Centre for Internet and Society

Inquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*

nishant — 2011-08-02T09:25:30Z

Research and activism on the Internet in India remain fledgling in spite the media hype, says Anja Kovacs in her blog post that charts online activism in India as it has emerged.

Since the late 1990s when protesters against the WTO in Seattle used a variety of new technologies to revolutionize their ways of protesting so as to further their old goals in the information age, much has been made of the possibilities that new technologies seem to offer social movements. The emergence of Web 2.0 seems to have only multiplied the possibilities of building on the Internet's democratising potentials, so widely heralded since the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and since then, the use of social media for social change has received widespread media attention worldwide. From Spain to Mexico, activists used the Internet as a central tool in their efforts to organise and mobilise – be it to express their stand against a war in Iraq, against a Costa Rican Free Trade Agreement with the United States, to mobilise support for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, or more recently, to push for a change of guard in Iran.

In 2009, when Nisha Susan launched the Pink Chaddi campaign, the 'ICT for Revolution' buzz finally seemed to have reached India as well. Phenomenally successful in terms of the attention it generated for the issue it sought to address, the campaign sought to protest in a humorous fashion against attacks on women pub-goers in Karnataka by Hindu right wing elements. In only a matter of weeks, Facebook associated with the campaign – 'The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women', which gathered tens of thousands of members. It was ultimately killed off when Susan's Facebook account was cracked by rivals. The campaign was perhaps the singular most successful account of ‘digital activism’ in India so far, and an impressive one by all measures.

The creativity of the campaign should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the long and rich history of activism for social change in India. Organised social actors have been critical influences in the emergence of new social identities as well as on critical policy junctures from colonial times onwards, developing a fascinating and unmistakably Indian language of protest in the process (see Kumar 1997 and Zubaan 2006 for examples from feminist movement).

As Raka Ray and Mary Faizod Katzenstein (2006) have pointed out, in the post-independence period, such organised activism for long was connected by at least verbal – if not actual – commitment to the common master frame of poverty alleviation and the ending of inequality and injustice, and this irrespective of the particular issues groups were working on. Since the late 1980s, however, a number of far-reaching changes have taken place in India. This period has been marked by the definite demise of secular democratic socialism as the dominant script of the Indian state and its simultaneous replacement by neo-liberalism. Moreover, in the same period, Hindu nationalism as an ideology too has gone from strength to strength, with only in the last five years a slowdown in its ascendancy. While for many traditional social movements of the Left the commitment to social justice remains, in this context a space has undeniably been created for groups with a very different agenda. The considerable popularity of organisations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu nationalist organisations, are prime indications of these transformations. However, the fragmentation of the activist space did not only benefit reactionary elements of society. The final emergence into visibility of a well-articulated middle class queer politics, for example, too, may well in many ways have been facilitated by the evolutions of the past 20 years. Although this point has been mostly elaborated in the context of the US (Hennessey 2000), in India, too, this seems to ring true at least in some senses.

The general shape-shifting of activism in India since the 1990s is not the only contextual factor that deserves obvious consideration in a study like this. In addition, since independence a close link has been forged in policy and people's imagination alike between science and technology on the one hand and development paradigms in India on the other. Not everyone agrees on the benefits of this association: all too frequently, the struggles of grassroots social movements are directed precisely against the outcomes or consequences of a supposedly 'scientifically' inspired development policy. The neo-liberal era is no exception to this: as Carol Upadhya (2004) has shown quite convincingly, the economic reform policies that are at the heart of neo-liberalism have been inspired first and foremost by the information technology sector in India, which has also in turn been their first beneficiary. And today as earlier, Asha Achuthan (2009) has pointed out, in the resistance to these policies, the subaltern who is the agent of grassroots social movements is frequently associated with a pre-technological purity that needs to be maintained in order to resist discourses and material consequences of technological change themselves. In popular discourses, at least, attitudes towards technology inevitably come in a binary mode.

Seeing the context in which digital activism in India has emerged, a number of pressing questions regarding the new forms that even progressive activism takes as it adopts new tools and methods, then, immediately offer themselves. Leaving aside the activities of right wing groups in India, who are the actors that occupy this space for activism and what are their relationship with offline activists groups? Which are the issues online activism seeks to address, and what are its master narratives, goals and audiences? Where does it locate problems in today's society, and what kind of solutions does it propose? How does it posit its relation to the global/international and to the offline-local; to dominant understandings of science and technology, development, or desirable social change? How are these understandings reflected in online activism, including in the choice and use of technologies but also in the discourses that are deployed and the audiences that are targeted? What are its methods, its strategies, its ways of organising? What role is played by organisations, collectives, networks, individuals? In what ways is the field marked by the conjuncture at which it emerged? Do those who first occupy (most of) it also set the parameters? Or do its tools fashion online activism's very conditions of existence?

