Centre for Internet and Society

Platformisation of Domestic Work in India: Report from a Multistakeholder Consultation

tasneem — 2020-02-17T09:46:52Z

On November 16, 2019, The Centre for Internet and Society invited officials from the Department of Labour (Government of Karnataka), members of domestic worker unions, domestic workers, company representatives, and civil society researchers at the Student Christian Mission of India House to discuss preliminary findings of an ongoing research project and facilitate a multistakeholder consultation to understand the contemporaneous platformisation of domestic work in India. Please find here a report from this consultation authored by Tasneem Mewa.

Report from the consultation: Download (PDF)

Agenda and details of the consultation: URL

Introduction

This collaborative project is being led by the the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) together with Domestic Workers Rights Union (DWRU) in Bangalore. The research team comprises of Geeta Menon, Parijatha G.P., Sumathi, Radha K., and Zennathunnisa from DWRU, and Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon from CIS. Through a collective research process, this research team has explored the proliferation of digital platforms as a key intermediary in the domestic work sector, and in supporting or challenging deeply rooted structural inequities. For more information on the research project, see the project announcement published on the CIS website [1]. This work forms part of the Association for Progressive Communications’ Feminist Internet Research Network project, supported by the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

The multistakeholder consultation was structured in two segments: a) a presentation outlining initial observations and analysis, and b) a semi-moderated open discussion. Together, these sessions aimed to initiate conversations pertaining to the role of digital platforms, the legal classification of domestic and gig workers, and devising regulatory solutions to improve conditions of work. Preliminary findings were based on qualitative in-depth interviews with workers, platform companies, unions, skilling agencies, and labour officials in both Bengaluru and New Delhi. Feminist approaches were employed in conducting these interviews, and participatory, consensual, reflexive and collaborative research was prioritised.

Situating the lived realities of domestic workers, the event sought to centre the voice of domestic workers in the consultation around the future of their work. The event had attendance from multilingual attendees. The original presentation was made in English, and Geeta Menon translated the presentation and the discussion that followed in Kannada [2].

Footnotes

[1] Tandon, A., & Rathi, A. (2019, October 1). Digital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement. Retrieved from https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement

[2] Rathi, A. (2019, November 16). Domestic Work in the 'Gig Economy'. Retrieved from https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116; Tandon, A., & Rathi, A. (2019). Domestic workers in the ‘gig’ economy [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/platformisation-of-domestic-work-in-india-report-from-a-multistakeholder-consultation

Parichiti - Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal

Anchita Ghatak — 2020-12-30T10:01:36Z

This report by Anchita Ghatak of Parichiti presents findings of a pilot study conducted by the author and colleagues to document the situation of women domestic workers (WDWs) in the lockdown and the initial stages of the lifting of restrictions. This study would not have been possible without the WDWs who agreed to be interviewed for this study and gave their time generously. We are grateful to Dr Abhijit Das of the Centre for Health and Social Justice for his advice and help. The report is edited by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, and this work forms a part of the CIS’s project on gender, welfare and surveillance supported by Privacy International, United Kingdom.

Domestic Workers’ Access to Secure Livelihoods in West Bengal: Read (PDF)

Cross-posted from Parichiti.

Executive Summary

Hundreds of thousands of women from poor communities work as domestic workers in Kolkata. Domestic work is typically a precarious occupation, with very little recognition in legislation or policy. Along with other workers in the informal economy, women domestic workers (WDWs) were severely impacted by the national lockdown enforced in March, with loss of livelihood and few options for survival.

Parichiti works with WDWs in 20 different locations - slums and informal settlements in Kolkata and villages in south 24 Parganas. We conducted this pilot study from late June to August 2020 to document the situation of WDWs from March onwards, in the lockdown and the initial stages of lifting of restrictions. We interviewed 14 WDWs on the phone to record their experiences during the lockdown and after, including impact on livelihoods. The objectives of the study were to document the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the lives of WDWs, with focus on economic and health dimensions.

We found that most domestic workers in our sample were paid for March, but faced difficulties in procuring wages April onwards. During this period, they faced economic hardships that threatened their survival, with members of their family also involved in the informal sector and experiencing loss of wages. Workers survived on relief received through civil society or by taking loans from banks or informal lenders. Some are now stuck in a debt trap.

Most went back to work from June, but faced several barriers – public transport services continued to be dysfunctional, apartment complexes prohibited entry of outsiders, and employers were reluctant to allow workers into their homes. Employers were wary of workers if they were employed in multiple households or used public transport, forcing workers to adapt to these conditions. Due to these reasons, some workers lost their jobs permanently, while others returned with lower wages or lower number of employers. Workers were well aware of the precautions to be taken at the home and workplace with regards to Covid-19.

Many WDWs were unable to access ration through the Public Distribution System. Some were not enrolled and others were enrolled in the districts they had migrated from. Some were not classified as below the poverty line and were hence not priority households for the state, although they were ‘deserving’ beneficiaries. All of the respondents were affected by Cyclone Amphan, which devastated parts of the state in May 2020. Despite the announcement of a sizeable compensation by the state, those whose homes were impacted were unable to get any relief. WDWs overall tended to not rely on the state for welfare or health services. Many regarded public health systems to have poor quality services, and turned to private services when possible. Both central and state governments fell short of meeting the needs of WDWs during the pandemic, which could potentially have long-term impact on their income and health.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/parichiti-domestic-workers-access-to-secure-livelihoods-west-bengal

Now Streaming on Your Nearest Screen

nishant — 2011-12-24T08:58:13Z

Digital cinema, especially the kinds produced using mobile devices and travelling on Internet social networking systems like YouTube and MySpace, are often dismissed as apolitical and ‘merely’ a fad. Moreover, content in the non-English language, due to incomprehensibility or lack of understanding of the cultural context of the production, is labeled as frivolous, or inconsequential, writes Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009.

Contextualising new digital cinema through Kuso[1]

Deploying the aesthetic framework of kuso as political engagement, this essay analyzes how its ‘aesthetic’ form of expression offers spaces of political participation and negotiation for the ‘Strawberry Generation’ digital natives in Taiwan. This paper draws from various youth phenomena like the emergence of the ‘BackDorm Boys’ as iconic representations of flawed stardom, the adoption of kuso lifestyles and the consumption/distribution cycles of cinema on the web to see the possibilities they offer for political engagement and participation through cultural expressions and productions, that are otherwise dismissed in contemporary discourse.

New digital technologies, initially developed for surveillance and strategic communication, because of the proliferation of the internet/s and the cyberspaces, have now become freely available at very inexpensive rates around the world. The easy availability of these technologies enables new conditions of production of hitherto privileged art forms. The new globalised circuits of un-contextualized distribution lead to the imagination of a deterritorialized community of consumers who share common systems of making meaning and receiving these objects. As has been noted in earlier cybercultures studies, objects found on the internet/s – the people and the narratives that they produce - are often consumed as outside of time and geographical space. William J. Mitchell (1996) in his now much critiqued conception of the ‘Infobahn’, conflates all geographical distinction in his imagining of the larger neural circuits of digital information and economy. Similarly, in his extraordinary book. Everything is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger (2007), explores the role that digital dissemination and distribution (as also storage and archiving) play in evolving a new miscellaneous form of sorting and classification, thus deconstructing established coda of knowledge determination. Weinberger, despite the keen insight into the importance of metadata and user-based personalised galaxies of information, is unable to talk of the entire range of phenomena as rooted in particular geo-political contexts. In fact, as Gasser and Palfresy (2008) make evident in their book Born Digial, whenever a body is referred to within cybercultures studies, it is the body of a white, upper class, masculine body; whenever a place is evoked, it is unequivocally the economic centres of the North-West; Time, which is an affiliate of the space and the body, is also then the linear and historical time determined by these concrete referents.

The West, with its wide consumer base and widespread proliferation of new digital technologies, often becomes the hegemonic legitimising authority as objects produced elsewhere are understood through ‘foreign’ aesthetics and logistics. Imagining the internet/s as residing outside of the time-space continuums, allows for a cyclical re-assertion of the Western paradigms as credible and authentic, and other forms as parodic or derivative in nature. New forms of cultural expression and narrativisation, received outside of the context of their production or the circuits of distribution and reception, are often mis-read and interpreted to fit the existing modes of making meaning.

This paper is an attempt to look at a specific form of new digital cinema in North East Asia that challenges the west-centric modes of understanding these objects. New digital cinema is a category that needs to be more sharply defined. In the last three decades of extensive technological advent and deployment in the fields of cinematic production, many different forms have claimed the space of new digital cinema. Post-celluloid cinema,[2] production of movies augmented by technologies, studio house experiments in animation and 3D technologies, distribution of movies and the networks of piracy that come into being with peer2peer networks,[3] conditions of reception and movie watching with digitally owned copies of movies,[4] the emergence of multiplex cinema and conditions of consumption,[5] etc. have been looked upon by different theoreticians and practitioners as new digital cinema.

I use the term ‘new digital cinema’ in the rest of the paper in a very specific sense of the phrase to make a very clear point of departure from the aforementioned approaches, which, though exploring the possibilities that digital technologies offer, still, often, stay with contained and unquestioned understanding of the established cinematic practices of production, authorship, distribution and spectatorship. New digital cinema is located in the new wave of cinematic forms produced by people who are enabled to do so by the easy availability of conditions of production and distribution that are framed by new digital technologies. Instead of looking at movies being produced by ‘film-makers’ or ‘film-studios’, maintaining the distinctions of authorship, readership and distribution circuits, I explore movies which are produced by people who are otherwise relegated to the realm of spectatorship and consumption. For the scope of this paper, new digital cinema refers to the cheaply produced cinematic forms, shot through inexpensive and slowly-becoming ubiquitous camera enabled devices. Geared towards an almost obscene abundance of details and demanding an untiring self-narrativisation,[6] these sites of social networking and expression have led to the production of videos and distribution of the self in unprecedented ways. These videos are further marked in their distribution through cyberspatial forms like YouTube, MySpace, and Google video, Television based reality shows based that run on user based programming consisting of personal videos, personal webcam sites, and MMS forums, to millions of users who enter into an interaction that is no longer limited to spectatorship.

There are three dialectic processes around the ‘personal’ videos broadcast on such sites of digital social networking and sharing, that need to be mapped in order to understand the impulse of this paper as well as to look at the dialectic reconstruction of earlier categories as understood by non-digital, pre-internet cultural forms. The first trope of dialectic comes in the form of continuity. Histories of technology taking the When Old Technologies were New (Marvyn, 1988) approach, often produce these digital moving images as bearing a relational value with the emergence of earlier technological forms and the use of these forms to produce personal narratives – print, camera, video, to name the three most influential forms of self expression and narrativisation. Such a historical narrative, unless carefully inflected with the growth and development of indigenous technologies and the indigenisation of these technologies, reads both, the technological development as well as the cultural forms thus produced, only through a West-centric paradigm of aesthetics, glossing over the differences that might be present in the very process and methods of reading such technologised forms. This non-disruptive, uninterrupted historicisation, while it is fruitful in questioning some presumed categories in the process of cultural production,[7] still reinforce these digital moving images as merely a new form of old cinema.

The second tension that needs to be mapped out occurs in the form of carefully maintained distinctions between the Sacred Cow of originality and the much maligned miasma of derivative, plagiarised, copied (left, right, centre), forms that have been facilitated by the proliferation of copy-paste digital technologies and internet networks. In the public as well as the theoretical discourse around these digital moving images, there is almost a Universal original (generally Western, otherwise canonised by the Western gaze in other geo-political contexts), to which everything else has a relation that is either praodic or uniformly derivative in nature. Even within the West, these videos on youtube and myspace are easily dismissed as plagiarised or unoriginal, often leading to a wide range of public controversy and exchange.[8]

The third dialectic is in the blurring of the pre-digital accepted terms of producers, spectators and processes of reading that these digital moving images produce. It is necessary to realise that the context of not only the production but also that of the reader is crucial to understanding the aesthetics of cyberspatial forms. The author in the digital world is as digital and ephemeral as the object itself. The tension between the corporeal and the digital has been effectively resolved by conceptualising the ‘interface’ – the space between the two conflicting and tense oppositional ideas- as the bearer of thought, idea, meaning and intention for digital objects. Such a complex structuring challenges the earlier crystalised practices authorship, spectatorship, distribution and reception, thus marking new digital cinema as not merely a cinematic practice augmented by technology but as a new form of cinema that challenges, quite radically, the earlier cinematic forms, in very much the same way that, in another historical and cultural moment, the print did to the manuscript.

This paper locates itself in these three dialectical flows to explore new digital cinema as a form of popular and cultural expression in Asia, specifically in Taiwan. It hopes to dismantle the myth of the universal/accessible/west-centric view of new digital cinema and demonstrate the need to assert the geo-socio-cultural contexts of their origin through exploring the aesthetics and genre of Kuso.

Knowing Miso from Kuso

Kuso, though it is a relatively new term, is highly popular in describing the new cybercultural forms that emerged with the proliferation of the internet/s. Anime fans are familiar with Kuso as an expletive or an interjection, used as the English equivalent of ‘Shit!’ Though Japanese in origin, it was made popular as a word, an aesthetic and a lifestyle in Taiwan around 2000, subsequently spreading to Hong Kong and China. Now, Kuso, along with other N.E. Asian products like Hentai,[9] and Manga, is a popular way of identifying cybercultural forms. The wikipedia mentions that

[t]he roots of Taiwanese “Kuso’ was Kuso-ge’s from Japan. The word Kuso-ge is a portmanteau of Kuso and game, which means, quite literally, “shitty games.” The introduction of such a category is to teach gamers how to appreciate and enjoy a game of poor quality – such as appreciating the games’ outrageous flaws instead of getting frustrated at them.
(Wikipedia, 2006)

It was an attempt to not only identify or locate flaws but to celebrate them and encourage an active production of them. Kuso, for the younger generation in Taiwan (and the thousands of fans all around the world, who subscribe to Kuso Bulletin Boards and discussion forums) is not just a cursory form of parody but a lifestyle. A Taiwanese artist, Yeh Yi-Li, in her solo exhibition, seems to suggest that as well. Her introduction to her exhibition titled ‘KUSO – Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower’ says

In Taiwan’s pop culture, internet subculture and video gamers’ communities, it (Kuso) became a trendy term that suggests “making fun of anything, playing practical jokes on everything.” KUSO subverts conventional values and turns things into garbage. It has no limits, history, agendas or logic. Like an amoeba, it is a subculture phenomenon that has no rules. (Yi-Li, 2006)

Making a list of characteristics of what might be Kuso is futile. As Yi-Li seems to suggest, Kuso, on the surface, is located on the ‘fun’ and ‘hilarity’ of an object. However, Kuso actually resides in the processes of subversion and resistance. Kuso not only makes ‘things into garbage’ but also, by logical corollary, turns ‘garbage into things’. It started as a subculture phenomenon but is now highly popular in mainstream cultures – on reality TV on youth oriented channels like MTV and Channel V, in local performances and spectacles, and in Stephen Chou movies. Kuso seems to refer to not just the discourse around a particular object but a subjective mode of representing the self into different narrative conditions enabled by new digital technologies. Kuso is about the ability to create fluid and transitory spectacles of the self as a trope of social interaction and communication. While Yi-Li might look upon Kuso as without ‘limits, history, agendas or logic’, she forgets that Kuso has been the way for organising political protests, flash mobs and social awareness collectives in many part of Asia.[10] It is in this very ‘free’ and ‘excessive’ structure of Kuso that one can locate the politics and processes by which New Digital Cinema can be understood.

In her Kuso exhibition, Yi-Li created the ‘Worm-man’ that

drags its body and slithers in the ever-changing world. In different kinds of worlds, the Worm-man develops into different phases. As phenomena are happening, it is also transforming. The Worm-man has multipe possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.
(Yi-Li, 2006)

While Kuso is often understood as parody, trash culture or camp humour, and is even attributed to MTV style movies by enthusiasts, for the large section of Kuso consumers, it is the governing principle for social interaction, dressing and appearance, hair and accessories, consumption of products and modes of expression. Kuso seems to be a way in which they produce themselves as parodic forms of themselves – producing themselves in conditions of constant transformation with ‘multiple possibilities, multiple personalities and multiple identities.’ As Yi-Li suggests in her art, Kuso is not just about producing parodies and mimicking popular art forms but it is also a way of producing the spectacle of the self. It is not surprising then, that Kuso emerges as an aesthetic with the proliferation of technologies and tools which allow for a narrativisation of the self for distribution and consumption in the public.

