Centre for Internet and Society

Open Content and Open Access

sunil — 2009-10-08T14:54:39Z

Open Content (of which Open Access can be thought of as a subcategory) is that content which is freely available on the Internet with or without rights to modify or re-use it. Open content can take many manifestations from openly-licensed materials (Creative Commons, etc.), open access to scholarly literature (scientific, legal, etc.), open educational resources, to open access to the law (particularly legislations and judgments). We at CIS believe that sharing of knowledge and culture is only human.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/publications/content-access

Members

sunil — 2009-06-19T14:16:51Z

The members of the Society registered under Karnataka Societies Act are Vibodh Parthasarathi, Atul Ramachandra, Achal Prabhala, Lawrence Liang, Subbiah Arunachalam, Nishant Shah, and Sunil Abraham.

Vibodh Parthasarathi

Vibodh Parthasarathi maintains a multidisciplinary interest in the creative industries, cross-national communication policy, business history of the media and governance of media infrastructure. Currently at the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, he has held positions at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, also at Jamia, Centre for Co-operative Research in Social Sciences, and Manipal Institute of Communication. He is the co-editor of L’idiot du Village Mondial (Editions Luc Pire/ECLM, 2004), Media and Mediation (Sage, 2005) and The Social and the Symbolic (Sage, 2007). His work has attracted support variously from the India Foundation for the Arts, Netherlands Fellowship Programme, Charles Leopold Mayer Foundation, Prince Klaus Fund, Charles Wallace India Trust and Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation. Periodically on assignments in business development and television production with the media industry, his last documentary Crosscurrents: A Fijian Travelogue (2001) explored the underbelly of ‘reconciliation’ following a decade of military coups in Fiji. Vibodh’s nominations include Non Executive Director, Kadam Films Ltd. (New Delhi); Independent Director, Centre for Social Ecology (Jaipur); Founding International Member, Intercultural Library for the Future (Paris); Associate, South Asian Poverty Network Association (Colombo); and, Member, Academic Council, Institute of Social Studies (The Hague).

Atul Ramachandra

Atul Ramachandra has a background in New Media having worked for 8 years with Explocity, a News Corp company, joining them at the set-up of their expansion with VC funding, looking after operations, budget control, management and selection of technology and technology providers with an accent on open source platforms. He completed his stint at Explocity as VP - Digital, having been in charge of developing new digital media products for the Internet and Mobile phones.

He is currently Project Director setting up a self-sustaining news and information service on mobile phones, for the urban slums of Kolkata. The project is funded by the European Commission through a grant to Internews Europe, a non-profit International news agency. Prior to this, he has over a decade of experience in the solar and renewable energy sector and has worked on product development and technical marketing. A graduate in applied physics (5 year MS) from IIT Delhi (1981), Atul specialised in Solar Energy and he has 3 years of post-graduate work at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, USA. His interests are product development and innovation, new trends in technology and web enabling of products and services. He continues to be interested in the area of new and renewable energy sources and new applications powered by them and technology for the supply of potable water powered by solar energy.

Achal Prabhala

Achal Prabhala is a writer and researcher based in Bangalore. He works primarily on intellectual property; previously, he worked in media, mainly in television and print. From 2004-2006, he coordinated the Access to Learning Materials Project in Southern Africa from Johannesburg. He works on aspects of patent and copyright systems, in relation to access to medicines and access to knowledge. Some representative publications by him include Battling HIV/AIDS – A Decision Maker's Guide to the Procurement of Medicines and Related Supplies, Intellectual Property, Education and Access to Knowledge in Southern Africa, Response to Indian Copyright Law Amendment, and Reconsidering the Pirate Nation: Notes from South Africa and India.

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

Distinguished Fellows

sunil — 2020-07-27T12:50:59Z

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam is based in Chennai. Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is based at UNU-MERIT at Maastricht. Hans Varghese Mathews is based in Bangalore. Shyam Ponappa is based in New Delhi. Prof. Tejaswini Niranjana is based in Bangalore and Mumbai.

