Centre for Internet and Society

You Have the Right to Remain Silent

nishant — 2013-07-22T06:59:53Z

Reflecting upon the state of freedom of speech and expression in India, in the wake of the shut-down of the political satire website narendramodiplans.com.

Nishant Shah's column was published in Down to Earth on July 17, 2013.

It took less than a day for narendramodiplans.com, a political satire website that had more than 60,000 hits in the 20 hours of its existence, to be taken down. A simple webpage that showed a smiling picture of Narendra Modi, the touted candidate for India’s next Prime Ministerial campaign, flashing his now trademark ‘V’ for ~~Vengeance~~ Victory sign. At the first glimpse it looked like another smart media campaign by the net-savvy minister who has already made use of the social web quite effectively, to connect with his constituencies and influence the younger voting population in the country. Below the image of Mr. Modi was a text that said, "For a detailed explanation of how Mr. Narendra Modi plans to run the nation if elected to the house as a Prime Minister and also for his view/perspective on 2002 riots please click the link below." The button, reminiscent of 'sale' signs on shops that offer permanent discounts, promised to reveal, for once and for all, the puppy plight of Mr. Modi's politics and his plans for the country that he seeks to lead.

However, when one tried to click on the button, hoping, at least for a manifesto that combined the powers of Machiavelli with the sinister beauty of Kafka, it proved to be an impossible task. The button wiggled, and jiggled, and slithered all over the page, running away from the mouse following it. Referencing the layers of evasive answers, the engineered Public Relations campaigns that try to obfuscate the history to some of the most pointed questions that have been posited to the Modi government through judicial and public forums, the button never stayed still enough to actually reveal the promised answers. For people who are familiar with the history of such political satire and protest online would immediately recognise that this wasn’t the most original of ideas. In fact, it was borrowed from another website - http://www.thepmlnvision.com/ that levelled similar accusations of lack of transparency and accountability on the part of Nawaz Sharif of Pakistan. Another instance, which is now also shut down, had a similar deployment where the webpage claimed to give a comprehensive view into Rahul Gandhi’s achievements, to question his proclaimed intentions of being the next prime-minister. In short, this is an internet meme, where a simple web page and a java script allowed for a critical commentary on the future of the next elections and the strengthening battle between #feku and #pappu that has already taken epic proportions on Twitter.

The early demise of these two websites (please do note, when you click on the links that the Nawaz Sharif website is still working) warns us of the tightening noose around freedom of speech and expression that politicos are responsible for in India. It has been a dreary last couple of years already, with the passing of the Intermediaries Liabilities Rules as an amendment to the IT Act of India, Dr. Sibal proposing to pre-censor the social web in a quest to save the face of erring political figures, teenagers being arrested for voicing political dissent, and artists being prosecuted for exercising their rights to question the state of governance in our country. Despite battles to keep the web an open space that embodies the democratic potentials and the constitutional rights of freedom of speech and expression in the country, it has been a losing fight to keep up with the ad hoc and dictatorial mandates that seem to govern the web.


Above is a screen shot from narendramodiplans.com website

We have no indication of why this latest piece of satirical expression, which should be granted immunity as a work of art, if not as an individual’s right to free speech, was suddenly taken down. The website now has a message that says, “I quit. In a country with freedom of speech, I assumed that I was allowed to make decent satire on any politician more particularly if it is constructive. Clearly, I was wrong.” The web is already abuzz with conspiracy theories, each sounding scarier than the other because they seem so plausible and possible in a country that has easily sacrificed our right to free speech and expression at the altar of political egos. And whether you subscribe to any of the theories or not, whether your sympathies lie with the BJP or with the UPA, whether or not you approve of the political directions that the country seems to be headed in, there is no doubt that you should be as agitated as I am, about the fact that we are in a fast-car to blanket censorship, and we are going there in style.

What happens online is not just about this one website or the one person or the one political party – it is a reflection on the rising surveillance and bully state that presumes that making voices (and sometimes people) invisible, is enough to resolve the problems that they create. And what happens on the web is soon going to also affect the ways in which we live our everyday lives. So the next time, you call some friends over for dinner, and then sit arguing about the state of politics in the country, make sure your windows are all shut, you are wearing tin-foil hats and if possible, direct all conversations to the task of finally finding Mamta Kulkarni. Because anything else that you say might either be censored or land you in a soup, and the only recourse you might have would be a website that shows the glorious political figures of the country, with a sign that says “To defend your right to free speech and expression, please click here”. And you know that you are never going to be able to click on that sign. Ever.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/down-to-earth-july-17-2013-nishant-shah-you-have-the-right-to-remain-silent

Writing the Future - IIT Delhi

nishant — 2008-11-05T05:57:40Z

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

‘WRITING THE FUTURE’

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

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

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

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

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

AIMS

Our goal is to:

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

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

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

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

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

ACTIVITIES:

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

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

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

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

Public events featuring established writers and performers of international repute.

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

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

ADVANTAGES

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

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

The Indian Council for Cultural Relations

The Sanskriti Foundation

The Indian Institute for Advanced Studies

The Sahitya Akademi or National Academy of Letters

Jamia Millia Islamia University

Scope Plus

Kusuma Trust and the Centre for Internet and Society

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

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

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

World Wide Rule

nishant — 2013-07-01T10:26:24Z

Nishant Shah's review of Schmidt and Cohen's book was published in the Indian Express on June 14, 2013.

