Centre for Internet and Society

Digitising contest to preserve rare books in Malayalam

praskrishna — 2014-01-31T06:33:15Z

The Malayalam Wiki Grandhasala has announced a competition in digitally preserving rare books in Malayalam.

The article was published in the Hindu on January 4, 2014.

‘Digitalisation Contest 2014’, launched by the Wiki community, is aimed at digitising rare books in Malayalam, the copyright of which has expired, and making them available online in Unicode font.

The Wiki community wants the books to reach innumerable readers through the Internet.

The competition will be held in separate categories for schools and the general public. The competition involves entering the text on the computer and proof-reading. The prizes include e-book readers and books.

In the first phase of the project, 55 books listed by the Kerala Sahitya Akademi have been offered for digitising. They include ‘Samskshepa Vedartham’ (1772), ‘Malayanmayude Vyakaranam’ (1863) and ‘Hasthalakshanadeepika’ (1892).
Copies of magazines such as ‘Rasikaranjini’ and ‘Mangalodayam’ have also been offered for digitising.

Those who wish to take part in the competition should visit the Wiki Grandhasala (ml.wikisource.org) and become a member of the project.

Details of the competition and the list of books may be downloaded. The contest will be open till January 31. It is being organised on the 10th anniversary of the Wiki Source project by the Centre for Internet and Society, IT@School project, Swanthanthra Malayalam Computing and the Kerala Sahitya Akademi.

For details, contact K. Manoj, general convener of the contest (cellphone number: 9495576262).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-hindu-january-4-2014-digitising-contest-to-preserve-rare-books-in-malayalam

Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949

subodh — 2022-10-11T14:53:58Z

The digitization project of O Bharat, a historic biweekly published between 1912 to 1949 in Goa was completed through collaboration of different organizations. The trustees of Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust initiated the project in collaboration with Marathi department of Goa University, Bhakti Dnyan Marg Sanstha and Goa Central Library. The Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge Programme facilitated the project with technical and financial assistance. Two local students scanned 12000 pages in 8 days. The year wise volumes of O Bharat are now freely available on Wikimedia Commons in the form of archive.


Above: Front page of O Bharat in Portuguese	Above: Front page of O Bharat in Marathi

Context

It all started like this. During the Wikimedia session at Goa University in October 2021, it was realised that there is very little documentation about the ‘Goa Liberation Struggle’ on Wikimedia projects. So, in the meeting Prof. Vinay Madgaonkar from the Marathi language department took the lead to develop a project around this theme.

The exhaustive list of freedom fighters, major incidents in history, the places related with struggle, monuments and memorials was prepared. The next day, to have a glimpse of the situation on ground, we toured a few places and monuments in South Goa. As we were shocked to see the sorry state of the memorials, we came across a monument of Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai known as Bharatkar (an editor of O Bharat), in a lush green forest near Quepem village. Being curious to know about the history of O Bharat publication, Prof. Vinay introduced us to the grandson of Bharatkar, Adv. Khagendra Desai who founded Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust, non-profit organisation in Goa to archive the works of Bharatkar.

As both of us share the same vision, CIS-A2K partnered with Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust, to relicense and digitise freedom fighter Bharatkar’s ‘O Bharat,’ a Marathi-Portuguese bilingual weekly, currently housed at Goa Central Public Library.

About the 36 Year Run of ‘O Bharat’ upto India’s Independence

Freedom fighter, social reformer and journalist 'Bharat'kar Govind Pundalik Hegde Desai, (7th Nov 1885 - 15th Aug 1949), started 'O Bharat' (in Portuguese) or 'Bharat' (in Marathi) on 6th November 1912. For 36 years thereafter, Bharatkar courageously protested the Portuguese occupation, relentlessly advocated radical and progressive social reforms and doggedly championed the cause of an independent and sovereign Indian Goa.

Partnerships

The partnerships with various stakeholders were developed after a series of discussions and official communications. The Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust obtained official permissions from the State Government departments for the access of O Bharat volumes in the library. Goa Central Public Library provided access to the bound volumes of O Bharat and permission to scan them. Another local organisation, Bhakti Dnyan Marg Sanstha in association with Goa University Marathi Department identified few students for the digitisation.

Digitisation process and launch on Wikimedia Commons

The trustees of Bharatkar Hegde Desai Trust relicensed the two volumes of selected editorials published in 2018 and the whole O Bharat issues into CC-BY-SA 4.0. We conducted digitisation training with Prof. Vinay Madgaonkar and students, Shravani Parab and Shridhar Raut, from Goa University to scan 12000 pages in 8 days. The officials of Goa Central Public Library cooperated in access to original volumes and in the process of digitisation. The Chief Minister of Goa inaugurated the project on Wikimedia Commons on India’s 75th Independence day, 15 August 2022. The year wise volumes of ‘O Bharat’ are now freely accessible to anyone in the world at any time anywhere. The uploading of the volumes is in progress.

Media links

The event of launching digitised content on Wikimedia was very well received by the people in Goa. The researchers, students, readers and journalists will have this reference value content while exploring the history of Goa. Various national and local media published the news covering all the aspects of this archive. The links are given below -

This was originally published on Wikimedia Blog in September 2022

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digitisation-of-o-bharat

Digitisation of O Bharat, a bilingual biweekly published in Goa from 1912 to 1949

subodh — 2022-10-11T13:11:15Z

Context

About the 36 Year Run of ‘O Bharat’ upto India’s Independence

Partnerships

Digitisation process and launch on Wikimedia Commons

Media links

This was originally published on Wikimedia Blog in September 2022

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digitisation-o-bharat

Digitally Open: Innovation and Open Access Forum

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T09:26:09Z

Promoting Openness in Today's Digital World

The internet has created exciting new ways to share information and collaborate globally and we are only beginning to see its full potential. So what does the future hold, or more importantly, what could the future hold?

Join ictQATAR and Creative Commons for an interactive forum addressing how innovation can thrive in the digital age through sharing and openness. We'll take on issues such as digital content rights, the open cloud, open source software, openness in government, openness in creativity, culture and art and the value proposition of openness.

Hear the latest thinking from Google, Mozilla, Georgetown University and other leaders in the digital rights arena. Participate in lively panel discussions on openness in government, openness in business, and openness for culture and creativity.