Hans Varghese Mathews

Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam (known to friends as Arun) started his career as a research chemist, but found his calling in information science. In the past four decades, he has been a student of chemistry, a laboratory researcher (at the Central Electrochemical Research Institute and the Indian Institute of Science), an editor of scientific journals (at the Publications and Information Directorate of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and the Indian Academy of Sciences), the secretary of a scholarly academy of sciences (IASc), a teacher of information science (at the Indian National Scientific Documentation Centre), and a development researcher (at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras). While working with M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, he initiated the South-South Exchange Traveling Workshop to facilitate hands on cross-cultural learning for knowledge workers from Africa, Asia and Latin America engaged in ICT-enabled development.

Arun is on the editorial boards of six international refereed journals including Journal of Information Science, Scientometrics, and Journal of Community Informatics; a member of the international advisory board of IICD, The Hague, a trustee of the Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, and a Trustee of the Voicing the Voiceless Foundation. Improving information access both for scientists and for the rural poor; scientometrics, ICT-enabled development and open access are among his current research interests.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is a researcher based in Maastricht. He is an Open Source Initiative board member, the founding international and managing editor of the peer-reviewed journal First Monday, and the Programme Leader of FLOSS at UNU-MERIT. He has undertaken several global, high-profile studies on Free Software. He is a jury member for Global Bangemann Challenge (now Stockholm Challenge Award), a prestigious prize awarded to IT projects with socio-economic impact by the mayor of Stockholm and founder member of the GII Internet Commerce Brain Trust. From 1995–1999, Rishab has worked as an editor at The Indian Techonomist, an analytical newsletter on Indian media and communications targeted at a global audience, an analyst and newsletter contributor for US-based Paul Kagan Associates, and a weekly columnist on Internet society (Electric Dreams). He still writes regularly, with over half a million words published in journals, newspapers and magazines worldwide, from PC Quest India to Wired Magazine, USA. From 2008, he heads the Collaborative Creativity Group at UNU-MERIT.

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow whose work is in the areas of broadband, telecommunications, and spectrum policy, from management, systems, and technology perspectives.

Beginning his career at the State Bank of India, he was a Senior Manager, Management Consulting Services, at Price Waterhouse in San Francisco, M&A Head for Citibank in India, and thereafter managed a partnership doing alliances, business strategy, and financial placements in New Delhi for major international and domestic clients. Subsequently, he was an independent consultant in India and abroad. His experience is in financial placements, M&A, and business strategy for clients in IT, telecommunications, power, oil/energy, airlines, biotechnology, banking/financial services, hotels, shipping, railroads, manufacturing, agri-business, law firms, and retail enterprises.

He has advised the government on public policy since 1990, primarily in telecommunications. As a columnist for the Business Standard, he writes on infrastructure and managing economic reforms (http://organizing-india.blogspot.com). He has an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley, an MA (History) and a BSc (Physics) from Madras Christian College."

Tejaswini Niranjana is presently a Senior Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore, and Visiting Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai.

At CSCS (www.cscs.res.in), Tejaswini helped set up in 2001 an inter-disciplinary doctoral programme in Cultural Studies, and many of her Ph.D. students have brought Indian language materials into their research and writing. At TISS (www.tiss.edu), Tejaswini is incubating the Centre for Indian languages in Higher Education, which will anchor a multi-institutional programme for Indian languages in higher education, including production of new resources, curriculum strengthening, research training, digitisation and archiving. On the anvil is the creation at TISS of a digital hub for Indian language resources for tertiary education.

She is also Lead Researcher of the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) Programme at CSCS (http://heira.in). HEIRA works towards sectoral transformation in higher education, working with private and public institutions to design and field-test new methods for curriculum development, teacher training and institutional change at the undergraduate and post-graduate levels. Tejaswini is co-author of a policy note on quality education in Indian languages, the recommendations of which are now part of the final 12^th Plan document (http://www.ugc.ac.in/ugcpdf/740315_12FYP.pdf).

Select publications are available from cscs.academia.edu. Her best-known book is Siting Translation: History, Post-structuralism and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). More recently, she published Mobilizing India: Women, Music and Migration across India and Trinidad (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).

Tejaswini is the Adviser (since February 2013) to the 'Access to Knowledge' programme of CIS and will guide the A2K team in expanding the Indian language Wikipedias and in increasing the number of active editors through strategic partnerships with Higher Education institutions across India.

