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

Power to the People

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:35:54Z

The digital revolution has helped make NGOs and civil society more influential, independent and transparent, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on Sunday, May 15, 2011.

The rise and spread of internet and digital technologies has invigorated the voluntary sector in the country, granting them better mobility, access to resources and wider visibility through digital networks. With the rise of the internet, augmented by easy access, civil society needs to claim its stake in the World Wide Web. Visibility and presence have become the buzzwords. There is a concentrated effort to become a Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent (SMART) organisation that doesn’t operate in remote silos but reaches out to an audience and a resource base.

While NGOs in the more developed countries have taken to digital technologies more easily, there is no doubt that the digital revolution has finally come to the civil society in India and it is offering unprecedented opportunities for social change and political participation. From the Bell Bajao campaign, which brought to the fore domestic violence in the urban middle class, to the recent demonstrations for Anna Hazare, we see many examples of the ways in which civil society and NGOs can still mobilise support from the public.

What has also been interesting is how collectives rather than registered organisations have played an important role in the public delivery of such campaigns.

Here is a look at three ways in which engagement with digital technologies, has led to new models of making public interventions and processes of initiating change for civil society collectives and NGOs.

Birds of a Feather

With the networked effect of the digital technologies, something as simple as building a Facebook page puts out the concerns and draws the attention and resources of a larger population. NGOs need no longer confine themselves to finding people in immediate environments and are extending their support base to large online networks. The Bangalore-based Blank Noise Project that started off as a public art intervention by Jasmeen Patheja has now emerged as a large volunteer-based network that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer networks to mobilise young urban dwellers, to talk about gender, safety and urban space. Not yet a formal NGO, it uses blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mailing lists etc. in order to bring people together for public interventions as well as digital dissemination. With more than 4,000 volunteers running the project in different cities, BNP proves the power of the Web to find “people like us” for a common cause.

Beyond Patronage

With the kind of outreach and visibility afforded by the internet, NGOs are turning to public support and individual contributions to carry out their work. Take Kickstarter, for example — a site where any NGO wanting to launch a creative project, can put up a project description and a budget. They can then invite people from around the world to “pledge” money by swiping credit cards, beginning with a contribution of $5. If, within a given time-span, enough people pledge enough money to cover the project’s budget, the organisation receives the money through electronic transfers. They become, thus, accountable not to individual donors or private development agencies. Instead, they become transparent and responsible towards the larger public who, as stakeholders and supporters can now endorse, amplify and track the activities of the organisation.

Transparency Unlimited

With the rise of information technologies, citizens have started asking for more details about organisations that seek to represent them in different sectors. It has become necessary for NGOs to become accountable at two levels — one is at the level of financial integrity and the second is at the level of public responsibility. The consortium Credibility Alliance is one example by which the voluntary sector can disclose certain minimum information to its public in order to build transparent governance structures. NGOs have also become more sensitive to the politics of representation and how to involve communities they work with, in their processes rather than becoming self-appointed vanguards. The field of collaboration has opened up and we see the rise of networks rather than individual players in the field.

Digital and internet technologies amplify, augment and enhance the existing processes. In the voluntary sector, like almost any other walk of life, many of these practices already exist. What these systems of the digital age have done is provide new ways by which the everyday citizen can participate and contribute to the processes of change.

Read the original published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/power-to-people

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

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

Pinning the Badge

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:34:23Z

In a world of competition, badging provides a holistic way of grading and learning, where individual talents are realised and the knowledge of the group is used.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on March 18, 2012.

I write this column fresh out of being a judge at the Digital Media and Learning contest on “Badging for Life-long Learning” in San Francisco. While the contest focused largely on the American education system and its future, the idea of badging that each person brings a set of skills to a study or workplace is useful to think about, in connection with India. We have now spent some time, in India, hearing about how education in the country has been ruined. There is a constant narrative of the university in shambles, where we seem to lack competent teachers, engaged students, and the resources to build efficient infrastructure for learning. This argument also positions employment as the only aim of education, reducing our humanist and social sciences legacies to skill-based information transmission.

Digital technologies emerge as a cure for the problems that contemporary education seems to be facing. The availability of resources at affordable costs for anybody online, has been one of the biggest promises of the internet, and it hopes to build a better learning environment and better learners. The condition of being connected to a much larger network of educators and learners, also offers us the possibilities of producing better and innovative knowledge structures. There is also an inherent ambition that the introduction of new digital competencies and skills will encourage both students and teachers to integrate their learning and pedagogy with their lived reality, producing responsible people and citizens. However, in all these expectations around the role of the digital technology in transforming learning, the idea of grading and evaluation remains unquestioned.

