Centre for Internet and Society

Reconceptualizing Privacy on Social Network(s) Sites

rebecca — 2011-08-18T05:07:09Z

While “privacy” on social network sites remains a highly ambiguous notion, much debate surrounding the issue to date has focused on privacy as the nonpublic-ness of personal information. However, as these social platforms become sites for diverse forms of “networking”, privacy must also be popularly conceptualized as control over personal data flows.

The perils of information exposure and the loss of privacy on social network sites (SNS) has become a talked about issue. Information once considered has private has in many instances become viewable by unintended audiences of parents, colleagues, college admission officers, employers, even the courts. The recent Facebook privacy scandal, which left sensitive personal information for millions of users open and searchable via Google, heightened privacy consciousness amongst users, public interest groups, and Facebook itself. As the free flowing nature of information on the internet has redefined practices surrounding the disclosure of information, new and multidimensional privacy challenges have arose as a result.

The much-celebrated ethos of “openness” continues to attract numerous and diverse users to SNS, and without a doubt, these platforms have enabled users to stay connected and share information with the people around them -- for better or worse. However, it is within this inherently open context that notions of privacy are continuously being challenged and redefined. While a particular user may prefer to keep certain information widely available to attract “potential friends” within a certain network or social circle, it may go without saying that the same user may not be comfortable with a family member viewing that same information, or having personal information open access to third parties. It is this iterative tension between “openness” and privacy which beckons the need to balance the openness of SNS with the privacy of its members.

Privacy as a Semi-Public Personal Space

Most commonly, privacy has been interpreted by users as a “lack of access”, or the degree to which they are able to protect their information from the public gaze. Various research examining the privacy (mal)practices of users have also, by in large, conceptualized privacy within this public/private binary. The most popular SNS today do allow users to careful define their privacy level. However, whether or not the information of a user remains open, restricted, or private will depend on the privacy preferences unique to the user, and to some degree, the architecture of a particular SNS. Inferring from privacy in practice, researchers have generally labeled users as privacy fundamentalists, pragmatics, or the marginally concerned . While making this distinction has been useful, is important to note that the diversity and complexity of relationships within a single networked space obscures the inherent simplicity of such typology. With many online social networks becoming representative of offline affiliation, the challenges inherent to maintaining a diverse number of social relations online may lead researchers to interpret uncertain privacy practices as paradoxical. Such a notion also calls into question the utility of categorizing users according to their privacy practices.

To illustrate such complexity, many users today are compelled to join sub-networks or groups within these sites, which then cluster users and relax the privacy settings between them. While a college student may wish to keep weekend outings hidden from the professors they have connected with, they may also be tempted to reveal such information with his network of peers-- to which the professors may belong. The open nature of these sub-networks are inherently valuable for maintaining offline affiliations, friendships and collegial relationship. However, this also increases the likelihood invisible audiences of unintended users may gain access to potentially unflattering information to an . By joining a network on Facebook, for example, the personal information of a users profile page becomes open to all “friends and networks”, even if the users may previously had their information set behind a more granular privacy settings.

Within these open spaces, the ability of users to make appropriate or selective disclosures of information is becoming obscured. While Facebook does allow for users to alter the settings after joining a network, such “openness by default” may catch many users off guard or only be brought to their attention once they face its negative repercussions. Because the maintenance of a wide variety of such social relationships depends on the disclosure/non-disclosure of certain types of information, privacy in praxis has become an act of balancing the utility of social network with the privacy concerns they present. Users are now faced with the challenge of classifying certain pieces of information public or non public, or determining suitable practices of disclosures amongst a diverse social graph. It is not to be expected that such decisions will become easier within a context whose architecture is built on openness to make it “easier for friends to find, identify, and learn about you”.

Privacy as Control over the Flow of Information

While the classification and coding of information vis-à-vis a diverse set of relationships forms the base of practice for most of the privacy conscious, this paradigm of privacy remains rather limited within a defined network of individuals, whether they be “friends”, within an intended audience, or not. Within this framework, information is understood as being either socially or institutionally sensitive, as its exposure may affect certain social or institutional relationships. Given the spatial and temporal context the “social profile” gives to personal information, it is reasonable to see how popular understandings of privacy have been within the public/private paradigm.

