Centre for Internet and Society

IRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:40:58Z

Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal

#DigitalPlatformAttributes - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#ListsAsDatabase - Ria De and Samata Biswas

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana

#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-sessions

IRC19 - Code of Conduct and Friendly Space Policy

sumandro — 2019-01-28T14:32:31Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-code-of-conduct-and-friendly-space-policy

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Poster

sumandro — 2015-10-07T10:24:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_IRC16_Poster01.png

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Banner

sumandro — 2015-11-15T07:44:39Z

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Banner

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_IRC16_BannerExtended.png

IRC16 - Studying Internet in India - Banner

sumandro — 2015-10-07T13:07:39Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/CISRAW_IRC16_Banner.png

IRC16 - Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2015-11-23T06:44:05Z

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

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #WikiShadows (Techno-Political Contours of Knowledge Production on Wikipedia)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:02Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Tanveer Hasan and Rahmanuddin Shaik.

Session

Wikipedia is a group project, and people in the group need to have separate pages to discuss changes and improvements to Wikipedia's content, be that an article, a policy, a help page, or something anything else. Reading these discussion pages is a vastly rewarding, slightly addictive, experience. Sometimes reading Wikipedia can ruffle feathers.

E.g. 1:

The song, Jana-gana-mana, composed originally in Bengali by Rabindranath Tagore, was adopted in its Hindi version by the Constituent Assembly as the National Anthem of India on January 24, 1950. It was first sung on December 27, 1911 at the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress. [1]

Whereas Wikipedia entry of National anthem mentions thus:

"Jana Gana Mana is the national anthem of India. Written in highly Sanskritised (Tatsama) Bengali." [2]

E.g. 2:

Are these beautiful waterfalls on the Kaveri River located in Tamil Nadu – or on the border between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka – or in Tamil Nadu on its border with Karnataka? Or is it really the Cauvery river, and Hogenakal Falls? [3]

Whatever you believe, be sure to bring a (Google) map to the debate, and point out that your opponent's sources are not RS or NPOV!

E.g. 3:

Born of Serbian parents in a part of the Austrian Empire, which a short time later became a part of the Hungarian half of Austria-Hungary and is now in Croatia. He eventually became a naturalized citizen of the US. [4]

So was he Serbian? Croatian? Austrian? Austro-Hungarian? Istro-Romanian? Jewish? American? Martian? You decide! But don't forget to leave an edit summary saying how pathetic it is to choose any other version. (Guess who are we talking about?) Clue: He is inventor par excellence.

In this day and age where information is often a touch and go process, a forgotten mode, a solitary quest towards creating knowledge sounds romantic (almost). Networked collaborations (such as Wikipedia) which have created Knowledge sites have led to democratic interpretation and assimilation of such knowledge. They also as a basic necessity have sprung up various modes of annotation, verifiability of the Knowledge thus produced and utility quotient of the same. After all, why create and hold on to information that no body really cares about.

Plan

In this discussion session, the co-leaders of the session shall attempt to peel out the benign face of the visible Wikipedia page(there is a hidden world out there) and discuss the political, technological and social contours of information available on Wikipedia. We shall take the participants through the various stages of discussion about a Wikipedia page and how discussions tend to alter the course of an article. How false consensus is proposed, consent is manufactured and how these efforts are usually defeated by 'Answer People' and 'Vandal Fighters'. It is no less of a war than the one between information and mis-information. The discussion on, calculus, for instance, was host to some sparring over whether the concept of "limit," central to calculus, should be better explained as an "average."

This discussion session brings to the table questions of legitimisation of knowledge and the inherent hierarchies that operate even within open networks of collaboration and offers a critique on consumption oriented knowledge production. The session also aims to ask questions around knowledge as an agent that has levelled some of the earlier existing contours but has introduced some of its own and how that has changed our usages and shapes our experiences.

The session will involve an edit-a-thon on a topic that will be selected by the co-leaders of the session and live commentary on the discussion pages will be tracked for further analysis. The session intends to build a dialogue towards attempting to problematise the questions of the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences that have played a significant role in production of knowledge in the era of new knowledge practices. The session also will question the 'best practices' in building consent in the present global techno-economic contours of the internet, and its effect on academic spaces, creative practice and intervention.

Readings

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

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 - #UnconfiedArchivesUnboundHistories

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:16:34Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Kausik Bandopadhyay and Sugata Nandi.

