Centre for Internet and Society

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects

nishant — 2013-01-26T09:49:07Z

Brown University is organizing an international conference that elucidates the networked conditions of our times, how they produce ways, conditions, and habits of life and living, how they spread local actions globally. The conference will be held from March 21 to 23, 2013 at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Nishant Shah is participating as a speaker in this event. Read the full details published on the Brown University website. Also see the Thinkathon page.

Through a series of workshops, art residences, and dialogues, Habits of Living seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed.

Conference: Habits of Living

This international conference will bring together prominent and innovative scholars and artists at Brown University. There will be ninety-minute panels (each with two speakers), a keynote address by the RAQs Media Collective, a series of concurrent "unconferences" (informal sessions to be run by the audience), a scrapyard challenge, and an exhibition of work running in parallel. Speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Elizabeth Bernstein, Biella Coleman, Didier Fassin, Kara Keeling, Laura Kurgan, Ganaelle Langlois, Colin Milburn, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Elias Muhanna, Lisa Parks, Raqs Media Collective, Nishant Shah, Ravi Sundarum, Tiziana Terranova, and Nigel Thrift.

This event is designed as a large public conference whose major segments are participant-driven "unconferences." Unconferences are fluid events of casual five-minute "lightning" presentations and informal dialogue generated through group interactions. To facilitate discussion around networked societies, the multiple unconference sessions will focus around topics generated in advance by all the participants in the audience who will be guided through a quick and easy sign-up process. The unconferences are meant to take a more improvisational form, so the themes and locations will remain flexible, and entirely driven by audience participation.

Attendance at the conference is free, but please register here.

Habits of Living is generously sponsored by Brown University via the Dean of the Faculty, The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, The Cogut Center for the Humanities, The Humanities Initiative, The Vice President for International Affairs, and The Brown India Initiative. Additional sponsorship provided by RISD Digital + Media.

Conference Schedule

Thurs., Mar. 21

1:00-5:00pm	Scrapyard Challenge—Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen
7:30-9:00	Raqs Media Collective

Fri., Mar. 22

9:00-10:20am	Nigel Thrift and Laura Kurgan
10:30-11:50	Elizabeth Bernstein and Didier Fassin
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Nishant Shah and Kara Keeling
4:00-5:20	Nick Mirzoeff and Ariella Azoulay

Sat., Mar. 23

9:00-10:20am	Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundarum
10:30-11:50	Elias Muhanna and Speaker TBD
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Lisa Parks and Ganaele Langlois
4:00-5:20	Colin Milburn and Gabriella Coleman

Speakers

Ariella Azoulay, Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Ariella Azoulay studies revolutions from the 18th century onward and investigates how civil historical knowledge can be portrayed from photographs and other visual media. The Israeli political regime has been a primary focus of her work. Recent books: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, August 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); co-author with Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012). Curator of When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea, Exhibition Room – Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices No. 16 (folded format in Hebrew, MOBY, 2013), Potential History (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Louven), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art). Director of documentary films Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004), The Food Chain (2004), among others.
Elizabeth Bernstein, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University Professor Bernstein is the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received two distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association as well as the 2009 Norbert Elias Prize—an international prize which is awarded biennially to the author of a first major book in sociology and related disciplines. Her current book project is Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, which explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary global policies surrounding the traffic in women. Her research has received support from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Social Science Research Council, the NSF, the AAUW, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. At Barnard and Columbia, she teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, on trafficking, migration, and sexual labor, and on contemporary social theory.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT). Dr. Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award winning researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of Trinity College Dublin. His work and thesis is titled "Deconstructing Networks" and includes over 77 creative projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His work has been exhibited and showcased at venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport), Palais du Tokyo,Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His writing has appeared in publications such as WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 14 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003. Portfolio and Work: http://www.coin-operated.com Scrapyard Challenge Workshops: http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com Twitter: @coinop29
Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman teaches, researches, and writes on computer hackers and digital activism. Her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" has been published with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Source: http://gabriellacoleman.org/
Didier Fassin, James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Director of Studies, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris Didier Fassin was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Social Sciences (CNRS — Inserm — EHESS — University Paris North). Trained as a medical doctor, he has been Vice-President of Médecins sans Frontières and is President of the Comité médical pour les exilés. His field of interest is political and moral anthropology, and he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state through a study of policing and the prison. His recent publications include: De la question sociale à la question raciale? (with Eric Fassin, 2006), Les politiques de l’enquète: Épreuves ethnographiques (with Alban Bensa, 2008), Les nouvelles frontières de la société française (2009) and Moral Anthropology (2012) as editor; When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007), The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, 2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), and Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), as author.
Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies (School of Cinematic Arts) and African American Studies (Department of American Studies and Ethnicity), University of Southern California Kara Keeling’s current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and (with Josh Kun) of a collection of essays about sound in American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled "From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema". Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling was an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and American Quarterly, where she is a managing editor, and she is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of the journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).
Laura Kurgan, Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), Director of Visual Studies, Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning, Columbia University Professor Kurgan's work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment, and a collaborative exhibition on global migration and climate change. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009, and named one of Esquire Magazine's ‘Best and Brightest’ in 2008. She has published articles and essays in Assemblage, Grey Room, ANY, Volume, and Else/Where Mapping, among other books and journals. Source: http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/people.php?id=10
Ganaele Langlois, Assistant Professor of Communication, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media Professor Langlois has recently published a co-authored book entitled The Permanent Campaign – New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang).
Colin Milburn, Associate Professor of English and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities, UC Davis Professor Milburn's research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a member of the Science & Technology Studies Program and the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cinema and Technocultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Theory, as well as the W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Since 2009, he has been serving as the director of the UC Davis Humanities Innovation Lab, an experimental offshoot of the Digital Humanities Initiative. Source: http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/milburn
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University My work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas. First, I have been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals "visualized" a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero. My book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality was published by Duke University Press (2011). Second, I produce texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third Visual Culture Reader was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images. Third, I work on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011. Finally, I am working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First. Source: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html
Katherine Moriwaki, Assistant Professor of Media Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design Professor Moriwaki’s focus is on interaction design and artistic practice. She teaches core curriculum classes in the M.F.A. Design + Technology Program where students engage a broad range of creative methodologies to realize new possibilities in interactive media. Katherine is also currently completing a Ph.D. in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared in numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou, Futuresonic, Break 2.2, SIGGRAPH, eculture fair, Transmediale, ISEA, Ars Electronica, WIRED Nextfest, and Maker Faire. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of venues such as Rhizome.org, Ubicomp, CHI, ISEA, NIME, the European Transport Conference, and the Journal of AI & Society. Her project Umbrella.net, in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen was featured in "New Media Art" by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in 2006. She has taught at a wide variety of institutions and departments, such as Trinity College Dublin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, as has lead workshops on interaction design and the creative re-use of electronic objects around the globe. These "Scrapyard Challenge" workshops have been held thirty-seven times in fourteen countries across five continents. Katherine received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where people and enabling interaction were emphasized over any specific technology. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO. Source: http://www.kakirine.com/?page_id=2
Elias Muhanna, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, Brown University Professor Muhanna teaches courses on classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University in 2012, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law in 2011-12. His current research focuses on classical and early modern encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world, and on particularly on the diverse forms of large-scale compilation during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). In addition to his academic scholarship, Muhanna writes extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition.
Lisa Parks, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara Dr. Parks is a Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of the Department of Feminist Studies. She also currently serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. Parks has conducted research on the uses of satellite, computer, and television technologies in different TRANSnational contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, art, international relations, and communication studies. She has published on topics ranging from secret satellites to drones, from the mapping of orbital space to political uses of Google Earth, from mobile phone use in post-communist countries to the visualization of communication infrastructures. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, and Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 9/11 (forthcoming), and is working on a third book entitled Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She has co-edited three books: Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures, Planet TV, and UNDEAD TV, and is working on a fourth entitled Signal Traffic: Studies of Media Infrastructures. She has served on the editorial boards of 10 peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed to many anthologies and edited collections.
Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh Bagchi, (b. 1965, New Delhi, India), Monica Narula, (b. 1969, New Delhi, India), Shuddhabrata Sengupta, (b. 1968, New Delhi, India) Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces, locates them in the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory — often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai-CSDS, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu and means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance. Selected Exhibitions: 2012 Art Unlimited, Art Basel 2012 solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012 group exhibition of billboards around the city of Birmingham (UK), Ikon Gallery & BCU 2012 solo exhibition Frith Street Gallery 2010 The Things That Happen When Falling In Love, a solo exhibition at Baltic Centre, Gateshead 2010 The Capital of Accumulation, a solo exhibition at Project 88, Mumbai 2010 a group exhibition at 29th Sao Paulo Biennial 2010, Brazil 2010 a group exhibition at 8th Shanghai Biennale, China 2010 The New Décor, a touring group exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London; The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow 2009 The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet, a solo exhibition at Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London 2009 When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes, a solo exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham (UK) 2009 Escapement, a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery 2008 Co-curators for Manifesta 7, Trentino
Nishant Shah, Founder and Director of Research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore Dr. Shah's doctoral work at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009), he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an IT City in India and China. He is the series editor for a three-year collaborative project on "Histories of the Internet(s) in India" that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country. Nishant’s current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples’ use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Working with a community of 150 young people and other stakeholders in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has co-edited a 4-volume book titled Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and an information kit titled D:Coding Digital Natives. Nishant writes regularly for The Indian Express and GQ India to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the intersections of digital technologies and social justice within the higher education space in India. Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia. Source: http://dmlcentral.net/node/4815
Ravi Sundaram, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the post-colonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the post-colonial city. Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe. His current research deals with urban fear after media modernity, where he looks at the worlds of image circulation after the mobile phone, ideas of transparency and secrecy, and the media event. Sundaram was one of the initiators of the Centre’s Sarai programme which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life, (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004) and Turbulence (2006). His other publications include Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2009). Two of his other volumes are No Limits: Media Studies from India (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Delhi’s Twentieth Century (forthcoming, OUP).
Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor, Sociology of Communications, Coordinator, PhD programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’ Tiziana Terranova's Her research interests lie in the area of the culture, science, technology and the economy from the perspective of the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivation. She is the author of Corpi Nella Rete, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, and numerous essays on new media published in journals such as New Formations, Ctheory, Angelaki, Social Text, Theory, Culture and Society, and Culture Machine. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studi Culturali (Il Mulino) and Theory, Culture and Society, a regular participant to the grassroots seminars of the Italian nomadic university ‘uninomade’ and occasionally also a writer on matters of new media for the Italian newspaper Il manifesto.
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick Professor Thrift is one of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists. His current research spans a broad range of interests, including international finance; cities and new forms of political life; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of time. During his academic career Professor Thrift has been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards including the Scottish Geographical Society Gold Medal in 2008, the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research in 2003 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Prior to becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, he was the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oxford. Source: http://liftconference.com/people/nigel-thrift

