Centre for Internet and Society

Know your Users, Match their Needs!

rebecca — 2012-02-27T15:06:14Z

As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. The following post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society.

Almost ten years have passed since the Montreal Declaration on Free Access to Law (FAL) was signed by eight legal information institutes and other FAL initiatives. Today, the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM) is growing with over 30 initiatives having signed onto the Declaration and providing free, online access to legal information. While the movement continues to gain momentum, the big question no longer remains why we need free access to law, but instead how FAL initiatives can continue to do so sustainably in the long-term. The principles of access and justice underpinning the FALM have been well-argued and few would dispute the notion that citizens ought to have access to the laws under which they are governed. As the Montreal Declaration states: "Public legal information from all countries and international institutions is part of the common heritage of humanity…Maximizing access to his information promotes justice and the rule of law" (2002).

Regardless of legal system or political context, the importance of securing free online access to the law has been recognized from a variety of perspectives. Whether FAL is considered a critical democratic function or simply an essential efficiency within any legal system, it is difficult to contest that the internet has increased the accessibility of and ease with which legal information is being published and shared online. Setting the ideological and practical foundations of the movement aside, effectively demonstrating the impact of FAL initiatives and to secure their sustainability in the long-term remains the next big challenge for the FALM. Today, there is a growing necessity for grounded and realistic indicators that can validate some of the long-held assumptions around the impacts and outcomes of FAL initiatives. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, there is also a need for a more nuanced understanding of the factors that influence the sustainability of FAL initiatives— particularly in resource-scarce and often nebulous legal systems of the Global South.

This blog post provides some insight into the questions above through a brief summary of the results of the study Free Access to Law—Is it Here to Stay? This global comparative study was carried out by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. The project set out to begin providing answers to some of these critical questions around the impacts and sustainability of the FALM. It was initially hypothesized in the study that the sustainability of a FAL initiative rests upon a particular string of contingent factors. To begin, a particular condition would incentivize the creation of the FAL initiative — more often than not meeting the unmet needs of those requiring access to legal information. Next, if the FAL initiative is able to provide the service within a favourable context, it was suspected that it would produce favourable outcomes for both users and society at large. In turn, if the FAL initiative was able to provide benefits to users, it was theorized that these benefits would then stimulate reinvestment into the FAL initiative — forming a positive and sustainable feedback loop.

As the Good Practices Handbook highlights, the research hypothesis provided an accurate reading of what the sustainability chain of a FAL initiative might look like in practice. If unable to keep up with the evolving information requirements of their users, this study suggests that FAL initiatives run the risk of FAL becoming outdated and even outperformed by either government-based or private sector initiatives. This is why FAL initiatives must continue to be innovative and find new ways to meet users’ needs. Approaches take my include keeping their collections up to date, fine-tuning their services or even reinventing themselves through the provision of value-added services. Gathered from the experiences of the eleven countries across Africa and Asia examined in this study, the following is a brief summary of the nine “Good Practices” that emerging FAL initiatives can consider:

The FAL initiative should establish clear objectives: Before doing anything, the FAL initiative should decide what exactly it’s setting out to do…critical components such as content selection, targeted audience, expected reach, search functionalities and other website features help determine priorities and evaluate capacity to achieve these objectives.
How to be small and do big things: Most of the FAL initiatives studied as part of this project were formed of small teams (often less than five individuals). Initially, this may appear to pose a risk for sustainability. However, we saw a number of ways in which small teams have proven to be innovative, flexible, and able to thrive in environments of scarcity. However, as much as small teams can be seen as a source of innovation, they may also pose a risk in the medium to long-term.
FAL initiatives require expertise in both IT and legal information: Legal information management experts understand how the law is applied, how different texts and parts of texts speak to one another, and how these documents are used. IT experts can imagine a variety of ways to address these needs. If both forms of expertise is not available within the team of a FAL initiative, institutional partnerships provide promising sites for collaborative support. For example, the FALM constitutes a rich source of expertise and has proven to be a site of collaboration between established and emerging FAL initiatives. Further, universities have proven to be a significant source of human and financial resources for several FAL initiatives.
FAL initiatives should look to where they are headed (but not too far ahead): Because the purpose of a FAL initiative is to provide free online access to the law, it must secure access to this data for regular publication. How will legal information be received and organized by the initiative? In what format will it be published in? Early on, FAL initiatives need to develop both internal and external workflow processes to ensure that the initiative is able to provide regular access to updated information. Furthermore, an important finding of the study suggests that context plays a much larger role in a project’s sustainability. Consideration should be given to a country’s ICT infrastructure, the transparency of a government and their access to information regimes, and the nature of the legal information market when designing the workflows of an FAL initiative.
FAL initiatives should work with the ICT infrastructure in place: The quality and consistency of internet access varies across countries in the Global South. FAL initiatives should remain aware of how stakeholders and users are accessing the internet and develop their service accordingly. Considering the often intermittent nature of internet connectivity in the Global South, providing users with offline access to databases is a practical alternative.
FAL initiatives should use Free and Open Source Software: FAL initiatives should maximise their use of FLOSS. All FAL initiatives use FLOSS to some extent and without these flexible and cost-effective alternatives, it would be safe to infer that the FALM would have grown as quickly as it has.
FAL initiatives should be sensitive to culture: FAL initiatives rely on stakeholders and communities of users. Staying mindful of the professional and organizational cultures within a country may provide the initiative with a source of community support which may become a sustainability strategy. Further, integrated or parallel social networking platforms can play an essential role in community-building around the FAL initiatives and can also serve as another source of content in resource-scarce environments.
Find your users, match their needs: Project goals and appropriate strategies should be based on an in-depth understanding of the needs of those using the FAL initiative. As the sustainability chain suggests, when FAL initiatives produce positive outputs and outcomes, stakeholders will reinvest in the initiative to ensure its sustainability. If a user’s needs are effectively met by an FAL initiative, this group can provide either the resources or impetus for its continued success. Identifying who your users are and staying aware of their needs is a good way to secure reinvestment into the project.
FAL initiatives should diversify funding sources: This may be easier said than done — reinvestment can be the most challenging aspect of sustaining a FAL initiative. Early on, initiatives that receive donor-based funding benefit substantially upon investment. However, these initiatives are put at significant risk once initial seed funding has been depleted. Similarly, FAL initiatives that partnerships with other during their start up phase face similar fates as securing long-term service delivery can become a challenge. Possible funding sources included throughout the study include, among others: government, international development agencies or NGOs, the judiciary, law societies and the sale of value-added services.

In addition to these good practices, this study has emphasized the role the that the FALM has played in helping redefine online legal information as a public good. Each of the case studies demonstrates in a unique way the value openness plays in a legal information ecosystem, and how a robust digital legal information commons can be of benefit to users. Traditionally, the legal information market has been dominated by a select number of commercial players. In response, the FALM has created an important transnational space within which conversations around the provision of and access to legal information as a political right rather than a commodity to be bought and sold can take place. Encouragingly, governments in the Global South are catching and FAL initiatives from the South have proven to be immense sources of innovation in their own right. In Indonesia, for example, FAL initiatives have laid the groundwork for emerging government initiatives that are now prioritizing the provision of free, online access to legal and other government information. Today, I believe that we are witnessing an important paradigm shift as governments are beginning to recognize that “access” to legal information is a right to be held by the public.

Despite such headway, it is needless to say that FAL initiatives in the Global South continue to face immense sustainability challenges. However, it is hoped that this study can provide some practical insights for emerging initiatives and partnerships. However, as more FAL initiatives begin entering into the next stage of maturity and growth, it is more important than ever that they are able to adapt to adverse environmental changes and form long-lasting partnerships with information sources within government. Most importantly, FAL initiatives must remain dynamic and responsive to users’ needs. To do so, they must be able to tailor and expand their services, offerings and user-base. To secure their sustainability and relevance in the long term, they must also be continuously strengthening their ties and maintain open communication flows with users. If FAL initiatives are able to successfully make the transition from being supply side initiatives to becoming demand driven services, the FALM will be well-positioned for another decade of sustainable growth.

Download the collection below:

Good Practices Handbook (426 kb)
Environmental Scan Report (860 kb)
Local Researcher's Methodology Guide (1225 kb)

The full collection of case studies and the Good Practices Handbook was originally published on the Project Website. The Centre for Internet and Society oversaw the following case studies: India, Hong Kong, Indonesia and Philippines.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/know-your-users

SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet

praskrishna — 2011-11-18T07:26:30Z

As the US government’s House Judiciary Committee begins hearings on the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, (SOPA), both supporters and opponents are ramping up their campaigning, with big names getting involved. And so they should. SOPA’s stakes are no less than the future of the Internet itself.

The key problem with SOPA is that it seeks to allow any copyright holder to sever any website’s relationship with online advertising networks or credit card processing services, simply by pointing the finger. As Ars Technica explains:

Calling its plan a “market-based system to protect US customers and prevent US funding of sites dedicated to theft of US property,” the new bill gives broad powers to private actors. Any holder of intellectual property rights could simply send a letter to ad network operators like Google and to payment processors like MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal, demanding these companies cut off access to any site the IP holder names as an infringer.

[…] So long as the intellectual property holders include some “specific facts” supporting their infringement claim, ad networks and payment processors will have five days to cut off contact with the website in question.

The bill also gives the government the power to get an injunction against foreign sites which would force ISPs to, within five days, ”prevent access by its subscribers located within the United States to the foreign infringing site.” Essentially, it obliges ISPs to break their own DNS servers by filtering or redirecting users who try to access an accused site. It would also ban any tools which allow circumvention of such blocks.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how this could be abused: An aggrieved party accuses a site of infringement, with or without reliable evidence, and suddenly that site can no longer accept credit cards or PayPal payments and its advertising revenue dries up completely. And we know that the IP industry isn’t above false accusations of copyright infringement. It’s not just business websites that could be affected, but open source projects too.

Opponents currently include businesses such as Google, Facebook, Zynga, eBay, Twitter, Yahoo!, AOL, and LinkedIn who, together, sent a letter; advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reporters Without Borders, and Human Rights Watch; as well as eleven members of the House of Representatives who have also written a letter to the House Judiciary Committee. Another letter from human rights groups includes India’s Centre for Internet and Society as well as the Church of Sweden.

There are also complaints that the House Judiciary Committee is trying to push the legislation through with undue haste. Says PCWorld:

Critics of the legislation also complained that the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee appears to be fast-tracking the bill before opposition can build. At a 10 am hearing Wednesday, five of six witnesses are likely to speak in favor of SOPA, with only Google opposed. Witnesses the Motion Picture Association of America, trade union the AFL-CIO and pharmaceutical company Pfizer have all voiced support for the bill.

No public interest groups, Internet engineers or human rights groups have been invited to the hearing, said Gigi Sohn, president of Public Knowledge, a digital rights group. “This is really being railroaded, without a full public debate,” she said.

Indeed, the tone of the Committee’s so-called fact sheet, which lays out a series of ‘myths’ and ‘facts’, gives cause for concern, implying as it does that they have already decided which side of the fence they will land on. What is also disturbing is that the US Copyright Office — which as a part of the Library of Congress, one would expect to be impartial and evidence-led — will be offering an “unqualified endorsement“:

“It is my view that if Congress does not continue to provide serious responses to online piracy, the US copyright system will ultimately fail,” [Copyright Office director Maria] Pallante’s testimony says.

Pallante and representatives from Pfizer, the Motion Picture Association of America, the AFL-CIO, and Mastercard, all of whom support the bill, will be testifying tomorrow before the House Judiciary committee.

For Americans who are unimpressed by this latest move from the content industries to control the Internet, there is a letter writing campaign encouraging people to contact their congressperson. For non-Americans, Avaaz has set up a Save the Internet petition which currently has 70,000 signatures and is racking up hundreds of new signatures every minute.

There’s no doubt that tech journalists, free software advocates and digital rights campaigners and internet businesses worldwide will be glued to coverage of today’s Judiciary hearing. But, given the power of the copyright industry’s lobbying arms, it is hard to expect discussions to conclude satisfactorily. It may just be that the entire Internet will have to rely on the strength of the US Constitution, which SOPA may contravene, to save it.

This article by Suw Charman-Anderson was published in Firspost.Technology on November 16, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bill-could-kill-internet

Telecom Path-Breaker?

Shyam Ponappa — 2011-11-18T05:42:00Z

Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on November 3, 2011.

There’s much to criticise the government about for not initiating systematic reforms. Yet, the draft National Telecom Policy 2011 (NTP-2011), announced three weeks ago, is a stunner.[1] It begins with a solid, integrated-systems preamble to IT, Communications and Electronics, followed by an excellent vision statement: “[to provide] secure, reliable, affordable and high quality... telecommunication services anytime, anywhere.” A sound beginning, although open-ended in terms of how the details could evolve.

There are potential problems with such high-level pronouncements, of course. A number of commentators castigate the motherhoods in the draft. With a lofty perspective and few details, much depends on how the open-ended possibilities develop, including the difficulties of execution in dealing with ground realities and obstacles.

An Assessment

NTP-2011 addresses six major areas: spectrum, licensing, broadband, convergence, roaming, and manufacturing. Focusing on the first two, there are sweeping proposals:

licences will not be linked to spectrum; and
spectrum sharing will be permitted.

Some view the separation of licences and spectrum as retrograde, because spectrum is essential for service delivery. Others suggest that transgressions that led to the scams are now being inducted as new policies, e.g., operators accessing networks they do not own, which is characterised as being against the public interest. Some heap opprobrium, alleging that like the previous policy, NTP-99, which they call retrograde (although it led to the phenomenal growth in mobile telephony), its main purpose is to allow companies to avoid paying licence/auction fees to the government.

The last expostulation is the most ludicrous, because revenue collections after NTP-99 far exceeded estimated fees foregone: Rs 20,000 crore estimated “loss” by March 2007, but Rs 40,000 crore actually collected, and Rs 80,000 crore collected by March 2010.[2]Add tax collections on exponential growth with increased profits, and the result is even higher total government revenues.
Opposing operator access to networks arises from confused objectives; blocking access is like cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. The purpose of the sector is to provide services and access to users for legitimate activities. The public interest lies in facilitating access on appropriate terms.
To evaluate licensing and spectrum, begin with the premise of shared spectrum. Spectrum is essential for effective service provision, particularly in the rural and semi-urban areas with about 70 per cent of the population. An aspect not commonly known is that larger bands of spectrum enable more efficient throughput. For example, 1 MHz of a 12 MHz band carries 50 per cent more traffic than 1 MHz of a 6 MHz band. An estimate of the benefit to Indian operators of more bandwidth at international norms is a reduction of 20 per cent in operating costs.

Spectrum Occupancy

In practice, assigned spectrum is idle much of the time, except during the busy hours in India’s heavy-traffic metros, for extraneous reasons: too many operators, with too little spectrum, in too- narrow bands. This aspect becomes clear from spectrum utilisation or occupancy studies. For instance, the chart shows spectrum occupancy in Bangalore, Edinburgh and Stony Brook (New York) sometime in 2011.

The low readings (250 to 850 MHz in Bangalore, 600 to 950 MHz in Edinburgh, and 500 to 850 MHz in Stony Brook, NY) indicate available “white spaces” that can be better utilised.