The value of greater insight into these issues is not immediately apparent to all. For one thing, some would argue that, as connectivity in the emerging IT superpower remains limited, the importance of these questions to those concerned with social justice in India is really marginal. It is true that while commercial Internet services have been available in the country since 1995, for long the number of connections remained abysmally low. Even today, the number of subscriptions has only just crossed the 14 million mark, and barely half of these are broadband subscriptions, severely limiting the usefulness of a wide range of potential online activism tools (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2009 – figures are for the second quarter of 2009). According to I-Cube 2008 report (IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India 2008), there were an estimated 57 million claimed urban Internet users in the country in September 2008 and an estimated 42 million active urban Internet users. Corresponding figures for Internet users in rural areas in March 2008 were 5.5 million and 3.3 million respectively. Almost 88 million Indians were believed to be computer-literate at the time. Clearly, then, online activists are a tiny section of an already fairly small, privileged group, and at least in a direct sense, the availability of new tools is thus indeed unlikely to affect all activists or activism in the country.

Some of my own starting points while embarking on this study may seem to further give fuel to arguments against the value of this research. The idea of investigating online activism in India as it emerges followed from my observation – and a troubling one at that for me – that so far, and despite all the hype internationally, more traditional grassroots movements in India seem to have been slow to embrace the Internet as an integral part of their awareness raising and mobilisation strategies. Although they may attract the largest numbers of activists offline, the many so-called 'new' social movements that have emerged since the 1970s and that remain important actors pushing for social change seem most conspicuous by their relative absence online. This is especially true of those critical of current development paradigms and practices: movements fighting against dams, special economic zones or land acquisitions for “development” purposes seem visible only in relatively fragmented and generally marginal ways. Instead, middle-class actors addressing middle class audiences on middle class issues seem to be the flag bearers of Internet activism in India – the Pink Chaddi campaign or VoteReport India, a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections” (see votereport.in/blog/about) perhaps among the most well-known illustrations of this argument.

Both points are valid, and yet, while inquilab it may not be, to conclude from this that the study of online activism automatically is of only very limited value would be short-sighted. Indeed, even if the hypothesis that Internet activism is dominated by middle class actors who address middle class concerns is validated (note that in any case considerable segments of the leadership and cadre of grassroots movements, too, tend to come from middle class backgrounds), this is likely to affect all those interested in affecting social change, even if perhaps in varying degrees. For one thing, it would mean that as the public sphere is reshaped, important new quarters of its landscape are inhabited only be the elite, contradicting the still widely popular and even cherished belief (at least among those who are familiar with the Internet) that the Internet is a democratising force. Instead, the proportional visibility in the public sphere of dissenting viewpoints on development, science, neo-liberalism, progress, the state will only decrease. In addition, then, it may also indicate a further refracting of the activism landscape and its master narratives and methods, where different segments of activists increasingly need to vie with each other for recognition and validation of their respective understandings of political processes and of appropriate forms of engaging with these. As such battles intensify it is not too risky to make a prognosis on who will be the main losers. If, in an era in which the old activist master narrative of justice for all remains under strident attack, civil society has come to occupy at the expense of political society (a useful distinction first made by Parth Chatterjee in Chatterjee 2004) a whole arena of activism, this would indeed need to be a cause of concern for all. In order to gauge its ramifications, it is however, crucial to first of all understand in which ways and to what extent this statement rings true.

The current study may well not be able to fully develop all the above and other theoretical strands as they emerge in the course of this research. But what it does promise to do is to outline the breaks and continuities that mark the make-up, strategies, audiences and goals of those who embrace the new possibilities that the Internet provides at the same time as the information age so fundamentally reconstitutes our society. As a starting point for the analysis, this research will therefore, attempt to map the online activism that has taken place in India so far, focusing more specifically on the forms of activism that leave a public record on the Internet (a more extensive debate of various definitional issues is in order – I will take this up in a separate blog post, to follow later, however). At the core of the research will be the construction of a database pertaining to online activism in India with links to email lists, blogs, Facebook groups, popular hash tags and the like. Although much of the activism I will be looking at will be centred around what has come to be known as 'social media', my focus is thus broader than that, as older tools such as e-petitions, discussion boards and list servs, too, will be included in this study. The aim is to be as comprehensive as possible, although for the database to ever be complete will, of course, be an impossibility. Moreover, since only data available in the English language will be collected, the database will automatically have its limitations. The database will be further complemented by interviews with activists who have been involved in key online campaigns and, where appropriate, case studies. It is the data thus gathered that will form the basis of our analysis.