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects

Alt needs to Shift

nishant — 2012-12-14T10:03:30Z

People maybe talking more online, but they all seem to be talking about the same kind of thing.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on November 18, 2012.

If you were to recount what has happened in the world, based entirely on your tweetosphere and Facebook timelines, you might realise that everything important seems to have happened elsewhere. It is true that we live in a widely connected viral world, where if the USA sneezes, India gets a flu, but it seems as if lately, the things that I hear and read about are generally things that happen only at a global level. More surprisingly, most of the news that trends on Twitter, gets promoted on Facebook, and discussed on Google Plus, is in sync with what is being reported in mainstream media.

Of course, the voices are different. People have found a space for their opinions. There are strong critiques and alternative viewpoints around these events which are finding space in the public domain.

Much like the salons and cafes of the 18th century, which saw a whole range of new educated classes coming into the public to discuss and shape the society they lived in, the digital commons have created new public spaces of expression and discussion. This has been, indeed, one of the visions of the social web and we have reached a point where, at least for digital natives who have grown up within digital ecosystems, there is space to produce alternative opinions in their immediate environments.

At the turn of the millennium, when the social Web was being shaped, this was one of the biggest excitements — the possibility that voices from outside of mainstream and traditional media, which often get curtailed, would find contestations and alternative visions from people’s everyday experiences. And in many ways, it looks like we have achieved this dream, and found channels, communities and information strategies, which allow for conflicting views to co-exist in our knowledge spectrum. It is fascinating to realise that just a decade ago, the ways in which we talked about the key questions of our life, was so different, and was largely controlled by those in positions of power who identified only certain things as “newsworthy”.

Traditional media has also changed dramatically, with citizen reporters contributing to the content, crowdfunded information shaping news, and ordinary people being the first to witness globally significant events before the larger media complexes arrived. And now that we are well on our way to harnessing the power of this social web, there is something else that needs to be addressed.

It is the concern that increasingly people are talking more, but they seem to be talking about the same kind of thing! Sure, there are many different voices, but their focus of attention is the same. We see a whole range of alternative opinions emerging, but they are still clustered around the things that traditional media is also covering.

In the age of information overload, with so many different information streams, it feels like there is a homogenisation of information where increasingly only that which can be easily understood, easily read, easily captured to create spectacles gets to be at the centre of the attention economies. Which is why, news which is local, things which do not have global interest, and events which cannot be captured in videos on YouTube and hashtags on Twitter, do not feature in the alternative worlds of the social web. And when these locally relevant and significant things get mentioned, they have to work so much harder, to overcome the visibility threshold to get attention from the local publics.

We have found the alternative to the mainstream, but maybe it is now time to find the alternative to the alternative. We need to think of localisation of our social web. A lot of effort is made towards being on the global information highway, but we now also need to start investing energy into rendering our local contexts more accessible and intelligible, not only to the larger worlds but also to ourselves. Maybe it is time to reflect on how much we posted, read and consumed of the recent presidential elections in the USA, and try to recollect what else happened in the world. Maybe it is time to step out of our silos where we have replaced multiplicity of things with diversity of opinions about a narrow range of things. The next time you see something trending or popular, it might be a good idea to reflect on what else might be hiding behind the virality of that digital object.

This column was informed by conversations from a thought exploration on ‘Habits of Living’ supported by Brown University and Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/indian-express-nov-18-2012-nishant-shah-alt-needs-to-shift

Habits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society

nishant — 2012-10-23T10:26:19Z

Recently, in Bangalore, a cluster of academics, researchers, artists, and practitioners, were supported by Brown University, to assemble in a Thinkathon (a thinking marathon, if you will) and explore how our new habits of everyday life need to be re-thought and refigured to produce new accounts of what it means to be human, to be friends, and to be connected in our networked societies.

