Centre for Internet and Society

Public Accountability

nishant — 2008-09-22T08:02:06Z

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

Digital Pluralism

nishant — 2008-09-22T07:58:57Z

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

Contact Us

nishant — 2011-12-04T15:25:31Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/contact

Contact Us

nishant — 2013-01-30T10:38:18Z

Postal Address:

The Centre for Internet and Society
No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross,
Domlur 2nd Stage
Bangalore 560 071

Phone: +91 80 40926283
Telefax: +91 80 25350955

If you want to get in touch with specific people:

For Advocacy: Sunil Abraham (Executive Director)
Email: sunil@cis-india.org
Phone: +919611100817

For Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance and Freedom of Speech: Pranesh Prakash (Policy Director)
Email: pranesh@cis-india.org
Phone: +919916158217

For Accessibility for Persons with Disabilities, and Telecom: Nirmita Narasimhan (Policy Director)
Email: nirmita@cis-india.org
Phone: +918040926283

For Research: Nishant Shah (Director - Research)
Email: nishant@cis-india.org
Phone: +919740074884

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/contact/contact-us

Collaborative Projects Programme

nishant — 2011-08-23T03:04:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and intervention. The Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP) is CIS’ platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially, and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work that CIS is committed to.

The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in the Global South.

The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences; experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage; implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas; developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies; engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of learning and participation online.

The CPP is NOT a grant making programme. However, we are interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision, please contact us and we can begin the discussions.

List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:

1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.

2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with Inclusive Planet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme

Pathways to Higher Education

nishant — 2015-03-30T14:52:54Z

The Pathways Project to Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in nine undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India.

These colleges are the SIES College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Mumbai, St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, Ahmednagar College, Ahmednagar, UC College, Aluva, Newman College, Thodupuzha, Farook College, Kozhikode, Vidhyavardhaka College, Mysore, Dr. AV Baliga College, Kumta and St. Aloysius College, Mangalore from the states of Maharashtra, Kerala and Karnataka.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/learning-in-higher-education

Researchers At Work

nishant — 2012-01-04T05:27:06Z

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

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

Histories of the Internet

nishant — 2015-03-30T14:15:10Z

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.
Porn: Law, Video & Technology - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
The Last Cultural Mile - 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
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities - Pratyush Shankar, Center for Environmental Planning and Technology University, Ahmedabad
Gaming and Gold - Arun Menon, Centre for Internet & Society

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

Research Programmes

nishant — 2009-01-15T12:02:51Z

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

Context

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

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

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

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

CIS Research Programmes

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

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

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

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

In this first book of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Collection, we concentrate on what it means to be a Digital Native. Within popular scholarship and discourse, it is presumed that digital natives are born digital. Ranging from Mark Prensky’s original conception of the identity which marked all people born after 1980 as Digital Natives to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s more nuanced understanding of specific young people in certain parts of the world as ‘Born Digital’, there remains a presumption that the young peoples’ relationship with technology is automatic and natural. In particular, the idea of being ‘born digital’ signifies that there are people who, at a visceral, unlearned level, respond to digital technologies. This idea of being born digital hides the complex mechanics of infrastructure, access, affordability, learning, education, language, gender, etc. that play a significant role in determining who gets to become a digital native and how s/he achieves it. In this book, we explore what it means to be a digital native in emerging information societies. The different contributions in this book posit what it means to be a digital native in different parts of the world. However, none of the contribution accepts the name ‘Digital Native’ as a given. Instead, the different authors demonstrate how there can be no one singular definition of a Digital Native. In fact, they show how, contextualised, historical, socially embedded, politically nuanced understanding of people’s interaction with technology provide a better insight into how one becomes a digital native.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1

(e)Governance by selection

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:37:21Z

The paper was presented at the Technology, Governance, Citizenship conference at the Indian Institute of Bangalore, and explores the processes of urban restructuration, positing of new digital citizenship, and the way in which technologised globalisation is implicated in the process. Looking at the instance of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad - a part of the Mega City project in India, the paper looks at the tropes of desire, ambition and aspiration as ways by which people relate and belong to circuits of technology but are often made invisible in the popular rhetoric of e-governance policies in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/governance%20by%20selection.pdf

Network as a Unit of CMC

nishant — 2009-07-07T06:09:00Z

The paper was presented at the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Conference, on a panel on the Digital DNA. With digital globalization producing cities, spaces, and identities heavily mediated by digital technologies, the Database becomes the interface through which the state regulates and controls cities and bodies to produce new conditions of citizenship. The Network links these databases to produce spaces, cities, bodies, and nation states in new transnational orbits. The Archive serves as a way through which belonging to these spaces and subjectivities become possible. As the Database adopts fluid architecture, mixing different set of informational archives to produce new identities, the Network emerges as an infinite, interminable set of legitimised objects, identities and spaces in new politics of power and economy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Network%20as%20a%20unit%20of%20CMC.pdf

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

The Curious Incident of the People at the Mall

nishant — 2008-12-14T12:13:09Z

The first flash mob in India, in 2003, though short-lived and quickly declared illegal, brought to fore the idea that technology is constructing new sites of defining public participation and citizenship rights, forcing the State to recognise them as political collectives. As India emerges as an ICT enabled emerging economy, new questions of citizenship, participatory politics, social networking, citizenship, and governance are being posed. In the telling of the story of the flash-mob, doing a historical review of technology and access, and doing a symptomatic reading of the subsequent events that followed the ban, this paper evaluates the different ways in which the techno-narratives of an ‘India Shining’ campaign of prosperity and economic growth, are accompanied by various spaces of political contestation, mobilisation and engagement that determine the new public spheres of exclusion, marked by the aesthetics of cyberspatial matrices and technology enabled conditions of governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/the%20curious%20incident%20of%20the%20people%20at%20the%20mall%20%20ACS%20Crossroads.pdf

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:14:45Z

The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies in a special issue on Multimedia Narratives. Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, gets produced within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/material%20cyborgs%20ejes.pdf