While the scope of the study is thus admittedly ambitious, the fact that online activism in India is a fairly recent affair – little happened before 2002, and it has only really taken off in the past three years or so – makes this venture not an impossible one. The contribution I hope to make through this research is not simply to work on the Indian context, however. Despite the media hype surrounding the possibilities of the Internet for social change, research on the Internet and activism more generally remains limited so far. The paucity is perhaps particularly acute where activism and social media are concerned (Postill 2009). Moreover, the work that does exist, I argue, tends to look mostly at activists' use of one particular tool, for example YouTube, or Facebook. Sight is thus generally lost of the larger cyberecology of communication in which this use must be located, preventing an opportunity for genuine insight into the ways in which activism is reconfigured from materialising. By using a much wider lens, this research hopes to make a beginning to correcting this lacuna. It is in this way that the importance of the changes that are underway in the Indian activist landscape as elsewhere can be appropriately assessed.

* Inquilab means revolution

References

Achuthan, Asha (2009). Re-Wiring Bodies. Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring/review, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Chatterjee, Partha (2004). The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Hennessy, Rosemary (2000). Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge.

IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India (2008). I-Cube 2008: Facilitating Citins, Altins, Fortins (Faster, Higher, Stronger) Internet in India. IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India, Mumbai. www.iamai.in/, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Kumar, Radha (1997). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990. New Delhi: Zubaan.

Postill, John (2009). Thoughts on Anthropology and Social Media Activism. Media/Anthropology, http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Ray, Raka and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (2006). Introduction: In the Beginning, There Was the Nehruvian State. In Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (eds.). Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (2009). The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators, April-June 2009. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, New Delhi. www.trai.gov.in , last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Upadhya, Carol (2004). A New Transnational Capitalist Class: Capital Flows, Business Networks and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry. Economic and Political Weekly, 39(48): 5141-5151.

Zubaan (2006). Poster Women: A Visual History of the Women's Movement in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop

Art and Social Media

radha — 2011-04-05T04:17:50Z

Art Resources and Teaching Trust in collaboration with The Centre for Internet and Society, is organizing a workshop titled "Art and Social Media" on January 16th-17th 2010, to be conducted by Anita Garimella.

Art, Resources and Teaching Trust (A.R.T.) Bangalore and The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore invites you to a two days workshop, “Art and Social Media” by Anita Garimella.

Anita Garimella (http://www.linkedin.com/in/anitagarimella) is an internet and software product management and marketing consultant. After graduating from Stanford University’s Human Computer Interaction Program in 2000, she has worked on several projects in the industry including the creation and design of applications for Wallop, Facebook and Bebo.

The schedule of the workshop is as follows:

Day 1
Social Media, Web 1.0 and 2.0, and Art 11.00 AM - 1.00 PM
•    What is Social Media – and how does it connect with Web 2.0?
•    How is Social Media measured?
•    Virality, and the dangers of this new yardstick
•    Brief overview of Art & Social Media

Lunch 1.00 PM - 2.00 PM

Deep Dive – Case Studies of Art and Social Media 2.00 PM - 4.30 PM
•    Art blogs & discourse
•    Facebook & art
•    Art-making
•    Art marketing
•    Art pedagogy

Day 2
Opportunities & Challenges for Art using Social Media 11.00 AM - 1.00 PM
•    What is art in this context?
•    What are good ways to use social media for art?
•    Importance of defining goals in social media usage
•    Copyrights and public domain
•    Democratization of art – is that really possible?

Lunch 1.00 PM - 2.00 PM

Future of the Internet and technology and their impact on Art 2.00 PM - 3.30 PM
•    Web 3.0: Surf to Search to Subscribe
•    How to penetrate in an increasingly aggregated world
•    New technologies

Find attached a registration form. You can also download the registration form from www.artscapeindia.org. Interested participants can complete the registration form and send it along with a DD of Rs.1800/- (per participant and includes lunch and handout material) to the address given in the form.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-social-media

Critical Point of View: WikiWars

nishant — 2011-04-05T04:18:33Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), brings together an international range of scholars, researchers, practitioners, artists and users, to critically think through the emergence and spread of Wikipedia in the last few years. In this two day event that seeks to engage with different aspects of Wikipedia across different disciplines and practices, we invite students, researchers, Wikipedians and interested stakeholders to come and join us at WikiWars

WikiWars brings together more than forty scholars, students, practitioners, artists and experts who have been critically reflecting upon the emergence of Wikipedia in various contexts of education, politics, resistance, art theory and practice, knowledge production, learning, pedagogy and new and alternative forms of interaction and community building.

Dates: 12th, 13th January, 2010.

Venue: The Bangalore International Centre, The Energy and Resources Institute, 4th Main, Domlur II Stage, Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka

Programme for the event has 40 International and National delegates presenting in panels on Wiki-Theory, Global Politics of Exclusion, Critique of Free and Open, Wikipedia and Education, Wikipedia and the Place of Resistance, Wikipedia and Western Knowledge Production, and Wikipedia and Art.