Nishant Shah's column was published in DML Central on October 22, 2012.

There is no denying the fact that life on the interwebz is structured around various negotiations with information. Even as we go blue in the face, in the face of information overload, we have a sacred trust in the idea that information is the new currency of society. In our networked worlds, it is our role and function to transmit information to the nodes we are connected to. On a daily basis, we commit ourselves to the task of producing content, consuming information, relaying and sharing resources, saving and archiving material. We add, through our transactions and interactions, new data sets of information to the already burgeoning world of the web. These information practices, for those of us who are immersed in the info-networks, have become so naturalised, that we have become oblivious to the effort, care, time and resources that go into a sustained engagement with them. They have become a part of our everyday lives, creating structures of comfort and desire, so that the reward and gratification we experience masks the physical and affective energy we invest in sustaining these networks. The discussions at our Thinkathon, spread over four intense days, brought out some really interesting insights I want to map, in a series of posts, providing new ways of thinking about life as created through habits within a network.

Habits of Being Human

One of the most effective human turns the digital networks have produced is about connections. Beyond the interfaces, the platforms, the networks and the infrastructure of access, on the other end is a human being who emerges as a friend, mediated by the huge complex of hardware and software that facilitates this relationship. We have learned how to make these mediations invisible, talking about real-time, and instant messaging, and live-chats, concentrating only on the human actors that engage with us in this networked state of being. This making invisible of the network is not a natural thing. Even for digital natives who are supposed to be immersed in these environments like ‘fish taking to water’, there is a recognition that the network demands time, attention, financial and emotional investment in order to sustain the social relations web we create within these worlds. Wendy Chun from Brown University suggested we have converted these networks into habits – unthinking, visceral, prewired responses that gloss over the toll they take over us. Which is why, for instance, we habitually connect to our networks, and the human beings within that, and yet face information fatigue and network tiredness that takes us by surprise.

Renee Ridgeway (NEWS, Amsterdam) introduced us to the idea that networked habits stand-in for the transactions we make, ignoring the fact that they are largely a commodification of social relationships, making the labour of care invisible in the quantification through systems of Like, Share, Retweet, Follow, Ping, etc. It becomes important to unpack this idea of ‘labour of care’ because we generally think of care as an essentially human condition. Which is why, we connect, share information, help, offer sympathetic shoulders to cry on, for people who are separated from us through geographies and lifestyles. Care is the way in which we separate ourselves from the technological bots and algorithms which can often outstrip us in performing networked habits but cannot emotionally invest in the relations as we human beings can.

Radhika Gajjalla (Bowling Green State University) furthered this notion of care to look at crowdfunding platforms like Kiva and Kickstarter, which essentially bank on the lay-user’s idea of care, and helps them invest a small sum to better the living conditions of somebody in need. She showed us however, that care is not a ‘natural’ response. The interfaces, the representations of the people, the narrative structures of the stories told within these kind of microfinance websites, are all geared towards shaping a particular kind of first world guilt on the user, inviting them to quantify their ‘care’ towards those in the poorer worlds, in need of financial support. The ways in which networks shape our habits, make them natural and encourage us to believe in them as the preconditions of being digitally human, need to be given more attention.

These so-called habits have direct implications on how young people learn and engage with conditions of knowledge production. That which we think of as a natural response within the networked worlds is often a habit that disguises the complex mechanics of control, containment, societal pressures and expectations, and systems of reward and punishment which all get flattened as we rethink what it means to be human in the digital worlds. Looking at the infrastructure, the interface, the processes of training, the threshold of critical competence and the incessant personal investment that is actually labour but is disguised as a habit within the networks of learning, makes us more conscious of the fact that the young users are not ‘born digital’ and nor are they going to become experts left to their own devices. It brings back to the surface the question of the role of technology in education, and the form and function of new knowledge actors in our systems of learning.

Banner image credit: timparkinson http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/3788726140/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/dml-central-blog-oct-22-2012-nishant-shah-habits-living-being-human-networked-society

Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like

nishant — 2012-10-23T10:13:36Z

There aren’t always rational explanations for the ways in which we behave on networks. While there are trend spotting sciences and pattern recognition methods which try to make sense of how and why we behave in these strange ways on networks, they generally fail to actually help us understand why we do the things that we do when we are connected.

Nishant Shah's column was originally published in FirstPost on October 12, 2012.

Recently, in a workshop on ‘Habits of Living’, organised by Brown University (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), a collection of researchers, artists, practitioners and educators came together to understand how networks form these habits that we take for granted in our digital lives.

Habits are unthinking, visceral actions that we do for survival within a network. They are things that we do without even realising that we are doing them – Liking a post, retweeting a tweet, sharing an interesting link, adding pictures on an album. These are all things we do without realising that they distract us from our work, need time, energy, and attention which we could have spent on other tasks. Instead of looking at these as actions which can be rationally explained, we might start looking at them as habits that shape the ways in which we trust, transmit and treasure information online.

Networks are everywhere these days. They are the things that we study and the lens through which we study the world around us. In the last week, I have faced three separate instances that reminded me of how we live in networked societies.

There was the scare that the private messages on facebook have suddenly turned public and available on our timelines for everybody to view. The social network, these simulated fortresses of friendships and trust, suddenly became a place of danger. Conversations which were committed as acts of secrecy emerged as potentially compromising public acts. The network was in my face, blinking red, making me suddenly aware of the fact that the network is not merely something I can take for granted. It is something that works seamlessly for most of the time, is actually something that I cope with, negotiate with, and teach myself to live with, without realising it. The relationship I have with my social network is a lot of work but it gets explained away as ‘habits’ , which are such an everyday part of my digital life that I have stopped looking at it as work.

The second incident was when a friend complained about the hostility she faces when she is not on any of the popular social networks. As an outsider, who refuses by choice, to belong to either Facebook or Google Plus or many of the activity networks (like Instagram, for instance) around, she constantly gets a raised eyebrow, a pointed question and a look of incredulity when she confesses it to somebody. More often than not, she gets treated like digital pariahs, social outcast who is no longer ‘relevant’ in the current scheme of things. She was telling me about how hard she has to work to convince people that she belongs to the communities, even though not to these networks. And how, she is constantly afraid that while she plugs out, people might be saying things about her that she might want to hear but never get to know.

The third is perhaps more common than we would agree to but it deals with multiple identities online. In the world of Wikipedia, there are people who use sock-puppets and meat-puppets, using multiple avatars and identities to make their point, to fake support for their arguments, and to build false consensus in order to win the edit wars that they are fighting. These puppets, that stand in as surrogate structures of real people, are not mere surface structures. They are fleshed out, have personalities, have styles and identities which the users invest in quite passionately. While the community frowns upon these false identities, and indeed social network platforms encourage us to shun all role-play and stick to our one authenticated social identity, these flourish and often gain a life of their own as a shadow double of the user. And yet, everybody knows that these identities are a matter of habits, a collection of ‘things that we do’ which emerge as important actors in the networks.

These habits might offer us an explanation of why we participate in memes, sharing and disseminating information virally across the interwebz. They might also give us an insight into why we troll and transmit viruses and spam, to friends in the networks, even when we do not mean to. They might help us understand why we are suffering from such an information fatigue, even when we have smart algorithms and softwares constantly sifting through the information web and filtering customised results for us.

