Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Native: Cause an Effect

nishant — 2018-06-26T15:21:01Z

Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 17, 2018.

Statistically, it has been proven, that the consumption of ice cream in the country increases significantly in the summer months. In the same months, the number of housebreak incidents also increase. It might be possible, though ridiculous, to now make an argument that eating ice cream leads to increased frequencies of housebreakings, and, hence, sale and consumption of ice cream should be regulated more rigorously. The humour in this situation arises out of the fact that we know, at a very human level, that correlation is not the same as causation.

We know that just because two things happen in temporal or spatial proximity with each other doesn’t necessarily mean they are connected or responsible in a chain of events. This is because human communication is designed to make a distinction between cause-and-effect relationship and happened-together relationship between two sets of information.

However, when it comes to computation, things turn slightly different. Within the database logics of computation, two sets of data, occurring in the same instance, are subjected to a simple scrutiny: Either one of them is linked with the other, or, one of the two is noise, and, hence, needs to be removed from the system. Computation systems are foundationally anchored on logic. Within logical systems, all the events and elements described in the system are interlinked and have a causal relationship with each other. Computational learning systems, thus, do not have the capacity to make a distinction between causal and correlative phenomena.

This is why computation systems of data mining and profiling are so much more efficient than human cognition. Not only are these systems able to compute a huge range of data, but they are also able to make unprecedented, unforeseen, unexpected, and often unimagined connections between seemingly disparate and separate information streams. I present to you this simplified notion of computer logic because it is at the heart of the biometric identity-based debates around Aadhaar right now. Recently, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO, UIDAI, wrote an opinion piece that insisted that the data collective mechanisms of Aadhaar are not only safe but also benign. His opinion is backed by Bill Gates, who also famously suggested that “Aadhaar in itself” is not dangerous.

And, in many ways, Gates is right, even if Pandey’s willful mischaracterisation of Gates’s statement is not. For Gates, a computer scientist looking at the closed architecture of the Aadhaar system, it might appear, that in as much as any digital system could be safe, Aadhaar is indeed safe. In essence, Gates’s description was, that as a logical system of computational architecture, Aadhaar is safe, and the data within it, in their correlation with each other, does not form any sinister networks that we need to worry about.

However, Pandey takes this “safe in itself” argument to extend it to the applications and implementations of Aadhaar. He argues that because Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign. In this, Pandey, either out of ignorance or willful mischaracterisation, confuses correlation with causality. He refuses to admit that Aadhaar and the biometrics within that are the central focal point around which a variety of data transactions happen which produce causal links between disconnected subjects.

Thus, the presence of a digital biometric data set might not in itself be a problem, but when it became the central verification system that connects your cellphone with your geolocation data, your presence and movement with your bank account and your income tax returns, your food and lifestyle consumption with your medical records, it starts a causal link between information which was hitherto unconnected, and, hence, considered trivial.

The alarm that the critics of Aadhaar have been raising is not about whether the data on Aadhaar is safe or not, but, how, in the hands of unregulated authorities, the correlations that Aadhaar generates and translates into causal profiles have dire consequences on the privacy and liberty of the individuals who carry the trace of Aadhaar in all facets of life. Pandey and his team of governors need to explain not the safety of Aadhaar but what happens when the verification information of Aadhaar is exploited to create non-human correlations of human lives, informing policy, penalisation and pathologisation through these processes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-17-2018-digital-native-cause-an-effect

Digital Native: Web of Wander

nishant — 2018-06-01T00:04:51Z

The idea of travel as a way of expanding our horizon has now been made redundant.

The article was published in the Indian Express on May 20, 2018.

The promise of connected digital networks — that which we now call the internet — was to replace space with time, as the unit of our life. Space has been critical in thinking of our units of a private, personal, social, collective and political organisation. Space had defined our notions of friendship, intimacy, family, society, and sociality. It seemed like a preposterous idea at that time, about four decades ago, to imagine that space would become less relevant in configuring our sense of who we are and how we relate to the world. In the early days of the internet, when people were still working on clunky connections and text-based interfaces, this idea of proximity being replaced by temporality, was relegated to the realms of sci-fi fantasy.

Now, our friends are not defined by proximity but through Facebook algorithms. We have come to learn that we might have more in common with a person halfway across the globe than with somebody who might be living next door. We think of global news as local news, consuming faraway information in real time, and being invested in the politics of spaces we have never visited. In IT-service countries like India, entire shadow cities have been built where people define their working times, rhythms, and, even their names, based on the distant geographies they work in — even when located in the back-processing offices in Bengaluru, Gurugram, and Hyderabad. We have started thinking of information as streams of time, and, increasingly, our digital practices have been space independent as we move our life to the cloud.

And yet, we remain enslaved to the geographies of our living and the materiality of our devices. Somebody might be just a click away, but they are also not always available because of the distances in space. Information might be easily available and ready to stream, but without the context of other people sharing and making meaning of it, there might be no relevance or urgency to it. We might lose ourselves in online role-playing games and immerse in social media conversation that makes us forget where we are. But none of it has actually made space irrelevant. If anything, as we become informationally overloaded subjects, and continue to invest all our time on digital screens, space has become a premium and travel has taken on new connotations.