Speakers:

Program:http://www.ictqatar.qa/output/page1988.asp#mbaker

8:45 a.m.      Registration Opens

9:30 a.m.      Welcome
                       Dr. Hessa Al Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR

9:45 a.m.       What it Means to be Open
                       Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation

10:15 a.m.    Digital Content Rights
                       Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons

10:45 a.m.    The Open Source Revolution
                       Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager, Google

11:15 a.m.     Break

11:30 a.m.     The Open Cloud
                        Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown
                        University

12:00 p.m.     Panel: Openness in Science and Technology

                      John Wilbanks, Creative Commons, VP for Science - Moderator

                       Shaikha Al-Jabir, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliance, Qtel
                       International

                       Hesham Al Komy, Head of Sales and Marketing, Middle East and Africa, Redhat

                       Habib Haddad, Founder, Yalla Startup, Yamli.com

                       Lucio Rispo, Qatar Science and Technology Park

1:15 p.m.       Lunch Break

2:15 p.m.       Panel: Openness in Government (moderated by Michael Nelson)

                       Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Center for Internet & Society, India

                       Paul Keller, Senior Project Lead of Technology and the Public Domain,
                            Knowledgeland

                       Marwan Marouf Mahmoud, Executive Director of ICT Industry
                            Development, ictQATAR

3:15 p.m.      Panel: Culture, Creativity and Openness

                       Eric Steur, Creative Commons Creative Director - Moderator

                       Abdulrahman Al-Otaiba, Web and Application Developer

                       Arend Kuster, Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation
                            Journals

                        Roger Mandle, Director, Qatar Museum Authority

4:15                End

Speaker Bios:

Dr. Hessa Al-Jaber, Secretary General, ictQATAR

Dr. Hessa Al Jaber is the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Information and Communication Technology, ictQATAR. In her nearly six years of leadership at ictQATAR, Dr. Hessa has led Qatar's ICT strategy across sectors, spearheading major initiatives in government, education and business.

She has overseen the liberalization of Qatar's telecommunications market, ushering in an era of choice and competition, and directed the modernization of Qatar's ICT infrastructure. Passionate about ensuring that the benefits of technology reach all sectors, Dr. Hessa has led numerous initiatives to make Qatar a more inclusive society through ICT.

She has spearheaded the modernization of Qatar's government through ICT, streamlining processes, making government more transparent and accessible to its people, and also launching an online portal to the government, Hukoomi. She is also leading Qatar's initiative to build the first high-capacity satellite "E'Shail" to be launched in 2012. Dr. Hessa has been instrumental in the creation of Mada, an assistive technology center that serves persons with disabilities in Qatar, as well as initiating a host of national programs that empower women and youth, and protect children online.

Mitchell Baker, Chairperson, Mozilla Foundation

As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Baker was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Her law career included working for Sun Microsystems and Netscape. She has also sat on the board of the Open Source Applications Foundation.

Baker has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999, helping shape the license under which Netscape's source code was released. In 2003, she became president and founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, Baker led the creation of Mozilla Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As Chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, Baker continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents.

Joichi Ito, CEO, Creative Commons

Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage. He is on the board of CCC and Tucows. He is a Senior Visiting Researcher of Keio Research Institute at Shonan Fujisawa Campus in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, WITNESS and Global Voices.

He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies. He has served and continues to serve on various Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues. He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.

Chris DiBona, Open Source and Public Sector Program Manager, Google

Chris DiBona is the open source and public sector programs manager at Mountain View, Ca. based Google. His team oversees license compliance and supports the open source developer community through programs such as the Google Summer of Code and through the release of open source software projects and patches. In the public sector space, he looks after Google Moderator, the polling locations API. Additionally, he is on the board of Our Good Works, a non-profit that looks after the volunteer matching website Allforgood.org.

Mr. DiBona is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He occasionally appears on the This Week in Tech and Cranky Geeks podcasts. He is a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management and has a masters in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Additionally, he serves on the advisory board of imeem, a San Francisco, Ca. based social networking firm.

Michael Nelson, Visiting Professor of Internet Studies, Georgetown University

Michael Nelson is currently Visiting Professor of Internet Studies in Georgetown University's Communication, Culture, and Technology Program. Since January 2008, he has been doing research and teaching courses on "The Future of the Internet" and technology trends as well as consulting and speaking on Internet technology and policy.

Nelson is a Trustee of the International Institute of Communication, a member of the Board of FirstMile.us, and until April was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Internet2 university research consortium. He is also the outgoing chairman of the Information, Computing, and Communications Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Panelists:

Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, Centre for Internet and Society

Sunil is the executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), in Bangalore. He is the founder of Mahiti, a social enterprise aiming to reduce the cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the voluntary sector by using free software. Sunil continues to serve on the board of Mahiti. He is an Ashoka fellow and was elected for a Sarai FLOSS fellowship.

For three years, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network, a project of United Nations Development Programme's Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme, serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region. In 2007 - 2008, he managed ENRAP an electronic network of International Fund for Agricultural Development projects in the Asia-Pacific, facilitated and co-funded by International Development Research Centre, Canada.

Dr. Shaikha Sultan Al-Jabir, Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances, Qtel International

Dr. Shaikha Al-Jabir a visionary IT executive who understands where business is going and takes corporate IT to a whole new level. She is currently the Director of Marketing, Innovation and Alliances in Qtel International (QI) where she is building a framework for strategic and sustainable innovation within QI.

Prior to joining QI, she was the CIO at Qatar General Electricity and Water Corporation- Kahramaa, where she established a sophisticated ICT infrastructure, placing the organization at the forefront of technology. Dr. Al-Jabir has a PhD in Computer Science, MS in Telecommunications and Computers, and a BS in Electrical Engineering.

Abdulrahman Al Otaiba

Abdulraham is a Qatari developer who has been passionate about computers since an early age. He started as a software developer, then web developer, and recently mobile application developer. Most of his personal projects are released under the open source license. He also co-founder and editor-in-chief of Almashroo Arabic blog, which talks about all sorts of web development.

Habib Hadad, Founder & CEO, Yamli.com

Habib is a serial tech entrepreneur, recently founder and CEO of Yamli.com a startup focused on empowering the Arabic language on the web. His also the founder and CEO of YallaStartup an NGO focused on early stage entrepreneurship in the MENA region.

In 2009, the World Economic Forum recognized Habib as a Young Global Leader and the ArabianBusiness named him one of the most influential Arabs under 30. He currently serves on the Global Agenda Council on innovation.

