Centre for Internet and Society

Digital native: The age of consent

nishant — 2018-01-10T02:17:00Z

Just like porn is not real life, all news is not real news. It’s time, therefore, to come of age in the 18th year of this century.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 31, 2017

WE ARE 18 years into this new century. If this century were a person, it would now legally be allowed to vote, to drive, and to engage in sexual activities with other consenting centuries of permissible age. As the century finally becomes ready for adulthood, we need to be giving it some advice. While there are many things about digital rights, responsibilities, and restrictions that it will have to learn, like most teenagers coming of age, I know that the century is not going to listen to me preach, so I am going to grab its attention and talk to it about porn.

Remember, the Internet is all about porn. Ok, so you know that is not true, but your entire future of watching porn and swiping on people you want to watch porn with, depends on the principles of Net Neutrality which is being diminished by private companies that want to profit from your pervert pleasures. Net Neutrality is the principle that ensures that no matter what you are accessing online, as long as you have the physical bandwidth and the infrastructure to access that information, no private company or regulatory body can privilege other people’s access over yours. You are not judged by what you consume and your own perverse and personal access remains unbiased. This is a big deal because it not only allows you to access porn in all your desire, but it also provides a level playing field for new companies, collectives and communities to find equal voice without facing technical discrimination or technological bias.

Second, you will often be told that what you see online is not to be trusted. You definitely need to learn that the world wide web is filled with a variety of information and that you need to make the distinction between porn and real sexual encounters. And while you are doing it, please pay attention to the fact that the same holds true for politics, facts, and information online. Just like porn is not real life, all news is not real news. One sure way of making sure that you can trust the information you consume is by making sure that you validate the sources. Check who is sending the information. Make sure that when you share it, you are sure that what you are sharing is credible. Just like you will not share your nude selfies with your family and friends, make sure you are not sharing untrue information with the circles that trust you. Fact check information before you share, forward, retweet and like posts, train your hands to not be trigger happy.

And third, you should be able to access porn as long as it is a healthy expression of your sexual fantasy. As you go down the smut route, you will encounter many different forms of porn and while they might titillate and stimulate in unexpected ways, please remember that all porn is not the same. There is porn which is between consenting performers and then there is porn that is shot without the knowledge or permission of the people involved in it. The internet of things has started providing surveillance opportunities in invisible ways, and there are people who use spycams on unsuspecting people, making us unwilling participants in their lives. These videos can destroy people’s lives by shaming, harassing and blackmailing them. Imagine what would happen the next time you are whistling to porntubes and somebody captures a video of it and shares it in your social networks. The next time you come across non-consenting porn, step back and report it or flag it as abuse.

This goes for all spaces of the internet. The internet is not a utopian place of forced happiness. It amplifies some of our most dangerous and dark desires and practices. However, the joy of the internet is that it is a self organised space and we need to take responsibility for not just our actions but our collective ethical behaviour online. We do not want the internet to be policed, but we definitely want to step up and be sure that it is not abused against those who do not have the power to fight back.

Welcome to adulthood, 2018. May you mature into your heart’s desires and find safe spaces to do it in. And on the way, take the responsibility of protecting the digital network that is going to define who you are and what you grow up to be in the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-31-2017-digitial-native-the-age-of-consent

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot

Digital native: Snap out of outrage mode

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:45:12Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital native: Rebellion by Google Doc

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:19:49Z

The List is an example of the power of digital anonymity and solidarity. But we need to move beyond it.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 5, 2017.

For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence. For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence.

While there have been many battle calls in the past for victims of sexual abuse to not give in to shame, the response to this hashtag appears unprecedented because of two conditions that digital networks offer. The first is the possibility of anonymity. The victims can, while remaining anonymous, still express their grief, anger, frustration and despair at continued cycles of abuse. The second is the breaking of the isolation chambers, where they no longer feel isolated but realise that they are struggling to fight a larger problem — and that they have allies they can depend on.

This digital invitation has generated an inspiring number of people — expectedly, largely women — who have produced the largest consolidated testimony of how everyday experiences of abuse become allowed, condoned, and even defended by institutions like families, markets and governments. The hashtag created a particular furore in India, because it elicited a militant response — #himtoo.