Once upon a time, when people talked about travel, it was a journey towards something — to discover new people, cultures, rhythms of life and ways of living. Travel carried with it a sense of purpose: to find more, learn more, explore more and enrich our lives with the experiences of diversity that the world holds for us. The presumption was that we live small and sheltered lives, and travel gifts us new horizons. This idea of travel has now been made redundant for the contemporary information subjects. At the speed of a click, we now have access to information of the world, often in real time, in ways that we could never have imagined. Our cultural references are global, our cuisine, too, is multicultural. We talk of shows and communities that are global. Travel is now just another data stream that adds to this milieu of the informationally overloaded subject.

The digital does not change travel. It does not make travel unnecessary. It doesn’t shrink the world or make it flatter. Instead, because it gives us access to the world already, it makes us ask questions of why we travel and what do we get out of it. The digital access through augmented reality, through virtual reality, through immersive media, and through connected networks, helps us ask a question again of why we travel, and subsequently, what we travel for and what we travel to. Digital travels are travels with an intention, with a purpose, and with a responsibility that makes it necessary for us to connect with the local in a new way. The digital platforms for travel – from Couchsurfing to Wikitravels, from augmented maps to TripAdvisor discussion boards — are a way of showing us the alternative that is no longer the expected brief. They are ways of finding communities, of ethical engagements and new modes of interaction where we take other roles than just being tourists, and become new subjects of critical discovery and exploring horizons with a purpose.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-20-2018-digital-native-web-of-wander

Digital native: What’s in a name? Privilege

nishant — 2017-10-13T00:51:04Z

Anonymity-based internet apps like Sarahah may not be as vicious for those surrounded by the comfort of social status. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 10, 2017.

After days of witnessing the brouhaha around Sarahah, I finally gave in and signed up for an account. Having been a part of the rise and fall of other similar anonymity-based spaces like QOOH, Secret, Yikyak; and, having lived out shamefully long hours on Internet-trawling platforms like Reddit, I was more or less ready for yet another app that invited the world to write to me anonymously, with no option of replying or engaging meaningfully.

When I signed up for it and shared the link on my social networks, I braced myself for the barrage to begin. As I went along with my usual day, with an eye on the app, the notifications started pouring in. Instead of the vicious and vitriolic tripe that I have come to expect from the anonymous message, my app was singing outpourings of love and celebration of different relationships. Friends shared memories that they wanted to re-live. Students wrote in with messages of joy, filling me with proxy pride at the wonderful young people I get to work with. Colleagues and acquaintances sent messages of celebration. One reluctant person regretfully told me that they find my work shallow but if I am successful doing it, then more power to me.

The invitation text on Sarahah says, “Say something constructive”, and it looked like people have been so well-conditioned to listening to bot-messages that they were actually following the instructions to the T. A few days of this euphoric validation from my social networks made me walk on clouds and smile at unsuspecting strangers. I also started thinking why people berate these anonymous app when they are such a wonderful celebration of a mediated social world, where performances of affection and appreciation are dwindling.

It would have been easy for me to dismiss the growing alarm around cases of bullying, harassment, threats, and destructive messages that others have experienced on this app. Absorbed in just my own bubble, I could insist the need for these kinds of platforms, ignoring the experiences of others. I had to remind myself that this super-positive response I have had in the last three weeks is not because of the nature of the app, but because of a confluence of privilege, sociality and demography inherent on my social networks.

As an independent expat living in Europe, with jobs that back me up with cultural and economic capital, and with years of fluency and familiarity with the medium that I am engaging in, I am not an easy target. If barbs, jabs, insults and threats had made their way to me, not only would I be able to take it in my stride and shake it off, but would, possibly, be able to reciprocate in ways where I would find myself on the winning end. I also live in the comfort of knowing that if there was ever a public brawl, I have the cushion of networks, which would not only come to my defence but also protect me from further repercussions of such events. Also, much as I would like to be otherwise, I am not young. I moved out of the digital natives demography a few years ago, and the social networks that I have created around me comprise people who I know to be mature and sensitive. I would have been shocked if any of them had engaged in acts of bullying or vicious attacks.

These are all affordances that might appear natural to me because they are a part of my everyday experience, but I need to recognise these as privileges. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital. Historically, those who carry the knapsack of privileges with ease, have never found themselves at the centre of bullying, intimidation or harassment. Those are always saved for minorities, people who do not fit, people who are marked by precariousness in a way that does not even give them the voice to narrate their stories or the capacities to deal with the abuse that is sent their way. It is very easy to just look at our experiences, shaped by privilege, and use it to dismiss the pain, sorrow and the turbulence that is often reserved for women, people of colour, people defined by markers of language, literacy, location and class. It is necessary to remind ourselves that the personal is not a symptom of the universal experience. More often than not, it is only a testimony of the extreme customisation that the digital world offers, so that, ensconced in our own filtered bubble, we can easily forget and devalue those who suffer through other conditions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-10-2017-digital-native-what-s-in-a-name-privilege

Digital native: You are not alone

nishant — 2017-09-12T13:22:14Z

Away from the guidance of adults, the internet can be a lonely place for youngsters, pushing them towards self-harm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on August 27, 2017.