While this may be the case, it is important that users observe how the inherently “networked” nature of these spaces complicates the common privacy paradigm. When a user joins a SNS, they enter into a complex and opaque set of networked relationships beyond those with their “friends” and “friends of friends”. There exists sub-networks of third-party actors which constitute corporate entities, their partners and affiliates --may they be advertisers, third party developers, or a broad range of other service providers. Many of which are granted access to your information in varying forms and for differing reasons. With the introduction of the Open Social network, fronted by Google and various social advertising and developers networks, the ability for one to maintain the control and integrity of their information or “data” has become an increasingly complex endeavor.

While the importance of maintaining non-public social spaces online should not be diminished, in a time when collecting, storing, aggregating and disseminating information has become increasingly easy and cost-effective, users of SNS must begin to conceptualize online privacy in a way which extends past the social context popularly understood to give “information” meaning. Once information loses its contextual place of meaning, which may be the profile itself, users seem less apt to consciously consider the collection and dissemination of such data as a breach of privacy, or even a concern at all. It may be true that the socially sensitive nature of such data is reduced once it is disassociated with a particular user, or that the click stream patterns and other information collected by advertisers through cookies may not always pose a direct and potential threat to our privacy as we’ve thus far conceived it. However, a brief glance at the privacy policies, terms of use, and on-site practices of a few SNS illuminates that privacy must be seen as the control over the flows of personal information.that

Privacy vis-à-vis Third Parties

As many have illuminated, SNS are commercial enterprises with a business model based on the harvesting of personal information for marketing and other purposes. Therefore, it may be naive for a users to believe what happens on these sites stays on these sites, or that privacy settings, however granular they may be, grants them adequate control over their information. While SNS such as Bebo state that they “take your privacy very seriously”, the onus is on the user to determine whether or not the privacy standards of third party applications are up to par. The transfer of responsibility for monitoring the privacy practices of third parties is characteristic of many popular SNS. MySpace states in their privacy policy that they do not “control third parties” and cannot “dictate their actions”, while Facebook similarly states that they cannot guarantee that such third parties will “follow their rules”.

As third parties are often governed by their own privacy policies, the unmonitored and unenforced nature of these networked relationships places further responsibility on the individual users to ensure that privacy practices are adequate. This becomes quite difficult on SNS like Facebook, where third party developers are granted access to the personal information of all you and all your network members, including photos, videos, and other biographical information.

The relatively anonymous nature of these parallel sub-networks also obscures the ability of the user to take control over the accessibility of their information. Further, the privacy policies of the various SNS give no indication as to “who” their affiliates, partners, and service providers are. Most SNS also reserve the right to transfer personally identifiable information to its partners and affiliates if they have a “business reason to do so” and in all cases, advertisers are subject to their own privacy policies with regards to the information they collect -- some of it personally identifiable. To complicate matters, all of the leading SNS, including Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, and Bebo, reserve the right to collect information about you from other companies and publicly available sources. It is unclear as to what information is being collected or for what purposes, and unfortunately, such information is effectively kept “private”.

Redefining Privacy on Social Network Sites

Social network sites can be seen as open spaces which allow users to maintain diverse personal relationships. However, the somewhat anonymous parallel networks of third parties which exist on these sites threatens the “open nature” of these sites vis-à-vis our privacy. While users may maintain that the information they have provided is kept secure and private, these parallel third party networks negates the control an individual may assert over the flow of their information. It is within this context that privacy needs to be conceptually redefined in relation to both user “information” as it appears on a social profile, and “data” once it is processed by third parties. There is a need for an alternative paradigm to privacy on SNS which takes into consideration the flow, retention and use of personal information.

While it may be too early to determine whether or not the expected digital dossiers complete with complex user-specific biographical data will be developed or come to threaten our privacy in a fundamentally new way, it is also premature and erroneous to assume that traditional notions of privacy are fundamentally antithetical to the net. As communication become increasingly mediated by digital technologies, so to should our perceptions of privacy and ways of preserving it. SNS must also become responsible for ensuring greater transparency in the flows and uses of personal information, working to standardize the privacy policies in such a way that makes the user experience one which is seamless with respect to privacy practices. Initiatives such as the W3C’s P3P are a promising step towards nurturing a more nuanced understanding of privacy among internet users. Only through understanding privacy as the control over the flows of personal information can be balance the interests of SNS users with the business models of these “open” networked spaces.