High-traffic cities like Delhi and Mumbai have much higher utilisation than cities elsewhere in the world. It comes at increased costs to operators, because of advanced equipment and the closer spacing of towers, as well as having negative environmental effects. If a system with on-demand access to centralised, more efficient spectrum bandwidth were available, the capacity would be much higher, while operators would gain tremendous savings.

Another aspect has to do with the structuring and pricing of shared spectrum. One scenario for sharing is to enable operators to share assigned bands on mutually acceptable terms, leaving the onus of structuring and deployment on the respective operators, as for mobile telephony towers. As with the towers, there are likely to be coalitions of operators/independent entities who are able to work out arrangements among themselves, while not attaining the ultimate efficiency of unified coordination. For instance, participants who share towers in India share passive but not active infrastructure, and a critical element of active infrastructure is spectrum.

An alternative scenario would be mandated spectrum sharing. Spectrum on demand could be made available to any operator/counterparties for the duration of every communication “transaction”. This would need a database-driven Dynamic Spectrum Assignment facility, as deployed by Spectrum Bridge in the US. The more efficient throughput would mean higher traffic capacity for a given investment through better utilisation.

The distributed processing alternative through cognitive radio in every user device is (a) much less efficient, and (b) far more expensive. The market consolidation-through-acquisition approach, with more auctions, is the least efficient and most expensive.

Common-Access Networks

There would be further efficiencies if the entire network (and not just the spectrum) were accessed on-demand for payment per use. Another benefit from a public perspective would be much lower collective investment in resources, because of better utilisation. A third benefit would be the reduced environmental impact because of a lower carbon footprint and radiation from two or three common-access national networks (assuming competition is essential for effectiveness and efficiency).

In other words, database-driven, shared spectrum and networks have to be organised and managed as a coordinated unit if the potential benefits are to be realised. America is doing this with TV white spaces/the digital dividend, through the appointment of 10 database administrators (including Spectrum Bridge, Google and Microsoft). This should elicit our interest.

Once the government and stakeholders accept these concepts, the next major task is structuring the networks as consortiums to align the interests of operators and network providers, with state-of-the-art lead partners. In this process, incorporating and reorienting BSNL and MTNL as guardians of national interests with oversight by an adequately empowered regulator will be the remaining major tasks.

[1].http://www.dot.gov.in/NTP-2011/NTP2011.htm

[2].TRAI, 2005: http://www.trai.gov.in/trai/upload/StudyPapers/2/ir30june.pdf
CAG: http://cag.gov.in/html/reports/civil/2010-11_19PA/Telecommunication%20Report.pdf

Shyam's article was originally published in the Business Standard. It can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/telecom-path-breaker

Professor Balaram talks Open Access

thomas — 2012-08-03T23:10:10Z

Last week Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science, about his thoughts on the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is available for download in the audio player within this post.

Professor P Balaram has been speaking on the Open Access movement for many years, and his position is nuanced. In this interview Balaram talks about the reasons he holds more hope currently for open-access archives over open-access journals, the importance of understanding the motivations of academics, and an idea for making institutional repositories more exciting.

~ 0:20 - Some of Balaram's views: the difficulty of the 'author pays' model for open-access journals, but our ability to separate this from the project of open-access institutional repositories.

~3:00 - clarifying the misleading idea that Indian scientists 'support' closed -access journals.

~4:30 - on the origins of the Open Access movement: not as an enabler of the developing world, but as an effort by libraries to counteract rising journal costs.

Professor Balaram on Open Access by CIS_India

~5:40 - on the future of the Open Access movement.

~6:00 - comparing open-access to the internet itself.

~6:50 - the importance of the community in expanding open-access, and the task of convincing more academics to support it.

~7:20 - how to make institutional repositories like vibrant and social parks.

~8:10 - the benefit of making repositories professionally competitive

~9:00 - the performance of the repositories at the Indian Institute of Science

~9:30 - the reasons why academics are currently slow to deposit papers, and how technology is making this easier.

~10:00 - the idea of changing the law in India to maintain the copyright of publicly funded work.

~10:50 - on how to make repositories more engaging: with websites, blogs, statistics, and rewards. More marketed, more dynamic, and the importance of imagination.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/professor-balaram-talks-open-access

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity

praskrishna — 2011-11-13T02:39:16Z

We from the Centre for Internet and Society had sent six open letters to the Parliamentary Finance Committee on the UID. The Committee responded through an email on 12 October 2011. Our response to the points raised is reproduced below.

Dear Members of the Finance Committee,

Since January 2011, we have sent six open letters on the Unique Identity (UID) project to the Members of the Finance Committee. The Committee has responded through an email dated 12 October 2011. This letter is in reply to the points that were raised.

Finance Committee: "Comparison between SCOSTA and the UID project are not valid since SCOSTA is fundamentally a standard for smart card based authentication and does not work for the objectives of the UID project."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. The UID Bill states that the aim of the project is to provide identification and authentication services. Biometric technology may be useful for identification. The seventh open letter [1] that we sent to the Committee last week uses basic statistical analysis to demonstrate that the FPIR has to be 10−6 or a thousand-fold greater than the current level mandated by UIDAI procurement policy in order to achieve the project goal of building a national database of unique ID's. SCOSTA based smart card technology is more appropriate for the authentication of individuals because:[2]

Authentication will be based on asymmetric keys and perhaps pass-phrase or pin. This is known as public key infrastructure, and will allow a person to protect their authentication factor, and easily replace it if compromised.
Authentication through public key infrastructure does not depend on connectivity to a centralized network. This will allow for inclusion of unconnected populations.
Authentication through public key infrastructure establishes mutual trust between citizen and state. Instead of only the citizen being made transparent to the state – the state is also made transparent to the citizens. This will lower the presence of fraudulent institutions and corrupt transactions.
Connection to a centralized server is not required for only the authentication of an individual in a transaction. This will lower the cost of transactions and lower the IT overhead costs.

Finance committee: "The UID project follows a different approach and has multiple objectives like providing identity to the residents of India, and ensuring inclusion of poor and marginalized residents in order to enable access to benefits and services."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. Biometrics do not ensure the delivery of benefits. As mentioned in our third open letter,[3] in every transaction that requires the use of the biometric based UID number, there are four points where corruption is possible and delivery of services will not take place:

The technology fails, and does not perform authentication. Lack of connectivity, electricity and non-lab conditions for biometric technology.
The authority fails and delivers a false positive or false negative.
The local agency fails to deliver the service after authentication.
The biometric fails due to biological changes, and thus the individual is denied benefits.

Finance Committee: "Eliminating the fakes, duplicates and ghost identities prevalent in other databases."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. Biometrics cannot eliminate fakes, duplicates and ghost identities. The deduplication algorithm only checks for uniqueness of biometric information. This can easily be defeated by a.) presenting a combination of two persons biometrics, b.) presenting the biometrics of foreign nationals collected remotely using the Internet, and c.) modifying biometric information using software tools like image editors. This is not a remote technological possibility since many registrars like banks have financial incentives for creating ghost identities for benami bank accounts. The deduplication algorithm and technology is completely black-box and has not been subject to any independent audit. Ideally research organisations like CIS should be provided legal immunity so that we can conduct independent audits of the deduplication technology and provide evidence for policy-makers. Since the deduplication technology has such a direct impact on the quality of citizenship – we recommend that the Finance Committee include proper independent audit provisions in the draft bill.

Finance Committee: "Provide a platform for authentication in a cost effective and accessible manner."

CIS: We disagree with this statement. As our first open letter[4] to the Finance Committee notes, biometrics are not appropriate authentication factors. In our opinion the dependency of biometrics on connectivity, deduplication, and centralized storage causes them to be more expensive than smart cards. The onus is upon the UIDAI to demonstrate that biometrics are cheaper than existing systems like magnetic cards used by credit card and debit card companies. If it was truly technologically and economically the better option, surely banks driven by such considerations would have adopted them many years ago.

Finance Committee: "UIDAI is not issuing cards or smart cards."

CIS: We agree with the statement made and that is why it would be possible to defeat the UIDAI authentication system using fevicol and wax as demonstrated by security expert, Jude Terence D'Souza.[5]

Finance Committee: "Cards can be issued by agencies that are providing services."

CIS: We agree with the statement made and that is why the UIDAI cannot claim the benefits of secure authentication. In other words, agencies providing smart cards will have a more secure authentication based on smart cards and sooner or later citizens will stop using the weaker authentication based on biometrics provided by the UIDAI.

Finance Committee: "UID authentication does not exclude smart cards – service providers can still choose to issue smart cards to their beneficiaries or customers if they want to."

CIS: We agree with this statement but that makes the whole project redundant. If service providers are forced to issue smart cards to their customers, they will have to create separate databases of pins and keys for authentication. The service provider will not be able to authenticate users through the UID system.

We are grateful to have received a response from the Finance Committee and look forward to more correspondence with the Committee. We would also be very grateful if the Committee could give us an opportunity to come to Delhi on our expense and testify before the committee on legal, technology and privacy related aspects of the project.

Yours sincerely,

Elonnai Hickok

[1].http://goo.gl/93sl2

[2].http://goo.gl/ZrEQr,http://goo.gl/jHRvq

[3].http://goo.gl/pW3Wi

[4].http://goo.gl/ZrEQr

[5].http://goo.gl/0z22h

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-on-finance-committee-statements

Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology

praskrishna — 2011-11-09T10:28:31Z

The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. The policy identifies several praiseworthy goals such as the promotion of open standards and open technologies, accessibility for persons with disabilities, affordable ICT services, transparency, accountability, technology development for Indian languages, placing data in public domain for use and value addition, using social media to engage with citizens and investing in indigenous R&D and capacity building. We deeply appreciate this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offer below brief comments to strengthen the draft.

Mission

It may be important to have one mission which is more citizen centric, for instance, to use ICT to empower and mainstream underprivileged sections of the population such as persons with disabilities, economically disadvantaged people, etc. All of the missions currently listed are related to making India an IT hub and around economic/commercial indicators and the focus on the human development aspect seems to be lacking.

Objectives

Objectives 8 and 9 which are dealing with government services could specifically mention accessibility. While access for persons with disabilities is covered in objective 12, it does not imply inherent accessibility of all government services, but merely an enablement of those which are required.

Enforcement Mechanism

While the policy has several commendable goals, there is little indication as to how it will be sought to be implemented. It would be helpful to have clear mention of the responsible authorities and execution mechanisms, including a mechanism for periodic review to ensure that all security, standards and quality guidelines and timelines are met.

Development of Language Technologies

Since the development of language technologies is extremely crucial to ensure that ICT access is possible for persons in both rural and urban areas, affordability should be stressed as a key aspect of this research and open source solutions may come out of public funded research.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/comments-national-policy-information-technology

Sources of CIS Funding

pranesh — 2018-07-07T01:19:19Z

CIS's donors' names and the amount of the grants they've provided are being published in an effort to be absolutely transparent and to make it clear that our donors do not dictate the policy and research positions we espouse.

To access the latest information on CIS funding click here

According to some news reports, the Centre for Internet and Society's criticisms of some government policies are being seen as being motivated by our funding. To set the record clear, we are publishing the names of all our donors, and the amounts received from them. It is to be noted that this list does not include donors (such as Privacy International) with whom we have agreements, but from whom we have not yet received any funding.

	Name of Donor	2008–2009	2009–2010	2010–2011	2011–2012	2012–2013	Total
1	Kusuma Trust	र14,473,000	र21,226,199	र22,190,787	र10,000,000	र2,32,99,038	र9,11,89,024
2	Hans Foundation					र1,40,85,662	र1,40,85,662
3	Wikimedia Foundation					र1,11,41,246	र1,11,41,246
4	Hivos		र6,49,635	र47,68,347	र22,82,939		र77,00,921
5	Ford Foundation				र45,01,370		र45,01,370
6	Privacy International					र25,05122	र25,05,122
7	Estudios para la Democracia Social			र24,32,877			र24,32,877
8	LexUM		र13,49,137	र7,11,716			र20,60,853
9	Open Society Institute, London			र900,000			र9,00,000
10	National Internet Exchange of India		र535,000	र100,000			र6,35,000
11	International Telecommunications Union			र616,487			र6,16,487
12	Rohini Nilekani		र5,00,000				र5,00,000
13	UNESCO			र2,63,480			र2,63,480
14	iCommons			र2,22,300			र2,22,300
15	Centre for the Study of Culture and Society			र1,61,100			र1,61,100
16	National Institute for the Visually Handicapped		र50,000				र50,000
Total		र1,44,73,000	र2,43,09,971	र3,23,67,094	र1,22,82,939	र5,10,31,068	र13,89,65,320

While CIS is not opposed to corporate funding (and is not opposed to corporations), we do not adopt policy positions on the basis of our funding. We adopt policy positions based on what we consider is in the public interest, specifically in the interest of consumers and developing countries such as India, as that would give effect to CIS's vision statement. While these interests may sometimes align themselves with the interests of multi-national corporations, it often does not.

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

Netizen Report: Transparency Edition

praskrishna — 2011-11-09T04:31:48Z

Global Voices Online has carried a feature story, "Netizen Report: Transparency Edition". We at CIS had filed an RTI application about website blocking. This is reflected in this article by Rebecca MacKinnon which was posted online on 7 November 2011.

Here at Global Voices Advocacy we believe that transparency by governments and companies about how and when censorship and surveillance takes place is a base-line requirement if the Internet is ever to be governed in a manner that is compatible with free expression, dissent, and citizens' right to organize and assemble. Thus we applaud Google's latest Transparency Report - the company's fourth such report detailing government requests for user data and content removal, as well as the traffic flows (or lack thereof) to Google webistes across the world since July 2009. The new data for January-June 2011 contains more detail than in the past, including data on how Google responded to the requests and whether they were honored. The data comes with a list of caveats including that automated content removal is not logged and that some data cannot be released due to local law. Nonetheless, we hope that Google's data will provide an interesting snap shot of the state of Internet affairs and the data could be used to hold governments accountable to their censorship activities. We believe that if all Internet companies disclosed similar data, the world would be further on its way to being a better place. Many articles have been written analyzing the data. A few of them include:

TechPresident: Google Data Shows Government Internet Surveillance Far Outstrips Wiretap Requests
WIRED: U.S. Requests for Google User Data Spike 29 Percent in Six Months
Huffington Post:The 13 Countries That Request The Most User Data From Google
CNet: Google: Governments seek more about you than ever

Adding to the publicly available data about censorship around the world, the Open Net Initiative has released its research data on global Internet filtering, covering seventy-four countries.

Thuggery: Read the latest news on GVA about bloggers jailed in Egypt, Syria, and Kuwait and spread the word.

Surveillance: As GVA and others have recently reported, 13 Internet filtering devices produced by the California-based company Blue Coat have made their way to Syria. According to the Wall Street Journal, Blue Coat executives say that the company will not sell the devices to countries that are under embargo by the United States, and that the devices found in Syria had been sold to a dealer who claimed they were destined for Iraq.

The Wall Street Journal has had several other items related to the role of companies in global surveillance, including a report on how China's Huawei has been peddling its mobile phone tracking and censoring equipment to Iran.

In India, Research in Motion has set up a facility in Mumbai to help the Indian government carry out lawful surveillance of its BlackBerry services including the messenger chat service, but the WSJ reports that India still has no method to intercept and decode BlackBerry enterprise email.

In Russia, bloggers' influence has apparently made the Kremlin nervous. Reporters Without Borders has condemned plans by the Russian government to deploy new software to track “extremist” content on the web, highlighting concerns about an over-broad definition of “extremist,” and the arbitrary and disproportionate approach to punishment and sanctions against websites. For more on the Russian Internet be sure to follow Global Voices' Runet Echo Project.