We have always known that the World Wide Web is a terrifying space. From the vicious rickrolling on Redditt to the lynch mobs on Twitter, we have seen and heard enough to know that when it comes to the social web, nothing is sacred and nobody is safe. As the web exposes the dirty, dangerous, and forbidden desires of our collective depravity, there is a growing concern for the safety of digital natives who come of age online.

Children are taught to identify signs of danger, protect themselves from strangers, and remain alert when alone in public because we know that despite decades of governance, our physical spaces are not free from danger. However, we do not stop children from going out. Instead, we assign signposts and take responsibility to look out for young people who might end up in trouble because of their naiveté or poor judgement.

However, when it comes to the connected web, the youth don’t have the comfort of this buffering adult, who might guide, protect and direct them in difficult situations. The lives of digital natives are so new that most elders in their life do not have a sense of what is happening there. For most digital natives, the foray into the world of connected media is unchartered territory of collective trial and sometimes ruinous error. It puts them in a condition of profound vulnerability.

On the one hand, they are being subjected to incredible risks of bullying, exposure, manipulation and coercion by strangers on the web. On the other hand, they know that their teachers, parents or mentors are going to be useless in giving productive advice. This only gets compounded by the fact that most elders think removing access to these spaces would put an end to the problem — a solution that can lead to such extreme isolation that the young victim would prefer to struggle in that situation rather than go to an elder.

It is from these conditions of digital loneliness that we see the horrors of internet phenomenon like the Blue Whale. Disguised as a game, Blue Whale is not really a game but a finely orchestrated circus of violence that preys upon young teens struggling with depression. An anonymous coordinator, through temptation, coercion, threats and manipulation over 49 days, instigates the player to harm themselves and, on the 50th day, to take their own life and broadcast it online.

Blue Whale has now reportedly claimed victims in more than 21 countries and despite governments, schools and parents on the vigil, it continues to replicate on the darker nodes of the web. We know from the past that attempts at censorship or education are only going to take us so far. Since the Blue Whale reared its head in India, I get asked many times by concerned parents and teachers how they can stop this from happening to their children. Trying to impose bans or take away access is not the way forward. Here are three strategies you could try to let those digital natives in your life know that they are not alone:

Be a part of the digital world. One of the easiest responses that a lot of older people have is that they don’t understand technology. They roll their eyes at the social web and reminisce about how, when they were young, things were better. The web isn’t an additional thing for digital natives — it’s central to their growing up. The more you exclude yourself from it, the more they are going to find it difficult to talk to you about it. An easy way of doing this might be to set up family social time online. Just like your Sunday lunch, you have a Friday evening online time, where you talk, play, interact, share, make videos, pass comments and traverse the digital web together.

Learn with them. It is OK to admit that the digital natives know more about how to Boomerang and what filters to use on Snapchat. You are not competing with them for expertise. Instead, if you put yourself out there as a learner and ask for their advice, you’d be surprised at the nuanced information they might be able to give you.

Troubleshoot together. The internet is essentially a space for tinkering. Most digital natives learn by experimenting and, when things collapse, they learn from each other. The next time you face a problem with your gadget or can’t figure out a functionality, don’t just ask somebody to sort it out for you. Instead sit with the digital native — learn with them and show that you can take control once you have the information at hand.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-27-2017-digital-native-you-are-not-alone

Digital native: Ever on the go

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:54:46Z

It is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.When the telephone was first introduced as a mass communication tool, one of the biggest fears was that it would allow people to lie and cheat at will.

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 30, 2017.

The social fabric of existence till then, was built on the idea that communication happens between two people who are in close proximity of each other, and thus, are careful of what they say, because there can be immediate consequences to their words. Editorials were written and codes were established trying to figure out how we will deal with this increased distance. When mobile phones came into the market, these fears were intensified. Because, the telephone, at least, had the individual tied to a location and fixed in a particular context. Whereas the mobile phone meant that you could be anywhere and lie about it.

In her hilarious book on modern day etiquette, Talk to the Hand, Lynn Truss describes how she spent hours in public spaces eavesdropping on people, hoping to catch them in the middle of spectacular lying. She was disappointed when people on the train, when called by their partners and bosses, honestly confessed that they were, indeed, aboard a train. In the hours spent lurking in public spaces, never once did she uncover a juicy story of somebody sitting in a park and trying to convince somebody else that they were in the middle of work on a hectic day. Disappointed as she was by the lack of imagination shown by her fellow human beings, Truss does remind us that this new condition of being mobile because we have a mobile phone is one of the most liberating moments of digital telecommunications. And, largely, it is true — our everyday communication now no longer takes for granted that we could know where people are when we are talking to them. Ubiquitous mobile coverage and ever-ready connections mean that we could be interrupting people in their most intimate moments — of making love or doing the morning needful in the loo, or, we could be reaching out to them in moments of such extreme boredom, that they have started tweeting back at celebrities in the hope of making a human connection.