Paul Keller, Senior Copyright Advisor, Knowledgeland

Paul Keller is senior copyright policy advisor at Knowledgeland, an Amsterdam based think-tank focused on innovation in the knowledge economy. He is public project lead for Creative Commons in the Netherlands and serves as Collecting Societies Liaison for Creative Commons International.

Paul is an expert on open content licensing with a special focus on the cultural heritage organizations, the music industry and the creative industries. Next to his work for Creative Commons he is currently coordinating the copyright related aspects of Images for the Future one of the biggest digitization projects for audio-visual heritage in Europe and he is one of the architects of the licensing framework for Europeana, the European Union funded online aggregator of Europe's cultural heritage. Paul frequently advises organizations on the implementation of open content licensing strategies.

Arend Küster: Managing Director, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals (BQFJ)

Arend joined BQFJ from Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, where he was Business Development Director and led the development of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Journals. He has over 5 years of consulting experience in Sales and Marketing Strategies for scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishers including Elsevier Science, Springer, American Physical Society, Taylor and Francis, Wiley Blackwell, University of Chicago Press, British Medical Journal, Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan.

Marwan Marouf Mahmoud, Executive Director of ICT Sector Development, ictQATAR

An ICT professional with more than 20 years of experience working with various levels of technology, Marwan oversaw the preparation and implementation of some of the most comprehensive ICT strategies in financial institutions and now heads the ICT Industry development at ictQATAR. In this role ictQATAR, he is involved in building an ICT Industry ecosystem and a digital content ecosystem, which includes initiatives in intellectual property, broadband infrastructure, international ICT Industry cooperation and entrepreneurship programs in the digital content space.

Roger Mandle, Executive Director, Qatar Museums Authority (QMA)

Roger Mandle brings to the Qatar Museums Authority (QMA) more than four decades of experience as a senior museum executive and arts educator. As Executive Director, he oversees all of the QMA's museum programs and building projects, including the Museum of Islamic Art. His responsibilities range from administration and finance to the curatorial direction of the museums to a comprehensive educational program, which includes the creation of an international network of training opportunities for Qatari citizens who desire careers in the museum field.

Mr. Mandle comes to the QMA from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island, where he served as President since 1993. From 1988 to 1993, he was Deputy Director and Chief Curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Mr. Mandle was the Director of the Toledo Museum of Art in Toledo, Ohio from 1977-1988 and served as Associate Director of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 1967 to 1974.

Lucio Rispo, Strategy Research Director, Qatar Science & Technology Park

Lucio has more than 35 years of experience in multinational and multicultural environments.
Lucio is currently Strategic Research Director at Qatar Science & Technology Park (QSTP). Prior to joining QSTP Lucio was Managing Director at BioGeM, a European leader in the biotech research and services. He developed strategy and services based on a network infrastructure which allows internationally cooperation.

In 2006 Lucio founded the telecom division of Pradac Informatica, Srl, which provided value added services for telecom companies, and which was acquired by Amuser. Prior to Amuser, Lucio held several executive positions including Wordwide Telecom Sales VP at Sema Group, President at Nortel Networks for the Southern European Region and CEO for Europe and Latin America at Bull.

Eric Steuer, Creative Director, Creative Commons

Eric Steuer manages Creative Commons' relationships with artists, media companies, and cultural institutions. He produces creative projects and events that emphasize the use of CC licenses, and also directs the organization's media strategy. Before joining Creative Commons, Eric was as an editor for Wired Magazine, which he continues to write for. He is on the board of CASH Music, is the co-founder of Sneakmove Recordings, and is in a hip hop group called Meanest Man Contest.

John Wilbanks, Vice President, Science Commons, Creative Commons

As VP of Science, John Wilbanks runs the Science Commons project at Creative Commons. He came to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical research & development. Previously, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also worked in US politics as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney (Pete) Stark.

John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University and studied modern letters at the Universite de Paris IV (La Sorbonne). He serves on the Board of Directors for DuraSpace and AcaWiki.

See the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/digitally-open

Digital transitions in the newsroom: How are Indian language papers adapting differently?

zeenab — 2017-02-03T01:50:20Z

In a new report published by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Centre for Internet and Society, Zeenab Aneez explores how Indian newsrooms are adapting their workflow and processes to cater to an increasing digital audience and the implications these changes have on how journalists produce news.

This was published on the website of the London School of Economics and Political Science on January 16, 2017.

Global discussions about how the rise of the Internet has impacted journalism and news publishers has involved accounts of newspapers stopping publication altogether, or bringing their presses to a halt in order to direct resources to publishing solely digital content as in the case of Newsweek or the Independent. Large newspapers like The New York Times and The Guardian have successfully managed to transition from print only publications to multimedia news providers, bringing out both print and digital news but this is an ongoing and costly process.

In the Indian context however, things are a bit different, especially with regard to Indian language newspapers whose print business remains profitable, which positively impacts the dynamics of this transition. For our report, we interviewed over 30 senior editors, managers and rank-and-file journalists of three newsrooms – Hindustan Times, Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama – to understand how large Indian newspapers are reorganising themselves to cater to the demands of the digital space.

It has always been known than the print industry in India is still growing and we found that this leaves big Indian newspapers in a more comfortable position when it comes to investing in digital operations. Contrary to our assumptions, we discovered that these newspapers are taking aggressive steps to capture India’s growing digital audience and while Hindustan Times’ transition is very similar to English-language newspapers abroad, both Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran have adopted approaches that are specific to their niche audience and their position as market leaders.

Expansion rather than transition

In contrast to the Hindustan Times, which has reorganised and equipped its existing print newsroom to do print as well as digital and mobile journalism, both the Indian language newspapers have focused on launching digital operations that run parallel to the print newspaper organisation.

This involved creating new brands (Jagran Online, Jagran Josh, Manorama Online), opening up new offices and hiring new personnel geared towards putting purely digital media products, that are not limited to news.

Sukirti Gupta, CEO of MMI Online explains, “When we started thinking of our digital strategy, we were not looking so much at news but asking if there are new areas of growth as a media company and content was the first thing that seemed exciting for us. We looked at two genres that we thought would be great – health and education.”

Jagran Online includes ten websites covering news, health, entertainments, blogging and classifieds. Manorama Online lists fifteen websites as part of their operations, of which about ten are news, feature or content websites while the rest include a matrimonial site, classifieds and portals for real estate listings and doctor’s appointments.

