Centre for Internet and Society

A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India

praskrishna — 2011-08-03T09:59:15Z

In this blog post, Zainab Bawa reviews the different spectrums of information, transparency and politics.

Politics has always been fashioned by information, a friend1 pointed out when I mentioned to her about this blog post I was writing to summarize my research on the CIS-RAW monograph about the history of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India.

The question that then arises is what kinds of information and subsequently, what kinds of politics (and vice-versa) are we referring to? I want to begin this blog post by reviewing the different spectrums of information and the contexts within which these different kinds of information become important/unimportant/valuable/invaluable for which groups in our polity? Consequently, how are our own notions of politics informed and how does politics, in terms of ideals such as democracy, equity, access, rights and justice, evolve/perpetuate in practice?

We, as individuals and as part of various groups in society, thrive on information for sustaining and enhancing different aspects of our lives, be they social, political, economic, cultural or historical. The criticality of information, especially information networks, has been revealed to us starkly in recent times by the 3G licensing scam where major corporations were vying for ‘insider’ information that would make it easier for them to obtain the requisite telecom licenses. Clearly, the 3G scam is not the first (and neither will it be the last) instance of the politics of lobbying, aligning with individuals and networks which provide ‘the’ ‘insider’ information and the capitalization of this information. We have known about the politics of ‘insider information’ in the context of stock markets and through Hamish McDonald’s explication of the way corporate giants such as Reliance and then Bombay Dyeing (aka the Wadia clan) have been ‘cultivating’ their ‘insider’ sources in the central government cabinets and ministries. The secrecy and more importantly the exclusiveness that underlies this kind of ‘insider’ information angers a certain strand of public and deepens the cynicism that pervades across a large section of the citizenry. The nature of this secrecy and exclusiveness gets compounded by the fact that there are phenomenally vast sums of money that are involved in this form of ‘insider’ information and the ensuing scams, thereby agitating different people because had there been ‘fair play’ and ‘true competition’, the monies could have benefitted the targeted beneficiaries in a ‘proper’ manner.

There is another kind of ‘insider’ information which exists on this spectrum of ‘insider’ information in particular and information in general, which I want to bring to your attention here. In 2008, I was researching the practices and reach of microfinance in Mumbai 2My research led me, for the first time, to the resettlement and rehabilitation (R&R) housing colonies of Mumbai.

These R & R colonies had been built to rehabilitate slum dwellers and squatters (occupying lands owned by different government agencies and private individuals/parties) whose possessions (claims over land and built structures were coming in the way of widening roads and railway tracks and building flyovers and rail over bridges under two mega infrastructure projects in Mumbai city then. Policies were formulated to compensate and rehabilitate persons and households who would be affected by these mega projects (PAPs and PAHs). I interviewed some of the PAPs and PAHs in an effort to understand the R&R process and the impact that the process had had on their lives and their relationship with the city and its governance.
During many of these interviews, the issue of ‘insider information’ repeatedly came up. PAPs and PAHs explained to me that as part of the R&R policies, surveys had been conducted to identify persons and households who would be eligible for compensation and resettlement. During the surveys, surveyors tried to determine since when the individuals and households had been residing in their houses/on the land, whether they owned the lands/built structures, and whether the structure was to be enumerated as a single unit or more and accordingly what should be the corresponding compensation awarded to the affected person/household. One form of ‘insider information’ in this context pertained to the knowledge of when the surveys would be carried out in the different settlements/squatted spaces so that people would make arrangements accordingly to claim entitlements under the R&R policies. For instance, in many cases, more than one family resided in the same built structure and consequently, only one house would be allotted in lieu of that structure irrespective of the number of families residing in it. Prior knowledge of the surveys, which was usually just a day or two before, would enable these families/households to determine how they would articulate their claim for more than one housing unit, either through appeal to the surveyor’s moral rationalities, or through graft and subversive strategies such as putting up makeshift structures, etc.

A second aspect of ‘insider’ information pertained to the number of units that would be allotted to different households/individuals i.e., those groups, leaders, NGOs (non-government organizations), CBOs (community based organizations), individuals and actors who were directly responsible for the allotment of housing and shops units under the R&R policies allotted more than the ‘fair’ share of entitlements to their favoured constituencies/households. Such actors even traded i.e., sold, the housing unit allotments to persons who were eager to buy these ‘low-income’ units, thus, giving rise to a form of property market around R&R policies and this kind of state intervention. Also, those who had direct/indirect access to actors making such allotments used their influence to obtain at least the compensation that should have accrued to them or more and, as mentioned above, persons interested in purchasing housing units despite not being from the settlement or even the same economic and social milieu influenced the ‘decision-makers’ in this case. An interesting outcome of this kind of ‘insider information’ was that those who had struggled to receive their due R&R compensations perceived these ‘extra legal’ (in this context) allotments as kabza (capture) of the resources (and space which is a premium in Mumbai city) offered under government policies. This notion of ‘kabza’ has now become part of the vocabulary of parties aggrieved by the allotment process and is being mobilized for fulfilling certain kinds of claims advanced before planning agencies in Mumbai, municipalities and the Maharashtra state government.

A third highly interesting form of ‘insider information’ in this R&R process was the prior knowledge that R&R would take place in due course of time, surveys would be conducted and there would be compensations awarded in the form of housing units and commercial spaces. This prior knowledge fuelled an atmosphere of intense speculation in some settlements where many individuals and households began to sell their possessions, built structures, shop spaces, etc., to newcomers (who would then be entitled to compensation under R&R) and the sellers moved out of the settlement to other areas, probably those that would not be marked for R&R or to neighbouring areas. Property values rose in such cases because newcomers were eager to be enumerated for a ‘secure’ entitlement, in this case a house/shop. Apart from the speculation which ensued from this form of ‘insider information’, ambiguity was also created, mainly related to determining who were the ‘original’ inhabitants and who were the ‘fake/newcomers’. There were no easy answers to resolving this ambiguity and interestingly, this ambiguity now resides (and may be legitimated in due course of time) in the survey records of the NGOs which were responsible for conducting the surveys, in the government’s entitlements’ records and now, in the property registries of the planning department and municipality that are being created as part of legalization of ownership of the R&R housing and commercial units.