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

Storytelling and Technology - Sartaj Anand

denisse — 2014-03-12T11:43:19Z

This post outlines the general characteristics of storytelling. The second section is an interview with Sartaj Anand, the founder of EgoMonk and BIllion Strong, who talks about storytelling as a strategy to build trust at the intersections of business and technology. This is the first of a series of installments exploring the potential of storytelling for social change.

CHANGE-MAKER: Sartaj Anand

ORGANIZATION: EgoMonk & Billion Strong

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Leverage technology by focusing on the relationship between people and technology, and build trust by localizing and personalizing communication

METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling

“We all have something to say. Question is: will anyone listen?”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud, 1994

Today, everybody seems to be talking about ‘storytelling’. From activists to corporates; they are all jumping on this nostalgic bandwagon and embracing once again an enthralling habit of yesteryear: the ability to tell good stories. The practice has taken an identity of its own. It's distancing itself from its roots in oral tradition, and morphing into a state-of-the-art communication strategy. This is no selfless trend, though. Behind the hype, lies their thirst for (your) attention, and the belief that they do not only have a story to tell, but that it is a story that matters. In the context of “making change” particularly, when political and social crises emerge, the public space is flooded by a series of narratives and discourses as told by different actors. This explosion of stories culminates in an overload of information that could end up saturating its intended audience. This is not only undesirable, but dangerous when underneath the noise lies a message important for human dignity and survival. So, what is it about a story that will make it worthy of your attention? And how can this seemingly simple, yet complex tactic culminate in further engagement?

To explain storytelling as a method to create change, I will focus on how this practice can be utilized to enhance visibility and effectiveness of advocacy practices, as outlined in the research overview. I will start by unpacking ‘storytelling’: focusing on its purpose and functions. I will also look at the the relationship between the storyteller and the audience, and also at how storytelling redefines ‘the public space’. Although I will be putting my best effort to explain the workings behind his method, I will rely on the storytellers themselves to learn about the power of well-crafted and well-delivered stories to make change. This opportunity’s change-actors: Sartaj Anand, The Ugly Indian, Blank Noise, come from different fields and will show very different perspectives of how the narratives of change utilized in their stories, re-articulates how users/citizens/customers interact and experience content.

Telling Stories

So, what is storytelling? And what makes it so different from other forms of narration? I consulted the work of German philosophers Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt to unpack the nature of this practice and its ability to transmit knowledge.

“the storyteller takes what he tells from the experience and he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening”

W. Benjamin, 1977

In Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller” (1955) he laments the demise of storytelling: “less and less frequently do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly [as if] the ability to exchange experiences [had been taken away from us]”. Having its origins in oral tradition, storytelling for the most part consists of taking experiences worth sharing and disseminating them in the community with a specific, and according to Benjamin, a useful purpose in mind. It could be a moral, a maxim or a practical advice (1977), but at the end of the day, the audience takes away a new piece of information it did not have at the beginning of the story. This lesson may be related to the past of the storyteller or one of his characters, but its value lies in how it can now be extrapolated to the audience’s future.

Ann Rippin's rendition to The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin. Visit her wordpress here.

Hannah Arendt, German-American philosopher from the early 20th century also had a lot to say about storytelling and ‘narratives’. She understood it as a framework, backed up by a strong tradition of its own, and a structure that embodies how our mind works: “the mind doesn’t simply re-create sequences of events as they occur, but it creates new sequences and integrates events into appropriate existing sequences; the mind is constantly forming narratives” (Kieslich, 2013.). This understanding of the practice goes beyond Benjamin’s proposition that we become part of the narration as it occurs. Arendt posits that our mind is already manufactured to construct sequences and connections in the same way in which we build stories -as opposed to the way we structure our essays, novels or tweets- before we tell them. Being such an embedded cognitive process, it feels familiar, comfortable and natural, which derives into a “critical appreciation” for the events of the story, and leads you to make deeper connections on how they relate to your life (Oni, 2012).