Even in the most radical restructuring of education systems, grades remain an absolute form of quantifying and measuring skills that the student is supposed to demonstrate. Grading might take up different forms — numbers, letters, percentile, etc — or it might take up different methods — continuous grading, take-home exams — but it eventually becomes the only badge that the student takes into the “real world”.

The idea of a badge as an alternative to this particular kind of quantification oriented learning that sees the grade as a final evaluation and in some ways, a termination of the learning process, opens up huge possibilities for how we understand learning. The badge is not imagined as yet another kind of grading, but instead it is recognition of certain skills and competences that we bring to and build in classrooms with our peers. A badge allows the students to recognise their own investment in the learning process, enabling them to realise their particular skills on the way to learning. In any learning environment, students play many roles. Some are good as connectors, some serve as conduits of information, some are good in specific areas and need help with others, some are mentors, some are translators of knowledge, some help in creating new forms of knowledge. Unfortunately, most of our grading patterns refuse to acknowledge and credit these skills which are crucial for surviving the academic world. The ability of the students to badge themselves, and others in their peer groups, acknowledging their contributions to their collective learning, might be the motivation and encouragement that we are looking for.

A peer-2-peer system of badging, which enables learners to be critically aware not only of their own interaction with knowledge, but also recognises the ways in which larger communities of knowledge — including the peers and teachers — opens up an extraordinary way of thinking about education. It disrupts the competitive modes of cut-throat modes of education systems we are building and allows us to re-think the function of education and the role of learners in educational environments. The digital systems of social networking and reputation management, already perform some of these tasks, which is why, a student who might not do well in class might be a YouTube sensation, finding thousands of followers worldwide. Or a student who might not show research aptitude in class might be editing complex Wikipedia entries on subjects that high-level researchers are engaging with. All these digital systems acknowledge the roles that people play in learning and knowledge production, and in that reward of recognition, provide incentives for learners to re-examine their role within knowledge systems.

Such a system of badging, that exceeds the static classroom, allows for students to become stakeholders in their own education, building connected communities of learning. It hints at what the future of education is going to look like. More importantly, it offers a new way of thinking about technology and its role in redesigning education, which is not merely about introducing technologies into classrooms and continuing with the traditional modes of learning through new technology skills. Instead, we have a model for what learning means, how we interact with conditions of knowledge consumption and production, and how, we can form global communities of learning which might find an anchor in the classrooms but also transcend the brick-and-mortar institutions of learning as we understand them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/pinning-the-badge

Personal Data, Public Profile

nishant — 2012-02-14T06:19:52Z

Whether we like it or not, we live in a world that is rapidly being Googlised, writes Nishant Shah in an article published by the Financial Express on February 13, 2012.

Apart from its core functions like search and email, we consume Google services and products around the clock and around the click—YouTube, Calendar, Docs, Google+, Google Reader, Google Analytics et al. On March 1, 2012, our increasingly co-dependent relationship with Google will reach a new stage of commitment as Google consolidates its privacy policies for the entire Google universe. If you are logged into your Google account, all your information across Google’s different platforms will be clubbed together to form a comprehensive profile of what you do online.

Google has suggested this will personalise your interactions with Google platforms. The videos you watch on YouTube might influence your search results; the links that you click on will affect the advertisements displayed to you; the mails that you read will establish proximity with your friends on Google+ ... A comprehensive profile of who you are, what you do, what you like, what you share and what you hide will be created. Google has shown unmatched commitment to transparency on user data retention, storage and usage over the years. However, a centralised profile on users rings a few alarm bells for me. There are three use-cases that immediately crop up with apocalyptic implications.

Death of anonymity: One of the biggest strengths of the internet, as a space for both political dissent and freedom of expression, is that it has allowed people to talk through their avatars without putting themselves in conditions of bodily harm. So, it was good to have a scenario where my activities on YouTube did not get mapped onto my more identifiable profile on Google+ and did not get correlated with my personal interactions on Gmail. Mapping all the actions of a user who might want a more distributed identity might lead to precarious conditions for users living in critical times.

Negotiation with governments: While Google claims that it is committed to protecting the safety of its users, we know that it is eventually subject to the rules of the countries that it operates in. In the past, say in skirmishes with China, we have seen that despite its powerful status, it is not exempt from the demands of different governments. Given the current state of negotiations around censorship that are ongoing in India, it is a little scary to think how users’ data can be abused by authoritative government officials. A multi-tiered, distributed system offers users safety which a consolidated one doesn’t.

Inter-platform repercussions: If something I do on a platform gets flagged as objectionable, does it mean that all my rights to Google World get revoked?

Hidden data collection: One of the things that a lot of people don’t realise is that Google, in its attempts at enriching our user experience, collects more data than you disclose. So, apart from the personal data that you have more control over, there is a range of other data—pages you visit, the time you spend there, links you click on, comments that you write, information you share, etc—which form a part of Google’s algorithms for you. Consolidation of this data through services like Ad Sense and Double Click might also expose you to third party advertisers who might abuse this information that is about you but not under your control.

