Centre for Internet and Society

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SmartThings (Conceptualizing Internet/Digital Technologies in the Age of "Smartness")

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ravi Shukla and Bharath Palavalli.

Session

With the increasing focus on making things - devices, services, cities, even planets - smart, there is a need to engage with the idea of smartness. What constitutes it? Who decides? Is there a need to re-conceptualize our understanding of these increasingly pervasive technologies and if so, how do we begin to do so?

The session engages with two inter-related questions - a) What constitutes a smart city? and b) How can we approach internet/digital technologies as enablers of basic, urban public services?

Plan

The session is broken up into three sections of half an hour each.

Content Overview

The first section involves the presentation of the findings of a survey across different social groups of what constitutes a "smart city". This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The second section involves presenting the findings of a pilot project using SMS technology as an enabler for public services within a community. This is followed by a Q & A session with the audience.

The third section involves asking people in the audience to list 5 characteristics that constitute (or in some cases, *don't* constitute) public services in a "smart" city. Depending on the size of the audience, either these responses can be collected individually or it can be broken into groups of 3-5 people. The responses are then collected and shared with the audience - either during the session (if time allows) or over email/website.

Expected Outcomes

At the end of the session we expect a set of responses on what characterizes public services in a "smart" city. These are seen as helping in drawing out a research/practice agenda on how internet/digital technologies may act as enablers of public services.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-smartthings

Consultation on 'Digital Futures of Indian Languages'

sumandro — 2016-01-15T06:10:57Z

A consultation on 'digital futures of Indian languages' will be held at the CIS office in Bangalore on December 12, 2015, to generate ideas and structure the Indian languages focus area of the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF). It is being led by Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), and Tanveer Hasan, A2K programme at CIS; and is supported by CDIF.

A Consultation to Generate Ideas for the CSCS Digital Innovation Fund (CDIF)

We at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Centre for Indian Languages in Higher Education, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai; and Access to Knowledge Programme, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, have between us more than a decade-long experience in the field of Indian languages for higher education and Indic language computing. Together we have, over the past ten years, produced new research and incubated innovative pilot projects to stimulate the use of Indian languages in higher education, especially in the context of a widening linguistic divide in that sphere.

As a new phase in this process, we would like to explore the possible digital futures of Indian languages. Already, there have been many interesting but sporadic attempts at digitization of Indian language text resources and development of software for translation between Indian languages and a host of Indian language support platforms for web-based services. While this momentum is impressive, a lot more remains to be done, when seen against the backdrop of the surging demand for Indian language computational tools, especially those with potential for knowledge-use, that is, tools which could be used by students, teachers, researchers, media analysts, self-learners, bibliographers, librarians, archivists, collectors and the public at large.

The CSCS Digital Innovation Fund is looking to help set up new platforms that aid in generating, processing and making available a wide range of born-digital content. Under the CDIF, the Indian Languages initiative will support the development of new technological aids, apps, software programmes, websites, DYI digitisation devices, and any other project which will enrich the digital use of Indian languages.

We are organising this national consultation with the intention of bringing together people who have been or would like to be involved in such initiatives. We expect each participant to make a short 10-15 minute presentation on an idea they would like to develop, to take part in the general discussions, and to offer feedback to other speakers. We hope to learn from these conversations so that our own research and initiative development will benefit from the inputs as also to contribute to the conversation in such a way that isolated practices, innovations and opportunities are given a platform for greater generalisation and scalability.

- Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar AP, and Tanveer Hasan

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-futures-of-indian-languages-2015

FOV Podcast - Data, People, and Smart Cities

sumandro — 2015-12-02T07:54:26Z

For the second part of the Smart City podcast series, Sruthi Krishnan and Harsha K from Fields of View spoke with Sumandro Chattapadhyay on data, people, and smart cities. Here is the podcast. We are grateful to Fields of View for producing and sharing this recording.

Podcast

If the audio player is not visible above, please download the MP3 file.

Source: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/2015/11/1126/.

Smart Cities podcast series: http://blog.fieldsofview.in/category/smartcitiespodcast/.

Fields of View

Issues in urban systems and public safety and security are often referred to as ‘wicked problems’. Such problems require a diverse set of actors to come together and collaborate. We need government, academia, industry, and civil society to question, debate, discuss, and ideate together. In short, we need a dialogue in diversity. Our goal at Fields of View is to design spaces to enable such dialogues using games and simulations – tools based on research at the intersection of social sciences, art, and technology.

Website: http://fieldsofview.in/.

Twitter: @fovlabs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/fov-podcast-data-people-and-smart-cities

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #LiterarySpaces (Online Literary Spaces in India)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:59:25Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by P.P. Sneha and Arup Chatterjee.

Session

The last decade has seen a slow but steady emergence of online literary spaces in India, marked by the ubiquitous nature of the internet and digital technologies, growing mobile phone penetration and increased access to devices such as tablets and e-readers. By literary spaces we refer to online journals, magazines and blogs, as well as reading groups and discussion spaces focused on writing in English and Indian languages. These range from those exclusively focusing on contemporary literature to others that feature writing on news, culture and arts. These spaces raise some intriguing questions about the growth a new online or digital literary culture, which may be mapped through the evolution of reading and writing practices as very explicitly technologized practices, and the changes in the notion of text and textuality, scholarship and pedagogy, among other things.

Some examples of such spaces that have come up in the recent years are The Little Magazine [1], Muse India [2], Kritya [3], Coldnoon: Travel Poetics [4], Kindle [5], Almost Island [6], The Indian Quarterly [7] and among several others. Many of these journals have both an online and print presence, while some are purely online and seek to reach a diverse audience featuring different genres of writing. While many carry an eclectic mix of creative and critical writing, perceptions about readership on the internet often dictate the form and manner of writing that is featured. The much anticipated and debated ‘disappearance’ of long form writing is one of the questions that may be asked of the emergence of these literary journals, which have in some way re-imagined this form in the digital sphere and have been instrumental in its growth. So even as there are books on twitterature [8], there are interesting ways in which online literary journals have tried to define the space of contemporary writing on the internet in India.