Registration opens on 5th January 2010 and ends on 10th January 2010. Registration is free but limited and available on a first come first served basis.
http://www.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg

For more information on WikiWars, click here

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

Preserving Digital Memories: A Patrimonial Approach

radha — 2011-04-05T04:19:32Z

The Centre for Internet & Society and The Centre for Contemporary Studies, Bangalore cordially invite you to a public lecture and discussion by Dr. Bruno Bachimont, on Preserving Digital Memories: A Patrimonial Approach, on 10th December, 2009 from 4pm to 6pm.

Dr. Bachimont is visiting India as a part of the “Bonjour French Science” framework constructed by the Embassy of France in India. He comes from a well-known technology university in France and has a background in computer science and philosophy. He is a researcher in the fields of Cognitive Science and Knowledge Engineering and has been very active in instrumenting connections between Philosophy, Science and Technology in the French Higher Education environment.

Sponsored by
The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore
The Centre for Contemporary Studies, Bangalore

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/preserving-digital-memories-a-patrimonial-approach

Experimental Economy Camp

radha — 2011-04-05T04:27:19Z

Experimental Economy Camp continued at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore on Nov 22nd, '09 from 10.30am to 5.30pm.

Experimental Economy Camp continued at CIS (http://www.cis-india.org/) which will combine a hackathon, inviting more local people to get
involved, with a 'camp' of presentations, live and via Skype (maybe you?), which discuss and brainstorm the Open Call, former a greater,
more discursive context. (without giving away any answers and not including people's proposals).

Shadow Search

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/experimental-economy-camp-1

Shadow Search

radha — 2011-04-05T04:28:00Z

CIS in collaboration with NEWS announces an open call for proposals to explore the use of natural-language search algorithms that are able to find people and activities that embody the self-understanding of the kind of art we are seeking without specifically using the word art or a related vocabulary.

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.

The selection procedure will take place over several stages:

15th October 2009 – Call goes out, submissions can be uploaded at n.e.w.s.

15th November 2009 – Closing date for entries

20th November 2009 - Final Round submissions announced

23rd November 2009 – Winner(s) announced

Please send:

A Pseudocode representation

A plain text description no longer than 500 words

If required, you can add a graphical representation along with the text

Please send all entries to: shadow@northeastwestsouth.net

Cash Prize: EURO 1000 (the jury reserves the right not to award the prize if no submission fits the bill)
All submissions will be published online (with the exception of personal details)

To learn more, visit n.e.w.s

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

An Introduction to the Chinese Wikipedia

pranesh — 2011-04-05T04:32:09Z

A talk at CIS by Ting Chen, a Trustee on the Wikimedia Board, about the Chinese edition of Wikipedia

Ting Chen was born in Shanghai, China in 1968. He grew up in Harbin, China, in the northeast corner of the country, where he attended elementary school and middle school. In 1989 he went to Braunschweig, Germany and began his study of Electrical engineering. He was especially interested in semiconductors and their physics. He graduated in 1993 with a diploma and now he works as an IT specialist in Mainz, Germany.

His first experience with a virtual community were during his university time in the German Fido-Net, where he moderated a forum about science and knowledge for many years. He learned of Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects through a news article about the German Wikipedia achieving a milestone in 2003. From then on Wikipedia became a new hobby of his. He started on the German Wikipedia and changed soon to the young Chinese Wikipedia, which was at that time still starting. Ting Chen attended the first Wikimania (Wikimania 2005) in Frankfurt, where he took part on a panel discussion and introduced the Chinese community. He also helped organize the third Wikimania (Wikimania 2007) in Taipei.

Ting Chen was elected a Trustee by the Wikimedia Community in June 2008 and his term started officially in July 2008. He was re-elected in August 2009. His term on the board would end at July 2011.

Vidoes

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

The new language of Internet: A report on the Chutnefying Hinglish Conference

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:10:19Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/Hinglish

Internet, first source of credible information about A(H1N1) virus

radha — 2011-04-02T15:10:40Z

An article was publised in The Hindu, 16th August '09 on how the internet has evolved as a de facto information system around the world and in India. Nishant Shah, Director- Research, CIS, has provided inputs for the article.

The internet evolved as de facto information system around the world and in India. Dedicated users put out hourly updates.

There was no missing it. Anywhere you turned these past few weeks, the pig was all over the place. At least the virus, once born of swine, now mutated into the A(H1N1) influenza was painting the towns a feverish red.

There was information, and misinformation, about the virus via the TV, newspapers and internet. For much of the community in the cities, at least, the net-enabled community, the www has been a huge source of information. While it cannot be denied that it has contributed to some of the panic that has defined this epidemic or near-epidemic, it has oftentimes also been the first source of credible, scientific information on how to prevent an A(H1N1) infection and to handle it.