Google’s consolidation of its privacy policies across platforms signal a new wave of information management on the web, where the earlier free-form distributed information practice is getting mapped on to the physical bodies of the users. While it might lead to better web services, it also means that we need to be more aware of our information practices and start preparing for a web that is going to demand more accountability from its users than ever before.

The author is a digital humanities scholar and Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

The original article was published in the Financial Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/personal-data-public-profile

People

nishant — 2020-08-04T05:52:57Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) brings together a range of people with backgrounds in various disciplines who have made significant interventions and impacts in the newly emerging area of Internet and Society. Functioning through a model of collaborations, consultations and peer-networking, our works feature some of the most innovative and relevant ideas embodied by the different people we work with. We also undertake research, advocacy, and educational programmes which involve an extensive network of researchers, practitioners, artists, and institutions partnering with us intellectually and programmatically.

Board and Society Members

Distinguished Fellows

Fellows

Staff

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

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

Out of the Bedroom

nishant — 2013-09-06T08:32:58Z

We have shared it with our friends. We have watched it with our lovers. We have discussed it with our children and talked about it with our partners. It is in our bedrooms, hidden in sock drawers. It is in our laptops, in a folder marked "Miscellaneous". It is in our cellphones and tablets, protected under passwords. It is the biggest reason why people have learned to clean their browsing history and cookies from their browsers.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on August 25, 2013.

Whether we go into surreptitious shops to buy unmarked CDs or trawl through Torrent and user-generated content sites in the quest of a video, there is no denying the fact that it has become a part of our multimedia life. Even in countries like India, where consumption and distribution of pornography are punished by law, we know that pornography is rampant. With the rise of the digital technologies of easy copy and sharing, and the internet which facilitates amateur production and anonymous distribution, pornography has escaped the industrial market and become one of the most intimate and commonplace practices of the online world.

In fact, if Google trend results are to be believed, Indians are among the top 10 nationalities searching for pornography daily. Even a quick look at our internet history tells us that it has all been about porn. The morphed pictures of a naked Pooja Bhatt adorned the covers of Stardust in the late 1990s, warning us that the true potential of Photoshop had been realised. The extraordinary sensation of the Delhi Public School MMS case which captured two underage youngsters in a grainy sexcapade announced the arrival of user-generated porn in a big way. The demise of Savita Bhabhi — India's first pornographic graphic novel — is still recent enough for us to remember that the history of the internet in India is book-ended by porn and censorship.

Recent discussions on pornography have been catalysed by a public interest litigation requesting for a ban on internet pornography filed in April by Kamlesh Vaswani. Whether Vaswani's observations on what porn can make us do stem from his own personal epiphany or his self-appointed role as our moral compass is a discussion that merits its own special space. Similarly, a debate on the role, function, and use of pornography in a society is complex, rich and not for today.

Instead, I want to focus on the pre-Web imagination of porn that Vaswani and his endorsers are trying to impose upon the rest of us. There is a common misunderstanding that all porn is the same porn, no matter what the format, medium and aesthetics of representations. Or in other words, a homogenising presumption is that erotic fiction and fantasies, pictures of naked people in a magazine, adult films produced by entertainment houses, and user-generated videos on the internet are the same kind of porn. However, as historical legal debates and public discussions have shown us, what constitutes porn is specific to the technologies that produce it. There was a time when DH Lawrence's iconic novel now taught in undergraduate university courses — Lady Chatterley's Lover — was deemed pornographic and banned in India. In more recent times, the nation was in uproar at the Choli ke peeche song from Khalnayak which eventually won awards for its lyrics and choreography.

In all the controversy, there has so far been a "broadcast imagination" of how pornography gets produced, consumed and distributed. There is a very distinct separation of us versus them when it comes to pornography. They produce porn. They distribute porn. They push porn down our throats (that was probably a poor choice of words) by spamming us and buying Google adwords to infect our search results. We consume porn. And all we need to do is go and regulate, like we do with Bollywood, the central management and distribution mechanism so that the flow of pornography can be curbed. This is what I call a broadcast way of thinking, where the roles of the performers, producers, consumers and distributors of pornography are all distinct and can be regulated.

However, within the murky spaces of the World Wide Web, the scenario is quite different. Internet pornography is not the same as availability of pornography on the internet. True, the digital multimedia space of sharing and peer-2-peer distribution has made the internet the largest gateway to accessing pornographic objects which are produced through commercial production houses. However, the internet is not merely a way of getting access to existing older forms of porn. The internet also produces pornography that is new, strange, unprecedented and is an essential part of the everyday experience of being digitally connected and networked into sociality.

