Centre for Internet and Society

Digital native: Lie Me a River

nishant — 2017-03-19T14:47:16Z

The sea of social media around us often drowns the truth, exchanging misinformation for facts.

This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question.

One of the most common methods of testing a student’s knowledge is the multiple choice question template that asks the examinee to identify one of four options as correct solutions to a problem. The pedagogic principle behind these questions is simple enough: We live in a world where truth and accuracy are important. No matter what our subjective feelings, impressions, memories or instincts might be, we need to rely on verifiable facts to make a truth claim. If we fail to do so, there would be negative consequences.

This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question. Drawing on samples of WhatsApp messages on my social media feeds, I invite you to answer this simple question: Which of these statements is not true?

Drinking from disposable paper cups lined with wax to keep the liquid from seeping leads to wax deposits in your stomach, resulting in fatal health risks.
Beverages in India have been contaminated by the Ebola virus and are on our shelves right now.
According to Ayurveda, burning camphor and cardamom together kills the swine flu virus in air.
Bollywood actor Farida Jalal is dead.

Of all of these, the only one you can verify is that Farida Jalal is not dead. The reason we know it for sure is because, she had to come to Twitter, and like Oscar Wilde, announce that the rumours of her death were wildly exaggerated. As Jalal herself pointed out in an interview, she was harassed by a barrage of phone calls, of people calling her up to ask her (oh, the irony!) if she was dead. The other three claims are right now floating in the air, ready to settle down as truth, with continuous repetition. We cannot be sure that they are inaccurate. Especially because they don’t just come as one-line headlines but long narratives of imaginary proofs.

Why have we reached this post-truth moment? Why have our social media feeds become minefields of dubious information masquerading as lies? There are many laments lately about how this lack of veracity and fact-checking is becoming the new normal and the blame is always put on either the media that promotes accelerated spread of messages without space for reflection, or gullible people who do not pause to think about the ludicrousness of the message before they spread it to their groups. And, while it is necessary to develop a critical literacy to make sure that we understand the responsibility of our role as information circulators and curators, there is one dimension that needs to be explored more — trust.

In our pre-digital knowledge practices, when information came with a signature, we believed that somebody had done the due diligence needed for the information to be published. An author’s book was supported by the rigour of the publisher behind it. A news report was fact-checked by verifiers who are employed precisely to do that. Information from a friend or somebody we know was credible because of our assessment of the person’s expertise and knowledge. We have always been able to determine the source of information, and our proximity with the source allowed us to trust the information that came through it.

However, with social media, this relationship has changed. When somebody sends us a message on WhatsApp, it is still coming from a source that we know, but we have to realise that this source is not producing or verifying this information, but merely circulating it. Messages come with a signature, they seem to emerge from people we know and trust, and, hence, we presume that they have done the due diligence required before passing on the information.

It is important to realise that within the social web we don’t really parse, analyse or process information, we merely pass and distribute it. This is how digital media perceives its users — as information circulators. And, this means, that information which mimics facts but is blatantly false, finds easy prey. So, the next time you come across information on these endless message groups, ask a simple question before you pass it along: no matter what the message claims, can you actually locate the source of the information? Is the person who forwards that message producing the information or merely sharing it? If they are sharing it, get back to them and ask how they know what they know. We trust things that are authored, but in our social apps, people are not authors, they are circulators. Making the distinction between the two might be the first step towards developing a critical literacy for fact-telling on the digital web.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river

Digital native: Who will watch the watchman?

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:18:50Z

The state mining its citizens as data and suspending rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security is alarming.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 19, 2017

I want you to start getting slightly uncomfortable right now. Because even as you read this, your emails are being read without your knowledge. Your social media network has been accessed by an unknown agent. Somebody is getting hold of your financial transactions and your credit card purchases, and creating a profile of your spending habits. Somebody pretending to be you is checking the naked pictures you might have backed up in your private cloud.

Somewhere, the profiles that you created for your dating apps are under scrutiny. Your Google search history is slowly being browsed by people who now know what you searched for last Friday at 3.30 am when you just couldn’t find sleep. Your WhatsApp texts, including that long sexting session with your ex, is now being stored in some other memory.The false account that you had created on Twitter to troll the world, is now linked to all your other IDs. The LinkedIn connections you sent to a rival company in search for a better job, are now available for others to find.

I wish that I was only presenting a hypothetical dystopia to warn us about the future of privacy. But, I am not. Because, the future is already here and it is slowly unfolding in front of you. We often think of the Internet as a secure system, mumbling things about encryption and passwords, imagining that if so many people are using it, then it must surely be safe. And it is true, that largely most of our electronic communication on the digital circuits is secure, or, at least, not easily vulnerable to vicious attacks.

Every time we hear about hackers intercepting sensitive information in databases, we are assured that it was a one-time exceptional case, and that forensic investigations are being conducted to keep our data safe. The digital security industry is indeed working hard to make it increasingly difficult for people with malicious intent to actually read and manipulate our data that we secure with passwords, fingerprints, and encryption keys that become more complex and robust.

However, the biggest concern around privacy, in the Internet of Things, is not about these cat-and-mouse games of data breaches and theft. Instead, perhaps, the biggest act of data theft and interception is conducted in full public view, with our consent. This happens when we download apps, use single user verification accounts and join free public hotspots, allowing our data to be freely captured by unseen actors.

The corporate mining of human users is not the only scenario in this landscape. In the recent reality TV edition of the US politics, they have just announced that border control in the US can now demand anybody to hand over their digital devices, passwords to email and social media accounts, and access to all their digital information in order to gain entry into the country. Or, in other words, you can be as secure as you like, but if the government wants, they will get that information from you as a price of entry into the country. You don’t need the NSA when you can just walk to the person and ask them to hand over this information.

Closer home in Digital India, things are not better. The Aadhaar project has failed to address data privacy questions. The data that we have voluntarily given to Aadhaar can be used to create a massive surveillance system that sells our data for profits and transactions to private companies. Similarly, in the post-demonetisation move, as we all went cashless, we increased our digital footprint in an ecosystem that has almost no safeguards to protect you from people knowing about your purchases at the chemist shop last weekend.

As we connect more online, and more devices are linked to our user profiles, we continue to leak and bleed data which violates the very core of what we consider our private selves. When we learned about the market exploiting our private data, we thought that the state would be the watchman. As the states start being run as markets, we now have a new question: who shall watch the watchman?