Moving on the United States, The Guardian has a fascinating report on the super-secret Intelligence Support Systems World Americas conference held recently in Washington DC, at which surveillance professionals shared the latest surveillance technologies and innovations that they don't want you to know about. Hacktivist and friend of GVA Jacob Appelbaum managed to get in, but was thrown out.

On a more positive note in the United States, the Washington Post reports that since 2009 many Internet companies have been more assertive about challenging “national security letters” from the FBI requesting information about users.

The Guardian reports that Civil liberties and privacy groups in the United Kingdom have raised concerns about the deployment by the London Metropolitan Police of a "covert surveillance technology that can masquerade as a mobile phone network, transmitting a signal that allows authorities to shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area."

Techdirt reports on the European Union's desire to have a “black box' built in to operating systems that would store a record of all of the computer's internet usage. The EU argues that this ability would be useful in cracking down on child pornography. The system that the EU is looking at as a possible candidate for role of ‘black box' is called LogBox. The developer of LogBox claims that the device is for preserving the freedoms and privacy of internet users, although Techdirt points out the fact that this device does little to ‘protect' the privacy of online users, it in fact, would make anonymous actions on the internet much more difficult and would provide governments and law enforcement a huge set of data on every internet user.

Censorship: The chief executives of China's 39 top Internet, telecom, and computer companies have agreed to “strengthen self-control, self-restraint and strict self-discipline” in order to “contain the tendency of spreading online rumours, pornography, fraud and other illegal, harmful information on the internet.” The move comes amidst a broader crackdown on the Internet and social media.

In India, the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society submitted a right to information request to the government's Department of Information Technology, asking for more information about website blocking. Based on DIT's response the Centre observes that “The data provided by the government seemingly conflicts with the data released by the likes of Google." Their conclusion: "Either the DIT is not providing us all the relevant information on blocking, or is not following the law."

Courts in Belgium and Finland have ordered ISPs to block the Pirate Bay.

The U.S. House Judiciary Committee has recently proposed a bill aimed at protecting intellectual property online that some critics describe as the beginning of a "Great Firewall of America". The Electronic Frontier Foundation and others have detailed the bill's problems, including lack of due process, near certainty of over-blocking and abuse, imposition of excessive liability on Internet intermediaries, global legitimization of DNS censorship and potential fragmentation of the Internet, among other things. It is considered even worse than its evil fraternal twin in the Senate, the PROTECT IP Act which is also opposed by many tech companies and non-profit groups. Despite such opposition, the bill draws relatively broad support from lawmakers.

Net Neutrality: South African technology journalist Jan Vermeulen ran the M-Lab's Glasnost Test on South African ISP's to see whether their stated bandwith shaping policies match up with reality.

The growth of bandwidth intensive internet applications in South Korea has made Net Neutrality an important issue there. South Korean ISP's are reporting that it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain neutral practices with content. The three largest telecommunications companies in Korea are worried by the rise of Smart TV's, which use Internet connections as opposed to traditional cable or satellite links to provide content. The ISP's want to charge companies varying amounts depending on the type and amount of content sent.

Internet Governance: ICANN held its 42nd public meeting in Dakar, Senegal late last month. Wendy Seltzer reported here on GVA why the seemingly arcane debates about domain name registrar accreditation is important. Konstantinos Komaitis, an active member of ICANN's Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group (Global Voices is also a member), describes the struggle that is taking place took place between governments and other ICANN stakeholders over whether some stakeholders are more equal than others within ICANN's multi-stakeholder governance model. Kieren McCarthy at dotNext also has an in-depth report and analysis on the clash between governments and registrars over law enforcement regarding domain names. Over at the Internet Governance Project Milton Mueller takes an in-depth look at the politics surrounding the Non-Commercial Stakeholder Group and related constituencies, and the fight for civil society representation at ICANN.

India has published a formal proposal to put the UN in charge of overseeing Internet governance. For different analyses by three Internet governance wonks see Kieren McCarthy, Milton Mueller, and Jeremy Malcolm.

The International Telecommunications Union has approved a new protocol for relaying biometric information. The protocol is intended to enable doctors to communicate data about patients safely and is geared towards developing countries where the access to medical care in rural areas is poor and communication between clinics and doctors would provide better patient care. You can read the full press release here.

Netizen Power: Lee Yoo Eun at Global Voices reports that the October 26th Seoul mayoral election was swayed by the use of twitter. Read the full article here.

African entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse gave a speech at the Tech 4 Africa conference highlighting what the rise of Internet Communication Technologies has done for Africa. A synopsis of his talk can be found on the Tech4Africa.

Sovereigns of Cyberspace: Facebook has introduced a new “guardian angel” feature to help users restore locked accounts.

The 13th Austrian Big Brother Awards were held on October 25th in Vienna. “Winners” included the CEO of Telekom Austria, the Ministers of Interior and Justice, and the head of the anti-terror police unit. Mark Zuckerberg received the “lifelong menace” award and a “Defender of Liberty” award went to the creators of the “Europe versus Facebook” campaign.

The Silicon Valley Human Rights Conference was held in San Francisco in late October (see GVA's report, Jillian York's report, and The Economist's) and released the Silicon Valley Standard, a set of 15 principles that technology companies should follow in order to protect human rights.

China's Weibo plans to launch an English version in partnership with Flipboard and Instagram. Will they agree to follow the Silicon Valley Standard?

Security Alert: The security researcher Barnaby Jack has found it possible to conduct a blind attack on insulin pumps. While there have been no reports of anyone being harmed by such an attack, this highlights how far behind security technologies are when it comes to wireless devices that are embedded in critical infrastructure and medicine.

Publications: Digital Cameras Reduce Electoral Corruption by Michael Callen and James Long.

Events: Check out this handy calendar of Internet-related events around the world, courtesy of Internews!

Access Contested: Security, Identity, and Resistance in Asian Cyberspace, by the OpenNet Initiative, to be officially released in December. Part I of the book (including a chapter by yours truly) can be read online or downloaded here.

Note: This report was compiled with considerable help from Ted Eby and Weiping Li.

Read the original article here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/netizen-report

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics

praskrishna — 2011-11-08T05:01:14Z

The Western Ghats portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state on biodiversity informatics on 25 November 2011 at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), Bangalore.

Schedule

09:00 – 09:20	Registration of participants
09:20 – 09:30	Welcome / Introduction
09:30 – 11:15	Plenary talks - Technology behind biodiversity informatics (3 talks)
11:15 – 11:30	Tea break
11:30 – 12:30	Plenary talks - Scientific commons and policy (2 talks)
12:30 – 13:00	Discussion
13:00 – 14:00	Lunch break
14:00 – 16:00	Biodiversity portals in India - Presentations by different teams/panel discussion
16:00 – 16:15	Tea break
16:15 – 17:00	Discussions and networking

Spheres of the Workshop:

Plenary I: Technology behind biodiversity informatics - 0930 - 1115 hrs

Development of Information System, Open Data standards, Archive and Geospatial solutions, Visualization in Bhuvan - Arul Raj, National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Exploring the semantic web for species pages - M. Sravanthi, Western Ghats Portal - 20 mins + 10 mins discussion

Challenges on the emerging discipline of Biodiversity Informatics - Donald Hobern, Atlas of Living Australia - 30mins + 10 mins discussion

Focus:

The objective of this session is to understand the global developments in biodiversity informatics in relation with developments in India. The session will focus on:

the evolution of the discipline of biodiversity informatics and its current status
the development of standards in Indian context
the technologies for biodiversity informatics
the challenges in biodiversity informatics

Plenary II: Scientific commons and policy - 1130 - 1300 hrs

Commons in the context of Biodiversity Information - Danish Sheikh, Alternative Law Forum - 20 mins + 10 mins

Open data in the scientific realm - Sunil Abraham, Centre for Internet and Society - 20 mins + 10 mins

Discussion on Scientific commons and Policy - 30 mins

Focus:

The objective of the session is to understand the commons principle and its implications for scientific research. The session will focus on:

the experience of developing a creative commons policy in Indian scenario and the resulting impacts for scientific collaboration, open data and open access
policy and social implications of open data sharing

Plenary III - Biodiversity portals in India - 1400 - 1700 hrs

Moderation: R. Prabhakar/ MD Madhusudhan
Panelists: (Introductory note by each of the panelists - 10 minutes each)

Suhel Quader, Season Watch (www.seasonwatch.in), Migrant Watch (www.migrantwatch.in)

Sanjay Molur, Pterocount (www.pterocount.org/)

K.N.Ganeshaiah - Indian Bioresource Information Network (www.ibin.co.in)

Ramesh BR - Western Ghats Portal (www.thewesternghats.in/)

Shwetank Verma, Biodiversity of India, formerly Project Brahma (http://www.biodiversityofindia.org)

Krishnamegh Kunte, ifoundbutterflies (http://ifoundbutterflies.org/)
Vijay Barve, DiversityIndia (http://diversityindia.org/)
Deepak Menon, India Water Portal (http://www.indiawaterportal.org/)
Chitra Ravi, India Biodiversity Portal (http://indiabiodiversity.org/)
Mr D.K Ved, Foundation for Revitalisation of Local Health Traditions (http://envis.frlht.org)

Focus:

The objective of the session is to learn from each other’s experience and develop a combined vision for the future of biodiversity informatics in India. The panelists will present a focused summary of the

key features available on their portals
the experience of building the portal
the key lessons learnt
future plans

We believe these four aspects will be of common interest to all participants and the presentations are expected to stimulate discussion around these four aspects.

Summary of the Day: R Prabhakar - Call for synergy/collaboration/Thank you!!

Concept Note

Rapid advancements in the domains of computer Science and information technologies have allowed integration of biodiversity information and analytical capabilities to collaborate on social networks, leading to the emergence of a new discipline, Biodiversity Informatics. The dynamics in this discipline are defined by integrating multiplicity with the semantic web and enabling of democratic social networks focused on biodiversity. We are bound to see tremendous diversification in the scope of biodiversity informatics globally and in India.

Harnessing technology for aggregating, storing, querying and analyzing biodiversity data has seen major developments over the last decade. There has been a plethora of biodiversity information resources that include mailing lists and discussions groups, occurrence records, geographical databases, biodiversity image libraries, institutional databases, species description pages, specimen records of herbaria and museum databases, and biodiversity focused Internet sites. The challenges on the biodiversity informatics landscape are on two fronts: (1) A semantic web framework to link these biodiversity information islands; and (2) Effective and flexible data exchange standards for seamless information sharing among these sites.

The evolution of social networks and communities around biodiversity information systems has been a unique factor in influencing the ways in which these information systems have developed. The assimilation and aggregation of user-generated biodiversity data and dissemination under the 'commons' principle has gained momentum globally. It has changed the way scientific collaborations are being made, and created possibilities for effective citizen-science initiatives. It is now possible to ask fresh questions, with more data, newer methods, better tools and for citizens to participate and report data from different geographies. With this, local-level data can be integrated with large-scale data leading to a better understanding of biodiversity.

With the increased penetration of the Internet into developing economies, and the widespread adoption of web technologies, biodiversity informatics has spawned an impressive variety of initiatives. These initiatives range from global knowledge bases and networks, national initiatives, eco-region based initiatives, as well as sharply focused initiatives which address a single species or event. There have been tangible advantages for stakeholders from these initiatives which has inspired many other endeavours. Success stories exist at both global and local level, and learning from these experiences can help one understand the multi-faceted nature of this discipline.

The Western Ghats Portal team is organising a one-day workshop to explore the contemporary state of biodiversity informatics as expressed in three spheres: i) technology behind biodiversity informatics, ii) scientific commons and policy and iii) biodiversity portals in India. With these objectives in mind, we welcome your active participation during the workshop. It could provide an opportunity for us to interact and learn from similar endeavors in this discipline.

Download the agenda here [PDF, 124 kb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bio-diversity-informatics-workshop

Once Upon A Flash

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:23:52Z

It was a dark and stormy evening. A young man in a dark blue Adidas jacket, collar turned up, eyes under green-black shades, hopped off a motorbike, tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his low-slung retro jeans and surreptitiously made his way through a road thronging with rush-hour traffic and irate pedestrians yelping on their cellphones. He skipped across death traps with skilled ease: leaping over potholes, jumping over halfdug trenches, avoiding the occasional pair of doggy jaws that longed to mate with his ankles, ignoring the bikers who were using the pavements as new lanes for driving towards a honking traffic jam bathed in an orange and red neon that made the road look like a piece of burnt toast with dollops of vicious jam on it.

After five minutes of brisk walking, he slowed down as if he had reached just where he wanted to be – nowhere in particular. On his left were the large Acropolis buildings, towering over the world from their gated existence, structured in pompous Greek columns and facades of granite, stone and marble. On his right, on the other side of the road, if you looked over the metal head of the traffic, you could see the small roadside restaurant that announced fresh fish at cheap rates, sitting cosily under a starved-looking tree, happily encroaching upon the pavement, forcing the pedestrians to disembark, navigate the traffic and then come back to the relative safety of the footpath.

Caught between these two ironies, he stayed put for a while, glancing at his chor bazaar Rado model that flashed on his left wrist. He headed towards the mall that rose in glass and neon, false curves and studious lines across the quickly staining sky of a Saturday evening. As he walked into the mall, the automatic doors that sensed his corporeal presence opened up for him and the girl in a polka-dotted blue-and-red dress threw him the smile that desk attendants save for strangers. The gush of cold airconditioned air and the noises of window shoppers greeted him to ease; mannequins in windows, draped in the latest fashions and various states of undress, winked at him; the smell of freshly brewed coffee came and enveloped him. He headed with ungrim determination towards the round performance area in the mall centre. Like many other hangers-out he too loitered without apparent intent around it, just another boy out on a Saturday evening.

Suddenly his cell phone buzzed. His alarm sounded in loud tones to blend with the Britney Spears playing on the mall sound system. He fished out a bright bumblebee-yellow bandana and tied it to his head. As he did that, the performance area turned into a sea of people wearing varied shades of yellow, blasting their cell phone alarms at full volume till all you could hear was a grating disharmony that would have caused comment on a railway station in India. The phones soon faded and a group of about 70 people formed a human ring, holding hands, their heads swathed in yellow, and sang at the top of their voices the first two stanzas of Hum Honge Kamyaab – the Hindi rendering of the famous song We Shall Overcome. Once the song sank into a bewildered silence, the people in yellow bandanas fell on their knees, raised their hands towards heaven and roared with laughter before quickly pulling off their headgear and dispersing, leaving an empty space and a gawking audience who just had their first dose of a ‘flashmob’ – a group of people who assemble together, suddenly, in a public place, perform an unexpected sets of choreographed actions and disperse without as much as a by your leave or with your leave.

Flashmobs trace their history to the early 18th century industrialisation, when a group of women working in the labour shops[1]in Australia used coded messages to meet and discuss the problems they had in their workplaces. These meetings were organised at random, and the women used the very technologies of production that they engaged with at work on a daily basis to fight the oppression and the injustice of the people at the top. The first modern flashmob, however, is attributed to Bill Wasik, editor of Harper’s Magazine, who, after the first failed attempt (May, 2003), managed to pull a successful flashmob where 200 people swarmed over the mezzanine floor of the Manhattan departmental store Macy’s, pretending to buy a ‘love rug’ for their commune where they supposedly all lived together; they left a bewildered audience and a bemused store staff behind them (3rd June, 2003).

Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. A polymorphous set of people are brought together through the commonality of subscribing to similar technological interfaces or gadgetry. Random e-mails, short messages (sms) on cell phones, discrete messages embedded in public works of art or media, blogs and wikis have now been successfully used to conjure these tenuous group formations that temporarily transform the space that they arrive at – flash sites – into something that neither the audience they perform to nor the state can comprehend, thus producing that space in a condition of social and physical illegality.

In The Name of Fun

One of the most overarching icons of a globalised economy has been the credit card – virtual money that has changed the way we think of money, capital and transactions. Visa Power, as the advertisement goes, is looked upon as the quintessential rhetoric of economic globalisation, where the power to change and to create is manifested through the processes of consumption. While technology has been heavily implicated in the creation of this new invisible money, it has remained on the background. The swiping of the card – the physical act of buying without ‘paying’ has become such a naturalised event that the technology it adopts or the networks it creates are not very visible... Flash mobs, in their construction, execution and ramifications, foreground technology as one of the most powerful tools of creating new formations of grouping and networking that, through their deliberately devised unintelligibility, transform the spaces they occupy.

This is the story of the first flashmob in India, and how it can be understood through the tropes of illegality, enchantment and transformation. The story starts a little before the flashmob itself. In the year 2000, a shopping mall in Mumbai created a furore amongst the public. It was the first ‘genuine’ shopping mall in India. The first space that claimed mallhood was in Bangalore – Kemp Fort, but it was more a large shopping store rather than a mall. This first all American shopping mall – Crossroads, with its promises of unlimited pleasure and brand-tagged shopping – attracted the largest crowd in its opening week. Everybody wanted to see what the mall was like. Everybody was curious about this space. Everybody wanted to be a part of this exclusive zone that clearly demonstrated that modernity and progress had finally come to us. Then everybody found out that they were not allowed to enter the mall. As the director of the mall pointed out in his interview with The Times of India, (23rd August, 2000), “Crossroads is not meant for everybody".

In those days when cell phones were still a novelty and definitely a curio for the upper classes, and when pagers were still struggling for a mass market, Crossroads passed a stipulation which restricted people not carrying a cell phone or a credit card from entering the mall. If you were still eager to enter the space, you paid extra fees of Rs 50 per head and thus made amends for not carrying a cell phone or a credit card. This was the first time a ‘public’ space made it very clear that the public it was looking for and attempting to effectively create was not “everybody”. The issue was talked about, shouted about, screamed at and criticised by all wings of the media, who passionately analysed this instance of discriminatory practices based on socioeconomics. Later, a PIL (Public Interest Litigation) was filed against the mall; it lost, and had to throw its doors open to “everybody” who had been clamouring to get in ever since they found out they were not allowed to enter.

On 4 October 2003, the mall again came into limelight in a manner it had not accounted for. This time it was initiated by an e-mail. About 5,000 original mailers went off to people all around Mumbai and even beyond the city, asking them to have a look at a new blog for Mumbai flashmobs. The blog posted a form asking for name, e-mail address and mobile number. On 3 October several cell phones rang, asking people who had submitted their details in the form to check their inboxes. The eager participants glided to their accounts to find a mail that agonisingly chalked out the time and space of the meeting venue – a flash site. The information was also sent by sms to all members who had volunteered. And then at exactly 5 pm a group of about a hundred participants entered Crossroads. They screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares belonging to Reliance India. They performed the garba. In the middle of dancing they all froze. And then without so much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving a trail of bewilderment and confusion, as an audience of over a thousand watched with their jaws on the floor.

This was India’s first recorded flashmob. A large crowd of people who did not know each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend the flashmob contact into relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads, thus marking it as the first flash site in India. Ironically, the group that converted the mall into mayhem consisted of whom Anne Balsamo calls the hyperreal people – people whose identities are created by the hypervisual and extra physical aesthetics of the digital technologies that they deploy - who were once the only legitimate owners of the space of that mall. This first flashmob sparked off many others all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces such as multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flashsite.

Bill Wasik, the creator of the first flashmob in Manhattan, in a recent interview,[2] looked upon the flashmob experiment as a study in behavioural psychology of people he called “hipsters” – people who would join ‘new’ or ‘cool’ things for no reason or investment but to be visible in the new trends and social fads. To a large extent, Wasik’s surface analysis seems to hold true. While flashmobs have been used as a political weapon by several groups and activists in many areas of human rights, queer rights, feminism, political democracy, etc., flashmobs fundamentally exist, like pre-Raphaelite art, for a solipsist reason. Bijoy Venugopal, who produced one of the most celebrated accounts of the Crossroads flashmob[3], mentions how it was all about having some “serious fun”. Increasingly, the flashmob organisers in and around the country have disavowed any ideological moorings for the gathering, and forcibly shelve it into the realms of entertainment or leisure. Following the banning of flashmobs in cities like Mumbai and Bangalore (Mid-day, 9th oct. 2003), even though they have invoked the right to freedom of speech and expression, the organisers and the participants have largely produced justifications by claiming to have no political agenda or inclinations in the construction or execution of flashmobs.

In this repeated disavowal of the political, one can read the desire for re-enchantment that flashmobs and mobsters bring with them. Flashsites, defined by the organising of the flashmobs, are usually sites of globalised consumption – an enchanted world of brand names and designer lifestyles that can make you feel as perpetually disoriented as Alice in Wonderland. These sites serve as the symbols of enchantment in the logic of the city.[4] The new urban enchantment and mode of fantasy is located in the circuits of consumerism where, with plastic money and unlimited credit, the consuming citizen can buy all that the heart desires. However, flashmobs, outside these networks of consumption, and constituted by the same people who fit the bill of the citizen as imagined and promoted by the state and the market as they embrace globalisation and its technologies, demand a re-enchantment of the city. They force us to acknowledge the need for such public spaces to be accessible to all, and provide a strong critique of the easily accepted globalised dream in which the state is so heavily investing. Flashmobs become a manifestation of how tenuously networked, fragile communities, their collaboration inspired and enabled by cyberspatial technologies, can contest the very forces that promote and proliferate these technologies. Flashmobs become a site upon which the drama of globalisation, consumption, state and space is discursively and recursively enacted.

In The Name of The Law

That flashmobs are in a condition of illegality is perhaps one of the easiest claims to prove. The very fact that the Mumbai Police, after the first series of flashmobs, invoked Section 37(1) of the Bombay Police Act in the name of security and safety, clearly states how flashmobs are considered outside the law in the most literal sense of the word. The then Mumbai Police Deputy Commissioner of Police, Amitabh Gupta, contacted Rohit Tikmany, organiser of the first flashmob and moderator of the flashmob blogging community (http://www.mumbaimobs.org/), asking him to shut down the site and stop all further attempts at organising flashmobs. Following the ban in Mumbai, cities such as Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Delhi have enacted similar bans within the city limits. These censoring forces look at flashmobs as potentially destabilising elements that can be ‘misused’ for violent acts such as riots and bombings by fundamentalist organisations.

However, of greater interest is the way in which flashmobs manage to reproduce flashsites in conditions of social and physical illegality by creative deliberate structures of transient unintelligibility. The leisure infrastructure of malls and multiplexes, cafes and large shopping complexes, gaming zones and commercial roads of consumption, are all aimed at the new citizenry that comes into being with these new urban economies falling into place. These spaces are not only legitimate spaces of self-expression through consumption, but also authorised spaces of public assembly and gathering. They promote an ethos of incessant consumption where the individual is also installed as a consumable product that relates to others in the processes of consumption. They are the locations where brands, accessories and lifestyles all come together as the figureheads of a sanitised economy which strives to make opaque the surrounding subcultures of piracy, theft, copying and distributing that emerge around such nodal points.[5] To belong to the space of a mall or a shopping complex, one needs to almost automatically endorse the original, the authentic, the expensive, as a way of making a conscious statement of style and lifestyle. These potential flashsites become the spaces that the state legitimises as the most visible and sanitised form of urbanisation in contemporary cities.

However, flashmobs definitely subvert the sanctity or the sanity of such spaces by compelling them to suddenly introject disruptive conditions of unintelligibility. Flashmobs force the other participants of the space to enter into a narrative of confusion and chaos; of turbulence, thus rendering the space of consumption incomprehensible for the short time that the flashmob unfolds. Moreover, flashmobs do not fall under globalisation’s rhetoric of consumption, and do not require any special access powers or consumption rites, thus defying the discriminatory protocols that such spaces put in motion under the uneasily hovering sign “Rights of Admission Reserved”. Flashmobs, by rejecting the very use and expectation of the space, in spite of the heavy surveillance, state opposition and hi-tech policing, are able to distort the formulaic narratives of the space, thus creating alternative structures of resistance, of transformation, of transition. State apparatus gets completely paralysed when faced with such a radical reconfiguring, and thus goes out of its way to put a special ban upon flashmobs in a city where even a small defeat in a cricket match, or various emotional events such a public mourning or celebration, bring together crowds much louder, more aggressive, tenuous and destructive than conventional flashmobs. The transient illegality that flashmobs produce is not only at the level of the law but also at the level of legibility and comprehension.

"What do the mobsters do when they come together for a flashmob?" is a wrong question to ask. While the actions of the mobsters might be bizarre and lacking in meaning, often uninformed by any obvious ideology, flashmobs do produce new modes of signification and networking patterns, unprecedented in modern history. The ephemeral nature of the flashmobs, the improbably pseudonymous identities of the participants, the technologically mediated communication and networking patterns, all hint towards a certain notion of technosociality, where the social world around us is profoundly affected by the technologies that we adopt. In these unexpected eruptions, flashmobs create a new relationship between actors, audience and the spaces that they inhabit, including all the three into the circuits of digital technologies. As a form of radical localised performance, flashmobs offer a way to question the hierarchical intentionality of the spaces that they transform; they embody new ways in which technologies interface with our daily life, producing new forms of technosocial living.

This paper was published in Academia.edu. Click here to read the original. Download the file here. [PDF, 129 kb]

[1].These were probably the precedents to the modern day sweat shops that have characterized Globalisation in the 21st century. The ‘labour shops’ were large stone and concrete buildings which housed workers working around the clock towards incessant production. Women and children were often preferred because they were given lesser wages than men and considered more easily malleable.

[2].The transcript of the interview is available at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[3].Venugopal, himself a prolific blogger, blogged about the flashmobs at http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/37/features-bemis.php

[4]. Po Bronson, in his spectacular analysis of the Silicon Valley in The Nudist on the Late Shift, talks about how in a post-industrial city, the quantifiable icons of enchantment and progress – large factories, smoke spewing chimneys and huge barricaded stone and iron constructions have given way to small and homelike offices which are almost human and hence negligible. In his search for the new symbols of enchantment, Bronson conjures the figure of the nudist on the late shift – an eccentric double billionaire who works and lives in a cubicle and rides on the crest of the IT boom. In the case of third world countries like India, these symbols might well be these new sites of consumption that have come with globalization.

[5].One of the more exciting facets of digital technologies and globalization has been the debate over property, ownership and theft. Easy duplication of brands and bypassing the traditional circuits of distribution or sale of property have created the glorified figure of the pirate who straddles the worlds of the legal and the illegal, the digital and the physical, the ephemeral and the tactical with great ease. Within the sanctuarised spaces of malls and shopping complexes, these referents to the other world of cheap duplicates and mobile consumables hang uneasily. There is a constant attempt at establishing the original and the legitimate over the fake or copied replicas which are available in the grey markets that emerge around them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/once-a-flash

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:24:05Z

The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Moving Images, Number 8, December 2009.

The idea of the single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube. The recent state of controversies around YouTube, has foregrounded the question of authorship in collaborative conditions. Questions of who owns the particular videos and what is the role that the large communities of authorship play have not been resolved as the debaters have concentrated only on single videos and singular notions of authorship, dismissing the (this paper proposes) collaborators as jesters, clowns and pranksters, without recognizing their contribution to the videos.

Introduction

I shall begin by misquoting and possibly violating copyright regimes by invoking Dostoyevsky, to say that all dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. Every technological innovation, but particularly innovations affecting authorship and the role of the author, brings with it a new set of anxieties and concerns. David Stewart, in his engrossing book on the history of technology and communication, for example, talks about how in the early years of postal service there were debates around who was the author of the mail that was being delivered. Through a particularly fascinating case that looked at a Lord in London holding the post office responsible for some objectionable mail delivered to his daughter, Stewart traces the origins of techno-neutrality and regulation to look upon technology as merely a bearer of knowledge – in this case, the mail – and the original author, this primordial figure that sits and writes or shoots or sings, as the only person upon whom the responsibility and hence also the credit can be placed.

Mark Joffe, in his movie The Man Who Sued God, introduces us to the case of Steve Myers, an ex-lawyer in Australia, who sues God because his boat is struck by lightning and his insurance company refuses to pay, claiming it to be an act of God. By claiming to be God’s representatives on Earth, the Christian churches and the Jewish synagogues are held to be the liable party, putting them in the difficult position of either having to pay out large sums of money, or prove that God does not exist. But more than anything else, it is the attribution of responsibility to one particular, identifiable entity that lies at the centre of the movie. Even in the pre-Internet world, one of the biggest sources of anxieties has been determining authorship and putting into place a knowledge apparatus that reinforces the need for such a condition. The question of authorship, while it surfaces in a number of contexts – copyright infringements, intellectual property right regimes, plagiarism, crediting and referencing industries, etc – is perhaps most interestingly manifest on video sharing social networking sites like YouTube and Myspace.

Rather than addressing what constitutes digital cinema or the future of celluloid, I would instead like to locate the emergence of the idea of authorship, through a historical examination of an ‘old media’. I will be looking at the early history of the book and the print revolution to argue that the condition of authorship that one presumes for the book, and subsequently, through a different trajectory, for cinema, is not something that was inherent to it; and in fact the early history of the book is filled with conflicts around the question of how you could attribute the book as an artefact to one individual author. By examining the conditions that enabled the establishment of the book as a stable object that can be linked to the author, I hope to return us to a different way of thinking about Youtube videos and the debates on authorship that surround it.

YouTube and the question of authorship

The world of YouTube stakeholders can roughly be divided into two camps: People who swear by it and people who swear at it. The camp has arisen mainly because of differences of opinions on who owns a YouTube video and the content therein. The critics of YouTube – largely recording companies and movie studios and distributors – argue that platforms like YouTube are killing their businesses, emptying their coffers, and are a direct threat to the sacred cow of all cultural productions – the livelihood and the integrity of the creative artist. They make claims that a site like YouTube infringes the copyright regimes because videos get published by somebody who has ripped it from another source, and often does no crediting. Also, that the sales of the music or the movies or television serials go down because of such activities.

One of the most recent infamous example that can be cited is the case of the Let’s Go Crazy Dancing video case, were the world literally went crazy. In early February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s 13-month-old son started dancing. Pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, Holden Lenz started moving to the distinctive beat of a song by Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy.” [1] Lenz wanted her mother to see the film so she did what any citizen of the 21st century would do: She uploaded the file to YouTube and sent her relatives and friends the link. They watched the video scores of times. It was a perfect YouTube moment: a community of laughs around a homemade video, readily shared with anyone who wanted to watch.

