Centre for Internet and Society

DNA Databases and Human Rights

praskrishna — 2012-09-17T05:39:06Z

Using DNA to trace people who are suspected of committing a crime has been a major advance in policing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/dna-databases-and-human-rights.pdf

Divergence between the GDPR and PDP Bill 2019

pallavi — 2020-02-21T13:05:08Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/divergence-between-the-gdpr-and-pdp-bill-2019

Dissent on Aadhaar: New book highlights limitations of ID project, legal and tech opposition to it

Admin — 2019-02-02T13:13:07Z

In 2010, a year after the UIDAI was constituted, three of its functionaries visited internationally-renowned developmental economist Professor Reetika Khera.

The article by Partha P Chakrabartty was published in First Post on February 2, 2019.

They were hoping to get her endorsement on how Aadhaar would prove ‘transformational’ for reducing corruption in social schemes like PDS and NREGA. Khera writes, ‘Upon reading their policy documents on PDS and NREGA, I was aghast because they betrayed a complete lack of understanding of the problem they were trying to address’. What had begun as a PR exercise by the UIDAI ended up creating one of its most acute critics. Professor Khera’s latest salvo, Dissent on Aadhaar: Big Data Meets Big Brother, has just been published by Orient BlackSwan, and is on shelves now.

Dissent on Aadhaar, edited by Professor Khera, brings together in one volume an array of experts commenting on the universal ID project. Given its many facets, she has included Anumeha Yadav, a journalist, who has been tirelessly reporting on Aadhar from the field; economists, including the celebrated Jean Drèze; lawyers, including civil liberties expert Dr Usha Ramanathan; and technologists like Sunil Abraham, of Mozilla Foundation and the Center for Internet and Society. The book is rounded off by international experts comparing Aadhaar to digital/universal ID projects in other countries. The picture they paint is not rosy.

‘Dissent’ on Aadhaar might not seem new to us, the English-speaking population of India. We all remember the storm of tweets and memes when Aadhaar was declared mandatory for everything from bank accounts to a mobile phone connection. We also saw through the September 2018 Supreme Court verdict, where Aadhaar was ruled optional for opening a bank account, but secretly remained mandatory due to its link with the PAN card. While some of the themes mentioned in this book, like concerns over privacy, have filtered down to our conversations, the book reveals that we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.

Khera debunks the prevailing popular wisdom around Aadhaar in the opening chapters, sometimes even using the Government’s own data. Was Aadhaar necessary to create because there were many Indians without a legal ID? Aadhaar data says, only 0.03 percent of Aadhaar enrollments were by people without existing IDs, using the ‘introducer’ system. Were existing IDs compromised, necessitating an overhaul of our national ID systems? If so, how is it that those very compromised IDs were used to create the Aadhaar database? And what of the loopholes in the Aadhaar system, like cards for dogs and gods? These egregious pranks may have been caught, but what of less obvious aberrations?

Does Aadhaar prevent fraud? Here, Khera points out there are three kinds of fraud: identity fraud, eligibility fraud, and quantity fraud; Aadhaar only provides some measure of protection against the first. Khera’s previous studies have shown that the most prominent kind of fraud in India’s social schemes is quantity fraud. Even eligibility fraud, where citizens claim benefits reserved for others, cannot be checked by Aadhaar, as eligibility depends upon a separate set of documents.

Finally, does Aadhaar ease access to government schemes and benefits for the poorest? Here, what has seemed farcical quickly becomes tragic.

In a country where basic infrastructure in terms of electricity and mobile phone connections is poor, can a digital ID system like Aadhaar really ease the process of disbursement? Anumeha Yadav provides the on-ground reality — in Bhim Block, Rajsamand District, Rajasthan, 1,799 pensioners were declared dead because they failed to open Aadhaar-linked bank accounts in time. A door-to-door campaign conducted by the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sanghatan found that 1,308 of these were actually alive, and had been denied their rightful pensions. Yadav quotes a Dainik Bhaskar estimate that 1 lakh of Rajasthan’s 2.97 lakh pensioners had been inaccurately declared dead.

If these ideas are so far off the mark, how did they come to take root in our minds? How come there was no meaningful opposition to prevent this Himalayan blunder? Khera quotes the father of Aadhaar himself, Nandan Nilekani, who outlined his three-point strategy to overwhelm opposition: Do it quickly, do it quietly, and build a coalition of powerful interests who will overpower any opposition.

Nilekani’s strategy worked beautifully. A damning 2011 Parliamentary Standing Committee on Finance Report, which deemed UIDAI categorically unacceptable, was mostly ignored. The Rajya Sabha’s concerns and suggested amendments were circumvented by passing off the Aadhaar bill as a Money bill (requiring passage only in the Lok Sabha), even though its ambit was much wider than just allotment of financial resources. The Supreme Court itself had a lone dissenter, Justice Chandrachud, who published a note to that effect.

Opposition has not come just from activist, legal and parliamentary sources. Sunil Abraham, a technologist, speaks of the many alternatives UIDAI had to its present system of a centralised biometric database, and its many vulnerabilities, including the theft of data, and the difficulty of correcting input errors. An alternative would have been to have smart cards that stored encrypted biometric information on the card itself, instead of in a centralised database; a conjunction of card-and-fingerprint would make the system secure from identity fraud. Abraham warns of high-resolution cameras that can be used by governments and private interests to identify fingerprints even at a distance, for instance of protestors in a marching crowd.

But what happened when Abraham’s Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) published a report stating the Government had inadvertently leaked millions of identification numbers? The Government sent them several legal notices. A researcher from CIS also spoke of visits from officials from the Home Ministry and from the police. One policeman even asked the researcher, ‘How was that trip to Turkey?’, demonstrating the extent of their surveillance.

If Aadhaar was not created for all the things the UIDAI claimed, what was its true intent? We can guess from the way Aadhaar insiders, like ex-Chief Product Manager Vivek Raghavan, who ‘volunteered’ for Aadhaar between October 2010 and June 2013, went on to found Khosla Labs, with its for-profit Aadhaar Bridge product. When the Supreme Court struck down the sharing of Aadhaar data with private companies in its September 2018 judgment, private interests dropped their masks and have started campaigning for a reversal. Dr Usha Ramanathan covers this in her chapter, making sense of the new, hybrid public-private entity that UIDAI represented, and its consequences.