(Read more on Arendt and storytelling here: The Story of Reconciliation – Hannah Arendt Center)

However, both Benjamin and Arendt’s analysis is still very focused on the oral vs. prose question. Entering the 21st century we face the question of the role of digital technology and our highly visual culture in facilitating, amplifying or limiting the process of storytelling. On this point, I jumped to the end of the 20th century and looked at one of the many forms of storytelling: the comic. Scott McCloud’s “Understanding the Comic” (1994) takes you through the whole process of creating a coherent interplay of words and pictures that “convey information” and/or produce an “aesthetic response in the viewer”. Why are aesthetics important? , Because, according to McCloud, the inclusion of art is both the rejection and affirmation of our human condition. On one hand, art (or how we respond to it) is a rejection to our basic instincts, allowing us to express needs beyond survival and reproduction. On the other hand, it is a vehicle through which we assert our identities as individuals and pursue a “higher purpose and truth” (1994). Digital storytelling is imbued with visual stimuli: pictures, videos, graphics, that enhance the sensory experience, and as we explored in the Information Design posts (Find Part 1:Information Activism, and Part 2: Information Design) create new (and deeper) channels to approach and understand the message delivered by these stories.

Excerpts of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud

From these three perspectives we understand the following about storytelling. It is:

A practice rooted in the tradition of sharing experiences

Participatory and interactive: the experience of the storyteller becomes the experience of the audience.

The purpose of storytelling is to pass on a message, moral guidance or practical advice to the audience, through its content.

The form or structure of narratives is determined by sequences of facts and events, which is the same way we build stories in our minds.

The experiential and familiar nature of storytelling makes it easier to engage with and relate to.

The inclusion of images, art and media produces an aesthetic response in the viewer, providing the audience an opportunity for self-expression and freedom.

Translating these characteristics to the theme of the Methods for Social Change project (how to build a sense of citizenship and civicness through technology-mediated practices. More here): storytelling (re)emerges as a promising vehicle for political change, especially when in par with the “technological possibilities” of our times (Benjamin, 1977). If we choose to entertain this thought, we find how its roots in community traditions make stories an excellent meeting point to form solidarity networks and stronger offline communities to sustain activism. The logical and sequential format of stories are interesting mediums, not only to transmit new ideas on citizenship and engagement; but make them relevant and appealing. Finally, 'the moral of the stories' are seeds for introspection and reflection, that may shape how we understand our role in society as a whole. At the end of the day though, it is storytellers who will lead this journey and meeting them is the first step to gauge how the theory of storytelling unfolds in the practice.

In the next section, we will meet some of the actors utilizing this method in different fields - and there are plenty of storytellers out there, gifted in skill and practice conveying an array of messages to an equally diverse public- but before moving on I will close with an excerpt from Lisa Disch’s essay that brings all these points together:

“[Storytelling] is more adequate than arguments to depict ambiguities of a multidimensional social reality”

In other words, it is a practice that strips narratives from all ornaments, displaying the complexities of humanity in its most intuitive and experiential form.

(Story)Tellers

Great storytellers: creators who devote their resources in controlling

this medium to convey their messages effectively”

Understanding Comics
Scott McCloud (1993)

Our first storyteller is Sartaj Anand; an India-based entrepreneur, founder of the innovation and strategy consulting firm: EgoMonk and active member of TED, Ashoka, Sandbox, Kairos Society and the Pearson Foundation networks (More about his work in his Social Good profile). His self-described “unreasonable dream” is to impact one billion people with his work and create “life-changing experiences”. He strives to do this by a) leveraging the relationship between people and technology and b) through his recently launched non-profit Billion Strong. Also, as opposed to other change-makers we’ve interviewed in the project, he comes from an engineering and business background; bringing a for-profit perspective into our melange of multi-stakeholder approaches to change.

The following interview touches on digital storytelling as one of the ways Anand is using to leverage technology. His vision highlights how you cannot disconnect people from the processes you are utilizing to impact their lives. Incorporating a more humane focus in the way we use technology, and in how we construct stories, is according to his experience, the best way to have practices resonate to and be appropriate for the public.

Sartaj Anand,

Founder of EgoMonk and Billion Strong

Tell us about your background and the intersections of your work with technology.

I started with an engineering background and my thesis was on language processing; figuring out how people talk and how that needs construction data. Fundamentally at some point, I figured out that technology is not the problem, people are; so that’s how I moved into my current focus in business: which is innovation strategic consulting. I frequently rely on technology to enable or actualize change but I don’t necessarily create it. The challenge is how we leverage the technology we have [...] and that’s where I can add the most value.