What I have tried to explain through the examples of the 3G scam and the R&R process in Mumbai is that there is a spectrum of contexts and situations across which information gets created, circulated/percolated and transmitted in particular forms and through exclusive networks and circuits. The spectrum of information gets created through this variety of contexts and the spectrum gets defined and redefined, time and again, in terms of the value and the criticality attributed to different kinds of information and therefore, the implications that are perceived to stem from hiding such information(s) and excluding different groups of people from accessing it. Assessing the implications of transparency, opacity and secrecy of information in different contexts becomes more complex when we understand how and why different actors and institutions within the state, in between the state-civil society complex, and a variety of other actors advocate for transparency and the vocabulary and manner in which they articulate claims and projects for transparency.

There is also the issue of scale of exposure of a particular scam or some other act of secrecy/‘insider’ information which leads us to assess transparency or the lack of it in highly normative and morally laden ways. For instance, the 3G scam acquired the issue of national importance because of the involvement of the national government in Delhi and a handful of corporations who gained vast sums of money in direct and indirect ways; the fact that the scam appeared as an act of cheating to several cell phone users in India and especially to the tax-paying publics who have already been articulating complaints about their entitlements with respect to poor quality or complete lack of government and municipal resources; the manner in which this scam was interpreted, analyzed and then communicated to the public through different media (newspapers, television, blogs, protests, etc). Whereas, the lack of transparency in the housing allotment process under the R&R policies’ implementation does not get the same kind of reactions and outcry by the same set of tax payers and citizenry base because of the scale of the issue and therefore, the exposure (something to think about), the disdain that exists among tax payers and citizens against slum dwellers, squatters and such ‘illegal’ groups and the widespread cynicism that resettled or rehabilitated squatters and slum dwellers will eventually go back to squatting and occupying public lands because this is their ‘inherent’ nature. The other, more important question, is whether the different kinds of ‘insider’ information(s) involved in the R&R implementation process should be made public because if these were made public, would the unfairness and ‘corruption’ in the process and the ambiguities that have emerged from the implementation be reversed? Even more importantly, do government agencies have the resources and the grasp to deal with reversing the survey and allotment process given that information concerning land is not only fuzzy but by nature is both incomplete and contested? And, following from the question of correcting wrongs and setting right the rights, does it imply that my analyses of the lack of transparency and the forms of ‘insider’ information in the R&R process actually legitimizes the corruption and inequities involved in allotments? (I deal with this question in a more detailed manner in the monograph.)

The other question that is connected with both the 3G scam and the problems with the R&R policy implementation process (and also the recent WikiLeaks and cablegate controversy surrounding the buying of elected representatives for the vote of confidence) is who are the people controlling information and what resources do they have at their disposal to hide or reveal some things to which publics? This question is not simply a matter of the BJP (Bhartiya Janata Party) having the financial and other resources at its disposal to engineer a plot for destabilizing the UPA (United Progressive Alliance) government. It is also a matter of say a licensing department in a municipality or a land and estates department in an urban governance set-up which is mired, by both default and design[3], in histories and presents of information inadequacies, information controls, claims (made by claimants from among citizens and state) and the corresponding access and/or lack of it to government resources and land/space. How do we evaluate/assess these departments’ acts of transparency and the lack of it as well as their strategies of information percolation, control and dissemination given their institutional and political context as well as the histories and the very kinds and nature of information that define and redefine their functioning?

Clearly then, we are talking about power – power relations and equations – here, and in this respect one would wonder what more does this monograph do other than discuss these power dynamics. But the monograph really does more than this. It tries to read these power dynamics in the context of how they inform and shape our understandings of information per se i.e., what constitutes information and how certain forms of information are made legitimate or illegitimate. The monograph also tries to analyze the notions and practices of authentication and certification of information that have come into being either directly or indirectly through mobilizations around access to information, use of information and rights of citizens, and how these efforts of authentication and certification shape the very nature of information and the politics around its production and transmission in different contexts. I must add here, therefore, that the monograph uses the term information technologies in a very broad sense even when it is covering a history of information technologies, mainly digital ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) such as databases, websites and e-governance. The monograph also looks at how these digital technologies get embedded within the existing and emerging technologies and institutions of governance and information production, circulation and percolation. Such an approach, I argue in the monograph, broadens the manner in which we view and evaluate digital technologies and their power as well as its appropriations (a term and practice discussed in much greater detail in the monograph) by different actors within the state and among the public.

There are two questions that I have to address before I close down this blog post. The first question is how I understand and define transparency and second is how I conceive politics. Transparency resides within the domain of information – the way in which information is produced (materially and symbolically), accessed, used, circulated, reproduced, appropriated, subverted and transmitted through various channels and mediums. I do not work with a single definition of transparency because as much as transparency is a desired norm, it is also a double-edged sword where the act of making something transparent has various kinds of repercussions, direct and indirect, on different strands of society. What I bring through this monograph is an urge to review transparency in more critical and thicker ways. This does not mean that we have to abandon the project of transparency altogether. Rather, we need to critically examine the emerging relationship between transparency, information and data and the increasing emphasis on ‘rational’ and ‘scientific data sets’ (such as budgetary analyses, certified information under the Right to Information (RTI) act, etc.) as the means of enforcing transparency and therefore, accountability – would not such transparency come with certain political costs for our society and who bears these costs and at what expense? This monograph therefore, examines transparency as a practice that has to be abstracted from the different contexts in which it is being applied, advocated and the manner in which claims for transparency are being advocated.