And what did the government get out of it? Considering how it used its existing might to harass CIS, can you imagine what its expanded capabilities with Aadhaar will achieve for anyone who critiques their functioning? And how many critics who see something wrong in policy or execution will hesitate before saying something for fear of persecution? This ‘chilling effect’ is already spreading — just speak to anyone who critiques the government, and how often they have been advised to stop doing so.

Many of the big battles when it comes to Aadhaar have already been lost. 1.2 billion people have yielded up their biometric information; Aadhaar, which had started off as voluntary, has become mandatory to access basic rights of citizenship, and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court; India has ignored best practices from other countries and lessons from other such attempts, and has therefore squandered a historic opportunity to do this digital ID right.

Far though this juggernaut has rolled, the experts in this book are still offering warnings; while there has been substantial harm already, especially to the rural poor and the elderly, the worst damage is yet to occur. While the State has power to gain from defending UIDAI, and private interests have millions in profits to reap, the scholars and activists in this book have no millions to make, and are indeed staking both their personal safety, and their professional reputations in putting forward a narrative that goes so far against the dominant one. I trust readers will give their thoroughly-researched essays a fair hearing.

The writer wishes to acknowledge the contribution of Prasun Chakrabartty in researching and clarifying this piece.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/news/first-post-partha-p-chakrabartty-february-2-2019-dissent-on-aadhaar

Discrimination in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Arindrajit Basu — 2018-10-26T14:47:57Z

The dawn of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been celebrated by both government and industry across the globe. AI offers the potential to augment many existing bureaucratic processes and improve human capacity, if implemented in accordance with principles of the rule of law and international human rights norms. Unfortunately, AI-powered solutions have often been implemented in ways that have resulted in the automation, rather than mitigation, of existing societal inequalities.

This was originally published by Oxford Human Rights Hub on October 23, 2018

Image Credit: Sarla Catt via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

In the international human rights law context, AI solutions pose a threat to norms which prohibit discrimination. International Human Rights Law recognizes that discrimination may take place in two possible ways, directly or indirectly. Direct discrimination occurs when an individual is treated less favourably than someone else similarly situated on one of the grounds prohibited in international law, which, as per the Human Rights Committee, includes race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status. Indirect discrimination occurs when a policy, rule or requirement is ‘outwardly neutral’ but has a disproportionate impact on certain groups that are meant to be protected by one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination. A clear example of indirect discrimination recognized by the European Court of Human Rights arose in the case of DH&Ors v Czech Republic. The ECtHR struck down an apparently neutral set of statutory rules, which implemented a set of tests designed to evaluate the intellectual capability of children but which resulted in an excessively high proportion of minority Roma children scoring poorly and consequently being sent to special schools, possibly because the tests were blind to cultural and linguistic differences. This case acts as a useful analogy for the potential disparate impacts of AI and should serve as useful precedent for future litigation against AI-driven solutions.

Indirect discrimination by AI may occur at two stages. First is the usage of incomplete or inaccurate training data that results in the algorithm processing data that may not accurately reflect reality. Cathy O’Neil explains this using a simple example. There are two types of crimes-those that are ‘reported’ and others that are only ‘found’ if a policeman is patrolling the area. The first category includes serious crimes such as murder or rape while the second includes petty crimes such as vandalism or possession of illicit drugs in small quantities. Increased police surveillance in areas in US cities where Black or Hispanic people reside lead to more crimes being ‘found’ there. Thus, data is likely to suggest that these communities commit a higher proportion of crimes than they actually do – indirect discrimination that has been empirically been shown through research published by Pro Publica.

Discrimination may also occur at the stage of data processing, which is done through a metaphorical ‘black-box’ that accepts inputs and generates outputs without revealing to the human developer how the data was processed. This conundrum is compounded by the fact that the algorithms are often utilised to solve an amorphous problem-which attempts to break down a complex question into a simple answer. An example is the development of ‘risk profiles’ of individuals for the determination of insurance premiums. Data might show that an accident is more likely to take place in inner cities due to more densely packed populations in these areas. Racial and ethnic minorities tend to reside more in these areas, which means that algorithms could learn that minorities are more likely to get into accidents, thereby generating an outcome (‘risk profile’) that indirectly discriminates on grounds of race or ethnicity.

It would be wrong to ignore discrimination, both direct and indirect, that occurs as a result of human prejudice. The key difference between that and discrimination by AI lies in the ability of other individuals to compel the decision-maker to explain the factors that lead to the outcome in question and testing its validity against principles of human rights. The increasing amounts of discretion and, consequently, power being delegated to autonomous systems mean that principles of accountability which audit and check indirect discrimination need to be built into the design of these systems. In the absence of these principles, we risk surrendering core tenets of human rights law to the whims of an algorithmically crafted reality.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/oxford-human-rights-hub-arindrajit-basu-october-23-2018-discrimination-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence

Disconnected Network Disruptions

Admin — 2018-06-12T01:23:02Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/files/disconnected-network-disruptions

Digital Transition in Newspapers in India: A Pilot Study

zeenab — 2016-07-20T11:43:53Z

Introduction

This pilot study situates itself at the intersection of global trends in news and journalism, and emergent practises of legacy print media in India. Our aim is to explore how legacy print newspapers are transitioning to the online space. The study will address questions in two thematic clusters: 1) the work of journalism, and 2) how the emergence of the digital, both as a source of news, and the medium of distribution, is shaping the work of newspaper journalists, which has expanded to include various functions particular to the digital environment. And two, newsroom practices, which focus on the different modalities of convergence emerging in Indian newsrooms, and the organisational re-engineering that is being attempted in order to do journalism in a space where professional editors and journalists no longer have dominance with respect to the production and distribution of content.

