the Stephanie Lenz case. The inability of the newly emerging digital cultural industry to recognise different forms of engagement – remixing, sampling, embedding, referencing, distributing, editing, etc. – as creative and productive forms of authorship is at the basis of the anxieties that run amok in these debates. My presentation made a call for not only a de-criminalisation of pirate positions in the realm of cultural production, but also to recognise and celebrate the various conditions of collaborative authorship – be it by Holden Lenz who probably made the song twice as popular than it was, or by Avril Lavigne fans who went on a spree to make her song Girlfriend, the first video to be viewed one million times on Youtube – not merely as derivative or acts of prank and jests, but as legitimate and distinctive forms of authorship which expand the scope of the cultural object and give it unprecedented layers of meaning and engagement.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image

Nishant Shah

nishant — 2010-02-05T11:15:33Z

This section contains the different essays which have been published over a period of five years, ranging from questions of Internet pornography, digital subjectivities, cyber communities, techno-social conditions, Internet technology and legality, urban restructuration and IT, globalisation, gender and digital forms like blogging, digital video, social networking systems and MMORPGs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant

The Anxiety of the Future and Internet Technologies

nishant — 2008-11-06T05:18:48Z

Nishant Shah and Sunil Abraham attended the "Writing the Future" conference organised by the Humanities Department at the IIT Delhi, and supported by the CIS and the Kusuma Trust. Nishant made a presentation at the conference entitled "Some Knowledge in Search of Authority: Cyberspace, Collaborations and Confusions".

The Anxiety of the Future and Internet Technologies

Shashi Deshpande, one of the first generation Indian writers in English, at her plenary speech at IIT Delhiś “Writing the Future” conference, made, to my mind a startling statement: “After all”, said Deshpande, “everybody who writes a blog eventually only wants to publish a book”. In itself, the statement appears to be in resonance with the mainstream discourse around the relationship that Internet Technologies have with the processes of writing, publishing and distribution. Even in some of the more sophisticated scholarship around cyberspatial forms like blogging, it is common practice to posit the blog in opposition to the book – more specifically to the novel form – and the spaces of knowledge production online as simulations of or threats to existing authoritative forms of knowledge. Despite the fact that we are publishing and writing more than ever before (in almost all languages of the world, but especially in English), that more people are reading (the very act of reading – emails, blogs, BBS, discussion forums, descriptions, manuals – in the rapidly transforming Information Societies), and that there is a significant rise in the circulation, distribution and consumption of books and newspapers and other print forms, there is a very consistent paranoia, across various disciplines, but especially in English Departments in the Universities, that believes writing is a dying art and that we will soon live in a bookless world of mediocre writing by uncensored and untrained authors.

The tone that Deshpande adopted in her plenary speech persisted through the various presentations we heard from emerging and established writers, poets, publishers and distributors from the Asia Pacific region who had come together to talk about the idea of the future and the future of ideas. There seemed to be, scattered across the panels, a series of alarms, anxieties and apprehensions which were specifically to do with the role technologies, and especially the digital technologies, play in shaping the future of the written word. And I think it is time to look at these anxieties and see them for what they are – symptomatic of a larger fear and misunderstanding of digital and information and communication technologies and the forms that have emerged therein.

All technological innovations, but particularly those technological innovations affecting knowledge production, bring a new set of anxieties and concerns. Lynn Truss, in her hilarious book on the history of manners, for example, talks about how, in the early years of telephone use, there were guidelines issued which said, “When you speak to the person on the other end, keep the receiver at a distance of two inches from your ear, lest the other person, if he suffers from germs, transfer them to you.¨ She subsequently illustrates how the anxieties about the physical and moral well being in the public and academic discourse of that time, around the telephone, were symptomatic of the anxiety about coping with conversation which was not face to face, and sometimes indeed, with strangers. The internet technologies also evoke similar anxieties, which I am going to caricature to ensure that they are, if not resolved, at least redundant.

Here is a list of the top three questions I have been asked in the last three months by students, researchers, journalists, or panellists at conferences:

Q. Is the internet going to replace books?

No. The internet does not compete with books.

Q. Is it going to shut down newspapers?

No. The internet does not compete with newspapers.

Q. Can we believe what we read on the internet?

Can we believe anything we read anywhere?