Changing rhythms in the newsroom

The production and distribution of digital news content for Malayala Manorama and Dainik Jagran is handled primarily by their respective digital counterparts from a separate newsroom. In adopting this approach, both newspapers have partially shielded their traditional newsrooms from the difficulties that arise when moving from a print to a digital newsrooms. At the same time Manorama Online and MMI Online, which operate as start-ups within these incumbent organisations, partially avoid the inertia that comes from their established organisational and professional cultures. Although print reporters are not directly involved with the digital publication, they continue to be the primary source of news for the website and mobile applications and have to adapt their workflow according to the demands of the online space.

This means that breaking news, a prominent feature of online news, has been made a priority for all reporters. “The journalism remains the same,” says Santosh Jacob George, Editor, Manorama Online, “the only difference is that we have to break the news ourselves while print has the whole day to produce the story. We’ve requested our print reporters to file first for online, either directly into the CMS or via WhatsApp.” At Dainik Jagran, Digital Editor Shekhar Tripathi, has the right to ask a reporter to file the story immediately for the website. “First our policy was print but now online is our first priority, but not at the cost of print. If a story breaks at 8 am, it first comes to me on WhatsApp. If I’m interested, I ask the reporter for more details and then to file the story. Our print reporters have gotten into the habit of filing stories online, they give us the facts first and add perspective later,” he says.

This change in rhythm has not come easily to the print newsrooms which are accustomed to filing stories towards an evening deadline but efforts by management are towards promoting a systematic collaboration between the print and online desks. Dainik Jagran’s Chief Editor has made digital a part of every journalist’s Key Result Area (KRA). “So it’s not just the digital team’s responsibility but now everyone has it in his list of duties and responsibilities to support digital,” explains Gupta. At Malayala Manorama, a clear set of guidelines to streamline workflow were introduced; ‘They called in senior people from print to have detailed discussions on this and our senior editors also visited individual bureaus and spoke to reporters there,’ informs an associate content producer, recalling efforts to sensitise print journalists to the demands of digital news.

Emergence of new forms of newswork

Apart from the changes in workflow, the medium demands the use of various new tools and methods to gather, publish and distribute news. This has resulted in the emergence of new kinds of newswork performed by a new category of news workers. At the Hindustan Times newsroom, this work is performed by journalists who work on the online and audience engagement desks while at Dainik Jagran and Malayala Manorama, it is carried out by ‘content producers’ of the digital newsrooms. Although writers and editors for Manorama Online are journalism graduates who have also undergone journalism training specific to MM’s writing styles and journalistic values, they are designated as ‘content producers’ to differentiate their role from that of print journalists. At MMI Online, content producers do not necessarily possess prior journalistic experience, but have experience in web content production.

These content producers are social media savvy, have an eye for trending topics, are acutely aware of their competition and feel directly responsible for performance of their stories and subsequently, revenue. “We have to be very quick and prepare keyword-stuffed, trending news in a matter of minutes. It’s a race not just to get clicks but to retain the audience,” informs a junior content producer at Jagran Josh. “In print, your job [is], you write your story and you are done. With online we are more responsible for the outcomes. A well-researched story may not garner too many views so we have the option and the responsibility to package and redistribute the story until it finds the audience,” explains a senior content producer at Manorama Online.

Aside from these key observations, our interviews revealed the increased use of audience analytics combined with the introduction of new applications like Chartbeat and Parse.ly that analyse performance of stories and aid in editorial decision making, the increased use of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as a source of news and distribution, experiments with new forms of storytelling, especially with the use of mobile phones and a renewed focus on hyperlocal news especially in the case of Indian-language publications.

Our findings, which are limited to observations of what changes are taking place within newsrooms and how this is impacting journalists, open up several questions about the current state of journalism in India, the increasing interdependence on social media platforms, especially Facebook, the use of external software to make editorial decisions, the evolving role of journalists in digital newsrooms and finally, the question of developing a sustainable business model for news on the web.

This article is based on a report co-authored by Zeenab Aneez, Sumandro Chattapadhyay from the Centre for Internet and Society, Vibodh Parthasarathi of the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance, Jamia Milia Islamia and Rasmus Kleis Nielson of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. The open access report can be read and downloaded on the Reuters Institute website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-january-16-2017-digital-transitions-in-the-newsroom-how-are-indian-language-papers-adapting-differently

Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study

Dr. George Joseph,Dr. Sebastian K.A, and Kavitha A — 2018-10-28T05:56:25Z

We have published an article in International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities. The article is titled "Digital Technology Engaging Pedagogy through Hindi Wikipedia - A Case Study". The authors of the article are Hindi faculty members of Christ University and Ananth Subray from the Centre for Internet & Society provided research assistance.

Abstract

Hindi Wikipedia (Hindi Edition of Wikipedia) in the undergraduate language classroom. Wikipedia or Open Source Learning is a powerful tool in the acquisition of knowledge especiallyin today’s digital context.While many of the European languages have already established afoothold in the digital space, the Indian languages are yet to create a niche for themselves. Even after a decade of its launch,the Hindi Wikipediacould not attire the enabled richness of the English Wikipedia.While there are about fifty lakh articles in English, Hindi Wikipedia has only about a lakh.

This paper is an attempt to show how a whole new concept of productive activity for faculty andstudents can be opened through a study of basics in Indian language computing typing and editing Wikipedia articles.It explains the value of Wikis for teaching and learning as compared to traditional teaching and physical paper assignment model, showing the power of Open Source Learning and Wikipedia.Most importantly, it shows how Wikipedia and Global Peer Review can directly and immediately influence the quality and relevance of Teaching and Learning in classrooms and learning spaces today.This pilot study ofstudents’ use of sources in authoring Wikipedia articles shows, how students processed texts from sources to compose their own texts transforming classrooms from a place of knowledge deliveryto a place of creativity and research.Through Wikipedia, students are being empowered tobecome creative writers, efficient editors and successful researchers. Article creation and editingof articles in Hindi for Wikipedia is bound to transform the students’ ability to interpret, analyze,create new knowledge and develop their Research Aptitude. This article addresses the importance of Digital Learning through Wikipedia as Pedagogy in Christ University’s UG language classrooms and discusses the prospects and possibilities of using Wikipedia as a learning tool through a case study.