Top of Form

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/reconceptualizing-privacy-on-social-network-s-sites

Re:wiring Bodies - Dr. Asha Achuthan

nishant — 2011-09-21T07:23:44Z

First draft of the monograph on "Rewiring Bodies" by Dr. Asha Achutan; format for Microsoft Office users

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/rewiringdoc

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political

Pleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law

namita — 2011-08-02T08:37:23Z

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …

In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.

For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.

This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.

In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.

Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.

Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.

Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes (7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).

In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.

'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.

Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter. There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The placement of the Ashoka Chakra or the States in the painting is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of the arguments advanced.

It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' (9)

A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.

Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.

Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.

Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.

I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television).

Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane

In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography.

'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".

However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'

The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.

The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into Secret Games 3 and Dark Dancers is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be classified hard or near-hard'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.

Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all.

Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane

In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s Dev.D, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as Dev.D does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.

After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.

The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself).

Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.

*****
Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?

Endnotes:

1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'.
2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005
3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity
4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp
5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms
6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.
7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc.
8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.
9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008

10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989
11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999
12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996
13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.
14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95.

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

Pleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects

namita — 2011-08-02T08:35:20Z

In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn.

The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book Imperial Leather (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies. The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment (iii) .

On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.

“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety.

McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.

Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.

The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.

Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.

For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn.

Soap in these strange days: fetish objects

“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”
Dana Polan (iv)

Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’.

Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone.

That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable.

Looking at MMS porn
“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”
Mace, Strange Days

When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie Strange Days, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.

Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)

In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same.

i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties.
ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.
iii. Ibid
iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20.

v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish

One for the avatar

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:19:34Z

With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. 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. This article was published on April 3, 2011.

On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.

When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.

For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.

However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.

These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.

Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.

For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.

Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.

It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.

Read the original in the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/one-avatar

My First Wikipedia Training Workshop – Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad

vishnu — 2013-08-19T06:51:16Z

On March 8, 2013, a day-long Telugu Wikipedia training workshop was organized by the Centre for Internet and Society's Access to Knowledge (CIS-A2K) team at the Golden Threshold, Nampally, Hyderabad in collaboration with Theatre Outreach Unit, University of Hyderabad. This blog post gives a concise account of the event.

CIS-A2K had planned a day long Telugu Wikipedia training workshop in collaboration with Telugu Wikipedians at the English and Foreign Languages University (EFLU), Hyderabad on March 8, 2013. The intention was to target research students at EFLU who are using Telugu material or working on topics related to Telugu and Andhra Pradesh. This event was also to be part of the Wiki Women’s month events across India. However, this event had to be cancelled in the last minute as a Research Student of EFLU committed suicide on the campus and there was major unrest. The faculty from EFLU though had informed of the possible cancellation of the event earlier, had only confirmed it on March 7, 2013. Rahmanuddin Shaik (Telugu SIG, Wikimedia India Chapter) and Dr. Rajasekhar (Telugu Wikipedia Administrator) had already blocked an entire day for this training workshop. In fact a lot of background work was already done for the EFLU event.

When I got the news of cancellation of the workshop, initially I was very dejected at the thought of informing the two active Telugu Wikipedians about it, which I had to do. As my tickets were anyhow booked to Hyderabad and there was no point cancelling them, as I was already on my way to catch the flight, I decided to go ahead with my journey. I made some couple of quick calls and with some effort managed to organize a Wikipedia Training Workshop in collaboration with the Theatre Outreach Unit (TOU), University of Hyderabad (UoH). I was anyhow planning on visiting them to explore an institutional collaboration. The Project Director of TOU Dr. Peddi Ramarao, though agreed to spread the word about the workshop, yet was not sure how many would turn up at such a short notice of one night.