This mobility has been celebrated as a part of our digital make up. Especially with high speed mobile data and almost a seamless access to the web, we now seem to think of this distributed and fragmented nature of our being as the new real. Conversations on apps like WhatsApp continue across spaces and time zones almost seamlessly. Our physical and contextual locations change rapidly even in the course of just one Twitter war. With streaming services like Netflix offering multi-device access to our favourite shows, binge watching is not just limited to the favourite couch at home. A series that starts on the laptop at home, might continue on the phone as we walk down to the cab or train, and then shift to the tablet as we switch from device to device.

Mobility has become such a celebrated way of life that we now presume that, to be truly digital, we have to be truly mobile — the figure of the millennial digital native as the global citizen who navigates geographies, cultures, distances and time easily has emerged as the face of the digital. In our quest for mobile information, we have also created ourselves as mobile people. Mobility is now equated with flexibility and is an increasing skill that is required in new workforces. Mobility is rewarded and also incentivised by the labour markets that are supported by gig economies like Uber. The mobile body in its interaction with the mobile devices is the new normal.

And yet, it is good to remember that the mobility we see as natural and desirable is a condition of privilege. The mobile phone might have penetrated the last mile in developing countries but it does not guarantee meaningful access or inclusion of large parts of underprivileged communities in the mobility networks. Even as new digital competition lowers the threshold of access and affordability, it is good to remember that having a mobile and being mobile are not the same thing. We are slowly witnessing different kinds of users beginning to get onto mobile networks, but their connectivity is always going to be undermined — the mobility expected from the mobile bearing bodies can be afforded only by those who can calibrate lives without the established social safety nets of static living. A mobile life is a migrant life which has uprooted individuals from families, communities and contexts, which might have supported them in times of crises.

The mobile individual has to form new connections, forge new support systems, and learn to cope with the precariousness of mobility in a way that is unprecedented. Otherwise, the continued reports of depression, burn-out, breakdown and mental health issues that we find increasing in digital migrant populations, is only going to get dire. If we make mobility the precondition of being digital, it is time to insist that the infrastructure of digital India is accompanied by the infrastructure of care for the digital Indian.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-30-2017-digital-native-ever-on-the-go-digital-india-mobility

Digital native: Not only words

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:33:20Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People

nishant — 2017-07-05T17:04:23Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: In digiville attention is Currency

nishant — 2017-07-05T16:40:52Z

The increased importance on attention and the lack of it on social media gives all the more reason why we need to be discerning about what we invest our attention upon.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 11, 2017.

We’ve grown to the idea that the digital is dangerously fast. We are now used to instant delivery of services, immediate streaming of programmes, and having a coterie of people available to us at a click and a scroll. The globe has shrunk, the world has flattened, and we live on a planet that is essentially a giant super-computer enveloped in information and data streams. There is much to celebrate about the light-speed traffic of digital networks, where the gap between yesterday and tomorrow is so small, that there is no more today left to live in.

Our quickly accelerated lives get closer and closer to the science-fiction reality that our fantasies had once imagined. People get connected in ways they had never imagined, and our social and personal lives experience dramatic upheavals that might have filled lifetimes in other epochs. While these transformations are surrounding us, and the digital fulfils the promises it had kept, it is time to realise that not all is well in digiville. Because, sure, the digital circuits give us access to unprecedented information and give us a window into bedrooms far away from home, but they also lead to triggers that were never possible.

Last week, for instance, a large part of the world was frantically looking for the meaning of “covfefe”, after the Twitter-happy president of the USA decided that the world was ready for that word. Twitter went berserk, with conspiracy theories of what “covfefe” could mean, and the social web was exploding with much hilarity at the cost of the president. At the same time, the algorithms that govern the empires of Google Search, were being confounded by the fact that all the Indians, who have been quite prominent in their quest for digital porn, had suddenly changed their preferences and were really into “peacock sex”. Following the misguidedly strange proclamations of the judge from Rajasthan who desexualised the peacocks and cast a blemish on their records, hordes of people spent their time talking about the sex lives of peacocks.

Both of these incidents, moments of great levity and mirth, are symptomatic of the reactive space that the web has become. The hashtags trended. Memes were created. YouTube suddenly got flooded with peacock-mating videos — don’t just take my word for it, seriously, go and search for them! — and the tweets went viral. If we were to quantify the time that was spent globally and locally, reacting to what can only be seen as the ramblings of ignorant demagogues; while it does reflect the democratic potentials of the digital web, it also shows how trigger-happy we’ve become in our interaction with information.

In the digital web, attention is currency. The more time, clicks, scrolls, likes and shares a digital object accrues, the more valuable it becomes. So much so, that completely insignificant items can thus assume dramatic proportions and people who have nothing more to offer than their ability to garner attention, can become celebrities. Incidentally, there is algorithmic science behind it. There is a reason why not all the rubbish that goes online becomes virally distributed. The human actors — the people who follow you — and the influence they create, form a small part of why some things get attention. The real influencers, in this case, are actually networked algorithms.