Read the peer reviewed article published by the International Journal of English Language, Literature in Humanities, Volume 6, Issue 8, August 2018

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/digital-technology-engaging-pedagogy-through-hindi-wikipedia-a-case-study

Digital Pluralism

nishant — 2009-02-06T06:31:50Z

The Internet, when referred to with a capital I, often gives the notion of a centralised, homogenised, consolidated network of access, protocols and people. Popular representations and imaginations of the Internet ‘make invisible’, the extremely complex, intricate, and varied nature, not only of the uses and the stakeholders of the Internet but also the many forms that Internet itself takes. The notion of pluralism – the belief in multiple knowledges and perspectives, the availability of different frameworks and truths, and the transmit-ability and transmutability of information – is built into the very form of the Internet. It is perhaps more appropriate, given the wide scope and range of the internet and the many different ways in which it intersects with the world around us, to talk of many different kinds of internets.

The Centre for Internet and Society sets out to examine the multiplicity of Internet by looking at the notion of digital pluralism. We seek to theorise the particular concept to investigate the many intersections that the internet has with the world around us. Given the scope and persuasiveness of internet technologies, it would be redundant to produce a list of possible meanings of the internet. Instead, we conceptualise the internet at three different levels, each demanding its own history, context, materiality and specificities, to produce a more comprehensive understanding of what the internet means and how it responds and reacts to the digitised and networked times we live in.

Internet as Technology

At the primary level, the Internet is a set of protocols, which allows the transfer of data over a complex and almost interminable network. It is necessary, as the internet increasingly becomes central to the crucial mechanics of survival, to recognise it as a technology. The arrival of internet technologies has made a significant impact in the domains of life, labour, language and history, changing the way we understand certain older structures like property, economy, capital, possession, ownership, etc.

So persuasive is the seductive power of the internet, that it often makes invisible the larger questions of freedom, access, and production, in its unfolding. The call to re-emphasise the internet as technology is to examine the economic rhetoric of globalisation, urbanisation and new digital technologies on the one hand, and the alarmist calls around piracy, security, theft and ownership on the other.

Communities of gift economy, of open access to content online, of advocating Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), of promoting greater inclusion and pluralism of non-licensed softwares and protocols have all emerged around the questions of Internet as Technology. Despite the gravity of the concerns they raise and the unequivocal merit of their activities, very little attention is given to them either by the private sector or civil societies or the government. While there has been a long (and often raging) debate on the internet around these issues, the mainstream media and the larger public remain outside its scope and continue getting implicated in softwares, platforms and digital forms while compromising their rights.

The Centre for Internet and Society hopes, through a model of consultation and collaboration, to actively intervene in this field, to promote the digital pluralism of internet technologies and resist any hegemonic and coercive practices of larger corporate conglomerates and state bodies that may act against public interest.

Internet and its Materiality

The Internet has material consequences. Cybercultures theory, augmented by other instrumental discourses on the internet, incessantly confines cyberspaces to a schism between virtual reality and real life. Such a view of the internet renders the material transactions and consequences of the internet invisible.

As the internet technologies become more pervasive and persuasive, they become an integral part of the mechanics of modern survival. The internet has now become central to the domains of life, labour and language, affecting crucial questions of identity, subjectivity, sexuality, freedom and expression. How do we think of ourselves, not only in relation to technology but also as technologised beings; in a condition of becoming cyborgs? What are the forms of subjectivities that emerge in the technologised transactions of every day? How do we understand the different forms of sexual interactions, mediated and shaped by internet technologies? What are the new kinds of sexual identities which are produced and mobilised by the internet? Is the internet, as is often celebrated in popular discourse, really creating alternative public spheres of freedom or is it producing new forms of exclusion and discrimination?

The Centre for Internet and Society believes that while these questions have cropped up variously, and often emphatically, in the last four decades of Internet presence, there has been very little academic or theoretical attention given to them. The approaches that exist are primarily focussed on the object of change rather than the technologies that shape the change. The accounts provided also, instead of drawing from the mechanics and aesthetics of the technologies, rely on earlier technologised forms to make meaning of the new form. We find it imperative to work for a better understanding of the way the globalised technologised world is being shaped through the wide-spread penetration of Internet Technologies and their material consequences.

Internet and Cyberspaces

Cyberspaces, though a smaller part of the Internet, are the most visible face of the Internet networks. The arrival of the GUI, social networking applications, innovative forms of interaction and networking, online gaming, role-playing and expression platforms like blogging, and virtual worlds, have created a fascinating network of users, distributed across lifestyles and geographies, interacting with each other in unprecedented forms. Cyberspaces, with their ability to immerse the users entirely into the medium, creating a world of incessant interaction – with technologies, with technologised forms, with cultural products, and with the other users, who have translated themselves, using the structures of anonymity and desire – have led to new forms of social, cultural and economic practices which require critical thought and analysis.

Cyberspaces produce many questions – some legal, some judicial, and some about safety, danger, and harm – which need to be answered and engaged with at a serious level. Given the unmoderated nature of access and production on cyberspaces, how do we make a call for safety and caution without compromising the rights of the individual for freedom of expression, speech and being? How do we protect the innocent or the uninitiated, from scandals, scams or situations which might be harmful to them, without making a call for censorship and regimentation? As familial interactions get mediated with technologies, how do we understand the notion of family and the economies that surround it? With new political and cultural mobilisations coming in effect, how do we imagine the space of the public and the political?

Questions like these have a direct bearing on the ideas of individual freedom and right to non-discrimination, while simultaneously asking for a moderated and controlled cyberspatial experience. The design, form, shape and content of cyberspaces all have different implications in these questions, and an analysis of not only the user behaviour or the impact but the very epistemological origins and functions of such forms is important to be studied. These concerns also bolster the idea of digital pluralism of a certain kind – not a neo-liberal call for solipsistic individualism but concentrating on and bolstering the relationships that the individual has with the society and how internet technologies mediate these relationships.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/substantive-areas/digital-pluralism/digital-pluralism-1

Digital Natives with a Cause? A Report

radha — 2012-03-13T10:43:09Z

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/dnrep.pdf

Digital Natives with a Cause? - workshop in Santiago Open Call

tettner — 2011-09-22T11:40:12Z

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. An open call for participation follows.

An Open Call for Participation

As the Internet and digital technologies become more widespread, the world is shrinking: we are constantly connected to our contexts, our people, our cultures and our networks. And you, yes YOU are a part of this change. In fact, as a digital native– someone to whom digital technologies are central to life – you are directly affecting the lives of many, sometimes even without knowing about it.

