Centre for Internet and Society

Bridging the Divide: Opportunities and Challenges

admin — 2008-10-11T10:27:58Z

This paper by Nirmita Narasimhan approaches the digital divide from multiple perspectives, looking at what "access" means and the factors responsible for the digital divide (income, gender, ethnicity, literacy and education, disability, law, etc.), surveys some digital divide initiatives in India, and presents some suggestions to tackle the divide.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nirmita/Nirmita%20Narasimhan%20-%20Bridging%20the%20Divide

Public Access to the Internet

admin — 2008-10-11T10:25:41Z

Paper by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam. The advent of the Internet brought with it hitherto unheard of possibilities for human creativity, information access, and global communication. When did these possibilities actually translate into widespread public access to the Internet? It is difficult to specify a date, but possible to identify a few key developments and the key actors behind those developments.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Public-access-to-the-internet.pdf

Design in urban democracy: A question of survival

admin — 2008-10-11T09:49:21Z

Urban dynamics dissected by John Thackara and Sunil Abraham; questions and answers on the anatomy of cities. An article from the August issue of Cluster Magazine.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/sunil/Thackara.pdf

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

The Curious Incident of the People at the Mall

nishant — 2008-12-14T12:13:09Z

The first flash mob in India, in 2003, though short-lived and quickly declared illegal, brought to fore the idea that technology is constructing new sites of defining public participation and citizenship rights, forcing the State to recognise them as political collectives. As India emerges as an ICT enabled emerging economy, new questions of citizenship, participatory politics, social networking, citizenship, and governance are being posed. In the telling of the story of the flash-mob, doing a historical review of technology and access, and doing a symptomatic reading of the subsequent events that followed the ban, this paper evaluates the different ways in which the techno-narratives of an ‘India Shining’ campaign of prosperity and economic growth, are accompanied by various spaces of political contestation, mobilisation and engagement that determine the new public spheres of exclusion, marked by the aesthetics of cyberspatial matrices and technology enabled conditions of governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/the%20curious%20incident%20of%20the%20people%20at%20the%20mall%20%20ACS%20Crossroads.pdf

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:14:45Z

The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies in a special issue on Multimedia Narratives. Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, gets produced within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/material%20cyborgs%20ejes.pdf

Subject To Technology

nishant — 2009-07-06T12:06:10Z

This paper is an attempt to examine the production of illegalities with reference to cyberspace, to make a symptomatic reading of new conditions within which citizenships are enacted, in the specific context of contemporary India. Looking at one incident each, of cyber-pornography and cyber-terrorism, the paper sets out to look at the State’s imagination of the digital domain, the positing of the ‘good’ cyber citizen, and the production of new relationships between the state and the subject. This essay explores the ambiguities, the dilemmas and the questions that arise when Citizens become Subjects, not only to the State but also to the technologies of the State. The paper first appeared in the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/iacs%20article.pdf

Open Spectrum for Development India Case Study

praskrishna — 2012-07-26T08:17:15Z

This report is authored by Shyam Ponappa and jointly produced by APC and CIS.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/publications/india-untapped-potential

The Last Cultural Mile

praskrishna — 2011-09-28T05:40:51Z

Ashish’s research inquiry is informed by the ‘last mile’ which has emerged as a central area of discussion in the domains of technology and governance from the 1940s in India. Starting from mapping technology onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which propelled communication technologies beginning with the invention of radio in India, the monograph conceives of the ‘last mile’ as a mode of techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/last-cultural-mile.pdf

Archives and Access

praskrishna — 2011-09-27T09:40:58Z

Aparna and Rochelle’s research is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/archives-and-access.pdf

Porn: Law, Video, Technology

praskrishna — 2011-09-27T11:25:57Z

Namita’s legal inquiry into the relationship between technologies and the law finds a new point of entry into existing debates by looking at the legal construction of pleasure through different technologies of mass consumption in order to revisit the arguments around pornography and obscenity effect in recent times. She produces a comprehensive overview of different debates, both in the West and in India, to concentrate on how the visual aesthetics of pornography, the new circuits of pornographic consumption and the privilege of affect over regulation lead to possibilities of interaction and negotiation with heteronormative power structures in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

praskrishna — 2011-10-16T08:17:13Z

The monograph on Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar, is an entry into debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of Internet technologies. Going beyond the regular debates on the modern urban, the monograph deploys a team of students from the field of architecture and urban design to investigate how city spaces – the material as well as the experiential – are changing under the rubric of digital globalisation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-society.pdf

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

praskrishna — 2011-09-27T10:07:24Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/internet-society-space.pdf

The India Chronicles

praskrishna — 2011-10-14T09:13:15Z

Tory Read, a professional researcher, writer and journalist was commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation to create a vivid description of its work in India. This was done in the interest of transparency and to ensure that it captured lessons from this new approach. Tory travelled for a couple of weeks across Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and some towns in Kerala — attending community meet-ups speaking with a host of individual community members in these cities. Tory has given a journalistic account and analysis, based on document review, interviews and observations conducted between November 2010 and June 2011, including 16 days in India in June 2011.The views expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Wikimedia Foundation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/india-chronicles.pdf

Porn: Law, Video, Technology

praskrishna — 2011-09-28T09:30:40Z

Namita Malhotra focuses on pornography, pleasure and law, where she finds a new point of entry into existing debates by looking at legal construction of pleasure through different technologies of mass consumption. She revisits the arguments around pornography, obscenity and affect in recent times. Malhotra produces a comprehensive over-view of different debates, both in the West and in India, to concentrate on how the visual aesthetics of pornography, the new circuits of pornographic consumption, the privilege of affect over regulation lead to possibilities of interaction and negotiation with heternormative power structures in the country. The monograph demonstrates how the grey zones of pornography and the law’s inability to deal with it, offer new conceptual tools of understanding the spaces of digital interaction and identity.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law.pdf