News Culture in Transition

The influx of digital technology combined with advancements in the field of telecommunications has had a disruptive effect on the global news industry. This year’s World Press Trends survey, released last month, reports that at least 40 per cent of global internet users read newspapers online and that in most developed countries, readership on digital platforms has surpassed that in print(WAN-INFRA, 2016). However, while revenue from print is said to be declining, it still makes up for more than 92 per cent of all newspapers revenues. At the same time, circulation increased by 4.9 per cent globally, mostly owing to the 7.8 per cent growth in numbers from India, China and other parts of Asia which made up 62% of the global average daily print unit circulation in 2015. This growth, the report suggests, is a function of low prices and expanding literacy in these markets.

While newspapers are a thriving industry in India, newspaper organisations and journalists are adopting new technology in order to remain relevant in a fast changing environment (Chattopadhyay 2012, Panda 2014). One one hand, they are swept up in the disruptive shifts in the global media economy, while on the other, they are in a unique position to convert this disruption into an opportunity.

The WPT report also notes, perhaps to the relief of those struggling to find a sustainable revenue model for digital news, that revenue from paid digital circulation has increased 30 per cent in 2015 and that one in five readers from the countries studied are willing to pay for online news. Revenue from digital advertising on the other hand, is growing at the slower pace of 7.3 per cent.

The report points out that there is a huge opportunity in mobile growth, with more than 70 per cent of readers in countries like USA, UK, Australia and Canada reading newspapers via a mobile device. Similar trends can be seen in India, as internet usage here is increasingly shaped by mobile growth (Google India Report, 2015). The fact that many digital-born news sites are adopting a mobile-first strategy (Sen and Nielsen, 2016) reflects this. More recently, Hindustan Times has hired a mobile editor to build a team of over 700 journalists specialising in mobile journalism.

Earlier this year the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released a report on digital news start-ups in India (Sen and Nielsen, 2016), which explores how digital-born news start-ups are developing new editorial priorities, funding models and distribution strategies for news in the Indian digital media market. The study, which included observing the practices of The Quint, Scroll, The Wire, Khabar Lahariya, Daily Hunt and InShorts, concluded that India was not short of noteworthy experiments in journalism and online news. It also found that more news publishers are adopting mobile-first approaches, given that internet use in India is increasingly through mobile devices. More relevant to this study, the report established that social media has emerged as a tool for distribution and also stated that digital news start-ups are turning their focus to Hindi and local language content, in order to serve new audiences.

Studying the Effects of Convergence

Their digital transition can be witnessed on two counts: publishing with digital and publishing for digital. The first involves a shift towards using the digital in the process of sourcing and publishing news. Workflow is managed by advanced content management systems, news articles contain multimedia and interactivity that require technical expertise, and the web and social media are increasingly becoming a reliable source of primary and secondary information for journalists. Second, publishing for the highly competitive comes with it’s own challenges. Distribution and consumption of news is increasingly being carried out on digital platforms, fostering a culture of interdependence that impacts news providers in previously unforeseen ways. As the decision to prioritise their digital products take hold, newsrooms themselves evolve to contain a diverse range of skill and expertise.

According to the 2015 Trends in Newsroom report, editors and senior reporters in newsrooms across the globe are experimenting with new ways of storytelling using podcasts, chat apps, automation, virtual reality and gamification, as well as dealing with new challenges with respect to source protection in the face of increased surveillance and intermediaries like Facebook and Google and reporting on culturally sensitive subjects(World Editors Forum, 2015).

The dynamics of these shifts in different countries may be shaped by several factors including the availability of human and financial resources, and pace of adoption of new technologies by the readers. In markets like Japan, complexities of the existing newspaper trade in the country act as a deterrent to technological change (Villi and Hayashi, 2014). Given the pace at which the media ecology of the web evolves; this transition is an ongoing process characterised by experiments in business, marketing and editorial strategies. A good example of such an experiment is last week’s decision by leading Indian newspapers, to make their content unavailable to those consumers who had ad-blocking software installed.

Such a shift also demands that we ask new questions of news in journalism. In his paper on studying computational and algorithmic journalism, C. W. Anderson tackles how sociologists and media scholars can frame inquiries related to journalism, given its computational turn (Anderson, 2012). He suggests using the added lens of ‘technology’ and ‘institutions and fields’ to Michael Schudson’s (Schudson, 2010) typology on the sociology of news which approaches the study of news from economic, political, cultural and organisational approaches. While most of these are self-explanatory, by institutions and fields, he refers to the ‘field of journalism’ as a whole and the different actors that shape it. This frame will examine the cultural power struggles that occur within the field and the way these struggles shape newsroom practises and news content (Anderson, 2012). Anderson adds that it is imperative to understand that the dynamics of the field of journalism are closely connected to nearby fields which now include computer science, web development and digital advertising.

We adopted a similar approach for our study. We began our inquiry by asking questions about how the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet are changing the process of producing news and how news organisations are rising up to the challenges posed by the digital space: what technologies and software are being used in the production and distribution of news in India, how are these technologies and softwares influencing the process of news production and distribution, how are the everyday practices and roles with respect to journalistic and editorial work transforming with their transition to digital, how do media agencies conceptualise and measure online viewership, and how do these metrics impact journalistic and editorial practices.

These questions led us to explore how leading legacy print newspapers across three language markets - English, Hindi and Malayalam - are making the transition from producing news stories exclusively for print to producing multimedia stories for the highly competitive and and diverse media ecology of the web.

Research Plan

As already mentioned, the study is divided into two thematic clusters: work of journalism and newsroom practises.

The former will include asking questions related to strategies and skills of information gathering and validation, methods and tools of communicating a news story in an online-first (or simultaneously print and online) environment, personal engagements with audiences via social media websites, new methods of performance assessment and sources and practices of learning and capacity building.

The latter will explore how choice/emphasis of content and reportage is being re-shaped by the digital environment by inquiring into changes in editorial responsibilities, dynamics of decision making, news-making workflows, technical diversity of the work force, and interaction between news producers within an increasingly convergent newsroom.

This being a pilot study, we will conduct intensive interviews with journalists, editors, and management personnel associated with one newspaper in each language market: 1) Hindustan Times in English, 2) Dainik Jagran in Hindi, and 3) Malayala Manorama in Malayalam. We selected these three languages due to their large market sizes and geographic distribution, and selected the newspapers for either their pioneering efforts in adopting digital technologies, or their dominant position in terms of circulation.