Contexualising Kuso

I look at two specific instances of Kuso to understand and frame the concept in this paper. The first emerged out of my own involvement with some of the students and their scheduled performances at the annual sports day.[11] My Chinese language teacher Mandy Hua, who is an undergraduate student at the NCU, is also a professional hip hop dancer. For her annual day performance at the university, Mandy chose (with some inputs from me) a popular Bollywood song that was creating raves in India at that time.[12] Mandy chose the song, edited the audio to make it tighter and shorter in duration and started the practice. Along with a flock of dancers from other schools on the campus, Mandy replicated an ‘Indian’ aesthetic for the song, doing elaborate costumes which included a lot of flowing skirts, veils, sequins and shimmer – the kind that was shown in the song. The female performers were in a state of erotic relationship – not only in their imitation of the seductive postures and movements of the dance sequence in the original movie song but also in presenting themselves as eroticised objects of glamour and desire to a young audience made primarily of students. The expected reactions of cat calls, of hooting, of lascivious laughter and of gasps of wonder and awe were all present in the crowd. However, a brief minute into the performance, their narrative of seduction, eroticism and obvious parody-imitation was disrupted and somehow harmoniously irrupted by a group of boys, wearing glasses, their bodies far from the perfectly sculpted eroticised bodies of the female performers, wearing clumsy looking ill-fitting karate dresses and making unrehearsed animal movements around the female performers.

It was the introduction of these dancers that completely displaced the element of parody within which I understood the performance. The male performers, who were completely unfamiliar with the original song, were imitating the female dancers on the ground. They were not interested in replicating either the movements of the female dancers or the sequences they were following. They were more interested in undermining the very aesthetic that the female dancers were trying to replicate or produce. Their movements were jerky, unpractised, bordering on the ridiculous. Their half naked bodies were un-sculpted and uneroticised. These were not the college hunks or super jocks coming out to parade their masculinities but the ‘geeks’ or the ‘dorks’ who were ravelling in their un-eroticised status and celebrating it with gusto.

What was more interesting was the way in which the audience was receiving these male performers. In spite of the engaged erotic relationship with the female performers, the audience was extremely appreciative of the male performers’ attempts at overthrowing the female performers’ spectacle. The audience was egging them to constantly be more ridiculous, be more flamboyant, be more self mocking, guiding their movements and actions, leading to a final mock chase sequence, where the male performers chased the female performers off the ground, stripped themselves to their shorts, flexed their un-muscled bodies and made their exit among huge cheering and applause. They were obviously the star attraction of the performance. Such a response was puzzling. It was the women who had put in hours of practice to produce themselves as erotic objects of consumption. The audience, in the beginning had engaged with them at that level. And yet, it was this bunch of slightly ‘with an L on my head’ guys who emerged in their buffoonery and antics as the heroes of the minute.

My first impulse was to read in it, the dynamics of a gendered space and a certain mock valorisation of this hyper masculinity. While gendered readings of the performance are indeed valuable and might offer an entry into looking at the construction of eroticism, desire, spectacle and the performative self, I am going to focus on the Kuso in this performance. My own gendered impulses were quickly overshadowed by the repeated use of the word Kuso that the members of the audience were using in order to explain the male performances. It was obvious that these male performers, in spite of their actions, were not really clowns but some sort of heroes and embodying this peculiar word – Kuso.

When I started asking around for Kuso, people pointed at several different objects, from Stephen Chou movies to Reality TV on Channel V, from personal videos to popular Kuso shows where people engaged in a set of ludicrous, often bizarre performances to make a public spectacle of themselves. The more I encountered these Kuso forms, the more difficult and incomprehensible it became to understand either the appeal or the aesthetic of the form. It looked like cheesy camp or an extension of a certain MTV aesthetic as a result of vulgarisation of technologies. When I crawled on the web looking at discussion forums that were devoted to Kuso, I found a huge number of people sharing my incomprehensibility and raised eyebrows at the Kuso objects, trying to figure out what it was that was attracting thousands of users to produce and consume Kuso with such dedication.

Especially in the context of Taiwan, Kuso belongs to the realm of what is called the ‘Strawberry Generation’ (Tsao-Mei Yi-Dai). The Strawberry generation in Taiwan refers to the people born between 1981 and 1991, and, despite its suggestions in English, carries negative connotations with it. The three most popular characteristics of the Strawberry generation – a phrase that has huge currency in popular media – have been severally explained. Rachel, who writes on the National Central University’s (Taiwan) website, explains:

In Taiwan, the Strawberry Generation refers to those who were born between 1981 and 1991, ranging from the 22-year-old university students to the 12-year-old junior high school students. This generation is labeled as “strawberry” due to two reasons: first, this generation of youth was raised in a better environment, as strawberries grown and nourished in a greenhouse, than the earlier generation. Second, strawberries are known for their beauty, delicacy and high price, suggesting that the young people can not withstand pressure, difficulties, and frustration as they grew up in a nice and comfortable environment and are able to get almost whatever they ask for.
(Rachel, 2008)

Henrry (2006), a student who also belongs to the Strawberry Generation, writes in his classroom assignment, ‘People of this generation are said to be fragile when facing pressure, just like the strawberries.’ He further goes on to suggest that the problems of the Strawberry Generation are largely economic in nature and might lead to serious problems for Taiwan’s economy. Myr Lim (2006) also looks at the economic and political instability of this generation and describes them as ‘Like the fruit, they look extremely good and sinfully juicy, who wouldn’t want one? But they have a very limited shelf life.’ Built into this criticism is also the understanding that the Strawberry Generation is also in a state of political disavowal.

And yet, when introduced to the different manifestations of Kuso, there was a very clear idea of resistance, subversion and mobilisation. A local incident, which made temporary heroes of two teenage boys who stripped in Public, on a university campus, was read as a sign of resisting the University’s attempts at regulating dress-codes for the students.[13] Other videos which were made for internet circulation had the digital natives refusing the Western models of masculinity or heroism and producing buffoon-like images to correspond with the glorified pop icons from the West – often producing infantile and juvenile forms of behaviour to exaggerate the effect. Other Kuso manifestations were in consumption, as different objects which were seemingly ‘cute’ (se-jiao) or ‘innocent’ were invested with sinister or often ludicrous intent.[14] The same kinds of aesthetics were also seen on the ‘LOL Cat’[15] and ‘All your base are belong to us’[16] internet memes which have gained currency online. It is while browsing through these worlds that I was introduced to a Kuso phenomenon which was garnering huge media and popular attention globally. This was a phenomenon which has now popularly been dubbed as the Backdorm Boys.

BackDorm Boys were three graduate students, two of whom became instant celebrities – Huang Yi Xin and Wei Wei - from the Guangzhu Academy of Fine Arts in China, who shot to instant fame when, in a state of boredom, they made a lip-sync cover version of popular Backstreet Boys singles, using nothing more than cheap digital cameras on their computers, in the restrictive space of their dormitories, and distributing them through video sharing spaces like YouTube, MySpace and other blogs (The Full Plate, 2008). These weren’t, at a first glance, very different from the ‘funny’ videos that one encounters online all the time – cheaply produced, shot with a webcam mounted on the screen, an almost unedited, uninterrupted full frontal frame, and an exaggerated attempt creating a certain Kitsch video that have gained popularity in the past. However, within my own contexts, the BackDorm Boys had strong resonances with the earlier dance performance I described. Once again, the three students in the videos were not the hyper eroticised masculinities that the boy bands like Backstreet Boys have embodied in popular cultures. Given the Confucian model of academia and studentship, students are not easily granted such erotic value to begin with. These were also not students who were particularly talented at singing. In fact, they were not singing at all, they were lip synching the songs in their videos. The videos did not involve any attempts at shooting but were in the full-frontal, almost pornographic frames of spectacle where the camera was mounted over the screen and the two performers were being caught in that frame. Dressed in identical clothes, the two main performers sang with extraordinary histrionics, the otherwise mellow and slightly cliché ridden love ballads that the Backstreet Boys had made their signature. In the background, one of their other dorm mates, played a Kuso-ge called Quaker throughout the video. He occasionally simulated the actions of a music mixer or a DJ or sometimes helped them with props.[17]

There was, at the first glance, nothing spectacular about the Backdorm Boys. As one of the responders on a blog dedicated to the Backdorm Boys very succinctly puts it:

Let’s face it: it doesn’t take a lot of talent to make faces. They didn’t write the song, didn’t sing the song, didn’t play any musical instructions, etc. Their sole accomplishment is they made faces at a camera. That’s not talent, man!!! And if they weren’t Chinese—i.e., didn’t have the freak factor of Chinese boys lip-synching to Backstreet Boys songs—NOBODY will notice this.
Da Xiangchang 2005

And yet, the Backdorm Boys, apart from cults developing around them and various internet memes devoted to them,[18] were featured live on NBC and both dropped out of their academic programmes to become hugely successful brand ambassadors and spokespersons for some of the largest mass media brands in China. They have both acquired a celebrity status and are role models and now popular media persons on TV channels, hosting their own shows.[19] In trying to understand these Kuso products in the realm of parody one starts asking the wrong kind of questions: where is the talent? Several respondents, including Da Xiangchang very pointedly pointed out that ‘it takes very little talent to make a fool out of yourselves.’ The more interesting question to ask would be the question that Yi-Li asked in her exhibition: How does Kuso manage to make garbage out of things? And further, is it possible, to read into Kuso, a new politics which guises itself as ‘fun’ or ‘hilarity’.

Differentiating between parody and Kuso

The Western gaze will only allow Kuso to be understood in a relationship of parody. However, looking at the contexts within which Kuso emerges and its ability to ‘make garbage out of things’, Kuso changes the relationship between the ‘original’ and the ‘discursive’ objects. parody, as a literary and a narrative form, resides more in the object being parodied (original) rather than in the parodic creation (discursive). To understand, appreciate or enjoy the discursive object, it becomes necessary to be familiar with, sometimes at a very intimate level, with the original object. The chief aim of a parody is to invoke the original object by introjecting it into new frames of references and meaning making, establishing a tenuous relationship of invocation between the original and the discursive objects. Parody seeks, not to replace the original but add to the ‘aura’ of the original object. Legends, myths, cult-stories and folklores can be understood as parodic in nature as they add to the understanding of the original or the core object. In the case of cinema especially, parody is not simply a process of poking fun at an earlier cinematic form or object but is an effort to evoke the original as a way of making meaning and seeking sense in the narrative.

The relationship between the original object and the discursive object is one of invocation where the parody invokes, glorifies and seeks justification for its existence through the original object. parody also resides in a certain historical reading of cinema as it produces often unintentional but present residues of earlier forms. parody can be looked upon as enabling a certain genealogical reading of cinematic narratives and forms. In the non-linear consumption patterns of cinema reception, especially with cable television and global distribution, the boundaries between the original and the discursive are often blurred and reconfigured. Often the audiences and consumers encounter the discursive before they get familiar with the original and hence they change the way in which the original object is understood or received, often mis/reading it through the lens of the parody instead of the other way round. Cinema also makes more visible, the ways in which the parody can also work through different genres and media – be it in the production of books that try to appropriate the cinematic language of telling stories or in the production of movies that are based on books or sometimes try to deploy the narrative conditions of books in the cinematic narratives. The only way to talk of parody is to read it in the cinematic object itself and in the invocations that it produces with the imagined or the real object. The concept of an original is necessary to the understanding of the parody.

It is exactly this relationship between the original and the parody that Kuso disrupts from the within. Kuso does not produce the definitive terminal points of the original and the discursive objects that parody requires. In the instance of any Backdorm Boys video, there is no presumed knowledge of either the Backstreet Boys videos or the kind of globalised consumption that they can be contextualised under. While there are many references – almost at the level of invocation, in the clothes that they wear, in the choices they make in songs etc. – they are not necessarily the frameworks through which their videos can be made meaning of. If it was merely a question of parody of Backstreet Boys, their subsequent videos where they also ‘Kuso-ed’ other performers and local artists would not have worked for their fans.

Like a network, the relationship between the original and the discursive objects of Kuso is masked so that each constantly feeds back into the other. Hence, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, if you tried to understand their work as simply a Chinese/Asian parody of a Western form of popular culture, you end up bewildered, unable to account for the huge popularity and success. However, if we place their production as Kuso, it allows us to realise that the objects being parodied in the videos, are not American popular cultural forms or specifically Backstreet Boys videos. What is being parodied is the original self of the performers.

Instead of the framework of parody or intertextuality, we can locate the Backdorm Boys Kuso videos as embedded in a particular lifestyle choices and consumption of cultural forms, accessories, appearances, class differences, language and most importantly the conditions made available by technologies. The original object is the three boys and their ‘real’ or ‘original’ status in their lived practices. The discursive object is also the three boys and their projected selves or desired selves which they are expected to either appropriate or wish for. The Kuso is in exaggerating the differences between these two and celebrating the obvious flaws in them and making them available as a public spectacle. While I shall steer away from discussions of talent, it becomes more evident that Kuso allows for us to recognise the aesthetics, politics and proliferation of these new digital cinema artefacts which earlier notions of parody did not.

Kuso establishes more non-linear, sometimes disruptive relationships, between different objects that it refers to in its production. The relationship between the various objects is not invocative but evocative in nature. The Kuso narrative does not presume specific knowledge of some other object being invoked. Instead, it produces a redolent relationship where the different objects mutually explain each other. Like any cyberspatial form, Kuso seems to produce a system of self-referential, almost cannibalistic meaning making where a range of objects seem to co-exist in improbably frames of non-real and in-credible, each forming a node through which the others are understood. The references Kuso makes in its narrative, are not to the other, original object in a wistfully reconstructed or imagined past but to the other back-tracking objects present in the narrative itself. This produces an almost infinite chain of inter-referencing objects that justify each others’ existence. Kuso thus disrupts the more linear and historical constructions that parody (and the subsequent attempts to read parody as a relationship between new digital cinema and Cinema) establishes. It is located in the materiality of the object, its reception, its manipulation, its distribution, its transformation and its ability to escape the more effective-causal circuits of meaning making.

While parody seeks to reaffirm the similarities between the original and the discursive objects, Kuso emphasises the inability of the original to explain the discursive, thus producing a relationship of difference rather than one of similarity. While parody deals with the questions of representation, Kuso enters into conditions of simulation. It is this evocative relationship that allows me to locate Kuso as an aesthetic of understanding New Digital Cinema in Asia and to materialise it as a lifestyle and as a condition of reception in the body of the Asian consumer.

Politicising Kuso

An uncontextualised notion of Kuso only allows for a relationship at the level of the Parodic. Hence, the discussants of the Backdorm Boys were always in a condition of unintelligibility about why these slightly clownish characters would become imitable heroes for a particular generation. Given the highly polarized nature of political orientations in Taiwan, it has been the despair of many educators and practitioners that the Strawberry Generation, which is also the largest subscriber base to Kuso, has no apparent interest in politics. It is a generally lamented as a generation that is unashamedly devoted only to having fun. I propose, in my reading and understanding of Kuso objects and Kuso as an aesthetic, that the participatory and performative nature of Kuso paradigm, offers space for negotiation and expression of political intent. I shall demonstrate this particular argument at two levels – the level of the body and the personal, and at the level of the public and the national.

The question of the body becomes central to almost all representation studies. Analysis of Kuso videos or objects lends itself easily to see how the accessorisation and the freedom to produce unsupervised spectatorial narratives of the self lead to new spaces of negotiation. There is also, very clearly, a definite deconstruction of the traditional, masculine and often imported forms of masculinity, femininity and sexuality which the videos lend themselves to. Cross dressing, excessive make-up, exaggerated actions, etc. all create a fluid world where gender structures used to define the body are dismissed and indeed, enter into parodic relationship with traditional perceptions or expectations. However, for the scope of this paper, I shall more narrowly focus on the construction of the heroic body in the Kuso videos.