The network is not just a benign connection of nodes. It is a self-sustaining system that is designed for circulation. The network has its meaning and its lifeness only in its capacity to circulate data. The minute algorithms notice some information gathering interest, they start spreading it to even more avenues. As the information spreads and leaks into different spaces, more people like it — and the more people like it, the more it becomes subject to rapid circulation. This avalanche of attention that networks deposit on some information allows for these viral objects to emerge as significant, becoming time sinks where we all spend our time responding to them, without giving us a space of reflection or critical distance.

This same phenomenon creates uncivil, arrogant and boorish media personalities into celebrities. This is why fake news has become a naturalised phenomenon, where what is missing, is not our ability to discern between good and bad information, but the fact that most of this information comes with the endorsement of thousands of likes and millions of views, which gives it credibility even when it has no claims to truth. The rapid nature of our responsive digital lives needs to be questioned. While it is obvious that in the constantly updated data streams, momentary and micro engagements is the only survival mechanism that we have to cope with information overload, it is important that we check ourselves to make sure that the attention that we are spending is bestowed on objects and ideas that might be more worthy than peacocks having covfefes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-11-2017-digital-native-in-digiville-attention-is-currency

Digital native: Snap out of outrage mode

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:45:12Z

Rage at the inequality of the digital world is good. But why stop at the Snapchat CEO?

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. The article was published in the Indian Express on April 30, 2017.

If you are reading this right now, let’s just get something out of the way — you are not poor. Just the affordability of English language literacy and access to national news media marks you as belonging to a very small elite group in the country. If you are reading this online, the point is driven home even more. So, when you heard about the CEO of Snapchat (If you are asking SnapWhat, don’t feel crestfallen, you are not “out of it”, you are just not 17) being quoted from a statement he made two years ago, that he is not interested in expanding in poor countries like India, you were obviously riled.

There were many things wrong with the alleged statement that Evan Spiegel made. He betrayed his own ignorance and arrogance, where he was unable to understand the growing consumer base of mobile-based apps in emerging networked countries like India. He also more or less failed to understand that poverty is layered, and while India continues to struggle with poverty, it has a growing population of extremely wealthy and affluent users, who are not only driving global consumption trends but also the key focus of digital growth. His biggest faux pas was to not recognise that in the global information technologies development cycles, there is a huge chance that a large number of his employees and contractors might be located in India, and that Digital India is an undeniable extension of Silicon Valley apps and platforms.

Speigel’s cockiness is actually so common in how digital ecosystems are mapped, that you could almost ignore it because “everybody says it”. It is great that he was called out on his neo-colonial viewpoints. Users from India (and around the world) joined in to not only to protest against his bravado, but also to call for an action that hurts private companies in the one way they recognise — revenue. #BoycottSnapchat has been trending this last week, and millions of people using this visual filtered storytelling app are uninstalling it from their devices. People have been making jokes and criticising Snapchat, leading to a huge dip in the user base of Snapchat.

These moments of digital collective action are admirable and we need more instances where we call out such acts of discrimination and exclusion. We do need to make sure that we do not make Snapchat Enemy No. 1, pretending that the rest of the web is all good. Speigel is profoundly wrong, in his comments or in his defence that his app is “free” to download, which shows that he is not excluding India. However, Speigel cannot be singled out in all of this. Across the digital landscape, countries like India are always trapped in a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, Indian engineers and knowledge workers are being harvested as the cheap labour who “steal global jobs” and on the other, India is always seen as poor, underdeveloped, in need of saving.

This distilling of the Indian landscape, in all its complexity, into these two polarised identities, allows for these tech companies to continue unfair practices which affect both the glamorous white-collar techies and the invisible labours of IT cities. It emphasises the idea that the IT worker, upwardly and geographically mobile, is being offered a path to escape either the country or their context, because they are touched by the economic power of the digital corporation. It also justifies the exploited labour conditions of IT industries, where the story of transformation is presented as an excuse for underpaid overworked production environments.

At the same time, these companies seek to take up state-like responsibilities without the accountability, destroying fundamental media and information rights in the guise of bridging the digital divide. Remember Internet.Org’s attack on #NetNeutrality in their attempt to provide free Internet to the poor. Pay attention to Uber’s continued exploitation of its drivers, refusing to treat them as employees and yet regulating them more than any employer can dare to. Realise that despite our #MakeInIndia campaigns, we have very little investment in creating localised, Indian language digital infrastructure. Notice that the Indian digital scene, far from being start-up friendly, is turning into a monopoly of a handful of telecom companies, which nonchalantly discard the legal apparatus of safeguards. Reflect on how we are building biometric databases like Aadhaar, without any regard for data protection and security, so that millions of people are compromised through data leaks. All of these different phenomena need to be read along with our outrage at Snapchat. All of these are stern reminders that our act of questioning the digital does not stop at uninstalling an app, but at reorganising our policies and politics of the digital in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-30-2017-digital-native-snap-out-of-outrage-mode

Digital native: Are You Still Having Fun?