The idea of the network as a series of habits opens up a new way to thinking about all the three instances, which I described above. It shows that the networks become invisible in our everyday practice, thus creating a condition of false crisis, because they are simultaneously transparent and opaque. It shows that networks are not ‘natural’ but take a lot of effort and energy to sustain – something that digital natives might take to easily but are not kind to digital immigrants, settlers or non-inhabitants, who cannot invest as much time in their networked lives, thus creating new demography of exclusion.

And it shows that the network, despite the much acclaimed wisdom of the crowds, can be easily manipulated by those who learn how to fake conditions of life and living within the simulated networked environments. And it would explain why, if I end this column by asking you to go to Google Images and search for “completely wrong”, partly out of curiosity, partly because of expectation, and partly because of habit, you will run the search strings anyway, in the process, supporting the network but also reinforcing your habits of information search and connections.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like

Who’s that Friend?

nishant — 2012-11-04T06:46:10Z

If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express and in the Financial Express on October 7, 2012.

We have all received messages of this order — if not exactly this much silliness — on the various social networks that we belong to. These are messages that warn us that our security is breached, our data is unsafe, that our transactions are public, and all the sensitive information we have trusted to the different platforms on the Web, is now up for grabs.

The best of us have fallen prey to such messages of alarm, and have “shared”, “liked”, or “retweeted” them, and in retrospect felt foolish when we realised that the message was just a hoax. For those of us who are savvy with the ways of the Web, even when we are sending these messages, there is an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, but we do it nevertheless, joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists who make this world enchanting and mysterious in its quotidian banality. These messages are common, harmless and habit-forming — they spread, even when we recognise that they are not completely plausible — because we have formed habits online, which we immediately perform, before rational thought or reason sets in.

At a recent Thought Marathon on “Habits of Living”, supported by Brown University and organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, a handful of scholars, artists, practitioners and researchers examined how such habits shape the world of the digital. One of the concerns about such habits of viral dissemination is about the design of trust and the nature of friendship in our social networking systems. How do you trust information online? What is the information that uses you as a conduit, disseminating through you into the network? What role do we play in keeping these messages alive, by spreading them, by talking about them, by retracting and discussing them, giving them more value than they could muster on their own?

At the centre of all these questions is the idea of proximity, intimacy and friendship. Within the social Web, we have all become “friends”. The six degrees of separation have fallen — every lurker is a potential friend, just waiting to be authenticated by a system, tagged in a photo, connected by a weak link of interest or closeness. These friends are our social safety nets on the Net. They give us a sense of belonging and safety when we are committing our intensely personal and private data on the publically private digital platforms. Despite knowing that information we produce online is going to be archived in servers over which we have no control, in forms and formats that will outlive our social relations and indeed, our very lives, we constantly produce data that quantifies and marks our social relationships. We commit secrets and private thoughts to “friends” in the network.

However, friendship within the social network is a non-reciprocal one-way transmission of secrets. The covenant of digital friendship on Facebook is that we pass on a secret to a friend, knowing well, that the act of passing on the secret expects a betrayal of that secret. The information that we submit to somebody to show our trust, has already been witnessed, stored, archived and mapped by the code and algorithms that make that system. Which is why, we live in constant fear of our data being compromised by the “system” which is both vulnerable and fragile. Which is why, we are continually bombarded by warnings of glitches in the matrix, outside of our control, reminding us of the fearful precariousness of being on the Web.

And yet, the trolling messages and the way they spread, remind us that in the system, it is the “friend” who is invariably the person who puts us in danger. There are almost no documented cases of a system endangering the person who shares information on the social Web. The leak in the network is always done through a human actor — somebody who is close to us, somebody who we trust — who invariably passes on that secret to another “friend” in the network. Similarly, the chances of your machine getting infected by a random virus by a stranger are very low. The people who infect you are those you trust, because you receive information from them without questioning it. An attachment in the email, a link to a dodgy site, instructions asking for personal details are all safe because we are naturally suspicious of strangers bearing candy. But when these questions come from our “friends”, we drop our guards and accept viruses, share personal data, give out compromising pictures, putting ourselves in conditions of threat.

This is the fundamental paradox of the social Web — that those who we trust, are generally the primary sources who put us in danger, and yet, because we think of them as “friends”, we continue to trust them, while remaining suspicious of the systems that are far more benign than the humans in the network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Closing Remarks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:27:31Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners. The aim of the workshop is to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Nishant Shah closed the Habits of Living Thinkathon in Bangalore by disclosing that there truly was no blueprint planned for the event, as all of the participants were so diverse. There are future events already planned, and a repeat event with the same participants was mentioned for a year’s time from now.

Some of the next steps suggested by Nishant are the creation of a course based on the Habits of Living events run by the same participants and a publication of sorts on the work and themes that were discussed over the course of the event. Oliver discussed some future events that he will be involved in that he hopes some of the participants will be able to become involved in. Following this, Nishant suggested that some structure of circulation, feedback, interaction and/or sharing be set up so the participants can continue to stay updated and involved in each others’ work. Tumblr and wikipages were suggested.

Participants were interested in creating a digital publication on the discussions that took place during the Thinkathon. The creation of a course, and even a textbook, was also well received by the participants.

Gita Chadha felt that the process of the event and the discussions was very useful and conducive to sharing and reflection without being overwhelmed. She felt very strongly that the event was very helpful in helping her to draw parallels and connection between her work and the themes of the Thinkathon. She also felt that inviting an economist, even a political economist, might bring an interesting view to future events.

Nishant suggested that each member write a guest blog for the website on their presentations, which the participants felt was an excellent idea. Nishant also suggested requesting blogs from the invited participants who could not make it to the Thinkathon, as well as extending the invitation to anyone the participants felt would be able to bring useful viewpoints to the discussions.

The participants expressed gratitude at their involvement in the event and excitement for future events and activities with the group, and Nishant was thanked heartily by the group.

CIS would like to thank Brown University and the Brown Indian Initiative for supporting the Thinkathon, and Wendy Chun for making it possible. We would also like to thank the participants for taking part in the event and for making it a huge success! Thank you!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-closing-remarks

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Namita A Malhotra on Amateur Pornography

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:23:05Z

We found Namita Malhotra’s presentation on amateur video porn to be particularly stimulating. However, she begins her discussion not with porn but with the Sumeet Mixie, the first mixie made for Indian food. At the time that the Sumeet Mixie had its heyday, it was largely inaccessible to most Indians, even those in the mid-level middle class. The mixie, Namita claimed, was a representation of a crisis of the middle class in India in the 1980s, a representation of the progress that was promised to them through Nehru’s development programs that was still largely out of reach for the average Indian. Namita draws parallels between a picture of her father, a young engineer, with Nehru and the famous picture of Nehru with the Santhali tribal girl, who, at some point after the famous shot of her inaugurating a dam, placed a garland around Nehru and was subsequently ostracized from her village on the grounds that she had become married to him. Namita’s father’s life was also heavily influenced by Nehru and his call for engineers, as he was pressured to become an engineer when he had little interest in doing so.