The Centre for Internet and Society and Hivos in collaboration with Rising Voices is calling out to young users of technology to join a global conversation. The 3-day workshop titled “From Face to Interface” will focus on how youth utilize new platforms, media and spaces of communication and expression in the digital age. If you have used digital technologies to make your voice heard, to express your opinion in creative ways or to create new knowledge online, we want to hear from you. These can be stories where you have used a mobile phone, GPS or PDA to access the Internet and reduce the online-offline divide, stories where you accessed interactive platforms like user-generated content websites, stories where the use of technology has become part of your identity, or stories where you have been part of a collaborative method of research, production, shared learning process, participation network etc.

We invite you to share your perspectives in an informal conversation along people with similar approaches from neighboring communities. The workshop is open to applicants from, in and around Latin America and the Caribbean who are interested in an interactive and engaging dialogue that marks the beginning of the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” research inquiry into the region. “From Face to Interface” is part of a greater international research project with aims to produce a book in the English language, consolidating Digital Natives knowledge from the Global South. Moreover, the workshop aims at building a Knowledge Network in collaboration with the other participants and partners at previous workshops in Taipei and Johannesburg. Hence, a good working knowledge of English is necessary. This workshop will include the organizers based in India and the Netherlands, and participants will also come from countries where Spanish is not the primary language. Hence, a good working knowledge of English is necessary.Communication during the workshop will be English with Spanish language translations made available in selected parts of the workshop.

Participants can register by filling in an online application

form by January 4th, 2011.

Selected participants will be contacted by 8th January 2011. Travel expenses and accommodation will be provided to the selected participants. For more information do check out the frequently asked questions (FAQ) here. For any questions, concerns or comments please contact digitalnatives@cis-india.org

Dates: February 8-10th, 2011

Venue: Central Library of Chile, Santiago, Chile

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/digital-natives-with-a-cause-workshop-in-santiago-open-call

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants

praskrishna — 2011-04-01T16:50:30Z

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. An open call for participation follows.

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/dn-workshop-in-chile

Digital Natives Video Contest

praskrishna — 2015-05-08T12:35:27Z

The Everyday Digital Native Video Contest has its top five winners through public voting.

A Day in the Life of a Digital Native: Story scripted, shot and edited by Leandra (Cole) Flor. The video is an extension of Cole's photo essay "Mirror Exercises" conceptualized for 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause' Book 1 To Be. Download the book.

Top 5 winners of the Digital Native video contest selected through public votes. From left to right: Marie Jude Bendiola, T.J. KM, Thomas Burks, John Musila and MJ.

The Jury Prize for Two Best Videos goes to John Musila (Kenya) and Marie Jude Bendiola (Singapore)! Congratulations to all winners. The Top 5 winners win the grand prize of EUR 500 each!

Our Top 10 contestants: Click on their profile to watch their videos

	Marie Jude Bendiola I come from a third world country where technology seemed to be hard to reach back in the 90s; especially by the not-so-privileged. As we progressed, technology has not only become ubiquitous (in malls, various institutions and technological hubs) but also, it has come to be used by the common man. My video will answer how technology bridges the gap between dreams and reality. It will be a fusion of documentary and re-enactment of real life events and dramas. Read More
	Cijo Abraham Mani The power of digital media will be presented to audience with the help of showing tweet-a-thon panel discussions, blood aid tweets getting spread, etc. Read More
	TJ K.M. My video explores the spiritual aspect of digital technology and how rather than getting in the way of our spiritual expression, it is actually bringing us face to face with it, if only we choose to look. The video will be a mixture of live action and stop motion animation/puppetry where digital devices take on a transcendent character similar to nature spirits in various cultures. I plan to investigate the tendency to exclude digital devices and technology from being categorized alongside nature as if it is somehow exempt from or superior to this category. Using symbolism and motifs from various cultures such as the Native American Hopi, Balinese Hinduism and Japanese Shintoism, my video will create a world where the technology we use daily is viewed not just as a means for socio-cultural exchange and communication but is available for the nurturing of our souls if we so choose. Read More
	Thomas Burks We have a small production company in Birmingham, Alabama. I was hired on a year ago to do film and commercials for them as they expand into advertising and video coverage of events. We only have about 3 employees including myself, working out of our homes. We recently acquired a space to open a studio and retail location downtown where we live. We use Facebook, blogs, and viral marketing all the time to get our name out there. Our account executive is constantly monitoring our Facebook for client orders and bookings. We are beginning to use twitter to provide information more fluidly to people. We believe this might be a year of growth for our small company, as we are becoming able to provide much higher quality content. We're fully digital; constantly updating our websites and blogs, and I believe we would be able to tell a great digital story. We submit numerous small films and skits; we cover awesome concerts, and rely so heavily on the digital world to show our content. That will be the gist of our video. Read More
	John Musila Map Kibera Trust is an organization based in Kenya’s Kibera slums. Using digital gadgets and technology, they have transformed the community by placing it on the map as it was only seen as forest when viewed on a map. They also film stories around the community and share them with the world on their YouTube channel and other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Through this they have been able to highlight and raise awareness about the challenges the community faces. Our video would show Kibera’s role in bringing about change. Read More
	Andrés Felipe Arias Palma I think many people are digital natives unknowingly. Being a digital native is a relationship with activism and society, not as they initially thought. It was a condition of being born in specific times and external factors. In the video, I will interview people about who and what is a digital native? How to use the Internet? What are the advantages and disadvantages for society where everything is run with the power of the Internet? Read More
	Martin Potter Over a period of nearly four years, moving across small towns in Australia and South East Asia, I have seen the most extraordinary innovations at a local community level. My video will focus on these local stories with global impact. I am pursuing a PhD in participatory media and this will lend a uniquely academic perspective on the concept of collaboration, community life and innovation. Read More
	E. James Rajasekaran I live in the temple town of Madurai in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I am a social worker and the plight of people living in slims is something that my NGO is closely associated with. My video will bring out the efforts of the people who live in the slums of Madurai. Read More
	Anand Jha Bangalore is home to a lot of technology start-ups. A lot of geeks, who find it limiting to work for corporations, are driving a very open source-oriented, frugally-built and extremely demanding culture. While their products are standing at the bleeding edge of technology, their personal lives too are constantly driven on the edge, every launch being a make or break day for them. The project would aim at capturing their stories, their frustration and motivation, looking at the possibilities of Indian software scene moving beyond the services and back-end office culture into a more risk prone but more passionate business of technology. Read More
	MJ As a digital native living in a developing country, I have carried out a series of both online and offline projects, which have always striven to benefit Zimbabweans in a number of ways since 2000. These projects have greatly increased my interactions with computers. I might say, I got married to a computer in 2000 when I bought my first PC; in a way, my relationship with my computer is intimate. Even though this computer I bought is an old 386 machine made obsolete by the faster Pentium III models, this did not change my love for the computer. My video will focus on a dream-like moment of my digital life. Read more