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:37:40Z

Before you accept a fun app into your digital ecosystem, prepare yourself for the data you will be giving away.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2017.

So, I hope, by now, you have figured out who your celebrity lookalike is. Mine, for her sins, is Emma Watson. Now, as you scratch your heads and wonder how a “facial recognition algorithm’”decided that my mug matches with the stunning actor who shall always remain imprinted as Hermione Granger to my Harry Potter- fan-boy self, it is worth wondering how on earth I know this.

If you have been on Facebook the last week or two, you will have noticed that almost all of your friends, as if drawn in a zombie apocalypse, taking this quiz and posting their results. It was a simple enough app — you upload a picture, and then using advanced computer morphing, it shows how your face transitions from yours to the stunning celebrities that we love and worship.

Nothing better on a Monday morning to know that the barely human face you are wearing — a mixture of grump and where-is-my-coffee — actually looks like the photoshopped avatar of a celeb. In many ways, this was a truly progressive app because it refused to look at gender, race, ethnicity, age or any of the other criteria of biometric representation and no matter what super-grouch face you presented, it always matched you with the celebrity you always secretly wanted to look like anyway.

Now, listen! I know that the earnest value of social media is essentially in apps like these. The point of these apps, which are largely just a continuation of the old trash magazine quizzes about self-determination and expression, is that they continue to enthrall, enchant and make our everyday click-and-scroll lives slightly more memorable and enjoyable. However, unlike those old Cosmo and Vogue quizzes which you secretly took to see if you are more a Miranda or a Carrie (I know that is an old reference, but hey, this is an old quiz!), these apps have a more sinister dimension.

When you clicked on that small app, because your friend did so, you did not count on three things. One, that as you nonchalantly clicked on ‘OK’ giving permission to this app to your Facebook profile, you also gave it consent to access your almost entire social media profile. Most of these apps are able to now look at your friends list, your contact list, your messaging history, your photo-gallery, and can access your microphone and camera, to give an answer that is so fake, it can easily masquerade as an elected official.

Second, that you might have taken the test for a moment of childish fantasy and then decided to move on with your life. Except that even if you did not share that post, the results were saved because you gave that app consent to use your uploaded picture in its own advertisement and also gave it authority to show your friends that you were stupid enough to take this test. This also includes your boss on Facebook, who might see what you were doing at 2.44 that afternoon when you were sitting in a serious meeting that was supposed to engulf you. Just like your friend might not have actively shared the first click-bait post but the app posted on their behalf.

And third, you gave this app the permission to not only harvest your Facebook profile for data that it is going to sell to third-party consumers who are curious to know about your location, age, eating habits, cultural preferences, friendship networks, and mood representations so that they can customise advertisements to sell you things that you didn’t know you wanted. In the world of Big Data, a single click-based consent can be the beginning of an avalanche of data mining, where, before you know it, all your correlated data across all your apps – sometimes sensitive data that might even betray your financial and physical safety — can easily be harvested, and all because you wanted to check out a fun app.

Apps pretend to be benign and often are so. However, when you accept an app into your digital ecosystem, it is sometimes useful to be slightly more cautious of what the added value of the app is. And before you say yes, it might also be good to just take a little more caution about what permissions you are granting it, and whether you really want to give away that data for a moment of fun. Facebook and other social media networks will continue to warn you about keeping your information private and safe from strangers. However, they will refuse to remind you that when you are online, your private data is more likely to be harmfully abused and used by apps with celebrity pictures and dancing babies, rather than the friend from school who has already probably put you into a block list.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2017-digital-native-are-you-still-having-fun

Digital native: You can check out, you can never leave

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:31:46Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital native: Lie Me a River

nishant — 2017-03-19T14:47:16Z

The sea of social media around us often drowns the truth, exchanging misinformation for facts.

This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question.

One of the most common methods of testing a student’s knowledge is the multiple choice question template that asks the examinee to identify one of four options as correct solutions to a problem. The pedagogic principle behind these questions is simple enough: We live in a world where truth and accuracy are important. No matter what our subjective feelings, impressions, memories or instincts might be, we need to rely on verifiable facts to make a truth claim. If we fail to do so, there would be negative consequences.

This basic process of truth telling loses all affordance in social media practices. Let me channel my inner school teacher and present you with a question. Drawing on samples of WhatsApp messages on my social media feeds, I invite you to answer this simple question: Which of these statements is not true?

Drinking from disposable paper cups lined with wax to keep the liquid from seeping leads to wax deposits in your stomach, resulting in fatal health risks.
Beverages in India have been contaminated by the Ebola virus and are on our shelves right now.
According to Ayurveda, burning camphor and cardamom together kills the swine flu virus in air.
Bollywood actor Farida Jalal is dead.