I use this glib mode to locate in the arrival and emergence of cyberspaces, the anxieties that also marked earlier technologies like print and especially the emergence of the book. These are the anxieties that fruitlessly emerge when we start subscribing to the idea that a blog is an extension of a personal diary or the simulation of a novel (that everybody who blogs basically wants to write a book), the website is a digital brochure, the internet relay chat is merely accelerated passing of notes, the social networking systems are replacing earlier ways in which people made friends, and the Wikipedia is just messed up knowledge.

In my presentation, I urged to that we move beyond these anxieties, to realise that historically, all new technologies have evoked similar anxieties and questions about authorit and credibility. The pre print period and the mode of reproduction of manuscripts are usually characterized as being full of mistakes and incredibly unreliable. This absence of certainty in the early history of the book was attributed to the mistakes made by scribes who had to copy by hand over many hours and were prone to making mistakes, since there was no fool proof method of ensuring the accuracy of the scribes methods.

One of my favourite jokes, about the Bible and its rule of law, is about a scribe who was making copies of the Bible from other copies. The original was locked up in the monastery cellars. The scribe asked the Abbot, ‘Master, I have never seen the original. How do I know that what I am copying is correct and faithful to the word of the lord? If I make mistakes, isn’t it possible that there were mistakes in the first copy of the original and nobody would know of it because nobody sees the original?” The Abbot, after some thought, went down into the cellars to check the validity of the question and compare his copy with the Original Bible. For ten days there was silence except for the rustling of pages and the careful squeaking of the quill. And on the eleventh day, everybody heard loud cries and groans of despair coming from the cellar. When they rushed down to find the cause, fearing the worst, they found the Abbot, almost in tears; he said, “It says Celebrate; Not Celibate. Somebody missed out an R and changed the E”.

Lawrence Liang, in his fantastic essay on “The Brief History of the Internet in the 15th and 16th Century” points out that the typographical fixity that is assumed for books did not always exist. In the first 100 years of print culture, errors were rife in printed books, Papal edicts against “faulty bibles” were issued, forgeries were rampant, manuscripts (as Jon Cook pointed in his excellent Plenary on the first day) were pirated or counterfeited. Print in fact opened up the floodgates of diversity and conflict and at the same time threw up questions about the authority of knowledge which could not easily be addressed. It is this open ended nature of print in making that I am interested in, since it seems to have many parallels with the information revolution that we call the internet. “ Liang’s point about knowledge as not intrinsic (automagically produced, presumed, imagined and installed in a book) but as transitive (constructed, deliberate, established through a knowledge apparatus that concretises the knowledge in a particular object – the book, the movie, the visual etc.) is one of the best responses to these anxieties.

As new technologies of writing and knowledge production and distribution emerge, we need to engage with the questions of authorship, possession, writing, dissemination, circulation, distribution and consumption because these concepts have a clear bearing on the notions of intellectual property, piracy, plagiarism, research and knowledge production. More interestingly, just as we do not confuse the writer with a film maker or a visual artist, it will be a fallacy to presume that the writer that emerged with the print culture is the same writer that is also using words on the digital medium. The conference, which was also supported by the Centre for Internet and Society, was extremely fruitful for us, making us acutely aware of the kind of anxieties we have about the future.

And perhaps anxiety is a good thing; it stops us from being smug and content in the dominant discourses of shining glories; it makes us stop to think about the way in which the world as we know it gets dismantled and deconstructed and how the past (and perhaps history), even though we might have announced its death, still haunts the idea of the future, as well as the future of ideas.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/the-anxiety-of-the-future-and-internet-technologies

Writing the Future - IIT Delhi

nishant — 2008-11-05T05:57:40Z

The First Ever Asia-Pacific Festival of Writing: An internationally-supported event for emerging and established writers, scholars of contemporary literature from Asia and the Pacific, publishers, and all those interested in new writing from the region -- New Delhi and Shimla, India, October 2008

‘WRITING THE FUTURE’

The Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi and the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership are pleased to collaborate in organising Indian and international support to hold the first ever Asia-Pacific Festival of Writing in New Delhi.

This unique Festival, which combines a regional focus with a truly international reach, seeks to raise the profile of the enormously rich literature and thought of the Asia Pacific region.

As the attached Program shows, the Festival has been planned in some detail and has already generated considerable interest through its website (http://www.apwriters.com)

Several writers and academics of international standing have agreed to be part of the enterprise and have brought their expertise and – above all – enthusiasm to the initiative.

Registered participants include writers and scholars from Australia, Bangladesh, Fiji, the Philippines, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, UK and USA, amongst others. This spontaneous show of interest, we feel, is in itself a true measure not only of the vitality and reach of the Festival but of the felt need for such self-expression and interaction across the region.