Sometime over the next four months, however, someone from Universal Music Group also watched Holden dance. Universal manages the copyrights of Prince. It fired off a letter to YouTube demanding that it remove the unauthorized “performance” of Prince’s music. YouTube, to avoid liability itself, complied. YouTube sent Lenz a notice that it was removing her video. She wondered, “Why?” What had she done wrong? Her questions reached the Electronic Frontier Foundation and then started the battle, where on Lenz’s behalf, the EFF lawyers sent a ‘counter-notice’ to YouTube, that no rights of Universal were violated by Holden’s dancing video. Lenz as the author of the video was concentrating on her son’s dancing and that the presence of Prince’s song was negligible and definitely fair use. Yet Universal’s lawyers insist to this day that sharing this home movie is wilful copyright infringement under the laws of the United States. On their view of the law, she is liable to a fine of up to $150,000 for sharing 29 seconds of Holden dancing. They specifically state that Lenz is not the ‘original’ artist who made the music and thus she is appropriating authorship and violating the rights of the artist – Prince, to be identified as the creator of the song. The notice also informed her that they were unhappy with the ‘clowning’ around of Prince’s music which might offend his fan-base.

The questions which come to the fore are very obvious and not new to the history of legal debates on cinema: What is the content of the video? Who is the author of the video? Who watches the video? What are the intentions of the video? The supporters of the ‘Free as in Beer’ access movements and also of YouTube clearly point out the farcical condition of this battle. As Lawrence Lessig very eloquently points out in his essay on the ‘Defence of Piracy’.

How is it that sensible people, people no doubt educated at some of the best universities and law schools in the country, would come to think it a sane use of corporate resources to threaten the mother of a dancing 13-month-old? What is it that allows these lawyers and executives to take a case like this seriously, to believe there’s some important social or corporate reason to deploy the federal scheme of regulation called copyright to stop the spread of these images and music? “Let’s Go Crazy” indeed![2]

In another instance, which is a competition on YouTube between two videos to reach the coveted “first video to be seen 1 million times” status, brings again these question of the author and the pranksters. Avril Lavigne fans, on the release of her recent Single ‘Girlfriend’, started campaigning to make that video the first to be viewed 1 million times on YouTube. They put it in direct competition with the then most viewed video – ‘History of Dance’ – and started activities that violated the Terms of Service for YouTube. They embedded the videos in many sites and started websites which played the videos automatically. They even created a website which auto reloaded the video every fifteen minutes and encouraged fans to keep the website opened, abusing the power of broad band, while they are browsing, surfing, or even sleeping. The efforts paid off and Avril Lavigne’s ‘Girlfriend’, in July 2008, became the first video to be watched 1 million times in the history of YouTube. One would have thought that such publicity is what a distributor’s wet dreams are made of. However, just after the video reached the 1 million mark and entered the heights of popularity, YouTube received a notice from Times Warner, to remove the video because it was a copyright violation. They also demanded that all the other compilations and samplings which included the song be removed from YouTube. The supporters of the move, condemned the Lavigne fans as ‘pranksters’ or ‘jesters’ who were in for the cheap publicity, because they were not really creators of the video or the authors. In a startling Op-Ed titled ‘How Avril Lavigne Killed YouTube’ in the New York Times, a spokesperson for Times Warner suggested.

This is not respectable fan behaviour. A fan is somebody who loves and worships the author and not somebody who pretends to be the author. The avrilelavignebandaid group just turned out to be a group of pirates who passed off Lavigne’s video as their own and went on to promote it, forgetting the fact that they were using a democratic platform like YouTube for activities which can only be called theft!

Predictably, the debate on the question of authorship takes place in a rather somber tone, whether it is the zealous claims of monopoly of production and authorship that the established industries claim for themselves, or the passionate defenses of the YouTubeians. What remains constant through the entire process is the fact that the idea of a singular, identifiable author remains stable and unchallenged. I would like to take a slightly different track here, and try and see how we can think the question of the “production of the author” by revisiting the history of the book and of early print culture, and look at the manner in which the idea of the author emerges.

There is often an unstated assumption about the book as authored by a single person and authorship is spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would be useful to situate the condition of authorship within a historical moment, where authorship is not seen to be an apriori condition but a constructed one, and one whose history is located in specific technological changes. The technology of print and paper brought about a set of questions around the question of authorship, and in the same way, the domain of Internet video sharing and collaborative authorship raises a set of questions and concerns.

The construction of author/ity

In many ways, the debate on authorship and knowledge is similar to the older debate in philosophy between body and self. Critics of self, such as Foucault, demonstrate that the notion of the self has often stemmed from very particular experiences in the Christian West, which were then posited as universal experiences. However, doing away with the notion of the self does not do away with the question of the body. In fact, Foucault goes on to explore the technologies of the self and how it informs our understanding of the body. In a similar vein, while the proponents of the Web 2.0 revolution (sometimes unknown to themselves, echoing debates that happened in print about a 100 years ago) announce either the death of the author or the availability of open licensing, fail to recognize that the question of authorship (and hence authority) are rooted both in particular practices as well as in technological forms. Hence the debates take familiar shapes: author versus pirate, digital versus celluloid, collaborative versus single author, etc.

It is especially when posing the question of authorship in absolute terms that the cultural producers/consumers on YouTube get reduced to pranksters, jesters or clowns. The debate also excludes the temporal framework of the debate and forget that the Internet is still a work in progress. Even though an Internet year is akin to seven pre-digital years, and time is now experienced in accelerated modes, it is necessary to realize that the domain of collaborative online sharing and production of videos is a relatively new one.

It may be more useful to think of the post-celluloid world as an extremely ambiguous and fluid period, undoubtedly marked by immense possibilities, but we have not reached any settled phase yet. So if we are to make comparisons, then it is more useful to compare the contemporary period with another moment in history, and the emergence of a cultural form other than cinema, which was marked by an equal fluidity. It is here that I go to the early history of print culture or ‘print in the making’[3] and the conflicts over the question of authorship, to demonstrate that the condition of authorship question is an important one, but it is not a question that is unique to YouTube or the Internet. And an examination of the conditions under which authorship came to be established may help us get over our anxieties about authorship, and better understand it with certain lightness – through pranks, jests and clowning around.

What’s in a name? – The author and the book

For us to understand the idea of print in the making, we need to understand some of the practices that preceded the idea of print. They also enable us to understand the specific nature of the disputes around the question of authorship, and more importantly rethink disputes over authorship as productive disputes. Lawrence Liang in his ‘A brief history of the Internet in 13th and 14th Century’ takes up the example of Chaucer, the father of English poetry. He demonstrates, through different readings, “how the structure and the form of the Canterbury Tales reflects, interestingly, the question of approaches to the idea of authorship as well as the conditions of the production of the Canterbury Tales itself.” Liang looks at the manuscript cultures and the ways in which authorship and rights were understood.

Borrowing from Mark Rose, Liang shows how, in the Middle Ages, the owner of a manuscript was understood to possess the right to grant permission to copy it, and this was a right that could be exploited, as it was, for example, by those monasteries that regularly charged a fee for permission to copy one of their books. This was somewhat similar to copyright royalty with the crucial difference that the book-owner’s property was not a right in the text as such but in the manuscript as a physical object made of ink and parchment. The value provided by the monastery and the reason for their charging for their copy fee did not emerge just from the existence of the copy alone, but also from the fact that each monastery also had their unique elements in the form of the annotations, the commentary, corrections, which only the particular monastery’s copy might contain. The very act of copying and possession made you the author of that text and also the owner of the book.[4] The author was not only the reclusive solitary figure that coins the first word but the various scribes, writers, annotators and litterateurs who offered changes, as well as helped in distribution and copying.[5]

So, while the popular account of preprint cultures is of slavish copying by scribes, the story turns out to be slightly more complicated. Acting as annotators, compilers, and correctors, medieval book owners and scribes actively shaped the texts they read. For example, they might choose to leave out some of the Canterbury Tales, or contribute one of their own. They might correct Chaucer’s versification every now and then. They might produce whole new drafts of Chaucer by combining one or more of his published versions with others. And these were all legitimate, acceptable and engaged forms of authorship. While this activity of average or amateur readers differs in scale and quality from Chaucer’s work, it opens us to new questions of the relationship between author, text, and reader in the Middle Ages, and also what it may mean to understand contemporary practices of knowledge and cultural creation.

Scribes and readers responded to Chaucer, Langland, and others, not by slavishly copying, canonizing, or passively receiving their texts, but by reworking them as creative readers. In doing so, they continue and contribute to the great layers of intertextual conversation that made the work of these now canonical authors relevant, interesting, and, fundamentally, possible. Similar debates surround the attribution of authorship to William Shakespeare for his work. Literary historians have periodically made claims that Shakespeare’s plays were written by the then court poet Ben Jonson, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Christopher Marlowe, who is considered to be his arch enemy, that Shakespeare’s plays were written by another man named Shakespeare, and not the Shakespeare we think we know. At the basis of these arguments was the idea that the plays were designed not to be written but be performed and that in the lively rendering of the play, between different actors and producers, the original text changed. Interestingly, the Shakespearean technique of ‘asides’ and ‘taking the audience into confidence’ was actually a way of inviting the audience to not only receive the story but to read it differently, and edit it with their response to it.

This invitation was accepted by late Elizabethans who took great pleasure in seeing the same play multiple times to see how it has changed in the performance. Moreover, as multiple copies of the same manuscript started appearing in the living public, along with the actors and the producers, the readers also took great pleasure in creating copies of the takes that drastically cut, expand, edit and otherwise Shakespeare’s plays.[6]

This activity goes beyond the mechanics of audience reception and looks at the plays as a collaborative effort which gets glossed over in the making of the authoritative folios which looked upon all such interventions as anomalies to the text. Before the fixity of text, there was a possibility to think of the text not as a finished product but a work in progress that elicits new responses, meanings and forms through its engagement with the audience. Moreover, the audience, in their rights of consumption, also seemed to possess the right to edit, change and circulate the text. They were the original jesters, pranksters and clowns, who, in their playful response to the text, constructed it to respond to their contexts and traditions. This sounds a lot like the debates we are experiencing on YouTube videos where the readers respond in kind to the poetics of reading and composing within which the YouTube videos operate.

Conclusion

Thus rather than speaking about authorship as something that is intrinsic to either a particular mode of authorship or intrinsic to any technological form, it might be more useful instead to consider the variety of knowledge apparatuses which come into play to establish its authority. In the case for the history of the book, it was clear that the establishment of authorship depended on the arrangements, classifications and kinds of assemblage that make it possible, maintain it as well as critique it. The conventions, for instance, by which the title and author of a work are identified play very specific functions in preparing for knowledge, as do the several kinds of documentation, attribution, citation and copyright.

The preconditions for authorship cannot easily be made into the object that we identify as author. It is a matter of making evident (making known) the structures of authorship which emerge in ways that provide definitive proof of the imperfectability and ambiguity of the authorial position. To speak of the productive nature of conflicts over authorship is then to recognize that any author – either exalted or dismissed - is constructed in a condition of potential collaboration and revision. The question thus centres on how we use the notion of authorship, how we bring it to light and mobilize it today to understand cultural forms differently. The way the authorship debates take place, there is almost a theological devotion to an exalted idea of author, without a consideration of the apparatus that was established to construct that condition.

The point is not to do away with the question of the author or construct another catch-all retainer that accepts all forms of engagement as authorship, but to recognize it not as something that is intrinsic or a given but something that is always transient, and to locate it, in the case of digital cinema, within specific practices and technologies. To return to the question of YouTube videos and the future of celluloid image; we are now faced with new questions about authorship and the very form that the digital cinema embodies: If the image itself is no longer made to bear the burden of meaning and intention, can we locate new forms of authorship – sometimes in incidental intertextuality, sometimes in creating conditions (as is in the case of DVDs or digital video sharing sites) narratives, meanings, interpretations and paraphernalia that simultaneously re-emphasize the sacredness of the image while deconstructing the apparatus that establishes a fixity of authorship over that image? Can we look at not only novel forms of interaction and consumption of the celluloid image but at a playful engagement with the image to create a galaxy of responses – sometimes as reciprocal videos, often through comments, embedding mechanisms, using the video not as an object unto itself but as a form of complex referencing and citation to a larger community of artists and authors?

The future of celluloid, especially if we are locating it in the realm of the Digital Moving Objects of Web 2.0 technologies, is going to have debates which were relevant also to the making of the book. However, this is not to say that the challenges faced and the problematic that emerge are redundant. Indeed, the celluloid frame and its overpowering capacity to incorporate technology, content, response and remixes, to produce the spectacle of watching, posit certain challenges to the Web 2.0 celebrations while simultaneously expanding its own scope of production. YouTube debates around infantile abuse of video/cinema technologies to make dancing babies and furry animals popular need to be read as symptomatic of a much larger question of authorship, authority and the conditions of cultural production rather than signalling the death of celluloid. An escape from the authority question also allows for an escape from the celluloid-digital binary and posits a more fruitful engagement in looking at how celluloid technologies (and the constellation of factors therewith) inform our understanding and analysis of the DMIs that are slowly gaining popularity.

This research was originally published in the Journal of Moving Images.

See the research paper in Academia.edu.

References

[1].Holden Lenz’s YouTube debut, that probably made him the most popular baby on the Internet is still available for viewing at <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1KfJHFWlhQ> retrieved 12:14 a.m. 22nd January 2010.

[2].The essay is available for open access at <http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html>

[3].I am grateful to Lawrence Liang for this methodological framework where he looks at the emergence of Wikipedia and the pre-print cultures, to look at the similarities and differences between the two. “A Brief History of the Internet in the 13th and 14th Century”. Forthcoming 2010.

[4].See Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading. 1990. New York: Penguin Books.

[5].Daniel Wolf, in Reading History in Early Modern England. 2005. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, explains in great detail how the reader as well as the author were imagined, constructed and recognized in the early days of print.

[6].See Molly Abel Travis’s comprehensive account of the debates in Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. 1998. Illinois, Chicago: Southern Illinois University Press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/jesters-clowns-pranksters

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:11:33Z

Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant Shah. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia, 2009, at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Abstract

As an increasing population in Asia experiences a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young Digital Natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the Digital Natives across emerging information societies are so entrenched in the rhetoric, vocabulary and practice of consumption, that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and are often contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilization and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production, as trivial or often unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the youth's consumption of globalised ideas and usage of digital technologies, has led to a new kind of political revolution, which might not subscribe to earlier notions of change but nevertheless offer possibilities for great social transformation.

Context: Techno-Social Identities

It was the beginning of the 1990’s that ushered in the digital globalisation in Asia and emerging information societies were experiencing a moment of significant socio-political and econo-cultural transition. Many countries in South and East Asia restructured their developmental agenda to accommodate the neo-liberal paradigm that opened their economic and cultural capital to the globalised world markets (Roy; 2005). Unlike in the West, especially in the United States of North America and North-Western Europe, where the internet technologies developed in hallowed spaces of academic and government research, conceptualised in an idealised ethos of open source cultures, free speech and shared knowledges (Himanen; 2001), the emergence of digital ICTs were signifiers of a certain economic mobility, globalised aesthetic of incessant consumption, availability of lifestyle-choices and a reconfiguring of the State-Citizen relationship.