Both the lives of her father and the Santhali girl were changed by the actions that they were asked to perform for the good of the country. Indians across the country were pushed to change their life, their dreams, and their habits in return for progress, for development, especially that of the Western kind. The reward was liberalization and a move towards consumerism, a duty that was placed upon the middle class as an activity of their earned progression but remained largely impossible. This struggle between the expectation to consume as a function of their hard-earned middle class status and their inability to do so was just one of many crises of the 1980s Indian middle class. Namita describes this period using two iconic phrases: “Life was hard and slow” and “a long afternoon of underdevelopment.”

Moving on from discussions of Nehru and the middle class, Namita presents to us her work, jointly titled: Nehru’s Technologically Enabled Future or It Could Be Me. She enters into the discussion of amateur porn in India by showing us a 2-3 minutes video clip of the women’s section of a bus. The women are standing or sitting, and their activity barely changes over the period of the video. The eroticism, she suggests, could be in the suggestion of activities that could take place. It is the seemingly non-erotic images in India that have become some of the most defining features of amateur porn in India, both currently and in the past.

In past decades, the consumption of porn largely took place in communal male spaces. However, the event of a somewhat non-erotic clip of a teenage couple negotiating the terms of oral sex being auctioned on a website led to what Namita calls a “moment of sexual eureka”: the realization that amateur clips could be shared online. This led to a flood of amateur porn being circulated and shared through online networks. This eventually prompted a response from the state, though the response was largely one of confusion towards who or what was really responsible—the individual, the network or the technology? The state, of course, is not afraid of the content of the clips but the networks and connections that they cannot see nor trace.

Namita then moves on to a discussion of content of much amateur Indian porn. Much of the media that is created and consumed on mobile phones is grainy and low resolution, and even higher-resolution image clips tend to be highly un-staged with little to no focus on performance. There is a creation of anonymity through the way many clips are filmed, with one participant holding the camera and focuses being placed on body parts instead of faces. Where, then, does the eroticism come from? Namita argues that the familiarity and ability to relate and be present as a viewer in these amateur videos creates its own eroticism. The same can be said about the realness of videos whose purpose is not performance of sexual acts by ideal bodies.

This creation of eroticism indicates possible discussion of surrogacy. Erotica stands in for sex, masturbation stands in for sex, etc. Surrogacy may be useful in completing this conversation about eroticism and Indian amateur porn.

Participants were unsure about the connection between Nehru’s paradigms and amateur porn, and felt that it needed a bit more fleshing out. Discussion then moved towards ideas of transgressive epistemologies, and whether or not the culture and networks situated around amateur porn where sites of transgressive practices. There was debate around what the purpose of the transgression is—recovering ground in visual culture? Gaining control over one’s corporeality? Ultimately, Namita was wary of invoking a transgressive framework around these cultures, and put forth pleasure as a more interesting and useful frame, as there is always a sexual layer involved. She felt that a transfessive framework may be limiting in the exploration of these cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-amateur-photography

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:18:59Z

Wendy Chun talked to us today about what it means to be a friend. She began with a brief overview of network theory, with a focus on the dilemmas of the constant mapping. Moving on, she asked us to think about how networks are related to habits, as habits focus us on the duration of events. This is important for the understanding of networks, as networks require the constant generation of associated events that seem stable. Wendy then asked us to think about the difference between communities and networks, and helped us to think about the extent that networks are imagined (in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the imagined). Throughout this discussion, she continues to come back to the theme of “you,” the idea that networks enable us not only to see ourselves and our place in relation to other nodes in the network, but that simultaneous access of a network, a moment of “we,” will actually cause the network to fall into crisis,

Using this “you” framework, Wendy moves onto a discussion of the internet and how it has moved from being seen as a anonymous free space to a semi-private space where freedom stems from private authentication by others in your network. It is at this point that she asks us how we understand the idea of “friend”; are friendships mutual bonds created for support in times of crisis, or are they sometimes one-way affections where the act of requesting friendship creates the connection? How much has friendship become about broadcasting our connections—our place in the network?

Cyber friendship, especially in the Facebook understanding of “friend,” becomes a method that we can use to understand our strange relationship with safety on online spaces—we desire security, and want to trust and authenticate our relationships with friends, but by pursuing this we can often put our friends into danger, or at least into realms that may not always be seen as “safe”, which now is often interpreted as “private.” For example, by “liking” a friend’s link on Facebook, we create tangible information for Facebook to collect and use about both our friends and ourselves. This method of capturing data only works when you are enmeshed in a network of friends. If our need for safety/privacy is what places in danger on the Internet, it is not security that tames networks by personalizing them that will help us; instead, we need to understand and accept that intimacy and danger in online spaces go hand-in-hand.

As a finishing note, Wendy describes to us a phishing attack that she suffered. After clicking a link sent to her by a friend on Facebook, she sent phishing spam to all of her friends—all of the members of her network. This event created a moment of understanding for her, as she realized that her spam messages reminded her friends that they were part of her network, and that she liked them enough to put them at risk.

Participant discussion began with a focus on how theory becomes implicated into networks, and how networks can be used to give oversights of theory. Participants asked: what does theorizing networks do to the networks, and the members in the networks? Can Facebook be seen as theory, particularly in the ideas of the existence of events without witnesses and how friendships are created and understood?

Participants also pointed out that it is wrong to be suspicious of organizations like Facebook, because it is not Facebook that betrays you but your friends. This is the implicit agreement of Facebook friendship—the agreement to be friends implicates the transmission of secrecy/vulnerability. Machines cannot betray, but humans, friends, can and often do, even in ways that may be involuntary.

Further discussion focused on both how friendships and application suggestions give us the ability to understand how we are building and presenting ourselves. This two-way communication with technologies that implicate networks puts us into a state of permanent crisis where we must continue to be active to connect, as connecting becomes the main activity of becoming and staying networked. This moved into a discussion on the creation of traces of networks that are constantly in motion, and constantly on the verge of disappearing.

Wendy’s discussion of friendship as an often one-way activity, particularly on Facebook where one member must request friendship with another, was a completely new way of thinking about the essence of friendship for me. How much does this cyber, “Facebook” method of creating friendship through the declaration of association cut into the real world? Are nonhuman agreements of friendship (i.e.: Facebook friends) reflections of significant real-world events, in the sense that they are often a nonhuman promise to pursue future friendship in the physical world that is made real through its broadcast on the network? What does this mean for real-world meetings that don’t cumulate in “friending”? What happens to the structure of real-world friendship if the promise of friendship that was broadcasted is never followed through? What does “defriending” mean? What does defriending do to networks?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-wendy-chun-on-friends

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Finding and Funding the Masses

alok — 2012-10-09T06:55:50Z

Nishant Shah of the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore began the final day of the THinkathon with his presentation “Citizen action in the time of the network: beyond spectacles of change.” Nishant begins by describing the climate of the current digital moment. We are dealing with unprecedented questions of territory. Democratic states are facing resistance with their promising notes for the future. With increasingly queer boundaries between ‘citizen’ and ‘State’ mediated by digital relations, we are looking at a radical re-imagining of the role of the State and its sovereignty.

These past few years – in the midst of the Arab Spring – we’ve heard a lot about the new era of digital activism. Shah is interested in pinpointing what is actually ‘new’ about this activism. He begins with a bold assertion: this newness is indicative of new forms of citizen action, but not necessarily new infrastructures of activism. Shah argues that what is actually ‘new’ about this activism is that these digital technologies present an imperative that (activist) events be rendered intelligible and accessible within their paradigms. These technologies presume that a legible and intelligible network exists, despite temporal and geographical differences. What becomes evident is that the system makes invisible those actions that cannot be interpreted by the system – they only recognise actions that can be accounted for by the system. The study of networks presents a problematic proposition because of its self-referential network – any phenomenon is explained only through its relationality with other phenomena. To illustrate this, Shah presents the provocative question: “If a tree falls in a lonely forest and nobody tweets about it, has it really fallen?” The very acts of witnessing have been replaced by tools of networking.