Politics – phew! Shall we get started on this? Of course! I will try and keep this brief. I started with explaining how there is a spectrum across which information exists. Politics also exists on a spectrum, and that spectrum is beyond one of ‘from petty corruption to high corruption’, from extortion of bribes by cops to 2G and 3G scams. At the moment, not only states within India and its central government, all parts of the globe are mired in various kinds of scandals and scams that are increasingly moving our thinking and even our faith into revolutions and radical overthrow of governments. At another end of the spectrum of our thinking and conception of politics is a strand of thinkers who have forced us to think about “quiet” (Bayat, 1997) and “insurgent” (Holston, 2008) politics, one that is articulated through very complex claims that arise and diminish in different contexts (Chatterjee, 2004; Benjamin, 1996, 2005, 2008). My task in this monograph is to explain this spectrum of politics, especially how it plays out in the context of transparency and information technologies. I will discuss the complexities of claims, autonomy, institutional politics and norms/ideals. The challenge of this monograph is to convince different stakeholders and the public to interrogate our notions of politics, and to instill a sense of optimism in a time which is an one interesting one for all of our lives and aspirations.

Notes

1Mythri Prasad, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for Development Studies (CDS), Trivandrum.

2Research conducted under the aegis of Delphi Research Services, Bangalore, and for the purposes of my doctoral dissertation.

3 I am grateful to Narayana Gatty, faculty at Azim Premji University, for raising this issue of ‘default and design’ in the context of his research on e-governance and its impact on citizens and state agents.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/transparency-and-politics/transparency-politics-it-in-india

Shadow Search Project (SSP) in CIS

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T06:54:12Z

CIS hosts an interesting line-up on the 18th of April with the Shadow Search Project (SSP).

Last year, n.e.w.s. a collective online platform for the analysis and development of art-related activity organized an open call: Shadow Search, which was looking for a specific algorithm. In particular this search engine would allow prospectors in the world of information and databases to discover ‘shadow art activities’ that are partially hidden, off-the-radar, stealthy. Last year a jury gathered at CIS to evaluate the 5 entries and after much deliberation, a winner was chosen, 'Narcissus', by Phil Jones and Aharon Amir. This algorithm is now being launched at CIS on March 31, 2011.

The corpus of objects being tested by the Narcissus search engine is the data uploaded from the students from the Dutch Art Institute, Srishti School of Art, Design, Technology, Shantiniketan and CKP for 'Space: the final frontier'. The past three weeks the students have been indexing the shadow worlds of Bangalore with various art projects, which were physically exhibited at CKP on March 17th, 2011. The Shadow Search Project (SSP) will continue at the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA) at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology this year as a full-time project, in which various aspects of art-related activities as well as their visibility, searchability and accessibility will be investigated by participants and visiting faculty.

Also included in the day's activities is a discussion encircling the concept of 'search' with local guests (Nishant Shah, Prayas Abhinav, Renée Ridgway, T B Dinesh, Ajai Narendran) and those from abroad via Skype (Geert Lovink, Stephen Wright, Marijn de Vries Hoogerwerff) This is a continuation of a series of Skype chats from the past year in Amsterdam (INC) and Bangalore at CIS in which 'search' as a larger concept is being rethought. Now more than ever, in an era where Google hegemony is being tested by Facebook linkage and alternative search models are surfacing, we need to keep the 'world's knowledge' open and not proprietary. Please join us!

Agenda

16:00	Discussion in Skype during European lunch break time
17:30	Launch of the Narcissus algorithm and how it works, Space the Final Frontier project
18:00	Shadow Search Platform: going further

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/shadow-search-in-cis

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS, Bangalore

praskrishna — 2011-10-21T08:24:19Z

Facebook designing your online identity is like designing your rooms with furniture from the bazaar. The only individuality lies in your family pictures standing on the shelves. On Saturday, April 2, 2011, CIS is organising a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

In the Web 2.0 world, most users of technology are reduced to being mere ‘users’. We are offered almost an endless number of choices but do not have the freedom to go against the ‘laws’ and ‘rules’ of the system we operate in. Take Facebook for example. Have you ever wondered if you can change the way Facebook works? Sure, we can start campaigns and mobilize people to impact some of the policies but we never think about the very design of Facebook and the laws that govern it.

What if you could change Facebook’s laws? In this workshop we begin modifying Facebook.com for ourselves, using the unique concept of “browser-hacks”. The aim is to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook’s software to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts. We further want to explore, how this creative intervention can also be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Facebook Resistance is a research initiative accepting the status quo of Facebook being the dominant social identity management system, researching on the ways to change its rules and functionality from inside the system. Facebook sets the rules of how-to behave, so we’re asking: Are we happy with their interface, features and rules or do we want to change them? A change can be as trivial as adding a background-image. As initiator Tobias Leingruber (@tbx), puts it: “Facebook designing your online identity is like IKEA designing your apartment. The only individuality lies in the family pictures standing in your BILLY shelves.”

While early online networks like Geocities.com encouraged its users to entirely modify their online presence, Myspace.com and Web 2.0 have steered this “User Generated Content” into a commercially valuable structure. Facebook has finalized this “evolution” by disabling the user to do anything but feeding the system that gives Facebook it’s estimated value of 50 Billion US$. Facebook is taking over the social web, and its design follows Mark Zuckerberg’s ideals. To quote Lawrence Lessig: “The code is law. The architectures of cyberspace are as important as the law in defining and defeating the liberties of the Net.”