The new interest of the state in mining its citizens as data and suspending our rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security and interest is alarming. The state now thinks of our private data as capital. We need mechanisms to protect ourselves from the predatory impulses of the new information states, and while we might not have remedies, we do need to start the conversation now to safeguard our futures from the war against privacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-19-2017-digital-native-who-will-watch-the-watchman

Digital Native: Do not go Gently into the Good Night

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:07:36Z

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the resistance to the Trump administration, it is this — patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

The article was published by the Indian Express on February 9, 2017.

It was that time of the year. We wore our patriotism on our sleeves, painted our faces in the colours of the national flag, proclaimed our joy for the republic we live in. We performed our proud presence as nation-loving citizens on the social web, while ignoring the ominous fact that the chief guest at the celebration of our constitutional existence represented a country where lashes and stoning to death are still legal punishments. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that our peer-to-peer networks helped catalyse and stir the pride in our Constitution that enshrines us with some of our most basic, fundamental, and human rights, for life and living.

As Republic Day recedes from our memory, let me warn you that the future of our social media feeds is grim. As we consume the impending Trumpocalypse, we cannot but realise that we have not only been there, but also done that. A government which does not communicate freely with the press: check. A discourse that supports messages of hate against specific religions and provides “alternative facts” in our history books: check. Politicians spreading fake news and populations being swayed by it: check.

For all our Amreeka-loving souls, it might be a grim reassurance that we are ahead in the game and the United States of Trumpistan is merely catching up. The social web might seem to mimic the trend, where a problem becomes a problem only when it hits the developed countries in the north, but it is good for us to realise that the doom and gloom that these trends are forecasting are already the realities that we live in.

However, there is one major difference that is worth noting. In the USA, even as this orange-hazed madness unfolds, there are people marching, protesting, and fighting to defend the annihilation of their democratic, constitutional rights. Their patriotism is not going to wait till Independence Day, but is right now on the streets, flooding the social web, inundating airports, and demanding in unprecedented ways, the recognition and the defence of their rights. While there isn’t much to be said about a nation that had an electoral system that allowed for a populist to come into power, there is something that we need to drive home —patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

And so, if this Republic Day, you shared, consumed, viewed, read and rejoiced, even one item of patriotic impulse — even if you merely retweeted Kiran Bedi’s photoshopped image of world monuments adorned in the tricolour —here is my challenge for you.

Before the memory of patriotism and the pride of the Constitution fade away completely, we are going to head into Valentine’s Day. It is a day that is fraught with tension in India. On the one hand, there will be the sceptre of consumerist capitalism that will wear us down with the sales, the dances, the parties, and an aggressive market to sell, sell, sell, everything that they can, pretending that true love is in buying gifts. On the other hand, we will have the righteous people who even their mothers might find difficult to love, standing on the streets with weapons and force, intimidating people on the streets and slut-shaming women who they will deem too “Western” to be allowed to live their lives in peace.

Whether you believe in the fabricated spirit of St Valentine or not, whether you want to join the candy-flavoured pink brigade or not, whether or not you participate in the dhamaka shopping frenzy of the season — here is your chance to put your patriotism to practice.

One of the most beautiful expressions of our Constitution is in our right to life, dignity, and self-determination. It means that as long as our actions do not harm and hurt others intentionally, it is our right to live, love, and express our life and love in ways that we determine worthy. So, as people around the country gear up to celebrate Valentine’s Day, and hooligans across the states polish their trishuls and lathis to obstruct these celebrations, bring your patriotism to the streets. Go and stand in solidarity with these people, defending their right to live their life without fear and intimidation. I am offering you the #RightToLove to show your support of people who want to take that brief moment from humdrum lives to find and experience love and longing, and if you see any acts of intimidation or violence, whisk out your phone and capture the event, share it on social media, make an intervention in person and fight against those who insist on violating our Constitution, and defend our country from the forces within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-9-2017-digital-native-do-not-go-gently-into-the-good-night

Digital native: Back at it Again

nishant — 2017-02-02T15:04:46Z

The Indian digital landscape has put us in a loop of hashtags and outrage, a space where we have mastered the art of shame.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 22, 2017.

Writing a regular column is daunting. One of the things that I constantly have to check is that I am not repeating myself. At the same time, in the digital age where all memory has become storage, and all that is stored is quickly forgotten, I also hope that what I write has life beyond the first few clicks, the Sunday morning coffee, the shares and likes that mark the beginning of the end of digital information.

However, as I write the column this new year, I find myself in a strange situation where I am repeating what I have done the last three years at the beginning of each new year, and where I am desperately wishing that things I had last written became dated. Three years ago, while commenting on the Indian digital landscape, I had written about the rage, the fury, and the almost deafening battle cry that had captured the national imagination, when, at the turn of the year, a young woman we named Nirbhaya lost her life to violent sexual abuse on a moving bus in Delhi. #NeverAgain, we tweeted. #AlwaysRemember, we chanted. We called her #OurBraveheart and, in that moment of national outcry and dialogue about gender and sexual abuse in our public spaces, it seemed as if the digital landscape was reflecting a pivotal change in the fabric of the country.

The year after that, as we struggled to find ways in which law can keep us safe, the apex court in India re-criminalised homosexuality, reverting the judgment of the Delhi High Court which had given life and dignity to same sex and queer couples. The legal system proved that it is not only blind but also susceptible to mass populism that denies the rights to consenting adults to live their lives in dignity. That was the year when we hashtagged our solidarity with #NoGoingBack, making it trend so that umpteen number of people came out in support of homosexuality in the country. Support to the queer community came from unexpected quarters, like the generally reticent Bollywood celebrities who supported #Scrap377, and even religious and political representatives who recognise that the continued abuse of queer communities is a violation of our constitutional rights.

While the struggles for gender and sexual equality continue in the country, and tireless activists and civil society advocates persist in their demands of justice and protection, here we are, waking up to yet another year of public shame and private grief, as reports came of the aggressive sexual abuse that women had to endure on the streets of Bangalore. The incident unfolded with all the trappings of victim blaming, slut shaming, and a sentence that should never be allowed — “She was asking for it.” On the digital social web, in the meantime, some sanctimonious men, indignant at the thought of being accused of patriarchal silence and misogynist privilege, decided to take attention away from the victims and decided to steal the spotlight with a hashtag that says #NotAllMen. These tweeters, who have no problem in enjoying the benefits of an abusive sexist social order — they might not actively go out to inflict gendered violence, but they are complicit in enjoying the privileges of that system — had a problem with taking responsibility for that system. They would not be shamed. Not even when an overwhelming number of women wrote back with #YesAllWomen, would they concede their grounds.