Shah roots his epistemology within a case study of the Shanzhai Spring Festival Gala in China. He shows how discourse around this event has marked it as a ‘failed’ event and representative of how there can be no citizen action within authoritarian contexts. Shah suggests that another way of looking at this event is a phenomenon which cannot be accounted for by the network – a radical critique presented by activists that cannot be rendered intelligible by the current system. This raises a larger anxiety for Shah and the participants: if events do not become accessible it always gets counted as a failure and gets lost in public memory.

Shah’s presentation raised vibrant discussion on the politics of visibility, knowing, and the avante-garde. Participants suggested that Nishant look into the work of artists and theorists like Ariella Azoulay who attempt to conceptualise actions outside of the paradigm of rights, citizenship, and propriety. What does it mean to do in action knowing that it will be shut down – a politics of despair, if you will. What also becomes apparent is the limits of revolution – there has not been a transformation of a system. Rather, the system has included more citizens into its fold. The conversation reveals that we need to find a more critical way to discuss networks – a language in which the network is not clichéd, but rather porous.

Renée Ridgway from NEWS Amsterdam follow’s Shah’s presentation with her presentation “Surrogacy: Bodies, States, Networks: Crowdfunding for funding the crowds, a new model for the distribution of wealth?” Ridgway takes a departure from other presentations by directly implicated the participants in one of her current art projects. Ridgway reviews one of her current research-art projects on documenting indigenous plants in Kochin Kerela – a location with histories of Dutch colonialism. Ridgway has visited and exhibited in Kerela in the past and is now interested in expanding on her work and developing a documentary about these issues. She asks the participants: how does she fund this project without the State?

In rooting questions of State reparation, (neo)colonialism, race, and other central political questions within a tangible project – Ridgway invites the crowd into critical discussion. Participants remain wary of the way in which technology can serve as a ‘trojan horse’ to build collaboration with communities. What becomes apparent is that Ridgway, as an artist, has become a surrogate for the State for the people she worked with on the project in India. Questions of collaboration remained central to this discussion – how do we imagine collaboration as a condition of care by the network, one that requires investment and material labour to perform a particular task. Also, questions of neoliberalism emerged. What is a collective process that relies on affective and material labour by diverse peoples becomes lost in the narrative of ‘individual’ artist.

I share participants concern that we complicate the role of an artist. What becomes apparent is that dynamics of class, race, and (neo)colonilism can manifest themselves in the technological realm. While I agree that technology can present a compelling platform to explore solidarities and collaborations across difference, it can simultaneously function as a site that reifies these oppressions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-finding-and-funding-the-masses

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Eivind Rossaak on Archives in Motion

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:39:46Z

Eivind Rossaak talks to us today about Archives in Motion, and how networks, especially those created though interaction with technology and social media, have consequences for the way we conceptualize the idea of the archive. He runs us through a brief introduction to archival theory to helps us understand how the purpose, structure, and function of archives and their artifacts have changed over time, and leads us into an exploration of contemporary developments and discourses on archives. Currently, Rossaak is interested in themes of counter-memory practices, software vs. memory, and whether or not social media is a form of archives in motion.

When approaching social media as forms of archives in motion, Rossaak calls on us to think differently about how we understand archival activities. Using the example of Youtube, Rossaak reminds us that we can’t just think of Youtube as a video archive or a repository of confessionary personal information, but instead we should begin to see Youtube as a platform of networked documents, and a site of network creation. Youtube videos are essentially linked; they are not just video logs, but emerge as the expressions of nodes in a complex network database.

Eivind calls upon the example of the Boxxybabe meme to help us understand this new way of being networked. The Boxxybabe video did not just go viral, it cut across many spheres of human interaction and activity, to the point where the identities and activities created by the Boxxybabe meme were experienced in both the online and offline worlds. The Boxxybabe video becomes a technological article in itself, as it testifies to multiple networks. Further, it represents new forms of associations created between objects that are both human and non-human, and motions towards a cyborg turn in the way we become human through the extension of human lives in cybernetic networks. The networks created by this plasticity between the human and nonhuman leads to new methods of social memory creation, and therefore new understandings of archives in motion.

Rossaak’s presentation prompts an ardent response from the participants. Participants discussed issues of anxiety associated with memory failure and how this leads to the desire to preserve. This leads into an exploration of what an archive really is and whether archives require institutionality or can be understood as personal. In this understanding, there is no need for counter-archives because archives are being built everywhere, all the time, and this facilitates the understanding of social media as archives. Participants agree that further study should be pursued around this concept.

Other issues are brought up around subjects that were not addressed in the summary of archival theory, mainly around ideas of locationality and objectivity in the collection of information for archives, selectivity of information that goes into archives, the labor of the archive, and the implication of locationality in the understanding and function of archives.

A large amount of further discussion is centered on the human and non-human elements of archive and network creation, and the activity of becoming human through the creation of non-human networks. Nishant Shah, our facilitator, sums up the main theme of this discussion with the following tweet: “If our idea of the human is mitigated through the non-human, then all attempts at being human will always be about being networked.”

Personally, I thought the concept of archives in motion was incredibly interesting, and I would like to push the ideas of the motion and a recreation of what it is to be human a bit further. I wonder if these structures of social memory and complex offline/online networks that are created through interaction with social media actually represent a movement not only towards our abandonment of the concept of an event or object of being rooted in time, only able to be understood and documented once it has ended (therefore allowing us, using a linear structure of time, to understand it by viewing its beginning point and end point), but also towards viewing ourselves as being in motion, as well. What does it mean to be a human in motion? Does it mean the abandonment of linear temporality? Am I able to see myself, my identity, as not rooted in time but as a node in a network of my self? Can personal conceptualizations of “self” be networked? Is this what it means to be a human in motion?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-archives-in-motion

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Rijuta Mehta on Militant Hindu Nationalist Networks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:34:59Z

Rijuta Mehta talked to us today about networks of Hindu militant nationalism, which she has termed “Hindutva” networks. Through her back in cultural media studies, she has become interested in the creation and existence of non-citizens as well as the interaction between the state and the stateless person. Using the larger framework of non-citizenship and the media, Rijuta has been trying to make sense of the militant Hindutva movements that are abound in India.

Rijuta argues that a good way of understanding these movements is by using a network framework, particularly one that recognizes the integral part that is played by interaction between the various networks and that these networks are characterized by the politics of non-citizenship—that is, those that are excluded from the Hindutva networks are non-citizens. Mehta asks us: What is the form of these networks, and what do they have to do with the persecution of non-citizens in India? To what extent does Hindutva make the form of the network visible in political society and political violence? How do networks of dispossession and externalism give and take form? What is the form of the Hindutva network(s)?