	Rahmanuddin and Dr. Rajasekhar giving hands-on training to edit Telugu Wikipedia at Golden Threshold, Hyderabad

So on March 8, 2013 Rahmanuddin, Dr. Rajasekhar and I landed at the Golden Threshold hoping against hope to see at least 3 or 4 participants. But alas there were only 2 people when we reached the venue by 10 a.m.. By 10.25 a.m. we had 9 participants, which excited us all. The training workshop began with an introduction of all the participants. Following this a presentation was made on the significance of Wikipedia in the digital era and how Indian language-Wikipedias are pivotal in preserving the vernacular language and culture. This session was interactive with participants asking many questions. Dr. Peddi Ramarao, later, spoke about his experience of using Wikipedia as a reference tool and how he got introduced to contributing Wikipedia. Further, the discussion went on to the poor quality of articles on Telugu Wikipedia and how the participants can take part in improving the existing articles and contribute new articles. Rahmanuddin and Rajasekhar practically demonstrated the process of editing on Telugu Wikipedia. This was followed by a hands-on session where the participants actively participated in creating their Wikipedia User name on Telugu Wikipedia and did editing of few articles. The training programme was to officially end at Lunch time but even post lunch some of the participants were enthusiastic about learning more nuances of contributing on Telugu Wikipedia. The hands-on session thus continued until 4 p.m.

Post the Wikipedia training programme, I have had interactions with the Project Director of TOU to explore possible future collaborations. TOU, UoH agreed to offer space to host all Telugu Wikipedia meet-ups. As the Golden Threshold space was in the central part of the city, having this infrastructure accessible was a major boost for the Telugu Wikipedia community in Hyderabad. Further, in the discussions we have agreed to collaborate with TOU, UoH in hosting the first mega Telugu Wikipedia community event Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013.


Telugu Wikipedia Orientation in progress

Outcomes and Impact:

Out of the 9 new Users, who were trained during this workshop, 5 people have done more than 5 edits.
One person has become a very active editor on Telugu Wikipedia with more than 1000 edits in 3 months. A detailed account of this event was put up by this user on Telugu Wikipedia here [*]
Because of CIS-A2K’s efforts, Telugu Wikipedians in Hyderabad now have a good meeting space.
The availability of this space has also encouraged the Telugu Wikipedians to meet more often than before. Since March 8, 2013 Telugu Wikipedians had a total of 6 meet-ups, and all these were held at Golden Threshold.
Golden Threshold also became a venue for hosting Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam 2013.
This visit to Hyderabad triggered a discussion about organizing Telugu Wiki Mahotsavam, which was successfully organized in a month’s time.

Looking back, though this event was done as a last minute measure without many expectations, yet it turned out to be a lucky break! Especially, because this was my first ever event as the CIS-A2K Programme Director. It will remain a very memorable one. More so because it was done in collaboration with two of the active Telugu Wikipedians. Even more so because it has created some positive energy for the Telugu Wikipedia community, which has since then become a home turf.

[*]. http://bit.ly/17WYq7X

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/my-first-wikipedia-training-workshop

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:34:22Z

Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.

In the new year, 2010, one of the most startling stories was of mass suicides. About 50,000 people were affected. Legal cases were filed. The interwebz were abuzz with the tale of how they did it. There was talk about a website that was responsible for this. The blogosphere went into a frenzy discussing the ‘new lease of life’ that these suicides provided. Videos of people caught in the act found their way onto popular video distributing spaces. And for everybody who talked about it, it was partly a joke and partly a gimmick. However, for a significant population, across the globe, the news came as a shock and a moment of self-reflection.

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. It is a simple online machine which helps people commit digital suicide by destroying their digital identities on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace. It is software that deletes every single transaction which you may have ever performed in your digital avatar. Messages sent to and received from friends, stored notes, results of viral quizzes, pictures of the last party that you attended, status messages describing state of mind, high scores and social assets on social networking games, links shared, videos uploaded – everything gets deleted, allowing you one last chance to re-live your digital life before it locks you out of the 2.0 web for once and for all. To many this might sound funny, but for the people, whose lives are lived, stored, shared and experienced in the online spaces that Web 2.0 has developed.

We find them in universities and colleges, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars. We encounter them in offices, glued with equal passion, to dating or social networking sites, and moderating geek mailing lists. We chance upon them in homes and bedrooms, sharing the most private and intimate details of their lives using live cam feeds and audio/video podcasts. If these images are familiar to you, you have encountered a digital native. It might have, recently, been a ‘child’ who knows how to use the mobile phone more effectively than you do, or a teenager who can connect your machine online while thumb typing on the cell phone, in a language which is not very familiar to you. It could also be the saucy colleague in office, who is always on the information highway, making jazzy presentations and animations or playing games with their virtual avatars, or the taxi driver who has learned the power of GPS maps or even the chaiwallah around the corner who uses his mobile phone to download new music and conduct a romantic affair.