The body comes to materialise Kuso through various practices and becomes the site upon which the Kuso self is enacted. As Kuso celebrates the flaws and exaggerates the imperfections, it allows for a certain masked relationship between the private self and the public politics. As is demonstrated in the case of the Backdorm Boys, Kuso, with its self referential boundaries, allows for a critical engagement with the very practices of the generation that subjects them to sever criticism. The Kuso bodies or the narratives of self are not longer in relation with the imagined body of the star or the aura of the star vehicle but in masked relationship with the larger politics of its time. The bewilderment or unintelligibility that the discussants of the Backdorm videos exhibit, is not particularly about why or how the video was created but how heroism or stardom was created by the celebration of the un-iconic or the unheroic.

And it is to answer this question that we go back to the Strawberry Generation again. The Strawberry Generation in Taiwan was not merely marked by economic transitions and infidelity. It is also a generation that has seen a severely politicised state of nationalism and national identity in Taiwan. The younger generation that grew up after the removal of the martial law has engaged in serious consumerism as a part of their national identity. As Chen Kuan Hsing (1998) points out, ‘From 1994 onwards…the cultural atmosphere was mediated through commodity structures.’ Chen further goes on to explain how the political economy and the question of the national are intrinsically linked. Given the hegemonic presence of the West in the cultural galaxy of Taiwan and the constant negotiations between the political position vis-à-vis China as well as the cultural imperialism of Japan, the Taiwanese Strawberry Generation finds itself without a particular model of national identity to follow. Along with these are the allegations of widespread corruption and the complete disinterest of the current political parties in the ill-effects of liberalisation (Asian Economic News, 2007) which contribute to a high rate of mental ill-health and suicides in the Strawberry Generation (The China Post, 2008). Given such a murky situation, the Strawberry Generation has indeed withdrawn from active political participation of fighting in the streets and has taken to new forms of expression, which, outside of the context, appear as solipsistic or merely for fun.

Kuso, as an aesthetic then, transcends the analysis of gender and sexuality, performativity and spectatorship, and becomes a site of national representation and subversion and the Kuso stars like the BackDorm boys embody these positions for a Strawberry Generation in Taiwan. The notion of flawed heroism, which simultaneously mocks the ubiquitous presence of the pop-culture from the West, the inability of the local cultural industries to produce original works of art, the apathy of the younger generation caught in the mechanisms of a liberalised globalisation, and the unavailability of spaces for political negotiations that they are built in. This is the defence that many of the Taiwanese and other Chinese speaking individuals produce on the discussions around Kuso. On the discussions on the Sinosplice blog, one of the most vocal defenders, John, who starts with calling this condition, a ‘rare talent’ goes on to say,

Have you ever tried to make a funny video? It’s much harder than you give these boys credit for. The fact that they were able to do it merely by lip synching is testament to their talent. If they’re using certain cultural expectations for humorous effect, then that’s further evidence of talent.
(John, Sinosplice, 2005)

However, John’s idea of ‘playing with cultural expectation’ remains a solitary voice. The other discussants go on to talk about how this particular series is only interesting because of the ‘freak value’ of the videos. Karen, another participant who introduces herself as a student in the West, writes

I have to reluctantly admit, as politically incorrect and offensive (sic) some of the comments may be, they are mostly valid in my opinion. I’m not saying that the “Back Dormitory Boys’” talent doesn’t play a part in why it’s so funny but the fact that the they’re Chinese with no doubt plays a huge role in the humour that that you could easily find elsewhere. How hard is it to find a few college students making goofball videos and putting them on the internet?
(Karen, Sinosplice, 2005)

The opinions that Karen and XiangChang express, resonate with the general perception of the BackDorm boys on many different discussion groups and media talks around the world. As they gained more popularity and exposure, there were more and more people exclaiming at why these antics were being heralded as heroic. However, there were no explanations which were forwarded. The interesting part is that a similar predecessor called the ‘Numa Numa Boy’ (Wolk, 2006), who also had a parodic relationship with the Romanian song, while he gained equal amounts of popularity, was not at the centre of any debate. His claim to fame was slapstick humour and very clearly complied with the Western understanding of parody. However, in the case of the Backdorm Boys, the debates continue as the existing understanding of parody as a universal value fail to account for the aura that surrounds them.

Kuso, as a way of looking at it, offers that the Backdorm Boys were not mere imitators. Imitation would have been in them trying to do a representation of the original Backstreet Boys videos. Instead, the Backdorm Boys are in a world of simulation, where they are simulating the flawed masculinities and identities that are excluded within popular cultures. In this method of simulation, they are able to produce a new and perhaps more believable ‘reality’ which needs to be dealt with in the larger context of the production.

The reason why Kuso makes garbage of things is because that is the only way to deal with the way things are – demolish them, look at their flaws, and find, within those flaws, interstices of negotiation and interaction, which are no longer available. The Kuso, refuses to identify a homogeneous way of understanding digital cinema on the web and insists on thus, contextualising the cultural products through their geo-political status. Because of the geographical origins of digital technologies – the West, and the generally assumed audience and paradigms of understanding it – the West again, most of these new digital cinema forms are looked upon as derivative or engaging in a parodic relationship with the original which is placed in the West. Kuso is a way of complicating the relationship between the two.

This is the first step in thinking about ways in which one can formulate a digital aesthetic which does not presume a homogenised community online but asserts, not only the physical bodies that are behind the production of these narratives but also the geographical boundaries and socio-cultural locations, without which the objects become incomprehensible and indecipherable. Moreover, it is necessary to rescue such ‘popular’ ‘aesthetic’ forms from discussions that confine them to the realms of performance or solipsism and look at the larger potential they have in creating new conditions of political engagement. For Taiwan’s Strawberry Generation, Kuso is a lifestyle, by which they are able to establish discursive and subversive relationships with the very actions and practices which subject them to sever criticism. The wave of new digital cinema, streaming on a screen near us, thus emphasise the need to revisit the relationship between aesthetics and politics on the one hand and the connections between the universal and the contextual on the other.

References

Asian Economic News. 2007. “Thousands Protest Against Taiwan President”. Retrieved on 5th March, 2007 from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0WDP/is_2007_Sept_15/ai_n27465185
Kuan-Hsing, Chen. 2005. “Interview with Kuan-Hsing Chen” by Greert Lovink. Retrieved on 12th March, 2007 from http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-
9803/msg00002.html
China Post, The. 2008. “Disturbing Suicide Rate Among Young People”. Retrieved on 11th August, 2008 from http://www.chinapost.com.tw/editorial/taiwan%20issues/2008/08/01/168122/Disturbing-suicide.htm
Fischer, Herve. 2006. The Decline of the Hollywood Empire. Tr. Rhonda Mullins. New York: Talon Books.
Full Plate, The. 2008. “Back Dorm Boys: Where are they now?”. Retrieved on 18th March, 2008 from http://escapetochengdu.wordpress.com/2008/02/24/back-dorm-boyswhere-are-they-now/
Gasser, Urs and John Palfrey. 2008. Born Digital: Understanding the first generation of Digital Natives. New York : Basic Books.
Henrry. 2006. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008. from Michel Cheng’s blog for her Writing Class at NCCU, available at http://nccujuniorwriting.blogspot.com/2006/06/weaknessesof-strawberry-generation_09.html
Ko, Yu-Fen. 2000. “Hello Kitty and the Identity Politics in Taiwan”. Retrieved on 10th January, 2007 from http://www.international.ucla.edu/cira/paper/TW_Ko.pdf
Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. “In Defence of Piracy”. The Wall Street Journal retrieved on 11th October 2008, available at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122367645363324303.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Liang, Lawrence. Forthcoming. “A brief history of the internet in the 14th and the 15th Century”
Lim, Myr. 2006. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008 from her blog titled ‘Wanderlust’ available at http://myr_fashionstylist.blogs.friendster.com/myr/2006/08/strawberry_gene.html
Mark Mclelland. 2006. “A Short History of Hentai”. Intersections: History and Culture in the Asian Context. Issue 12 http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue12/mclelland.html
Marvin, Carolyn.1990. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking about Electric communication in the earliest 19th Century. London: Oxford University Press.
Mitchell, William J. 1996. City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn. Massachusetts: MIT Press
Rachel. 2008. Retrieved on 5th March, 2008 from the National Central University’s (Taiwan) PR Team Page available at http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys
Yi-Li, Yeh. 2006. KUSO –Red, Spring Snow, Orange Flower. Taipei National University of the Arts, Taipei. Retrieved on 20th November, 2006 from http://www2.tnua.edu.tw/etnua/modules/news/article.php?storyid=28
Sinosplice. 2005. “Backdorm Boys”, a blog entry on a blog. Retrieved on 10th November 2006 from http://www.sinosplice.com/life/archives/2005/10/25/back-dorm-boys
Turkle, Sherry. 1996. Life on the screen: Identity in the age of the internet. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Weinberger, David. 2007. Everything is Miscellaneous The Power of the new digital disorder. New York : Times Books.
Wolk, Douglas. 2006. “The Syncher, Not the Synch : The irresistible rise of the Numa Numa Dance”. Retrieved on 10th November, 2007 from http://www.believermag.com/issues/200606/?read=article_wolk

[1].A first draft of this article was first presented at the ‘New Cinemas in Asia’ conference organized by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society at the Christ University, Bangalore. The paper owes its gratitude to S.V. Srinivas for his support both for my journey to Taiwan and for the confidence required to write such an essay on cultures and phenomena that I cannot with confidence claim to be my own.
[2]. The Jadavpur University Film and Media Lab, as recently as November 2008, organized a conference to discuss The Future of Celluloid,where, there were many engrossing presentations on what celluloid can mean in the digital age and where its futures reside. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his key-note speech, made a significant remark that the Celluloid is the original object that the digital shall always invoke in its manifestation; not merely in its aesthetics, which might change, but in the sheer capacity that the digital has to pay unprecedented attention to the moving image and reconstruct it for new meanings.
[3]. Hervé Fischer, in The Decline of The Hollywood Empire, arrives in a long line of prophets who have been announcing the demise and the end of Celluloid Cinema as we know it. Fischer announces, quite early in the book, ‘[d]igital distribution will end this archaic system of distribution and hasten the decline of the Hollywood Empire: Two giant steps forward for film in one fell step!’
[4]. The large undivided screen gets replaced by a small ‘Window’ on the right hand corner of the monitor which also houses various other contesting media forms that vie for the users’ attention. Sherry Turkle, in her study of MUD users also talks of how the Window has become a metaphor of our times.
[5].In a much more measured tone, Kim Soyoung, in her formulation of a trans-cinema and new public spheres simulated by Korean Cinema, suggests that ‘new digital cinema…attentive to the transformation of its production, distribution and reception modes as shown by independent digital filmmaking and its availability on the net’. She further goes on to propose ‘digital and net, cinema LCD screens (installed in subways, taxis and buses) and gigantic electrified display boards (chonkwangpan in Korean) should be seen as spaces into which cinema theories and criticism should intervene.’ This paper adds to the list, the extremely personalised but virtually public and shared space of the computer monitor and portable media devices.
[6]. In another essay exploring the aesthetics of social networking and blogging (especially with the increasing implementation of Web 2.0), I make a claim at these sites being sustained through a constant and incessant production of both the virtual persona of the author as well as the body of the author that serves as an anchor to the virtual reality. I further suggest that this process of continuous translation leads to the self as being recognised and gratified only in a state of performativity over inter-looped surfaces.
[7]. Lawrence Liang, in his forthcoming essay, “The History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century”, examines the history of the print and pre-print cultures, to make a brilliant argument around the questions of knowledge, the authority of the knowledge, and the problems of legitimacy or authenticity that have surrounded the Wikipedia in recent years.
[8]. The anxiety around such objects primarily circulates around questions of copyright infringements and piracy. The Music And Film Independent Association, for instance, claims that due to the re-mix, unlicensed distribution, and/or re-working of their material, they are suffering a heavy financial loss, leading to ridiculous legal cases that seem to hold no legitimacy in their sense or sensibility. Lawrence Lessig looks at a recent controversy on youtube where a mother, who broadcast digital moving images of her 13 month old son dancing to Prince’s song Let’s go Crazy was accused of copyright violation by the License owners who demanded the withdrawal of the video from YouTube.
[9]. In A short History of Hentai, Marc Mclelland, defines Hentai as follows: “Hentai is a Sino-Japanese compound term widely used in modern Japanese to designate a person, action or state that is considered queer or perverse, particularly in a sexual sense. Unlike the English term 'queer', however, hentai does not have predominantly homosexual connotations but can be used to describe any sexual acts or motivations other than what might be termed 'normal' sexual relations. Indeed the loanword nōmaru (normal) is sometimes used as an antonym for hentai. Apart from this general use of the term hentai, it can also be used to designate a specific genre of Japanese manga and animation that features extreme or perverse sexual content and it is in this sense that hentai has become well-known among western fans of Japanese popular culture.”
[10]. Professor Yu-Fen Ko (2000) at the Hsih-Shin University in Taipei, locates similar receptions of the ‘Hello Kitty’ phenomenon in Taiwan. Yu-Fen Ko examines how, the larger reception of popular cultural artifacts fail to look at the political potential that these objects have in the way they reconfigure the existing relationship between the personal and the political.
[11]. This paper owes great intellectual and emotional debt to many people. Mandy Hua, who, apart from teaching me Chinese, also helped me get introduced to the intricacies of youth fashion and trends in Taiwan. Ted Cheng, who introduced me to many different Kuso objects and helped, whenever my own skills at access or analysis flailed. Amie Parry, Naifei Ding, David Barton, Chen Kuan-Hsing and Josephine Ho who made my stay in Taiwan so fruitful, providing emotional support, and listened to me patiently, correcting me when I was wrong and directing me to people and resources that helped me frame this argument and understand the entire new digital cinema phenomenon in a new light.
[12]. After much screening and watching of Indian movie songs from Bollywood, we finally narrowed down to “Kajrare Kajrare” from the movie Bunty aur Bubly, with Aishwarya Rai doing a special dance number.
[13]. The particular video can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=9NlZaDGPEOg The original video that is supposed to make this particular kind of Kuso-streaking is the video which also shot two young men into becoming Television celebrities and can be viewed at http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=0caIbkYfWTY
[14]. One of the most popular icons of such consumption is in the popularity of Hello Kitty – a young female cat without a mouth (and hence without speech or the need to eat) - and has elicited much popular discourse. An example of how Hello Kitty is used as a way of also resisting the Western, Disneyfied, Barbie concepts of femininity can be seen in the video available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFBHPbEtfqA
[15]. LOLCat started as an internet meme which displayed a set of cat pictures, with cheeky captions, parodying ot only the internet slang known as ‘netspeak’ but also reflecting upon how central internet discussions and arguments were to the lives of the digital natives. Some of the most famous examples of LOLCat captions are ‘I can haz cheezburger’, ‘Ceiling Cat’ and then subsequently ‘Basement Cat’. More information and almost an exhaustive range of pictures can be seen at http://icanhascheezburger.com/ More interesting LOLCat phenomena also include the under construction LOLCat Bible translation project available at
http://www.lolcatbible.com/
[16]. ‘All your base are belong to us’ started as a successful parody of the obsession with UFO and space travel in the late nineties. The meme borrows this slightly cryptic line from European Sega Mega Drive Version of the video game Zero Wing, where it signified victory and total takeover of enemy territories by aliens, and specializes in putting up the caption on different familiar images taken from contemporary as well as historical times. A large collection of ‘All your base are belong to us’ images can be found at http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/
[17]. A full list of their videos is available to view and download at http://twochineseboys.blogspot.com/
[18]. A quick glimpse of their popularity can be obtained on fan and internet monitoring sites like http://www.milkandcookies.com/tag/backdormboys/ and http://www.tian.cc/2005/10/asian-backstreetboys.html
[19]. This trajectory from Reality TV to popular cultural icons is not unfamiliar or new. Various popular shows like American Idol in the USA, Big Brother in the UK, SaReGaMaPa in India, and Kuso Kuso in China, have all spawned instant celebrities who have cashed their media presence and fame to bag roles in featured television programming, cinema, etc. This particular ability of making one’s self popular and recognizable, often by using the internet as a medium for the same, and then penetrating more corporatized and affluent mass media markets, is a ploy that many aspiring media professionals are employing these days.