The internet has now evolved as the de facto information system for a significant and growing population around the world and in India, says Nishant Shah, Director of research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

He says that in the last two decades internet technologies have played an important role, both in creating safety havens for people to come, discuss, voice their fears and get responses to their queries, as well as in initiating rumour mills which sometimes create great panic attacks.

Melissa Davies wrote in Nielsen Online (http://blog.nielsen.com) in May 2009 .. the buzz volume about swine flu in the blogosphere was still on its meteoric climb, far surpassing discussion levels for the peanut butter/salmonella scare that happened earlier this year…

She adds that a measure of the extent of Internet engagement regarding swine flu is Wikipedia. The sites page on swine influenza has been updated hundreds of times this week. Wikipedia created a separate page focused on the 2009 swine flu outbreak for current information that page has been updated 119 times as of early on May 1.

Not to leave the social networking sites out of the picture, she mentions that there were more than 500 Facebook groups dedicated to Swine Flu as early as May 1. On Twitter, Swine Flu mentions topped out at a rate of more than 10,000 tweets per hour earlier in the week. Dedicated users such as @Swine_Flu_Vrus, and @CDCemergency put out nearly hourly updates from across the world.

Social networking

Social networking fora also became a sort of platform for those who were quivering with fear to seek advice. G-chat and Facebook status messages were in the flu vein: Have cough. Need Mask? ... I have fever and cold. Is it the S.flu?

Apart from lists of symptoms and helplines, many What to do if you have the Swine Flu kind of advisories cropped up online in no time, some culled from information put out by the World Health Organisation and the CDC. This seemed to have assuaged some in a tizzy about the flu.

Keywords: Internet, A (H1N1), credible information, swine flu, Centre for Internet and Society.

More information is available on the following url: http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article3572.ece

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-first-source-of-credible-information-about-a-h1n1-virus

Children's Forum on the Internet and New Media

radha — 2011-04-05T04:34:14Z

CIS, in association with Ranga Shankara and IT for Change, is conducting a workshop designed to give Voice to children's perspectives on the Internet and New Media

Ranga Shankara is having a Children’s Theatre Festival from Aug 26th to Sept 6th, called AHA! Theatre for Children – International Festival.

CIS, in association with Ranga Shankara and IT for Change, is inviting students from the 9th to 12th standards from the schools in Bangalore for a revolutionary new -

Children’s Forum on the Internet and New Media

This Forum is designed to give Voice to our youth’s perspectives on the Internet and New Media and aims:

To bring out our youth’s experiences not only as consumers, but also as producers and critical thinkers on the Internet
To bridge a communication gap between the youth and adults on young people’s internet use.

The participants will be the students, who will be the Voice of the Forum.

The workshop is scheduled for the students on Aug 28th @ 2.30pm.

At 7.30pm the auditorium doors at Ranga Shankara will be opened to the parents, teachers, public and media, who are invited to explore the outcomes of the forum.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/childrens-forum-on-the-internet-and-new-media

Call for participation: Conference @ Bangalore - 'WikiWars'

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:43:41Z

Call for Participation: Conferences and Reader on critical insights and experiences on the Wikipedia

CPOV - Critical Point Of View : WikiWars

Call for Participation: Conference and Reader

CPOV (Critical Point of View) Context: The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to produce a critical Reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a Reader that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.

WikiWars Conference: The first conference to be held in Bangalore, called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view. WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority, verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences, experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:

Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document Wikipedia based art practices or debates
Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on the Wikipedia
Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage, production and participation on the Wikipedia
Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on Wikipedia etc.
The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and ideas
Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities around the Wikipedia

For detailed information on each theme, please go to http://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Who Should Apply: The conference in Bangalore aims to bring together an interesting mix of diverse voices from different cultures, geo-political spaces, and context-based practices from around the world, to start consolidating the approaches, experiences, and impact of the Wikipedia:

Students and Wikipedia users who belong to different local chapters or have editorial/contribution experiences on the Wikipedia,
Academics and publishers who are exploring the changes caused by Wikipedia, both in classroom pedagogy and in knowledge production systems,
Researchers and theoreticians, practitioners and proponents, artists and social activists, who are interested in Wikipedia cultures and their socio-political conditions, should be attending this conference.

How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following information by email to infowiki@cis-india.org by the 15th of October, 2009. 1. A note of interest (450 - 700 words) detailing your ideas and possible contribution 2. Your updated resume 3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)

Conference time-line:

Announcement of short-listed proposals – 21^st October, 2009.