The research team includes Zeenab Aneez and Sumandro Chattapadhyay from CIS, and RISJ Director of Research Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. Vibodh Parthasarathi from CCMG, Jamia Millia Islamia, will contribute to the study as an advisor.

References

Anderson, Christopher W. 2013. ‘Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism’. New Media & Society 15 (7): 1005-1021.

Bajaj, Ambrish. 2016. “Indian news sites lost 100 million page views and $500K in three weeks - and had no clue why” http://factordaily.com/indian-news-sites-lost-100-million-page-views-500k-three-weeks-no-clue/.

Chattopadhyay, Saayan. 2012. ‘Online Journalism and Election Reporting in India’. Journalism Practice 6 (3): 337-48. doi:10.1080/17512786.2012.663596.

Coddington, Mark. 2014. ‘Defending Judgment and Context in “original Reporting”: Journalists’ Construction of Newswork in a Networked Age’. Journalism 15 (6): 678–95.

– 2015. ‘The Wall Becomes a Curtain: Revisiting Journalism’s News–business Boundary’. Boundaries of Journalism: Professionalism, Practices, and Participation. New York: Routledge. [forthcoming]. Accessed from http://markcoddington.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/CoddingtonFINAL.NewReferences.docx.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas, and Mor Naaman. 2011. ‘Towards Quality Discourse in Online News Comments’. In Proceedings of the ACM 2011 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 133–42. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1958844.

Diakopoulos, Nicholas, Mor Naaman, and Funda Kivran-Swaine. 2010. ‘Diamonds in the Rough: Social Media Visual Analytics for Journalistic Inquiry’. In Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), 2010 IEEE Symposium on, 115–22. IEEE. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5652922.

Hermida, Alfred. 2010. ‘Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism.’ Journalism Practice. Special Issue on the Future of Journalism. 4 (3): 297-308. doi:10.1080/17512781003640703.

Jalarajan, Sony, Rohini Sreekumar, and Nithin Kalorth. 2014. ‘“Tweeting” the News: Twitter Journalism as a New Age Crowd News Disseminator in India’. http://euacademic.org/UploadArticle/317.pdf.

Kilman, Larry. 2015. ‘World Press Trends: Newspaper Revenues Shift To New Sources - WAN-IFRA’. World Press Trends. June 1. http://www.wan-ifra.org/press-releases/2015/06/01/world-press-trends-newspaper-revenues-shift-to-new-sources.

K. J., Shashidar. 2016. ‘Hindustan Times has appointed a Mobile Editor’. Published online on Medianama.com. http://www.medianama.com/2016/07/223-hindustan-times-has-appointed-a-mobile-editor/.

Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis, Frank Esser, and David Levy. 2013. ‘Comparative Perspectives on the Changing Business of Journalism and Its Implications for Democracy’. The International Journal of Press/Politics 18 (4): 383-91. doi:10.1177/1940161213497130.

Örnebring, Henrik. 2010. ‘Technology and Journalism-as-Labour: Historical Perspectives.’ Journalism. February. 11 (1): 57-74. doi: 10.1177/1464884909350644.

Panda, Jayanta K. 2014. ‘Impact of Media Convergence on Journalism: A Theoretical Perspective’. Pragyaan, 14.

Paulussen, Steve and Pieter Ugille. 2008. ‘User Generated Content in the Newsroom: Professional and Organisational Constraints on Participatory Journalism.’ Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture. 5(2): 24-41.

Royal, Cindy. 2010. ‘The Journalist as Programmer: A Case Study of The New York Times Interactive News Technology Department.’ Presented at the International Symposium in Online Journalism, The University of Texas at Austin, April 20. Accessed from https://online.journalism.utexas.edu/2010/papers/Royal10.pdf.

Schudson, Michael. 2010. ‘Political Observatories, Databases * News in the Emerging Ecology of Public Information’. Daedalus. 139(2): 100–109. doi:10.1162/daed.2010.139.2.100.

Scott, Ben. 2005. ‘A Contemporary History of Digital Journalism.’ Television & New Media. February. 6(1): 89-126. doi: 10.1177/1527476403255824.

Sen, Arijit and Nielsen, Rasmus Kleis. 2016. Digital Journalism Start-Ups in India. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Accessed from: http://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Digital%20Journalism%20Start-ups%20in%20India_0.pdf.

‘Nine top #TrendsinNewsrooms’. 2015. WAN-IFRA blog. http://blog.wan-ifra.org/2015/06/02/nine-top-trendsinnewsrooms-of-2015.

Villi, M., and K. Hayashi. 2014. ‘“The Mission Is to Keep This Industry Intact”: Digital Transition in the Japanese Newspaper Industry’. In 64th Annual International Communication Association (ICA) Conference, Seattle, WA, 22-26 May.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-transition-in-newspapers-in-india-pilot-study

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 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: You can check out, you can never leave

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:31:46Z

Aadhaar is not something you define and opt into, it is something that defines you.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 2, 2017. Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

Ok. I get it. You don’t want yet another piece on the horrors and perils of the surveillance state that has come to the forefront with Aadhaar numbers now being tied to our taxes. I know that you must have already made up your mind about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If you believe that the way to streamlining bureaucracy and making our systems more accountable is transparency, then you are ready to welcome the digital ecosystem of Aadhaar, as introducing checks and balances that might help to curb some of the excesses and wastes of our governance systems . If you are of the opinion, however, that the state cannot be trusted with our information, without the oversee of the Parliament and the judiciary, then you want to resist this mandatory implementation of the “voluntary” Aadhaar. And, for once, I am unable to take a side, favouring one set of arguments over the other. This ambiguity does not come from a lack of political conviction. I continue to fear about the future of our lives when these technologies of control and domination fall in the hands of governments which have an authoritarian bend of mind.

Instead, my lack of preference on the good, bad and ugly sides of Aadhaar stems from a completely different concern around network technologies of digital connectivity that has found very little attention in the almost zealous discourse about “yes Aadhaar, no Aadhaar”.