These techno-mutants are slowly, but surely taking over the world. By the end of 2010, the global youth population will be about 1.2. Billion and 85 per cent of it will be in the developing countries of the world, growing up with digital and Internet technologies as an integral part of their life. They might not be a significant number now, but they are going to be the citizens of the future, taking important decisions about the destinies of nations and states, creating businesses and running economies, educating young learners and shaping public opinions. And they are learning the fundamentals of these actions in their online interactions on Web 2.0 spaces using digital tools to morph, mobilise, mutate, and manage their social, cultural and political lives and identities. It is of these people that this column writes of – people who are marked by digital and Internet technologies in strange and unprecedented ways.

Originally published at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News as a part of the Knowledge Programme: "Digital Natives with a Cause?"

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation

praskrishna — 2011-07-21T06:00:39Z

Deadline for submission: 26th July 2011-06-08; When: 19th - 22nd August, 2011; Where: Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT) University, Ahmedabad; Organised by: Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore and CEPT University, Ahmedabad. Please Note: Travel support is only available for domestic travel within India.

LOCATING INTERNETS is an innovative, multi-disciplinary, workshop that engages with some of the most crucial debates around Internet and Society within academic scholarship, discourse and practice in India. It explores Where, When, How and What has changed with the emergence of Internet and Digital Technologies in the country. The Internet is not a singular monolithic entity but is articulated in various forms – sometimes materially, through accessing the web; at others, through our experiences; and yet others through imaginations of policy and law. Internets have become a part of our everyday practice, from museums and archives, to school and university programmes, living rooms and public spaces, relationships and our bodily lived realities. It becomes necessary to reconfigure our existing concepts, frameworks and ideas to make sense of the rapidly digitising world around us. The Internet is no longer contained in niche disciplines or specialised everyday practices. LOCATING INTERNETS invites scholars, teachers, researchers, advanced research students and educationalists from any discipline to learn and discuss how to ask new questions and design innovative curricula in their discipline by introducing concepts and ideas from path-breaking research in India.

Comprised of training, public lectures, open discussion spaces, and hands-on curriculum building exercises, this workshop will introduce the participants to contemporary debates, help them articulate concerns and problems from their own research and practice, and build knowledge clusters to develop innovative and open curricula which can be implemented in interdisciplinary undergraduate spaces in the country. It showcases the research outputs produced by the Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers @ Work Programme, and brings together nine researchers to talk about alternative histories, processes, and bodies of the Internets, and how they can be integrated into mainstream pedagogic practices and teaching environments.

Knowledge Clusters for the Workshop

LOCATING INTERNETS is designed innovatively to accommodate for various intellectual and practice based needs of the participants. While the aim is to introduce the participants to a wide interdisciplinary range of scholarship, we also hope to address particular disciplinary and scholarly concerns of the participants. The workshop is further divided into three knowledge clusters which help the participants to focus their energies and ideas in the course of the four days.

Bridging the Gap: This workshop seeks to break away from the utopian public discourse of the Internets as a-historical and completely dis-attached from existing technology ecologies in the country. This knowledge cluster intends to produce frameworks that help us contextualize the contemporary internet policy, discourse and practice within larger geo-political and socio-historical flows and continuities in Modern India. The first cluster chartsdifferent pre-histories of the Internets, mapping the continuities and ruptures through philosophy of techno-science, archiving practices, and electronifcation of governments,to develop new technology-society perspectives.
Paradigms of Practice:One of the biggest concerns about Internet studies in India and other similar developed contexts is the object oriented approach that looks largely at specific usages, access, infrastructure, etc. However, it is necessary to understand that the Internet is not merely a tool or a gadget. The growth of Internets produces systemic changes at the level of process and thought. The technologies often get appropriated for governance both by the state and the civil society, producing new processes and dissonances which need to be charted. The second cluster looks at certain contemporary processes that the digital and Internet technologies change drastically in order to recalibrate the relationship between the state, the market and the citizen.
Feet on the Ground: The third cluster looks at contemporary practices of the Internet to understand the recent histories of movements, activism and cultural practices online. It offers an innovative way of understanding the physical objects and bodies that undergo dramatic transitions as digital technologies become pervasive, persuasive and ubiquitous. It draws upon historical discourse, everyday practices and cultural performances to form new ways of formulating and articulating the shapes and forms of social and cultural structures.