How do you leverage technology in the context of making change then?

I leverage technology in terms of using it but focusing on the ‘people’ side of it”: the relationship between people and technology. That’s the main intersection point. [...] This is what I mean when I talk about technology, innovation, social structures and change.

Ideas for Change from Sartaj Anand

Economically, business models have to replicate and service society. If businesses serve their people, they capture maximum value and gain efficiency over ten, twenty years (and this is appealing to all the capitalists in industrial businesses). However, towards the course of these years a lot of things can change and you progressively become more and more outdated. When you have this premonition, that's the point when you need to step in and cannibalize your own business model.

For example, for seven years, music labels sold cds only. Then Apple came in with iPods and digital music downloads. After milking this for 10 years, what it should have done is fortify it and start streaming music to capture maximum value, like Spotify did. [...] This is a model EgoMonk works with and we try to communicate these things to our clients. They have the power to execute it, but they have to internally feel confident with all their stakeholders, whether it is for-profits with their board; or non-profits with donors and program partners. This is a choice we need to commit to. A lot of the problem in the change process (technology enabled or otherwise) is trust building. At the end of the day you are working with people, and this is a challenge.

In order to build this trust you must be aiming for a deeper and personal communication with your clients. How are you including this in your business model?

We focus a lot on communication and that’s something we rely on increasingly; and I found it has to have a Why-What-How model -borrowing from Simon Sinek's gold circles. In that order.

Storytelling 101 from Sartaj Anand

People don’t buy the 'what' of it, without the 'why' you do it. For example, Apple is great because it works to improve your life, to inspire you, amuse you: make your life better. What they do comes second: Apple is an electronics company, an application company. Last is the how: It makes the iPhone. We apply a similar model and this is something I apply in my storytelling also. I’m a believer that every story has to have an end or a moral: something that is more hopeful and optimistic. Rely on that but decide that also, I’m not the only one around: stories are increasingly personal and local.

Given the personal and experiential nature of storytelling, I assume it is a challenge to mainstream it in your services. Tell us more about the practices you are using to implement it and how they break from more traditional communication practices in the past.

EgoMonk

EgoMonk is an Innovation and Strategic Management Consultancy (More about EgoMonk here). Particularly this means that:

a) We start with the hypothesis that we don't know everything. With that in mind, we borrow amazing frameworks from amazing institutions. For example, Holacracy; (a “purposeful organization” technology that changes how the organization is structured, how decisions are made and how power is distributed); 'How will you win' philosophy from traditional large companies,, where they equate every decision to a couple of questions like what's your winning aspiration?, where will you plan?, how will you win?, what capability systems/processes need to exist to make this a sustainable practice that outlives you? This approach gets us halfway there, [especially] working with people who haven't had access to this before.

EgoMonk's services

b) We localize it. We work with high impact entrepreneurs and turn their life goals into a four week plan. We frame it: What happens if after four weeks, you die. If these are four weeks you have to live: what really matters to you? What do you want to accomplish professionally and personally? Once you go through that exercise we say: What can continue sustainable during your life? What can you take away? We focus on timing and what you have to do. Once you put that concept of mortality into every day's existence, you start behaving differently.

c) We work with gamification. For example, we worked in a factory and completely changed the incentivization for their workers into something that is more fun. The challenge was: how do you improve the process of well-being in an industrial environment. How do we make working enjoyable for them? This model consists of short-term rewards: if you work really hard over this much time, you get 10 points and this gets you a (reward) with your family. This has never happened before.

Billion Strong

Billion Strong is a platform. We want to impact a billion people and mobilize a billion dollars every year. The concept behind it is that the future is completely decoupled from our reality. It is highly utopian and right now we are not there and my hypothesis is that we'll never get there because our perspectives and assumptions keep evolving. This non-profit aims to accelerate the future in our lifetime so we can at least enjoy some of its benefits. It focuses on six things: culture, mobility, technology, art, nutrition and divinity. Each of these will be used as levers to impact a billion people. In the case of Billion Strong, user adoption is the most frequent challenge you face in the non-profit space. I will explain this using our first two projects:

a) Project 1 - Divinity:
We want to take religion, God and spirituality as a lever to impact people. A manifestation of this is the release of an open source tool kit to convert religious institutions into co-working spaces.