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Click to read the original published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Volume 3, Issue 1, June 2009

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November 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-24T02:37:09Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet and Society newsletter! In this issue we bring you the updates of our research, events, media coverage and videos of some past events organized by us during the month of November 2011.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Key Research

On Fooling Around: Digital Natives and Politics in Asia
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Youths are not only actively participating in the politics of its times but also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation, writes Nishant. The paper was presented at the Digital Cultures in Asia conference at the Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan.

Links in the Chain

Analog Relics in the Digital Age, volume 8, issue 4
Guest Editor: Nilofar Ansher
“The scale of inventions has not really leaped, so much as mutated. We had Twitter and Facebook ... (remember notice boards, community centers and pamphlets); they just weren’t so instant, hyperlinked and global in scale. We still use the medium of a mouthpiece and speaker to talk to each other long distance, the difference is in the changed aesthetics of the 21st century – it’s all squarish curves and scratch-proof glass that are more appealing today. Blackboards, writing material, listening devices and memory aids have undergone unprecedented transformations of function and usage, but it’s still about having a blank canvas to write upon with a chalk, pen, paper or iClick”, writes Nilofar in this issue of the Digital Natives newsletter.

Articles/Columns

In Search of the Other: Decoding Digital Natives: Nishant Shah charts the trajectories of our research at the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and Hivos (The Hague, The Netherlands) to see how alternative models of understanding these relationships can be built. This blog post by Nishant Shah was published in DML central on 24 October 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

The Write Stuff, Deccan Chronicle, 14 November 2011. Nishant Shah has been quoted in this article.

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

The Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education is a collaboration between the Higher Education Innovation and Research Applications (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). The project is supported by the Ford Foundation and works with disadvantaged students in 9 undergraduate colleges in Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, to explore relationships between Technologies, Higher Education and the new forms of social justice in India.

Article Published by the Media

Learn it Yourself: The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published by the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.

Video of Event Participated

Mobility Shifts 2011 — An International Future of Learning Summit: The summit was organised by the New School and sponsored by MacArthur Foundation and Mozilla. It was held from October 10 to October 16, 2011 at the New School, New York City. Nishant Shah participated in the summit and spoke on Digital Outcasts: Social Justice, Technology and Learning in India. The video of the event is online.

Accessibility

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

Publication

e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities (Russian Version)
Edited by Nirmita Narasimhan
The e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities is now available in Russian. The handbook is a joint publication of ITU, G3ict and the Centre for Internet and Society, in cooperation with the Hans Foundation. Dr. Hamadoun I. Toure, Secretary-General, International Telecommunication Union wrote the preface. Dr. Sami Al-Basheer, Director, ITU-D wrote the introduction and Axel Leblois, Executive Director, G3ict wrote the foreword.

Blog Post

The case for Accessible Banking by Dinesh Kaushal.

Access to Knowledge

The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge:

Key Research

Of Jesters, Clowns and Pranksters: YouTube and the Condition of Collaborative Authorship
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research, Centre for Internet and Society
The idea of a single author creating cinematic objects in a well-controlled scheme of support system and production/distribution infrastructure has been fundamentally challenged by the emergence of digital video sharing sites like YouTube, writes Nishant Shah in this essay published in the Journal of Moving Images.

Blog Posts

CIS Hosts Scanned Version of George Orwell’s Books vs. Cigarettes

Comments / Statement

CIS Intervention on Future Work of the WIPO Advisory Committee on Enforcement: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement (ACE) is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash intervened during the discussion of future work of the ACE with this comment.
Comment by CIS at ACE on Presentation on French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting: The seventh session of the World Intellectual Property Organization's Advisory Committee on Enforcement is being held in Geneva on November 30 and December 1, 2011. Pranesh Prakash responded to a presentation by Prof. Pierre Sirinelli of the École de droit de la Sorbonne, Université Paris 1 on 'The French Charter on the Fight against Cyber-Counterfeiting of December 16, 2009' with this comment.
Statement of CIS on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 23rd SCCR: The twenty-third session of the Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is being held in Geneva from November 22, 2011 to December 2, 2011. Pranesh Prakash delivered this statement on a new proposal made by South Africa and Mexico (SCCR/23/6) on a treaty for broadcasters.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Content, Open Standards, Open Access to Law, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Featured Research

Know Your Users, Match their Needs!
As Free Access to Law initiatives in the Global South enter into a new stage of maturity, they must be certain not to lose sight of their users’ needs. This blog post gives a summary of the “Good Practices Handbook”, a research output of the collaborative project Free Access to Law — Is it Here to Stay? undertaken by LexUM (Canada) and the South African Legal Institute in partnership with the Centre for Internet and Society. Rebecca Schild and Prashant Iyengar from CIS were part of the research team.

Event Organised

Open Access to Academic Knowledge, organised by the Indian Institute of Science and CIS at National Centre for Science Information, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore on 2 November 2011. Tom Dane participated in this event.

Event Participated

3rd Canadian Science Policy Conference, organised by Canadian Science Policy Conference from16 to 18 November 2011 at the Ottawa Convention Centre. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Global Implications of Open and Inclusive Innovation.

Announcement

The Wikimedia India Program Trust. A new entity, the “Wikimedia India Program Trust”, has been registered in Delhi. Sunil Abraham is one of the trustees.

Internet Governance

The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes:

Comments / Submissions

CIS Comments on Finance Committee Statements to Open Letters on Unique Identity: The Parliamentary Finance Committee responded to the six open letters sent by CIS through an email on 12 October 2011. CIS has commented on the points raised by the Committee.
Comments on the National Policy of Information Technology: The NPIT 2011 has the laudable goal of making India a ‘knowledge economy with a global role’ by developing and deploying ICT solutions in all sectors to foster development within India and at a global level. CIS appreciates this initiative of the Department of Information Technology and offers brief comments to strengthen the draft.
CIS Comments on the Draft National Policy on Electronics: CIS submitted its comments to the request for comments put out by the Department of Information Technology on its draft 'National Policy on Electronics'.

Statement

India's Statement Proposing UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy: India made its statement at the 66th session of the United Nations General Assembly, its proposal for the UN Committee for Internet-Related Policy was presented.

Podcast

Professor Balaram talks Open Access : Tom Dane spoke with Professor P Balaram, Director of the Indian Institute of Science about the Open Access movement. A podcast of the interview is online.

Event Report

The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series — A Post-event Report : The 2nd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series was organised by the Indian Journal of Law and Technology and CIS on the 21st and 22nd of May 2011 at the National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore. The main theme for this year was Emerging Issues in Privacy Law: Law, Policy and Practice.

Essay in Peer Reviewed Journal

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries
by Nishant Shah, Director-Research
Nishant explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2.

Articles/Columns

What is Dilligaf? On the web, time moves at the speed of thought: Groups emerge, proliferate and are abandoned as new trends and fads take precedence. Nowhere else is this dramatic flux as apparent as in the language that evolves online. While SMS lingo – like TTYL (Talk To You Later) and LOL (Laughing Out Loud)– has endured and become a part of everyday language, new forms of speech are taking over. This article by Nishant Shah was published in GQ India.
The Book of Jobs The man who made the computer personal, who changed the face of the digital media industry, who was inspired by Zen philosophy to create an eight-billion-dollar empire, Steve Jobs, died last month. Just a few weeks before his death, in the midst of his painful illness, he told Walter Isaacson, the man chosen to write his authorised biography, “I really want to believe that something survives”. And Isaacson wrote him a fairy tale which will make sure that Jobs will be remembered beyond the gizmos and gimmicks, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 12 November 2011.

Staff Quoted in the Media

Is Facebook tracking your virtual footprints? by Sheetal Sukhija in MidDay, 22 November 2011. Sunil Abraham was quoted in this article.
M-governance gains momentum by Vasudha Venugopal in the Hindu, 20 November 2011. Nishant Shah was quoted in this article.
SOPA: The bill that could kill the Internet by Suw Charman-Anderson in Firstpost.Technology, 16 November 2011.
Broadband user base still has a long way to go, by Leslie D’Monte & Deepti Chaudhary in Livemint, 15 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
‘Not mandatory’ but maids, guards get fingerprinted by Hemanth Kashyap in Bangalore Mirror, 9 November 2011. Sunil Abraham has been quoted in this article.
Netizen Report: Transparency Edition by Rebecca MacKinnon in Global Voices Online, 7 November 2011.
Blocking online content: Google gets more requests than govt by Pallavi Polanki in Firstpost.com, 2 November 2011. Pranesh Prakash has been quoted in this article.

Blog Posts

Sources of CIS Funding by Pranesh Prakash on 9 November 2011.

TRAI urged to take action against P2P throttling and DNS hijacking by Anand on 9 November 2011.

Events Organised

Exposing Data: Art Slash Activism organised by Tactical Tech and CIS at CIS office in Bangalore on 28 November 2011. Ward Smith and Stephanie Hankey (Co-founders of TTC), Ayisha Abraham (Filmmaker, Srishti School of Art Design) and Zainab Bawa (Research Fellow, CIS) gave a lecture.

Droidcon India, first Android Conference in Bangalore, organised by CIS in collaboration with Droidcon.com, Bangalore Android User Group, MobileMonday Bangalore and Android Advices on 18 and 19 November 2011 at the MLR Convention Centre, Bangalore.

Events Participated

Western Ghats Portal: Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics organised by the Western Ghats Portal team at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, 25 November 2011. Sunil Abraham spoke in the session on Scientific Commons and Policy.
Names Not Numbers Mumbai, 26 November 2011. Nishant Shah spoke in a panel on “The New Digital Individual: Is New Technology Liberating or Enslaving?”. The event was organised by Editorial Intelligence and partners which included the British Council and Financial Times, BBC World News, Mumbai first, Vodafone, Trident and Godrej India Cultural Lab.

Upcoming Events

Dialogue Cafe @ Centre for Internet and Society, 2 December 2011, Centre for Internet & Society, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m.
The High Level Privacy Conclave, 3 February 2011, Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens New Delhi, 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. This is a closed-door meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).
All India Privacy Symposium, 4 February 2011, India International Centre, New Delhi. This is a public meeting. For participation, get in touch with Elonnai (elonnai@cis-india.org).

Video

Facebook Resistance Workshop at CIS. This was a workshop for people to learn on how to think beyond the rules and limitations of Facebook, to tweak and play around the features and design to generate useful, creative, and funny concepts and explore how this creative intervention can be turned into a real software developed by the Facebook Resistance.

Telecom

While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum:

Column

Telecom Path-Breaker? (by Shyam Ponappa): Does the draft National Telecom Policy-2011 reflect true brilliance or smoke-and-mirrors? It will be a game-changer if a shared network is implemented effectively, writes Shyam Ponappa in this article published in the Business Standard on 3 November 2011.

Follow us elsewhere

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Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

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

Not a Goodbye; More a ‘Come Again’: Thoughts on being Research Director at a moment of transition

nishant — 2014-06-15T02:17:06Z

As I slowly make the news of my transition from being the Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to taking up a professorship at the Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany, there is a question that I am often asked: “Are you going to start a new research centre?” And the answer, for the most part, is “No.”

Not because I don’t see the value of creating institutional spaces like these or that starting and running CIS has been anything short of a dream, but because I don’t how to. When I tell people I don’t know how CIS came into being, they suspect that I am being either facetious or dismissive. But I am not. If somebody asked me to write an Origin Story for CIS, I would be baffled – or probably sum it up by saying that it happened. There was the germ of an idea, a whole lot of people who responded to it, and like the great Tolkienian epic, it was a story that grew in its telling.

I was 27, when Sunil Abraham, the now Executive Director and I met together in New Delhi, to talk about what a research organisation that represents the public interest at the intersections of Internet & Society would look like. We spent three days in the Delhi heat, coming up with the most fantastic ideas about methods, structures and core areas of interest. It was one of those divine exercises where you build the template for your dream work and then, like a fairy-tale, we had incredible people who came and supported us to make that dream a reality. In six months of that first conversation – I had just turned 28 and was completing the last drafts of my Ph.D. dissertation – CIS got officially registered and with some of the most incredible people, who have been with us, both in their generous affective investment as well as in their intellectual and professional support, we kicked-off a research centre, that has become not only hard to ignore but also significantly important in bringing about scholarly and practice based research around the different facets of how the emergence and widespread reach of the Internet is changing the ways in which we become human, social and political in emerging information societies of the Global South.

In the 7 years since that first conversation started, I have learned so much from CIS and the networks that built around it, that it would be impossible to write an exhaustive account of it. However, as I now take up a new position at the CIS as a member of its board, and continue to collaborate with the on-the-ground teams intellectually, from my new position as a Professor, there are five things I want to dwell upon, more to remind myself of important lessons learned, but also as approaches that the new director and team might want to reference:

Research cannot be individually focused
One of the things that academic training does is that it promotes the idea of an individual researcher. We write, publish, seek grants and present our work, taking individual credit and building a body of work that is centred on us. True, we collaborate and we participate and we are opening up more distributed modes of learning and research, but at the end of the day, there is still an imagination of a research community that is built of individual scholars who work in a happy symbiosis and synthesis.

The biggest lesson I learned with the CIS was that research requires collectives – peers, supporters, and critics – that can help materialise a vision. Instead of trying to do ‘my’ research, it was the first time that I was enabling others’ research. I had a say in building the research vision, and establishing protocols of rigour and review, but to have a dream, and then to share it with others, so that it becomes a collective dream was an incredible experience. It was the beginning of a method that I hope informs all my work, where research methods are constantly going to accommodate for and be shaped by collective visions and approaches rather than just the individual as a lone warrior. More than anything else, it reassures us that we are not alone, either in our triumphs or our road-blocks, and it builds a community of thinkers that is more important than just the single authored outputs that we bring out.
Research requires infrastructure
Institutions are infrastructure. However, our jobs are so segregated, that we don’t always realise the incredible effort that goes into building such institutions and then making them work as efficient infrastructure to support research. It is very rare, in research publications that we thank our everyday office staff, the accounts team that processes the complicated bureaucracies of research funding, the programme managers who create networks and evaluation formats, or the numerous people who perform ‘non-research’ jobs so that we can do the research.

I had worked in project and programme manager positions before CIS. I had also worked as an independent researcher and consultant before that. But this was the first time I actually took the dual responsibility of not only initiating research but also providing the infrastructure for it. And I know that I am a wiser person for it. The intricate world of fund-raising, managing and developing networks, of implementing and monitoring research projects and contracts, and the need to constantly find sustainable options for the research programmes is something that requires an incredible amount of effort and resources. The researchers often are kept away from this world, or we often just ignore the intense quotidian activities that give us the privilege of doing our work, and my time with CIS taught me not only to appreciate this, but also to recognise these tasks as research.
All research must try and answer the ‘So What?’ question
Within academic circles, research has inherent value. We do have the freedom to develop new frameworks and ideas that might not have any immediate relevance and might in fact even fail without seeing the light of day. Academia is privileged because as long as we perform our pedagogic tasks, we have the space to experiment and often work on areas that might not benefit anybody outside the disciplines that we are located in.

At CIS, working at such close quarters with colleagues who are experts in policy and regulation, research became critical for me. It wasn’t research for research’s sake. It was research with a cause. At the same time, making the research relevant was not an exercise in dumbing it down so that it can be reduced to easy implementation. The effort required at making academic and intellectual research accessible, while still retaining its complexity has been a heady experience for me. Since CIS, I have tried to make sure that all research is able to answer the ‘So What?’ question, and every time, it has made the research more robust, more rigorous and having a greater audience and impact than it would otherwise have.
To be a research organisation is to be unafraid
One of the most fantastic things about being a young research organisations was that we were not afraid to voice our opinions and voice them loud. In the last 6 years, CIS has evolved into a strong voice that is not unanimous, but is still clear. We have had disagreements with established research and policy actors. We have critiqued decisions taken by policy and development institutions when we felt that they were flawed. We have provided a critical commentary to different instruments of law and regulation when necessary. We have challenged academic researchers in their methodology as well as in their disconnect from the ‘real world’. And we did it, because early on, the people who guided us, taught us, that research organisations have to be unafraid.