Click to read the original published in the Indian Express here

Book: The New Digital Age
Author: Eric Schmidt & Jared Cohen
Publisher: Hachette
Price: Rs 650
Pages: 315

When I first heard that Eric Schmidt the chairman of Google and Jared Cohen, the director of the techno-political think-tank Google Ideas, are co-authoring a book about our future and how it is going to be re-shaped with the emergence of digital technologies, I must confess I was sceptical. When people who do things that you like start writing about those things, it is not always a pretty picture. Or an easy read. However, like all sceptics, I am only a romantic waiting to be validated. So, when I picked up The New Digital Age I was hoping to be entertained, informed and shaken out of my socks as the gurus of the interwebz spin science fiction futures for our times. Sadly, I have been taught my lesson and have slid back into hardened scepticism.

Here is the short version of the book: Technology is good. Technology is going to be exciting. There are loads of people who haven't had it yet. There are not enough people who have figured out how things work. Everybody needs to go online because no matter what, technologies are here to stay and they are going to be the biggest corpus of power. They write, "There is a canyon dividing people who understand technology and people charged with addressing the world's toughest geopolitical issues, and no one has built a bridge…As global connectivity continues its unprecedented advance, many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society." So the handful who hold the reigns of the digital (states, corporates, artificial intelligence clusters) are either going to rule the world, or, well, write books about it.

The long version is slightly more nuanced, even though it fails to give us what we have grown to expect of all things Google — the bleeding edge of back and beyond. For a lay person, observations that Schmidt and Cohen make about the future of the digital age might be mildly interesting in the way title credits to your favourite movie can be. Once they have convinced us, many, many times, that the internet is fast and fluid and that it makes things fast and fluid and hence the future we imagine is going to be fast and fluid, the authors tell us that the internet is spawning a new "caste system" of haves, have-nots, and wants-but-does-not-haves.

Citing the internet as "the largest experiment involving anarchy in history" they look at the new negotiations of power around the digital. Virulent viruses from the "Middle East" make their appearance. Predictably wars of censorship and free information in China get due attention. Telcos get a big hand for building the infrastructure which can sell Google phones to people in Somalia. The book offers a straightforward (read military) reading of drones and less-than-expected biased views on cyberterrorism, which at least escapes the jingoism that the USA has been passing off in the service of a surveillance state. And more than anything else, the book shows politicos and governments around the world, that the future is messy, anarchy is at hand, but as long as they put their trust in Big Internet Brothers, the world will be a manageable place.

So while you can clearly see where my review for the book is heading, I must give it its due credit.

There are three things about this book that make it interesting. The first is how Schmidt and Cohen seem to be in a seesaw dialogue with themselves. They realise that five billion people are going to get connected online. They gush a little about what this net-universality is going to mean. And then immediately, they also realise that we have to prepare ourselves for a "Brave New World," which is going to be infinitely more messy and scary. They recognise that the days of anonymity on the Web are gone, with real life identities becoming our primary digital avatars. However, they also hint at a potential future of pseudonymity that propels free speech in countries with authoritarian regimes. This oscillation between the good, the bad, the plain and the incredible, keeps their writing grounded without erring too much either on the side of techno-euphoria or dystopic visions of the future.

Second, and perhaps justly so, the book doles out a lot of useful information not just for the techno-neophytes but also the amateur savant. There are stories about "Currygate" in Singapore, or of what Vodaphone did in Egypt after the Arab Spring, or of the "Human Flesh Search Engine" in China, which offer a comprehensive, if not critical, view of the way things are. Schmidt and Cohen have been everywhere on the ether and they have cyberjockeyed for decades to tell us stories that might be familiar but are still worth the effort of writing.

Third, it is a readable book. It doesn't require you to Telnet your way into obscure meaning sets in the history of computing. It is written for people who are still mystified not only about the past of the Net but also its future, and treads a surprisingly balanced ground in both directions. It is a book you can give to your grandmother, and she might be inspired to get herself a Facebook (or maybe a Google +) account.

But all said and done, I expected more. It is almost as if Schmidt and Cohen are sitting on a minefield of ideas which they want to hint at but don't yet want to share because they might be able to turn it into a new app for the Nexus instead. It is a book that could have been. It wasn't. It is ironic how silent the book is about the role that big corporations play in shaping our techno-futures, and the fact that it is printed on dead-tree books with closed licensing so I couldn't get a free copy online. For people claiming to build new and political futures, the fact that this wisdom could not come out in more accessible forms and formats, speaks a lot about how seriously we can take their views of the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-world-wide-rule

Will You be Paid to Post a Picture?

nishant — 2014-03-06T11:58:41Z

The wave of free information production on the web is on the wane.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 18, 2014

The age of volunteerism is officially over. The last decade of the mass adoption of the internet has been fuelled by endless human hours being spent in producing information which is the new currency of our times. The big transition to Web 2.0 began when the individual “user” became more than either an individual or the user. The individual found herself as a part of a collective, finding a voice and a community of others to belong to. Simultaneously, instead of being a passive consumer of the web, the user started producing data — blogs, videos, tweets, content management systems, online discussion boards, massively multiple online role-playing platforms, social network transactions — all of which became a part of the new Web’s widespread popularity.