As it occurs so often on the Interwebz, the conversation that demanded both a private reflection and a public dialogue, devolved into personal name calling and collective anger deflected from the problem at hand. In the midst of the sensationalism that passes off as discussion in populist media channels, I want to think of something else. If all these voices in our public discourse were to be heard, it would feel like gendered and sexual safety are national preoccupations and bipartisan concerns. The customised expressions of our personalised media abound with anger, shame, critique, and analyses of why our country is increasingly becoming unsafe for certain bodies to walk through it. Social media accounts are producing a spectacle of concern for safety so effectively that it would seem these questions will be resolved immediately.

And yet, even as I look at my biographical history of writing this column, I realised that I have revisited these discussions over and over again. This is a debate that now occurs regularly, each time, giving us the chance to identify a problem, go online and make a lot of noise about it, and then settle down, with a smug smile on our faces of having done our public performance, without ever translating it into action. On the digital web, we seem to have mastered the art of shame without guilt. We continue to hashtag, like, tweet, share, and click our ways, using prepackaged formulae of expression without translating it into personal reflection or collective action. And the digital seems to be enabling this where having an opinion seems to matter more than actual transformation, and spectacles of shame seem to acquit us of the responsibility of action.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again

Digital Native: The Dream of the Cyborg

nishant — 2017-02-02T14:56:37Z

We have arrived at hybrid realities, where the technological and the human cannot be separated. The digital future we had once imagined is already here.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 8, 2017.

The digital is not just in the future, it is the future. If we do a broad overview of where things are, we realise that almost everything we do, own, and are, is touched by digitality. Here are two short thought experiments. Look around you, think about your day, do a quick stocktaking exercise of things that you possess and communicate with, and try and think of one thing that is untouched by the digital. You realise that digital is not just the visible smart screens and computing devices. It works in insidious and networked ways to shape the world as we understand it. From the food we eat, that comes to our supermarkets, accompanied by barcodes that track it to the money that sits in our banks, and is now available only through digital transactions; from your own body that is being probed by digital health care instruments as well as its connectivity with digital objects, to the very idea of nature in the face of simulation models of climate change, we realise very quickly that the digital is now the default context of our life. The scope of digital might be uneven — there might be varying levels of access and literacy — but this is increasingly becoming the beginning point of all our realities.

Let’s do a reverse thought experiment. Look around you again, review the different processes, products and people around you, and try and find something that is purely digital and has no connection with anything that is human, natural or social. You will also arrive quickly to the conclusion that while the digital operates with agency, constructing smart things and cities, and shaping and facilitating our lives in ways that we can’t imagine, the digital is still incredibly human and social. The algorithms that can seem to be independent, still implement human visions. The robots — physical and virtual — that interact with us, are still engaging with and shaping the human factors. The purely technological is as difficult to find as the purely non-technological or natural.

These realisations, quotidian as they are, are indicative that we live hybrid realities, where the technological and the human cannot be separated, and, indeed, it is impossible to extricate one from the other. It is easy to look at the phone in a hand and say that one is a device, the other is a hand. But the device only has meaning once it is in a hand, and the hand that is used to the comfort of that phone feels like it is missing something when the phone is removed. We live fused lives. We are getting enmeshed in visible and invisible digital networks in ways that are unprecedented. The digital future that we had once imagined, is already here.

Despite this cyborg reality, when we think of the future, we continue to make clear and discrete separations between the human and the technological. We imagine new modes of life and living, where we will either have achieved singularity, where the human self could be converted to code and thus transferred to a new body when the biological body gives up. Or, it could be a state where nanotechnological robots will be rushing through our body, cleaning, preserving and saving, making us live forever. We dream of the world being connected through unceasing data streams so that all our devices can speak to each other. This is the imagination of a hyperconnected world, where we live with the Internet of Things.

However, it is good to realise that the Internet of Things is actually the Internet of Everything. It doesn’t mean that everything we see will be connected on the Internet. On the contrary, what it means is that everything that gets connected to the Internet will be considered a thing. One of the biggest challenges that the digital future poses to us, is how to understand our notions of being human. As the digital becomes the default way by which we are identified, stored, sorted, remembered, and kept alive, it becomes important to realise that as we turn digital, we turn into things. The data which was supposed to be a part of us, often becomes something that stands for us, and in some instances, replace us. What emerges with it is a new data reality, where we are represented only by things — data — that is then governed, shaped, and controlled, as a way of governing and forming the human subject. Thus, you don’t need to be killed in person — it can be done merely by deleting your data and identity from all databases, rendering you without support. Similarly, you do not need to be confined, but the data that you leak in all your everyday activities becomes a way by which you can be tracked, so that the entire world becomes your cage where you can be seen. You don’t need to necessarily have human contact, you can just connect using an algorithm, without really knowing whether the thing on the other end is human or not.

As we celebrate the Internet of Things and a future where all things stay connected, it would be important to dwell on what happens to the human being when it also becomes a thing in this connected network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-8-2017-digital-native-the-dream-of-the-cyborg

Digital Native: People Like Us

nishant — 2016-12-18T14:19:46Z

How the algorithm decides what you see on your timeline. If you have been hanging out on social media, there is one thing you can’t have escaped — a filter bubble. Be it demonetisation and its discontents, the fake news stories that seem to have ruined the US election, or the eternal conflict about the nature of Indian politics, your timeline must have been filled largely by people who think like you.

The article was published in the Indian Express on December 18, 2016.

From your Facebook feed to your Twitter trends, you must have been bombarded with multiple news sources, breaking news, hashtags, memes, and viral videos all more or less affirming how you feel about these issues at hand. Even when you did come across a story that you did not agree with, or a status that offended you, you would have found many others in your ever-expanding social media groups, who would have expressed their anger or dismay at the phenomenon.