The recent controversies about the former congressman from New York, Anthony Weiner, sexting — sending inappropriate sexual messages through his cellphone — gives us some idea of what internet porn looks like. It is not just something captured on a phone-cam but interactive and collaboratively produced. Or as our own Porngate, where two cabinet ministers of the Karnataka legislative assembly were caught surfing some good old porn on their mobile devices while the legislature was in session, indicated, porn is not something confined to the privacy of our rooms. Naked flashmobs, young people experimenting with sexual identities in public, and sometimes bizarre videos of a bus-ride where the camera merely captures the banal and the everyday through a "pornographic gaze" are also a part of the digital porn landscape. The world of virtual reality and multiple online role-playing games offer simulated sexual experiences that allow for human, humanoid, and non-human avatars to engage in sexual activities in digital spaces. Peer-2-peer video chat platforms like Chatroulette, offer random encounters of the naked kind, where nothing is recorded but almost everything can be seen.

The list of pornography produced by the internet — as opposed to pornography made accessible through the internet — is huge. It doesn't just hide in subcultural practices but resides on popular video-sharing sites like YouTube or Tumblr blogs. It vibrates in our cellphones as we connect to people far away from us, and pulsates on the glowing screens of our tablets as we get glimpses of random strangers and their intimate bodies and moments. An attempt to ban and censor this porn is going to be futile because it does not necessarily take the shape of a full narrative text which can be examined by others to judge its moral content. Any petition that tries to censor such activities is going to fall flat on its face because it fails to recognise that sexual expression, engagement and experimentation is a part of being human — and the ubiquitous presence of digital technologies in our life is going to make the internet a fair playground for activities which might seem pornographic in nature. In fact, trying to restrict and censor them, will only make our task of identifying harmful pornography — porn that involves minors, or hate speech or extreme acts of violence — so much more difficult because it will be pushed into the underbelly of the internet which is much larger than the searched and indexed World Wide Web.

Trying to suggest that internet pornography is an appendage which can be surgically removed from everyday cyberspace is to not understand the integral part that pornography and sexual interactions play in the development and the unfolding of the internet. The more fruitful efforts would be to try and perhaps create a guideline that helps promote healthy sexual interaction and alerts us to undesirable sexual expressions which reinforce misogyny, violence, hate speech and non-consensual invasions of bodies and privacy. This blanket ban on trying to sweep all internet porn under a carpet is not going to work — it will just show up as a big bump, in places we had not foreseen.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-august-25-2013-nishant-shah-out-of-the-bedroom

Our Internet and the Law

nishant — 2012-03-26T09:28:22Z

Nishant Shah was interviewed by the BBC Channel 5 (Radio) for its Outriders section. Jamillah Knowles reports this through this blog post published by BBC Radio on 24 January 2012.

Hello Outriders!

This week on the podcast we look at some of the problems netizens are facing when it comes to access and sharing online. SOPA, the stop online piracy act and PIPA - protect IP bills have been making headlines from the United States, where the bills were designed and all over the web where protesters showed that they did not want this sort of legislation to be passed.

It's a tricky topic as there are many protesters raising their voices against the laws and there are plenty of people who support these ideas too.

Indian internet

Along with these headlines about legislation in America, there are many other places around the world that are debating how best to manage a population that has an increasing presence on the internet.

In India, a court case is continuing that may affect how social networking websites work. Not in relation to copyright material, but as a reaction to offensive content being spread and shared.

So, what do they mean by offensive content and who are the big names in this case?

Friend of Outriders, Nishant Shah, is the Co-Founder and director of research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society, he explained the case and more about the effects of a possible outcome.

Friend of Outriders, Nishant Shah, is the Co-Founder and director of research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society, he explained the case and more about the effects of a possible outcome.

Last week also saw a huge story of the web as content sharing website Megaupload was taken down and the site's owners were charged with copyright violation.

As a response, the loose network of hackers and activists known as Anonymous activated their own take down campaign, targeting the Department of Justice, the FBI and the Motion Picture Association of America.

Upload down

Many users of the MegaUpload site watched countless hours of video posted by other people with accounts on the site, copyright or otherwise, but the shut down does not just mean that people are no longer able to watch videos, it also means that people who had put files on that site, are currently unable to access them.

One such customer is Jay Springett, who is a technology consultant, photographer and musician. I asked him how he came to use the site and if he had heard anything about getting his files back.

Well, we hope that Jay does get his raw files back and I grateful to him for talking to us about his experience - it's good to have a reminder about our information and files online. Take care of what you own and think twice about the reliability of the cloud. Though you may never be in this situation - and we hope this is the case, it's always a very good idea to keep copies of your own files, you never know what might be ahead as the internet changes.