Trainer

Marc Stumpel (@Zuurstof) is a privacy/user-control advocate, holding a MA degree in New Media and Digital culture. He has recently discussed browser hacks in his thesis:

‘The Politics of Social Media. Facebook: Control and Resistance’, and continues to elaborate on this type of resistance while travelling in India. Several Facebook Resistance workshops already took place in Europe, organized by initiator Tobias Leingruber (@tbx) a famous artist and free communication designer working in viral media, popular culture, amateur aesthetics and browser apps.

Example Ideas

Dislike Button
Graffiti Wall (based on GML/webmarker.me)
Auto-comment generator (e.g. LOL or Kanye West speak)
Custom background images and visual css styling for your visitors
Themes, e.g. change your Facebook’s colour: pink, yellow…

Skill-set participants

It would be great to have a few people with some web development experience (html/css/javascript), or Photoshop skills, but also people who can write good (philosophical) texts are very welcome. In the end everyone who really uses web 2.0 will fit in, so just come and join us!

Information and registration

We have place for 20 people. You can register by sending an email to digitalnatives [at] cis-india.org. The workshop takes place at the the Centre for Internet and Society on Saturday, April 2nd from 11.00 to 17.00 hr. There is no charge for taking part in the workshop, but make sure to bring your laptop or mobile computing devices with you.

If you have questions please contact Marc Stumpel: m.stumpel[at]gmail.com.

VIDEO

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/facebook-resistance

February 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:16:29Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Monographs finalised from these projects have been published online for public review:

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities

Digital Natives

CIS has interest in developing Digital Identities as a core research area and looks at practices, policies and scholarships in the field to explore relationships between Internet, technology and identity. The Digital Natives project is funded by Hivos, Netherlands. CIS involvement has resulted into these:

Columns on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following articles were published in the Indian Express recently:

Pull the Plug [published in the Indian Express on February 20, 2011]
A FLASH of Change [published in the Indian Express on February 6, 2011]
Wiki changes the world [published in the Indian Express on January 23, 2011]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project took place in Santiago, Chile, from 8 to 10 February 2011. Samuel Tettner wrote a report about the workshop:

Digital Natives with a Cause? —Workshop in Santiago — an Afterthought

Blog Entries by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is doing Masters on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause? framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The new ones are:

Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Coordinator in the Digital Natives project. He has written one blog entry:

Computer Science & Society – The Roles Defined

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

New Blog Entry

The Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010: Does it exceed its Mandate in Including Provisions Relating to Other Disability Legislations?

Intellectual Property

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entries

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software, its latest involvement have yielded these results:

New Blog Entries

Internet Governance

Announcement

Google Policy Fellowship Program: Asia Chapter

New Blog Entries

Privacy

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24^th March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Blog Entries by Elonnai Hickok

Elonnai Hickok is a Programme Associate in the Privacy in Asia project. She has published a series of Open Letters to the Finance Committee regarding the UID:

Other New Blog Entries

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Spectrum auctions - 'Jhatka' or 'Halal'? [published in the Business Standard on February 3, 2011]

Forthcoming Events

CIS is holding some conferences/workshops in the month of March in Delhi and Bangalore:

Role of the Internet in Fostering Freedom of Expression and Strengthening Activism in India - A Workshop in Delhi (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression (March 4, 2011, Constitutional Club, Rafi Marg, New Delhi)
Electronication: Ragas and the Future (March 6, 2011 Jaaga, Bangalore)
Design!publiC (March 18, 2011, Taj Vivanta, New Delhi)

Staff Update

Deepti Bharthur

Deepti Bhartur is a Research Intern at CIS. She did her BA (Hons) in Journalism from Lady Sriram College, University of Delhi and completed her Masters in Communication from Sarojini Naidu School of Arts and Communication, University of Hyderabad. Deepti joined the Accessibility team of CIS and is working on accessibility in telecom policy in India.

News & Media Coverage

Growing cyberspace controls, Internet filtering (Hindu, February 20, 2011)
2(m) or not 2(m) (Business Standard, February 19, 2011)
Can the twitterati change the world? (The Times of India, February 12, 2011)
Can the mouse be a tool of revolution in India? (DNA, February 12, 2011)
Social Network Suicide (Bangalore Mirror, February 6, 2011)
New Kids on the Blog (Indian Express, February 6, 2011)
Procuring books in Indian libraries (Hri Institute for Southasian Research and Exchange, February 4, 2011)
What Are You Accused of? Find Out Online (Wall Street Journal, February 1, 2011)
One among the clan of Wikipedians (Hindu, January 27, 2011)
Digital Wrongs (Forbes India, January 24, 2011)

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

Looking forward to hearing from you. Please feel free to write to us for any queries or details required. If you do not wish to receive these emails, please do write to us and we will unsubscribe your mail ID from the mailing list.
CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/february-2011-bulletin

Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T10:32:32Z

Pratyush Shankar's research project on "Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. His monograph explores the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space.

There has been, in the fields of design and architecture, a close link between the shape and imagination of the city spaces and the dominant technologies of the time. The study of space (architecture, public places and city form) can lead to very interesting insights into the expression of the society with respect to the dominant technologies. Manuel Castells argues that space is not a mere photo¬copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression (Castells, 2009). Fredric Jameson, in his identification of the condition of post-modernity demonstrates how the transition into new technologies is perhaps first and most visibly reflected in the architecture, as physical spaces get materially reconstructed, not only to house the needs and peripheries of the emerging technologies but also to embody their aesthetics in their design and built form (Jameson, 1991).

Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues on how the emergence of print cultures and technologies led to a structural transformation of the public sphere by creating new and novel forms of participation and political engagement for the print readers. Within cinema studies in India, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhav Prasad have looked at the 'cinematic city' — how material conditions of the city transform to house the cinema technologies, and how the imagination of certain cities is affected by the cinematic representations of these spaces (Rajadhyaksha, 2009). Mike Davis' formulations of an 'Ecology of Fear'(Davis, 1999) and Sean Cubbit's idea of 'The Cinema Effect' (Cubitt, 2005) also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

I wish to explore the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space. The issue of imagination is an important one here as much as the material realities of our cities. However, to begin with one needs to look at the very idea of cities in the Indian context. The fundamental idea of a city and that of a space becomes important here and has been explored in the chapter on cities. The issue of representation as related to ideas of 'social space' and 'abstract space' (Lefebvre, 1992) has been used as a methodological framework while analyzing cities. The social space of a city here refers to the production of space that is biomorphic and anthropological. From this perspective people and history and memory along with social economic processes play a strong role in its definition. Hence, city spaces cannot be understood as a collection of building and other material production alone but rather as an act of social production involving people over a long period of time. The appropriation and representation of cities is another important concern as it creates an imagination structure and often justifies the material transformation.

The research is primarily concerned with first creating an understanding of the cities in Indian context from the point of view of their social, technological and material productions. The ideas and representations of space therefore, become critical issues of exploration to understand the nature of imagination of space with reference to Indian cities. An empirical study of issues of spatial transformation was conducted in Bangalore and Gurgaon to find certain patterns and its correlation with the present discourses on the technology and the city. The issue of perception of lived in space, cartography and myth became important issues to understand the nature of the imagination of space and positioning of the digital space. The contradiction of a networked geography with the present spatial arrangement of cities that is the centre of a larger territory becomes important shifts to be accounted for while understanding the new geography. The patterns and possibilities in these new geographies of information technologies have been understood by studying three building programmes in the city. The question of transformation and future of cities and the position of digital space in these times then became an important one to answer. The initial study concerns with laying out a framework for examining the techno-spatial discourses in cities in general while establishing the key characteristics of its narration in the Indian context.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.

Word
PDF

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by April 5, 2011 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/city-and-space

January 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T11:25:44Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! It gives us immense pleasure to present regular updates on the progress of our research on the mainstream Internet media. In this issue of we bring our latest project updates, news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

Digital Natives

Column on Digital Natives

Is That a Friend on Your Wall? [published in the Indian Express on 9 January 2010]

Workshop

The third and final workshop in the Digital Natives with a Cause? research project will take place in Santiago, Chile, from the 8 to 10 February. Open Call and FAQs for the workshop are online:

Blog Entry by Maesey Angelina

Maesy Angelina is a MA candidate on International Development, specializing in Children and Youth Studies at the International Institute of Social Studies, Erasmus University of Rotterdam. She is working on her research on the activism of digital natives under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme. She spent a month at CIS, working on her dissertation, exploring the Blank Noise Project under the Digital Natives with a Cause framework. She writes a series of blog entries. The latest is:

The Digital Tipping Point

Announcement

Rising Voices Seeks Micro-Grant Proposals for Citizen Media Outreach

Accessibility

New Blog Entry

Accessibility in Telecommunications

Intellectual Property

Copyright, patents and trademarks are the most important components on the Internet. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime. Our latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Entry

New Release of IPR Chapter of India-EU Free Trade Agreement

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralised authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cybercrime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Within the larger field of Internet governance, the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), a multi-stakeholder policy dialogue forum that was instituted by the WSIS processes and that is their only formal outcome, has fast emerged as one of the key institutions. As the definition quoted above indicates, a unique feature of the field of Internet governance is that, unlike many other governance spheres, it does not only involve governments. Historically, not only governments but also the technical community and private players have played a crucial role in the development of the Internet. In the context of the IGF, that role is not only explicitly acknowledged but also institutionalised as the IGF formally brings together governments, private players and civil society actors from all areas of and organisations involved in Internet governance. Moreover, now that the open and egalitarian potential of the Internet is increasingly under attack, this unique nature of the IGF, in addition to its WSIS roots, has made it a prime venue to remind stakeholders in all areas of Internet governance of the commitment they have made earlier to building a “people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society” (WSIS Geneva Principles, Para 1). CIS involvement in the field of Internet governance has the following shape:

New Blog Entry

Jurisdictional Issues in Cyberspace

Privacy

CIS has undertaken many new and exciting projects. One of these, "Privacy in Asia", is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and is being completed in collaboration with Society and Action Group. "Privacy in Asia" is a two-year project that commenced on 24 March 2010 and will complete within two years from the commencement date, unless otherwise agreed to by the parties. The project was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around privacy challenges and violations in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote an over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Apart from "Privacy in Asia" CIS is also participating in the " Privacy and Identity" project, which is funded by the Ford Foundation and managed by the Centre for Study of Culture and Society. The project is a research inquiry into the history of Privacy in India and how it shapes the contemporary debates around technology mediated identity projects like Aadhaar. The "Privacy and Identity" project started in August 2010.

New Blog Entries

Staff Update

Prashant Iyengar is a lawyer and legal scholar who has worked extensively on intellectual property issues particularly focusing on copyright reform and open access. He is a past recipient of an Open Society Institute fellowship for research into Open Information Policy, and has been affiliated with the Alternative Law Forum – a collective of lawyers in Bangalore engaged in human rights practice.

Prashant joined the Centre for Internet and Society as a lead researcher in the Privacy India project recently.