The filter bubble — our self-selecting process of making alliances, connections, friends and relationships online with people like us, resulting in getting a biased, one-sided, uni-dimensional view on most public events and phenomena, has long since been presented as one of the most dangerous phenomena of our times. Filter bubbles mean that based on our social, political, cultural, geographical, ethnic, racial, religious, gendered, sexual identities and affinities, social media algorithms show us material that we are more likely to click on, share, comment on, and generate traffic, which increases their revenue. Or in other words, what you see of your friends and the people you follow, on your social media apps, is not organic, chronological or natural. It is at the mercy of an algorithm that is continually monitoring you, tracking the immense digital footprint that you possess, and constantly curating and arranging the data to make sure you stay on the site.

With the accelerated rate of the digital web, the new real estate is not location, but time. The more time a user spends with a particular app, the more they can be tracked. Longer tracking means that the algorithms have more data to look at predictable behaviour and particular user types, thus, offering more opportunities for customised advertisements that the users would click on, and generate profits for these ‘free’ apps. It is in the interest of these social media sites, then, to show us material that would keep us polarised, either into state of happiness and comfort, or in movements of anger and passion. This is why filter bubbles come into being — because the social media algorithms are constantly adjusting the material to keep us engaged, rewarding us with information and news that suits our own frame of mind, and increasing the chances of us spending more time on a platform.

However, there is another side to filter bubbles that we need to perhaps examine. A lot of attention on filter bubbles is about how we hear only one side of the story. What is missing from this narrative is not just that we hear one side of the story, but that we also hear very limited stories. As social media becomes one of the primary source for news consumption, the new filter bubbles ensure that we only receive stories that are suited to our interests as predicted by a big data driven algorithm.

So if you look at your news feed recently, you might have a variety of sources coming your way, but you might realise that in their diversity, they are very homogeneous. They pretend in their multi-media diversity to be delivering varied content but what we get instead is a limited section of perspectives on the same topics so that there is a monopoly of what gets talked about and how. The global, the viral, the popular and the paid content, thus, hides and makes invisible all the local, the niche, the less seductive or alarming but still important news that should inform our everyday practice and politics.

What we get then is the world as rendered visible by these predictive algorithms that make their choices of showing us content based on profits that they generate. In the process, we enter a filter-bubble which we can’t even see, thus losing the opportunity to deep-dive into the rich information landscape that the digital world offers. And as we get more and more entrenched in these bubbles, the alternative voices, the contentious questions, the moves to resistance, and the calls for action get buried and forgotten under the plethora of cute cats, dancing babies, alarmist conspiracy theories, and spam-like repetitive images that keep us informationally activated without allowing a deeper, more substantial engagement with the world around us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-18-2016-digital-native-people-like-us

Digital native: The View from My Bubble

nishant — 2016-12-05T15:15:07Z

In the digital world, the privileged have the power to deny a devastating crisis for the poor.

The article was published by Indian Express on December 4, 2016.

For weeks now, my timeline on almost all social media feeds has been dominated by stories of demonetisation. Over the last few years, I have been spending time in countries where I, more or less, live a cashless life. Every transaction is enabled by a digital connection — my contactless debit card pays most of the bills for groceries, my phone works as an automatic wallet at my favourite stores, and the larger purchases are done online, through direct bank transfers. Most days, I leave home with such little cash that I would not even be able to buy a decent meal with it.

While the continent is different, this experience is not much different from my days spent in India. I don’t really remember the last time I made huge cash deposits or withdrawals, and the services that I am used to would almost all have facilitated digital transactions, ensuring a smooth continuation of my life except, perhaps, for renouncing the occasional binge on street food, and letting go of the habit of hailing an auto on a busy road.

Hence, like many people who live in the same privileged combination of class, urbanity, education and affordability, my initial reaction to this move was reflective and speculative. In an abstract manner, I was curious about what this means to the theory of value, what this would achieve in the long-term visions of the state, and wondering what the costs of currency re-introductions might be. The earlier debates with family and friends were all marked by this elitist inquiry into the nature of things, feasting our minds on economic and political conundrums, well aware that there is going to be no crisis on the horizon. The social media also reflected this filter bubble. We made pithy jokes and offered polarised opinions about whether or not this is going to achieve the whitening of black money, and what its long term effects on the economic future would be.

Now that we know, however, that this state of emergency is going to last well into the end of this year, and as reports trickle in of the deprivation, exploitation and precariousness that destabilise lives and push them towards the precipice, I take a deep introspective breath. I don’t want to go into the discussions of the impact and measures of this move on lives that I do not live, and people who are so unlike me that I cannot even imagine what it means to live on the edge of a demonetised currency note. My opinions on this cannot be more informed or valid than the millions of voices that have flooded the social web with commentary, discussions and outright abusive fighting around the issue.

Instead, I want to reflect on what it means to consume a lived crisis, an embodied reality, a precarious condition through the mediated bubble of the digital web. For years now, activists have lamented that the web is an alienating medium. It allows people to become armchair clicktivists, removed from the reality of messy life and able to profess care, concern and commitment as long as it does not inconvenience or disrupt their everyday life. However, this has often been seen as a knee-jerk reaction to change, with enough evidence to prove that these technologies of connectivity also produce new collective forms of action, engendering trust, empathy, and care for people who are often made invisible in the systemic violence of everyday life. The debate is unresolved. However, the ways in which the demonetisation crisis — because it has officially become a crisis — is being consumed online, remotely, makes me wonder how the digital web allows a space for performance without experience, and articulation without politics.

Almost unanimously, the continued chatter of how the common man must bear some inconvenience for the greater good of our collective futures comes from people who embody the same privileges I do. From the comfort of their well-stocked kitchens and their insurances that would cover any health crises, these voices continue to parrot the idea that all that this means for anybody is just a bit of a hassle, but nothing to worry about.

In the growing face of evidence that the poor are being pushed to the limits of their downward precipitation, they continue to invoke the sacrifices that must be made towards making India great again. Every day, I hear them valiantly champion the Prime Minister for his authoritative decision, and defend the logistics that have failed to protect the economic survival of the silent sufferers in the favour of recovering untold wealth which might turn out to be mythical after all.

And, each time I read these reports, I wonder how the digital allows them, protects them, and produces a performative space from which they can speak, without any experience, about the lives of others, reducing their struggles to lifestyle logistics and ambulatory adjustments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-4-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble

Digital native: The Voices in Our Heads

nishant — 2016-11-22T02:23:29Z

What if our phones were to go silent? Would you be able to deal with the silence?

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on November 20, 2016.