Well, thanks to our guests as ever and of course you too can share your internet adventures or experiments with electrical things. Drop me a line at outriders at bbc dot co dot uk, tweet at me on Twitter where we are @BBC_Outriders or search for Outriders on Facebook and Google+ to add us to your feed.

Until next week!
~ Jamillah

Listen the Podcast here

The original blog post was published by BBC Radio

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

Openness, Videos, Impressions

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:23:13Z

The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.

The notion of free and open is under great debate even under that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different, often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.

Open video, in that matter, has gone through different iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective hearing, through the day: Access, Archive, Share, Remix, Repurpose. And it is these five that we need to now imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups today.

Access has been one primary question that almost everybody dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements, where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access, privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something that different participants have voiced the need for.

Archive is a preoccupation with most people because archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to different people, there are older questions of representation, voice, empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of access, distribution etc.

Sharing is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do we share it with? Tools by which sharing leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks can be built up?

Remix has been of great value because it means that you are being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc. can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic and mechanics seems to have emerged.

Repurpose is my additional reading of something that perhaps needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms, protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport

Open Secrets

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:21:21Z

We need to think of privacy in different ways — not only as something that happens between people, but between you and corporations.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was originally published in the Indian Express on October 27.

If you are a part of any social networking site, then you know that privacy is something to be concerned about. We put out an incredible amount of personal data on our social networks. Pictures with family and friends, intimate details about our ongoing drama with the people around us, medical histories, and our spur-of-the-moment thoughts of what inspires, peeves or aggravates us. In all this, the more savvy use filters and group settings which give them some semblance of control about who has access to this information and what can be done with it.

But it is now a given that in the world of the worldwide web, privacy is more or less a thing of the past. Data transmits. Information flows. What you share with one person immediately gets shared with thousands. Even though you might make your stuff accessible to a handful of people, the social networks work through a "friend-of-a-friend effect", where others in your networks use, like, share and spread your information around so that there is an almost unimaginable audience to the private drama of our lives. Which is why there is a need for a growing conversation about what being private in the world of big data means.

Privacy is about having control over the data and some ownership about who can use it and for what purpose. Interface designs and filters that allow limited access help this process. The legal structures are catching up with regulations that control what individuals, entities, governments and corporations can do with the data we provide. However, most people think of privacy as a private matter. Just look at last month's conversations around Facebook's new privacy policies, which no longer allow you to hide. If you are on Facebook, people can find you using all kinds of parameters — meta data — other than just your name. They might find you through hobbies, pages you like, schools you have studied in, etc. This can be scary because it means that based on particular activities, people can profile and follow you. Especially for people in precarious communities — the young adults, queer people who might not be ready to be out of the closet, women who already face increased misogyny and hostility online. This means they are officially entering a stalkers' paradise.

While those concerns need to be addressed, there is something that seems to be missing from the debate. Almost all of these privacy alarms are about what people can do to people. That we need to protect ourselves from people, when we are in public — digital or otherwise. We are reminded that the world is filled with predators, crackers and scamsters, who can prey on our personal data and create physical, emotional, social and financial havoc. But this is the world we already know. We live in a universe filled with perils and we have learned and coped with the fact that we navigate through dangerous spaces, times and people all the time. The digital is no different than the physical when it comes to the possible perils that we live in, though digital might facilitate some kinds of behaviour and make data-stalking easier.

What is different with the individualised, just-for-you crafted world of the social web is that there are things which are not human, which are interacting with you in unprecedented ways. Make a list of the top five people you interact with on Facebook. And you will be wrong. Because the thing that you interact with the most on Facebook, is Facebook. Look at the amount of chatter it creates — How are you feeling today?; Your friend has updated their status; Somebody liked your comment… the list goes on. In fact, much as we would like to imagine a world that revolves around us, we know that there are a very few people who have the energy and resources to keep track of everything we do. However, no matter how boring your status message or how pedestrian your activity, deep down in a server somewhere, an artificial algorithm is keeping track of everything that you do. Facebook is always listening, and watching, and creating a profile of you. People might forget, skip, miss or move on, but Facebook will listen, and remember long after you have forgotten.

If this is indeed the case, we need to think of privacy in different ways — not only as something that happens between people, but between people and other entities like corporations. The next time there is a change in the policy that makes us more accessible to others, we should pay attention. But what we need to be more concerned about are the private corporations, data miners and information gatherers, who make themselves invisible and collect our personal data as we get into the habit of talking to platforms, gadgets and technologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-october-27-2013-nishant-shah-open-secrets

Open letter to Kolaveri Di makers: How Dare You!

nishant — 2012-05-23T07:02:03Z

When it comes to piracy, you are sure to have an opinion. You might either make a virtue out of it, talking about cultural commons and collaborative conditions of production. Or you might vilify it as the social fault-line that is destroying the very pillars of commerce and cultural negotiations.