Of all of these, the only one you can verify is that Farida Jalal is not dead. The reason we know it for sure is because, she had to come to Twitter, and like Oscar Wilde, announce that the rumours of her death were wildly exaggerated. As Jalal herself pointed out in an interview, she was harassed by a barrage of phone calls, of people calling her up to ask her (oh, the irony!) if she was dead. The other three claims are right now floating in the air, ready to settle down as truth, with continuous repetition. We cannot be sure that they are inaccurate. Especially because they don’t just come as one-line headlines but long narratives of imaginary proofs.

Why have we reached this post-truth moment? Why have our social media feeds become minefields of dubious information masquerading as lies? There are many laments lately about how this lack of veracity and fact-checking is becoming the new normal and the blame is always put on either the media that promotes accelerated spread of messages without space for reflection, or gullible people who do not pause to think about the ludicrousness of the message before they spread it to their groups. And, while it is necessary to develop a critical literacy to make sure that we understand the responsibility of our role as information circulators and curators, there is one dimension that needs to be explored more — trust.

In our pre-digital knowledge practices, when information came with a signature, we believed that somebody had done the due diligence needed for the information to be published. An author’s book was supported by the rigour of the publisher behind it. A news report was fact-checked by verifiers who are employed precisely to do that. Information from a friend or somebody we know was credible because of our assessment of the person’s expertise and knowledge. We have always been able to determine the source of information, and our proximity with the source allowed us to trust the information that came through it.

However, with social media, this relationship has changed. When somebody sends us a message on WhatsApp, it is still coming from a source that we know, but we have to realise that this source is not producing or verifying this information, but merely circulating it. Messages come with a signature, they seem to emerge from people we know and trust, and, hence, we presume that they have done the due diligence required before passing on the information.

It is important to realise that within the social web we don’t really parse, analyse or process information, we merely pass and distribute it. This is how digital media perceives its users — as information circulators. And, this means, that information which mimics facts but is blatantly false, finds easy prey. So, the next time you come across information on these endless message groups, ask a simple question before you pass it along: no matter what the message claims, can you actually locate the source of the information? Is the person who forwards that message producing the information or merely sharing it? If they are sharing it, get back to them and ask how they know what they know. We trust things that are authored, but in our social apps, people are not authors, they are circulators. Making the distinction between the two might be the first step towards developing a critical literacy for fact-telling on the digital web.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river

Digital native: Who will watch the watchman?

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:18:50Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: Do not go Gently into the Good Night

nishant — 2017-03-03T16:07:36Z

If there’s a lesson to be learned from the resistance to the Trump administration, it is this — patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

The article was published by the Indian Express on February 9, 2017.

It was that time of the year. We wore our patriotism on our sleeves, painted our faces in the colours of the national flag, proclaimed our joy for the republic we live in. We performed our proud presence as nation-loving citizens on the social web, while ignoring the ominous fact that the chief guest at the celebration of our constitutional existence represented a country where lashes and stoning to death are still legal punishments. Be that as it may, it is undeniable that our peer-to-peer networks helped catalyse and stir the pride in our Constitution that enshrines us with some of our most basic, fundamental, and human rights, for life and living.

As Republic Day recedes from our memory, let me warn you that the future of our social media feeds is grim. As we consume the impending Trumpocalypse, we cannot but realise that we have not only been there, but also done that. A government which does not communicate freely with the press: check. A discourse that supports messages of hate against specific religions and provides “alternative facts” in our history books: check. Politicians spreading fake news and populations being swayed by it: check.

For all our Amreeka-loving souls, it might be a grim reassurance that we are ahead in the game and the United States of Trumpistan is merely catching up. The social web might seem to mimic the trend, where a problem becomes a problem only when it hits the developed countries in the north, but it is good for us to realise that the doom and gloom that these trends are forecasting are already the realities that we live in.

However, there is one major difference that is worth noting. In the USA, even as this orange-hazed madness unfolds, there are people marching, protesting, and fighting to defend the annihilation of their democratic, constitutional rights. Their patriotism is not going to wait till Independence Day, but is right now on the streets, flooding the social web, inundating airports, and demanding in unprecedented ways, the recognition and the defence of their rights. While there isn’t much to be said about a nation that had an electoral system that allowed for a populist to come into power, there is something that we need to drive home —patriotism is not a feeling, it is an action.

And so, if this Republic Day, you shared, consumed, viewed, read and rejoiced, even one item of patriotic impulse — even if you merely retweeted Kiran Bedi’s photoshopped image of world monuments adorned in the tricolour —here is my challenge for you.

Before the memory of patriotism and the pride of the Constitution fade away completely, we are going to head into Valentine’s Day. It is a day that is fraught with tension in India. On the one hand, there will be the sceptre of consumerist capitalism that will wear us down with the sales, the dances, the parties, and an aggressive market to sell, sell, sell, everything that they can, pretending that true love is in buying gifts. On the other hand, we will have the righteous people who even their mothers might find difficult to love, standing on the streets with weapons and force, intimidating people on the streets and slut-shaming women who they will deem too “Western” to be allowed to live their lives in peace.