Workshop Outcomes

The participants are expected to engage with issue of Internet and it various systemic processes through their own disciplinary interests. Apart from lectures and orientation sessions, the participants will actively work on their own project ideas during the period in groups and will be guided by experts. The final outcome of the workshops would be curriculum for undergraduate and graduate teaching space of various disciplines in the country.

Participation Guidelines

LOCATING INTERNETS is now accepting submissions from interested participants in the following format:

Name:
Institutional affiliation and title:
Address:
Email address:
Phone number:
A brief resume of work experience (max. 350 words)
Statement of interest (max. 350 words)
Key concerns you want to address in the Internet and Society field (max. 350 words)
Identification with one Knowledge-cluster of the workshop and a proposal for integrating it in your research/teaching practice (max. 500 words)
Current interface with technologies in your pedagogic practices (max. 350 words)
Additional information or relevant hyperlinks you might want to add (Max. 10 lines)

Notes:

Submissions will be accepted only from participants in India, as attachments in .doc, .docx or .odt formats at locatingInternets@cis-india.org
Submissions made beyond 26th July 2011 may not be considered for participation.
Submissions will be scrutinized by the organisers and selected participants will be informed by the 30th July 2011, about their participation.
Selected participants will be required to make their own travel arrangements to the workshop. A 2nd A.C. train return fare will be reimbursed to the participants. Shared accommodation and selected meals will be provided at the workshop.
A limited number of air-fare reimbursements will be available to participants in extraordinary circumstances. All travel support is only available for domestic travel in the country.

Chairs: Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society Bangalore;

Pratyush Shankar, Associate Professor & Head of Undergraduate Program, Faculty of Architecture, CEPT University

Supported by: Kusuma Foundation, Hyderabad

Experts:Anja Kovacs, Arun Menon, Asha Achuthan, Ashish Rajadhykasha, Aparna Balachandran, Namita Malhotra, Nithin Manayath, Nithya Vasudevan, Pratyush Shankar, Rochelle Pinto and Zainab Bawa

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/workshop

It’s Common Practice

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:41:47Z

Technologies are no longer abstract. They're habits. What constitutes a habit? The gestures that you make as you read this, the way your eyes flick when you encounter somebody you like, the way you stroke your chin in a moment of reflection, or the split second decisions that you make in times of crises — these are all habits. They are pre-thought, visceral, depending upon biological, social and collective memories that do not need rational thinking. Habits are the customised programming of human life.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on May 12, 2013.

However, habits are not natural. They are, in fact, man-made nature. They appear as natural, matter-of-fact, instinctive and intuitive, but they are built over years of shared experiences, learning and empathy. And more often than we realise, habits are formed because of the different technologies that surround us.

If you are reading this column on paper, look at the way you are holding the magazine, folding the paper and note how you can read this easily because the text has been arranged from left to right, top to bottom. If you are browsing through this piece on a digital device, look at how your fingers move on your scroll button, or on your touchscreen, helping you make sense of complex devices without a second thought.

Habits that are formed through technologies work so seamlessly because they make technologies transparent. They make us forget that there is a complex network of machines, devices, grids and information that shape our lives. Do you remember the time when you came across something online and didn't look for the 'Like' button that is now a part of everyday internet practice? Do you remember the last time you struggled to manage the cursor on your screen using a mouse? Do you realise how the mouse has already become obsolete and is now being replaced by other touch-and-flick devices for a new generation?

I recently encountered this habit when my three-going-on-90-year-old Kindle — the Amazon device I use to read books — fell in the hands of a six-year-old. Like many digital natives of her time, she is unfazed by technology and, as her parents confess, is much better at operating most things digital in the house than them. She thinks nothing of streaming her favourite cartoon show from a website. She is adept at customising the many screens on her father's smartphone and has accepted that specific movements of her fingers will produce information on brightly-lit touchscreens.