AIMS

Our goal is to:

bring the excitement of reading new literature to a wide audience across the region;

enable young writers and university students to interact with well-known writers; and

encourage cultural cross-talk & literary debate across a variety of regional languages

focus on new forms of writing engendered by e-media such as internet (blogs, chats etc.)

To this end, we have organized the following forums for literary interaction:

ACTIVITIES:

Creative writing workshops for emerging writers from the region, taught by writers of international repute - a festival feature that is familiar in the West but has never before been part of South Asian literary events. Emerging writers in the West have over the past decades gained tremendous benefit and advantage from workshops with peers and established writers, but there are few equivalent opportunities in Asia. This festival hopes to change this situation.

Translation workshops, undertaken in collaboration with the Indian Academy of Letters and the Jamia Millia University. These workshops will be held in four languages (Hindi/Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam and Tamil) at venues in Southern India (Mysore) and Eastern India (Kolkata) as well as in Delhi. Translators of national standing are involved in this initiative.

A major academic conference on new writing from Asia and the Pacific

The conference will examine contemporary writing from the region, the value of writing programs, the contrasts and synergies between traditional oral forms of literature and new forms of writing influenced by multi-media, the state of national literary studies, and notions of writing in relation to regional, hybrid and/or diasposric identities globalization, cosmopolitanism, post-colonialism, and other associated issues.

Public events featuring established writers and performers of international repute.

These will include readings by emerging and established writers; panel discussions with publishers, literary agents, and writers; book launches; and cultural performance by Indian poets, theatre-people and singers.

Local and international established writers who conduct workshops and participate in the public events will visit schools and colleges in New Delhi to read from their work and talk about their writing process. Engaging with youth is a very important and intrinsic part of the conceptualisation of this festival.

ADVANTAGES

It is our belief that this Festival is the timely start of an important new form of cultural cooperation which will provide valuable opportunities for new writers in the region for years to come. It will eventually provide a forum that challenges outmoded boundaries between academic and creative texts, between traditional pasts and technological futures, between the new and old media and between genres, cultures and institutions.

One of the more unusual features of this festival is that the IIT will host the ‘Writing the Future’ conference together with a host of other Indian institutions who have generously extended their support. These include:

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations

The Sanskriti Foundation

The Indian Institute for Advanced Studies

The Sahitya Akademi or National Academy of Letters

Jamia Millia Islamia University

Scope Plus

Kusuma Trust and the Centre for Internet and Society

To repeat, this festival, an initiative of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, international scholarly collaboration and the Asia-Pacific Writing Partnership, is the first ever festival of its kind being held in the region. It offers a unique blend of academic interaction, creative writing workshops and public events where writers interact with participants, publishers and other players in the global literary arena.

The aim of the festival is, finally, to together ‘write the future’.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/writing-the-future-iit-delhi

Uploads

nishant — 2008-11-01T07:59:16Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uploads

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Histories of the Internet

nishant — 2010-06-17T07:45:03Z

For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.

Histories of internets in India

The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.

The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.

Scope of the Theme:

We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.

We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:

Rewiring Bodies - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
Archive and Access - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Pleasure and Pornography - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Rethinking the Last Mile Problem - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
Using the Net for Social Change - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Queer Histories of the Internet - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets

Home images

nishant — 2008-09-25T09:25:05Z

The images to be plugged on the home page. The folder is to be excluded from navigation. ALWAYS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images

Digital Pluralism

nishant — 2009-02-06T06:31:50Z

The Internet, when referred to with a capital I, often gives the notion of a centralised, homogenised, consolidated network of access, protocols and people. Popular representations and imaginations of the Internet ‘make invisible’, the extremely complex, intricate, and varied nature, not only of the uses and the stakeholders of the Internet but also the many forms that Internet itself takes. The notion of pluralism – the belief in multiple knowledges and perspectives, the availability of different frameworks and truths, and the transmit-ability and transmutability of information – is built into the very form of the Internet. It is perhaps more appropriate, given the wide scope and range of the internet and the many different ways in which it intersects with the world around us, to talk of many different kinds of internets.

The Centre for Internet and Society sets out to examine the multiplicity of Internet by looking at the notion of digital pluralism. We seek to theorise the particular concept to investigate the many intersections that the internet has with the world around us. Given the scope and persuasiveness of internet technologies, it would be redundant to produce a list of possible meanings of the internet. Instead, we conceptualise the internet at three different levels, each demanding its own history, context, materiality and specificities, to produce a more comprehensive understanding of what the internet means and how it responds and reacts to the digitised and networked times we live in.