Almost everything that we understand as the social web today is contingent upon people producing data in their interactions with the world around them. From knowledge producing websites like Wikipedia to entertainment platforms like YouTube, visualisation and data gathering spaces like Pinterest to photographs of self, food and cute animals on Instagram, political and social commentaries on Tumblr to Listicles and memes on Buzzfeed, the internet is a veritable smorgasbord of new information forms, formats and functions that are generated by the users.

What is possibly the most exciting about this burgeoning information universe has been the amount of free labour that goes into it, and often remains invisible. As digital labour scholar Trebor Schulz points out, the internet has become both a factory and a playground, where our leisure time is capitalised into producing work that sustains the new attention and information economies. For instance, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, does not produce any of its contents. It is, in fact, a system of information mining and sorting, which works as long as a growing user base continues to produce information on it. Tomorrow, if all of us stop producing Facebook, and only lurk on it, the platform will collapse. Which is why, Facebook continues to acquire new platforms and applications to be integrated into its universe.

Similarly, the real effort that goes into the sustenance of sites like Wikipedia, which has become the de facto reference for global knowledge systems, is carried out by unsung and invisible editors who patiently, meticulously, and without almost any expectation, continue to add, verify, strengthen and curate reliable information that we can use. When the non-profit organisation WikiMedia Foundation prides itself in running one of the least expensive websites in the top 10 most visited sites in the world, it is signalling its deep appreciation for the countless human hours that have made Wikipedia possible.

But, in recent years, there is noticeable stagnation in the wave of free information production on the Web. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We are producing an unprecedented amount of data — we are constantly being watched by surveillance technologies that detect biometric and genetic make-up of all our transactions, or we are inviting people to watch us on social network sites where we reveal some of our deepest secrets and desires, or we are watching ourselves, quantifying everything from things we ate to the number of hours we sleep. And yet, as we live in a world of Big Data, there is a definite decrease in people contributing to production of free information.

As the digital natives move from the web to mobile phones, traditional websites are already facing a crisis. News and media agencies that have celebrated the global citizen media networks have started realising that the individual user is more interested in local networks and information ecologies which are independent of mainstream conglomerates. And people are realising that their time and effort is worth money. They can be easily compensated for their online activities and gain reputation and importance.

The tension only becomes more palpable when people start realising that there are others who are being paid to work on the platforms that they are contributing to. We all knew that this model of depending on free information was not a sustainable one. But it seems the day has arrived, especially with the recent drives on Wikipedia to build specialised knowledge editors. In the last few months, we have seen people in the FemTechNet project — an academic activist feminist project that seeks to remind us of the intersections of feminism and technology in network societies — carry out “Wikistorming”, where students are adding pages of women’s contribution to technologies on Wikipedia. More recently, medicine students at University of Chicago have taken to correcting and adding accurate information to Wikipedia, which is often a source of health information.

Both of these are fantastic efforts to add to the platform that was the underdog that overthrew the mammoth encyclopaedia like The Encyclopaedia Britannica. We hope more specialised users in different locations, fields, disciplines and languages continue to edit and contribute to Wikipedia. However, it is also a signal that the generalist information producer is on the decline. We are transitioning into a new age, where people are going to need rewards, incentives and benefits for performing information transactions on the web. The user is no longer going to be available for free labour, and it is time we started thinking of “paid usership”.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-february-18-2014-nishant-shah-will-you-be-paid-to-post-a-picture

WikiWars: Programme - pdf

nishant — 2010-01-06T10:15:46Z

The WikiWars programme, 12th, 13th January - PDF document P.S. Thanks, A. Kumaran, for making this better formatted copy

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/uploads/wikiwarsprog1

WikiWars: Programme

nishant — 2010-01-05T17:37:43Z

The programme for Wikiwars, 12th, 13th January - MS Office document

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

Wikiwars: 12th, 13th January, Bangalore

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:09Z

The Centre for Internet and Society and the Institute of Network Cultures brought together a critical range of scholars, academicians, practitioners, artists and researchers to inquire into the new conditions which emerge with the rise of Wikipedia. The first of two events, WikiWars was the beginning of a knowledge network that shall contribute to a reader titled Critical Point of View, becoming the first resource tool to engage creatively and fruitfully with the diverse range of questions that surround Wikipedia.

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

The first event, titled WikiWars is scheduled on the 12th and 13th of January 2010. This is the registration page for interested participants who want to join us in the discussions at the WikiWars.

For Event Details look here

For information on Programme, Panels, participants and presentation titles, look here (MS Office) or here (PDF document)

For more details on WikiWars and CPOV, look here

We have, apart from the 40 presenters, 45 seats available for interested participants to join the discussions.

There are no fees for registration, but the seats are limited, available only on first come first serve basis and not expandable.

To register, email us on : nishant@cis-india.org

Registrations closes: 10th January, 12:00 midnight, Indian Time.

Make sure you give us the following information in your registration request: Name, Email address, Cell phone/contact number, Institutional affiliation, Position/Designation, Areas of interest.