Telecom

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

The policy langurs [published on 6 January 2011]

News & Media Coverage

Civic hackers seek to find their feet in India (Livemint, 24 January 2011) and (IndiaInfoline, January 2011)
A Tweet and a poke from the CEO (Livemint, 24 January 2011)
Clicktivism & a brave new world order (Mail Today, 2 January 2011)
Would it be a unique identity crisis? (Bangalore Mirror, 2 January 2011)
Nel suk dei nativi digitali. Perché gli studenti 2.0 hanno bisogno di una bussola per orientarsi (Il Sore24 ORE, 2 January 2011)
A Refreshing Start! (Verveonline, Volume 19, Issue 1, January, 2011)
Getting Connected (Livemint, January 2011)
Knowledge Warriors (Il Sore24 ORE, January 2011)
Nishant Shah Quoted in Livemint 2011 Tweet-out (Livemint, January 2011)
Digital Natives with a Cause? - Workshop in Chile seeks participants (Bahama islands info, 30 December 2010)
Mothers discuss kids, music, fashions, on Net (The Hindu, 26 December 2010)

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Visit us at www.cis-india.org

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2011-bulletin

Myth/History/Irreverence: Flaneurs and Whores of Our Time

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:22:36Z

As part of a longer discovery and reading of Walter Benjamin's work, Atreyee Majumder constructs an argument that the turgid notions of the new, the contemporary and the important are endless repetitions of nothing-new. Atreyee will give a lecture on this on 8 January 2011 at the Centre for Internet and Society.

Many epochs, many histories seem to collide in a transient yet euphoric sensation of the ‘new’, immediately turning into ash-like heap of nothing-new. This understanding of the historic contemporary as a shuffle of old cards, yields new lenses through which to interpret the turgidity of the 'new' and the 'novel' in our times — technologies, crises (climate change, political upheaval, etc.), Facebook. She revisits the notion of history as scaffolding — especially, through the Benjaminian point of view of the Flaneur and the Whore, albeit the ones of our time.

Atreyee Majumder

Atreyee graduated from the National Law School of India University in 2006 and is a PhD student of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Yale University, with keen interests in political anthropology, spatiality, historicity, the interaction of many planes of history which constitute the historical residue of the contemporary. She is doing a dissertation research on the making of political subjects on the peri-urban terrain in Howrah, West Bengal, in the shadows of socialisms, and everyday dialog with metropolitan norms of civicness from neighbouring Kolkata. She has worked as an activist and researcher in the fields of law, environment and development in Delhi.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/myth-history-irreverence

Pornography & the Law - A Call for Peer Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T12:12:17Z

Namita Malhotra's research project on "Pornography & the Law". is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Her monograph is an attempt to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary.

It is these shifts that push the arguments here to be relevant beyond specific occurrences or phenomenon in the digital world (the moment of video pornography, interactive cyber sex, webcam sex, camfrog, social networking and sexual behaviour, chatroulette, facebook, confessional and sexualized blogging, sexting and mobile phones, etc.) to attempt to understand the nature of affects that surround pornography, especially as reflected in the law and its desire to contain it, and how law’s desire to contain is also about subjectivities and practices around technology. The structure of the monograph is somewhere between a willful literature review and a dressing room, where various concepts, ideas, images or visions around law, film/video, technology and new media are tried on for size to explain or unravel parts or whole of the picture around pornography in the Indian context.

Word
PDF

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law

Archive and Access: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

The Archive and Access research project by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran and Abhijit Bhattacharya is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The project that attempts to look at the ways in which the notion of the archive, the role of the archivist and the relationship between the state and private archives that has undergone a transition with the emergence of Internet technologies in India has been put up for public review.

Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.

The monograph has emerged out of the "Archive and Access" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 15 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archive-and-access

Identity, Identification and Media Representation in Video Game Play: An Audience Reception Study

nishant — 2011-04-04T07:22:52Z

Adrienne Shaw from the Annenberg School for Communication, who is a visiting fellow at MICA is giving a public talk on research on representation in video games on 27 November 2010 at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

Adrienne Shaw

Adrienne Shaw received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2010. Her research focuses on popular culture, the politics of representation, cultural production and qualitative audience research. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, representations of gender and sexuality, and the construction of identity and communities in relation to media consumption.

Abstract

Research on minority representation in video games usually asserts:

the industry excludes certain audiences by not representing them;
everyone should be provided with characters they can identify with; and
media representation has knowable effects.

In contrast, this dissertation engages with audiences’ relationship to gamer identity, how players interact with game texts (identification and interaction), and their thoughts about media representation. This dissertation uses interviews and participant observation to investigate why, when and how representation is important to individuals who are members of marginalized groups, focusing on sexuality, gender and race, in the U.S. The data demonstrate that video games may offer players the chance to create representations of people “like them” (pluralism), but games do not necessarily force players to engage with texts that offer representation of marginalized groups (diversity), with some rare and problematic exceptions. The focus on identity-based marketing and audience demand, as well as over-simplistic conceptualizations of identification with media characters, as the basis of arguments for minority media representation encourage pluralism.

Representation is available, but only to those who seek it out. Diversity, however, is necessary for the political and educative goals of representation. It requires that players are actively confronted with diverse content. Diversity is not the result of demand by audiences, but is rather the social responsibility of media producers. Media producers, however, can take advantage of the fact that identities are complex, that identification does not only require shared identifiers, and that diversity in a non-tokenistic sense can appeal to a much wider audience than pluralistic, niche marketing. In sum, diversity can address both the market logic and educative goals of media representation. I conclude by offering three suggestions bred from this analysis. First, researchers should be critical of this emphasis on pluralism rather than diversity. Second, rather than argue that video games should include more diversity because it matters, producers should include it precisely because representation does not matter in many games. Finally, those who have invested in diversity in games should not just prove the importance of representation in games, but rather argue for it without dismissing playfulness.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/adrienne

Talking Back without "Talking Back"

maesy — 2011-09-22T11:37:54Z

The activism of digital natives is often considered different from previous generations because of the methods and tools they use. However, reflecting on my conversations with The Blank Noise Project and my experience in the ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei, the difference goes beyond the method and can be spotted at the analytical level – how young people today are thinking about their activism.