This article by Nishant Shah was published in First Post on May 22, 2012.

No matter which part of the fault-line you fall under, this is the time for all good (and otherwise ambiguously identified) people to come to the aid of the party. This is an open call for anybody who has been on the interwebz, to share and distribute one particular object whose rights protector have recently taken your right to access countless platforms which are a part of your everyday life online.

If you haven’t yet grasped it, I am referring to the recent events where, following a John Doe order from the High Court of Chennai, all kinds of file sharing platforms are suddenly being blocked by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) across India.

The film producers of ‘3’, the movie whose claim to fame has been the spectacular viral success of the Kolaveri Di song, have moved the courts to issue a blanket order that has suddenly made it impossible for Indian netizens to access file sharing, user-generated-content hosting websites which allowed for digital cultural texts – from print to music to movies to presentations – to be shared and disseminated freely online.

The producers and those who support them, are glorying in this legal battle where they have identified nodes in our networks, through which their copyright information was potentially being pirated. They are hoping that by ensuring this lack of digital mobility for their film, they will be able to entice audiences to come into the theatres and spend their money ‘legitimately’ on the film.

They are revelling in the fact that hundreds of thousands of users have been thwarted in their attempts at copyright infringement. What they haven’t realised is that they have justified their box-office greed by infringing on your and my rights to perform everyday activities online.

I am sure there is going to be a smart-aleck riding a moral high horse, who will applaud this move and point out to me about the rights of the producers to protect their content. There are many who support this high-censorship which not only betrays the power of the Music And Film Industry Association (MAFIA, to friends) to curb us of our rights, but also the completely depraved technology apparatus of the State which seems to have no understanding of how the internet actually works.

However, i want to shift the focus from the rights of these victimised producers and right-holders to the right of the individual who is actually the structural unit of cyberspaces. And I want to suggest to you that these right-holders, who incidentally, have such global value only because the Kolaveri Di song put them on the global meme map, have now infringed upon my right to access my content which I had put out to share.

There are open content videos on Vimeo that we have produced through years of research and a huge amount of financial investment, which are now no longer available to people who want to view them.

There are powerpoint presentations and publications on file sharing sites, seeded through torrents, which are now impossible to access for people in India. A large amount of our personal research and lectures, which we have shared for educational purposes, are now not even available for us to download.

And we are not alone in this. Hundreds of thousands of individuals, who have shared openly licensed material, have now lost the ability to access that information because one private company wanted to make sure it made its profits.

I am not going to write a manifesto for the digital world, but I do want to put it out there, this new cultural MAFIA, grant to me my rights which their actions have violated. For every site that they have included in their banned list, they have disrespected the open, collaborative licenses that enabled sharing of information whose value, usage and worth is more than their commercial pot boiler, which shall hopefully be forgotten before we realise it was released in the markets.

Their commercially driven arrogance has suddenly demanded that we pay a price for the shared information, and that price should be to those who hold rights over the movie.

And so I am writing this open call, for you to come and demand your right. If that movie producer has the right to protect his interests, you and I have the right to protect ours. I demand that for every site that I am not able to access, for public domain information that I am entitled to, they pay us a penalty.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/open-letter-to-kolaveri-di

Online Censorship on the Rise: Why I Prefer to Save Things Offline

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:26:50Z

As governments use their power to erase what they do not approve of from the web, cloud storage will not be enough.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2016.

It took me some time to trust the cloud. Growing up with digital technologies that were neither resilient nor reliable — a floppy drive could go kaput without you having done anything, a CD once scratched could not be recovered, hard drives malfunctioned and it was a given that once every few months your PC would crash and need a re-install — I have always been paranoid about making backups and storing information. Once I kicked into my professional years, I developed a foolproof, albeit paranoid, system, where I backed up my machines to a common hard drive, made a mirror image of that hard drive, and for absolutely crucial documents, I would put them on to a separate DVD which would have the emergency documents. It was around 2006, when I discovered the cloud.

It began with Google’s unlimited email accounts where you could mail information to yourself and then it would stay there for a digital eternity. I noticed that the size of my digital storage began decreasing. I no longer download videos I find on the web. I don’t save information on a device and I have come to think of the web as one large cloud, relying on the fact that if something is online once, it will always be available to me.

However, over the last couple of months, I have started noticing something different in my usage patterns. These days, when I do come across interesting information, instead of merely indexing it, I find myself making an offline copy of that information. Tweets enter a Storify folder. YouTube videos get downloaded. I make PDF copies of blogs and take screenshots of digital medial updates. I have been wondering why I am suddenly so invested in archiving the web when, theoretically, it is always there.