Sharing of Detailed Proposals with all participants – 15^th December, 2009

Announcement of Conference Schedule and Logistics – 30^th December 2009

Online Registration for non-presenting participants – 3^rd January 2010

Conference Dates – 12^th, 13^th January 2010

Travel support: Travel support is available for some of the conference participants (national and international). The selected participants will be provided with the basic travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the conference from their home-countries/cities to travel to Bangalore for the conference. If you are applying for travel support, please indicate clearly in your “Note of Interest” any of these three options: 1. Full travel support required. 2. Partial travel support required with estimate. 3. Travel support not required. Travel support will be provided by the conference organisers on a case-by-case basis.

Conference Organisers: Sunil Abraham (Sunil@cis-india.org) and Nishant Shah (Nishant@cis-india.org ), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. If there are any queries regarding the WikiWars conference please write to us.

Research and Editorial Team: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/wikiwars

Art and Augmented Reality

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:33:55Z

Talk by Jose David Cuartas Correa

The Centre for Internet and Society and the Free Software Users' Group, Bangalore, invite you to a talk by Jose David Cuartas Correa on his project on Augmented Reality (with Sologico Libre Foundation, with the support of Caldas University, CEMA (Center of Experimental Media Arts) and Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology). In this presentation, Jose David will discuss the concept of Augmented Reality (fusion of the real world with the virtual objects and data), and demonstrate how it can be used as an alternative model of manipulation, integration and interaction for media and information. This new technology gives us new ways to create and think; Graphical Interfaces and options for the construction of new worlds, environments and alternative spaces. Augmented Reality is thus a useful tool that can be used by artists, designers and expert users.

The presentation will also analyse the metaphors used in the development of previous, present and next-generation Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) and look some examples of interaction interfaces developed by different research groups around the world.

Finally, Jose David will demonstrate the ATOMIC Authoring Tool, software initially developed to create Augmented Reality applications and mind maps, created under the GPL licence.

Speaker

Jose David Cuartas Correa is a student of visual design at the Caldas University in Manizales, Colombia, South America. He is at present an exchange student in the Advanced Diploma in Experimental Media Arts at CEMA – Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore, India. He also serves as visiting faculty at Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, teaching the course “Interaction and Interface Design in the Web” at the foundation level. Jose David is the founder of the Junior Research Group in Free Software for Design, Caldas University, and current president of the SoLógiCo Libre ONG, which promotes the use and development of the free software, free culture and emergent technologies for art, design and entertainment.

Time and Date

Wednesday, 17 June, 2009; 6.00-7.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

Augmented Reality

ATOMIC Authoring Tool - September 2008

http://sologicolibre.org/projects/atomic/atomic/en

atSourceforge

http://atomic-project.sourceforge.net

March 2009

Puzzle in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4g7nzl5DKI

June 2007

Music Player in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enIN1diZuzA

May 2007

Interactive Sound Mixer in Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xLHO2c7lMQ

May 2007

Color theory demonstration using Augmented Reality

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srDaBHiFhRs

April 2007

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/art-and-augmented-reality

Financial Speculation as Urban Planning

sunil — 2011-04-05T04:36:21Z

Talk by Prof Michael Goldman

A talk by Michael Goldman followed by an open discussion organised by a group of concerned citizens and the Centre for Internet and Society, about the roots of the US financial crisis and related dynamics in "world city" planning, such as that here in Bangalore.

Speaker Bio

Michael Goldman
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology
Univ of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN
McKnight Presidential Fellow

Interest Areas: Transnational, political, environmental, and development sociology; Sociology of knowledge and power; Transnational institutions (international finance, expert networks).

Current Research: Neoliberalism and its discontents; the making of a world city: Bangalore, India; “Water for All”/ water privatization policies; development and environment in North-South relations.

Recent Publications

“How ‘Water for All!’ Became Hegemonic: The Power of the World Bank and its Transnational Policy Networks.” 2007. Geoforum special issue on global water policy, 38(5): 786-800.
“Under New Management: Historical Context and Current Challenges at the World Bank.” 2007. Brown Journal of World Affairs, special issue on Wolfowitz’s Bank, Vol. XIII: 2, Summer 2007.
“El neoliberalismo verde.” 2006. Chapter in Las Politicas de la Tierra, Alfonso Guerra and Jose Felix Tezanos, eds. Madrid: Editorial Sistema.
Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. 2005. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Yale UP paperback edition, 2006; India edition, Orient Longman Press, 2006; Japanese edition, Kyoto University Press, 2008.
“World Bank.” 2005. Entry in Encyclopedia of International Development, Tim Forsyth, ed., London: Routledge.
“Tracing the Routes/Roots of World Bank Power.” 2005. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, special issue on global water policy, 25(1/2): 10-29.
“The Birth of a Discipline: Producing Authoritative Green Knowledge for the World (Bank).” 2005. Chapter in Earthly Politics: Local and Global in Environmental Governance, Sheila Jasanoff and Marybeth Long, eds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
“La tragedia della recinzione dei beni comuni.” 2005. Beni Comuni: Fra Tradizione e Futuro, Giovanna Ricoveri, ed., Rome: Editrice Missionaria Italiana.
“Eco-governmentality and Other Transnational Practices of a ‘Green’ World Bank.” 2004. in Liberation Ecologies 2nd ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds. London: Routledge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/financial-speculation-as-urban-planning

Experimental Economy Camp

sachia — 2011-04-05T04:36:50Z

Open Discussion

n.e.w.s. is a platform for participatory development of artistic and curatorial projects in contemporary art and new media framed by curatorial contributions from around the globe, bringing together voices and images from North, East, West and South. n.e.w.s. reflects geographic diversity and facilitates a framework for collaboration, content and visions of change outside the normal parameters of the established art world networks.