We will publish the final list of registered participants on the 11th of January 2010. Registered participants will be provided with a Registration kit and lunch & refreshments during the event.

Please Note: We might not be able to accommodate participants who turn up at the venue without prior registration due to logistical constraints.

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

WikiWars - A report

nishant — 2010-10-06T11:21:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and the Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, hosted WikiWars – an international event that brought together scholars, researchers, academics, artists and practitioners from various disciplines, to discuss the emergence and growth of Wikipedia and what it means for the information societies we inhabit. With participants from 15 countries making presentations about Wikipedia and the knowledge ecology within which it exists, the event saw a vigorous set of debates and discussions as questions about education, pedagogy, language, access, geography, resistance, art and subversion were raised by the presenters. The 2 day event marked the beginning of the process that hopes to produce the first critical reader – Critical Point of View (CPOV) - that collects key resources for research and inquiry around Wikipedia.

The debates around Wikipedia, the de facto dynamic knowledge production system online, are very fairly divided into two competing camps. There is a group of people who swear by Wikipedia – celebrating its democratic processes of knowledge production, ease of access, and the de-canonisation of knowledge to produce the ‘WikiWay’; And then there is a group of people who swear at Wikipedia – raising concerns over authenticity, reliability, vulgarisation of knowledge and the de-hierarchisation of knowledge systems that Wikipedia seems to embody. The debates between the two groups are often passionate and situated in wildly speculative and often personal interests and investments in Wikipedia and the Web 2.0 Information Revolution that it seems to be a symptom of. The debates also play out in various international locations, most of them relying on personal anecdotes, experiences and half hearted data that does not stand the tests of rigour.

WikiWars, then, concentrated on things which are about Wikipedia but also not about Wikipedia. In many ways, as Geert Lovink, the Director of INC suggested, WikiWars was a recognition of the fact that Wikipedia has come of age and can now be systematically and philosophically examined as a work in progress that has long-term implications about our future. It was the ambition of the Editorial team (consisting of Geert Lovink, Sabine Nerdeer, Nathaniel Tkacz, Johanna Niyesito, Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah) to veer away from the recognised battle-lines drawn in, around and about Wikipedia, and instead examine the fault-lines that run under many of our assumptions, prejudices and imaginations of Wikipedia. And Wikiwars, through careful screening and invested interests, became one of the first platforms in the world to initiate a critical discourse on Wikipedia, seeking to engage with its histories, it contemporary manifestations and practices, and the futures that it seeks to inhabit.

The different presentations brought in located debates, theoretical and philosophical concepts and personal experiences to build frameworks that explain and contextualise Wikipedia as one of the most contested spaces online. The eight panels across two days dealt with four major thematic areas which need to be summarised in brief:

1. Education, Pedagogy and Knowledge: At the very basis of Wikipedia (and other structures like it) is the question of knowledge production, the possibility of using it as an educational tool and the potentials it has for introducing new pedagogies and learning practices in and outside of institutionalised education. Presenters from various disciplines engaged with these questions in interesting ways.

Usha Raman from Teacher Plus in Hyderabad, brought in the question of primary education, the need for teacher training programmes and the ways by which infrastructure development needs to be thought through when talking of Wikipedia and education in the Indian context. The necessity of locating Wikipedia in a much larger debates on learning were also echoed by Noopur Rawal and Srikeit Tadepalli, students from Christ University who brought their experience of Wikipedia and the expectations from classroom education and learning in their presentation.

In the same field, but from a different approach, a panel examined Wikipedia as a site to critique Western Knowledge production systems. Stian Haklev and Johanna Niyesito concentrated on the questions of language and knowledge production. Haklev made an impassioned argument deconstructing the utopian idea of Wikipedia’s multilingual dreams and instead made a call for recognising the black-holes when it comes to non-English production and consumption of knowledge on Wikipedia. He further explored the implications that linguistic imbalance has on the very governance structure of Wikipedia and its communities. Niyesito challenged the ‘global’ and ‘cosmopolitan’ image that Wikipedia has built for itself and posited the idea of Wikipedia as a translingual space where different languages and cultures negotiate common understandings and processes of producing knowledge. HanTeng Liao explored knowledge production through the market economy of key-words to see how the linguistic biases of search engines that harvest these keywords, determines the access and visibility of different Wikipedia pages.

Resistance, Diversity and Representation: While these questions were present as undercurrents to most of the presentations at WikWars, they were perhaps most fiercely present in the debates that followed the presentations by Eric Ilya Lee (Academia Sinica, Taiwan), YiPing Tsou (National Central University, Taiwan), William Beutler and Eric Zimmerman (IDC, Israel).

For Lee and Tsou, the responses to the Chinese language Wikipedia from popular media and personal experiences, were demonstrative of the fact that the lack of diverse means of representation and participation lead to a strong resistance of Wikipedia in Taiwan. Beutler looked at the heavily contested editorial space and policies of Wikipedia to make a point about how lack of effective governance systems based on mutual tolerance and diversity lead to stressful and often traumatic experiences for users who might not be represented through the mainstream ideas and ideologies of an English speaking populace.

Zimmerman took a startling position, calling for a regime of attribution and dissolving the pseudonymous structures of knowledge production in Wikipedia in order to build designs of trust and verification into the system, thus leading to better and more credible research tools and representations.