Session

The archive as we know it today was an official invention of the nineteenth century. It was taken to be a repository of information which aided and validated the creation of a new specialized scientific knowledge called History. With the archive was born was official histories. Being constituted of official documents the archive served official objectives. The professional historian born with the archive was a practitioner of a new science of the state, who produced knowledge verifiable at the archive. In the nineteenth century the archive served imperialist objectives, from the mid twentieth century it catered to states which emerged from erstwhile colonies and continued to serve official interests while producing histories which often rendered the earlier histories into mere cultural artifacts of a bygone age devoid of scholarly value. Through this period historians remained bound to archives which granted them access and they were compelled to narrowly demarcate territories. i.e. states, provinces within them or even smaller areas like a city or a village, which were to become their subjects. With the coming of the Internet the archive is now taking on a new meaning altogether as it no longer confined spatially. With the easy availability of technology for creation and preservation of documents and their public accessibility , the archive is being constituted and re-constituted continuously. As it is no longer bound down by statist objectives alone the questions come up: a) are we in the threshold of the demise of official histories? And, b) has time come for de-territorialization of histories altogether?

Plan

Abstracts of three hundred words are invited which critically assess the archive today from this perspective and its implications for history writing taking into consideration three works on archives.

Readings

Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (Part III, the Statement and the Archive), 1972

Jacques Derrida and Eric Prenowitz, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression", Diacritics, 25, 2, Summer 1995

Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain, 2009.

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

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

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SpottingData

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:11:12Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Session

The proposed workshop will focus on internet usage in India and the possibilities that the internet offers for representation of data. The workshop will be divided into two parts, the first, of a more general nature, and the second, will focus on one specific aspect of data—representation. While the first part will be more of a documentation exercise, the second part will be a hands-on exercise of some data representation tools that are available on the internet.

Plan

Part I: The Nature of Internet Usage in India

The workshop will engage the participants in trying to map the ways that they use the internet in their daily lives, such as circulating emails, using social networks, downloading software, online commerce, academic research, circulating audio and video, etc. This part of the workshop will try to study ‘the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the [internet] in India’. The study will try to distinguish between those who are consumers of data and systems and those who, in addition to consuming, also produce data and systems. Various types of production of data will also be looked at, such as crowdsourcing data (such as in Wikipedia, or restaurant review or hotel review websites).

The workshop will be conducted in an interactive manner, where the participants will enter their responses in an online collaborative platform (Google Sheets), which will be editable by all the participants. This brief documentation exercise will also be used to prepare a report at the end of the conference.

After completing this exercise of mapping the usage of the internet, the second segment of the workshop will try to explore various ways of representing data. This exercise will be done by using tools available online.

Part II: Representation of Data

This part of the workshop will deal with various kinds of data representation, of various kinds of data that users contribute to the internet through websites, such as social networks, blogs, etc. The workshop will try to look at the various existing ways in visualising and representing such data through the internet, such as chronology timelines, location mapping, network mapping, enhanced text representation such as through display of XML-Text Encoding Initiative (XML-TEI) files, etc. so as to enhance the data and open up other aspects of the data not usually evident in forms such as lists and spreadsheets.

The participants will be led through to the creation of small chronology timelines and location mapping in particular. Therefore participants will be requested to contribute data in the form of simple and small English texts which have either several markers of time, or several markers of location, so as to enable such visualisation. Examples of such texts include biographies, travel narratives, etc. The workshop will discuss how to filter ‘structured data’ from prose text to get desirable result from the softwares.

This part of the workshop will try to answer the question as to ‘how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?’ The workshop will use open-access tools and software so as to highlight the low-investment infrastructure that is often sufficient enough to represent and enhance data.

Readings

Participants are requested to look at two visualisation tools in particular (both of which were developed by the Knight Lab in Northwestern University, USA), one for creating a chronology timeline (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/timelinejs) and the other for creating a location map (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/storymapjs).

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

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

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #PoliticsOnSocialMedia

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:51:03Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dr. Rinku Lamba and Dr. Rajarshi Dasgupta, with Dr. Mohinder Singh, Professor Valerian Rodrigues and Professor Shefali Jha as co-members.

Session

Indian politics had witnessed the entry of new social movements in the 1970s, adding a whole set of new issues, actors, and ways of activism to the older nationalist tradition. We suggest a similar change is now taking place, as different ways of governance and interventions aided by latest technologies are emerging in the social media. Websites, blogs, tweets, emails and online petitions are creating a new virtual space for politics, through information, propaganda, debates, appeals and mobilizations.

The proposed session will discuss this emerging field of power, critically considering its democratic potential and interrogating the political issues and ideas at stake in it. The aim is to tackle the new forms of civic and public-political engagements witnessed in the domain of social media, and analyze their implications for the theory and practice of democracy. In the process our papers would explore conceptual notions such as agency, political act and participation as well as notions of selfhood and subjectivity.

Plan

We will present four papers, with a question-answer and discussion session at the end. The papers will be addressing broadly three kinds of concerns.