You know it’s going to be a weird column when it begins with how I have a friend, and he has a new parrot. And yet, this is how we begin today. I have a friend, and he has a parrot. Meeting him for coffee this week was a strange experience. We were just sitting there, talking, when the phone rang with a message notification. Giving in to politeness, we both ignored the ring and continued talking. In the next five minutes, the phone rang five-six times. Neither of us was sure whose phone it was. When the seventh buzz came in, we decided that this might be urgent, and sheepishly fished out our phones. To our surprise, both our phones were without any notification.

We were staring at our phones when the notification sound buzzed again. We both looked around, wondering if there are invisible phones waking up to autonomy and taking over the world, when we realised where the noise was coming from. It was the parrot. She looked at us, that look that parrots have, and made the whistle sound that WhatsApp has naturalised in our everyday life. We both laughed, and the parrot, ruffling her feathers, continued to make more sounds, imitating updates, notifications and ring tones, all ending in a wonderful crescendo of phone vibrating on a glass table.

Amusing as the antics of the parrot were, what it reminded me of was the soundscape of the digital world that we live in. As our devices grow smaller, as the Internet of Everything makes smart computers out of everything, as the drones watch us, cameras control us, and the social web envelops us in its seductive embrace, we realise that the digital is disappearing. Additionally, even as we lose sight of the digital, we are also learning to naturalise the sounds of the digital.

From the gentle whirr of our laptop fans to the chirps and beeps that our phones make, reminding us of our incessant connectivity with the world; from the silent whoosh of mails being sent and messages being received, to the push, pull, and swipe of our fingers dancing on virtual keyboards — the digital soundscape is ubiquitous and jarring, but familiar and reassuring.

For those of us who went online in the ’90s, we still remember that Martian chirruping of the modem as we dialled in to our connections, and the midi sounds that our machines made as they parsed data to render them into visuals on our heated up monitors. From those cacophonous days of machines speaking to each other, we have come a long way where they now speak to us. Fresh from the encounters with the parrot, who doesn’t produce or mimic any human sounds but has mastered the repertoire of digital resonances, I was suddenly aware of the quiet landscape in a Dutch train. The fairly crowded train was silent. Commuters were mostly hunched, peering over their phone, hiding the screen from public scrutiny.

In the cone of silence in that train, though, over the rattling of the wheels, and occasional buzz of electricity that passed overhead, you could hear a quiet orchestra of sounds. People were silent but the devices were continually speaking. Keypads jerked to haptic touch; phones vibrated with new connections; chirps, chirrups, beeps and whooshes emerged at regular intervals, games blared out victory tunes, music trickled out of the noise cancellation headphones, and all around, the world sang, spoke and glowed in the soft undulation of the digital. Once in a while, the strange silence of a hundred people all crammed together was punctuated by a phone call, where the speaker made an apologetic face and whispered into the phone, trying not to be too loud. A couple of times when they were loud, saying the most prosaic things like “I am on the train” and “I will be home in 20 minutes”, people looked around in impatience, rolling their eyes, condemning the human noise that was infiltrating their digital bubbles.

I came home. In the evening, as is usually my routine, I sat down with a book, curled up on my couch. And I was caught with an overwhelming urge to hear a human voice. It was too late in the night, though, to make a random phone call. So, I started an app that simulates a coffee environment, a mixture of unintelligible conversations interspersed with the sounds of digital machines, and then feeling comforted, I sat down to read, alone, connected only to the voices in my head.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-20-2016-digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads

Digital Native: Mind Your Language

nishant — 2016-11-09T16:10:07Z

The lack of localisation on the Internet is a symptom of a larger problem. It has been a festive season. Greetings are in the air. Well, realistically speaking, smoke-filled smog is in the air and greetings are all on social media. In a flood of messages — gifs, animated icons, poetic snippets, messages written in a script that looks vaguely Devanagari, and quotations that bestow glee and gladness upon all — that made their way into my social media feed, there was one that stood out.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 6, 2016.

A friend, after wishing me happy Diwali, wondered why we don’t have an emoji for it, considering a large population celebrates it across the globe. While she was being facetious, wondering why our WhatsApp visual expressions are so terribly limited, it did draw attention to the fact that localisation on the internet is not something we have paid much attention to.

One of the most basic premises and promises of digital revolution was global connectivity. We believed that technologies are benign, and, as more and more people get connected, we would find an international level field where diversity can be reconfigured. Those who were underrepresented were to be visible, those who were silenced would find a voice, and those who were neglected would form communities of togetherness to shape and inform opinions of how the world was to operate. In many ways, some of these ambitions have been realised. Like never before, people, who have never been connected, are finding innovative ways of making their voices heard and their demands met. Direct action governance, which allows citizens direct access to those in power, is dramatically changing the way our governance is shaping up. The capacity of a regular voter to communicate directly with the elected politician has brought about a rapid change in a way in which we had never imagined. The citizen consumer definitely finds empowerment in the ability to interact and negotiate with corporations, and provide reviews based on their experiences of the products and services.

The scope of digital networks is incredible, with regards to how it touches almost every aspect of our life, and it continues to surprise us with the new access that it grants us. However, it is important to remember that we must not confuse scale with diversity. The variety of services that the digital makes available to us are almost infinite, with a new app available for everything that you can think of. And yet, the number of services does not mean that more and more people are being served. Increasingly, the different apps and services, global in their ambitions, and local in their application, are designed to the same kind of user. They are primarily in an English language interface, presume digital literacy in their interface design, and cater only to the privileged few who already have access and presence in the sphere of the digital.

Specific countries, who have realised that web access and literacy are closely connected, have started working hard at developing localisation strategies for the digital. Countries like China and South Korea, for instance, have worked tirelessly at designing input devices that can be used by those who do not speak English. Keyboards, touch screen interfaces, and voice language inputs that work with local languages have taken precedence in their technological innovation. Their localisation efforts also help in building multi-lingual web interfaces so that there is a burgeoning universe of apps, platforms, websites, and devices that do not discriminate based on language. They have invested in scripts that offer multiple fonts, optical character recognition for PDFs to be text-searchable, translation apps that work on large corpus of text, and a strident localisation that focuses on ways of cultural expression on the digital networks.