However, when she used my non-backlit, non-touch Kindle that requires buttons to be pushed, she faced acute frustration. After trying to scroll, flick, activate, zoom and pinch on the screen she flung it at me, bewildered and angry that her habits were suddenly redundant and challenged. I want to use this moment of reflection to understand how technologies are integral to our ways of living. Technologies are habits. You don't need to be online 24x7, constantly upgrading yourself to the latest version of Android to interact with technology. Instead, we need to think about technologies as outlets that allow us to think about who we are and how we relate to the world around us.

One way of looking at technology as habits is to see how we have started thinking of ourselves through metaphors of the machines that we use. For example, it's quite common to hear people complain about "lack of bandwidth" to describe busy schedules. We now think of ourselves as systems that need upgrading. Life has long been lived on windows through which we recycle ourselves.

If technologies are such an inseparable part of ourselves, maybe it is time to stop making a distinction between the human and the technological. It is time to stop thinking about technologies only in terms of gadgets that can be removed from our biological assemblage. And indeed, if we are ready to recognise these technologies as a part of being human, then we need to think of technology politics in a new way. The questions around piracy, privacy, intellectual property, proprietary technologies, openness, etc. which are relegated to the digital world are also questions of us. They are not external problems but are centrally shaping how we construct ourselves as humans. Through habits.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-may-12-2013-nishant-shah-its-common-practice

IT, The City and Public Space

nishant — 2011-08-02T06:07:02Z

In the Introduction to the project, Pratyush Shankar at CEPT, Ahmedabad, lays out the theoretical and practice based frameworks that inform contemporary space-technology discourses in the fields of Architecture and Urban Design. The proposal articulates the concerns, the anxieties and the lack of space-technology debates in the country despite the overwhelming ways in which emergence of internet technologies has resulted in material and imagined practices of people in urbanised India. The project draws variously from disciplines of architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to start a dialogue about the new kinds of public spaces that inform the making of the IT City in India. You can also access his comic strip visual introduction to the project at http://www.isvsjournal.org/pratyush/internet/Dashboard.html

Introducion:

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. Manuels Castells argues that space is not a mere photo-copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression. 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.Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues, 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. Mike Davis’ formulations of an ‘Ecology of Fear’ and Sean Cubbit’s idea of ‘The Cinema Effect’ also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

Research Area:

The rise of the Internet in India in last decade poses interesting questions concerning ways of studying city spaces and its architecture. The Internet evokes and represents space in more than one way. Communities that represent the present urban social processes often mediate this visual and textual reference to space on the Internet but it is also an unwitting expression of way people choose to imagine their city, its places and its built form. It is important and pertinent for example to understand how Internet communities choose to abstract their own city through various direct or indirect discourses. The following will be the key questions

· It will be interesting to observe how the idea of a city gets represented on the Internet through both intended and casual references. For example is the City seen as a finite clarified artifact (as many political leadership would like us to believe) or is it seen as complex set of relationships or systems of places.

· How does the city get represented through the Internet with reference to its regional physical context (both geographical and cultural landscape)? Such an enquiry can help us in knowing how representation of city through the Internet acknowledges, neglects or fails to read its relationship with the local fundamental conditions[i] (of topography, water and culture)

The actual morphological context of the city will then become an important precursor for such an enquiry. The structure and flows in the city have often been compared to the Internet itself in popular discourses. This assumption can be further analyzed through spatial study of the city as a node in large region and as many several nodes within the city itself. The idea of Spaces of Flow in metropolis cities and places as nodes serving the flow has been very well articulated by Manuel Castells at a generic level. The issue of place[ii] and its representation (through internet) can be another area that can offer us very interesting insights into the relationship between the Cartesian and imagined space. The evolution of a new graphic language on the Internet needs closer examination from both its use of spatial symbolism as well as its impact on urban space.

However the contextual issue of an Indian idea of space will becomes the important narration as a background to such studies. This inquiry needs examination from a more contextual point of view: from both geographical (nature of cities) and building typology perspectives (spatial and programmatic types)

The following questions will be investigated further

a. How do the current Internet technology, processes and language reflect in Architecture and urban spaces of cities?

b. Will the form of the City and its Architecture understood any differently now[iii]?