Last August, I had the opportunity to participate in the three-day grueling yet highly rewarding ‘Digital Natives Talking Back’ workshop in Taipei. On the very first day, Seema Nair, one of the facilitators and a good friend, asked us to reflect about what ‘talking back’ means in the context of activism. At first glance, activism is almost always interpreted as a confrontational resistance towards an identifiable opponent over a certain issue - a group of activists protesting against a discriminatory legislation passed by a government, for example. Although this is definitely the most popular form, is this the only way activism could be done?

While reflecting on Seema’s question, I thought of my conversations with people in the Blank Noise Project and how they seem to defy this popular imagination through their efforts to address street sexual harassment. From the way it articulates its issue (I have shared it before in here), Blank Noise challenges the idea of an opponent in activism by refusing to identify an entity as the “enemy” or the one responsible for the issue, given the grey areas of street sexual harassment. The opponent is intangible instead: the mindset shared by all members of society that enables the violation to continue.

Consequently, Blank Noise ‘talks back’ differently. While it is common for many movements to set an intangible vision as its goal (for instance: a society where women is treated as equals with men), they also have a tangible intermediary targets to move towards the broader vision (e.g. a new legislation or service provision for women affected by domestic violence). Blank Noise sticks with the intangible. The goal is to form a collective where eve teasing is everybody’s shared concern, spreading awareness that street sexual harassment is happening every day and it is unacceptable because it is a form of violence against women. Pooja Gupta, a 19 year old art student who is one of the initiators of the ‘I Never Ask for It’ Facebook campaign, underlined this intangible goal by saying that “The goal really is to spread awareness. It is not about pushing any specific agenda or telling people what to do.”

Because of this goal, I initially thought that there is a clear demarcation between people within the Blank Noise and the ‘public’ whose awareness they would like to raise – that there is a clear “us” (the Blank Noise activists) and “them” (the target group). However, I was corrected by Jasmeen Patheja, the founder of Blank Noise, when we chatted one day. “I haven’t ever put it that way. Since the beginning, the collective is meant to be inclusive and there is no specific target group. The public is invited to participate and there is no audience, everyone is a participant and co-creator.”

The strategy for this is to open up a public dialogue. When Blank Noise first started in 2003, it started with the street as the public space and uses art as its method of intervention. It takes many forms: performative art, clothes exhibition, street polls, and many others. Although today Blank Noise is much more known for its engagement with the virtual public through its prolific Internet presence (4 blogs, a Twitter account, 2 Facebook groups, many Facebook events, and a YouTube channel), the street interventions remain a significant part of its activities. Regardless of the methods, which I will elaborate more in future blog posts, the principles of creativity, play, and non-confrontation are always maintained.

At this point, some critical questions could be raised. What is Blank Noise actually trying to achieve through the dialogue? Can public dialogue really address the issue? How does Blank Noise know if it is interventions have an impact?

When I asked the last question, many people in the Blank Noise admitted that impact measurement is something that they are still grappling with. Some said that the public recognition of Blank Noise by bloggers and mainstream media is an indicator; others said that the growth of volunteers is also an impact. However, I found that this is not an issue many people were concerned with and was a bit puzzled. After all, if one were to dedicate their time and energy to a cause, wouldn’t s/he want to know what kind of difference made?

The light bulb for this puzzle switched on when Apurva Mathad, one of Blank Noise male volunteers, said, “Eve teasing is an issue that nobody talks about. It seems like a monumental thing to try and change it, so the very act of doing something to address it and reaching as many people as possible right now seems to be enough.”

Apurva basically told me that it is the action of doing something about the issue is what counts – and that it is the personal level change among people who are active within the Blank Noise is the real impact. I recalled that everyone else I talked with mentioned individual transformation after being a part of Blank Noise intervention – something I would elaborate upon in future posts.

This observation was confirmed in a later conversation with Jasmeen, where I discovered that Blank Noise also has another goal that was not as easy to identify as the first: to allow people involved with the collective to undergo a personal transformation into “Action Heroes” - people who actively takes action to challenge the silence and disregard towards street sexual harassment. In this sense, Blank Noise is similar to many women collectives that became organized to empower themselves and hence could be said to also adopt a feminist ideology.

The difference with most women collectives, however, lies on Blank Noise’s aim to allow a personalization of people’s experience with the collective. “The nature of this project is that people are in it for a reason close to them and they give meaning to their involvement as they see fit,” Jasmeen said.

Blank Noise does face challenges in doing this. Some people found it difficult to understand that an issue could be addressed without shouting slogans or advocating for a specific solution and others joined with anger due to their personal experiences. Hence, the non-confrontational dialogue approach becomes even more important. The discussion and debates it raises help the Blank Noise volunteers to also learn more about the issue, reflect on their experiences and opinions, as well as to give meaning to their involvement. This is when I finally understood the point of “no target group”: the Blank Noise people also learn and become affected by the interventions they performed. Influencing ‘others’ is not the main goal although it is a desired effect, the main one is to allow personal empowerment.

Going back to the ‘talking back’ discussion in Taipei, Seema then shared her experiences working with women groups in India and showed how ‘talking back’ could also be ‘talking with’, engaging people in a dialogue. It need not always address the state; it could also be aiming to make a change at the personal level in everyday life. It could also be ‘talking within’, keeping the discussion and debates alive within a movement to avoid a homogenized, simplification of the activism and provide a reflective element to the action. ‘Talking back’ could also take form other than “talking”, which usually is done through slogans and placards in a street protest, petition, or statements. It could be done through art, theatre performance, and many, many other possibilities.