Plan

This panel discussion proposes to examine this phenomenon of the growth of online literary journals to understand the imagination of the ‘digital’ in their practices of writing and publication, whether as medium, content or context, as a way to explore how writing and reading practices today have been shaped by these changes. This also includes questions on methods of literary analysis that may have changed with the advent of the digital, and from a broader perspective, the production of literary scholarship and pedagogy in India. Some questions that could be points of discussion are as follows:

What is the pedagogical role, if any of digital/online journals? Are they simply cost-effective modes of production of knowledge or are they indicative of some other form discrimination? Perhaps a discrimination between what gets read and what does not? Is a voluminous archive of nineteenth century writings of the same pedagogical merit as a list of 100 Hollywood romantic comedies? If the former is arguably much more educational, why then is the latter the source of the greatest traffic? Is pedagogy then a misnomer, and a non-entity in the world of online magazines?
Can the rise of online magazines be related with the rise of print culture and the subsequent rise of the novel? The novel was educational and, while English was still a very evolving language in the 17th and 18th centuries, the form helped both shape the language and educate the masses, bourgeoisie, and the aristocracy about the nuances of the still-nascent English language. Can a similar function be said to have been fulfilled by online journals? Or have they failed in playing this radical role of disseminating new language and new vocabulary, which is required to articulate new modes and conflicts within modernity--sexualities, queerness, televised elections, middle-eastern (Syrian, Palestinian, Israeli, Iraqi) mayhem in times of democracy, globalization, urbanization, travel, genocide, partition, terrorism, and so on? Are there any exceptions among the journals in being able to somehow fulfil the criteria of engendering a new language? What are the examples, if any? How popular are they?
Is online literature less literary than print? Is it more amenable to news, while print continues to be literary? Or is this only a misconception? Is online literature prone to non-serious, or populist sources of pedagogy, which serve more to titillate through trolling, humour, half-baked information, gossip, or is it playing a serious role too in portions? Apart from those newspapers and journals/magazines which also have print components, which are possibly the portals that create viable, meritorious, and universal categories of knowledge? Or, invocation of 'merit' and 'universal' essentially a flawed mechanism to judge online literatures?

Addressing some of above questions through a study of two or more online journals, this session will attempt to open them up to a broader discussion on the nature and growth of an online literary culture in India, and the need for and significance of research in this area.

Readings

None.

Notes

[1] See: http://www.littlemag.com/.

[2] See: http://www.museindia.com/.

[3] See: http://www.kritya.in/.

[4] See: http://coldnoon.com/.

[5] See: http://kindlemag.in/.

[6] See: http://almostisland.com/.

[7] See: http://indianquarterly.com/.

[8] See: http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/307055/twitterature-by-alexander-aciman/9780143117322/.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-literaryspaces

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptiveTransport (Aggregators, Ownership, Tracking, Space, Internet Models)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:00:57Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Srinivas Kodali and William F. Stafford Jr.

Session

Transportation has been seeing disruptions through Internet aggregators using complex models which nobody understands in detail. This is primarily being seen in the space of urban transport, but is not limited to them alone. 1960`s saw disruptions in airline industry when each airline was fighting for it's own space in flight reservations and aggregations. This disruptive trend is now being observed globally in other transport modes. Aggregators are playing an important role in transporting people and disrupting markets globally. Internet Models are varying within aggregators who are not limiting themselves to ticket reservation, but are also providing information about the availability of transportation options. With increasing demand and surge pricing taking up the market, what is the role of the state. What are the ownership rights of an aggregator? What are licensing/lease models of a provider? What about un-fair practices and consumer rights? What forms of labour and regulation are imagined? What is the role of state run aggregators like IRCTC in this changing landscape?

Many of the platforms that have been created, primarily in the beginning concerning tracking or making complaints, were accessed through websites and have since been migrated either to a combined website/ app structure, or wholly to smartphone apps. This raises interesting and important questions concerning the imagination of an increased reliability and accesibility of services, as well as a power to hold public institutions accountable, as they relate to the question of access to these technologies and the habits of their use, especially demographically and linked to class.

Furthermore, both the near and far future promise an reworking of the internet as a system with which commuters and others interface to consume or deliver a service, to transport as one part of a mobility ecosystem, which is currently being tooled (both in regulatory frameworks and industrial planning) as a microcosm of the internet of things. With internet being connected to personal transport at every intersection of the road, what is the scope of privacy and accountability, the role of encryption layer and also the importance of governance in the fragile/disrupting space. How will the internet impact personal transport of citizens and the economy? Cashless payments, driver-less cars, surge-congestion pricing with disruptive internet models need regulation before they over-run and create chaos with the system.

Plan

The session will focus on Delhi as a case study.

Discussants will present their current work around these questions, and then open a discussion among those present on the issues raised therein.

The first discussant will present on the changing architecture of the auto-rickshaw meter as a regulatory platform, from the recent introduction of GPS to the creation of various surveillance and business models which either exploit its native GPS or duplicate and substitute it through the use of smartphones, and the folding of autos into the emerging e-hailing environment and the possible implications of changes being sought in the regulatory framework for connected vehicles. These include technological treatments of questions of class, trust and accountability, as well as significant policy and material changes in the classification of what is owned, by whom, and its conditions of transfer.

Srinivas will continue the presentation on transport data by showing use cases and potential harms about the data. How big data is changing the landscape of transportation systems and privacy concerns with the future of autonomous vehicles and intelligent traffic management systems. Data driven decisions are a big concern when data can also be used to lie at a scale. Data ownership and rights are a challenge the state and the citizen need to think about before forcibly submitting data.

The discussion will be primarily around:

Digital Ownership and Physical Ownership
Scope of Internet Governance on Aggregators
Pricing Models and Service Availability
Future of On-Demand Transportation Services vs Public Transportation

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-disruptivetransport

Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:56:36Z

This book marks the beginning of an interdisciplinary artistic project, Silicon Plateau, the scope of which is to observe how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Silicon Plateau is a collaboration between T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Volume 1 has been developed in collaboration with or-bits.com.

For us this series has a two-fold core. One the one side, there is the city of Bangalore, the trigger for various reflections about the way in which technology (old or emerging, as a service or as infrastructure) informs the socio-cultural and political environment; a city that is fascinating to us not just because we are located here but also for its characteristic fast-paced development shaped by the IT-boom and related industries. On the other side, there are the arts and creative thinking, for us the languages, lenses and methods to be used for interpreting technological developments and discussing their role and impact in the present time.

Our hope is that of building a series based on tangible accounts revolving around the unresolved complexities inherent to the intermingling of the arts, technology and society, and in the context of local histories and occurrences rather than of global narratives and mass media constructs. Stories that for our audience, we hope, will be those of the encounters—fortuitous, anticipated or even inconvenient—that a wide variety of contributors will have had with this fascinating city.

— Marialaura Ghidini and Tara Kelton

High-resolution PDF: Download (31.8 MB)

Low-resolution PDF: Download (4.7 MB)

T.A.J. Residency & SKE Projects: Website

or-bits.com: Website

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/silicon-plateau-vol-1

Launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2015-11-26T04:32:41Z

Please join us on Friday, November 27, 2015 at 6.30 pm for the book launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1.

Born from a collaboration with or-bits.com and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Silicon Plateau is the first volume of a publishing series aimed at observing how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Guided by our belief in the importance of understanding technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, Silicon Plateau presents observations emerging from the personal experiences and perspectives of a variety of contemporary artists, writers and researchers, national and international, who either live in or have spent a period of time in the city, or have just crossed paths with its communities.