As different countries in Asia invested in the physical infrastructure of ICTs and widespread access to cyberspatial technologies, they also posited the figure of a techno-social citizen-subject who was caught in a double bind: On the one hand, these new subjects were the wealth of the nations, providing a base for outsourcing and back-processing industries, using their skills with digital technologies to aid the State’s aspirations of economic progress and development. With the digital technologies appearing as the panacea for the various problems of illiteracy, population explosion and ethnic/regional conflicts that have marked many Asian countries in the second half of the Twentieth Century, these new subjects were looked upon as the pall-bearers who would usher in the much desired economic development and socio-cultural reform in these emerging information societies. On the other hand, the ability of these techno-social subjects to transcend their local, to circumvent State authority and regulation, and adapt to a new era of economic and cultural consumption, posited a huge problem for these States that strove to contain the spills of an economic decision into the domains of the social, cultural and the political (Bagga, et al; 2005).

Among the populations who were actively (or, as is often the case, unwittingly) embodying these changes, were the Digital Natives – younger children and youth who have embraced digital technologies and tools as central to their every-day lives and sense of the self – who used (and abused) these technologised spaces in unpredictable and creative ways beyond, and often against, the authority of the State (Shah; 2007) . This particular identity has raised a lot of concern from different authorities like the government, the educators, the legislators and policy makers, and even civil society practitioners and theorists. Most governments had their initial responses to these Digital Native identities as rooted in paranoia and pathologisation. The cyberspatial matrices are looked at with suspicion as creating a world of the forbidden, the dirty and the dangerous. Public debates over pornography, obscenity, need to control and censor the unabashed fantasies that the cyberspaces were catering to, and a call to govern, administer and contain these spaces (and consequently, the people occupying them), have riddled through information societies around the globe.

The many anxieties that have surfaced from parents, teachers, interventionists and policy makers, have led to a global industry that is aimed at keeping the children and youth safe from the ‘ill-effects’ of being online. The responses have been varied and diverse: Radical measures from heavy censorship and regulation of all information accessed through the digital spaces to opening up de-addiction and rehabilitation centres; Strong anti-piracy and pornography drives to forming strict legislation on digital crimes; Extraordinary steps to educate the young people about the perils and pit-falls of internet usage to actual policies dissuade internet usage by regulating the physical spaces of access and the promise of dire punishments for ‘abuse’.

Providing a litany of these anxieties – each made unique by the differential and contextual experience of digital technologies across regions and societies – can be a daunting and eventually a futile exercise because the landscape of digital technologies and spaces is extremely varied and fluid and each new crisis leads to the emergence of a new set of problems. However, there are certain common tensions and uncontested assumptions that run through these anxieties, which need to be understood and examined. It is the intention of this paper to extrapolate these less visible anxieties with a particular focus on the techno-social identity more popularly referred to as Digital Natives.

Misunderstood & Misrepresented

The term ‘Digital Natives’ (Prensky, 2001) is slowly becoming ubiquitous in its usage amongst scholars and activists working in the youth-technology paradigm, especially in emerging Information Societies. The phrase is used to differentiate a particular generation – generally agreed upon as a generation that was born after 1980 – who has an unprecedented (and often inexplicable) relationship with the information technology gadgets. It is a phrase used to make us aware of the fact that these people are everywhere: On the roads taking pictures on their mobile phones and uploading them on their blogs and photo-streams; In public transport, in their own individually created islands where they listen to music and furiously typing text message their friends; In schools and universities, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars; In offices, glued in with equal passion on to dating and social networking sites as the geek mailing list that they moderate; In homes and bedrooms, uploading the most private and intimate details of their lives (or becoming subjects to other peoples’ online activities) on live cam feeds and audio and video podcasts; In our imaginations, sometimes cracking into our machines, at others, helping us remove that malware, and at yet others, appearing as flesh-and-body familiar strangers just a click away.

All of these are the common sense characteristics attributed to Digital Natives. These are all people born into globalised markets and liberal economies; into accelerated communication and digital representations. And they have skills (and choices) to navigate through the increasingly mediated and digitised technosocial[1] environments that we live in. Most of the stories around these Digital Natives, take on the expected tones of euphoria and paranoia. On the one hand, are the unabashed celebrations of this new digital identity and the possibilities and potentials it offers, and on the other are concerns and alarms about the lack of structures which can make meaning or shape these identities in meaningful and constructive ways which can contribute to a certain vision of democracy, equality, community building and freedom. Both these accounts often contain the Digital Native in geo-political (North-Western, developed countries) and socio-cultural (Educated, affluent, empowered), and do not provide much insight into the incipient potentials of social transformation and political participation with the rise of the Digital Native identity.

There are strident voices that knell the toll of parting day when it comes to Digital Natives. There is a general outcry from scholars that the typical Digital Native is basically dumb. Mark Bauerlein (2008) calls them ‘The Dumbest Generation’ that is jeopardising our future. He paints them as being in a state of constant distraction made of multi-tasking and gadgets that demand their attention. Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell suggests that they exhibit, because of their scattered engagement with technology, symptoms that look like attention deficit disorders. The educators in class lament about how this is a copy + paste culture that refuses to read and write or even think on their own (Bennett et al, 2008) as Digital natives increasingly depend on machines and networks to do their work for them.

In 2008, China recorded its 100 millionth internet user and also witnessed the death of a 13-year-old Digital Native, who, after two days of non-stop gaming, jumped off an elevator to ‘meet another character from his game’ (China Times; 2008) – the gaming environment leading him to a state of hypnosis where he could not make a distinction between his physical reality and his digital fantasy. Immediately following this, China started its first internet rehabilitation clinics, identifying internet addiction disorder (IAD) as significantly affecting young people’s mental growth as well as their social and interpersonal skills. Dan Tapscott has announced the birth of the “Screenagers” who are unable to look beyond their need for entertainment and personal gratification, all at their fingertips as they live their lives on the Infobahn.

It is in the nature of the design of trust online (Nevejan, 2008) that the Digital Native in his/her transactions becomes the centre of his/her own universe. The recent explosion of news feeds on sites like Facebook, or the use of Twitter to create social networks, or blogging which is often contained in echo-chambers (as demonstrated by Howard Dean’s political campaign in the USA, 2004), often gives the young Digital Native an inflated sense of the self. The tools that the Digital Natives have for finding people who think exactly like them lead to a sense of intense self gratification (Shah, 2005) and also provide a dangerous outlet for violence to themselves and others, as they find validation for their actions within that group without facing any protest or conflict – what Loren Coleman (2007) calls the ‘copycat effect’. The phenomenon of younger users seeking internet celebrity status by engaging in dangerous activities like confessionals, recording and sharing of sexual escapades, bullying and exposing themselves in ridiculous situations to get attention and limelight, have raised concern among parents and educators (Gasser and Palfrey; 2007).

This list is by no means exhaustive but gives a clear indication of how the Digital Natives are contained in the matrices of the internet in their representations and are painted as irresponsible and irreverent individuals who appear as pranksters, jesters, and clowns, carrying with them, also the darker sides of cruel humour, dark deeds and sinister pranks which need to be regulated and censored – to save the society from this growing menace, and indeed, to save them from themselves.

Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns?

It is easy, from such perspectives, to not only demonise (thus enabling regulation and control) of Digital Native identities but also ignoring their new aesthetics, politics and mechanisms of participation and change as trivial or ‘merely cultural’. There have been many instances, over the years, where each new technology and technologised space of cultural production has been treated as frivolous, infantile or faddy. Let me take this discussion through three case-studies where Digital Native spaces, engagements and activities have been perceived as juvenile or foolish to examine this particular presumption of trivialness that is often pegged on the Digital Natives and their activities. Each Case-Study has been structured in two parts: the first gives a short understanding of the technologised phenomenon and space, the second provides a brief summary of the event.

Flash (Mob) in a Pan from India

Flash-mobs: Organise, congregate, act, disperse – that is the anatomy of a flash mob. Howard Rheingold, in his book titled Smart Mobs, suggests that the people who make up smart mobs co-operate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing capabilities. Their mobile devices connect them with other information devices in the environment as well as with other people's telephones. Dirt-cheap microprocessors embedded in everything from box tops to shoes are beginning to permeate furniture, buildings, neighbourhoods, products with invisible intercommunicating smartifacts. When they connect the tangible objects and places of our daily lives with cyberspace, handheld communication media mutate into wearable remote control devices for the physical world (Rheingold, 2001). The flash-mobs, along with the now ubiquitous terms like viral-networking and crowd-sourcing are the most significant examples of the ways in which the digital networks can mobilise people towards a common cause within the digital matrices as well as in the physical world.

The story: India’s first recorded flash-mob started with a website asking for volunteers who wanted to ‘have some serious fun’. On the 3rd of October, when several cell phones rang and email inboxes found an email that briefly chalked out the time and space for a venue – a Flash site. Text messages were sent to all the members who had volunteered by anonymous agencies. And then at 5:00 p.m., the next day, about a 100 participants assembled at a mall called Crossroads.

At the Crossroads Flash-Mob, the mobsters screamed at the top of their voices and sold imaginary shares. They danced. They all froze still in the middle of their actions. And then without as much as a word, after two minutes of historic histrionics, they opened their umbrellas and dispersed, leaving behind them a trail of bewilderment and confusion. This was India’s first recorded flash-mob. People who never knew each other, did not have any largely political purpose in mind and did not really intend to extend relationships, got together to perform a set of ridiculous actions at Crossroads. This first flash mob sparked off many different flash mobs all around the nation – most of them marking out spaces like multiplexes, shopping malls, gaming parlours, body shops, large commercial roads and shopping complexes as their flash sites.

One of the most celebrated accounts of the flash-mob was by Bijoy Venugopal, a serious blogger and writer (Venugopal; October 2003), who also reiterated the fact that the intention of participation was to have some ‘serious fun.’ Subsequent experience-sharing by other members of the flash-mobs also endorsed the idea that the flash-mob was like an extension of online gaming or the tenuous digital communities which are a part of the lifestyle choices and social networking for an increasing number of people in the large urban wi-fi centres of India. The Flash-mob seemed to carry with it all the elements that digital cyberspaces have to offer – a sense of tentative belonging, a grouping of people who seek to network with each other based on similar interests, a growing sense of a need to ‘enchant’ the otherwise quickly mechanised world around us, and an exciting space of novel experiences and unmonitored, pseudonymous (except for the physical presence) fun.

The flash-mob gained huge media coverage and local buzz and was talked about and debated upon quite furiously in popular media. The organisers of the flash-mobs became instant celebrities and were questioned repeatedly about the reasons for organising the flash-mob. The answer was always unwavering – the organisers insisted that the flash-mobs were a way for them to instil fun and novelty in the very hurried life in Mumbai. On the website, Rohit Tikmany, one of the original organisers, very passionately argues:

We are not making any statement here - we are not protesting anything - we are not a revolution, a movement or an agitation. Our purpose (if any) is solely to have fun… None of us is here for anything except fun. We will not have any sponsors (covert or overt) and we will never respond to any commercial/political/religious influences. (Tikmany, 2003)

There was a particular and specific disavowal of the ‘political’. The organisers went out of their way to convince that they do not have any political cause that they endorse, that they are not affiliated with any socio-political organisations or parties in the city, and that their actions were guided only by the desire to have some fun and games. The popular media painted it as a fad that made its point about internet mobilisation but was nothing more than a flash in a pan. Initial responses to the flash-mobsters painted them as clowns – a bunch of young people having a bit of fun. It came as a particular shock, in the face of this celebratory mode of looking at flash-mobs and the composition of the crowd (largely upper class, English speaking, Educated, and implicated in the digital circuits of globalised consumption), when the flash-mobs came to be banned in Mumbai and then around the country, as ‘a serious threat the safety and security of the public’ and offering ‘unfavourable conditions of danger’ in the city.

Flash-mobs have been recorded around the globe, for different reasons and to fulfil varied socio-political ambitions. However, most of them have been explicitly for fun. Tapio Makela at the Tempare University, Finland, suggests that flash-mobs are indeed the first real-time digital gaming experience that the internet can provide us with. And yet, flash-mobs are being regulated in almost all emerging Information Societies. While the political rhetoric of unsupervised mobilisation can be understood easily, what lies beneath it is a much more interesting story. For emerging information societies in the world, the digital technologies have a much more significant role to play in economic development and creation of global infrastructure. Most governments have invested highly in the creation of techno-social skill based identities and have a clear idea of the ‘correct’ usage of technology. The flash-mobs present a situation where the ‘ideal’ citizens who should be engaging with these technologies to enhance the labour markets and augment the nation’s efforts at restructuring in global times, are engaging in apparently frivolous activities which are aimed at self gratification and fun. Flash-mobs, through their aesthetic of irreverence and fun, also present a space for criticism and political negotiation to the Digital Natives, who, while they might not be equipped to engage with traditional channels of politics, are now finding ways by which to make their opinions and expressions heard.

The Flash-mob in Mumbai, for example, builds upon a much richer contextual local history of politics and access. Crossroads, the flash-site, was also the first American Super-Mall in India. In 2001, when the mall opened, it was restrictive in its access, where it demanded the curious onlooker to either pay an entry fee of 50 Indian Rupees or be in possession of a Platinum Credit Card or a Cell phone to enter the mall. The idea was that only a certain kind of citizenship was welcome in this consumerist heaven. It was presumed that people who do not come from a class that can afford to purchase things in the mall might not know how to behave in the mall. A public interest litigation suit against the mall soon revoked these conditions of access and announced the mall as a public space of consumption. However, the lineage of the restrictive conditions that the mall opened with, resonates through the local knowledge systems. The first flash-mob at Crossroads, even though it was ‘fun’, managed to provide a critique of the new class based urban society that global India is building. Ironically, the people who constituted that flash-mob and managed to turn the mall into a place of total chaos for the brief performance were the ‘desirable’ people for the mall. Such a critique, while it might not be overtly articulated for different reasons, still manages to surface once the contextual histories of these events are produced.

10 Legendary Obscene Beasts from China

User Generated Knowledge sites: The world of knowledge production was never as shaken as it was with the emergence of the Wikipedia – a user generated knowledge production system, where anybody who has any knowledge, on almost anything in the world, can contribute to share it with countless users around the world. The camps around Wikipedia are fairly well divided: there are those who swear by it, and there are those who swear against it. There are scholars, activists and lobbyists who celebrate the democratisation of knowledge production as the next logical evolutionary step to the democratic access to knowledge. They appreciate the wisdom of crowds and revel in the joy that in the much discussed Nature magazine experiment, the number of errors in Wikipedia and its biggest opponent, Encyclopaedia Britannica, were almost the same. And then there are those who think of the Wikipedia and other such peer knowledge production and sharing systems as erroneous, unreliable and a direct result of collapsing standards that the vulgarisation of knowledge has succumbed to in the age where information has become currency. Add to this the hue and cry from academics around the globe who lament falling research standards as the copy+paste generations (Vaidhyanathan; 2008) in classrooms skim over subjects in Wikipedia rather than analysing and studying them in detail from those hallowed treasuries of knowledge – reference books.

As can be expected, the questions about the veracity, verifiability, trustworthiness and integrity of Wikipedia and other such user generated knowledge sharing sites (including YouTube, Flickr, etc.) are carried on in sombre tones by zealots who are devoted to their beliefs. However, the one question that remains unasked, in the discussion of these sites, is the question of what purpose it might serve beyond the obvious knowledge production exercise.