Unafraid, not just to ask tough questions of those outside, but also of asking tough questions internally. The team, as it has grown, has been a smorgasbord of disciplinary and stakeholder locations. We don’t necessarily speak the same language. We don’t also, agree on many critical points. But we never tried to be a consensus generation institute. Instead, we learned to coexist and even collaborate in our differences – it was something that external partners often had problems with. How can one set of people work towards critically opposing a phenomenon when others might actually write in favour of some of the aspects of that same phenomenon? How is it possible that some in the institute have great collaborations with a network that the others critique persistently in their work? These tensions, for me, have been generative and I hope that they continue, both in the institution but also in my future work.
Researchers are people too
This is one of the strangest things to realise, but it is a good lesson to remember. Academia and research work through abstractions. At some point, the researchers become names. They become only a body of work, a certain number of words. But dealing with researchers is to deal with human beings. We have to remember that researchers, while they are often driven and passionate and unable to extricate their lives from their work, do have lives and bodies and socialities that need to be managed. Institutions often get driven by matrices of measurement and politics of promotion and evaluation, at the neglect of the people who actually build it. The constant push at CIS was to recognise that we are all too human in our everyday lives. And to build work environments, relationships and spaces that nurture the people we work with is the primary responsibility of all research.

These points are probably too vague, but this blog post is already too long. I just wanted to take this opportunity to write some ‘Notes to the self’ about things that have been the most important to me in being the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society. And now, it is time for me to move on. I want to place myself in an academic setting where I learn, I get some headspace to think and write, and do the one thing that I enjoy the most – teach. Starting 1st October 2014[*] I am stepping down as the Research Director and taking up a professorship in a new and exciting university, designing courses and research agendas at the intersections of internet studies, media studies, culture studies and aesthetic studies, bringing together some of my most passionate areas of interest. However, I continue to be interested and invested in CIS’ institutional growth. I shall be a part of the search committee as we invite a new Research Director in the Bangalore office, I shall be a part of the Board that governs the CIS, and I shall always think of CIS as my home, continuing mentoring and implementing existing collaborations but also building more, especially towards the pedagogic and knowledge production side of things.

When the final decisions about this transition were made last week, I had thought I would be emotional and heart broken. Instead, I only feel excited. I have a wonderful set of colleagues in Bangalore, and they, in turn, are at the centre of networks of support, love, empathy and trust. CIS will benefit from having a new Research Director who will bring new visions, new methods, new processes and infrastructure to the table, and I hope that as my own academic career grows, I shall find myself returning to CIS in different capacities and roles, both for what I could contribute to it, but also for what I continue to learn from the rich range and variety of activities that it anchors.

[*].For me, this is not a goodbye, but just a change in roles at the CIS. I will continue to use my CIS credentials and email address, and will be found on the existing contact details there for any queries or interactions with and on behalf of the CIS. So no need to change your address books, just yet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again

Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav - Power Chronography of Food-Delivery Work

Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav — 2020-05-19T06:33:39Z

Working in the gig-economy has been associated with economic vulnerabilities. However, there are also moral and affective vulnerabilities as workers find their worth measured everyday by their performance of—and at—work and in every interaction and movement. This essay by Noopur Raval and Rajendra Jadhav is the fourth among a series of writings by researchers associated with the 'Mapping Digital Labour in India' project at the CIS, supported by the Azim Premji University, that were published on the Platypus blog of the Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC).

Originally published by the Platypus blog of CASTAC on August 15, 2019.

The ethnographic research was conducted by Rajendra and this short essay was collaboratively produced by the field researcher and Noopur (co-PI). The accompanying audio recording has been produced by Noopur.

Summary of the essay in Hindi: Audio (YouTube) and Transcript (text)

This post presents the observations around the design of temporality within app-based food-delivery platforms in India. It draws on semi-structured interviews by field-researcher Rajendra and his time spent “hanging out” with food-delivery workers who are also often referred to as “hunger saviors” and “partners” in the platform ecosystem in India. Like in the earlier post by Simiran Lalvani on food-delivery workers in Mumbai, we also observed that app-based work was structured and monitored along similar lines. However, in this post, we go into a detailed description of how work-time and temporality of work are configured in order to fulfill the promises that app companies make to customers in urban India. Before such app-based services came into existence, there were some popular claims around delivery-time (“30 minutes or free pizza” by Domino’s) but the entire process of food preparation, travel and delivery had not been made as transparent and quantified in a granular way as they are now through popular apps such as Swiggy, Zomato and UberEats. While such companies exist in the other parts of the world and make the promise of “anytime work” to potential workers, as we observed during fieldwork, app-based food delivery-work is anything but flexible. People could indeed start working at any time of the day, but it had real consequences to earn a living wage. While they were free to logout or switch off their app also at their convenience, they would be constantly nudged in the form of calls by warehouse managers as well as through text messages telling them how they were missing out on earnings. It is also important to note that, in India especially, food-delivery as a standardized form of work, exists in a regulatory grey space. In that sense, there is not a lot of clarity on the maximum limit of working hours in a day and in a week. In the following sections, I provide details about how work is structured temporally in this system.

Shift-based Work

When Rajendra spoke to workers in the Delhi-NCR region, they reported that they could choose to work different kinds of shifts like part-time (8 AM – 3 PM or 7 PM – 12 AM), full-time (11 AM -11 PM) or ultra full-time (7 AM -11 PM). While workers could pick their timings or slots on weekdays, it was mandatory to work on the weekends. As mentioned earlier, while companies claimed that riders could log in and out at any time of the day, their pay depended on the number of deliveries they make and the hours they worked. But it’s not that simple. It is not just the wholly quantified units (an hour, a day) that become exigent and overbearing; it was in fact how these rules demanded high levels of alertness and care from the workers. Any kind of carelessness, not paying attention (to time, text message announcements) could be detrimental to claiming pay for the work they had done already. For instance, like a worker described, if he even logged out a minute before the end of the shift, he would lose out on his incentive. Another worker added,

If you log off even five minutes before eleven (pm), a call comes from the company and they ask you to log back in immediately.

In such cases, those managing the backend systems even make these calls to shield workers from the eventuality of losing pay and the hassle of resolving disputed payments later by simply urging and pushing workers to stay on-time and online. In that sense, there is not only an expectation of punctuality and always being-on as a desirable thing, but it is also imperative for the workers to meet these expectations while they interact with the app itself.

Sticker provided by a food-delivery platform to promote its brand. Source: Noopur Raval, author.

Time of Eating, Time of Sleeping

Typically, restaurants and food businesses in Indian cities are heavily regulated, especially in terms of closing times. While these rules differ for each city, in and around Delhi, restaurants are expected to close down by 10 pm, and those that seek to remain open for longer need special permissions. With the arrival of app-based delivery companies, the time of food production and consumption has stretched. Also, with the right kinds of permits, cloud kitchens and home-based producers are also allowed to operate through these platforms, thus making multiple food choices and cuisines available until as late as 4 am in the morning. Whose consumption needs are being serviced at these late hours is a question beyond the scope of this post, but it also means that there is opportunity/compulsion for workers to stay up late at night, making deliveries. Not surprisingly, it is also often these late-night shifts that are better incentivized, not just money-wise but also because there is less traffic at night (a constant source of stress in day-time shifts). As other studies have also noted, platform companies, especially food-delivery services that mostly engage bike and scooter riders (Lee et al. 2016) globally, enforce this cruel temporal inversion where being a service-worker in this economy also means working on others’ (customers’) time of leisure and/or comfort. Especially in Delhi, where the winters get brutally cold, ironically, the profitability of delivering hot food increases. However, it is not that straightforward. One worker Rajendra spoke to in March (springtime) explained,

I am not going to work with any of the food delivery company from April onwards because of the hot summer in Delhi, it is very difficult to ride in a day time of summer.

Temporary Work

Temporariness is the dominant temporal fate of gig-work at-large—workers in our study (food-delivery as well as ride-hailing) often insisted how gig-work was only temporary until they could become business-owners, find a better job, or fund their education and so on. However, as we observed in food-delivery work, there was also a lot of seasonal movement of workers, a reminder of the contextual, ecological and urban migration continuities that inform, support and shape who comes to the reserve force/waiting zone of gig-work. In classic labour terms, the push and pull factors that move people out of agricultural labour or other kinds of work must be studied with an eye to new forms of easy-entry jobs such as gig-work. On the other hand, there were also other considerations on time such as responsibilities and social obligations to family that made food-delivery work (fast paced, inhering a certain amount of recklessness and the willingness to put oneself at risk) less attractive to some (older men and women with a family) and more to some others (younger single men). This made us think of the way in which Sarah Sharma (2011) emphasizes temporal power over speed discourses (she offers the term ‘power-chronography’) where, the ways in which food-delivery work is temporally arranged, distributed and rewarded, privileges certain actors (the customers but also some kinds of workers) over others in the city’s labour market.

References

Lee, Do J., et al. “Delivering (in) justice: Food delivery cyclists in New York City.” Bicycle Justice and Urban Transformation. Routledge, 2016. 114-129.

Sharma, Sarah. “It changes space and time: introducing power-chronography.” Communication Matters: Materialist Approaches to Media, Mobility and Networks (2011): 66-77.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/noopur-raval-rajendra-jadhav-power-chronography-of-food-delivery-work

No access to pornography in cyber cafes, declare new rules

praskrishna — 2011-05-01T01:09:50Z

Fresh guidelines, which are part of Information Technology (guidelines for cyber cafe) Rules 2011, will require cyber cafe owners to "tell users" not to surf websites that contain "pornographic or obscene material". Experts termed the rule arbitrary, saying that watching pornography is not an offence in India. This article by Javed Anwer was published in the Times of India on April 26, 2011.

According to the rules notified on April 11, all cyber cafes in the country will have to register with an "agency as notified" by the government. While some of the guidelines deal with the security threat posed by "anonymous internet users", most aim to make sure that people don't use cyber cafes to access pornographic material.

Pawan Duggal, a lawyer who specializes in IT laws, said the new guidelines were arbitrary. "Watching pornography is not illegal in India," he said. "It's absurd to ask cyber cafe owners to tell their customers not to access pornographic material even as law allows individuals to access adult websites unless it's not child pornography. The new rules require a second look."

The new rules suggest cafe owners install filtering software and keep a log of all websites accessed by customers for at least one year. Cafe owners have also been asked not to build a cabin/cubicle with a height of more than four and half feet. In a cyber cafe where there are no cubicles, "owners will have to place computers with the screens facing outward" or towards open space. The move is aimed at reducing privacy a cyber cafe user can get.

Duggal said if implemented earnestly, the new rules will put most of cyber cafe owners out of business.

Internet activists termed the guidelines "unconstitutional". Pranesh Prakash, a programme manager with Centre of Internet and Society, said the rules will violate privacy and will hamper internet users' ability to freely express themselves.

The new rules make it mandatory for user to carry an identity card. Cyber cafe owners have been asked to give user logs to the "registration agency" every month as well keep these records along with the log of websites accessed at the cyber cafe safe for a period of one year. A few cafe owners said that technically, it would be a daunting task to keep a record of every website accessed using their computers for a year.

While minors, if carrying identity cards have been permitted to use computers in a cyber cafe, they won't be allowed inside cubicles if not accompanied by guardians or parents. There is also provision of photographing cyber cafe users using a webcam or other device. The photographs will have to be authenticated by the user. Prakash said that photographing users raises serious privacy questions, especially in the case of children.

Read the original article published by the Times of India here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/no-pornography-in-cyber-cafes

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:27:16Z

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

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

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

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

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

New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

sneha-pp — 2016-06-30T04:45:25Z

An extended survey of digital initiatives in arts and humanities practices in India was undertaken during the last year. Provocatively called 'mapping digital humanities in India', this enquiry began with the term 'digital humanities' itself, as a 'found' name for which one needs to excavate some meaning, context, and location in India at the present moment. Instead of importing this term to describe practices taking place in this country - especially when the term itself is relatively unstable and undefined even in the Anglo-American context - what I chose to do was to take a few steps back, and outline a few questions/conflicts that the digital practitioners in arts and humanities disciplines are grappling with. The final report of this study will be published serially. This is the sixth among seven sections.

Sections

01. Digital Humanities in India?

02. A Question of Digital Humanities

03. Reading from a Distance – Data as Text

04. The Infrastructure Turn in the Humanities

05. Living in the Archival Moment

06. New Modes and Sites of Humanities Practice

07. Digital Humanities in India – Concluding Thoughts

Introduction

From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself, in India. As the previous sections may have illustrated, most of the prominent initiatives around DH in India have largely been within the university context, or have at least focused around the university as the centre of the processes of knowledge production, and emphasise a move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, and at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation. In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and topics, which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide or even accommodate. These include tools for working with digitisation processes, digital archives, and the use of computational methods in the study of cultural artifacts. Thus processes such as topic modelling, data visualisation, cultural analytics, sentiment analysis and several more become increasingly prominent in discussions about DH. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a particular kind of teaching-learning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.

Wikipedia and internet-based sources of information are entering classrooms with the proliferation of gadgets and tools, and with this there is a tendency towards adopting a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration. DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ (Davidson and Goldberg, 2010) – not only in terms of people, but also spaces, methods and objects of learning - to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this in the global discourse on DH is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ [1]: people with training in the humanities who now inhabit what earlier seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. But it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that are now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters within the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. While the DH discourse in India has developed mostly within the university space, given its multidisciplinary interests and methods, it is often seen as bearing potential in terms of working outside the academic norm. Through an examination of changes in teaching-learning methods, creative and critical practices that come about with the adoption of the digital, it may be useful to explore whether it indeed opens up such alternate modes of humanities practice and how it informs the way we do DH in India; as practitioners, researchers, students, teachers or the lay person. The growth of the internet and digital tools and technologies has led to many changes in teaching-learning practices, and engendered new methods and forms of humanities practice, all of which may now be found within the university or academic space. It is therefore imperative to examine these new modes of research and practice, to arrive a better understanding of the changes in and possibilities available for humanities work after the digital. The notion of the ‘alternate’ is also an important concern here, and the emergence of these new modes of humanities practice help unpack and understand this term better.

Technology in the Classroom

This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster new and alternate knowledge-making practices. India is also still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition, and the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the university circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research, where one may see DH–related work being done. What remains an important part of the discourse in the context of the university is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom.

The use of technology in education has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom [2]. However, the digital divide still persists, as a result of which many initiatives come with problems of their own, the most important being the lack of connection among practice, content and pedagogy [3]. Vikram Vincent, a doctoral scholar in the Interdisciplinary Program in Educational Technology, Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, attributes this to a problem of understanding technology itself and what it can do for learning. He looks at technology as an extension of the human body and not something alien to it. Over the course of his research, he has found that the prevalent attitude to the use of technology in the classroom, particularly in early ICTs in education projects, has been more techno-centric rather than learner-centric, which is not the most effective approach [4]. Technology has always been around in some form or the other, from drawing on walls to the blackboard to now the smart board; it has always been in the classroom. How you choose to use it determines the outcomes, and one needs to ensure that the learning environment evolves with the new technology that is introduced, because it does not happen automatically but over a period of time.

The Wikipedia India Education programme pilot project, implemented in Pune in 2011 is an example of the number of challenges that the introduction of a new technology in the classroom brought forth, in terms of skills, content and pedagogy [5]. The need to focus on the educational component of the technology, the improvement of skills of the learner in writing, research and communication, rather than on the tool itself has been an important learning from the programme, even as it continues in a different university today. As Vincent adds further, the problem arises with looking at technology as a disruptive element or merely a tool to aid learning, which prevents institutions from envisioning a more holistic model of learning that takes some amount of time and effort. This also requires the appropriate stimulus and other conditions such as training of teachers, access to resources and training in certain required skills, addressing barriers of language and so forth, which is a feature of some programmes, such as the IT @ school in Kerala which have seen a measure of success [6]. Vincent further mentions examples of programmes he has been part of, some of them under the MHRD-NMEICT initiative which focussed on the teaching-learning process rather than the technology itself, key to which is building teacher capacity to use new and already available resources better [7]. These would be crucial steps to take before envisioning a model of teaching-learning that is premised largely on digital technologies and the internet.