Silicon Plateau Vol–1 features works by Abhishek Hazra, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Achal Prabhala, Sunita Prasad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Renuka Rajiv, Anja Gollor & Mirko Merkel, and Christoph Schäfer.

VENUE: T.A.J. Residency, No. 21 (New No. 53), 2nd Cross, Wheeler Road Extension, Cooke Town, Bangalore, 560084.

PLEASE NOTE: Coming from Pottery road up to Wheeler Road Extension there are three roads called 2nd Cross. Take the third one on the right-hand side, just after D'Costa Café. The road is also marked with a blue sign for CCBI. Also note that our building does not have parking.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/launch-of-silicon-plateau-vol-1

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalLiteraciesAtTheMargins

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:20:26Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Aakash Solanki, Sandeep Mertia, and Rashmi M.

Session

The session intends to initiate a discussion on digital literacies in the wake of ‘Digital India’ programme drawing on the empirical insights from three different field situations. The discussion will be anchored in the social and material context of Digital India but will not be limited to it. The questions we raise in this specific context may be extended to understand the current conceptual as well as practical deployment of many ICT4D programmes as envisioned by both government and non-government actors. The idea of digital literacy is central to both the conceptualization and the execution of such programmes, and the actors in charge work with their own understanding of the context and needs of the people they aim to empower. There have been very few attempts to systematically understand the concept of digital literacy which leave much scope for either lenient contextual interpretations or context insensitive one-size-fits-all approach towards technological interventions. This session is an effort to begin one such discussion which we hope will refine the prevalent understanding of digital literacy/literacies in India.

From a glance at the structure of Digital India programme, it is apparent that the programme is designed to achieve digital inclusion and is primarily directed towards the digitally marginalized in spite of having a more comprehensive agenda. The schemes such as National Digital Literacy Mission (NDLM) and the way they are conceived are indexical of the kind of target groups which the programme plans to address. A key concern for us is to think through the mismatches between the frameworks of the digital literacy initiatives and the local socio-technical contexts which we observed in our field sites. The objective of the session is not as much to arrive at the definitional fixity of the concept of digital literacy as it is to complicate and problematize the prevalent definitions of digital literacy implicit in both visualization and execution of such initiatives. We plan to meet this objective through empirical insights we have on three different field sites.

The session will also focus on certain methodological questions that might help us better understand digital literacy. This part of the session addresses questions such as: how can we conceptually define digital literacy/literacies? What parameters should go into the measuring of digital literacy? How should we theoretically understand it – as technical skills or knowledge or some higher cognitive ability? How can we best pedagogically achieve it given the complexity of ground reality? The questions will be directed towards encouraging thought in this area rather than providing answers. The session will also try and discuss various kinds of policy and pedagogical documentation available on digital literacy and critically debate their conceptualization and execution by juxtaposing them against various uses of ICTs on the ground by specific groups of users. This part of the discussion will draw upon scholarly and other kinds of documentation available on the topic and use them to evaluate various government and corporate initiatives to achieve digital literacy in India.

Plan

In keeping with the spirit of the conference, the three discussants’ will try to put forth empirical insights from their respective field situations and frame nuanced research and discussion questions on digital literacies at the margins of techno-cultural capital and/or access. Further the discussion will be aided by specific readings and the insights drawn from them. The idea is to have a symmetrical, reciprocatory and anthropologically comparative conversation on questions of technology, materiality, access, meaning making, development and literacy, by moving back and forth between different fieldsites and interpretive frameworks.

Field Note I

The first discussant's work on social media use in rural Rajasthan discusses socio-technical changes instituted by the introduction of ICTs despite their developmental failures. He claims that these changes have been often viewed from technologically or socially deterministic positions and that there are significant empirical gaps between such technocratic discourses and the grassroots experiences of technology. There is a growing usage of social and digital media in rural areas where ICT4D and e-Governance pilot projects have failed to meet their goals. Based on an ethnographic study of ICTs in two villages of Rajasthan, his work aims to situate social and digital media in a complex rural society and media ecology using co-constructivist approach. Focusing on context sensitive meaning making of ICTs, it will seek to contribute to an empirically sound discourse on media, technology and rural society in India.

Field Note II

The second discussant's work on mobile phones and multimedia consumption among the digitally marginalized users in Bangalore brings into focus the popular usage of ICTs, specifically mobile phones, among the subaltern users. While such popular usage indicates a certain level of literacy already achieved by the digitally marginal groups by mere exposure and peer learning, it is not sufficient to do away with all kinds of guided training required to make such users participate in informationalized environments. Her observations on the mobile phone usage among the subaltern users in Bangalore problematize the notion of digital literacy and invite us to think about it as a more layered and stratified concept. They raise questions such as ‘what constitutes digital literacy?’ – some complex use of gadgets learnt by mere exposure and peer knowledge or an awareness about the social relevance of the technologies and knowledge about their appropriate deployment in different social contexts? While mere access and some nominal training might be helpful in equipping people with some knowledge about gadget-use, her study points out that such initiatives are far from achieving the right degree of digital literacy needed to make these people participate in new media ecologies. Thus it contends the claims of 1. Organic literacy attained by mere exposure and peer sharing of technological knowledge and 2. Literacy attained by current training programmes which might equip the digitally marginalized with knowledge of technological use but not necessarily inform them about the context relevant knowledge needed for their appropriate deployment.

Field Note III

The third discussant's work on e-governance initiatives in an Indian state plans to return the gaze on to the bureaucracy itself and takes the conversation from the margins back to the centre. His work moves away from the target groups generally alluded to in programs such as the NDLM. It takes into accounts the struggles, anxieties, hopes and promises of/for a bureaucracy in coming to terms with a gradual but seemingly eventual shift from paper work to digital paper work. The users in this case are staff members tasked by the higher-level bureaucracy-who have little or no clue about it themselves- to learn a new tool and migrate all paper work to the digital domain. Many of e-governance projects are spearheaded by corporate organizations, which in turn dictate the terms of the conversation on Digital Literacy even within the government. What impact does this have on how Digital Literacy is understood, articulated and executed in ICT4D programs within and without the government.

Readings

Terranova, Tiziana. 2004. Chapter 5: Communication Biopower, 131-157. Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. London: Pluto Press.

Mazzarella, William. 2010. Beautiful Balloon: the Digital Divide and the Charisma of New Media in India. American Ethnologist, 37(4), 783-804.

Smith, Richard Saumarez. 1985. Rule-by-Records and Rule-by-Reports: Complementary Aspects of the British Imperial Rule of Law. Contributions to Indian Sociology 19(1): 153–176.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitalliteraciesatthemargins

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalDesires

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:03:52Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.