The tone of debates was altered with presentations by Mark Graham (Oxford Research Institute) and the team of artists Nathaniel Stern and Scott Kildal, the team responsible for the Wikipedia Art Project. Graham showed the complexity of visualising space and how the production of space (or physical geography) on Wikipedia often reflects the virtual density of access and presence online. Showing a nuanced set of images that help mapping these new geographies for a richer diversity and representation, Graham showed how systems like Wikipedia ‘cannot know what they cannot know’ despite the reliance on the wisdom of crowds.

Stern and Kildall, in giving an account of their project which used Wikipedia’s policies to undermine and challenge it, show how the institutionalisation of a space and its ‘canonisation’ can quickly lead to a new set of problems where the space becomes the very thing it had set itself against.

3. Politics of Free, Open and Exclusion: The rhetoric of free and open have been built into all popular discourses around Wikipedia. However, the presentations at WikiWars showed that these need to be taken with at least a pinch of salt and further examined for what they signify. Alok Nandi of Architempo made a dramatic and creative revisit of these guiding principles of Wikipedia. He showed how an inquiry into rituals of participation, distortion and access on Wikipedia can promote, not merely looking at the politics of exclusion but also at the politics of inclusion and the problems therein.

Dror Kamir’s evocative narrative of ‘Your side, my side and Wikipedia’ illustrated how the question of boundaries, of knowledges, of facts and truths get distorted as language, community, nationality, etc. come into play in recording and documenting knowledge on Wikipedia. Concentrating on conflict zones in the Middle East, he talked about the lack and perhaps the impossibility of producing neutrality the way in which Wikipedia demands of its users. These ideas resonated with the propositions that ShunLing Chen from Harvard had floated in the opening panel to explore the ‘boundary work’ of Wikipedia and how it defines and produces itself in relation to external forces and controversies. These discussions on the politics of presence, absence, inclusion and exclusion were further layered by presentations by Linda Gross, Elad Weider, Heather Ford and Nathaniel Tkacz who produced a critique of the Free and Open, taking a cautionary step away from accepting these as inherently good.

While Gross explored the structure of egalitarianism that Wikipedia builds for itself, Ford presented an analysis of the licensing regimes of the knowledge produced within Wikipedia and the problems they pose to traditional knowledges and non-mainstream information. Weider, trained as a lawyer, critiqued the neo-liberal discourse around Wikipedia and tried to correlate the communities with markets. Tkacz’s historical overview of Free and Open, resulted in a compelling inquiry into the very structures that inform the shape and functioning of objects like Wikipedia.

Twitter: #WikiWars http://twitter.com/wikiwars and www.twitter.com/jackerhack/wikiwars

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30479432@N03/sets/72157623193288710/

CPOV blog : http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/cpov/

The videos fom the Wikiwars event are embedded below:

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

Why your Facebook Stalker is Not the Real Problem

nishant — 2012-03-21T05:02:16Z

We live in networked conditions. This is a statement that can now be taken at face-value, and immediately explains our highly connected, inter-meshed environments finds Nishant Shah in this article published in FirstPost on March 20, 2012.

Especially within the digital world, the World Wide Web has become synonymous with social networking systems, where increasingly all our access, communication and interaction is located within a series of interconnected networks.

From the imagination of the web as a complex network, we have evolved to looking at the web as facilitating networks where different relationships, transactions and connections can be mapped and managed. This is why we often have romantic imaginations of networks as free, open, collaborative, shared spaces of interaction and expression.

However, we have reached a stage where this idea of a network as a liberatory space is under threat. Even as I write this, Internet Service Providers are now planning to set up sophisticated, automated systems that will do a deep-spy on your data transfer to see if you are sharing files (sometimes also called piracy) using the Internet.

These systems will now keep track of all your digital transactions and will monitor what you consume, who you talk to and determine whether you are a good ethical subject who is only using the Internet in ways that the powers to be want you to.

For me, this particular networked condition of being constantly monitored and watched is scary. And it surprises me that this invasive process is less in public attention than Google’s recently changed privacy policies or the TOS-in-progress nature of privacy on Facebook.

This is because the ubiquitous presences of networks in our lives have made them transparent to us – we do not think of the networks themselves as entities but as spaces where interactions with other objects is possible. Hence, if I ask you, right now, to name the top 5 entities that you interact with the most on Facebook, I am sure you will be able to name them. More probably than not, these top 5 entities with people that you have formed strong Facebook Friendships with.

In fact there are platforms designed to let you know who you are talking with most on your networks. Network influence measurement indices by services like Klout are able to tell you not only who you talk to but also what are your key areas of influence. This is a way by which the network becomes invisible to us. It hides the fact that the thing that talks to you the most on Facebook is Facebook itself.

The marketing of Facebook might tell you that you are talking to other human beings, but reality is that the network is more than the sum total of all human beings on the system. Just look at the amount of information Facebook produces on your behalf and to you. Notifications for adding friends, for liking people, for people writing to you, for people commenting on your walls and posts, form more than 50% of the information traffic on Facebook or social networking systems.

This information is produces and shared by scripts, coded bots, algorithmic applications, and non-human entities that not only support and sustain the network but are also significant members of the networks.