Centers of religion are:

Everywhere and permanent

Well known by the community

Community centers

Safe

Non-profit and non-taxable

Underutilized 99% of the time

Disconnected from youth

Centers of religion have always been centers of education and community oriented, but within the last generation they've become prayer halls, and I think this is the wrong way of using this infrastructure. There are a couple of narratives being negotiated here (See box to the left).

In this case [the open source tool-kit] has a framework, and it is dynamic to the point where your choices in real time will influence the policies of this place and their physical manifestation. So you ask questions in a flow chart: Do you want men and women to work together or not?; Do you have the ability to buy new furniture or you want to use the existing furniture?; when you ask these questions you navigate a flow chart, depending on your choices. They will lead to a different output and when they see that, it is immediately empowering. This is storytelling, and this what will help us navigate the adoption issues. It's essentially us saying you own it; you know exactly what is good for your own community. In terms of the narrative, each copy will be different and adapted to its language. It has to be made for this community and everything has to be localized for that story you are telling. The religious and cultural narrative needs to be blended into it.

b) Project 2 - Nutrition:
Meat consumption is a huge challenge and highly unsustainable. We will use kick-start mechanics in a mobile app to trigger and enable change in food habits. We are obviously very digitally inclined right now. It's easy to capitalize on that, but instead of giving them money, we will ask them to skip a meal, go vegetarian for today or for the week and we are going to support that.

Adoption is a huge challenge, so we'll ask them: Where do you stay? They'll say: Amsterdam [for example], and it will provide them with a template. If you are vegetarian for today, for the week, or the month, this is your meal plan and all you need. Users will find meals close to them and won't have to worry about it anymore. And we will map their impact in real time through info-graphics and data visualization. They will be constructing and visualizing their own story in real time and we’ll present it through different narratives.

We are also looking at multi-stakeholderism in this project. Both EgoMonk and Billion Strong seem to be a combination of business, technology and communication strategies. Why multi-stakeholderism?

Three reasons:

a) The future is multi-domain. You will never understand the whole picture if you say: I’m only going to solve water, but what about the pipes, the roads, the environment, infrastructure, cultural issue. One domain is no longer good enough. You will never be a complete expert of the complete ecosystem.

b) Adoption models will always be a challenge and right now it’s a compromised formula. Now it's a zero-sum game. We literally need to escape that and make it future-oriented; make it 1+1 through partnerships.

c) Storytelling is also getting more mainstreamed into change management and multi-stakeholderism. At the end of it, if you tell a good enough story, you can sell and get people to believe in your projects. This inherently builds partnership models. There is something that is permission marketing: all sales in the future are relationship based and indirect sales.(E.g. Red Bull is all about the experience) That’s how we have to be when we talk about multi-stakeholderism. Everything needs to be built in.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

** Next installment will look at how storytelling enhances visibility and accessibility, and how it is being used by Urban Governance groups in Bangalore.**

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. The literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.p.308
Benjamin, Walter. (1977): "The storyteller."89.
Disch,Lisa Jane (1994) Hannah Arendt and the limits of Philosophy. Cornell University Press. p.172-173
Kieslich, Ingo. (2013) "Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt: Storytelling in and as theoretical writing." PhD diss., Vanderbilt University,
McCloud, Scott. (1994)."Understanding comics: The invisible art." Northampton, Mass
Oni, Peter (2012). "The Cognitive Power of Storytelling: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in a Postmodernist/Africanist Context."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/storytelling-sartaj-anand

Open Access Logo 2

thomas — 2011-10-24T17:11:27Z

The Open Access Logo

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/Openaccess.jpg

Open Access to Science and Research

admin — 2008-09-22T07:39:19Z

Ogg format

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Open%20Access%20to%20Science%20and%20Research.ogg

Why Do We Need Open Access to Science?: A Developing Country Perspective

admin — 2008-10-11T09:45:01Z

Prof. Arunachalam's paper presented at the A2k3 conference in Geneva.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/uploads/Subbiah%20Arunachalam%20-%20Why%20Do%20We%20Need%20Open%20Access%20to%20Science

Reconceptualizing Privacy on Social Network(s) Sites

rebecca — 2011-08-18T05:07:09Z

While “privacy” on social network sites remains a highly ambiguous notion, much debate surrounding the issue to date has focused on privacy as the nonpublic-ness of personal information. However, as these social platforms become sites for diverse forms of “networking”, privacy must also be popularly conceptualized as control over personal data flows.