Session

We propose to design the panel as a workshop with three paper presentations followed by an open discussion with the house exploring the key question of media objects‟ (in the form of film/film music/memes/gifs/trolls) changing relations with law; copyright and piracy having attained newer connotations in the age of media convergence. While we deal with the materiality of cinema in the new media moment, the session will open out debates on the mutability of media objects in a networked digital terrain ushered in by fast growing and cost-effective internet culture in urban India.

In terms of methodology the panel deploys media archaeology to trace the mutations that film culture has undergone in the digital age. The coexistence of the obsolete media copyright with its meme and its digitally re-mastered copy on torrent informs the research that the three papers involve. A certain engagement with the logic of informed/fan-cinephilic digital labour that unwittingly maintains and updates the algorithmic database of Web 2.0 services will run through the presentations. Along with archival research and interviews with professionals involved with online media companies and “users” who are now the "pirate/prosumer-cinephiles" of media objects, we will carry out extensive digital ethnography to map the chimera of digital territory that user traffic based internet culture in India helped produce.

The digital is a space of intervention: a space for the users to intervene and play with the material online. It is a constant form of participation underscoring a potential for democratic authorship. The definitive notion of authorship voices the overarching body of the state through its legal status. Thus copyright as a legal entity produces a discourse of power through this form of authorship. The contemporary medium or rather the multi-media constellation driven by internet culture in India produces an alternative discourse on authorship, complicating the notion of copyright and piracy at the same time. This charged terrain of (il)legality is also due to the nature of piracy in the digital domain, which does not exist in isolation but have now created bodies or spheres where it has been appropriated as a sub-cultural practice. The figure of the “pirate”/ the “troll”/ the “fan” and the “cinephile” now merges with the technologically enabled body of the user of new media who negotiates with the medium in multiple ways (and morphs it) and thereby touches all kinds of spaces within and outside the webspace. It has changed the physical scope of cinephilia as addressed in the paper "A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar," where the culture of networked sharing evolves from and further complicates physical stations. It has permeated into the body of film music in the paper "Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item numbers and the web", which interrogates the layers of user-based morphs that the text of a dance number in Bollywood undergoes in the culture of web based remixing and hacking. It changes the way protected materials like films circulate in the space designated as YouTube, marked by its ability to reproduce copyright materials without violating the law as the third paper titled "Online Streaming in the Era of Digital Cinephilia" points out; the logic of the obsolete license of old Hindi films which gains a new viral life on YouTube with its official upload vying with the multiple hacker-user uploads.

Thus the panel intends to explore the dizzying overlaps that produce this internet induced distinct zone of ambiguity that neither the law nor the state or the author can claim ownership over. The very embodiment of the material in the digital is in transition i.e. in a state of being morphedby the blurring of the identities of the multiple bodies at work at each moment. Through the three papers we intend to chart this transitional aesthetic sometimes contained and sometimes flowing out of the body of the media text onto the physical, technological and extra textual objects as well. The panel seeks to position this new world of media objects that overlap and form an uncontainable entity, seeking newer forms of negotiations with the older existing order. We seek to explore then what happens to the very essence of author(ity)ship when digital enters its domain.

Plan

A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar

With the changes technology has brought to contemporary life, cinephiles – for whom movies are a way of life, films and how they are experienced have undergone major changes. The classic cinephile, as the term was adopted in the 1960s has undergone a major change in the era of internet piracy. I will look at the way pirated films via torrent downloads are consumed by students in certain pockets in New Delhi especially around Mukherjee Nagar area. These students who come from the upwardly mobile Indian middle class families are engaged inpreparations of competitive exams to land a lucrative government job. Circumstances dictate that these students own a laptop to watch films but not a high speed internet connection. To fuel their cinephilic urge, they are dependent upon soft copy vendors of pirated films. These vendors are like a video library, the repository here being a laptop and a storage drive. These professional film pirates depend upon the p2p file sharing commonly referred as "torrent." DVD and Blu Rays released by official sources are ripped at a bigger size by certain uploaderswhich are downloaded by another one who rips it to an even smaller size, fit enough to be downloaded by pirates with a slower broadband till it reaches places like Mukherjee Nagar. Using this particular case study, where the world of online film piracy merges with a third world piracy domain, I plan to interrogate the logistics of a new kind of cinephilia and try and frame this particular form of informal circuit of media production and consumption into a coherent perspective.

Relevant websites: https://kat.cr, https://yts.la/, https://torrentfreak.com.

Relevant software: Handbrake, uTorrent / Deluge / Vuze.

Relevant reading: Treske, Andreas. The Inner Life of Video Spheres: Theory for the YouTube Generation. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013

Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item Numbers and the Web

The coming of new digital technologies has rendered the relationship of media objects’ with law extremely malleable and volatile. It urges us to rethink certain categories we have been working with, viz. piracy and copyright. The specific focus of the paper will be on item numbers’ relationship with changing technology and the law. The proprioceptive body being the central node of enquiry here: the law that affects the body that moves on screen and the body that is moved by the screen is made flexible in the digital age with Web 2.0’s unique design that spawns hackability and remixability. Through the registers of music licensing to YouTube, circulation of content offline as MP3 downloads in cheap mass storage devices, user generated morphed content related to item numbers (in the form of memes, GIFs, trolls, posters, tumblr blogs and listicles) spawned by amateur digital culture and remixing videos of film content the paper traces the gray zone between web based music piracy and its copyright rules. It will interrogate the moment when the entertainment industry has recognized the clear shift of its spectatorship from the older media to the more digital platforms and appropriates the contingency brought in by the algorithmic anxiety of Web 2.0 and its unique relationship with law and hence censorship regulations to innovate newer means of mass circulation and bypassing censorship.

Relevant content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2O2dBonBok.

Relevant user-traffic-oriented platforms: http://www.memegenerator.com, http://www.trolldekho.com, http://www.imgur.com, https://www.tumblr.com/.

Relevant curated online media platforms: ScoopWhoop, Buzzfeed India, blog.erosnow.com.

Online Streaming in the era of Digital Cinephilia

Digital piracy has allowed for certain democratization of film distribution and consumption through a parallel economy of piracy. The lack of control over these channels of distribution produces a blatant threat to the copyright and intellectual property rights that are quintessential to the mainstream culture of commercial film distribution. This paper will focus on the intersection of these two dichotomous cultures through the experience of watching old films via online streaming. The resurfacing of old films hosted by big corporations like Shemaroo, Venus and Ultra who began as film rights and video rights owners at one point host their old video content in a user generated space called youtube. The video content is a very specific form here. It is an obsolete entity, defined by its ambiguity with copyright that is able to make a legal transgression in order to circulate.

The circulation of the feature films in a web space that is primarily known for its clip culture also provides an interesting paradigm for the copyright material. The big corporate copyright floats in a culture of pirated experiences where the legal domain becomes a dizzying site of contradictions. Through this paper I will draw parallels between the history of these companies and their work in the field of film circulation and to the creation of a new form of cinephilia and its complicated relationship to the law. I will use a variety of archival sources, legal documents and discourses on online streaming to contextualize my argument.