While educational technology is a separate field in itself which looks at better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology [8], it does form part of the context, or landscape in India within which DH would perhaps develop as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach.

Another predominant discourse that informs DH is that of Information Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) which is often used as a rather broad, catch-all term, and has been variously defined and used by different groups and stakeholders across domains (Saith et al, 2008). ICT4D is premised largely around the question of access, and seeks to bridge the digital divide in terms of knowledge, resources, people and infrastructure, among other things. This has also been an intensely debated term, given its social and political implications, particularly in the manner in which it informs a larger discourse on development, technology and globalisation in the global South.(Sundaram, 2005) It is important to understand whether DH has been posited as making an intervention into these prevailing systems of knowledge – so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change. What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it – will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.

Towards a Digital Pedagogy

Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University is positive about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies. According to him, while a media or film studies department would be close to the concerns of DH, and use some form of digital technology such as video clips or blogs as part of coursework, it is particularly important to see what change it has brought about in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages. While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research that he sees a vast change now. Many researchers, many of his students also, have found this a useful part of the research process, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms and tools like Academia or Scalar [9]. It not only makes the process more transparent, but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities for teaching-learning practices.

It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies, but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few, with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata, and more recently Srishti School of Arts, Design and Technology in Bangalore. The change is recent, as several researchers have pointed out. There have always been concerns about privacy and regulation of content, whether on a university archive or its network. The enthusiasm towards ‘anything digital is good’ is relatively new, and comes from a larger (and sometimes rather utopian) development discourse focussed around modernity and technology. Curricularisation comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets - we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital, and both modes exist simultaneously - but the rate of change is faster with the digital than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities, thus also seen as threat to the disciplines themselves, but to see if it has its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.

The development of courses on DH in three universities in India, and the manner in which the field has been ‘curricularised’ so to say, would be an indication of its specific academic concerns in the Indian context, and the disciplinary challenges and questions that it may throw up for the teaching-learning process. Expectedly, the three courses mobilise a set of resources and expertise that the schools have built over the course of many years. In doing so they also foray into areas that existing humanities courses at the university may not have explored enough, within their own disciplinary framework. For example the course on Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics at Jadavpur University [10] comprises of components on software studies and digital music preservation, building on work done at the large archives at the School of Cultural Texts and Records. Similarly, the course at Presidency University [11] has components on storytelling in digital media through video games, while the course at Srishti [12] has a focus on design practice and critical making amongst other interests. The courses therefore follow a decidedly interdisciplinary framework, which no doubt interesting, also makes curriculum development and course assessment a challenge. While the ‘digital’ aspect of ‘DH’ forms a significant part of these explorations, the manner in which it is being studied is an important point of focus – whether as a condition, space, concept or object, rather than just a set of tools and methods that facilitate the enquiry of the humanities. Digitisation significantly alters the cultural artifact, and there is a need to understand and theorise this digital object better. As Padmini Ray Murray points out, the digital is one way to mediate the material object, particularly those that are not textual, since that kind of experiential access can only be provided by the digital, especially in the case of archival objects. A critical understanding of the digital needs to therefore be a key aspect of such an enquiry in DH.

Alternate Spaces of Humanities Practice

While these are the developments within academia or the university space, there are a number of spaces outside this circle that have also been asking similar questions, and producing new kinds of scholarship and research around these ideas. The Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma archives have not only served as rich repository of material on film and video, used by scholars and film enthusiasts alike, but also as a pedagogic tool in spaces like the Media Lab at Jadavpur University. Through an innovative fellowship programme, Pad.ma has supported research and film making using the archive as a platform. An interesting example here would be a documentary film on power plants in Chhattisgarh made by Sunil Kumar. Available as a film treatment/script on Pad.ma, Kumar’s work is based on research in mainly two districts of Chhattisgarh, where he met and spoke with people, collected documents and shot several hours of video, which he then published in the form of 80 footage series on Pad.ma [13]. There are several other examples on Pad.ma, such as the video-art project on the Radia tapes, and the work on "perfume arts" in Bangalore [14]. The Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW) through its workshops on oral and visual history has tried to engage with the more pedagogic aspects of the archive [15]. While the possibilities are many, the uptake of such platforms in universities has been slow, due to issues that range from lack of internet connectivity to a discomfort or unfamiliarity with the internet and other kinds of technology. This eventually relegates initiatives like these to the space of an alternate, extracurricular or outlier, even though they seem to be asking the same questions as the mainstream institutions and doing similar work.

What this also refers to is the space for new modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders or even brings to the fore in already existing practices. With these however, also come the questions about the legitimacy of these forms and methods of knowledge production, as seen in the rather polarised positions around DH in its global discourse. The Wikipedia is one example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang (2011) describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the 15th -18th centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the Internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says:

The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and ahistorical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6 located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge, but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?

He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.

The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’–often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge. While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of prominent practices and occupations are but alternatives - from alternative medicine to education - to the already established or mainstream system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now. The attempts to subsume these alternate practices under a unifying term such as DH, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long, within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question.

Humanities and Technology: A Twinned History

Another factor in this reduced visibility of the alternate and now re-emergence is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. Therefore by extension then, the term DH itself may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. David Berry (2012) in his essay on the computational turn speaks of possibilities that computationality, and specifically new software and code offer in terms of unifying multiple kinds of knowledge in the university. He says that:

In trying to understand the digital humanities our first step might be to problematize computationality, so that we are able to think critically about how knowledge in the 21st century is transformed into information through computational techniques, particularly within software. It is interesting that at a time when the idea of the university is itself under serious rethinking and renegotiation, digital technologies are transforming our ability to use and understand information outside of these traditional knowledge structures. This is connected to wider challenges to the traditional narratives that served as unifying ideas for the university and, with their decline, has led to difficulty in justifying and legitimating the postmodern university vis-à-vis government funding. (5)

Berry therefore indicates that this turn towards computationality is the result of an emerging need to demonstrate the relevance of the university structure to processes of knowledge production, therefore reiterating the ‘crisis’ argument. The notion of the postmodern university has been examined in detail by Bill Readings, who Berry quotes in his paper. Readings (1997) is sceptical of the term postmodern, preferring instead the idea of a post historical university, which is divested from the notion of the nation-state and further culture as a unifying idea, and is moving towards a notion of excellence that he sees as techno-bureaucratic, a result of several factors including globalisation and the fact that processes of knowledge production and institutionalisation are no longer centred around a liberal subject. If the demonstrated project of the university has changed, the emergence of such new discourse, and specifically concepts and terms such as the ‘alt – academy’ has relevance to how one may now imagine new spaces, objects, processes and figures of knowledge itself.

The significance of the university system to knowledge production has been a recurring point of much debate and discussion in India. Although not explicitly stated as a crisis in humanities by the people interviewed, there are problems of content, pedagogy, infrastructure, and vision that continue to plague higher education at large [16], and very often technological fixes are seen as a solution to these, in some part due to the imagination of a techno-democracy as described in the introduction to this report. As Berry points out then, computationality is a promise, or possibility to do things differently, which is then also inherently assumed to be a way of doing things better. The computational possibilities of DH still need to be explored, but how much of these contribute qualitatively to addressing or even furthering certain disciplinary concerns, still remains an open question. As Jan and Sebastian point out from their experience of working on Indiancine.ma and Pad.ma, the computational aspects of the archives are still to be developed, as there are still restrictions in terms of speed and feasibility (see chapter on infrastructure [17]); the kind of new questions it produces for cinema studies at large will remain a contention. Further, as Padmini Ray Murray observes, drawing on archival material, or data to develop new computational hypotheses would be a direction to work towards, as not much work has been done in this respect in India (See chapter on archives [18]). The challenges with computationality then demand, as Berry argues, a more critical exploration of the term itself, and in fact can be extended to a critical analysis of the state of digitality more broadly.

Final Notes

The problems with the crisis in the humanities and the contribution of technology to these changes could be located to this change in what has traditionally been seen as the space of culture and reason, which has now moved on to something else, a notion of excellence in Readings’ example, thereby changing the questions at the centre as well. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field. At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of humanities practice have been brought to the foreground, but have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come. Some of the questions or points or focus that open up are as follows:

The role of extra-institutional/non-academic or alternate spaces in humanities practice, and in producing and creating new kinds of knowledge.
The increased visibility of new objects and methods within informal and marginal spaces of knowledge production. This demands different, and often innovative methods of enquiry, and whether they alter disciplinary modes of humanities practice and research.
The notion of a moving away from established modes of humanities practice, research and scholarship (therefore the question of a ‘crisis’) which would open up a larger debate around the authority of knowledge.
The ontological and epistemological stake of DH, in short the kinds of new questions it enables us to ask.

As important and visible as the idea of the alternate is in DH, it also presents the mainstream itself as fractured space that imbibes several contradictions of the practices in question, which cannot be confined to these watertight silos of formal/informal, academic or creative. Nevertheless, the mainstream spaces remain crucial for widening and deepening creative digital practice and research in arts and humanities disciplines, and will be the spaces to watch to understand the development of a substantive DH discourse in India.

Endnotes

[1] For more on this see: Nowviskie, Bethany, (Ed.) Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011, http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/cluster/alternative-academic-careers-humanities-scholars, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[2] The largest and most ambitious has been the Ministry of Human Resources and Development’s National Mission in Education through ICT programme (NMEICT), started in 2009. See: http://mhrd.gov.in/technology-enabled-learning-0 Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[3] To stay with the example of the NMEICT, an evaluation of the programme pointed out several challenges to technology-enabled learning, namely in the areas of connectivity, content, and pedagogy. See http://www.sakshat.ac.in/Document/NMEICT_Evaluation_Report.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[4] For more see this position paper by the NCERT on education technology in India: http://www.ncert.nic.in/new_ncert/ncert/rightside/links/pdf/focus_group/educational_technology.pdf. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[5] See an evaluation report on the programme by Tory Read: http://oceanwork.com/portfolio/wikipedia-education-program-reputation-management/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[6] See: http://education.kerala.gov.in/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=51&Itemid=59. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[7] For more on these projects see: http://www.et.iitb.ac.in/sanket/?p=87. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[8] See: Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015; and Toru Iiyoshi and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008, https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/titles/content/9780262515016_Open_Access_Edition.pdf. Also see: http://ciet.nic.in/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[9] See: https://www.academia.edu/ and http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/. Last accessed December 23, 2015.

[10] See: https://sctrdhci.wordpress.com/. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[11] See: http://dhgenedpresi.blogspot.in/2014/01/welcome-to-digital-humanities-presidency.html. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[12] See: http://srishti.ac.in/programs/pg-program-ma-in-digital-humanities. Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[13] See: http://pad.ma/texts/sunil_kumar:Future_Power_Plants_in_Chhattisgarh:_a_Documentary_Film_Treatment_%2F_Script. Last accessed December 12, 2015

[14] See: http://pad.ma/texts Last accessed December 12, 2015.

[15] See: http://www.sparrowonline.org/.

[16] See the report of 'The Committee to Advise on Renovation and Rejuvenation of Higher Education: by the Ministry of Human Resources and Development: http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/document-reports/YPC-Report.pdf; and Roy, Kum Kum, "Decoding 'New Education Policy,'" Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 50, Issue No. 19, May 09, 2015, http://www.epw.in/journal/2015/19/web-exclusives/decoding-new-education-policy.html, last accessed December 23, 2015.

[17] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/the-infrastructure-turn-in-the-humanities.

[18] See: http://cis-india.org/raw/living-in-the-archival-moment.

References

Berry, D.M. "The Computational Turn." Culture Machine. Vol 12, 2012 http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/viewArticle/440. Last Accessed April 12, 2016.

Davidson, Cathy N and David Theo. Goldberg. The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

Iiyoshi, Toru and M.S. Vijay Kumar. (Eds.) Opening up Education. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2008.

Liang, Lawrence. "A Brief History of the Internet from the 15th to the 18th Century." In Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader. Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (Eds). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011.

Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997.

Saith, A, M. Vijayabaskar and V. Gayathri. ICTs and Indian Social Change. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2008.

Spector, J. Michael. Fundamentals of Educational Technology: Integrative Approaches and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Sundaram, Ravi. "Developmentalism Redux." In Incommunicado Reader. Geert Lovink and Soenke Zehle (Eds.). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2005.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/new-modes-and-sites-of-humanities-practice

New Contexts and Sites of Humanities Practice in the Digital (Paper)

sneha-pp — 2019-12-06T05:03:33Z

The ubiquitous presence of the ‘digital’ over the couple of decades has brought with it several important changes in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. Particularly in the arts and humanities, the role of digital technologies and internet has always been a rather contentious one, with more debate spurred now due to the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics. Even as these fields signal several shifts in scholarship, pedagogy and practice, portending a futuristic imagination of the role of technology in academia and practice on the one hand, they also reflect continuing challenges related to the digital divide, and more specifically politics around the growth and sustenance of the humanities disciplines. A specific criticism within more recent debates around the origin story of DH in fact, has been its Anglo-American framing, drawing upon a history in humanities computing and textual studies, and located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and academia. While this has been met with resistance from across different spaces, thus calling for more diversity and representation in the discourse, it is also reflective of the need to trace and contextualize more local forms of practice and pedagogy in the digital as efforts to address these global concerns. This essay by Puthiya Purayil Sneha draws upon excerpts from a study on the field of DH and related practices in India, to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice with the advent of the digital and explore the developing discourse around DH in the Indian context.

This essay was published in Vol 22 No 1 (2016): SummerHill, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Edited by Dr. Bindu Menon. Download the essay here (PDF).

Abstract

The last couple of decades have seen an increasing prevalence of digital technologies and internet in the study and practice of arts and humanities. With the growth of fields like humanities computing, digital humanities (henceforth DH) and cultural analytics, there has been a renewed interest in the increasing role of the ‘digital’ in interdisciplinary forms of research and knowledge production. DH in particular has become a field of much interest and debate in different parts of the world, including in India. Globally, in the last two decades, there have been several efforts to organize the discourse around this field which seeks to explore various intersections between humanities and digital methods, spaces and tools1. But DH also continues to remain a bone of contention, with several perspectives on what exactly constitutes its methodology and scope, and most importantly its epistemological stake.

A specific criticism has been the Anglo-American framing of DH, located within a larger neoliberal imagination of the university and the higher education system at large. As a result, the connection of these two threads—a history of DH located in humanities computing and textual studies and its contextualization within the American university—is often represented as the history of DH. This has been met with resistance from several scholars and practitioners across the world calling for more global perspectives on the field. Drawing upon excerpts from a recently completed study on mapping the field of DH and related practices in India, this essay will attempt to outline the diverse contexts of humanities practice emerging with the digital turn, along with a reading of some of the global debates around DH to understand the discourse around the field in the Indian context.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/new-contexts-and-sites-of-humanities-practice-in-the-digital-paper

Net cracker

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T17:11:03Z

Is Facebook taking over our lives? And if it is, so what? In email interviews with new media researcher and user control advocate Marc Stumpel who is conducting a Facebook Resistance workshop this fortnight, and artist and communication designer Tobias Leingruber, the originator of the FB Resistance idea, Akhila Seetharaman attempts to answer these questions. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011.

There’s a lot said about the role of social media in fuelling political revolutions. What do you make of the role of Facebook, for instance, in the recent uprisings in the Arab world?

Marc Stumpel Clearly, social media has been utilised as instruments by citizens in the Middle East to organise and coordinate democratic protests. They have also proven to be important sources for real-time reporting and documenting political events. The use of networked communication in political protests, however, is nothing new. In my view, it’s wrong to assume there is a causal relationship between social media and “political revolutions”. You need “the people” to instigate a revolution; they will unquestionably use any media at hand.

My interest lies more with researching and exposing the political dimension of social media, rather than questioning its relationship with the politics that we are used to talking and writing about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sites of governance themselves, as the user activities, conditions and data distribution are maintained by a particular set of rules and constraints, embedded in the software.

How do social media sites control people, while at the same time giving them more outlets for self expression and communication?

MS Proprietary social networking software like Facebook have many constraints, which means that users have to abide by the laws and strict limits as defined by the software. Where is our ‘freedom’? For example, why not let the users change their background colour or ‘dislike’ something?