The perils of information exposure and the loss of privacy on social network sites (SNS) has become a talked about issue. Information once considered has private has in many instances become viewable by unintended audiences of parents, colleagues, college admission officers, employers, even the courts. The recent Facebook privacy scandal, which left sensitive personal information for millions of users open and searchable via Google, heightened privacy consciousness amongst users, public interest groups, and Facebook itself. As the free flowing nature of information on the internet has redefined practices surrounding the disclosure of information, new and multidimensional privacy challenges have arose as a result.

The much-celebrated ethos of “openness” continues to attract numerous and diverse users to SNS, and without a doubt, these platforms have enabled users to stay connected and share information with the people around them -- for better or worse. However, it is within this inherently open context that notions of privacy are continuously being challenged and redefined. While a particular user may prefer to keep certain information widely available to attract “potential friends” within a certain network or social circle, it may go without saying that the same user may not be comfortable with a family member viewing that same information, or having personal information open access to third parties. It is this iterative tension between “openness” and privacy which beckons the need to balance the openness of SNS with the privacy of its members.

Privacy as a Semi-Public Personal Space

Most commonly, privacy has been interpreted by users as a “lack of access”, or the degree to which they are able to protect their information from the public gaze. Various research examining the privacy (mal)practices of users have also, by in large, conceptualized privacy within this public/private binary. The most popular SNS today do allow users to careful define their privacy level. However, whether or not the information of a user remains open, restricted, or private will depend on the privacy preferences unique to the user, and to some degree, the architecture of a particular SNS. Inferring from privacy in practice, researchers have generally labeled users as privacy fundamentalists, pragmatics, or the marginally concerned . While making this distinction has been useful, is important to note that the diversity and complexity of relationships within a single networked space obscures the inherent simplicity of such typology. With many online social networks becoming representative of offline affiliation, the challenges inherent to maintaining a diverse number of social relations online may lead researchers to interpret uncertain privacy practices as paradoxical. Such a notion also calls into question the utility of categorizing users according to their privacy practices.

To illustrate such complexity, many users today are compelled to join sub-networks or groups within these sites, which then cluster users and relax the privacy settings between them. While a college student may wish to keep weekend outings hidden from the professors they have connected with, they may also be tempted to reveal such information with his network of peers-- to which the professors may belong. The open nature of these sub-networks are inherently valuable for maintaining offline affiliations, friendships and collegial relationship. However, this also increases the likelihood invisible audiences of unintended users may gain access to potentially unflattering information to an . By joining a network on Facebook, for example, the personal information of a users profile page becomes open to all “friends and networks”, even if the users may previously had their information set behind a more granular privacy settings.

Within these open spaces, the ability of users to make appropriate or selective disclosures of information is becoming obscured. While Facebook does allow for users to alter the settings after joining a network, such “openness by default” may catch many users off guard or only be brought to their attention once they face its negative repercussions. Because the maintenance of a wide variety of such social relationships depends on the disclosure/non-disclosure of certain types of information, privacy in praxis has become an act of balancing the utility of social network with the privacy concerns they present. Users are now faced with the challenge of classifying certain pieces of information public or non public, or determining suitable practices of disclosures amongst a diverse social graph. It is not to be expected that such decisions will become easier within a context whose architecture is built on openness to make it “easier for friends to find, identify, and learn about you”.

Privacy as Control over the Flow of Information

While the classification and coding of information vis-à-vis a diverse set of relationships forms the base of practice for most of the privacy conscious, this paradigm of privacy remains rather limited within a defined network of individuals, whether they be “friends”, within an intended audience, or not. Within this framework, information is understood as being either socially or institutionally sensitive, as its exposure may affect certain social or institutional relationships. Given the spatial and temporal context the “social profile” gives to personal information, it is reasonable to see how popular understandings of privacy have been within the public/private paradigm.