Relevant websites: https://www.youtube.com/user/ShemarooEnt, https://www.youtube.com/user/VenusMovies, https://www.youtube.com/user/UltraMovieParlour

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #InternetMovements

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:04:11Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.

Session

Since its early days the Internet has been conceived in terms of both movement and landscape - from “cyberspace” to the “Information Superhighway” - and in popular perception is often viewed as a boundless space imagined in terms of limitless possibilities. Indeed, across our research fields, from digital media to performance and social activism, we find that the Internet is frequently perceived as a space of mobilisation: where moving bodies are remediated within online content; where the movement of images, ideas and bodies can occur freely, with the rapid transmission of the “viral”; and where movement(s) frequently spill over into physical geographies.

Yet increasingly the Internet is also a space of fractured and fragmented movement(s): of blockages and blockades, discontinuities and disappearances. Landscapes become territorialized and movement(s) confined or obstructed. On this basis, we propose an interdisciplinary discussion session around the theme of "#InternetMovement(s)". We ask how we can conceive of movement(s) in relation to the Internet in India, in terms of both mobility and immobility, fissure and flow.

To encourage fluidity, we propose to structure the session around three "nodes" rather than three separate research papers. Our nodes are as follows:

How can we conceive of movement(s) in relation to Internet research in India?
What are the forms that movement(s) take in our respective fields?
What "stop" or blocks" movement in these cases?

The three co-conveners will each prepare a 5-minute response to each of these nodes, based on our specific areas of research. At each nodal point we will then allow time for wider discussion, enabling inter-disciplinary discussion and flow to underpin the session.

We perceive the session to speak to the first of the conference’s core questions: “How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?”

Each of the three co-convenors is approaching this question in their own research, asking how online media and communications mediate, remediate and transform the fields of film-media, social activism, and performance. We also ask the corollary: what are the limits and impediments to those transformations or mediations? The following section outlines the co-convenors’ approaches in more detail.

Plan

Statement of Intent I

The internet increasingly impresses traces on nearly all media technologies everyday. The once stable film body, gets disaggregated into various new forms of loop videos, GIFS, photo-memes, as clips and stills from disparate films get extracted, re-edited, patched and re-moulded into new user-generated media material. Solitary moments and gestures from films (a menacing wink by Jack Nicholson from The Shining, a clap from Charles Kane, a tear from the Tin-Man in The Wizard of Oz) get completely unchained from the original narrative context and used as discrete independent communicative units (Kane’s a popular Birthday wish gesture, while Nicholson’s Is a common linguistic unit signifying playful flirtation.) One of the primary ontological pegs of cinema - movement, today becomes the center of urgent debate around the status of photographs, movement-image forms like GIFs, and traditional moving images as the basic configuring elements of contemporary cinema. Using the film-GIF form as its primary vector this paper opens up the category of ‘movement’ philosophically as well as a constituent form to understand cinema today within the context of India.

As the cinematic object disperses into thousands of fragments hurtling through innumerable new online contexts, questions related to stardom also get radically transformed. I will be investigating a particular site of cinematic re-instansiation - the recent Alok Nath meme phenomenon. Long relegated to the margins of films as the venerable Hindu middle class father, the ‘’Alok Nath is so sanskaari..’’ set off a viral maelstrom that suddenly recast his cinematic body and the memory of a whole host of films (the Suraj Barjatya Hindu joint-family films). The paper focus on questions around movement as a philosophical arena as well as radical new form re-inscribing the cinematic in hitherto unprecedented shapes today.

Statement of Intent II

An examination of social movements with digital components in India begs several questions: What forms do social movements take in the digital world? How do we conceptualise social movements using digital and physical evidence? How does the context of India – as a functioning democracy - allow or restrict digital and physical social movements and define what is an “acceptable” protest movement? Engaging with these questions demands an interdisciplinary perspective, and exploring the interplays between the physical and the digital in regard to social issue protest movements.

Movement in my particular research area is understood in two aspects: the physical mobilisation of individuals to protest against perceived grievances and the movement of information around specific issue areas. The physical movement of bodies in public places is intimately connected to flow of information throughout digital networks, generating entangled and complex interfaces between the digital and the physical and creating new imagined possibilities of the efficacy of social protest (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). Examining recent social movements in New Delhi allows us to explore the linkages and disjuncture between the physical and digital, using theoretical developments in social movement theory to anchor the study (Earl, Hunt, and Garrett 2014; Krinsky and Crossley 2014).

Examining the repercussions and strategies of physical/digital mobilisation can lead to a confrontation between the “imagined” possibilities of digital mobilisation and the realities of technological and physical blockages. These blockages can exist at the level of the network – both in digital and physical limitations – but also at the level of digital informational flow and who is allowed to view data? Confronting the “imagined” capabilities with the reality of entrenched power networks contests the notion of the digital as a free superhighway of information into a series of blocks and stoppages, restricting what is possible and feasible. By exploring question of movement(s) in New Delhi, I will explore the disjuncture between the imagined possibilities and the restriction of information – by nature of the algorithms that govern our capabilities and our own social networks – and complicate the triumphal narrative of the affordances of digital mediums on protest movements.

References

Castells, M. (2012) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press

Earl, J., Hunt, J., and Kelly Garrett, R. (2014) ‘Social Movements and the ICT Revolution’ in van der Heijden (Ed.) Handbook of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pgs. 359-383

Gerbaudo, P. (2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Press

Krinsky, J. and Crossley, N. (2014) ‘Social Movements and Social Networks: An Introduction’, Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, Vol. 13, No. 1. Pgs. 1-21

Statement of Intent III

My research centres on the recent history of flash mob performance in India and analyses the transformations that have taken place within the genre: firstly, as an initially American, then “global,” performance form becomes re-situated and adapted within an Indian context; and secondly, as the form has evolved over time in relation to the transitioning of the Internet from a predominantly text-based medium to a predominantly image- and video-based one (see Strangelove 2010).

In the field of flash mob performance, we see moving bodies becoming re-mediated as moving images, and mobilised into the flow of global circuits of online reception. My underlying concern when approaching this research is: who is mobile in these contexts? Who becomes visible through movement, and by extension, who may disappear in these same moments?

I intend to approach this session by examining what is enacted through the movements of flash mob performance, focusing on the more recent phase of the genre in which flash mobs become mobilised through online video-sharing practices. I argue that they perform mediated representations of “New India” for an online national and international audience, valorising the new “non-places” (Augé 1992) of Indian supermodernity, through the acts of a mobilised “digerati” (Keniston 2004). If we consider that performance can play a role in the construction of cultural memory (Roach 1996; Taylor 2003), and that the Internet as an archive can become a repository of performances and thus memories(Gehl 2009), I ask if online performance in these contexts may be seen as an aspect of the processes that structure a “politics of forgetting” (Fernandes 2006) in globalising India. Which narratives are rendered visible and which invisible through these performances? Who appears and who disappears? Movement on the Internet thus becomes a political question concerned with comparative mobilities, visibilities, and participation in the narratives of “India” that are constructed for global circulation.