To help answer some of these questions, Mehta walks us through a brief history of the growth of Hindutva groups in India, and describes to us how their characterization has changed over time. Hindutva has moved from being a collection of networks of those who identify as Hindu to a multilevel movement known for its violence against Muslims and those it views as non-citizens. The Hindutva organization is characterized by many branches of networks, which has allowed for the expression of many different beliefs and ideologies within the overarching framework of Hindutva. However, though the networks may appear to be decentralized, the groups are still dependent on a hierarchal stratification of central nodes of power. This complex structure of authority allows for niches for petty/local sovereigns.

Mehta points out at this point that the public often sees networks as being emancipatory, but in the example of the Hindutva, this has to be questioned. We should expect to see networks being created in instances of mediated rule and patron-clientalism, both of which lead to the structure of civil society being characterized by the creation of multiple networks centralized around middlemen. Networked associations such as these tend to enable higher incidences of violence, and can even lead to long-term entrenched violence. Consequently, networks should not be seen as being ultimately emancipatory, as they can be the cause of more established structures of oppression.

Participants were quick to discuss the use of the word “Hindutva” when describing these networks. It was pointed out that in a Supreme Court of India ruling, Hindutva was defined as “the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos,” and that Hindutva could encompass any type of Hinduism. Discussion arose over whether or not there are non-problematic Hindutva networks. Many participants argued that though Hindutva is now associated with the militant right-wing, it may still be incorrect to called the violent or aggressive Hindu nationalist movement Hindutva because the borders between the militant Hindutva networks and various other non-militant or even non-nationalistic Hindu networks are not clear.

Bringing it back to habits and living, discussions were brought up about the similarities between Hinduism as a lifestyle, as being part or a guiding structure to habits and living, and Christianity as a lifestyle. In many places in the USA, many people who are not orthodoxly religious still perform religious activities simply because it is part of their habit and lifestyles, and those practices are so deeply engrained into the culture and everyday life of those Americans. This is where the term Hindutva becomes problematic as simply a term to describe militant nationalist networks, as Hindutva can also be seen as a structure of everyday life for many Indians.

I thought the discussion about the use of the term Hindutva was very important, as the use of an all-encompassing term with unclear boundaries can vilify groups or individuals who do not identify with the popular understanding of Hindutva as a militant nationalist group. I also thought that the point about mediated rule and patron-clientalism is a highly interesting avenue for the research of networks and how network structures interact with the state and the political sphere, as they can influence both the development of a legitimate political regime as well as the creation of citizen and non-citizen identities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-militant-hindu-nationalist-networks

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Joshua Neves on Media Archipelagos

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:04:53Z

Joshua Neves presents two areas of his work today. The first presentation is about his research on what he calls “media archipelagos,” a project that was inspired by island studies and grew into a focus on inter-Asian film festivals. The use of the term “archipelagos,” Neves argues, is a much more useful way of conceptualizing islands and “edge” communities—regions that are often thought about in terms of their isolation or juxtaposition against the mainland—than the current understanding of these regions as disconnected or “fringe.”

The idea of an archipelago of these fringe regions becomes particularly useful when we attempt to realize, or even map, the networks that are beginning to characterize the media industries in these areas of the world, especially in the study of film festivals. Exclusively Asian film festivals like BUSAN represent the emergence of what Neeves calls “minor media capitals” in the periphery, which are significant entry points (nodes) in a network or multitude of networks that exist outside of or even parallel to the core’s networks (the implications of the use of dependency theory terms was not discussed). Increasingly, these minor media capitals are becoming important sites of the production of Asian experience and Asian identity.

Of course, true to network theory, the mapping of these media networks, even within the archipelago framework, only leads to the discovery of more networks, or at least ways of thinking about these networks. Joshua asks us: are these networks at the edge or networks made up of edges? Do different networks characterize continental islands and oceanic islands? The only certainty is that there are many different ways of imagining these networks.

In his second presentation, Neves discusses with us another one of his research projects focused around mobile TV in post-socialist China. Mobile television has become common-place in most public spaces in urban China. Public squares, train stations, subways and buses—Television screens, and almost constant programming, can be found in all of the spaces. Many of these screens are aimed towards capturing the gaze of migrant populations, which Joshua finds particularly interesting and has become a major site of inquiry in this work.

Because mobile TV is tailored to time and location, the common model of televisuality as being distant and uninfluenced by the individual viewer has been reconstructed. Specific viewers at specific places are viewing programming that has been created specifically for their consumption, and the experience is becoming seamless, in that the average urban Chinese individual moves from one screen to the next throughout their daily activities. Joshua asks: what is it to be seamless? How do we become seamless? How does homelessness interplay with seamlessness in this context?

In the discussion, participants debated the use of the term “archipelagos,” particularly for islands, because there was a worry that the term did not invoke the complexity of many of the regions that it could encompass. Issues were also brought up with conceptualizing periphery media centres in the same way as core media centres, the structures of power in the dependency theory framework, and whether or not seamlessness could be invoked in the characterization of archipelago networks. Discussions about the habits of living as being temporal or spatial were also brought up, which led into a discussion of habits versus practice and habitus.

I actually found Neves' use of the word Archipelagos to be very useful for the conceptualization of "fringe" networks, as I felt that it was a term that invoked geography more than essence. I was troubled by the use of dependency theory in his presentation, but his reasoning for its use ("I like using problematic terms; they create dialogue") was satisfying for me. I think, though, that we must look closer at the film festival as a site of identity creation. How is this process happening? Why? Through films or the event itself? What type of films, then, are being rewarded? Is this influencing the types of identities being produced? Are these sites also producing restrictions on what is acceptable as "Asian" and asian identity?

I was also very intrigued by the participants’ further discussion of habitus and its relation to the entrenchment of power relations and unequal systems. Development, participants reasoned, is impeded by habits as they reinforce an understanding of the socio-cultural world. Without getting into a discussion on highly troublesome use of the word development, this is a problematic claim for me, as it infers that habitus is homogenous across multiple individuals. While I do not disagree that there must be patterns of habitus in certain groups or networks, the experience of socialization that leads to habitus must be different for each individual, especially overtime as their navigate the creation of their own identity. This idea of habitus-as-impediment also gestures towards a set of habits that are static over time.

This is an interesting claim for development theory, especially in the context of relating networks to habits, as the starting point of development would then be to identify the cultural habitus (i.e. map the network), which would cause the network to fall into crisis. Is this not similar to the colonial process of dismantling local culture?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-media-archipelagos

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Akansha Rastogi's Performance on Exhibition Space

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:09:29Z

Akansha Rastogi changes the pace of the afternoon session with a lecture—nay, a performance—on the form in exhibition spaces. Using language that can only be called poetry, she leads us through the biology of an image, and asks us to archive the image to the point of exhaustion and non-meaning. Though image analysis, she helps us to think about images through how they are accessed, to read their stories through their creators, their viewers, their past and present and their correspondences with the elements inside and out of the exhibition space—everything but the actual meaning of the image as art.

Towards the end of her presentation, Rastogi switches from prose to a discussion of her work, in which she divulged to us that many of the images she works with are from events that she was not involved in, and that she approached them as an outsider, a lurker. This allowed her to imagine and map the networks that were implicated in the exhibitions.

The participants were very pleased by the form that Rastogi had used in her presentation, though a debate was generated around whether or not it was art piece. Another artist in the crowd interpreted it as a performance lecture, and was critical of the discussion of Rastogi’s work in the end. Other participants and Rastogi herself defended the discussion of the project in the end, as it was useful in helping the participants understand the layers and context of the documentation.