There have been many changes to Facebook that have met with widespread opposition and outrage. How does one make sense of these instances?

MS Facebook’s PR communication regarding its immediate software changes has been very deceptive. They’ve repeatedly used a particular vocabulary to create images of Facebook ‘apologising’ for or ‘justifying’ rigid changes. They say, ‘Look! We ‘simplified’ privacy controls, because we care about your privacy,’ while making them more complex instead.

Can you tell us a few things that Facebook users should know but don’t, about the way Facebook uses their stuff?

Tobias Leingruber Realise the nature of the company. Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network. Facebook is not a social network – it’s an advertising network. We are the product, ‘the sheeple’. We get to be in a herd, but we pay with our most private data. They shave our wool.

MS Facebook is not transparent about its Web user-tracking activities. Via cookies it saves every website you visit outside of Facebook that has any FB social plugin implemented. We don’t exactly know what FB does with this tracking data.

What is the Facebook Resistance?

MS Our attempt is to resist from within the system by slowly undermining and questioning it. This means we’re not leaving it and building a new one. We’re accepting the fact that Facebook has already ‘won’ for now, and we’re trying to make the best out of it by bending its rules.

Critical talk about social media landscape often borrows from the lexicon of war – with online suicide, tactical media, resistance, etc. How much of a warzone is it?

TL Nice observation! Actually ‘cyberwar’ has become very real this year, as US and Israeli militants created a worm that successfully attacked and physically destroyed parts of the Iranian nuclear research programme.

But more specifically on social media I think those extreme terms are very helpful to get people’s attention. We’re overwhelmed by information, so getting people’s attention is an art form itself.

MS We are not at ‘war’ with Facebook; we are at “softwar”, fighting for internet freedom and the adoption of open standards.

What is the potential of resistance to Facebook? What can be achieved?

TL In theory we could undermine and replace their entire system. For example, the chat – to get rid of the tracking and censorship, the system behind Facebook’s chat interface could be replaced with something else, such as the Jabber protocol through an independent server.

MS Expanding your freedom on Facebook by learning how to impose new rules and features onto the system through internet browser processing (thus, not changing any code on Facebook’s server) and spreading awareness about this possibility.

Photography by Tobias Leingruber

Read the original article here

Download the article here [pdf 3.7 mb]

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

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

praskrishna — 2011-04-04T07:22:36Z

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

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

Atreyee Majumder

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

VIDEOS

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

Multimedia Storytellers: Panel Discussion

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:26:51Z

This post brings three storytellers together to find points of intersection between their methods. The format will be that of a panel discussion and it features: Arjun Srivathsa from Pocket Science India, Ameen Haque from the Storywallahs, and Ajay Dasgupta from The Kahani Project. They discuss technology, interpretation and action in storytelling.

CHANGE-MAKERS: Arjun Srivathsa, Ameen Haque and Ajay Dasgupta

ORGANIZATIONS:Pocket Science India, The Storywallahs and The Kahani Project

METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling

Over the last couple of weeks, I had the privilege of interviewing three storytellers. What struck me the most, besides from their fascinating ideas about storytelling, was how many of their ideas overlapped. As much as I would love to sit all of them in the same room and enjoy the fireworks, there are a number of logistical constraints that shut my storyteller reunion daydreams down; so for this post, I decided to be a self-appointed liaison between you and them. I will mimic this discussion by putting my conversations with them side by side, in the format of a panel discussion. Their interaction will have to happen in the realm of your imagination.

The questionnaire I used for my interviews was open-ended. I was curious to hear what they wanted to share about their work, as opposed to filtering and steering the conversation in a certain direction; so I let them take their own turn. While I clearly inquired about the relationship between storytelling and making change, it was fascinating to see each storyteller reach the question of ‘social impact' through different channels; testimony of the influence of their education and professional backgrounds in their work.

If I were to bring them together, the topic of the discussion would be: 'Technology, Interpretation and Action in Storytelling'. We briefly discussed mediation and semiotics[1] in the Pre-Production section of the Storytelling as Performance post. We mentioned then:

"mediums are combined to enhance the visibility of the message and the power of the experience of stories. [...] Each medium: video, audio, text, music, etc.- becomes “a new literate space” or “symbolic tool” storytellers use to portray narratives about the self, community and society (Hull, 2006)”

These thoughts were triggered by the work of the French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who considers our self-identity a result of sign mediation and interpretation. Other themes in his work include: discourse and action, temporality, narrative and identity; also useful and relevant when exploring how storytelling and reality intersect. For example, how does building a narrative develop into a discourse that mirrors our context and existence? How does the medium chosen to carry this narrative define the language system of our discourse? Finally, let’s not forget this discussion is happening amid the digital question: how does the mediation of digital technologies enable or constrain our narratives of change?

Against this background, I would like to propose a discussion around five points of intersection that came up organically* during my conversations with them.

a) The power of storytelling:
What makes it a powerful vehicle of communication? How does this practice break from more traditional strategies of information dissemination?

b) Storytelling as a vehicle to make change:
How does the practice of storytelling intervene in the social imagination of its audience? Is it the experience or the content of stories what drives the message of change forward? Where does change happen: at the value, behavioral, community or macro level?

c) The role of technology in storytelling:
What is the part technology plays in storytelling vis-a-vis traditional storytelling? Is it a static infrastructure or does it shape the force and direction of the story? How does technology influence and impact their work

d) Translating awareness to action through stories:
Can you guarantee the ideas and values imbued by the story will translate into action in the public space?

e) Influence of stories on citizenship and political participation:
Can the power of stories be leveraged to instill a sense of responsibility in the audience?

* With the exception of Arjun Srivathsa, who addressed these points in a conference I attended. He later responded to a questionnaire in which I inquired about the intersections specifically.

Introductions

We first have Arjun Srivathsa. He has a Masters in Wildlife Biology and Conservation and currently works as a Research Associate for the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS India). In tandem, he started Pocket Science India, an initiative that combines wildlife science with art and cartoons to promote conservation in India and disseminate information from scientific journal articles. He aims to bridge the gap between the work of scientists and people using art and humour.

Arjun: I find the world of science and scientists very cool. Finding new things, discovering and inventing ways to understand the world better is an awesome way of life. I chose a career in science for this reason, second only to my love for nature and wildlife. But the essence of science, according to me, is not just to discover, but also to communicate. Even though wildlife research in India has progressed massively in the past few decades, the only notion people have is that of exaggerated scenes from television documentaries. When I discovered that most of the work by Indian scientists on wildlife and conservation of India is making no difference to people (mostly because they are unaware), I decided to use the easiest way to bridge the gap: through humour and art.

Second speaker is Ameen Haque from The Storywallahs. In what he calls his past life, he worked for 18 years in Advertising and Brand Strategy Consulting. Ameen also has a background in theatre and now works as as storyteller for The Storywallahs.

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Finally, we have Ajay Dasgupta, the founder of The Kahani Project, who also has a background in theatre and believes listening to stories is a fundamental right of children. His team works to capture stories in audio format and make them accessible.

I will now invite them to share their thoughts on the points described above. Each panelist will respond to the questions using a different medium: Arjun will comment with text and images, Ameen will comment with video and Ajay will comment using audiobytes. The idea is for each storyteller to use the medium and language they use for their own storytelling: cartoons, body language and audio respectively, as we explore how this choice mediates how they conceptualize change. I will act as a moderator and comment on common themes in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s characteristics of narratives.

1. The Power of Storytelling

What makes it a powerful vehicle of communication?

“narrative attains full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” Time and Narrative

The first characteristic of narratives according to Ricoeur is: the ability to bring independent elements and episodes together into a plot within a specific context and time. The relationship between time and narrative is addressed by the philosopher in his work 'Oneself as Another,' in which he frames narratives as the most 'faithful articulations of human time'. This leads to an understanding of time as a framework where we can locate unique events and patterns, trajectories and sequences. Our three storytellers comment on how stories are an effective mean to communicate information, and how this information resonates because it can be located in the frame of our human existence.

Arjun: Storytelling really is the nascence of any communication technique. As kids we were all told stories with bees and birds, which spoke and thought. The moral life lessons and similar “information” were served to us on these fascinating platters.

Dugongs are closely related to whales and dolphins. They are peaceful mammals that swim around gracefully and feed on sea grass.
They are categorized as “VULNERABLE” because there are not too many of them left in the world.

Find full cartoon here

At some point in life, we all seem to stop appreciating the power of storytelling. Plain reporting of information has been done to death. Even an amazing discovery written as a formal report will fail to excite audience. It is time we all get back to appreciating stories. They sell. Movies generally do better than documentaries don’t they?

Ameen:

Ajay:

2. Storytelling as a vehicle to make change

How and where does change happen?

“All action is in principle interaction [...] change happens through interaction, as others are also encouraged to change” From Text to Action

The second characteristic of narratives is how the episodes in our narratives involve contingencies that will be shaped and reformulated through the development of the story. The narratives are constructed in such a way that induce us to imagine possible events in the future and how we would act in said circumstances. This characteristic is supported by Ricoeur's understanding of the 'self' as an 'agent', who can act and influence causation by taking initiative or interfering[2] in the story. Even if the listener cannot necessarily influence the outcome of the story (unless it is participatory storytelling), it triggers thoughts about its capability to act and its ability to change future realities, as he imagines himself n the situation of its characters. This out-of-body experience is what turns story into experience.

Our storytellers comment on how stories can influence and activate our agency and enable listeners to act towards creating change.

Arjun: Of course! Like I said, it is easier to influence people when you are not being preachy. Storytelling sidesteps the moral high ground that change makers are often blamed to occupy and takes a pleasantly shrewd path, as silly as it may sound.


#2: Increase in wildlife tourism has been brought about by the increasing population of the ‘Tourist’. This species is easy to recognize (see figure). The species has created an ecosystem of its own. It eats any kind of high or low profile food. Lives in resorts. Seeks charismatic animals like the tiger. Its daily activity involves excessive use of its camera. This species facilitates wildlife tourism	#9: Wildlife tourism is an excellent way to expose people of India and abroad to its rich natural heritage [...] We definitely need to regulate the number of tourists to avoid crowding in the forests, but we also need to educate tourists, especially the first-timers, about wildlife and its conservation. The tourist can be an important tool in conservation – let’s not let it go waste!"

#2: Increase in wildlife tourism has been brought about by the increasing population of the ‘Tourist’. This species is easy to recognize (see figure). The species has created an ecosystem of its own. It eats any kind of high or low profile food. Lives in resorts. Seeks charismatic animals like the tiger. Its daily activity involves excessive use of its camera. This species facilitates wildlife tourism

#9: Wildlife tourism is an excellent way to expose people of India and abroad to its rich natural heritage [...] We definitely need to regulate the number of tourists to avoid crowding in the forests, but we also need to educate tourists, especially the first-timers, about wildlife and its conservation. The tourist can be an important tool in conservation – let’s not let it go waste!"

Find full cartoon here.

To the question of where we locate change, it depends on what this change is. Through my work, I often target individuals and smaller communities (say students, villagers etc.). I don't necessarily grab my paintbrush and declare that I will change the world. My idea of change is a tailored, targeted and therefore an efficient influence on individuals.

Ameen:

Ajay:

3. The role of technology in storytelling

How does technology influence and impact your work?

Ricoeur’s thoughts on the relationship between text and action, makes us reconsider how we think about ‘text’ and how this reading can be applied to technology. According to him, the distinction between text and action is not at the linguistic, but at the discursive level. This is how he differentiates language from discourse:

	Language	Discourse
Structure	A system: timeless and static	Located at a given time and moment
Composition	A sequence of signs	A sequence of events that describe, claim and represent the world
Meaning	Refers to signs	Refers to the world
Communication	Provides codes for communication. Necessary but not sufficient	Communicates

Using these working definitions, we can understand the medium as a language: a system that provides us with signs and codes for communication. A creative use of language and mediums will hence, enable us to create narratives and produce meaning (which will be generated and negotiated by the audience). Technology is in this case our language, and how each storyteller uses it determines new ways to create meaning: experiences, connections and associations with and within their stories. We now ask them if/how the use of this 'language' mediates and impacts their work.

Arjun: Technology is the best facilitator in the realm of my science-art-communication. I depend on it extensively, to first educate myself. Then to create artwork (computer, tablet, smartphone). And then eventually I depend heavily on social media to broadcast my work. I will definitely credit the power of technology for fostering and enabling effective communication.

# 11: The story of Ajoba was carried far and wide in newspapers, television news and the internet. Find full cartoon here.

In my capacity, I feel most confident targeting students and urban youth. But thanks to the power of social media, putting my work out there has grabbed the attention of change-makers who are capable of things that is beyond my scope. This has led to collaborations through which the reach has become wider. Teachers use my art work in their classes, some organisations are using it in forest department buildings to educate visitors, some local groups have translated my work into regional languages.

Ameen:

Ajay:

4. Translating awareness into action through stories

Can you guarantee the ideas and values imbued by the story translate into action in the public space?

“what must be the nature of action...if it is to be read in terms of change in the world?” From Text to Action

So far they have told us about the power and content of stories. However, we have yet to find out what is it in stories that make listeners translate fiction into real life action. Ricoeur's final characteristic of narratives points us in the direction of empathy and interpretation.

Like discourse, action is open to interpretation. He posits that characters of our stories rise to the status of ‘persons’ when we evaluate their actions, including their doings and sufferings. This ethical verdict determines the identity of the character in the eyes of the audience (above any other physical or emotional characteristics) and this is what ultimately adds meaning to the events of the story, as it inspires the audience to emulate or reject this behavior through their actions.

We asked our storytellers their thoughts on how to translate stories' messages into meaningful action, or if it was even possible to guarantee this transition to begin with:

Arjun: I don’t [know]. One never does, I feel. But a lot of good awareness programs have made me change little things in my life. The people or groups who initiated those campaigns don't know of this, do they? This is somewhat similar. I believe that even if ONE person in the thousand who view my work gets influenced into making little changes, then it was worth my time and effort.

Ameen:

Ajay: (Ajay commented on the impact of stories while we were discussing how to gauge the impact of his work. In our first conversation he said: "Change is happening but there are no tests that can measure it and quantify it." and he elaborates on this idea below:)

5. Influence of stories on citizenship and political participation

Can the power of stories be leveraged to instill a sense of responsibility in the audience?

"You can only achieve power in common by including the opinions of as many people as possible in the discourse"

Finally, as stated in the brief of the project on methods for change, we are also interested in defining how political participation should be manifested in the public space. Ricoeur frames political action as a result of discourse and political deliberation.For a brief discussion of the relationship between storytelling and our political identity visit Part 2 of Storytelling as Performance.)

This last section captures the storytellers' point of view on how stories may affect our sense of citizenship and political responsibility.

Arjun: We are living in a society which is becoming increasingly insensitive and arrogant. There seems to be no time to stop and see the big picture: what are we doing? are our demands and lifestyles sustainable? Is the future generation secure? Impacts of our actions on the natural world.


#1: Most of us love seafood. And why shouldn't we? It tops the charts as some of the most delicious delicacies in the world! It so happens that we rarely think about what goes on “behind-the-scenes” and take many things for granted. The story behind how food reaches your plate is quite a scary one!	#12: So next time you feel like a getting a seafood dinner, do it with some perspective.

Find full cartoon here

Ameen:

Ajay:

Closing Remarks

I hope you enjoyed reading, watching and listening these three wonderful storytellers share their ideas on technology, interpretation and action. The question that remains unresolved is whether the effect of the story is shaped by the use of technology or not. At the end of the day it is the interpretation of stories -more than what it is said and how it is being said- what will determine the sustainability of these intents for change. The answers of our storytellers reinforce the notion that technology is a system, a language, a medium that transports our messages and intentions, but that inherently lacks the ability to provide guarantees for action and sway users into a lifestyle of responsible citizenship the second they pull out from their cartoon, screen or mp3.

The box below includes a quick run through the main ideas discussed throughout the post:

1. On the power of storytelling:

Arjun argues that storytelling is the origin of all communication techniques, and this makes it extremely attractive for the public.
Both Ajay and Ameen bring up the ability to influence behavior, shape the minds of people and transmit experiences, values and beliefs.
Both also brought up how dominant religions, ideologies, markets governments use storytelling to build movements and sustain their support
Finally Ajay comments on the issue of access: stories are powerful yet only a small share of stories are being told Hence, the need for this method to become more pervasive.