References

Augé, M., 1992. Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Translated by J. Howe. 1995. London & New York: Verso.

Fernandes, L., 2006. The politics of forgetting: class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. In Y. Lee and B.S.A. Yeoh eds., Globalisation and the Politics of Forgetting, London; New York: Routledge.

Gehl, R., 2009. YouTube as archive: Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer? International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(1), pp.43-60.

Keniston, K., 2004. Introduction: The four digital divides. In K. Keniston & D. Kumar eds., IT experience in India: bridging the digital divide, New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

Roach, J.R., 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-atlantic performance. Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press.

Strangelove, M., 2010. Watching YouTube: Extraordinary videos by ordinary people. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Taylor, D., 2003. The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. USA: Duke University Press.

Readings

Noys, B. (2004) Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film. In Film Philosophy Vol. 8 no. 22. Available at: http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys.

Couldry, N. (2015) ‘The Myth of ‘Us’: Digital Networks, Political Change and the Production of Collectivity’, Information Communication and Society, Vol. 18, No. 6. Pgs. 608-626 .

Appadurai, A., (2010) How histories make geographies: circulation and context in a global perspective. Transcultural Studies, 1. Availabile at: http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/6129.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WebOfGenealogies

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:07:18Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ishita Tiwary, Sandeep Mertia, and Siddharth Narrain.

Sessions

The Internet today, as we know, is one of the most challenging socio-technical systems to understand and theorise. As a hybrid medium that perpetually, reinvents, redesigns and re-markets itself and its publics it defies all forms of historical, social, legal and technological determinisms and/or generalisations. The complex nature of the medium and the social and cultural lives of the information packets which flow through it can perhaps be better understood by heeding critical attention towards longer histories of media circulation, technology-society relationships and legal regulations.

The panel attempts to understand the way digital technologies (the Internet/the current digital moment) mediate aspects of our contemporary being through the history of media circulation, legal regulation and data infrastructure. The papers in the panel focus on three crucial periods - the 1940s early history of statistical mediation, the 1980s video moment and the early 2000s advent of legal regulation of the Internet. Each of these moments is marked by socio-technical, cultural and legal disruption as seen through both moral anxieties and utopian claims that circulate at the time. The panel attempts to understand media technologies through their technological affordances (unpacking current debates around data analytics through a history of statistical mediation) and the social and legal disruptions that follow their advent (video in the 80s and the Internet in late 90s).

The papers in the panel approach the Internet and networked digital media as an assemblage of media infrastructures, bringing together both conceptual and material layers of their experience. The papers in this panel use a media archaeology approach (Elsaesser, 2004) to engage with the longer history of electronic communication in India by looking at both its material nature (how law produces the representation of digital media and the Internet), and the history of non narrative framework of databases (the Internet as a massive data infrastructure) which have become increasingly diverse and distributed through a network of institutions, practices and technological platforms.

Plan

Abstract I: 'What is Video?' Video and the Moment of Legal Disruption

The advent of YouTube changed the way users interact with media content as now they are making videos, watching videos, editing them, sharing them and discussing them at a frantic speed, creating new communities as they go along (Manovich, 2008).

The YouTube phenomenon and its implications cannot be understood without contextualizing it within the broader history of video. In India, the Asiad Games heralded the arrival of analog video technology, although there was no legal producer of video content in the country. In a sense video was an illegal object that spawned a vibrant economy of video films, video magazines and pornography.

Video cassettes were primarily in the pirate economy and circulated all across the country through video libraries and parlours. New Bollywood and Hollywood releases as well as pornographic films were available on video cassettes which initially did not have any film certification regulation. The new mode of circulation made these video exhibition spaces a lynchpin of moral paranoia and economic anxiety for those in authority-video was like a plague that needed to be monitored and regulated. This led to a string of legal regulations to keep the ‘video menace’ in check. Associations, organizations and forums protested the new wave of regulations as it pitched the medium of video against that of cinema, demanding new medium specific laws instead of amendments to previous laws on cinema.

In this paper, I will examine how the wave of regulations and contesting bodies creates a charged force field of the period that gives one a sense of a social, cultural and legal disruption caused by the arrival of a new technology. Particularly, I want to focus on how video as an illegal object circulates through informal circuits at a rapid pace and how the law deals with this new technological development. By looking at the example of video, it would be productive to think about the resonances the extended genealogies of how the law is interacting with the current digital moment through the prism of analog video.

Abstract II: Big Data 2.0 -- A History of Statistical Remediation

One of the fast emerging themes in the understanding of the Internet is centred on its various technological affordances to generate, collect, measure, analyse, mine andvisualise data. With the recent (circa 2010) advent of the hype cycles of Big Data and data revolution, the socio-technical imaginaries which reveal the Internet as a massive data infrastructure have been gaining momentum. ‘Data’ which in many ways is an ontological byproduct of the Internet, is now increasingly becoming the object of thought and computation for understanding and analysing the Internet. This moment of flux invites us to reflect upon the genealogies of the concepts, techniques and practices which are consciously or otherwise informing the incredible epistemic investment in data-driven systems. With an aim to unpack some of the long histories of the contemporary data analytics movement and moment, this paper tries to trace some of the inflection points in the genealogies of analytics and statistical remediation in colonial and post-colonial India, with an emphasis on the works of P C Mahalanobis and the statistical framing of planning and governance in the pre- and post-independence era.

The author will utilise ethnographic and archival material from his on-going fieldwork on emerging data-driven systems in the social sector in India, to reflect upon the shifts in materiality of data, classificatory affordances of paper and software based systems, and their epistemic implications across two different epochs. In addition, as a methodological reflection, the paper will argue that – developing lateral, conceptual connections between pre-digital circulations and meaning making of numbers and their contemporary algorithmic ecologies, is crucial for moving beyond causalities and the Big Data hubris, towards a thicker anthropology of data-driven knowledge production across times, infrastructures and networks.

Abstract III: The History of Internet Law in India

The relationship between law and media technology in India has been broadly characterized as the law catching up with technological change. To unpack this statement, one needs to take into account how the law both shapes and is shaped by media technologies. As the law ‘catches up’ with new technology, it also characterizes this technology, brackets it, and helps reinforce popular perception of technology. This paper will examine the early history of Internet law in India, the debates that arose in the pre web 2.0 era, and the ways in which a wide variety of factors, over a period of 15 years, has gradually shaped the scope and extent of the law that governs the Internet, the Information Technology Act (IT), 2000.