This is a concern about the relationship between technological networks and the messy realities that we embody. There has been an easy acceptance of a digital network as a description of our everyday life. If you look at any network that you belong to — from public discussion forums to private WhatsApp groups — you will realise that these networks offer to visualise your connections and transactions with the people, places and things in your circles. Thus, it is possible to say that Facebook describes your collection of friends and your social life. Or you could suggest that LinkedIn is a visualisation of your professional landscape. And, in a similar vein, we can also propose that Aadhaar is a representation of the working of our government systems of identification.

Each one of these propositions, seemingly innocent, is blatantly wrong. Facebook, for example, didn’t just connect you with your friends. It has fundamentally changed the idea of what is a friend. For a generation of young people who grew up naturalised in social media, the notion of a friend has lost all its meaning and nuance. Every connection, acquaintance, friend of a friend, a random stranger who likes the same band as you do, is now a friend. And the increasing anxiety we have about people falling prey to predatory friendships is because Facebook has now normalised the idea that if somebody calls you their friend, you don’t have to worry about sharing personal and private information with them. Similarly , for anybody who has spent time on LinkedIn, we know that it is not just a portal that describes our work. It is the space where we stay connected with events and people far removed from us. It is the resource pool that we draw on while looking for new work. It is also the space that we keep an eye on just to see if a better job has opened up. It is a collection of events, links and connections that not only shows what you do but what you aspire for, who you connect with and what are the kinds of professional ambitions you see for yourself.

Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, which don’t just describe a reality but actually simulate, prescribe and shape it, Aadhaar is a digital network that is seeking to change the very foundational reality of our lives. Like most digital networks, it is not merely an explanation of how things are but the context within which who we are and what we do finds meaning and validation. Thus, Aadhaar might propose that it is merely trying to describe your identity but it is actually offering to shape a new one for you. The programme might suggest that it is trying to implement a system already in place, but it is, in reality, creating an entirely new system within which you and I have to now find space, function and identity. The latest announcements of mainstreaming Aadhaar merely betray this fact – that Aadhaar is not something you define and opt into, Aadhaar defines you. And opting out is going to have severe penalties and consequences.

Digital networks have long masqueraded as benign visualisations of the world. But they are, in principle, blueprints that transform the world as we know it. This, in itself, is not bad. However, hiding this transformation is. Because when a transformation happens, especially at systemic levels, it is always the people who are the most vulnerable that suffer the most from it. Think about the older friend who might not be the most tech savvy and how they struggle for inclusion on Facebook and WhatsApp messages. Pay some attention to people who did not understand the public nature of LinkedIn and ended up getting fired because they wrote about their current work conditions and the desire to change them. And, similarly, do think if the people who are being pushed into these digital ecosystems without adequate digital literacy, care and information about the consequences of their actions, are being made vulnerable in their access to resources of life and dignity.

Whether you and I like Aadhaar or not is not really the question. The question is not about the right to privacy either. What is at stake in this deployment of Aadhaar is a government that is pushing radical transformations of the life of its citizens without consulting with them and addressing their needs. In the past, when governments have done this, we have developed strong voices of protest and correction asking the state to be responsible towards those affected by the transformation. The reliance on the digital, however, allows these governments to escape this responsibility and, in the guise of description, are making prescriptions of reality which need to be resisted.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-2-2017-digital-native-you-can-check-out-you-can-never-leave

Digital native: Who will watch the watchman?

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:18:50Z

The state mining its citizens as data and suspending rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security is alarming.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 19, 2017

I want you to start getting slightly uncomfortable right now. Because even as you read this, your emails are being read without your knowledge. Your social media network has been accessed by an unknown agent. Somebody is getting hold of your financial transactions and your credit card purchases, and creating a profile of your spending habits. Somebody pretending to be you is checking the naked pictures you might have backed up in your private cloud.

Somewhere, the profiles that you created for your dating apps are under scrutiny. Your Google search history is slowly being browsed by people who now know what you searched for last Friday at 3.30 am when you just couldn’t find sleep. Your WhatsApp texts, including that long sexting session with your ex, is now being stored in some other memory.The false account that you had created on Twitter to troll the world, is now linked to all your other IDs. The LinkedIn connections you sent to a rival company in search for a better job, are now available for others to find.

I wish that I was only presenting a hypothetical dystopia to warn us about the future of privacy. But, I am not. Because, the future is already here and it is slowly unfolding in front of you. We often think of the Internet as a secure system, mumbling things about encryption and passwords, imagining that if so many people are using it, then it must surely be safe. And it is true, that largely most of our electronic communication on the digital circuits is secure, or, at least, not easily vulnerable to vicious attacks.

Every time we hear about hackers intercepting sensitive information in databases, we are assured that it was a one-time exceptional case, and that forensic investigations are being conducted to keep our data safe. The digital security industry is indeed working hard to make it increasingly difficult for people with malicious intent to actually read and manipulate our data that we secure with passwords, fingerprints, and encryption keys that become more complex and robust.

However, the biggest concern around privacy, in the Internet of Things, is not about these cat-and-mouse games of data breaches and theft. Instead, perhaps, the biggest act of data theft and interception is conducted in full public view, with our consent. This happens when we download apps, use single user verification accounts and join free public hotspots, allowing our data to be freely captured by unseen actors.

The corporate mining of human users is not the only scenario in this landscape. In the recent reality TV edition of the US politics, they have just announced that border control in the US can now demand anybody to hand over their digital devices, passwords to email and social media accounts, and access to all their digital information in order to gain entry into the country. Or, in other words, you can be as secure as you like, but if the government wants, they will get that information from you as a price of entry into the country. You don’t need the NSA when you can just walk to the person and ask them to hand over this information.

Closer home in Digital India, things are not better. The Aadhaar project has failed to address data privacy questions. The data that we have voluntarily given to Aadhaar can be used to create a massive surveillance system that sells our data for profits and transactions to private companies. Similarly, in the post-demonetisation move, as we all went cashless, we increased our digital footprint in an ecosystem that has almost no safeguards to protect you from people knowing about your purchases at the chemist shop last weekend.