This is the actual networked condition – where the processes and entities that make the networks possible, produce an illusion of seamless communication and interaction, while performing and extraordinary amount of information and for you.

This blindness to our own ‘networkedness’ has crucial ramifications for our online activities because it makes us oblivious to questions of privacy, control, safety and trust. We have privacy settings to protect us from human entities on Facebook. There is very little concern about the non-human entities who store, distribute and use the data that we produce. If we don’t even know what these watchers are, how do we protect ourselves from being watched? What happens when between you and your ‘friend’, is a series of silent interceptors who are recording and using your data without your knowledge?

Being in a network is like being in a glass-house. We cannot see the walls and hence, we presume that we need our privacy from the other inhabitants of the same house. However, in that, we forget that the walls are watching, and that there are invisible watchers beyond the walls, who are in control.

It is time to make our networks visible again. It is time to realise that what we really need to be afraid of, on social networking systems, is the social network itself, and not the mythical stranger who wants to stalk us or that unwanted friend you want to exclude from your information sharing.

Privacy and safety are not merely compromised at the interface, where information might leak and travel into zones outside of your knowledge and control. The real questions of being safe are actually in the protocols and designs of the network itself.

We need to start looking at larger invasive policies exercises by the different invisible actors like the ISP, ICT ministries, corporate policies, design choices and architecture of interception that sustain the networks we so gladly embrace.

Nishant Shah is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society and recently edited a 4 volume book on youth, technology and change, titled ‘Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?’

Read this in FirstPost

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/facebook-stalker-is-not-real-problem

Why I’m not going to tell you about the dangers of apps like FaceApp

nishant — 2019-07-31T02:37:09Z

Concerns about privacy, aimed solely at users, are better directed at owners of digital infrastructure.

The article by Nishant Shah was published by Indian Express on July 28, 2019.

I want to write about our data, your security, and the ever-burning question of privacy and its discontent on the social web, all triggered by the viral FaceApp challenge. Timelines have been flooded by people using this free app to see what an AI thinks they will look like 20 years from now. And they haven’t stopped at just themselves. Their friends, their families, their pets, their favourite celebrities, and stars have all been morphed by this “free” Russian-made app, which takes data, overrides all consent, and shows your future old-face.

However, I know that by the time this column reaches you, you will not only have moved on from the viral seduction of FaceApp, but will also have been admonished by every critic, activist, advocate, and woke friend on Facebook, for trading your privacy and personal data to join the mass-sheep movement that we call social apps. You are either irritated by now about people lecturing you of the risks of using apps that exploit your digital footprint to manipulate your future behaviour, or you are shrugging it off as a trade-off that you are happy to make because you have “nothing to hide”.

Any alarm or pangs that you might have felt when you first read about the potential privacy vulnerability hidden in this app have long since been assuaged by the mindless scrolling through the thousands of pictures of your social circles ageing. If you are like me, perhaps, you have gone over to the dark side and laughed at the naiveté of people who talk of graceful ageing in the face of imminent climate collapse.

So I won’t talk to you about the danger of these apps and how you must be more careful with protecting your privacy. Because, the bottom-line is that you don’t care. And I don’t mean you, the individual reader. I mean the collective, Facebook-friends-forever you, that has long since stopped caring about what happens to things that we can’t see. Data Privacy indifference is not just a new normal, but alarmingly, even after the stunning expose of data-driven manipulation and AI regulation post the Cambridge Analytica revelations, it seems that we don’t care.

It is easy to blame the users — call them ignorant, label them indifferent, chastise them for not being digitally literate, call for awareness and outreach — but that is perhaps the easiest of the scapegoats. All the people who have been smugly announcing that they won’t use this app because they don’t want to feed the machine-learning beast with more of their private data, have largely been targeting individuals for their callous agnosticism when it comes to data sharing. However, what most of these responses fail to take into account is that the user has long since been installed in a condition of precarious data mining with no way out.

We can blame FaceApp, but we have to realise that every app, platform, service, device, institution and organization involved in the digital social web ecosystem has been primarily working as a data broker, selling us all without knowledge, but with consent. FaceApp is the flavour of the week, but it is merely following in the tradition of all our digital intermediaries who have now naturalised the system of capitalizing on our private data for profits. The woke bros can go around pointing fingers towards those who did use the app, but they must surely recognise the hypocrisy of using the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on their Android and iOSphones in order to perform their digital sapience. Because we might ban FaceApp, mount a scrutiny to evaluate the vulnerabilities, and help people avoid it, but FaceApp is just one in millions of data leaks that are built as the default in our digital deliriums.

To call the user ignorant or negligent is to conveniently abdicate the digital infrastructure owners and providers of their wilful, deliberate, and designed policies that compromise user data and privacy for gain. To put the onus of using this app and leaking data on to the user is to gloss over the fact that our laws and policies are woefully inadequate to protect the individual user against this continued data extraction, correlation, and consolidation. To laugh at the user who used an app for fun is to ignore the reality that these apps are verified, promoted, and shared without impunity because it is merely doing what the social web was designed for. So use FaceApp. Don’t use it. It doesn’t matter. Your individual actions are not to be blamed or celebrated. The only real change that can come in how we manage our data privacy is going to be in collective accountability of digital intermediaries and an active responsibility on the part of civil and political societies to step out from under their influence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-july-28-2019-why-i-am-not-going-to-tell-you-about-the-dangers-of-apps-like-face-app

Whose Change Is It Anyway? | DML2013

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:47:19Z

As a preparation for the DML conference, Nishant Shah had an interview with Howard Rheingold, a cyberculture pioneer, social media innovator, and author of "Smart Mobs. Nishant Shah is chair of 'Whose Change Is It Anyway? Futures, Youth, Technology And Citizen Action In The Global South (And The Rest Of The World)' track at DML2013. Here, he talks about shifts in citizen engagement in Indian politics and civics, and the underlying significance of these changes.