When I voiced this to a group of young students, I was surprised to hear that I wasn’t alone. The web is becoming a space that is crowded with take-downs, deletions, removals, and retractions which leave no archival memory. The students quickly pointed out that these take-downs are not just personal redactions. In fact, what we personally choose to remove has very little chances of actually disappearing from the web. Instead, these are things that are removed by governments, private companies and intermediaries who are being largely held liable for the content of the information that they make available.

Turkey, recently, demanded that German authorities remove a satirical German video titled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan mocking their President. In response, Germany reminded the Turkish diplomacy of that lovely little thing called freedom of speech, and in the meantime, Extra 3, the group that had released the video on YouTube, added English subtitles to the video. Just for perks. I hope you gave a brownie point to Germany, even as you scrambled to see the video.

On the home front, though, things are not as celebratory. The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Rajyavardhan Rathore, and the head of the BJP’s information and technology cell, Arvind Gupta, have called for action against journalist Raghav Chopra who tweeted a photoshopped image of PM Narendra Modi bending down to touch the feet of a man dressed in Saudi Arabia’s national dress, to make a political comment about the PM’s recent visit to SA.

The two politicos, who have not had much to say about the doctored videos that were used to convict innocent students in JNU or the photoshopping that the government’s Press Information Bureau had indulged in to give us that iconic image of the prime minister doing an aerial survey of #ChennaiFloods, have taken umbrage against an image because it seems (obviously) false, and are demanding its takedown.

My proclivity for saving things offline is perhaps fuelled by this web of partisan censorship and the atmosphere of precarious hostility that governments seem to be supporting. Increasingly, we have seen, in India and around the globe, a rush of political power that exercises its clout to remove information, images and stories that they do not approve of.

Instinctively, I am reacting to the fact that intellectual questioning or cultural critique is being removed from the web at the behest of these vested powers, and that the cloud, light and airy as it sounds, is prone to some incredible acts of censorship and removal. I have found myself facing too many removal notices and take-down errors when trying to revisit bookmarked sites, that I am beginning to feel that the only way to keep my information safe might be to archive the whole web on a personal server.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2016-online-censorship-on-the-rise

One. Zero.

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:50:32Z

The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak. So sophisticated is this network of digital infrastructure that we forget how our languages of connection are constantly being transcribed in binary code, allowing for the information to be transmitted across the web.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on September 16, 2012

Indeed, we have already reached a point where we don’t even need to be familiar with code to perform intimate functions with the machines that we live with, as they respond to us in human languages. While this human-machine duality has been resolved with the presence of intuitive and interactive interfaces that allow us to seamlessly connect to the person(s) at the other end of a digital connection, there is another binary that still remains at the centre of much discussion around all things digital.

This is the duality of the Real and the Virtual. In geekspeak, this particular separation has been coded as a divide between RL (Real Life) and VR (Virtual Reality). This separation between the two is so naturalised that it has become a part of our everyday imagination where things that happen online are ‘out there’ and ‘an escape’ whereas things that are offline, are ‘real’ and ‘believable’. However, as digital technologies become pervasive and ubiquitous, these lines between RL and VR have blurred. Especially with new technologies of augmented reality and simulated layers like Google Goggles or even location-based services on your smartphone that help you navigate through the offline world, it is becoming difficult to clearly say what is online and what is offline.

There are two questions that help demonstrate this blurring of boundaries very clearly. The first is an existential one, something that doesn’t crop up often in conversations, but suddenly haunts you on at 2 pm on an idle Thursday: Who are you, when you are online? A famous cartoon on the web had two dogs sitting on a connected computer, their paws on the mouse, and telling each other, ‘On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog’. But in the hyper-connected world that we live in, everybody knows exactly who we are, even as we ourselves are confused about where our bodies end and where our digital extensions and avatars begin. Things that we do in RL affect and shape the ways in which our avatars evolve on social networking sites. The interactions that our avatars have with other digital objects map back on our understanding of who we are and how we dress our bodies. Even when we are not connected, our avatars interact, constantly, not only with other avatars in the system, but also machines and artificial intelligence scripts, and robots and networks, masquerading as ourselves even outside our knowledge. We might be tagged, liked, shared, transmitted and morphed; we might be photoshopped, reduced to a tweet, condensed to a status message, embodied in an avatar on our favourite role playing game, or hovering as a signature to emails. These are all parts of us, but they are not just extensions of us. These are things that not only stand in for us but also shape the ways in which we understand ourselves and how we connect to the world.