The first concern is to identify novel understandings of the political and political acts in the social media. We ask the following questions in this regard: What are the political issues and ideas at stake and how do they affect conventional understandings of democracy? Who are the new actors outside the fray of party-centered politics and how do they see what is political in the acts of internet-users? How are political institutions including parties reacting to the phenomena?
The second concern relates to probing the new forms of political subjectivity that are emerging in this process. The questions here include: What kind of political actor is getting shaped by the forms of political participation engendered by the social media? How does the virtual nature of practice impact on questions of location and identity as determinants of political membership and political action? Is this nature of virtual participation too fluid for the state to control?
The third concern relates to the forms of exclusion and inclusion that virtual participation entails. This involves questions like: What kind of social capital is necessary for talking part in the process and does it cut across cultural and economic divisions? What kinds of interest drive the social media? How does it shape the meaning of political concepts like representation and rights, accountability and political agency?

It is likely that we will raise more questions than we can answer at this point. However, we think it is important to raise them all the more in keeping with the questions that make up the focus of the conference, especially, the first question of how do we conceptualize, 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.

Readings

None.

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

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #MinimalComputing

sumandro — 2016-01-03T06:57:20Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Padmini Ray Murray and Sebastian Lütgert.

Session

The triumphal mythic narrative of India’s relatively high and rapid rates of Internet penetration is underpinned by the country’s access to data via mobile devices. The black box proprietary technology of the iPhone, or the less explicitly restrictive nexus (pun unintended) between the Android OS with device manufacturers, has meant we have large swathes of technology users whose only encounter with online content has been via these closed ecosystems. Minimal computing is both an intellectual intention and pragmatic response that seeks to disrupt these systems by subverting existing frameworks and creating new infrastructures, acknowledging the ground realities that exist in India, such as lack of resources and access. This position essentially privileges “ease of use, ease of creation, increased access and reductions in computing—and by extension, electricity” (Gil). The intention of this workshop is to explore, discover, discuss and build resources that observe these tenets, under different heads, such as physical computing, archives, interface, database.

One of the obvious outcomes of the growth of digital technology in the region is the increasing intersection with the scholarly record – be that a theorizing of these new contexts, as is the case at this conference, or in the building of dissemination tools for memory institutions or academic scholarship. As such scholarship (which would be considered under the rubric of the digital humanities) is still in its early stages, it is incumbent upon us to set an example for other scholars when we build these resources; fast to load, easy to build and administer, which can function in low-bandwidth areas – especially as we embark on larger scale projects that are now possible through advances in digitization of different forms of content, as well as of Indic language character sets. Uses of technology in India are often anarchic, and the digital is constantly imbricated with the analogue and these grassroots, informal practices could usefully inform scholarship in this area, and possibly be transposed to other similar environments, such as those found in the global south.

The other crucial exploration that will be undertaken in this workshop will be how to use guerilla computing and other methods to safeguard our fundamental human rights both online and offline, strategies increasingly essential in a country where censorship against individuals and misuse of personal data is rapidly on the rise. The online citizen must be encouraged to think about the virtual space in which s/he works and plays, and learn how to navigate it responsibly, by being alert to the dangers of the networked world being overly regulated, and this workshop will also discuss surveillance and collection of personal data by governments, corporations, advertisers, and hackers, and how to circumvent it using relatively simple methods.

Plan

At the outset of the workshop, participants will be introduced by the co-leaders to some examples and concepts in #minimalcomputing, and then to a range of tools and resources such as Markdown, Jekyll, Pan.do/ra, Pandoc etc., as well as simple encrypting methods. Participants will also be encouraged to share examples of good practice that they might have encountered in their own contexts.

Participants will then be asked to consider a digital project that they might be in the process of building, or envisioning, or to reflect on their personal digital footprint and be facilitated by the co-leaders on how to rebuild and reimagine these using a minimal computing perspective, and to document these ideas so they might be shared with the rest of the group, and promote more discussion.

The aim of the workshop is to draw upon collective expertise to create a handbook of sustainable, scalable resources that can be created without over reliance on third party infrastructures, in order to retain agency over projects initiatives and digital identities; and provide a roadmap for an alternative Internet that meets the needs of users in both personal and professional contexts.

Readings

Budish, Ryan and West, Sarah Myers and Gasser, Urs. Designing Successful Governance Groups: Lessons for Leaders from Real-World Examples (August 2015). Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2015-11. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2638006.

This reading sets out how an effective multistakeholder governance group might be structured, convened and operate and its stated values of inclusiveness, transparency, accountability, legitimacy, and effectiveness might serve as a useful guide to how we might envision a #minimalcomputing community.

Gil, Alex. The User, the Learner and the Machines We Make. Minimal Computing website. (May 2015). Available at: https://go-dh.github.io/mincomp/thoughts/2015/05/21/user-vs-learner/.

This reading sets out some of the underlying concepts of #minimalcomputing and raises important questions that might be flagged up for discussion during the workshop.

https://github.com/xpmethod/dhnotes/

A growing resource for relevant material and information on #minimalcomputing – start here.

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

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