Recently, n.e.w.s. won the ‘Competition of Ideas’ for authoring a book proposal entitled “Arbitrating Attention”, which would explore new economic and social contexts for art. This 100-page text will be published at the beginning of next year. One of things they hope to do in the book is tap the undercurrent of new economic experiments in the way artistic activities can be de-framed yet incorporate survival tactics for sustainability.

At the Experimental Economy Camp at CIS, n.e.w.s. contributors Renée Ridgway, Stephen Wright and Prayas Abhinav will present certain ideas, seeking counter-points, information and queries, which lend different perspectives to the questions at hand, in order to outline possible strategies and targets. The discussions thereafter will attempt to draw learnings from the dynamic media, academic and scientific community with which CIS interacts, imagining 'new social and economic contexts for art.' At this camp, n.e.w.s hopes to meet and interact with people and researchers with an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial and economic experiments.

Further interested individuals and institutions can take part in a symposium and brainstorming event that n.e.w.s will organize in July 2009 in Bangalore. n.e.w.s. will also run an online forum during the symposium in July (http://northeastwestsouth.net).

Speakers

Renée Ridgway is an artist, free-lance curator and writer, based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Since completing her studies in fine art at the Rhode Island School of Design, (BFA) and Piet Zwart Institute (MA), she has exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad (P.S.1 MoMA Hotel New York, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Gouda Museum) She has made numerous public presentations at various conferences and forums and taught at several universities in the Netherlands and abroad. From 2005-6 she served on the board of the former Gate Foundation, whose artists archive and library were given as a gift to the Van Abbemuseum, and where in 2007 she organised a panel as part of the Be(com)ing Dutch caucus, entitled 'Gate Foundation- Past, Present and Future'. For 2009 Ridgway is organising ‘Negotiating Equity’, a collaborative project at DAI, (Dutch Art Institute) involving the n.e.w.s. platform and her contributors that examines the artist and 'the curatorial'.

As an artist Ridgway is presently preparing the latest installment of her 10-year 'Manhattan Project': 'Beaver, Wampum, Hoes'- a series of installations and public interventions at various locations in and around NYC and the Netherlands in 2009. This focuses on the value of the contemporary ‘cultural currency’ of Dutchness, in relation to the Dutch colonial past (US, Indonesia, South Africa, Suriname); the next presentation will be at De Lakenhal in Leiden, May 16th-August 31st 2009.

Ridgway is a co-initiator of n.e.w.s. Her website is http://reneeridgway.net/.

Stephen Wright is a Paris-based art theorist, writer, and Editorial Director of the Biennale de Paris. In 2004, he curated The Future of the Reciprocal Readymade (Apexart, New York), in 2005 In Absentia (Passerelle, Brest), in 2006 Rumour as Media (Aksanat, Istanbul) and Dataesthetics (WHW, Zagreb), and is currently preparing, amongst other projects, Withdrawal: The Performative Document (New York) as part of a series of exhibitions examining art practices with low coefficients of artistic visibility, which raise the prospect of art without artworks, authorship or spectatorship. He has also written extensively on the theoretical dimensions of such practices, and, following a writing residency at Artexte (Montréal, 2006) a book-length essay on the subject, dealing with the challenges of performatively archiving and documenting disappearance, is forthcoming. Wright’s writing has also focused on the use-value of art, particularly in contexts of collaborative practices outside the performative framework of the artworld. A former programme director at the Collège international de philosophie (2000-2007), and corresponding editor of Parachute magazine (1999-2005), he is currently on the editorial advisory committee of the journal Third Text.

Born in 1963 in Vancouver, Canada, he lives and works in Paris.

Prayas Abhinav is a writer and artist working and living in Bangalore, India. He has an interest in re-vitalizing and re-imagining urban spaces. Through his work he explores how public and semi-public spaces can be utilized for cultural and civic uses. He explores the potential of low-fi technologies to connect communities and resources.