Internet as Technology

At the primary level, the Internet is a set of protocols, which allows the transfer of data over a complex and almost interminable network. It is necessary, as the internet increasingly becomes central to the crucial mechanics of survival, to recognise it as a technology. The arrival of internet technologies has made a significant impact in the domains of life, labour, language and history, changing the way we understand certain older structures like property, economy, capital, possession, ownership, etc.

So persuasive is the seductive power of the internet, that it often makes invisible the larger questions of freedom, access, and production, in its unfolding. The call to re-emphasise the internet as technology is to examine the economic rhetoric of globalisation, urbanisation and new digital technologies on the one hand, and the alarmist calls around piracy, security, theft and ownership on the other.

Communities of gift economy, of open access to content online, of advocating Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), of promoting greater inclusion and pluralism of non-licensed softwares and protocols have all emerged around the questions of Internet as Technology. Despite the gravity of the concerns they raise and the unequivocal merit of their activities, very little attention is given to them either by the private sector or civil societies or the government. While there has been a long (and often raging) debate on the internet around these issues, the mainstream media and the larger public remain outside its scope and continue getting implicated in softwares, platforms and digital forms while compromising their rights.

The Centre for Internet and Society hopes, through a model of consultation and collaboration, to actively intervene in this field, to promote the digital pluralism of internet technologies and resist any hegemonic and coercive practices of larger corporate conglomerates and state bodies that may act against public interest.

Internet and its Materiality

The Internet has material consequences. Cybercultures theory, augmented by other instrumental discourses on the internet, incessantly confines cyberspaces to a schism between virtual reality and real life. Such a view of the internet renders the material transactions and consequences of the internet invisible.

As the internet technologies become more pervasive and persuasive, they become an integral part of the mechanics of modern survival. The internet has now become central to the domains of life, labour and language, affecting crucial questions of identity, subjectivity, sexuality, freedom and expression. How do we think of ourselves, not only in relation to technology but also as technologised beings; in a condition of becoming cyborgs? What are the forms of subjectivities that emerge in the technologised transactions of every day? How do we understand the different forms of sexual interactions, mediated and shaped by internet technologies? What are the new kinds of sexual identities which are produced and mobilised by the internet? Is the internet, as is often celebrated in popular discourse, really creating alternative public spheres of freedom or is it producing new forms of exclusion and discrimination?

The Centre for Internet and Society believes that while these questions have cropped up variously, and often emphatically, in the last four decades of Internet presence, there has been very little academic or theoretical attention given to them. The approaches that exist are primarily focussed on the object of change rather than the technologies that shape the change. The accounts provided also, instead of drawing from the mechanics and aesthetics of the technologies, rely on earlier technologised forms to make meaning of the new form. We find it imperative to work for a better understanding of the way the globalised technologised world is being shaped through the wide-spread penetration of Internet Technologies and their material consequences.

Internet and Cyberspaces

Cyberspaces, though a smaller part of the Internet, are the most visible face of the Internet networks. The arrival of the GUI, social networking applications, innovative forms of interaction and networking, online gaming, role-playing and expression platforms like blogging, and virtual worlds, have created a fascinating network of users, distributed across lifestyles and geographies, interacting with each other in unprecedented forms. Cyberspaces, with their ability to immerse the users entirely into the medium, creating a world of incessant interaction – with technologies, with technologised forms, with cultural products, and with the other users, who have translated themselves, using the structures of anonymity and desire – have led to new forms of social, cultural and economic practices which require critical thought and analysis.

Cyberspaces produce many questions – some legal, some judicial, and some about safety, danger, and harm – which need to be answered and engaged with at a serious level. Given the unmoderated nature of access and production on cyberspaces, how do we make a call for safety and caution without compromising the rights of the individual for freedom of expression, speech and being? How do we protect the innocent or the uninitiated, from scandals, scams or situations which might be harmful to them, without making a call for censorship and regimentation? As familial interactions get mediated with technologies, how do we understand the notion of family and the economies that surround it? With new political and cultural mobilisations coming in effect, how do we imagine the space of the public and the political?