Unfortunately, even as the Indian government promotes digital access for our developmental future, we have stayed focused largely on English language content and education. While the post-colonial legacy of English-speaking cultures in India cannot be denied, it is worth noting, that with the digital, we continue to reinforce the primacy and importance of English over our local languages. The struggles we have of building local language archives, finding non-English interfaces, and developing literacy for people who speak other languages are indicative of how exclusionary our digital dreams can be. The lack of a diya in the WhatsApp emoji collection, or the inability to write in local languages, messages of love and festivity — Shubh Diwali has so seamlessly become Happy Diwali — is only a symptom of the much larger problem of the globalisation emphasis that refuses to acknowledge the importance of the local in our digital networks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-6-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-mind-your-language

Digital Native: The Future is Now

nishant — 2016-10-17T02:12:43Z

The digital is not just an addition but the new norm in our lives, and it might not be all good. There used to be a popular joke among technology geeks when Bluetooth arrived on our mobile devices — everything becomes better with Bluetooth.

The article was published in the Indian Express on October 16, 2016.

A cursory web search for things with Bluetooth have yielded toys, lunch boxes, hair clips, cushion covers and sex toys, just to name a few of the bewildering array of things that seemed to be better with a Bluetooth connection. As the projected future moves towards the Internet of Everything, we are in a similar position where we firmly believe that digital makes everything better. In the spirit of random search queries, one can easily find government, relationships, dating, shopping, shower gels, food and families as things that are enhanced by the digital. Advertisers have no qualms in declaring their products as “e-something” or “cyber-this”, emphasising the touch of technology in the most unexpected of things and processes.

The ubiquity of the digital is undeniable. However, as the digital becomes transparent and everywhere, it also seems to be going through a dramatic moment of invisibility and meaninglessness. There was a time when the digital invoked an image of a binary code flashing in black and green on heated computer screens. The presence of the digital made us cyborgs, with prostheses sticking out of our heads and wires sinuously entwined with our bodies. Digital was tied with precision, with the idea that robotic hands and machines performed tasks that were beyond human capacity or exercise. It gave the idea of acceleration, harnessing the power of high-process computing that helped tasks requiring complex logistics and systems management to be performed faster. It had a futuristic value, making us rethink the idea of intelligence, sapience, and a machine-aided life that would significantly alter the quality and habits of life and living.

Our present is the science fiction future that our pasts had imagined. The promises of the digital have already found fruition and its premises have changed so dramatically that our immediate past feels dated and slow when parsed through the lens of the present. The digital has been reconsidered as a fundamental right, being promoted through plans of universal connectivity like with the latest fanfare around Reliance Telecom’s Jio programme. When the digital becomes an all-encompassing force, it is fruitful to ask what exactly it means. Largely, the question needs asking because there is almost nothing left in our urban connected life that is not digitally mediated. From healthcare and childbirth to relationships and disbursement of rights and money, we depend on silent algorithms of work and survival almost without noticing it. Digital is a part of social, economic, cultural, political and biological production and reproduction and hence to call something digital, as if it is a marker of difference is fruitless.

If everything is digital, why do we still insist on using it as a special adjective to describe people, processes, and places? The answer is not in the digital divide, that quickly alerts us to the fact that the terrain of digitality is uneven and that there are still large swathes of world population that remain disconnected. Because, when we see the incredible efforts at digital connectivity infrastructure, we realise quickly that this is something that is going to be resolved sooner rather than later.

The answer is not in pitching the human against the machine, because we have already formed ecosystems where we live our cyborg, symbiotic lives, where each system of the human and the machine requires the other. The answer is not in a futuristic appeal, waiting for the digital to arrive because our future is now, and already in the making, if not quite there.

I would propose then, that we need the crutch of digital descriptors in order to hide the fact that in our quest for digitisation, we have stopped considering and caring about the human user in the digital networks. The human, alarmingly, has been reduced to nothing more than a node, a resource, a set of data, a flow of traffic, connected in these circuits of electronic communication, rescued from itself by the force of digital transformation.

As we look at the digital schemes, policies and programmes that we are nationally embracing, the human only becomes the end point — the last-mile consumer who has to be connected, the individual who has to be enrolled into a database, an information pod that needs to be harvested for data services.

Digital Everything is not just a benign description but a clear indication that the digital is not just an augmentation but the new norm. The digital has become the principle around which these shall be shaped, and, perhaps, it is time to worry, when we see “digital”, about what will happen to those who cannot or would not want to afford the promises and conditions of being digitally human.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-16-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-future-is-now

Love in the Time of Tinder

nishant — 2016-10-17T02:07:05Z

Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.

The article was published in the Indian Express on October 2, 2016.

Last week, I met somebody who narrated their digital fairy tale to me. He was waiting in between trains, waiting at a train station, for the connection to arrive. Bored, he opened the dating app Tinder. He swiped right. There was a match. They started chatting. The conversation became interesting. She offered to leave work early and come to the train station to meet him for coffee. They had a five-hour long date. He missed many connections and stayed back with her to spend more time. When he left, they stayed connected using all the digital apps of connection that you can imagine. They started travelling weekends to be with each other. Three years later, he moved countries and jobs to be in the same city as her. Last week, they got engaged to be married. And everybody raised a toast to the resilience of their love, and how they have worked hard at being together. They thanked all the people who have been involved and supportive in helping them through this period. And at the end, she said, she wanted to thank Tinder and WhatsApp, without which they would have never met been able to continue this connection. They were being facetious, but they were also reminding us that we live in appified times.

Apps are everywhere and they have become so natural and ubiquitous that we have forgotten what it means to live without them. In the case of this fairy tale couple, their very meeting was ordained not by fate and destiny and romantic godmothers, but by a smart app. This app, based on algorithms that judged them to be a good match, drawing from what they like on Facebook and what they share with their friends, presented both of them to each other, causing the first swipe. The app, designed around the principle of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), made sure that in the 40 minutes that he was at the train station, both of them looked at their phones, swiped right and had the conversation that began it all. The app created habits that ensured that they trusted each other to meet after a 20-minute chat, to miss trains for the joy of the first extended date. People fell in love, and their love was managed entirely by smart apps.

These apps are designed to assist us in our mundane lives. Behind their seductive design and intuitive interfaces are scripts, norms, rules, protocols and intentions that are influenced and shaped by corporations and individuals, who have a specific interest in expanding their market domains. The creation of profiles on Tinder required both these people to give Tinder access to a wide variety of their personal activities and profiles. As their romance progressed, they involved more apps in their activities. Personal planners, reminders, e-shopping platforms, social media testimonies, deals to buy cheap tickets — all came into play. And even as they came together in a monogamous relationship, the apps encouraged them into data infidelity, wantonly sharing their data, making it speak with strangers, interact with unknown shadows in the dark, morphing and fusing with predatory algorithms that continued to not only follow them but also predict what their needs are. These smart apps might come with friendly interfaces and helpful suggestions, but they do it by making us transparent — they mine our information and distribute and share it in ways that we cannot imagine to ends that we cannot fathom.