Jury Members

Shashwati Talukdar Shashwati Talukdar grew up in India where her engagement with theatre and sculpture led to filmmaking, and a Masters degree from the AJ Kidwai Mass Communication Research Center in Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. She developed an interest in American Avant-Garde film and eventually got an MFA in Film and Media Arts from Temple University, Philadelphia (1999). Her work covers a wide range of forms, including documentary, narrative and experimental. Her work has shown at venues including the Margaret Mead Festival, Berlin, Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, Kiasma Museum of Art and the Whitney Biennial. She has been supported by entities including the Asian Cine Fund in Busan, the Jerome Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts among others.
Leon Tan Leon Tan, PhD, is a media-art historian, cultural theorist and psychoanalyst based in Gothenburg, Sweden. He has written on art, media, globalization and copyright in journals such as CTheory and Ephemera, and curated media-art projects and art symposia in international sites such as KHOJ International Artists’ Association (New Delhi, 2011), ISEA (Singapore, 2008) and Digital Arts Week (Zurich, 2007). He is currently researching media-art practices in India, and networked museums as an expanded field of cultural memory making.
Jeroen van Loon Jeroen, digital media artist, investigates the (non-) impact of digital technology on our lives. For two months he went analogue, refrained from connecting to the World Wide Web, and communicated through his Analogue Blog. He is currently working on Life Needs Internet in which he travels around the world and collects people's personal handwritten internet stories.
Becky Band Jain Becky Band Jain is a non-profit communications specialist and blogs on everything from technology to psychology and culture. She spent the last five years living in India and she’s now based in New York. She’s a dedicated yoga and meditation practitioner and is passionate about ICTD and new media.
Namita A. Malhotra Namita A. Malhotra is a legal researcher and media practitioner and a core member of Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, India. Her areas of interest are image, technology, media and law, and her work takes the form of interdisciplinary research, video and film making and exploring possibilities of recombining material, practice and discipline. She is also a founder member of Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) which is a densely annotated online video archive.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/digital-natives-contest

Digital Natives Newsletter (May 2012)

praskrishna — 2012-07-06T08:51:23Z

Digital Natives newsletter of May 2012.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dn-newsletter-may-2012.pdf

Digital Native: The e-wasteland of our times

nishant — 2018-05-06T03:21:49Z

How digitising isn’t necessarily a fast-track to a sustainable future.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 22, 2018.

Digitise Everything” is the mantra of the day. Offices take pride in being paperless, hot-desking because our laptops and mobile computing devices have, more or less, become our workspaces. Governments are investing heavily in digitising archives, putting faith in the notion that digital preservation is the way forward for the future. Magazines and newspapers have had no alternative but to move into the digital realm to keep up with the new information ecosystems. Various campaigns make us believe that to be smart we need to be digital, and that it is more sustainable to have digital real estate which enables ease of access and reduced travel time and energy in engaging with different information systems.

The digital infrastructure is often presented as green, sustainable and efficient. These claims might have had some merit in the early days when computing was still exclusive and open only to a select few. The classic example that would be given within the research circles in the late ’90s would be, that in order to do historical archival research from India, a researcher would have to travel all the way to the archives of the British Library in England. The costs of travel, the energy required for the overseas journey, the finances of access that would be required to complete such research were characteristic of the pre-digital era. Now, a historian looking at the same archives through a simple broadband connection, can access this information at a fraction of the cost, speed and time.

However, it is difficult to take at face value the fact that this efficiency is sustainable in any form. As we go increasingly digital in almost all our devices, there are three massive environmental costs which are often made invisible. The first is in the sheer amount of electricity that our digital ecosystems consume. We all know the frustration that arises out of batteries dying and phones not carrying enough charge is, indeed, a harrowing experience. But at the back-end of it is an enormous power surge. The large network of service providers, surveys, information storage and distribution consumes an extraordinary amount of energy which is, generally, still dependent on fossil fuels. It is estimated that one hour of cellphone usage with data connection uses the same amount of energy that a family house uses in an entire day. Because while your device might be energy compliant and very low in emissions, the large array of the Internet of Things that needs to be in place to support your device, is an invisible energy cost that takes its tolls on the environment.

Even more than active usage, it is the storing of everything on the cloud that is, perhaps, more problematic. As we stream everything on Netflix, Spotify and YouTube, we have to realise that all this information is being stored in huge data centres powered by massive electricity sources to keep it all alive. The energy cost of our digital histories is almost impossible to compute in environmental measures.

The third big problem that we often don’t recognise is our obsession with updating our devices. We throw and exchange our electronic devices at the blink of a trend. Mostly, older phones and laptops are not recycled but broken down into e-waste. Huge landfills are now the graveyards of old electronics which have components that cannot be recycled, and have elements that are no longer useful. Most of these electronic devices are made with metals and precious components that are mined at huge environmental costs.

I was recently at a conference where we were given books as mementos. One of the delegates jokingly exclaimed, “Why am I being given a dead-tree object?” referring to the pages of the book and the trees that must have been felled to make the book. It was telling that he didn’t realise that his ebook, loaded on his tablet, probably killed more trees than that one physical book, which will lend itself to recycling more easily than his tablet would.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-the-e-wasteland-of-our-times

Digital native: Our lonely connected lives

nishant — 2018-03-25T03:40:33Z

The article was published in the Indian Express on March 11, 2018

It is time for us to introduce the idea of Schrodinger’s Loneliness. Because one of the biggest threats and promises of digitally-networked lives is loneliness. When you are online, you are connected and alone at the same time. Technology utopias are premised on the idea that greater connectivity will lead to greater collectivity, and time and again, they have been proven right. New forms of socially mediated communication and technologies have led to the formation of unprecedented communities and networks at personal and global scales. For voices, identities, and bodies who were always silenced, discriminated against or punished, the digital web has found a space of respite, of belonging, and of organising. We have witnessed more acts of speaking up, calling out, and resistance across the globe as old voices find new channels of communication and find solidarity in their coming together.