He has been part of efforts to seed open content movements in India and in 2007 helped with launching the Creative Commons India licenses in India. In 2007, he also initiated a long-term engagement with urban food systems by using public-spaces to grow vegetables and make them openly accessible through recipe-based maps. In 2008, he spent a month at Khoj Workshops to work on modular toolkits for anarchic protests in cities. In 2006 he made a short film with the Public Service Broadcasting Trust in which he narratively mapped the spaces which the homeless in Mumbai use to sleep at night. In 2005, as a fellow at Sarai-CSDS, he responded to the way urban spaces were used for advertising through poetry and photographs. He edited the Crimson Feet magazine from 2003-2005 (after which it died).

Prayas' projects are documented at http://prayas.in and http://cityspinning.org.

Time and Date

Friday, 17 April 2009; 5.30-7.30 pm

Venue

Centre for Internet and Society, No. D2, 3rd Floor, Sheriff Chambers, 14, Cunningham Road, Bangalore - 560052

Map

For a map, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/experimental-economy-camp

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

Article by Malvika Tegta in Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 8 March 2009

Artists, academicians, tech heads and lawyers have come together to give the country a voice in technology, study, polity and discourse, says Malvika Tegta

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The Internet has changed lives in ways we haven't stopped to grasp — the real feeding into the virtual and the other way round. Also, how the Internet interacts with individuals varies across cultures and societies. Narratives on the medium originating in the West cannot size up the complexities of the developing world. In the absence of a voice from the "global south" in affecting the direction of the Internet, technologies continue to be designed for a certain kind of end user, with underlying assumptions. "That apart, as the Internet grows, it doesn't necessarily always grow for the better, with things like cyber terrorism, cyber bullying, pornography, identity theft, gambling, internet addiction, being the by-products of the information revolution," says Nishant Shah, director-research and one of the brains behind the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), initiated in August 2008, set up to take note of what we passively allow to direct our lives.

These are the issues that led Gibraltar-based Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, parent company of online poker site PartyPoker.com, to think that "the time had come for India to have a voice in technology study, polity and discourse, as we quickly find ourselves becoming an Information Society". He, along with Alternative Law Forum's legal theorist Lawrence Liang, Shah and Sunil Abraham, brought CIS into being, pooling in the finest minds from the field of arts, academia, law and technology. CIS, since, has set out to produce local and contextual histories of the Internet to make voices "emerging out of Asia more visible in international dialogues around technology".

Their approach: research, awareness and advocacy. Their goal: to make sense of how the Internet is changing the world around us, with India at the heart.

CIS looks at, among other things, the way copyrights, closed standards and an absence of public policy in certain areas have affected access, innovation and kept the Internet from being less democratic and vibrant. "Copyright law is kind of a monolithic thing, like a 'one size fits all' kind of solution for encouraging creativity. It doesn't really work especially when you look at an equitable system of access," says programme manager Pranesh Prakash. He adds: "Copyright proves to be a huge barrier to promotion of accessibility, and in the Indian context needs some kind of relaxation." Programme manager at CIS, Nirmita puts this in perspective, in the particular case of internet access for the visually impaired and those with cognitive disabilities. "A blind person cannot read the written word, so you record an audio cassette or you have an e-version of it and a screen reader reads it for you. That inverts the conversion of a format, which is not permitted legally under the copyright law in India. Every time you want to convert it, you need to take permission of the copyright holder. So what that is essentially doing is depriving you of your right to read," she says. "Our country should have a law that is universal. We have signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that says that everything on the Internet should be in accessible formats, but it's not binding and we don't have a law on it."

In the area of science and academics, copyrights pose another challenge, that of impeding innovation by keeping from the taxpayer, results of at least the research that is funded by tax a notion CIS has been pushing for. "Scientific literature is propounded on the principles like everyone is allowed to review it and that knowledge spreads to a number of people," says Prakash. Both the scientist and the reader want that. But what we see today is that a few publishers control most of all scientific literary output, so most of it is not accessible because a month's subscription sometimes amounts to the entire library budget of an institution. That is especially a big problem for developing countries.

By the end of this year, CIS hopes that individual institutions take up open access policy. "It may not always have to be a top down approach," he says.

In the realm of governance, CIS identifies use of closed standards software as not only unwise strategy, but also socially and ethically a bad decision, and is looking at policy change in the area. Explains Sunil Abraham, director-policy, in his paper: "If I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires." He adds that governments have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values. "In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors," he writes.

They are also exploring bridging digital divides without ignoring the "complex interplay, in the case of India for instance, of caste, language, affordability, education, literacy, and in some cases, even religion" and how the Internet is changing the landscape of higher education in India.
As Shah puts it: "Internet technologies are now becoming tools that we think with. We cannot write without the cursor blinking on an empty screen, we cannot talk in public without the aid of a digital presentation..."

It's about time, then, that we thought about the one thing that's becoming one of the bigger movers in our lives and build a discourse around it.

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To read the article in DNA's e-paper, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/getting-the-net-out-of-its-web