Another large discussion that was spurred by the performance was centered on the method of network mapping that Rastogi put forward, and whether or not the claim that we must be outside of a network to see it is valid or not. Further, participants debated the role that locationality played in the mapping of networks, especially if networks could be mapped from within.

Participants were also interested in the concepts of “parasite” in the performance and its relation to surrogacy. While it was almost universally agreed that surrogacy was a troublesome concept that required further study, there was general contention around whether characterized terms like “parasite” or “epiphyte” were useful for discussion of surrogacy, and if more useful conceptualizations of surrogacy needed to move beyond the use of bounded language.

I was very intrigued by the discussions of inclusion and exclusion in the viewing and mapping of networks. Like many participants, I found the claims of required exclusion in order to view a network to be problematic. I agree that it may be easier to perceive a network when we are on the outside of it, but I don’t agree that it’s a pre-requisite. I think that this sort of “logical-academic” way of thinking about networks—that we need to be in a position of study, which requires an overview of all the various bits and pieces—places networks in an essence of structure that I am not sure is useful or not. Maybe the ability to see only certain parts of a network, which may be a position we find ourselves in when we are part of the network, is a better way of understanding the network, particularly its locationality, its presence, and its purpose, than comprehending it through the identification of all of its parts (i.e.: mapping).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-exhibition-space

Habits of Living: Surrogate States, Bodies and Networks, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2012-09-28T12:40:30Z

The Centre for Internet & Society is organising the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012.

Schedule

26^th September, Wednesday

9:30 – Registration and Tea

10:00 – Introduction – Wendy Chun, Nishant Shah

11:00 – Pecha-kucha presentations followed by Q&A from all the participants

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Akansha Rastogi, Shiv Nadar Museum, New Delhi

16:00 – Oliver Lerone Schulz, Post Media Lab, Lueneburg

19:00 – Welcome Banquet @ Jaymahal Palace with other invitees

27^th September, Thursday

10:00 – Radhika Gajalla, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green

11:30 – Saumya Pant, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

13:00 – Lunch

14:30 – Deepak Menon, India Water Portal, Bangalore

14:00 - Joshua Neeves, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:30 – Eivind Rossaak, National Library of Norway, Oslo

19:00 – Trip to down-town Bangalore (optional)

28^th September, Friday

07: 30 – Bangalore Heritage Walk (optional)

11:30 – Maya Ganesh (via Skype), Tactical Technologies, Berlin

13:30 – Lunch

14:30 – Rijuta Mehta, Brown University, Rhode Island

16:00 – Wendy Chun, Brown University, Rhode Island

19:00 – Dinner at South Indies, Infantry Road

29^th September, Saturday

09:30 – Maesy Angelina, AusAid, Jakarta

11:00 – Renee Ridgway, NEWS, Amsterdam

12:30 – Lunch

14:00 – Gita Chadha, SNDT Women’s College, Mumbai

15:30 – Open Board: Habits of Living

17:00 – Wrap up and next steps

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/habits-of-living

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: On Technology and Affective Indian Feminism(s)

alok — 2012-10-09T09:39:08Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Saumya Pant from the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad begins the day with a controversial and important talk "For the Love of Child? The Economy of Desire in Cases of Transnational Surrogacy". Pant invites us into the taboo world of international couples travelling to India to receive a child from a surrogate mother. After Oprah featured a story on Indian commercial surrogacy mothers, India has seen a surfeit of foreign couples looking for a — comparatively inexpensive — surrogate mother. Surrogate mothers must be between 20 to 45 years old, married, and have at least one child. They stay in carefully regulated spaces and are provided with vitamins, extravagant meals, and access to a television. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s theory of affective economies, Pant is interested in privileging the narratives of the Indian surrogates themselves. What motivates them to participate in this emotional journal of ten months?

Inspired by transnational feminist analyses, Pant concedes that one’s privilege in the world system is always linked to another women’s oppression and exploitation. However Pant wants to push and tease out this analysis — asking us to re-imagine the agency and affectual relations that mediate these surrogacy interactions. Pant shows how emotions actually do things in these interactions. Emotions circulate and create relationships of attachment between child, surrogate mother, commercial parents. This affect is not permanent, rather it is ephemeral. Pant traces these circulations of economies of hope and love and shows how Indian surrogate mothers position themselves as a 'giver' — in the most non-capitalist sense of the idea — to construct and experience surrogacy as a legitimate choice.

Pant’s project raised serious issues of methodology for the participants. One participant felt that in the turn to affect theory, we neglect the very real experiences of pain and exploitation that are apparent in these interactions. All in attendance re-iterated the importance of understanding how women perceive their own bodies, versus the various theories that govern how they should see their bodies. Others discussed how this project presents a useful opportunity to tease out the ‘body’ from the ‘bodily.’

Indeed, it seems as if Pant has stumbled on a very compelling research project — one which raises serious questions of (post)colonialism, citizenship, tourism, ethics, among others. I’m particularly intrigued by exploring the possibility of the Indian surrogate mother as a Global South queer figure. Much theorising in Western queer scholarship (especially explorations in queer temporality) has positioned ‘queerness’ as opposed to ‘reproduction.’ The surrogate mother calls this framing into question – how is reproduction mapped differently on bodies of women of color in the Global South? How can we imagine queer ways of actually participating in reproductive economies?

Gita Chadha from Mumbai ended the day by sharing her perspective on Thinkathon themes from her background in Feminist Science Studies. Chadha begin with raising her concerns with the metaphor of surrogacy — what does it mean to use a metaphor that is derived from such a potentially traumatic and embodied situation of women? Chadha outlines a brief history of the development of South Asian Feminist Science studies and then follows this summary by asserting that there are three major relational cognitive-affects of modernity that we continue to produce in postmodern times: the self system, the truth system, and the community system. For Chadha, the wholeness of these categories is contested in contemporary times with the digital turn: the self becomes hyphenated, the truth becomes destabilised, and the community fractured.

Coming at this digital moment from a feminist background Chadha reminds us how feminist positions on technology have shifted from viewing women as victims of technology to women as active claimants of technology. She then highlighted the particular challenge of Indian feminists who discuss issues of technology in negotiating their relationship to Western scholarship, including Dona Harraway. After reviewing this genealogy, Chadha argues that currently the real and the virtual in a sense serve as surrogates for each other and deliver a sense of self, a notion of truth(iness), and experience of community.

Chadha concludes by applying this feminist epistemology to the Pink Chaddi Campaign — a recent expression of ‘collective rage’ put forth by Indian women tired of the State’s regulation of the public space. Chadha draws our attention to the way that digital media was central to this campaign. While some critical feminist voices felt that the use of the chaddi in this campaign undermined the seriousness of the issue of violence against women, Chadha asks us to see how truth and community shift and are mediated by technology in these campaign spaces.

Chadha’s framework allowed participants to talk about how what gets lost in science is the technology of science itself – how science valorises one scholar at the cost of collaborative processes. Once again questions of the efficacy of the visual domain arise. What does it mean to prioritise the visual within the affective turn? What also emerges is the ability to assert a truth with limited knowledge.

I find Chadha’s commitment toward feminism as a particular epistemological/theoretical perspective (versus simply a mode of activism) very important. Discussions in media/digital theory often assume a de-gendered subject and Chadha does good work in bringing in the critical question of gender difference within our discussion of theory and networks.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-technology-and-feminism