The relationship between the building skin and spatial typology of some recent architectural and urban design project can form an interesting narrative to understand these issues. Here the issue of urban and architectural lighting, signage and graphics can be examined more closely and hence a study of the building skins and typology. The other largely ignored area of study concerns the role of the Government of India with the Internet. When was the last time we visited the railway reservation center to get a ticket or stood in a queue for hours to be the first on the window? Many Indians still do, but for many an Internet based on-line tickets reservation site largely substitutes that experience of the place (railway reservation center), people and the early morning tea on the gate. This needs closer examination from point of view of understanding the transformation and gentrification of some of the most democratic public service spaces in India such as the Railway stations, Municipal offices and banks. Apart from the material practices of the people, it is interesting to see how the integration of technologies within various urban governance practices affect the way in which cities morph, develop and change.

Methodology:

The aim is to engage with the spatial context of Indian cities while teasing out issues of the cultural phenomenon associated with the Internet. The following will be the key methods used in research

· To identify and narrate the social structures and processes that engage both with the intangible (meanings, symbols, communication etc.) and the tangible (morphology, structure, geography) in select Indian cities. This elaboration will form an important theoretical premise specific to further understanding space in Indian Cities.

· To document stories of individuals and groups of the city that demonstrates the typical changes that are taking place in various social and economic processes as related to the Internet. The aim will be to address both the tangible and intangible aspects while narrating the stories

· To map the spatial implication (structure and nature of spaces) of the above mentioned changes on the city

· To derive a broader narrative while weaving through different stories, that attempts to address the issue of Internet, society and space in Indian Cities

The research can be largely narrated through documentation of such representative situations but will require a clear articulation of the theoretical premises at the onset.

A review literature chapter which specifically marks the different contours of city-technology relationship – from IT cities which are planned to house technologies, to SEZ’s which emerge as new forms of technologised cities, to the gradual transformation and restructuration of city spaces and publics would also be undertaken. Moreover it will combine the contextual based study of cities, their public place and Architecture along with studies of the discourses on the Internet. The project will look at different actors who play an active, but often invisible role in the transformation of these spaces.

Dissemination and Outputs:

The project shall bring forth a monograph (approximately 50,000 words) that looks at a relationship between internet technologies and the city with a historical perspective, in order to explore the notions of public, built form, city spaces etc. within the Indian context.

A journal paper that engages with the contemporary discourses in Architecture and produces a new theoretical formulation of the city-technology relationship.

Part of the research method could possibly include an elective course or workshop at CEPT University to tap on variety of narrations through different students to strengthen both the premise and contextual focus of the study.

[i] This is to say that city form and its perception is very much a result of the both the local geographical and cultural context

[ii] “Place” can be defined through both space and character of an area and where the human experience is important. We experience places and hence understand it as they hold different processes and meanings.

[iii] So does the presence of Internet in our lives impact the way we begin to understand the Architecture of our city?

Bibliography

Venturi, Robert. Learning from Las-Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. MIT Press, 1976

Castell, Manuel. The Rise of the Networked Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

Adorno Theoder. The Culture Industrty (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001

Benjamin Walter. The Arcade Project. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002

Jameson Fredric. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capatalism. Verso, 1999

Davis Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Random House, 1998

Ashish Rajadhayaksha. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (South Asian Cinemas).

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

IT and the cITy

nishant — 2009-09-18T10:45:27Z

Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.

Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself, trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces, that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it, becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the City.

A cursory glance around you, perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements, live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying, schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same – either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars to the fluid geography of the city.

If you happen to stand on the magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address. No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected, mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a paradigm of its own.

And so strong is this seduction of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai, always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial), and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and speed. So that the historicity in PuXi becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?

It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social change can be built.

This blog, in its ten different entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful discourse.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity

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

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

First Look: CIS Cybersecurity documentary film

purba — 2013-12-17T08:16:42Z

CIS presents the trailer of its documentary film DesiSec: Cybersecurity & Civil Society in India

The Centre for Internet and Society is pleased to release the trailer of its first documentary film, on cybersecurity and civil society in India.

The documentary is part of the CIS Cybersecurity Series, a work in progress which may be found here.

DesiSec: Cybersecurity and Civil Society in India

The trailer of DesiSec: Cybersecurity and Civil Society in India was shown at the Internet Governance Forum in Bali on October 24. It was a featured presentation at the Citizen Lab workshop, Internet Governance For The Next Billion Users.

The transcript of the workshop is available here: http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/component/content/article/121-preparatory-process/1476-ws-344-internet-governance-for-the-next-billion-users

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-film-trailer