The Story: In China, where the government exerts great control over regulating online information, Wikipedia had a different set of debates which would not feature in the more liberal countries – the debates were around what would be made accessible to a Wikipedia user from China and what information would be blanked out to fit China’s policy of making information that is ‘seditious ‘and disrespectful’, invisible. After the skirmishes with Google, where the search engine company gave in to China’s demands and offered a more censored search engine that filtered away results based on sensitive key-words and issues, Wikipedia was the next in line to offer a controlled internet knowledge base to users in China.

However, another user-generated knowledge site, more popular locally and with more stringent self-regulating rules than Wikipedia, became the space for political commentary, satire, protest and demonstration against the draconian censorship regimes that China is trying to impose on its young users. The website Baidu Baike (pinyin for Baidu Encyclopaedia), became popular in 2005 and was offered by the Chinese internet search company Baidu. With more than 1.5 million Chinese language articles, Baidu has become a space for much debate and discussion with the Digital Natives in China. Offered as a home-grown response to Wikipedia, Baidu implements heavy ‘self-censorship to avoid displeasing the Chinese Government’ (BBC; 2006) and remains dedicated to removing ‘offensive’ material (with a special emphasis on pornographic and political events) from its shared space.

It is in this restrictive regime of information sharing and knowledge production, that the Digital Natives in China, introduced the “10 legendary obscene beasts” meme which became extremely popular on Baidu. Manipulating the Baidu Baike’s potential for users to share their knowledge, protestor’s of China’s censorship policy and Baidu’s compliance to it, vandalised contributions by creating humorous pages describing fictitious creatures, with names vaguely referring to Chinese profanities, with homophones and characters using different tones.

The most famous of these creations was Cao Ni Ma (Chinese: 草泥马), literally "Grass Mud Horse", which uses the same consonants and vowels with different tones for the Chinese language profanity which translates into “Fuck Your Mother” cào nǐ mā (肏你妈) . This mythical animal belonging to the Alpaca race had dire enemies called héxiè (河蟹), literally translated as “river crabs”, very close to the word héxié (和谐) meaning harmony, referring to the government’s declared ambition of creating a “harmonious society” through censorship. The Cao Ni Ma, has now become a popular icon appearing in videos distributed on YouTube, in fake documentaries, in popular Chinese internet productions, and even in themed toys and plushies which all serve as mobilising points against censorship and control that the Chinese government is trying to control.

However, the reaction from those who do not understand the entire context is, predictably, bordering on the incredulous. Most respondents on different blogs and meme sites, think of these as mere puns and word-plays and juvenile acts of vandalism. The Chinese monitoring agencies themselves failed to recognise the profane and the political intent of these productions and hence they survived on Baidupedia, to become inspiring and iconic symbols of the slow and steady protest against censorship and the right to information act in China. Following these brave acts, Baidu’s user base also experimented very successfully with well-formed parodies and satires, opening up the first spaces in modern Chinese history, for political criticism and negotiation.[2] What is discarded or overlooked as jest or harmless pranks, are actually symptomatic of a new generation using digital tools and spaces to revisit what it means to be politically active and engaged. The 10 obscene legendary creatures, like the flash-mobs, can be easily read as juvenile fun and the actions of a youth that is quickly losing its connection with the immediate contemporary questions. However, a contextual reading combined with a dismantling of the “Digital Native in a bubble” syndrome, can lead to a better understanding of the new aesthetic of social transformation and political participation – one which is embedded in the growing aesthetic of fun, irreverence, and playfulness.

A 32 Year Old Dancing Global Nomad

Context: The aesthetic of irreverence, of playfulness and of exuberant joy is perhaps the best demonstrated by the third case-study which deals with user generated content and sharing sites like YouTube and Blip TV or social networking sites like Facebook and Livejournal. With the easy availability of digital technologies of production – portable laptops and digital cameras, PDAs enabled with phones and multi-media services, webcams and microphones – and tools to share and exchange these productions, there has been an unprecedented amount of digital cultural production which has propelled what we now call the Web 2.0 explosion. There has been much criticism about how we are building a junkyard of digital information. Videos of cats and hamsters dancing, inane audio and video podcasts documenting personal anecdotes and opinions, blogs that publish everything from favourite recipes to sexual escapades, and social networking sites that map rising networks, all add to the immense amount of data that dwells in cyberspace. Questions of data mining, of data redundancy are coupled with alarms of the ‘infantile’ uses of technology have emerged in recent debates around this user generated content. Governments are also battling with problems of piracy, hate-speech, bullying and fundamentalism that have found pervasive channels through these platforms and networks.

The Story: In the middle of celebrity hamsters (Hampster the Hamster), popular dancing babies, and parodies of pop stars, there was one particular internet celebrity who is famous, because nobody knows where he is going to dance next. “Where the Hell is Matt?” is a viral video which shot to fame first in 2006, which features Matt Harding, a video game designer from America, who performs a singularly identifiable dance routine in front of various popular destinations in different countries around the world. It started off as a friend recording Matt Harding doing a peculiar dance in Vietnam became popular on the internet and became one of the most popular videos on cyberspace, with his second video released in 2008, viewed 19,860,041 times on YouTube as on 31st March 2009.

Harding has now become a celebrity, featuring on TV talk shows, guest lecturing at universities, and is brand ambassador to a couple of global brands. He is now, also featured dancing on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website under the title “Happy People Dancing on Planet Earth”, claiming that it shows humans worldwide sharing a joy of dancing. Unlike the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia instances, Where The Hell is Matt? does not have any overt political position or agenda. It has not entered into a condition of strife or struggle with any authoritative regimes or systems of conflict. And yet, what Harding has managed, through his ‘pranks’ , is to create a series of videos which have now come to embody values of cultural diversity, tolerance and universal joy. Instead of making serious speeches, petitions or demonstrations, through his prankster image, Matt Harding has become the unofficial ambassador of peace and harmony around the globe, being discussed avidly by anybody who sees him, with a smile.

One can either ignore this viral video as a short-lived meme that will soon be forgotten by the next dancing sensation. Even if it might be true, the impact that the “Where the Hell is Matt?” videos have created is significant. When Matt sarcastically said at Entertainment Gathering, that his videos were a hoax, that he was an actor and the videos were an exercise in animatronic puppets and video editing, he had everybody from fans on blogs to new reporters on television responding to it – some often with outrage at being ‘fooled’ by such morphing. Harding revealed his ‘hoax about a hoax’ at the Macworld convention to great amusement. While Matt’s dancing pranks might indeed be forgotten by the next big thing, it is still a fruitful exercise to read it as symptomatic of a much larger redefinition of notions of political participation and social transformation that the Digital Natives and their technology-mediated environments are bringing about.

Digital Natives: Causes, Pauses

Running common, through all these three stories, in popular discourse as well as in academic scholarship, is the presumption of frivolity and non-seriousness that misses out on the much larger contexts of socio-political change. The youth have always been at the forefront of social transformation and political participation. The youth, traditionally, has also had an intimate relationship with new technologies of cultural production, producing influential aesthetics through experimentation and innovation. A brief look at the socio-political history of technologies, shows us that the young who grow up with certain technologies as central to their mechanics of life and living, have led to a reconfiguring of their role and function in the society. The emergence of the print culture, for example, led to the energising of the public spheres in Europe, where young people with access to education and books, could participate and restructure their immediate socio-political environments. Cinematic realism has had its heyday as the tool for political mobilisation through representing the voice of the underprivileged communities. The expansion of the tele-communication networks have led to the rise and fall of governments while changing the face of socio-political and economic activities.

It is not as if these technologies were without their own concerns, questions and doubts. However, most of these anxieties have been successfully resolved through experience, experiment and analysis. Such practices and communities have Moreover, the promise and the potential of this youth-technology engagement have always surpassed the ensuing anxiety.

With the Digital Natives, as a small percentage of the world’s population engages with technologies and tools that are quickly gaining currency and popularity, there seems to be a cacophony of alarms and anxieties which seem to have no scope for resolution or respite. And this alarm seems to be louder and more anxious than ever before because it marks a disconnect of the Digital Natives from the role that youth-technology relationships has borne through history – that the Digital Natives are in a state of apathy when it comes to engaging in processes of social transformation and political mobilisation and prefer to stay in isolated bubbles of consumerism and entertainment. This particular accusation that is levelled at the Digital Natives, if true, is not only alarming but also bodes dire fortunes for the whole world as a new generation refuses to engage with questions of politics, governance and transformation outside of the realm of the economic and the personal. This particular disconnect amplifies the other anxieties – moral anxieties around pornography and sexuality, ethical anxieties about plagiarism and piracy, intellectual anxieties about knowledge production and research – because the re-assurance that the Digital Natives will augment the processes of positive social transformation and fruitful political participation, is perceived as lost.

Moreover, unlike earlier technologies, the youth is not being guided into the use of digital technologies but are actually spearheading the development, consumption and rise of these technologies. There is a strong reversal of the power structure, where the digital migrants and settlers have to depend upon the Digital Natives to traverse the terrain of the digital environments. The Digital Natives are in a uniquely singular position where, due to the economic and global restructuring of the world, their world-view and ideas are gaining more currency and visibility than those belonging to previous generations. However, the adults who enter the world of the Digital Natives, insist on viewing them through certain misapplied prisms:

Difference without change: These stories or anecdotal data almost always gives us a sense of marked difference of identity in an unchanging world. The Digital Native remains a category or identity which remains to be understood in its difference to integrate it into a world vision that precedes them. The difference is invoked only to emphasise the need for continuity from one generation to another; and thus making a call to ‘rehabilitate’ this new generation into earlier moulds of being.

The social construction of loss: A common intention of these stories is to mourn a loss. Each new technology has always been accompanied by a nostalgia industry that immediately recreates a pre-technologised, innocent world that was simpler, better, fairer, and easier to live in. Similarly, the Digital Native identity is premised on multiple losses[3] : loss of childhood, loss of innocence, loss of control, loss of privacy etc. Predicated on this list, is the specific loss of political participation and social transformation; a loss of the youth as the political capital of our digital futures.

Trivialising the realm of the Cultural: The third is that these anecdotes of celebration and fear, mark the Digital Native’s actions and practices as confined to some “My bubble, My space” personal/cultural private world of consumption which, when they do connect to larger socio-political phenomena, is accidental. Moreover, they concentrate on the activities and the immediate usage/abuse of technology rather than concentrating on the potentials that these tools and interactions have for the future. They paint the Digital Native as without agency, solipsistic, and in the ‘pointless pursuit of pleasure’, thus dismissing their cultural interactions and processes as trivial and residing in indulgent consumption and personal gratification.

Such perspectives and analytical impulses are a result of the pertinent and influential research methods and disciplinary baggage within contemporary cybercultures studies. Much of the imagination of the Digital Natives carries the baggage of false dichotomies and binaries of discourse around technologically mediated identities. Within cybercultures studies, as well as in earlier interdisciplinary work on digital internets, there has been an explicit and now an implied division of the physical and the virtual. The virtual seems to be a world only loosely anchored in the material and physical reality, and almost seems to be at logger heads with the real in producing its own hyper-visual reality. These distinctions, though not often invoked, are present in different imaginations of the Digital Natives. They seem to reside in virtual worlds producing a ‘disconnect’ from their everyday reality. The alternative public spheres of speech and expression created by the rise of the blogosphere and peer-to-peer networking sites seem to reside only within the digital domain. The frenzied cultural production and consumption on sites like YouTube and Second Life are contained within digital deliriums. Similarly, when attention is paid to Digital Natives and their activities, it is confined to what they do, inhabit, consume and produce online, often forgetting their embodied presence circumscribed by different contexts.

The notion of contexts, as it is relevant and important to understand techno-social identities, is even more crucial when talking about Digital Natives. Contextualised understanding of their environments, histories, and engagement help us to realise that Digital Native is not a universal identity. Even though the technologies that they use are often global in nature, and the tools and gadgets they employ are shared across borders, the way a digital native identity is constructed and experienced is different with different contexts. As we see, in the case of the flash-mobs and the Baidupedia, the digital native, especially when it comes to social transformation and political participation, is a fiercely local and context based identity and community. It is because of this, that Ethan Zuckerman’s Cute Cat Theory (2005) actually makes sense – that the Digital Natives, when they do utilise digital tools for social transformation or mobilisation, will not go in search for new tools. Instead, they will use the existing platforms and spaces that they are already using to share pictures of cute cats across the globe. The idea of a context based Digital Native identity also leads me to suggest two things to conclude this paper: The first, that Digital Natives are not merely people who are using new tools and technologies to augment the ideas of change and participation that an earlier, development-centric generation has grown up with. By introducing and experimenting with their aesthetic of fun, playfulness and irreverence, they are re-visiting the terrain of what it means to be political and often embedding their politics into seemingly inane or fruitless cultural productions, which create sustainable conditions of change. The second, that the Digital Natives, while they seem to be a different generation and having a unique technology-human relationship, are not really different when it comes to envisioning the role of youth-technology paradigm in the society. What is really different, with this young generation of active, interested and engaged people, is that their local movements and actions are globally shared and accessed, thus forging, perhaps in unprecedented ways, international and cross-cultural communities of support, help and interest. Moreover, these communities subscribe to a new paradigm and vocabulary of socio-political change which is often tied to their every-day actions of entertainment, leisure, networking and cultural production, which provide the potential for the next big change that the Digital Natives set themselves to.

[1]. The term ‘techno-social’, coined by Arturo Escobar, refers to a social identity mediated by technology. It puts special emphasis that the digital and physical environments need to be seen in segue with each other rather than disconnected as is often the case in cybercultures and technology studies.

[2].A more serious political satire that moves beyond just punning and avoiding censorship was found in the now-deleted entry for revolutionary hero Wei Guangzheng (伟光正, taken from 伟大, 光荣, 正确, "great, glorious, correct"). An excerpt from it is included here for sampling.

Wei Guangzheng
Comrade Wei Guangzheng is a superior product of natural selection. In the course of competition for survival, because of certain unmatched qualities of his genetic makeup, he has a great ability to survive and reproduce, and hence Wei Guangzheng represents the most advanced state of species evolution. Here is the evolution of Wei Guangzheng's thinking: Since the day of his birth, comrade Wei Guangzheng established a guiding ideology for the people's benefit, and in the course of connecting it with the real circumstances of his beloved Sun Kingdom, a process of repeated comparisons that involved the twists and turns of campaigns of encirclement and suppression, his ideology finally realized a historic leap forward and generated two major theoretic achievements. The first great theoretic leap was the idea of leading a handful of people to take up arms to cause trouble, rebellion, and revolution in order to build a brave new world, and to successfully seize power. This was the "spear ideology." The second great theoretic leap was a theory, with Sun Kingdom characteristics, in which Wei Guangzheng was unswervingly upheld as leader and the people were forever prevented from standing up. This was the "shield theory." Under the guidance of these two great theoretic achievements, comrade Wei Guangzheng won victory after victory. Practice has proven, "Without Wei Guangzheng, there would be no Sun Kingdom." Following the road of comrade Wei Guangzheng was the choice of the people of the Sun Kingdom and an inevitable trend of historical development.

[3]Indeed, as Chris Jenks notes in his work on the construction of youth, through history, it is the function of civilisation to construct youth as not only an innocent category which needs to be saved but also a demonic identity which needs to be trained and taught into the roles and functions of civilisation. Each emergent technology of cultural production, in its turn, has been examined as potentially contributing to the notions of the youth and their role and function in the society.