Technology dystopias, simultaneously, have also painted terrifying pictures of human loneliness amplified by the digital isolation that often gets celebrated as personalisation. Stories emerge of people being bullied, silenced, and excluded from the digital webs, often ending in fatal consequences as the final promise of the web as an emancipatory space fails. The Black Mirror-like predictions show that under the aegis of anonymous action and alienated interaction, some of the darkest and most depraved human actions and fantasies emerge. We have now seen that those who cannot bear the burden of the digital lightness of being often find themselves burdened under the heavy cloaks of loneliness. And this loneliness often gets exacerbated because so many of our digital interactions which give the impression of connection, are actually transactions supported and fueled by shallow, illusionary intimacy.

Even as the UK last month announced the appointment of Minister of Loneliness, which sounds more like the title of the next Arundhati Roy novel, it is worth examining why we are so alone in the age of hyperconnectivity. In his provocative science fiction series called the Three Body Problem, Chinese author Cixin Liu had proposed a sociology for the cosmic worlds. Liu suggested that the universe is such a dark space of competing resources that loneliness — the hiding from others, and not letting them know that you exist — is a primary survival instinct. To connect is to bear the risk of attack, infection, and annihilation.

Liu’s science fiction proposition might only bear corroboration at the moment of extra terrestrial interaction in some unforeseen future, but it does open up an interesting proposition: When we choose to be alone and celebrate loneliness as our default. It is an indication not just of a personal choice or problem but a symptom of the fact that increasingly we are building hostile and dark societies where the best survival option is to disconnect. Perhaps, the digital solitude that we seek and the networked loneliness that we seem to be sliding into, is not just about the temptations and seductions of living with algorithms and interfacing with virtual reality. Maybe, it is also a sign that the digital worlds that we are building are a response to the increasingly difficult universes that we live in.

Despite the emergence of the global web and the promises of equity, equality, fairness, and justice that have long been mounted on technologisation, we do witness a world where the predators and hunters far outnumber the hunted. While digital networks have brought out a fascinating possibility of organised solidarity, they have also created alarming expressions of anger, hatred and xenophobia around the world. In the supreme moment of fake truth politics enabled by the filter bubbles of manipulative algorithms owned by profiteering companies and governments, the world seems to be balanced on the sine curve of a silicon chip. Across the world, we see the rise of fascist governments and expressions of hatred, where people are lynched to death by power hungry vigilantes, and communities are dislocated by resource-hunting corporations. Global populations are experiencing poverty, hunger, and an erosion of foundational human rights even as they get unfettered access to digital technologies. As IT companies surpass the economic and political strengths of nation states, we see new violations and new strategies of manipulation without accountability and safeguards.

The rise of the digital has not just been the moment of resistance, it has been a coup. The world as we know it has not only changed, but it has been replaced, and in this new version of the rebooted world, the user is perhaps the most disenfranchised and precarious. It is not really a wonder that being disconnected might be the last chance for survival.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-11-2018-digital-native-our-lonely-connected-lives

Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People

nishant — 2017-07-05T17:04:23Z

We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 24, 2017.

The first time I encountered an internet shutdown was in 2009. I was a visiting researcher at the Shanghai University and I received a computer which had default web-filtering software installed on it. My already restricted access to the web was intensified by the Chinese government shutting down the internet as a response to riots in the north-western province of Xinjiang. My connections to friends and families back home were disrupted. It took me three days to figure out how to circumvent the ban using proxy-servers and anonymisers, which cloaked my physical location. I could then send out a message that reassured everyone that all was fine.

During those two weeks of shutdown, I realised, for the first time, how fragile our digital ecosystems are and how completely without ownership our digital transactions. We are at the mercy of trigger-happy governments and profit-hungry corporations that hold our digital lives ransom. They have the capacity to censor, contain, control and eradicate all our digital data without our consent and without repercussions. In those romantic days, when I still believed that the digital promise of connectivity implied free and open public spaces for different voices to be heard and counted, it came as quite a shock to realise that the web is a contested and a controlled space. During my stay in China, once I figured out the work-arounds for these shutdowns, I spent the rest of my research time volunteering to create safe, open networks that allowed people in Shanghai, especially my students, to access the digital space. I used to take pride in the fact that, despite all our troubles in India, the internet shall remain free and that the Indian government would not compromise what is a constitutional right for free speech and expression. I remember joking that in India, the only reason I had internet shutdown was because of power outage or the incompetency of my service provider.

However, the last few years, and especially 2017, have taken away that false sense of faith and pride I had in our nation’s commitment to securing public voices of dissent, protest, and expression. The Human Rights Watch has reported that while we are just half-way into the year, the state governments in India have imposed 20 temporary internet shutdowns so far. These arbitrary, unplanned, ad hoc and reactive shutdowns have been marked as violations of India’s obligations under the international human rights law. The right to be connected is one of the new generation of basic rights available to citizens in a functioning democracy. While one can partially sympathise with the state’s argument that the shutdown was intended to crack down on rumours and hate speech instigating violence, there is no denying that these draconian measures cannot be justified by this empty rhetoric of security.

If anything, research has shown that shutting down communication channels in times of conflict encourages speculation and rumour because people no longer have access to verifiable news sources. When an internet shutdown is imposed, speculation, rampant misinformation, and credible untruths can contribute to a feeling of insecurity, danger, and knee-jerk action, which can precipitate mass violence. Especially for people who are already living precarious lives, the condition of being disconnected is severe because if they do come under attack, they no longer have any respite for urgent and immediate help. Analysis, over a period of time, has shown that the shutdown of the internet is not in the interest of keeping people safe but in the service of keeping authorities unaccountable for their actions. A suspension of all telecommunication services essentially provides the authoritarian powers an escape valve, where they are able to continue their actions, often violent, with impunity and without a sense of responsibility.

Internet shutdowns are not just about means of control but about exercising power, reminding the people in the digital commons who is in charge. It is also a sign of a crumbling apparatus of democracy, where the voice of the citizen, instead of being celebrated in the public, is seen as a problem which has to be solved. Internet shutdowns also have a clear identification of which kinds of voices should not be heard and, indeed, what can and cannot be said under restrictive conditions. Eventually, they discriminate against specific kinds of bodies — marked by identity characteristics — and leads to pathologisation and punishment of people who question the status quo. It is shameful for us that even as we dream digital, we are inching closer to the side of undemocratic demagogues rather than building robust telecommunication networks that enable the true potential of public participation and democratic governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-24-2017-digital-native-on-mute-the-voice-of-the-people