"More and more, you have young people who are trying to come together, not merely to express discontent, but actually take action so that they can build the kinds of futures they want to occupy."

The 2013 DML conference will be held in March 14-16, 2013 in Chicago, Illinois. The conference is supported by the MacArthur Foundation and organized by the Digital Media and Learning Research Hub located at the University of California's systemwide Humanities Research Institute at UC Irvine.

More details about the DML2013 Conference and the Call For Workshop/Panel/Paper Proposals can be found at the conference website: dml2013.dmlhub.net.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Whose Change is it Anyway?

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:56:47Z

This thought piece is an attempt to reflect critically on existing practices of “making change” and its implications for the future of citizen action in information and network societies. It observes that change is constantly and explicitly invoked at different stages in research, practice, and policy in relation to digital technologies, citizen action, and network societies.

The White Paper by Nishant Shah was published by Hivos recently.

However, we do not have adequate frameworks to address the idea of change. What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved? Whose change is it, anyway?

Drawing on the Hivos Knowledge Programme and on knowledge frameworks around youth, technology, and change from the last four years, this thought piece introduces new ways of defining, locating, and figuring change. In the process, it also helps understand the role that digital technologies play in shaping and amplifying our processes and practices of change, and to understand actors of change who are not necessarily confined to the category of “citizen”, which seems to be understood as the de facto agent of change in contemporary social upheavals, political uprisings, and cultural innovations.

Methodologically, this thought piece attempts to make three discursive interventions: It locates digital activism in historical trajectories, positing that digital activism has deep ties to traditional activism, when it comes to the core political cause. Simultaneously, it recognises that new modes of political engagement are demanding and producing novel practices and introducing new actors and stakeholders. It looks at contemporary digital and network theories, but also draws on older philosophical lineages to discuss the crises that we seek to address. It tries to interject these abstractions and theoretical frameworks back into the field by producing two case studies that show how engagement with these questions might help us reflect critically on our past practices and knowledge as well as on visions for and speculations about the future, and how these shape contemporary network societies. It builds a theoretical framework based on knowledge gleaned from conversations, interviews, and on-the-ground action with different groups and communities in emerging information societies, and integrates with new critical theory to build an interdisciplinary and accessible framework that seeks to inform research, development-based interventions, and policy structures at the intersection of digital technologies, citizen action, and change by introducing questions around change into existing discourse.

Click to download the full White Paper here (PDF, 321 Kb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway

Who’s that Friend?

nishant — 2012-11-04T06:46:10Z

If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express and in the Financial Express on October 7, 2012.

We have all received messages of this order — if not exactly this much silliness — on the various social networks that we belong to. These are messages that warn us that our security is breached, our data is unsafe, that our transactions are public, and all the sensitive information we have trusted to the different platforms on the Web, is now up for grabs.

The best of us have fallen prey to such messages of alarm, and have “shared”, “liked”, or “retweeted” them, and in retrospect felt foolish when we realised that the message was just a hoax. For those of us who are savvy with the ways of the Web, even when we are sending these messages, there is an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, but we do it nevertheless, joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists who make this world enchanting and mysterious in its quotidian banality. These messages are common, harmless and habit-forming — they spread, even when we recognise that they are not completely plausible — because we have formed habits online, which we immediately perform, before rational thought or reason sets in.

At a recent Thought Marathon on “Habits of Living”, supported by Brown University and organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, a handful of scholars, artists, practitioners and researchers examined how such habits shape the world of the digital. One of the concerns about such habits of viral dissemination is about the design of trust and the nature of friendship in our social networking systems. How do you trust information online? What is the information that uses you as a conduit, disseminating through you into the network? What role do we play in keeping these messages alive, by spreading them, by talking about them, by retracting and discussing them, giving them more value than they could muster on their own?

At the centre of all these questions is the idea of proximity, intimacy and friendship. Within the social Web, we have all become “friends”. The six degrees of separation have fallen — every lurker is a potential friend, just waiting to be authenticated by a system, tagged in a photo, connected by a weak link of interest or closeness. These friends are our social safety nets on the Net. They give us a sense of belonging and safety when we are committing our intensely personal and private data on the publically private digital platforms. Despite knowing that information we produce online is going to be archived in servers over which we have no control, in forms and formats that will outlive our social relations and indeed, our very lives, we constantly produce data that quantifies and marks our social relationships. We commit secrets and private thoughts to “friends” in the network.