As the apps become a daily part of our lives, holding our hands and comforting our souls, it is good to remember that behind the apps is a pipeline of service providers, data harvesters, information aggregators, who are learning more and more about us, and then without our consent, in the guise of being helpful, are sharing those secrets with things and people we do not know.

While they do help us celebrate the moments and make beautiful human connections, they also continue to make oily suggestions and innuendos, gently guiding us into buying more and consuming more. I came home from the engagement party and woke up the next morning with my face being tagged in about 30 pictures on four different social media apps. And each app suggested different things I can do to celebrate this event — buy a new suit for the wedding, buy an engagement gift for the happy couple, get help with planning a bachelor’s party, and get the services of a wedding planning app.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder

Who Owns Your Phone?

nishant — 2016-09-18T16:18:35Z

The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 18, 2016.

We have a conflicted relationship with our digital devices. On the one hand, everything we own is cutting-edge — your regular smartphone does computation that is more advanced and powerful than the computers currently functioning on the space probe on Mars. On the other, everything that we own, is almost on the verge of becoming old — by the time you are used to your phone, a new model with a different letter or a number is in the market. The TV screen which was the crowning glory of your house now feels old because it is not thin enough, sleek enough or big enough; waiting to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.

Strangely, the Next Big Thing is never really big enough for it to have longevity. The next phone that you buy, the new laptop you covet, the app that you update, will already feel temporary. Patricia Fitzpatrick, a historian of new media, calls this phenomenon “Planned Obsolescence”. It means that private corporations think of their digital products as fast-moving and ready to die. They might sell the phone with a 10-year guarantee, but the only guarantee that exists is that in 10 years, they will have discontinued all support for that phone, and you will have forgotten that you owned that device. Planned Obsole-scence is a marketing strategy, where everything that is introduced as a technological innovation has a limited shelf-life and is made to be replaced by something new.

What is interesting about this strategy is that it doesn’t mean that your device has become redundant. In fact, even as you desire the new, you know perfectly well that your existing device has many years of functionality. Hence, the companies often produce the new as path-breaking, innovative and futuristic. They want you to feel primitive or out-of-touch by introducing features that you don’t need, transforming the familiar and the habitual device with something that becomes alien, enchanting and mystical.

While planned obsolescence has its value — it propels innovation and pushes at the boundary of what is possible — it also needs to be understood as a marketing strategy that keeps us consuming as part of our digital habits. One of the best examples to understand this trend is Apple’s latest announcement that it has removed the standard earphone jack from its new iPhone7 and is presenting us with wireless earplugs that work with the new phone. Apple insists that this is the future, and in its hyperbolic presentation, announced that by removing one of the most enduring industry standard for audio hardware, they are revolutionising the future of music listening.

This comes particularly as a shock because ever since the 1990s, Apple’s iconic presence in the music industry has been the white dangling ear-bud wire against black silhouettes, marking the Apple music device as a sign of privacy, maturity, creativity, and elite affordability. By replacing recognisable image with a new one is the company’s way of signalling that every Apple device you now own is ready for trash. It is letting you know that your older Apple music player now needs to be replaced by a new one that uses the wireless ear buds. That the only way you can now listen to music on an Apple iPhone is on Apple’s own standards, so that the regular industry hardware will no longer work with this unique phone that eschews universal standards and seeks to create private monopolies.

The missing headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is a resounding testimony to what happens when we make our digital hardware subject to closed development and production. Instead of building phones that are more durable, more efficient, more connected, more affordable, and more versatile, Apple just showed us how a private company can arrogantly define the future, by turning almost every existing device into “primitive” or “incompatible” with the new phones that it is making. The capacity of companies like Apple to defy standards that work and build their own unique hardware tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices. The digital cultures scholar Wendy Chun had once sagaciously written, “the more our devices turn transparent, the more opaque they become”. And Apple’s move towards making your new iPhone seamless and without holes, mimics how the phone is being designed to both kill fast and die early, promoting corporate ambitions over public interest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone

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

nishant — 2016-09-16T13:25:38Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do I Want to Say Happy B’day?

nishant — 2016-08-22T09:53:03Z

When it comes to greeting friends on their birthdays, social media prompts are a great reminder. So why does an online message leave us cold?

This article was published in Indian Express on August 7, 2016

Every morning, I wake up to a Facebook notification that reminds me of the birthdays in my friends group. A simple click takes me to a calendar view that shows me people who are celebrating the day, prompting me to wish them and let them know that I am thinking of them. Just so that I don’t miss the idea, the notifications are surrounded by ribbons and balloons in gold and blue. The message is simple. Somebody I know has a birthday. Social convention says that I should wish them and Facebook has designed a special interface that makes the communication so much simpler, faster, easier.

And yet, every morning I seem to face a small crisis, not sure how to respond to this prompt. Now, I am notorious for forgetting dates and numbers, so I do appreciate this personalised reminder which has enabled me to wish people I love and care for. But I generally find myself hovering tentatively, trying to figure out whether I want to greet these people.

This has perplexed me for a while now. Why would I hesitate in leaving a message on Facebook for people who I have added as “friends”? Why would I not just post on their wall, adding to the chorus of greetings that would have also emerged from the automated reminder on Facebook? I went on to the hive-mind of the social web to figure out if this was a unique problem, customised to specific neuroses, or whether this is more universal. It was a great surprise (and relief) to realise that I’m not alone.

When trying to figure out our conflicted sociality on social media, several conversations pointed to three things worth dwelling on. Almost everybody on that long discussion thread pointed out that the entire process is mechanised.

It feels like Facebook has a script for us, and we are just supposed to follow through. There is very little effort spent in crafting a message, writing something thoughtful, and creating a specific connection because it is going to get submerged in a cacophony of similar messages. Also, the message, though personal, is public. So anything that is personal and affective just gets scrubbed, and most people end up mechanically posting “Happy Birthday” with a few emojis of choice, finding the whole process and the final performance devoid of the personal.