Blank Noise is definitely an example of these different forms and its experience shows that the difference is not arbitrary. It is based on a well-thought analysis of the issue that extends to how it formulates its objectives which is then translated into its strategies. Blank Noise is not only an example of how activism is done differently, but also on how the thought behind it is different.

As I looked around the workshop room I was reminded that Blank Noise was not the only one. A few seats away from me sat two people who combined technology and poetry to create everyday resistance towards consumerism in Taiwan and a young woman who held urban camps in India to mobilize young people to volunteer Regardless of the issue and the technology used, many digital natives with a cause across the world remind us that ‘talking back’ could be done in many other ways than “talking back”.

This is the third post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with The Blank Noise Project under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

*The photo is from one of Blank Noise's interventions in Cubbon Park, Bangalore. You can learn more about this intervention here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talking-back-without-talking-back

What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now

anja — 2011-08-02T09:25:39Z

In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?

Among those who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion, critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or adivasis, often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and intense. In a recent video posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist – called on the nation to support the adivasis and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested people to get off the Internet:

Is me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge.

[To the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach the common people, neither will we come to know the country's problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people].

Not everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online. But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the only way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the context of the Free Binayak Sen campaign, for example, there is considerable recognition that the website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of 2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist who had worked for more than twenty five years among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website, and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.

In this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres of movements are online, despite their protestations against online activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case, it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the kind of elements that determine whether you are an online activist. What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only work online is not sufficient.

Importantly, such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once come across “online activists” who started their conversation with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all. Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to identify as an activist among participants in the Blank Noise project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming), a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on here, (earlier posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why people refused the “activist” label was generally not because they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a clear difference between their own contribution and that of the full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process – the “jholawallahs”, as one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do, however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:

I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am convinced, that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference, you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.

Clearly, then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense, but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even though small that difference often may be.

In many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as contributions of non-activists have always played an important role in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free; lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return; people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much easier to contribute to publicising and building community around issues that are close to movements' heart as well.

So how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have platforms such as MoveOn or Avaaz, that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly embedded in communities of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists, from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media, valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can and does infuse the method, at least for now.

This, then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people willing and available to help building such communities in a more or less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core “activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more and more people start to care as the message of social movements is amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly, and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a forward-looking alternative to the existing progressive politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the space to such challengers.

The point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and minds of activists and non-activists alike.

With thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.

References

Angelina, M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague, International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now

Locating Gender Politics in the New Techno-Industrial Complex: A Lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin

praskrishna — 2011-10-21T08:44:37Z

The Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), IT for Change and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) are hosting a lecture by Dr. Lisa McLaughlin, Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies, Miami University, Ohio, USA at CIS, Bangalore on 23 July, 2010.

Dr. McLaughlin will address the gendered ties that bind the 'new global governance' to the 'new information economy', with a focus on women, work, and information and communication technology.

Dr. McLaughlin is spending two months in India (June and July) to work on a joint research project with IT for Change titled, “Women’s Enterprise and Information Technology”. The study explores ICT policies and practices that seek to integrate women entrepreneurs, especially from the informal and small business sectors, into formal and global markets. She is also part of the Advisory Group of the research program “Gender and Citizenship in the Information Society”, coordinated by IT for Change. This initiative aims to explore the the concept of citizenship, and use citizenship as a framework to understand gender issues implicit in the 'Information Society'.

About Dr. Lisa McLaughlin

Dr. McLaughlin is an Associate Professor in Media Studies and Women's Studies at Miami University-Ohio, USA. She teaches undergraduate courses in media and society, global media, and gender and media. She also teaches graduate seminars in feminist media theory, global media, technology and culture, and media governance. Her research has been published in scholarly journals including as Media, Culture and Society, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Critical Studies in Media Communications, and Sociological Review. She is the author of two forthcoming books, one titled Global Communications and the Public Sphere and the other titled Keywords in International Communications. She also has worked as an academic journal editor and is founding editor, and current co-editor, of an international journal titled Feminist Media Studies. Her research interests include feminist studies, critical theory, gender and information work in the knowledge economy, and global communications governance.

Video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/locating-gender-politics

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:27:16Z

Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.

The Critical Point of View (CPOV), a Wikipedia research initiative organized in partnership with the Centre of Internet and Society (Bangalore, India), has so far successfully produced two conferences: One in Bangalore in January 2010 and one in Amsterdam in March of the same year. Reports, videos, the mailing list and further resources can be accessed at the CPOV website.

A reader based on the conferences is currently being produced and is planned to be released by January 2011 as a part of the INC reader series.

A next conference is foreseen to take place in Leipzig (Germany) 25-26 September 2010 and will be a German speaking CPOV event. For news and updates check the project’s website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/CPOV-conference-Leipzig

CIS featured in the Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:27:38Z

Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.

Research Councils UK had undertaken a mapping exercise to gain a better understanding of the research and funding landscape within the arts and humanities in India. The India Foundation for the Arts won the tender to undertake the exercise.

The report highlights:

The challenges of definition with the term ‘arts and humanities’ and ‘social science’ in India and subsequently how this affects funding for research in these areas
The strengths, current themes and challenges of arts and humanities (and in some cases social science) research in India
The challenge of creating an accurate arts and humanities archive in India
An overview of the Indian funding and research structures
The challenge of funding fine and performing arts separately from traditional arts research disciplines
A discussion on significant shifts in theory and approaches in some of the disciplines and this impact on the current research landscape
A list of centres of excellence in arts and humanities research in India
A list of centres with potential or those which are working in innovative research areas
An outline of government, non-government and foreign funders

Click here for the Report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-and-funding