However, friendship within the social network is a non-reciprocal one-way transmission of secrets. The covenant of digital friendship on Facebook is that we pass on a secret to a friend, knowing well, that the act of passing on the secret expects a betrayal of that secret. The information that we submit to somebody to show our trust, has already been witnessed, stored, archived and mapped by the code and algorithms that make that system. Which is why, we live in constant fear of our data being compromised by the “system” which is both vulnerable and fragile. Which is why, we are continually bombarded by warnings of glitches in the matrix, outside of our control, reminding us of the fearful precariousness of being on the Web.

And yet, the trolling messages and the way they spread, remind us that in the system, it is the “friend” who is invariably the person who puts us in danger. There are almost no documented cases of a system endangering the person who shares information on the social Web. The leak in the network is always done through a human actor — somebody who is close to us, somebody who we trust — who invariably passes on that secret to another “friend” in the network. Similarly, the chances of your machine getting infected by a random virus by a stranger are very low. The people who infect you are those you trust, because you receive information from them without questioning it. An attachment in the email, a link to a dodgy site, instructions asking for personal details are all safe because we are naturally suspicious of strangers bearing candy. But when these questions come from our “friends”, we drop our guards and accept viruses, share personal data, give out compromising pictures, putting ourselves in conditions of threat.

This is the fundamental paradox of the social Web — that those who we trust, are generally the primary sources who put us in danger, and yet, because we think of them as “friends”, we continue to trust them, while remaining suspicious of the systems that are far more benign than the humans in the network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend

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

WhatsApps with fireworks, apps with diyas: Why Diwali needs to go beyond digital

nishant — 2015-11-23T13:27:37Z

The idea of a 'digital' Diwali reduces our social relationships to a ledger of give and take. The last fortnight, I have been bombarded with advertisements selling the idea of a “Digital Diwali”. We have become so used to the idea that everything that is digital is modern, better and more efficient.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 22, 2015.

I have WhatsApp messages with exploding fireworks, singing greeting cards that chant mystic sounding messages, an app that turns my smartphone into a flickering diya, another app that remotely controls the imitation LED candles on my windows, an invitation to Skype in for a puja at a friend’s house 3,000 km away, and the surfeit of last minute shopping deals, each one offering a dhamaka of discounts.

However, to me, the digitality of Diwali is beyond the surface level of seductive screens and one-click shopping, or messages of love and apps of light. Think of Diwali as sharing the fundamental logic that governs the digital — the logic of counting. As we explode with joy this festive season, we count our blessings, our loved ones, the gifts and presents that we exchange. If we are on the new Fitbit trend, we count the calories we consume and burn as we make our way through parties where it is important to see and be seen, compare and contrast, connect with all the people who could be thought of as friends, followers, connectors, or connections.

While there is no denying that there is a sociality that the festival brings in, there is also a cruel algebra of counting that comes along with it. It is no surprise that as we celebrate the victory of good over evil and right over wrong, we also simultaneously bow our heads to the goddess of wealth in this season.

Look beyond the glossy surface of Diwali festivities, and you realise that it is exactly like the digital. Digital is about counting. It is right there in the name — digits refers to numbers. Or digits refer to fingers — these counting appendages which we can manipulate and flex in order to achieve desired results. At the core of digital systems is the logic of counting, and counting, as anybody will tell us, is not a benign process. What gets counted, gets accounted for, thus producing a ledger of give and take which often becomes the measure of our social relationships.

I remember, as a child, my mother meticulously making a note of every gift or envelope filled with money that ever came our way from the relatives, so that there would be precise and exact reciprocation. I am certain that there is now an app which can keep a track of these exchanges. I am not suggesting that these occasions of gifting are merely mercenary, but they are embodiments of finely calibrated values and worth of relationships defined by proximity, intimacy, hierarchy and distance. The digital produces and works on a similar algorithm, which is often as inscrutable and opaque as the unspoken codes of the Diwali ledger.

There is something else that happens with counting. The only things that can have value are things that have value. I don’t know which ledger counts the coming together of my very distributed family for an evening of chatting, talking, sharing lives and laughter. I don’t know how anybody would reciprocate that one late night when a cousin came to our home and spent hours with my younger brother making a rangoli to surprise the rest of us. I have no idea how they will ever reciprocate gifts that one of the younger kids made at school for all the members of the family.

Diwali is about the things, but like the digital system, these are things that cannot be counted. And within the digital system, things that cannot be counted are things that get discounted. They become unimportant. They become noise, or rubbish. Our social networks are counting systems that might notice the low frequency of my connections with my extended family but they cannot quantify the joy I hear in the voice of my grandmother when I call her from a different time-zone to catch up with her. Digital systems can only deal with things with value and not their worth.

I do want to remind myself that there is more to this occasion than merely counting. And for once, I want to go beyond the digital, where my memories of the past and the expectations of the future are not shaped by the digital systems of counting and quantifying. Instead, I want Diwali to be analogue. I shall still be mediating my collectivity with the promises of connectivity, but I want to think of this moment as beyond the logics and logistics of counting that codify our social transactions and take such a central location in our personal functioning. This Diwali, I am rooting for a post-digital Diwali, that accounts for all those things that cannot be counted, but are sometimes the only things that really count.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-indian-express-nishant-shah-november-22-2015-whatsapps-with-fireworks-apps-with-diyas-why-diwali-needs-to-go-beyond-digital