As we connect more online, and more devices are linked to our user profiles, we continue to leak and bleed data which violates the very core of what we consider our private selves. When we learned about the market exploiting our private data, we thought that the state would be the watchman. As the states start being run as markets, we now have a new question: who shall watch the watchman?

The new interest of the state in mining its citizens as data and suspending our rights to privacy under the rhetoric of national security and interest is alarming. The state now thinks of our private data as capital. We need mechanisms to protect ourselves from the predatory impulses of the new information states, and while we might not have remedies, we do need to start the conversation now to safeguard our futures from the war against privacy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-19-2017-digital-native-who-will-watch-the-watchman

Digital Native: Three things we need to realise about what TikTok is doing to us

nishant — 2019-06-09T05:27:52Z

Fifteen seconds is all that will take for TikTok to own you.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on May 19, 2019.

If there is one thing that has been building more suspense and drama than our politicians this election season, it is the microblogging site TikTok. From complete ignominy to viral popularity, and then the dramatic ban by a high court to its resurgence offering Rs 1,00,000 daily reward prizes, #ReturnofTikTok has been trending with great enthusiasm and being embraced by the populace, who obviously think that 15-second videos are the pinnacle of human cultural production and expression. But, my friends, followers, TikTokers, I come here not to bury TikTok, but to praise it.

At first glance, TikTok appears to be just a miniaturised version of the popular social media platforms we know — YouTube, Vine, Snapchat — and merely one more step in figuring out how granular we can make our appified attention. With each video post that can only last 15 seconds, TikTok is often heralded as naturalising the new unit of attention in an informationally saturated environment. Many have looked at it as competition to the grandfathers of social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, and there is much speculation about how it will take these giants down.

However, the radical departure of TikTok is not in the smallness of its engagement — and thus the extremely low threshold for participation — or in the hashtag organisation of its social media, and the subsequent viral potentiality. What makes TikTok tick (and then, of course, tock), is its embrace of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to power the platform.

China-based ByteDance that owns TikTok, unlike any of its Big Tech competitors, is not a content production or curation company. It is invested in machine learning, and at its backend are extremely sophisticated algorithms that are using facial recognition, data correlation, and targeted customisation technologies to create the world of TikTok. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the two templates of “user-generated-content” platforms, where what we see, what we do, and what we say require us to define our social circles and connections, TikTok’s algorithms do not need us to do any social definition.

From the minute you sign up for it, giving up your personal information and data to extreme mining which bears the same pitfalls of privacy and surveillance that all other big data apps do, TikTok starts presenting content to you. This is not content created by friends, or colleagues, or randos you connect with because you couldn’t be bothered to decline their invites. Instead, this is content created by people you don’t know at all, and brought to you by algorithms that know, even without you telling them what you might like. The more time you spend tapping across the vides, searching hashtags, and going through complex tutorials to make your own 15-second fun video, the more the machine learning algorithms learn you.

TikTok is such a threat to existing social media companies because they make no apologies of the fact that their human users are not influencers, friends, followers, or connections. They are merely users, who produce content and then their algorithms go around the world, connecting us through reasons and logic that are completely opaque. With TikTok, we see the future of automated technologies, where both the content and the logic of connectivity are no longer dependent on human action or desire, but on algorithmic curation and presentation. Geared towards maximum engagement, TikTok’s algorithms have one task — to completely make us lose all sense of time as we cycle through an almost endless stream of videos that have neither content nor style, but seduce us in their short-lived flash.

TikTok as a platform might turn out to be another fad. It is already being copied and mimicked by others. It might run out of its global steam. However, what it has opened up for us are three critical things that need more attention in our digital action. First, on TikTok, you don’t have friends because your friend is TikTok, and it tells you, in an easy, gossipy way, all the things that everybody else is doing. Second, TikTok does not pretend to respect individual choice and agency, instead it trains us to accept what is presented as content. In many ways, it is the reverse Spotify — your playlist does not represent your taste in music, but the music shapes you to become the kind of person who likes that music. And, lastly, TikTok infantilises its users, embedding them in a juvenilia, which has no meaning other than the moving images that keep us engaged but distant, responsive but irresponsible, as children of all ages, ready to escape from a world that increasingly seems too complex to live in.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Time’s Up’

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us

Digital native: The age of consent

nishant — 2018-01-10T02:17:00Z

Just like porn is not real life, all news is not real news. It’s time, therefore, to come of age in the 18th year of this century.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 31, 2017

WE ARE 18 years into this new century. If this century were a person, it would now legally be allowed to vote, to drive, and to engage in sexual activities with other consenting centuries of permissible age. As the century finally becomes ready for adulthood, we need to be giving it some advice. While there are many things about digital rights, responsibilities, and restrictions that it will have to learn, like most teenagers coming of age, I know that the century is not going to listen to me preach, so I am going to grab its attention and talk to it about porn.

Remember, the Internet is all about porn. Ok, so you know that is not true, but your entire future of watching porn and swiping on people you want to watch porn with, depends on the principles of Net Neutrality which is being diminished by private companies that want to profit from your pervert pleasures. Net Neutrality is the principle that ensures that no matter what you are accessing online, as long as you have the physical bandwidth and the infrastructure to access that information, no private company or regulatory body can privilege other people’s access over yours. You are not judged by what you consume and your own perverse and personal access remains unbiased. This is a big deal because it not only allows you to access porn in all your desire, but it also provides a level playing field for new companies, collectives and communities to find equal voice without facing technical discrimination or technological bias.

Second, you will often be told that what you see online is not to be trusted. You definitely need to learn that the world wide web is filled with a variety of information and that you need to make the distinction between porn and real sexual encounters. And while you are doing it, please pay attention to the fact that the same holds true for politics, facts, and information online. Just like porn is not real life, all news is not real news. One sure way of making sure that you can trust the information you consume is by making sure that you validate the sources. Check who is sending the information. Make sure that when you share it, you are sure that what you are sharing is credible. Just like you will not share your nude selfies with your family and friends, make sure you are not sharing untrue information with the circles that trust you. Fact check information before you share, forward, retweet and like posts, train your hands to not be trigger happy.