While this may be the case, it is important that users observe how the inherently “networked” nature of these spaces complicates the common privacy paradigm. When a user joins a SNS, they enter into a complex and opaque set of networked relationships beyond those with their “friends” and “friends of friends”. There exists sub-networks of third-party actors which constitute corporate entities, their partners and affiliates --may they be advertisers, third party developers, or a broad range of other service providers. Many of which are granted access to your information in varying forms and for differing reasons. With the introduction of the Open Social network, fronted by Google and various social advertising and developers networks, the ability for one to maintain the control and integrity of their information or “data” has become an increasingly complex endeavor.

While the importance of maintaining non-public social spaces online should not be diminished, in a time when collecting, storing, aggregating and disseminating information has become increasingly easy and cost-effective, users of SNS must begin to conceptualize online privacy in a way which extends past the social context popularly understood to give “information” meaning. Once information loses its contextual place of meaning, which may be the profile itself, users seem less apt to consciously consider the collection and dissemination of such data as a breach of privacy, or even a concern at all. It may be true that the socially sensitive nature of such data is reduced once it is disassociated with a particular user, or that the click stream patterns and other information collected by advertisers through cookies may not always pose a direct and potential threat to our privacy as we’ve thus far conceived it. However, a brief glance at the privacy policies, terms of use, and on-site practices of a few SNS illuminates that privacy must be seen as the control over the flows of personal information.that

Privacy vis-à-vis Third Parties

As many have illuminated, SNS are commercial enterprises with a business model based on the harvesting of personal information for marketing and other purposes. Therefore, it may be naive for a users to believe what happens on these sites stays on these sites, or that privacy settings, however granular they may be, grants them adequate control over their information. While SNS such as Bebo state that they “take your privacy very seriously”, the onus is on the user to determine whether or not the privacy standards of third party applications are up to par. The transfer of responsibility for monitoring the privacy practices of third parties is characteristic of many popular SNS. MySpace states in their privacy policy that they do not “control third parties” and cannot “dictate their actions”, while Facebook similarly states that they cannot guarantee that such third parties will “follow their rules”.

As third parties are often governed by their own privacy policies, the unmonitored and unenforced nature of these networked relationships places further responsibility on the individual users to ensure that privacy practices are adequate. This becomes quite difficult on SNS like Facebook, where third party developers are granted access to the personal information of all you and all your network members, including photos, videos, and other biographical information.

The relatively anonymous nature of these parallel sub-networks also obscures the ability of the user to take control over the accessibility of their information. Further, the privacy policies of the various SNS give no indication as to “who” their affiliates, partners, and service providers are. Most SNS also reserve the right to transfer personally identifiable information to its partners and affiliates if they have a “business reason to do so” and in all cases, advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies with regards to the information they collect -- some of it personally identifiable. To complicate matters, all of the leading SNS, including Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and Bebo, reserve the right to collect information about you from other companies and publicly available sources. It is unclear as to what information is being collected or for what purposes, and unfortunately, such information is effectively kept “private”.

Redefining Privacy on Social Network Sites

Social network sites can be seen as open spaces which allow users to maintain diverse personal relationships. However, the somewhat anonymous parallel networks of third parties which exist on these sites threatens the “open nature” of these sites vis-à-vis our privacy. While users may maintain that the information they have provided is kept secure and private, these parallel third party networks negates the control an individual may assert over the flow of their information. It is within this context that privacy needs to be conceptually redefined in relation to both user “information” as it appears on a social profile, and “data” once it is processed by third parties. There is a need for an alternative paradigm to privacy on SNS which takes into consideration the flow, retention and use of personal information.

While it may be too early to determine whether or not the expected digital dossiers complete with complex user-specific biographical data will be developed or come to threaten our privacy in a fundamentally new way, it is also premature and erroneous to assume that traditional notions of privacy are fundamentally antithetical to the net. As communication become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, so to should our perceptions of privacy and ways of preserving it. SNS must also become responsible for ensuring greater transparency in the flows and uses of personal information, working to standardize the privacy policies in such a way that makes the user experience one which is seamless with respect to privacy practices. Initiatives such as the W3C’s P3P are a promising step towards nurturing a more nuanced understanding of privacy among internet users. Only through understanding privacy as the control over the flows of personal information can be balance the interests of SNS users with the business models of these “open” networked spaces.

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