The IT Act, being relatively recent legislation is an ideal illustration to study the manner in which government policy, public perception, judicial pronouncements, parliamentary committee proceedings, legislative debates, and rapidly changing technology have influenced the shaping of this specific media infrastructure. By examining these documents I would like to open up a series questions around law and media technology How is the relationship between law and media technology staged through public discourse? What are the ways in which both the extremes – utopian hope and moral panic play out, and how are these then related to the more functional aspects of technology? Who were the major actors, individuals and institutions, who drove Internet law and regulation at this time?

By addressing these questions, this paper seeks to examine a small slice of the longer history of electronic communication in India.

Readings

Lovink, Geert and Nadiere, Sabine ed. Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube, Amsterdam, Institute of Network Cultures, 2008.

Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson, Introduction, Raw Data is an Oxymoron. Edited by Lisa Gitelman. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2013.

Shreya Singhal v. Union of India. Full text of judgement available at http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-webofgenealogies

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ManyPublicsOfInternet

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:06:54Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sailen Routray and Khetrimayum Monish.

Session

The discussion in this session will focus on the cultures of practices around digital / information networks. The objective would be to open up the understanding around notions of identity and rights in the context of governance on one hand, and the proliferation of various subcultures on the other. The objective is to try and understand the political and cultural imaginations 'of and as the public' enabled by internet and digital technologies. In this, we are trying to connect the whole discussion to the first two questions the conference focuses on:

How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?
How do we frame and explore the experiences and usages of internet and digital media technologies in India within its specific historical-material contexts shaped by traditional hierarchies of knowledge, colonial systems of communication, post-independence initiatives in nation-wide technologies of governance, a rapidly growing telecommunication market, and informal circuits of media production and consumption, among others?

Plan

Each discussant will present for 20 minutes after which the session will be thrown open for discussion amongst all the participants of the session.

Abstract I

Internet in India has led to the proliferation of practices and notions of governance and citizenship simulated by information networks and data. On one hand, the internet has captured the imagination of citizens and the reassertion of user agency; on the other, the experiences with the internet reflects the new ways of how the state imagines itself and the citizens. Hence, not only a critical mass replete with the possibilities of user agency, but also one aggregated by the state as part of a political project. Initiatives such as Digital India, the Aadhar project, rural internet and increased emphasis on mobile internet services are some of ways through which the logic of access and participation now operates. The paper will draw perspectives from four case studies in Assam - the Mahanagar Project (internet and mobile services), the National Register of Citizens (NRC) update, the Aadhaar Project and rural internet kiosks (Common Service Centers). With these, it focuses on the larger context of the cultures of digital practices; and techno-politics through the various sites and projects through which the internet operates in India.

Abstract II

Those of us who have jumped or meandered across to the wrong (or perhaps the right) side of thirty by now, first came to consume internet in what were called, and are still called, cyber cafes or internet cafes. Their numbers in big Indian cities is dwindling because of the increasing ubiquity of smartphone, and netbooks and data cards. The cyber café seems to be inexorably headed the way of the STD booth in the geography of large Indian cities. The present paper is a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experience of running and using internet cafes. With ethnographic fieldwork with cyber café owners and internet users in these cafes in the Chandrasekharpur area of Bhubaneswar (where the largest section of the computer industry in the state of Odisha is located), this paper tries to capture experiences that lie at the interstices of ‘objects’ and spaces - experiences that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city. By doing so it tries to ask and answer the question - what kinds of publics does the consumption of the internet in spaces such as cybercafes create?

Readings

Escobar, Arturo, et al. 1994. Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture [and Comments and Reply]. Current Anthropology. 35(3): 211-231.

Nayar, Pramod K. 2008. New Media, Digitextuality and Public Space: Reading "Cybermohalla". Postcolonial Text. 4(1):1-12.

Kurian, Renee and Isha Ray. 2009. Outsourcing the State? Public–Private Partnerships and Information Technologies in India. World Development. 37(10): 1163-1173.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-manypublicsofinternet

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #EducationAndInternet (Culture and Politics of Digital Online Space as Teaching Pedagogy)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:06:27Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Shruti Nagpal and Ravi Chaturvedi.

Session

The proposed Discussion Session involves two sections, the first concerning the media education in India and the use of online digital space as the teaching learning pedagogy and the second exploring the pros and cons of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) in India. Looking at the objectives defining the pedagogy by the media professors using them, the session will explore the ways the online space has provided voice to everyone irrespective of their designation and position. Studying the ever changing patterns of content production and consumption because of the digital literacy and technologies of governance, the session will explore the internet as a space for academic intervention. The session seeks to encourage discussion on the patterns of consumption and creation that facilitate interactivity, looking at the pedagogy on methods and materials needed to document cultures of interaction created by a digitally networked world, technologies and best practices for creating and sustaining interactivity, locating interactivity as a means for including populations marginalized by the digital divide and implications of invoking this construct for teaching as well as practice.

Plan

Section I

With 'Schools in a Cloud' (where students can explore online resources to answer questions) and SOLES (Self Organised Learning Environments) coming up, the researcher will try to integrate digital media into the classroom teaching/learning, and focus on the need to carefully review existing teaching strategies and understandings of digital media and its usage in addressing the curriculum/syllabus. Discussing the research results of a study conducted in Delhi, the paper will also analyse the current and potential use of virtual learning environment, understand if these e-modules are necessary by identifying the challenges faced in the development of e-learning modules in the university set ups and the role of Social networks, increased connectivity and its effect on the teaching learning practice and virtual regions and spaces. Being a media scholar and teacher, pursuing Phd on pedagogies of media education from MCRC, Jamia; the researcher expands 'micro' experience to 'macro' and talks of the ways the digital online space can be included in the media teaching pedagogy discussing the issues related to curriculum, learner and teacher profiles, evaluation and economics of running a digital media pedagogy/ course.

Section II

This sub section will explore the advantages and challenges of Massive open online courses (MOOCs) in emerging economies and developing societies like India. MOOCs are a relatively new phenomenon sweeping higher education. Less than five years ago, MOOC was just an idea , but currently there seems to be a robust market for these courses and India is turning into one of the biggest market for many massive open online course (MOOC) providers like Coursera. Given India’s need for reaching out to the largest possible numbers of learners, MOOCs are seen by some as the hi-tech engine of a transformative revolution that will remake education as a highly engaging, open and low cost activity, whereas the sceptics decries the hype surrounding MOOCs and claims that their benefits are illusory. The paper tries to understand the MOOC trend in India and its difference with the other online and open education programs. By conducting surveys and analysing data of institutions and universities running MOOC program in Delhi, the research study will ponder on how transformative the MOOC phenomenon can or will be, and what are the learners perspective about different tools and approaches adopted in the courses? Being a media scholar and practitioner, the researcher will also explore whether MOOC can become the interface and bridge the gap between the needs and aspirations of media education and media organizations?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-educationandinternet

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #FutureBazaars

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:08:30Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Maitrayee Deka, Adam Arvidsson, Rohini Lakshané, and Ravi Sundaram.