Questions like these have a direct bearing on the ideas of individual freedom and right to non-discrimination, while simultaneously asking for a moderated and controlled cyberspatial experience. The design, form, shape and content of cyberspaces all have different implications in these questions, and an analysis of not only the user behaviour or the impact but the very epistemological origins and functions of such forms is important to be studied. These concerns also bolster the idea of digital pluralism of a certain kind – not a neo-liberal call for solipsistic individualism but concentrating on and bolstering the relationships that the individual has with the society and how internet technologies mediate these relationships.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1

Cyberspace in its Plurality: Cybercultures Workshop at TISS, Mumbai

nishant — 2008-10-31T10:38:17Z

Cyberspace has become one of the most potent and persuasive metaphors of our times, enveloping and embracing a wide range and scope of areas across disciplines and perspectives. The cybercultures workshop is designed to be an introduction to the multiplicity of cyberspaces and internet technologies and the key questions which have emerged in the almost four decades of cyberculture theory. The workshop is designed across four days; each day dealing with a certain understanding of cyberspace – in its materiality, in its imagination, in its instrumentality – in order to present a comprehensive view of the vast terrain of cyberspace and its intersections with the contemporary worlds we live in.

Workshop @ Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai

The four day workshop at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, sees CIS engaging with one of the most exciting spaces in the Indian academia; we design and administer an introduction course on cyberspace and its plurality to students of media and cultural studies. The workshop is a part of the Centre for Internet and Society's larger concern on providing a multidisciplinary, multi-media approach towards the internet and contextualising it in India.

Structured on a seminar model, the workshop hopes to bring together the questions in academic debate as well as in the realm of cultural production, for students to understand the internet technologies and cyberspaces as not only important cultural outputs but also crucial forms that shape the world we live in.

Objectives: The four day cybercultures workshop hopes to achieve the following objectives:

To introduce the students to the multiplicity and complexity of ‘cyberspace’.
To introduce ‘cyberspace’ as an epistemological category to emphasise the centrality of cyberspaces in understanding the mechanics of urban survival in the contemporary.
To orient the students towards understanding the textuality of cyberspace; rescuing it from the confines of digital networks and locating it in the transactions of globalization and urbanization in Asia.
To introduce the key debates in cybercultures theory: body, gender, sexuality, authorship, ownership, access and information democratization.

Design: The cybercultures workshop is designed to be conducted over four days with two sessions (of three hours each) per day. Each day is thematically divided to look at a particular idea of cyberspace; the sessions are further sub-divided to introduce a particular perspective on the day’s theme. Each session has its set of individual pre-readings which will serve more as indicators of the stake of the debate rather than as texts around which the class will be centred. The readings shall remain as introductory material, and the class room discussions, while referring to them, will not concentrate on explaining the material.

Day 1: Cyberspace – Form, Textuality and Frameworks

Session 1: Exploring Cyberspace:

Definitions, explanations, locations

Cyberspace and Digital Technologies

Form, text, textuality

Pre-reading: Shah, Nishant, 2005. “Playblog: Pornography, Performance, and Cyberspace” available here

Session 2: The Digital DNA – Database, Networks, Archives

The Database Imperative: Sorting, information, databases

The Networking Impulse: Social Networking Systems and the condition of networking

The Archiving Aspirations: Intention, aspiration and archiving the present

Pre-reading: Manovich, Lev, 2001. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” available here

Day 2: Information technology and human engineering

Session 3 : Gender, Technology and Cyberspace

Gendering of Technology; Gendered Technologies

The body and its boundaries

Physical bodies; Digital selves; cyborgs

Pre-reading: Light, Jennifer, 1999. “When Computers Were Women” available here

Dibbell, Julian, 1991. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” available here

Session 4: Techno-social Worlds

Orkut Deaths : The distributed self

Role playing and identity : The real and the authentic

DPS MMS: The trajectories of selves

Day 3- 4 : Cyberspace and the Infobahn

Session 5: Movie Screening: Good Copy, Bad Copy (followed by discussion)

Session 6: Who owns Cyberspace?

Ownership and Possession

Licensing and access

Open source and the gift economy

Pre-reading: UNCTAD essay on copyright and related questions, available here

Session 7: 18 Reasons Why Piracy is Good for You

The need for piracy

Piracy, theft, and property

Session 8: The Cultural Value of Intellectual Property

The Digital Millenium Rights

The Copy Right and the Copy Left

Open Access and the Creative Commons

Outputs

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai

Conferences & Workshops

nishant — 2009-07-10T07:28:21Z

The Centre for Internet and Society firmly endorses the model of collaboration, consultation and feedback, and looks upon conferences within various disciplines, which engage with questions of Internet technologies and their bearing upon the times we live in, as extremely fruitful forums of engagement with the peers. This is where we document the different conferences that we are institutionally or individually participating in and the ideas that emerge out of them.

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