The second question crops up regularly in digitally mediated conversations. When your parents call you on the cell phone, or your friend messages you on the Blackberry, or your colleague pings you on Skype or your IRC buddies see you on a chat channel. As our modes of access have become mobile and devices of access have become portable, we can never really clearly answer the question, ‘Where are you right now?’. It is a question worth dwelling on. Where are you when you are walking down a street, using GPRS data on your cellphone, and a friend uses a Voice Over IP service like Whatsapp to ask you, ‘Where are you right now?’. Are you on the street? On your phone? On an application? Located somewhere on a server? Bits of data on a high-speed optic fibre, zooming across the ionosphere? Depending upon who is asking the question, you would be able to and in fact have to give a different answer about where you are when you are online.

This blurred duality might be seen as confusing, taking away the assurance of our body and our geography from everyday practices. In fact, one of the reasons why the digital revolution has been so well received is because these technologies facilitate an almost seamless transfer of ideas, emotions and connections across the different realms of RL and VR, offering us new ways of thinking about being human, being social, and being connected. The strength of the digital is in this coupling together, of the hitherto irreconcilable realms of our life in messy and enchanting ways, giving us new opportunities to think about who we are and where we are in our quotidian lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/www-indianexpress-com-one-zero

One Pokémon to Rule Them All

nishant — 2016-07-25T01:16:04Z

America’s head start on the augmented reality game Pokémon Go shows that the interweb is not an egalitarian space.

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 17, 2016

I was busy, writing, when a Telegram message trickled in. It was a friend who asked me if I had looked at the new Pokémon Go game which has been getting more attention than national elections and global warfare in the USA lately. A location-based augmented reality game that involves the users moving around their physical environments “collecting” pokemon characters that appear hiding in different locations has a large part of the American population in a frenzy, leading to aching soles, traffic accidents, and involuntary bumping into things and people as the players move around, their eyes glued to their screens. The global release of the game is still in the pipeline, and so the rest of us will have to make do with the videos and screen grabs of the game.

While a big Pikachu fan myself, I don’t see myself going crazy over this game as and when my geography allows me for it, but the friend who had written to me about it is perturbed. An avid gamer and a self-proclaimed Pokémon fan, he is devastated that the users in privileged geography are going to get a head start in the global leader boards that he can never catch up with. The interwebz is already abuzz with players sharing hacks, cracks, bugs, cheat codes, and tips to collect more Pokémon, discover hidden powers, and rise quickly in the ranks as they drive, walk, run and jog around their neighbourhoods, in the quest of catching those delightful monsters on their phones. While my friend is aware that this cloud-based game will have multiple servers for different geographies, and so there will be relative rankings and customised interfaces for each community of players, he was feeling cheated about living in India and not having access to the first release of the game that has all the attention on the social web right now.

‘It almost makes me want to leave India and move to the USA,’ he said in mock frustration. It made me think about the privilege of geography when it comes to the presumed flatness of the digital world. One of the imaginations of the peer-to-peer architectures of the internet is its promise of flatness. With a series of non-discriminatory principles like #NetNeutrality and #ZeroRating enshrined as the fundamental attributes of the digital internet, we are often led to believe that when we are online, we are equal. This idea is so prevalent that in most of our technology-based development practices and policies, we think of access as the “be all”, if not the “end all”, of our activities. The rhetoric promises that if we get everybody online, we will have an egalitarian society where everybody will have equal access to resources, and equity by participating in the decision-making processes.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the digital world is anecdotally and systemically a space of exclusion, contestation, and intimidation, we continue to propagate the idea that these are “human” problems. Humans, fragile, frail and foolish in their being, contaminate the digital space. Humans, mired in the analogue systems of hatred and abuse, appropriate technologies to perpetuate these older forms of discrimination. The technological structures are imagined as pure, sterile, and committed to constructing parameters of equality through their neutral promises of universal access and seamless connectivity. Technology is clean, the human being is impure. Technology is robust, the human frail. Technology is flat, human hierarchical. These narratives of a neutral and egalitarian technology consequently lead us to put more importance and faith in algorithmic decisions and data-driven governance and policing. We have come to believe that because technologies are neutral, they will do a better job of regulating us than we do ourselves.

Pokémon Go, and its obvious geographical privilege reminds us that the digital is not flat. It is oriented towards a very obvious logic of geopolitical, economic, racial, and identity privileging that continues to promote some parts of the world as favoured standards of first access. The exclusive release of Pokémon Go reminds us that the digital is as subject to Euro-American centrism which treat these erstwhile imperial geographies as the beginning points of all digital activities, slowly expanding their fold to other regions through a trickle-down politics and economics. Whether you are waiting impatiently to join the global bandwagon of Pokémon collection, or are ready to shrug this off as another thing that people do on the web, this differential, preferential, and variable access of the internet is something we definitely want to consider as we continue to push for the digital as the solution to human problems.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-17-2016-one-pokemon-to-rule-them-all