Whether you believe in the fabricated spirit of St Valentine or not, whether you want to join the candy-flavoured pink brigade or not, whether or not you participate in the dhamaka shopping frenzy of the season — here is your chance to put your patriotism to practice.

One of the most beautiful expressions of our Constitution is in our right to life, dignity, and self-determination. It means that as long as our actions do not harm and hurt others intentionally, it is our right to live, love, and express our life and love in ways that we determine worthy. So, as people around the country gear up to celebrate Valentine’s Day, and hooligans across the states polish their trishuls and lathis to obstruct these celebrations, bring your patriotism to the streets. Go and stand in solidarity with these people, defending their right to live their life without fear and intimidation. I am offering you the #RightToLove to show your support of people who want to take that brief moment from humdrum lives to find and experience love and longing, and if you see any acts of intimidation or violence, whisk out your phone and capture the event, share it on social media, make an intervention in person and fight against those who insist on violating our Constitution, and defend our country from the forces within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-february-9-2017-digital-native-do-not-go-gently-into-the-good-night

Digital native: Back at it Again

nishant — 2017-02-02T15:04:46Z

The Indian digital landscape has put us in a loop of hashtags and outrage, a space where we have mastered the art of shame.

The article was published in the Indian Express on January 22, 2017.

Writing a regular column is daunting. One of the things that I constantly have to check is that I am not repeating myself. At the same time, in the digital age where all memory has become storage, and all that is stored is quickly forgotten, I also hope that what I write has life beyond the first few clicks, the Sunday morning coffee, the shares and likes that mark the beginning of the end of digital information.

However, as I write the column this new year, I find myself in a strange situation where I am repeating what I have done the last three years at the beginning of each new year, and where I am desperately wishing that things I had last written became dated. Three years ago, while commenting on the Indian digital landscape, I had written about the rage, the fury, and the almost deafening battle cry that had captured the national imagination, when, at the turn of the year, a young woman we named Nirbhaya lost her life to violent sexual abuse on a moving bus in Delhi. #NeverAgain, we tweeted. #AlwaysRemember, we chanted. We called her #OurBraveheart and, in that moment of national outcry and dialogue about gender and sexual abuse in our public spaces, it seemed as if the digital landscape was reflecting a pivotal change in the fabric of the country.

The year after that, as we struggled to find ways in which law can keep us safe, the apex court in India re-criminalised homosexuality, reverting the judgment of the Delhi High Court which had given life and dignity to same sex and queer couples. The legal system proved that it is not only blind but also susceptible to mass populism that denies the rights to consenting adults to live their lives in dignity. That was the year when we hashtagged our solidarity with #NoGoingBack, making it trend so that umpteen number of people came out in support of homosexuality in the country. Support to the queer community came from unexpected quarters, like the generally reticent Bollywood celebrities who supported #Scrap377, and even religious and political representatives who recognise that the continued abuse of queer communities is a violation of our constitutional rights.

While the struggles for gender and sexual equality continue in the country, and tireless activists and civil society advocates persist in their demands of justice and protection, here we are, waking up to yet another year of public shame and private grief, as reports came of the aggressive sexual abuse that women had to endure on the streets of Bangalore. The incident unfolded with all the trappings of victim blaming, slut shaming, and a sentence that should never be allowed — “She was asking for it.” On the digital social web, in the meantime, some sanctimonious men, indignant at the thought of being accused of patriarchal silence and misogynist privilege, decided to take attention away from the victims and decided to steal the spotlight with a hashtag that says #NotAllMen. These tweeters, who have no problem in enjoying the benefits of an abusive sexist social order — they might not actively go out to inflict gendered violence, but they are complicit in enjoying the privileges of that system — had a problem with taking responsibility for that system. They would not be shamed. Not even when an overwhelming number of women wrote back with #YesAllWomen, would they concede their grounds.

As it occurs so often on the Interwebz, the conversation that demanded both a private reflection and a public dialogue, devolved into personal name calling and collective anger deflected from the problem at hand. In the midst of the sensationalism that passes off as discussion in populist media channels, I want to think of something else. If all these voices in our public discourse were to be heard, it would feel like gendered and sexual safety are national preoccupations and bipartisan concerns. The customised expressions of our personalised media abound with anger, shame, critique, and analyses of why our country is increasingly becoming unsafe for certain bodies to walk through it. Social media accounts are producing a spectacle of concern for safety so effectively that it would seem these questions will be resolved immediately.

And yet, even as I look at my biographical history of writing this column, I realised that I have revisited these discussions over and over again. This is a debate that now occurs regularly, each time, giving us the chance to identify a problem, go online and make a lot of noise about it, and then settle down, with a smug smile on our faces of having done our public performance, without ever translating it into action. On the digital web, we seem to have mastered the art of shame without guilt. We continue to hashtag, like, tweet, share, and click our ways, using prepackaged formulae of expression without translating it into personal reflection or collective action. And the digital seems to be enabling this where having an opinion seems to matter more than actual transformation, and spectacles of shame seem to acquit us of the responsibility of action.

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