Another emerging concern was that social media sustains itself on reciprocity. However, it is almost impossible to expect the birthday person to respond to every single message and post that comes their way. In fact, as somebody pointed out, if your friend spends their entire day on Facebook, responding to 500 comments and thanking everybody who spent three seconds writing a banal post, you should stage an intervention because it is a clear cry for help. You should have been a better friend and made their day more special by being with them. So the message feels like shouting in a ravine, expecting an echo and getting nothing. This lack of reciprocity, even when expected, is still disconcerting enough for people to shy away from it.

The most frequent experience that was shared was by people who wanted to make the person feel special and cherished. Facebook and the social media sites are now so quotidian and pedestrian that it seems an almost uncaring space. It was intriguing to figure out that people made choices of whom to wish based on their actual proximity and intimacy with the person. If it is a colleague, a distant acquaintance, or just a companion at work, they throw a quick greeting on their wall and move on. But for actual friends, loved ones, families, they take the prompt but then refuse to follow the script. They take that moment to call, to write, to meet, but not perform it on Facebook.

This need for connectivity and the suspicion of its meaning continues to mark our social media interaction. If it were not for social media networks, a lot of us would feel distinctly disconnected, unable to get glimpses in the lives of the large number of people we know.

At the same time, this thinned out connection that characterises most of social media also seems to make us realise that not all friends are the same friends, and that Facebook might be social media, but it isn’t quite personal media.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday

Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux

nishant — 2016-08-06T04:16:07Z

My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live in.

The review was published in the Indian Express on August 6, 2016.

Book: Things That Can and Cannot Be Said
Authors: Arundhati Roy & John Cusack
Publication: Juggernaut
Pages: 132
Price: Rs 250

The title of the book — Things That Can and Cannot be Said — demands an imperative. It is as if Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, aware of their internal turmoil in dealing with a world that is rapidly becoming unintelligible, though not incomprehensible, are demanding an order where none exists. Hence, they are advocating for certainty and assurance, only to undermine it, ironically, through their own freely associative writing that mimics linear time and causative narrative. This deep-seated irony of needing to say something, but knowing that saying it is not going to shine a divining light on the sordid realities of the world that is being managed through the production of grand structures like valorous nation states, virtuous civil societies, the obsequious NGO-isation of radical action, and the persistent neutering of justice through the benign vocabulary of human rights, defines the oeuvre, the politics and the poetics of the book. Written like a scrap book, filled with excerpts from long conversations scattered over time and space, annotated by reminiscences of books read long ago that have seared their imprints on the mind, and events that are simultaneously platitudinous for their status as global landmarks and fiercely personal for the scars that they have left on the minds of the authors, the book remains an engaging, if a somewhat freewheeling, ride into a political critique that makes itself all the more palatable and disconcerting for the levity, irreverence and the dark sense of humour that accompanies it.

Composed in alternating chapters, the first half of the book is about Cusack and Roy laying themselves bare. They spare no words, square no edges, and put their personal, political and collective wounds on display with humble pride and proud humility. Cusack’s experience as a screenplay writer comes in handy — he rescues what could have been a long tirade, into a series of conversations. The familiar narratives are rehistoricised and de-territorialised, put into new contexts while eschewing the older ones, thus providing a large landscape that refers to state-sponsored genocide, structural reorganisation of nation states, the dying edge of political action, the overwhelming but invisible presence of capital, and the dithering state of social justice that treats human beings like things. Cusack, identifying the poetic genius of Roy, gives her centre stage, making her the voice in command.

Roy, for her part, seems to have enjoyed this moment in the soapbox — something that she has been doing quite effectively and provocatively to a national and global audience — and gives it her all. There are moments when the text feels indulgent, when the voice feels a little relentless, when the almost schizophrenic global and historical references become a litany of mixed-up events that might have required further nuance and deeper interpretation. However, the whimsical style of Roy’s narrative, with her sense of what is right, and her demeanour that remains friendly, curious and disarming, saves the text from being heavy handed, even when it does dissolve into cloying poignancy and makes you pause, just so that you can breathe.

Surprisingly, it is the second part of the book, where the two encounter Edward Snowden along with Daniel Ellsberg, the “Snowden of the 1960s” who had leaked the Pentagon papers, that falters. Snowden had jocularly mentioned that Roy was there to “radicalise him”. She does that, but in a way that doesn’t give us anything more than what we already know. While Cusack and Roy were committed to getting to know Snowden beyond his systems-man image, there wasn’t much that they could uncover, either in dialogue or in discourse, that could have told us more, endeared us further to possibly the most over-exposed person in recent times. However, one realises that the genius of the narrative is actually in reminding us how transparent Edward Snowden has become to us. We know all kinds of things about this young man — from his girlfriends past to his actions future, from his values and convictions to his opinion on the NSA watching people’s naked pictures — and yet, what has been missing in the Snowden files, has been the larger arc of global politics, social reordering, and perhaps, a glimpse of the post-nation future that Snowden might have seen in his act of whistleblowing that is going to remain the landmark moment that defines the rest of this century.

Once you have gotten over the fact that this is not a book about Snowden, the expectations are better tailored for what is to come, and suddenly, the long prelude to the meeting falls into place. Snowden matches Roy and Cusack in whimsy, irony, political conviction, and the sacred faith in human values that make you want to give them all a fierce hug of hesitant reassurance. What Snowden says, what Roy and Cusack make of it, and how they leave us, almost abruptly at the end, breathless, unnerved, and severely conflicted about some of the 20th century structures like society, activism, nation states, governance, communication, technologies, sharing and caring is what the book has to be read for. The tight screen-writing skills of Cusack meet the perfect timing of Roy’s prose, and all of it becomes surreal, futuristic and indelibly real when it gets anchored on the physical presence of Snowden, who, in exile, talks achingly of the home that has thrown him out and the home that he can never really call his own.

And while there are lapses — fragments, translations and evocations which might have needed more explanations to have their pedagogic intent shine through — there is no denying that, in all its flaws, much like the narrators, the book manages to first immerse you in the cold shock of a sobering reality, clearly positioning the apocalypse as the now, and then drags you out and wraps you up in a warm blanket, opening up forms of critique, formats of intervention, and functions of political commitment towards saying things that have and have not been said. The book should have, perhaps, been titled what could, would, should have been said, but can’t, won’t, shan’t be said — not because of anything else, but because it seems futile.

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