2. Storytelling as a vehicle for change:
Each storyteller locates change in different yet complementary spaces:

Arjun believes it must occur at the community level and hence the approach (stories) must be tailored and targeted in order to achieve an effective influence. His approach to change is very contextual.
Ameen locates it at the behavioral level; in our ability to make decisions and choices. His approach to change is based on how we use information from stories to interact with our surroundings.
Ajay locates it at the value level: He believes stories should influence us to adjust our values and only then, we will shape our behavior accordingly.

3. Role of technology:
We approached technology as a 'text' and as a 'language' that creates new possibilities for meaning and interpretation.

For Arjun and Ajay, technology enabled them to connect with other organizations and increased possibilities for partnerships and collaborations.

The three of them believe technology is an accelerator of the journey of stories and that it enables them to reach a larger audience.
Ameen argued that each medium requires different fluencies, and that the language of each medium should be adapted for the story. For example, a story will be told in different ways if using body language, video, audio, etc. He uses the example of the Twitter adaption of the Mahabharata.
Ajay closes by noting that although technology enables, it cannot replace the storyteller.

4. Translating awareness into action

Arjun and Ameen comment on the power of effectively and positively influencing one person. They believe the impact will exponentially spread and grow through that person's network or community.
Arjun believes you can guarantee it will turn into action.
Ameen believes you need to move them and inspire them through your characters to the point they feel they can be the hero of that story and act accordingly.
Ajay takes a more pragmatic approach towards action and shares some of the activities The Kahani Project uses to complement his storytelling sessions, such as: story-thons, story-booths and interactive storytelling, where they engage the audience in the production of their own stories.

5. Impact of storytelling on citizenship and political participation

Arun and Ajay believe this will come as a result of self-reflection and an evaluation of our impact in the world.
Ameen believes effective stories transmit the 'responsibility of action' through rhetoric. He uses the example of the popularity of India Against Corruption movement.
Ajay believes storytelling is a humanizing force that has the power of healing. He recommends institutions should utilize this method to spread confidence and inclusion among society and particularly with excluded groups.

Footnotes

[1] Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It is the study of making meaning and is essential to understand communication processes. While we will not look at any specific semiotics theory, we will focus on how stories create meaning through different signs and mediums, and how this meaning can be leveraged for making change.

[2] Refer to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on Paul Ricoeur and the section on ‘Selves and Agents’ to learn more about how action is mediated by causation, interference and intervention. Some interesting thoughts that inspired the above post

“What must be the nature of the world … if human beings are able to introduce changes into it?. Ricoeur adopts the analysis of interference or intervention that G. H. von Wright gives in Explanation and Understanding, and shows that for there to be interference, there must be both: an ongoing anterior established order or course of things and a human doing that somehow intervenes in and disturbs that order. Moreover, interference is always purposeful. Hence an interference is not merely ascribable to an agent. It is also imputable to the agent as the one whose purpose motivates the interference.”

“The second crucial question about action is “What must be the nature of action … if it is to be read in terms of a change in the world?” Ricoeur argues that every action involves initiative, i.e., “an intervention of the agent of action into the course of the world, an intervention that effectively causes changes in the world” (Oneself as Another, 109, translation modified). Initiative requires a bodily agent possessing specific capabilities and vulnerabilities who inhabits some concrete worldly situation.”

Sources:

Dauenhauer, Bernard and Pellauer, David, "Paul Ricoeur", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ricoeur/>.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/multimedia-storytellers

Metaphors of Work, from ‘Below’

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon — 2023-07-03T12:29:29Z

Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon authored a chapter that describes platforms as more than technological interfaces. The chapter invokes some of the metaphors that gig workers use to make sense of platforms. This chapter was part of an edited volume published by Springer. This chapter forms part of the ‘Labour Futures’ research project, hosted at the Centre for Internet and Society, India, and supported by the Internet Society Foundation.

Various disciplines have produced literature on digital platforms—broadly categorised as technological interfaces enabling the exchange of goods and services — with little consensus on what platforms are and how they impact economic and labour systems. Features that are commonly associated with platforms include their role in increasing efficiency in supply chains, their deployment of cutting-edge technology, and their ability to ‘disrupt’ existing modes of provision of services and goods (Jarrahi & Sutherland, 2019). The use of metaphors and carefully curated taxonomy has been crucial in cementing this idea of the digital platform as a technological layer objectively matching supply and demand (Gillespie, 2017). This chapter seeks to document and understand how workers experience different types of digital platforms, and how workers’ imaginaries of platforms differ from popular and academic conceptions.

Click to read more

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/springer-platformization-and-informality-chapter-metaphors-of-work-from-below

May 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-07T06:59:29Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of May 2012! In the current issue, we bring to you updates of our latest research, event reports, videos, and media coverage:

Access to Knowledge

Copyright Amendment Bill

Analysis of the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012
Pranesh Prakash
There are some welcome provisions in the Copyright (Amendment) Bill 2012, and some worrisome provisions. Pranesh Prakash examines five positive changes, four negative ones, and notes the several missed opportunities. The larger concern, though, is that many important issues have not been addressed by these amendments, and how copyright policy is made without evidence and often out of touch with contemporary realities of the digital era. The analysis was reposted in infojustice.org on May 25, 2012.

Op-ed in Indian Express

Copyright Madness (Lawrence Liang and Achal Prabhala, Indian Express, May 22, 2012): India’s Copyright Act allows owners of content the right to prevent infringement through the use of injunctions, but these injunctions have to be narrowly construed and applied only to specific instances of infringement. This is to say, take down the infringing video, not the whole website, and don’t intimidate the host. When injunctions threaten freedom of speech and expression, then free speech should necessarily trump copyright claims — and the courts cannot be used as convenient shopping forums for maladies that don’t exist.

Call for Participation

2012 Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest: Call for Participation and Save the Date (FGV Law School, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, December 15 – 17, 2012): We invite applications to attend the Congress, including proposals to chair workshops or deliver a paper or presentation related to the Congress’s theme.

Event Participated

The International Copyright System and Access to Education: Challenges, New Access Models and Prospects for New Principles (Max Planck Institute, Munich, Germany, May 14 and 15, 2012). The event was organised by the University of Minnesota and Max Planck Institute. Pranesh Prakash participated in the event.

News & Media

Will the Copyright Law Help the Starving Artist?:(by Margherita Stancati, Wall Street Journal, May 28, 2012): "The singers and producers of...unlicensed versions could be jailed under the current India Copyright Act, which allows even non-commercial copyright infringers to be put behind bars."
Pranesh Prakash quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Did Sibal just get arm-twisted by book publishers? (FirstPost, May 25, 2012): Pranesh Prakash’s article on parallel importation of books is referred in this article.

Accessibility

India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies:

Blog Entries

Copyright Amendments – Empowering the Print Disabled by Rahul Cherian.
An FAQ on the Copyright Amendment Bill, 2012, for the Benefit of Persons with Disabilities by Dr. Sam Taraporevala and Rahul Cherian.

Openness

The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Article in the Indian Express

Cancel the Subscription (Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, Indian Express, May 8, 2012): It has been a slow but steady move to make scholarship freely available... In India, though, there appears to be very little enthusiasm among the leaders of the science establishment. Neither the office of the principal scientific adviser nor the department of science and technology seems to have shown any interest in mandating open access to taxpayer-funded research. The National Knowledge Commission has recommended mandating open access to all publicly funded research, but it is not clear who will implement the recommendation. Right now, it is left to individuals to promote open access in India.

Event Organised

Design!PubliC — Third Conclave in New Delhi (National Museum, New Delhi, April 20, 2012): The event was organized by the Center for Knowledge Societies in collaboration with IBM, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Google and the Centre for Internet and Society. Sunil Abraham was a panelist and spoke in the session on Participation, Collaboration and Innovation.

Internet Governance

Google Policy Fellowship

Google Policy Fellowship Programme: Call for Applications: CIS is inviting applications for the Google Policy Fellowship programme. Google is providing a USD 7,500 stipend to the India Fellow, who will be selected by August 15, 2012. The focus areas for the present fellowship programme include Access to Knowledge, Openness in India, Freedom of Expression, Privacy, and Telecom. The duration of the fellowship will be for about ten weeks starting from August 2012 upto October 2012. CIS will select the India Fellow. Send in your applications for the position by June 27, 2012.

Events Participated

Internet at Liberty 2012: Promoting Progress and Freedom (Newseum, Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest Washington, D.C., May 23 – 24, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a speaker in Plenary IV, Debate 3: In a world where nearly nine out of ten Internet users are not American, what is the responsibility of United States institutions in promoting internet freedom?
Meeting on Internet Governance (Conference Hall No. 4009, Dept. of Electronics & Information Technology, CGO Complex, New Delhi, May 9, 2012): Pranesh Prakash participated in this meeting.

Op-ed in Down to Earth

Beyond Sharing: Towards our Digital Futures (Nishant Shah, Down to Earth, May 31, 2012): The battle is not about file sharing and a petty film producer wanting to rake in the box office earnings. It is about the law’s incapacity to deal with post-analogue practices and processes.

Columns by Nishant Shah

Open letter to Kolaveri Di makers: How Dare You! (Nishant Shah, FirstPost, May 22, 2012): When it comes to piracy, you are sure to have an opinion. You might either make a virtue out of it, talking about cultural commons and collaborative conditions of production. Or you might vilify it as the social fault-line that is destroying the very pillars of commerce and cultural negotiations.
The Private Eye (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, May 14, 2012): As we move towards a data-driven future, we need to be more aware of the different kinds of data sets that we are making public and educate ourselves about the risks of this disclosure, without being carried away by the sway of meme-like behaviour and viral trends online.

Video

Do IT Rules 2011 indirectly leads to Censorship of Internet: Pranesh Prakash along with Dr. Arvind Gupta, National Convener, BJP IT Cell and Ms. Mishi Choudhary, Executive Director, SFLC participated in a panel discussion on censorship of the Internet on May 8, 2012. The discussion was broadcast on Yuva iTV and featured on YouTube.

Letter

Letter for Civil Society Involvement in ITU’s WCIT (by Center for Democracy and Technology): Academics and civil society groups wrote to the ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Touré regarding the lack of opportunity for civil society participation in the World Conference on International Telecommunications process.

Blog Entry

Open letter to Hillary Clinton on Internet freedom (by Sunil Abraham): This blog entry is based on a presentation made in the Internet at Liberty conference in Washington DC on May 24, 2012.

Media Coverage

Why this blocking di? (by R Krishna, Daily News & Analysis, May 27, 2012): “Unlike the Calcutta High Court order in March this year, which specified the 104 websites that should be blocked, a John Doe order doesn’t mention any specific website. In some cases, the websites are being blocked without any evidence (of copyright infringement). Courts need to be informed of what people with John Doe orders are doing. We need to be specific about what can be blocked and what can’t be.”
Pranesh Prakash quoted in Daily News & Analysis

Rajeev Chandrasekhar Urges PM To Withdraw India’s Proposal For UN Committee On Internet-Policy (by Anupam Saxena, Medianama, May 16, 2012): An interview that Medianama had with Pranesh Prakash is cited in this blog post.
MPs oppose curbs on internet; Sibal promises discussions (Times of India, May 18, 2012): “The IT minister has promised to hold consultations but the ideal way to do so would have been to scrap the rules and start from scratch... It's not only about language in these rules. There is a problem with provisions like the one that empowers intermediaries to remove content without notifying the user who had uploaded the content or giving users a chance to explain themselves.”
Pranesh Prakash quoted in the Times of India.

Kapil Sibal & Co shoot down motion to kill IT Rules: cite terrorism, drugs (by Prachi Shrivastava, Legally India, May 18, 2012): “Government is not censoring. It has created a system by which anyone can censor with impunity.”
Pranesh Prakash quoted in Legally India.

Vimeo Ban: More Web Censorship (by Preetika Rana, Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2012): “Shutting websites merely on the basis of suspicion amounts to private crackdown on free speech of the web...Why didn’t the telecom ministry repeal or object to the move, knowing that the court didn’t spell out the websites to be blocked?”
Pranesh Prakash quoted in Wall Street Journal.
Taming the Web, are we? (by Javed Anwer, Economic Times, May 13, 2012): "During the revolutions in Arab countries last year, protesters mobilized themselves through Twitter and Facebook. Then there are Wikileaks and Anonymous. This has made governments and politicians jittery."
Sunil Abraham quoted in the Economic Times.

Cordon tightens: Rajya Sabha nod to harsh IT rules (Anil Sharma and Aishhwariya Subramanian, Daily News & Analysis, May 18, 2012): "The trouble with Indian government's proposal to address issues such as network neutrality, privacy and freedom of expression, is top-down. Unlike other countries where internet policies have always been developed with consultation with other stakeholders, here the government imposes its will."
Sunil Abraham quoted in Daily News & Analysis.
"It is an ironical situation where India is not following domestically what it is proposing internationally." Pranesh Prakash quoted in the same article in Daily News & Analysis.

Empires: Individuals in Search of Society (Marc Lafia, Huffington Post, May 18, 2012).
Cyber Appellate Tribunal in Bengaluru (Deccan Herald, May 9, 2012): “The state IT secretary has passed more than 80 orders. They include both cases of phishing and orders against cyber cafes for not adhering to rules under the IT Act. The Adjudicator has held that ‘section 43 of IT Act is not applicable to a body or Corporate’, after the amended IT Act came into force in 2008.” Pranesh Prakash quoted in the Deccan Herald.

Digital Natives

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a research inquiry that looks at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South:

Columns by Nishant Shah

Digitally Analogue (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, May 27, 2012): While those of us who were not born digital natives — we still remember what an audio cassette looks like and the smell of screen printing — will negotiate with the form of our access to cultural objects, it is also time to realise that being non-digital is no longer an option.
We Are All Cyborgs (Nishant Shah, Indian Express, April 29, 2012): The cyborg reminds us that who we are as human beings is very closely linked with the technologies we use.

Citizen Action

Resisting Revolutions: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action (Nishant Shah, Development, Volume 55, Issue 2, May 2012): In this peer reviewed journal article, Nishant Shah looks into the radical claims and potentials of citizen action that have emerged in the last few years. He seeks to show how citizen action is not necessarily a radical form of politics and that we need to make a distinction between Resistances and Revolutions. It locates resistance as an endemic condition of governmentality within a State–Citizen–Market relationship and shows how it often strengthens the status quo rather than radically undermining it. He examines a campaign against corruption in India to see how the dissonance between the claims of the future and the practices of the present is produced in citizen action.

Telecom

Course

Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India: Ford Foundation has given a grant of $200,000 to CIS to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India over a period of two years. The project involves creating a repository comprising information about telecommunications related issues and policies and online course materials designed for a multi-stakeholder audience, organising interactive public lectures and workshops around the country to disseminate information on telecom issues and using traditional and new forms of media to disseminate information to academia, civil society, policy makers and the general public.

Column in Business Standard

The Coming Telecom Monopoly (Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, May 3, 2012): “The 2G judgment and Trai spectrum pricing recommendations have led to a policy that makes sense for only one survivor.”

Event Organised

3rd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series at NLSIU, Bangalore (National Law School of India University, Bangalore, May 27, 2012): Organised by CIS in association with the Indian Journal of Law and Technology. Professor Rohan Samarajiva delivered a lecture on Tariff Regulation in South Asia.
The Awesome Contracts Project (Geekup @ CIS, May 18, 2012): CIS co-organised the event with Has Geek. Vivek Durai, co-founder at Awesome Contracts gave a public lecture. Amith Narayan participated through Skype.

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. Over the last four years our policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos. With foreign governments we worked on National Enterprise Architecture and Government Interoperability Framework for Govt. of Iraq; Open Standards Policy for Govt. of Moldova; Free and Open Software Centre of Excellence project plan for Saudi Arabia; eGovernance Strategy Document for Govt. of Tajikistan. With the Government of India we have done policy research for Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, Interoperability Framework in eGovernance, Privacy Bill, NIA Bill, National Policy on Electronics and IT Act.

CIS is an accredited NGO at WIPO and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2012-bulletin