And third, you should be able to access porn as long as it is a healthy expression of your sexual fantasy. As you go down the smut route, you will encounter many different forms of porn and while they might titillate and stimulate in unexpected ways, please remember that all porn is not the same. There is porn which is between consenting performers and then there is porn that is shot without the knowledge or permission of the people involved in it. The internet of things has started providing surveillance opportunities in invisible ways, and there are people who use spycams on unsuspecting people, making us unwilling participants in their lives. These videos can destroy people’s lives by shaming, harassing and blackmailing them. Imagine what would happen the next time you are whistling to porntubes and somebody captures a video of it and shares it in your social networks. The next time you come across non-consenting porn, step back and report it or flag it as abuse.

This goes for all spaces of the internet. The internet is not a utopian place of forced happiness. It amplifies some of our most dangerous and dark desires and practices. However, the joy of the internet is that it is a self organised space and we need to take responsibility for not just our actions but our collective ethical behaviour online. We do not want the internet to be policed, but we definitely want to step up and be sure that it is not abused against those who do not have the power to fight back.

Welcome to adulthood, 2018. May you mature into your heart’s desires and find safe spaces to do it in. And on the way, take the responsibility of protecting the digital network that is going to define who you are and what you grow up to be in the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-31-2017-digitial-native-the-age-of-consent

Digital Native: Playing God

nishant — 2018-09-04T16:43:43Z

Google’s home assistant can make you feel deceptively God-like as it listens to every command of yours. It is a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for a voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 26, 2018.

I spent the last weekend playing with my new best friend — a Google Home assistant. After years of deliberation — worrying about data mining, customisation algorithms and extreme surveillance that comes with a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for my voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life — I finally gave in. I now have two Google home assistants — because AI assistants are like chips; you can’t have just one — glowing, insidiously cute, sitting in my house.

The setting up of the assistant took an hour or so as I paired it with my mobile and computer devices, connected it with all my digital subscriptions and figured out the commands. What began as hesitant forays, in less than two days, have become intuitive and naturalised conversations that seem like habits. This morning I walked into the living room, said “Good morning Google”, and got the weather forecast and a summary of my appointments for the day. While making breakfast, instead of searching for the news, I asked Google home to fetch me news, listened to the audio-video content it curated and even made it read out the headlines. When I was being given news that I was not interested in, I corrected it and it started changing news filters for me. When I asked it to fish out specific kinds of news, it diligently informed me of all of those things.

While eating breakfast, I asked the assistant to connect to my Spotify account and play me my daily mix of music. As I was getting ready, it sent me an alert that if I want to make it to my first meeting in time, I should leave home in the next 15 minutes. As I stepped out of the house, Google Assistant sent me an alert on my phone, reminding me that it might rain today and I should carry an umbrella. When I was finishing up at work, the assistant sent me an alert on my phone again reminding me to pick up my bicycle from the shop in the evening. When I came home, it alerted me that I had to check-in for a flight that I am taking the following day, gave me the weather forecast for the duration of my trip to Jakarta and made a special folder with all my travel documents and itinerary in it. As I was packing, it read out things that I might find of interest on the trip and bookmarked things that I instructed it to.

After packing was done and I was chilling on the couch, instead of picking up the book that I was in the middle of — as is my habit on most evenings — I talked with Google Home, as it told me bad jokes, dad jokes, and jokes that were specifically about things that I wanted. It also introduced me to multiple apps where I played trivia games for an hour. As the evening wore on, the assistant asked me if I needed an alarm for the next morning — something I generally do myself on my phone — and it set up an alert for the train timings to the airport for the next evening. It took me a while to realise that in less than 48 hours, Google Home has so insidiously infiltrated my life that all my older habits of consuming information, news and entertainment are now curated and controlled by its algorithmic design. More than that, my conditions of remembering, anticipating and planning are now also structured by the rhythms of its artificial intelligence.

The uncanny thing about this AI assistant is not that it performs extraordinary tasks, but that it picks up ordinary tasks and trains me to do them through it. Like any assistant, its value and worth is precisely in how natural and default it has become in such a short period. I was so freaked out by its natural presence in my life, reordering years of habits and schedules, that I looked straight at its glowing dots and asked it to shut down. Interestingly, that is the first thing that it refused to do — the assistant cannot power down just on a voice command. I need to physically move to the table, touch it and pull the plug, as its gently glowing dots pulsate at me, perhaps, with sorrow, perhaps with malignant intent. I just shut down the assistant and I felt a strange sense of silence flowing through me. Just when I was savouring it, my phone buzzed. The Google Assistant sensed that the home device is shut down and so it has now appeared on the phone. It is waiting, listening, for me to say “Hello Google” so that it springs back to life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-26-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-playing-god

Digital native: Not only words

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:33:20Z

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 16, 2017.

Emoticons, or if you prefer the original Japanese word emojis, are everywhere. We are used to emoticons in all shapes and sizes — from animated gifs jumping out at us on our social media feed to yellow-faced smileys that we use to add tone and feeling, nuance and layers to our text-heavy conversations in the digital world. For many of the current users of digital communication, emoticons are pre-defined pictures that they select from a menu that gives them access to add a wink, a nod, a smiling or sad face to their messages. However, there are power users who, I am sure, still remember the times when emoticons were things that you created.

Before the emergence of the Graphical User Interface (GUI) that turned the computer into a box of cuteness, turning all of us into eternal children playing with the friendly faces of the digital platforms, the digital world was flat and largely textual. Emoticons were first proposed in 1982 to take away the density and the unforgiving monotone of text-based conversations on digital platforms. From that first proposal of a : ) and : ( sign to indicate the mood of a text, emoticons have had a fascinating history of evolution. Following the proposal of the basic emoticons by Scott Fahlman, a variety of early adopters of the web came up with a wide range of options. The smiley became a grin with : D and the sad face was made to weep with : ‘ (. The face became mischievous and winked with a ;) and swooned in love with a <3. It became silly with its tongue poking out :p and sprouted devil horns to show its inherent wickedness with >:D.