References

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Bennett, Sue, Karl Maton and Lisa Kervin. 2008. “The ‘Digital Natives’ Report - A Critical Review of the Evidence”, Melbourne. Available at http://www.cheeps.com/karlmaton/pdf/bjet.pdf
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Navejan, Caroline. (2008). The Design of Trust. Utrecht University. (Forthcoming).
Palfrey, John and Urs Gasser. (2008). Born Digital. New York: Basic Books.
Prensky, Marc. (2001). Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, available at http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf, retrieved January 2009.
Rheingold, Howard. (2001). Smart Mobs: the next social revolution . New York: Perseus Publishing.
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Shah, Nishant. (2007). “Subject to Technology” Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal. Available at http://cis-india.org/publications/cis-publications/nishant-shahs-publications
Tapscott, John. (2008). Grown-Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing your World. New York: Vintage Books.
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Vaidhyanathan, Siva. (2008). Available at Chronicle of Higher Education, September 19, 2008. http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i04/04b00701.htm.
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This research paper was published in Academia.edu. It can be downloaded here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-and-politics-in-asia

Open Access to Academic Knowledge

thomas — 2011-11-03T05:40:09Z

The Indian Institute of Science and the Centre for Internet and Society are holding a workshop on 'Open Access to Academic Knowledge' on Wednesday 2nd November from 14:30 to 17:00

The workshop will involve an introductory presentation by Dr Francis Jayakanth of the National Centre for Science Information, followed by an interactive discussion of Open Access issues and ideas. This is a free event.

The workshop will take place in the Seminar Hall of the National Centre for Science Information, within the Indian Institute of Science from 14:30 to 17:00. For a map to this event click here.

For more information and to confirm attendance please contact Tom Dane (tom at cis-india dot org) or on +91 7829 451 902.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/events/open-access-to-academic-knowledge-at-the-iisc

India's Statement Proposing UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy

pranesh — 2011-10-31T15:28:04Z

This is the statement made by India at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, in which its proposal for the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy was presented.

66th Session of the UN General Assembly

New York. October 26, 2011.

Agenda Item 16: Information and Communications

Technologies for Development (ICT): Global Internet Governance

Statement by India

Mr. Chairman,

We thank the Secretary-General for his report on enhanced cooperation on public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, contained in document A/66/77, which provides a useful introduction to the discussions under this agenda item.

As a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural and democratic society with an open economy and an abiding culture of pluralism, India emphasizes the importance that we attach to the strengthening of the Internet as a vehicle for openness, democracy, freedom of expression, human rights, diversity, inclusiveness, creativity, free and unhindered access to information and knowledge, global connectivity, innovation and socio-economic growth.

We believe that the governance of such an unprecedented global medium that embodies the values of democracy, pluralism, inclusion, openness and transparency should also be similarly inclusive, democratic, participatory, multilateral and transparent in nature.

Indeed, this was already recognized and mandated by the Tunis Agenda in 2005, as reflected in paragraphs 34, 35, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61 and 69 of the Agenda. Regrettably, in the six long years that have gone by, no substantial initiative has been taken by the global community to give effect to this mandate.

Meanwhile, the internet has grown exponentially in its reach and scope, throwing up several new and rapidly emerging challenges in the area of global internet governance that continue to remain inadequately addressed. It is becoming increasingly evident that the Internet as a rapidly-evolving and inherently global medium, needs quick-footed and timely global solutions and policies, not divergent and fragmented national policies.

The range and criticality of these pressing global digital issues that continue to remain unaddressed, are growing rapidly with each passing day. It is, therefore, urgent and imperative that a multilateral, democratic participative and transparent global policy-making mechanism be urgently instituted, as mandated by the Tunis Agenda under the process of ‘Enhanced Co-operation’, to enable coherent and integrated global policy-making on all aspects of global Internet governance.

Operationalizing the Tunis mandate in this regard should not be viewed as an attempt by governments to “take over” or “regulate and circumscribe” the internet. Indeed, any such misguided attempt would be antithetical not only to the internet, but also to human welfare. As a democratic and open society that has historically welcomed outside influences and believes in openness to all views and ideas and is wedded to free dialogue, pluralism and diversity, India attaches great importance to the preservation of the Internet as an unrestricted, open and free global medium that flourishes through private innovation and individual creativity and serves as a vehicle for open communication, access to culture, knowledge, democratization and development.

India recognizes the role played by various actors and stakeholders in the development and continued enrichment of the internet, and is firmly committed to multi-stakeholderism in internet governance, both at the national and global level. India believes that global internet governance can only be functional, effective and credible if all relevant stake-holders contribute to, and are consulted in, the process.

Bearing in mind the need for a transparent, democratic, and multilateral mechanism that enables all stakeholders to participate in their respective roles, to address the many cross-cutting international public policy issues that require attention and are not adequately addressed by current mechanisms and the need for enhanced cooperation to enable governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, India proposes the establishment of a new institutional mechanism in the United Nations for global internet-related policies, to be called the United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP). The intent behind proposing a multilateral and multi-stakeholder mechanism is not to “control the internet’’ or allow Governments to have the last word in regulating the internet, but to make sure that the Internet is governed not unilaterally, but in an open, democratic, inclusive and participatory manner, with the participation of all stakeholders, so as to evolve universally acceptable, and globally harmonized policies in important areas and pave the way for a credible, constantly evolving, stable and well-functioning Internet that plays its due role in improving the quality of peoples’ lives everywhere.

The CIRP shall be mandated to undertake the following tasks:

Develop and establish international public policies with a view to ensuring coordination and coherence in cross-cutting Internet-related global issues;
Coordinate and oversee the bodies responsible for technical and operational functioning of the Internet, including global standards setting;
Facilitate negotiation of treaties, conventions and agreements on Internet-related public policies;
Address developmental issues related to the internet;
Promote the promotion and protection of all human rights, namely, civil, political, social, economic and cultural rights, including the Right to Development;
Undertake arbitration and dispute resolution, where necessary; and,
Crisis management in relation to the Internet.

The main features of CIRP are provided in the annex to this statement. In brief, the CIRP will comprise 50 Member States chosen on the basis of equitable geographical representation, and will meet annually for two working weeks in Geneva. It will ensure the participation of all relevant stakeholders by establishing four Advisory Groups, one each for civil society, the private sector, inter-governmental and international organizations, and the technical and academic community. The Advisory Groups will provide their inputs and recommendations to the CIRP. The meetings of CIRP and the advisory groups will be serviced by the UNCTAD Secretariat that also services the meetings of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development. The Internet Governance Forum will provide inputs to CIRP in the spirit of complementarity between the two. CIRP will report directly to the General Assembly and present recommendations for consideration, adoption and dissemination among all relevant inter-governmental bodies and international organizations. CIRP will be supported by the regular budget of the United Nations; a separate Fund would be set up by drawing from the domain registration fees collected by various bodies, in order to mainly finance the Research Wing to be established by CIRP to support its activities.

Those familiar with the discourse on global internet governance since the beginning of the WSIS process at the turn of the millennium, will recognize that neither the mandated tasks of the CIRP, nor its proposed modalities, are new. The Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) set up by the UN Secretary- General had explicitly recognized the institutional gaps in global internet governance and had proposed four institutional models in its report to the UN General Assembly in 2005. The contours of the CIRP, as proposed above, reflect the common elements in the four WGIG institutional models. While the excellent report of the WGIG was much discussed and deliberated in 2005, unfortunately, no concrete follow-up action was taken to give effect to its recommendations on the institutional front. We hope that this anomaly will be redressed at least six years later, with the timely establishment of the CIRP.

In order to operationalize this proposal, India calls for the establishment of an open-ended working group under the Commission on Science and Technology for Development for drawing up the detailed terms of reference for CIRP, with a view to actualizing it within the next 18 months. We are open to the views and suggestions of all Member States, and stand ready to work with other delegations to carry forward this proposal, and thus seek to fill the serious gap in the implementation of the Tunis Agenda, by providing substance and content to the concept of Enhanced Co-operation enshrined in the Tunis Agenda.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

***

Annex

The United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP)

The United Nations Committee for Internet-Related Policies (CIRP) will have the following features:

Membership: The CIRP will consist of 50 Member States of the United Nations, chosen/elected on the basis of equitable geographical representation. It will provide for equitable representation of all UN Member States, in accordance with established UN principles and practices. It will have a Bureau consisting of one Chair, three Vice-Chairs and a Rapporteur.

Meetings: The CIRP will meet annually for two working weeks in Geneva, preferably in May/June, and convene additional meetings, as and when required. The UNCTAD Secretariat will provide substantive and logistical support to the CIRP by servicing these meetings.

Multi-stakeholder participation: Recognizing the need to involve all stakeholders in Global Internet Governance in their respective roles, the CIRP shall ensure the participation of all stakeholders recognized in the Tunis Agenda. Four Advisory Groups – one each for Civil Society, the Private Sector, Inter-Governmental and International Organisations, and the Technical and Academic Community - will be established, to assist and advise the CIRP. These Groups would be self-organized, as per agreed principles, to ensure transparency, representativity and inclusiveness. The Advisory Groups will meet annually in Geneva and in conjunction with any additional meetings of the CIRP. Their meetings will be held back-to- back with the meetings of the CIRP, so that they are able to provide their inputs and recommendations in a timely manner, to the CIRP.

Reporting: The CIRP will report directly to the UN General Assembly annually, on its meetings and present recommendations in the areas of policy and implementation for consideration, adoption and dissemination to all relevant inter-governmental bodies and international organizations. .

Research Wing: The Internet is a rapidly-evolving and dynamic medium that throws up urgent and rapidly-evolving challenges that need timely solutions. In order to deal effectively and prudently with these emerging issues in a timely manner, it would be vital to have a well-resourced Research Wing attached to the CIRP to provide ready and comprehensive background material, analysis and inputs to the CIRP, as required.

Links with the IGF: Recognizing the value of the Internet Governance Forum as an open, unique forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue on Internet issues, the deliberations in the IGF along with any inputs, background information and analysis it may provide, will be taken as inputs for consideration of the CIRP. An improved and strengthened IGF that can serve as a purposeful body for policy consultations and provide meaningful policy inputs to the CIRP, will ensure a stronger and more effective complementarity between the CIRP and the IGF.

Budget: Like other UN bodies, the CIRP should be supported by the regular budget of the United Nations. In addition, keeping in view its unique multi-stakeholder format for inclusive participation, and the need for a well-resourced Research Wing and regular meetings, a separate Fund should also be set up drawing from the domain registration fees collected by various bodies involved in the technical functioning of the Internet, especially in terms of names and addresses.

***

Excerpts from the Tunis Agenda

Paragraph 34 of the Tunis Agenda defines Internet Governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet”.

Paragraph 35 reaffirms the respective roles of stakeholders as follows: “(a) Policy authority for Internet-related public policy issues is the sovereign right of States. They have rights and responsibilities for international Internet-related public policy issues”. (b) The private sector has had, and should continue to have, an important role in the development of the Internet, both in the technical an economic fields. (c) Civil society has also played an important role on Internet matters, especially at community level, and should continue to play such a role. (d) Intergovernmental organizations have had, and should continue to have, a facilitating role in the coordination of Internet-related public policy issues. (e) International organizations have also had and should continue to have an important role in the development of Internet-related technical standards and relevant policies.”

While delineating the respective roles of stakeholders, Paragraph 56 recognizes the need for an inclusive, multi-stakeholder approach by affirming that “The Internet remains a highly dynamic medium and therefore any framework and mechanisms designed to deal with Internet governance should be inclusive and responsive to the exponential growth and fast evolution of the Internet as a common platform for the development of multiple applications”.

Paragraph 58 recognizes “that Internet governance includes more than Internet naming and addressing. It also includes other significant public policy issues such as, inter alia, critical Internet resources, the security and safety of the Internet, and developmental aspects and issues pertaining to the use of the Internet”.

Paragraph 59 further recognizes that “Internet governance includes social, economic and technical issues including affordability, reliability and quality of service”. Paragraph 60 further recognizes that “there are many cross-cutting international public policy issues that require attention and are not adequately addressed by the current mechanisms”.

Paragraph 61 of the Tunis Agenda therefore concludes that “We are convinced that there is a need to initiate, and reinforce, as appropriate, a transparent, democratic, and multilateral process, with the participation of governments, private sector, civil society and international organisations, in their respective roles. This process could envisage creation of a suitable framework or mechanisms, where justified, thus spurring the ongoing and active evolution of the current arrangements in order to synergize the efforts in this regard”.

Paragraph 69 further recognizes “the need for enhanced cooperation in the future, to enable governments, on an equal footing, to carry out their roles and responsibilities, in international public policy issues pertaining to the Internet, but not in the day-to-day technical and operational matters, that do not impact on international public policy issues”.

***

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/india-statement-un-cirp

Open Access Week begins in Bangalore

Tom Dane — 2012-08-03T23:04:06Z

On Monday 24 October, the National Aerospace Laboratories in Bangalore held an event to mark the beginning of Open Access Week 2011

During the event, Professor Balaram spoke on 'Issues of Access in Science Publishing', and Dr. L Venkatakrishnan gave a talk 'Open Access: Promised Utopia or Eventual Reality?'

Before the speakers, Shyam Chetty framed the discussion by suggesting that India currently lags behind other nations in the adoption of Open Access. He said that the Indian Council of Scientific and Industrial Research should lead an initiative to promote India's National Open Access Policy and perhaps bring it into law.

Prof. Balaram spoke next, and brought some refreshing realism and complexity to the Open Access discussion. He noted that both as a reader and as an author he supports Open Access, but there are costs involved in making research available, and these will have to be covered in some way. He shared first-hand experience of expensive subscriptions for Indian institutions, and how even the IISc has cancelled many journal purchases. In a later interview, Professor Balaram discusses some solutions to these problems.

Prof. Balaram highlighted that Closed Access journals do add value to scholarship ― in terms of peer review, editing, and aggregation (the collection of related articles in useful ways). While Open Access journals may offer these services too, Prof. Balaram suggested that some of the strongest supporters of Closed Access journals are working academics who value the increased reputation and status they can offer. This lead him to expressing an opposition to institutional Open Access mandates. Instead, he encouraged an approach where academics are motivated to open their work for self-interest, rather than by obligation.

Prof. Balaram also said that India must take an independent approach to Open Access and not expect western nations to lead the way. Increasingly India and China are seen as real competitors in the international field, and in the future may not receive concessions in journal subscriptions or other help currently offered to developing nations.

Dr Venkatakrishnan was more skeptical towards Open Access. He emphasized that the price to make an article freely available in a Closed Access journal could be over USD $3000. From this he suggested that the Gold Route to Open Access lacked potential because the costs involved are prohibitive. This does leave out alternative ways of financing Open Access journals that do not involve the author paying for submission.

Dr. Venkatakrishnan echoed Prof. Balaram in saying that a strong motivation to publish in top-tier Closed Access journals is the increased reputation or funding it can bring. While it is true that academics can usually still upload their work to Open Access databases, Dr. Venkatakrishnan concluded that he did not know if Open Access was an 'open door' or a 'blind corner'.

This could be taken as a strange end to an Open Access celebration, but the implication seemed to be this: in order for more Indian academics to support Open Access, they must be convinced of the real benefits it can bring to their own reputation and career success.

For the event flier click here
For details of Open Access Week, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/lecture-at-nal