Session

Up till now digital technologies have mostly served to create new markets opportunities for the large capitalist monopolies like Facebook, Apple and Google that dominate the global information economy. But what happens when the potential for disintermediation and market making that comes with digital technologies hit the bazaars for of the worlds 'other economy,' what Ravi Sundaram has called 'pirate modernity.' Indeed this is already happening in two inter-related ways.

First, the availability of cheap, copied or pirated digital goods like Shanzhai cell phones or pirated video games support a reinvigorated bazaar economy made up of small traders who eek out a living while providing informational goods to the broad popular market segments that large brands do not cater to. This is already an emerging phenomenon in India, Africa and large parts of South America, but similar forms of what Gordon Mathews and his colleagues call 'globalisation from below' are gaining an influence in Europe as well.

Second, the potential for disintermediation on the part of digital technologies like WhatsApp today and blockchain technologies in the near future provide a technical infrastructure for strengthening the organizational basis of such bottom-up markets and enable them to strengthen their standing vis-a-vis capitalist monopolies. Can the 'pirate economy' launch its own institution, its own capital markets and its own brands?

In this session we want to explore the future of bottom-up markets. What happens when traders on Delhi’s electronic bazaars can bypass middlemen connecting directly to their Chinese suppliers via WhatsApp; what happens when informal financial circuits like Hawala networks start operating blockchain technologies? Extrapolating from research on what is going on know we want to collectively imagine what the future might bring. What sort of economic social and, importantly political consequences might these changes bring about? How can we theorise this emergence and how does it challenge and force us to rethink basic categories like capitalism, markets and agency?

Plan

The sessions will start with presentations on traders in Delhi's pirate bazaars, blockchain and the democratization of financial markets, impact of mobile connectivity on business and family interaction, and relationship between peer-to-peer, pirate economies, and large media corporations within cultures of circulation. The presentation will be brief (about 20 mins.) and will serve to open up discussions and constitutions form workshop participants.

Discussions will be centred on:

What are interesting areas of study in understanding how digital technologies are changing the balance of power in the digital economy in India?
What is the potential of digital technologies in relation to the mediation and transformation of bottom up economic processes in contemporary India?
What are the new forms of injustices and/or imbalances are arising form these transformations?
What is the political potential in digital disintermediation in relation to markets, beyond the ‘official paradigm of ecommerce and Uber-like platforms?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-futurebazaars

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #STSDebates (Science, Technology, and State Debates)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:08:58Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Jahnavi Phalkey.

Session

The proposed workshop session is motivated by an interest in historicising contemporary debates on the state's role in development of science and technology in India, and the adoption of both into the processes of government and statecraft. From the DNA Bill to the Digital India initiative, we are experiencing a state that takes science and technology seriously, perhaps a little too seriously.

The debate on state-led organisation of science and technology began in earnest in late-imperial India. The National Institute of Sciences of India met in Calcutta during WWII (1943) to discuss the following questions: “what should be the organisational model for science and technology adopted for post-war and independent India; and how should India benefit from the Commonwealth structure?” In his report at the end of the visit the following year, Archibald Vivian Hill, British physiologist and Secretary of the Royal Society, suggested centralised state-led organisation of science and engineering research as the way forward in India. The debate continues to date.

More recently, especially since 1991, the Indian state has entered into multiple forms of relationships with the science and technology establishments in the country, both public and private. Centralised support for science, technology, and innovation is distributed through various channels that range from regulated oligopolistic markets, to public-private partnerships in fundamental and applied research, to strict governmental control over primary means of communication.

This session is interested in situating present day controversies around the state and internet in India within a historiography of science, technology, and state in India.

Sources on these debates are not readily available in a structured format for direct analysis or visualisation. The session, therefore, plans to make use of the diverse group of participants at the Internet Researchers' Conference to start developing an open data set to understand the key topics, positions taken by the Indian state, institutions, persons, policy directives and statements, and objects involved across the science and technology debates in twentieth century India.

We hope to achieve two goals with this session: 1) to begin to address the challenge of conceptualising contemporary discussions about the internet in a historical frame, and equally, 2) to rethink methods of representing and mapping debates and its components, when the sources are not found readily in digital form.

Plan

The key methodological difficulty faced by this session is that lack of structured data and sources on the topic of science, technology, and state debates in India. Most, if not all, tools and methods of issue, debate, or controversy mapping have dealt with forms of discussions and materials that is either taking place over digital media (for example, social media platforms), or is already made available in a digital format (for example, digitised books). These tools have often developed to address the unique issue mapping challenges and opportunities emerging with the distributed, and often real-time, discussions taking place over the internet (See: http://www.issuemapping.net/Main/WebHome).

In this session, however, we are interested in debates both after and before internet became a commonplace technology in India. Our energies are focused on generating a data set on debates on topics of science, technology, and the state in twentieth century India, which is 1) structured, so that it can utilised for various kinds of analysis and visualisation, 2) expandable, so that we can continue to add information, and 3) open, so that it can be modified and used by other researchers.

The workshop will begin with a quick overview of science and technology projects by the Indian state in the last century. We will be attentive to the vocabulary of the imaginaries within which these projects were proposed.

The participants will be divided into groups, each focusing on one thematic area of science and technology debates (for example agriculture, space, and biotechnology)). Each group will use a spreadsheet software (say, Libre Calc or Microsoft Excel) to document the key aspects of the debates concerned along the following categories: 1) fundamental question of the debate, 2) position taken by the state, 3) institutions involved, 4) persons involved, and 5) objects involved.

This documentation will be done using a pre-designed schema so that the resultant data can be combined and visualised to test the robustness and feasibility of the project.

The final 30 minutes of the session will be kept for combining all collected data, visualising it, and doing some initial exploration of the linkages foregrounded by the gathered data.

We will use RAW, developed by Density Design, and possibly Google Charts library to create the preliminary visualisations.

All collected data, along with documentation of the data creation process, will be published under open standard and license with appropriate credit attribution.

Readings

Caroll, Patrick. 2006. “Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation: Theory and Analysis.” In Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press. 11-27. http://www.ucpress.edu/content/chapters/10533.ch01.pdf.

Density Design. RAW. http://raw.densitydesign.org/.

Marres, Noortje. 2015. “Why Map Issues? On Controversy Analysis as a Digital Method.” Science, Technology, & Human Values. 40(5). 655-686. http://sth.sagepub.com/content/40/5/655.full.pdf+html.

Phalkey, Jahnavi. 2013. “Introduction: Science, History and Modern India.” Isis. 104. June. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670950.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-stsdebates