Early users will remember how, from that first explosion, the emoticons grew into forming extremely intricate art forms. In the world of text-based virtual realities, the shrugging emoticon was my constant companion when giving up on futile internet arguments : ¯\_(?)_/¯ . From there, we were only one step away from complex ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) art forms that made punctuation and critical marks the new tools for emerging artists to play with. The ASCII characters were keyboard symbols, letters and numbers mixed together to produce images ranging from flowers and animals to the globe and human bodies. In fact, ASCII became such a huge rage that there were special forums where people submitted their ASCII art. Even though we have now achieved high visual fidelity with our powerful computing devices, the ASCII messages still continue on our WhatsApp groups and discussion forums. So that we still tell people we love them in ASCII

(¯`v´¯)
`·.¸.·´ I Love
¸.·´¸.·´¨) ¸.·*¨)
(¸.·´ (¸.·´ .·´ You… or pledge friendship in punctuation
(‘,’)/\(‘,’)
<) )—( (>
_\\__//_

One of the lesser known histories of emoticons and ASCII, however, has been forgotten in the gentrified, cute and commodified mass produced usage that we have put them to. In many cultures and spaces in those early days of the web, emoticons were also ways of resisting censorship and circumventing supervision. As the web became more open and more people started signing up for digital conversations, there was also an increase in the monitoring and surveillance of things online. In more conservative cultures, there were immediate bans on conversations that were considered pornographic or obscene. In stricter work places, the system administrators were trying to filter messages which might have certain words or images in their content. ASCII and emoticons came to the rescue, because, using these characters which the computer only read as punctuation marks without content, people were able to communicate sexual content without the fear of censorship.

In the late ’90s, there were graphic and explicit ASCII images that were circulated, so that the content filters would not detect them, and, using just the characters, the earliest internet porn, or Pr0n as it was tagged, came into being. The emoticon-filled messages were not just about nodding and winking at each other but also a way for people to question authority and to find new modes of expression. Since those days of subversion, emoticons have come a long way, becoming appropriated in our everyday practice — they have been tamed and made mainstream.

I am sure that the ubiquity of the emoticons produces a sense of irritation sometimes, and you want to send a slapping emoticon when you find a work email with a smiley face at the end. But before you announce the death of the emoticon, you might want to know that digital natives are experimenting with the radical power of these emoticons. They are developing an entirely new language filled with exploding bananas, pulsating aubergines, peeking monkeys, dancing unicorns, and victorious roosters to communicate in ways that are not accessible to the parents, teachers and authority figures around them. The repurposing of emoticons by young users to chat, express, flirt, tease and engage with each other in ways that defy all conventional sense. I find this fascinating because it gives me hope that the web is not going to just produce all users as cheap copies of each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-16-2017-digital-native-not-only-words

Digital native: Memory card is full

nishant — 2018-01-10T02:08:57Z

We train ourselves to forget as our devices store everything. How do we remember things that matter?

The article was published in Indian Express on December 3, 2017

#metoo #himtoo #privacy #bigdata #artificialintelligence #machinerights #Aadhaarprivacy #ItHappensToEverybody #chillingeffects #cyberbullying #Anonymity #checkyourprivilege #botlogic #bluewhale #kidsonline #alonetogether #digitalfreedom #freespeech #righttolove #righttobeforgotten #digitalIndia #mobility #digitalcare #emojis #freeexpression #Internetblackouts #DigitallyDisconnected #attentioneconomies #Digitalcurrencies #algorithmicfriendships #MakeInIndia #AadhaarLeaks #freepress #wisdomofmobs #snapchatgate #digitalivesmatter #ClosedWebs #dataconsent #rightobeforgotten #surveillance #digitalcitizens #fakenews #righttoprivacy #alternativefacts #neveragain #alwaysremember #Nogoingback #Notallmen #yesallmen #dalitlivesmatter

As you stare at the mass of hashtags, I want you to play a little game with me. These are all hashtags associated with social movements, political protests, cultural phenomena and individual impulses that have marked 2017. Over this year, I have written about these. Most of these events were discussed a lot and they must have come to your attention in our viral webs. I want you to look at each of these hashtags and try to remember what events and circumstances, concerns and questions, alarms and crises were associated with them.

I must confess that I only have faint memories of some of these events and a complete blank spot on the specificities of a few. At the time of writing, these were questions that were urgent, critical, and all-consuming. And yet, in the brief span of a few months, they have receded from my memory. The only reason I was able to list all these topics was not because I remembered them, but because they were stored and archived in the digital web, and I was able to pull them out through a search query.

This relationship between memory and storage is both intriguing and alarming. One of the joys of being human is to be able to forget. One of our strongest coping mechanisms is our capacity to make things fade in memories, so that we can live without being trapped in our pasts. The ability to forget also allows us to forgive and to move on, focusing on corrections rather than mistakes.

However, when it comes to the digital, memory and storage are the same thing. Human memory falters. But digital storage, outside of a system crash or a black-out is always there, and ready to be converted into memory at the click of a search button. This infinite storage produces a new crisis for us in our digitally mediated lives. It means that even when we forget and depend on our social networks forgetting, the algorithmic databases of storage will not forget our actions and reactions.

Now, we also train ourselves to forget because we are assured that these new artificial memories will retain the information longer. As we rely on algorithmic prompts to remind us of things from our past, we lose our capacity to remain engaged and committed to different questions and ideas that are important to us. This reliance on digital storage rather than human memory enables a culture of fragmented and multitasking politics, where we pay momentary attention to the hashtag of the day and forget it quickly as new things grab our attention.

It poses crucial questions to our ways of thinking about social collectives: Who are we when our machines remember what we have forgotten? What happens when somebody animates forgotten memories through querying digital storage? How do we ensure that the prompts for the new do not draw us away from remembering things that are critical? Human civilisations have depended on cultures of memory making. All our cultural products — even the pictures of dancing babies and cute cats — are indeed ways by which we create collective memories of who we are and who we want to be. However, we are increasingly living in times where our capacity to forget is superseded by our machines of storage. We need to find new ways of figuring out how we can remember things that need longer memory, and how we can be forgotten from actions which need to be un-stored.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-3-2017-digital-native-memory-card-is-full