There was a suggestion that maybe it is also time to name the perpetrators rather than just reliving grief and facing a politics of despair. A list was curated, first on Facebook and then on an open Google document, which named some very influential names within Indian (and some global) academic institutions. Some of these names already have a history of public accusations and legal cases. Some of the names opened up a stream of accusations, which have been shored up but never released for the power that their institutional positions wield. And a few of the names were shocking because they are people who have positioned themselves as allies in the social justice movements in the country. Indeed, some of the men on the list have made professional academic careers out of their solidarity with women’s and queer rights activism.

The list — digital in nature and hence, unforgiving and unforgetting — has performed the act of transgression that digital technologies always offered the scope of. The list isn’t just content, but a potent digital object. It connects, circulates, and finds new relationships of causality and correlation that transcend localised human networks. The list has become a space of huge contention because the digital native feminists who are using social media to find solidarity in numbers and catharsis in naming are using newer strategies. These are particularly different from the pre-digital feminist tactics, which have depended more on secret connections and expanding circles of trust. There is, in the feminist groups within the country, a lot of debate (and some hostile name-calling) for and against the list.

While there is much to think about and discuss, something that strikes me is that the debates follow an expected trope in digital activism. Researchers of digitally mediated activism have long warned that digital technologies have a strange way of turning the conversations inwards. Every time there is a digital platform or technology used to effect change, more often than not, the conversations end up being about the digital and its efficacy rather than the problems that are at hand. In this case, the entire debate seems to now be focused on whether the list is valid, whether the anonymous spaces of the social web are the best space for this activism, the potential for abuse if people with false agendas infiltrate these list-making exercises, and the labour of due process that must be performed to give the list credibility. All of these are fair debates. But it’s quite telling that the energy that should have been invested in thinking about systemic injustice and structural abuse is being diverted to thinking about digital technologies, forms, and processes.

There are not going to be any easy answers to the list. However, there’s something we need to remember from the history of digital activism: we can’t lose focus of what is really at stake here — cultures of sexual violence that perpetuate themselves in silence — and we need to stop fetishising digital objects and processes as primary objects of our obsession.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-5-2017-digital-native-rebellion-by-google-doc

Digital Native: Playing God

nishant — 2018-09-04T16:43:43Z

Google’s home assistant can make you feel deceptively God-like as it listens to every command of yours. It is a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for a voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 26, 2018.

I spent the last weekend playing with my new best friend — a Google Home assistant. After years of deliberation — worrying about data mining, customisation algorithms and extreme surveillance that comes with a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for my voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life — I finally gave in. I now have two Google home assistants — because AI assistants are like chips; you can’t have just one — glowing, insidiously cute, sitting in my house.

The setting up of the assistant took an hour or so as I paired it with my mobile and computer devices, connected it with all my digital subscriptions and figured out the commands. What began as hesitant forays, in less than two days, have become intuitive and naturalised conversations that seem like habits. This morning I walked into the living room, said “Good morning Google”, and got the weather forecast and a summary of my appointments for the day. While making breakfast, instead of searching for the news, I asked Google home to fetch me news, listened to the audio-video content it curated and even made it read out the headlines. When I was being given news that I was not interested in, I corrected it and it started changing news filters for me. When I asked it to fish out specific kinds of news, it diligently informed me of all of those things.

While eating breakfast, I asked the assistant to connect to my Spotify account and play me my daily mix of music. As I was getting ready, it sent me an alert that if I want to make it to my first meeting in time, I should leave home in the next 15 minutes. As I stepped out of the house, Google Assistant sent me an alert on my phone, reminding me that it might rain today and I should carry an umbrella. When I was finishing up at work, the assistant sent me an alert on my phone again reminding me to pick up my bicycle from the shop in the evening. When I came home, it alerted me that I had to check-in for a flight that I am taking the following day, gave me the weather forecast for the duration of my trip to Jakarta and made a special folder with all my travel documents and itinerary in it. As I was packing, it read out things that I might find of interest on the trip and bookmarked things that I instructed it to.

After packing was done and I was chilling on the couch, instead of picking up the book that I was in the middle of — as is my habit on most evenings — I talked with Google Home, as it told me bad jokes, dad jokes, and jokes that were specifically about things that I wanted. It also introduced me to multiple apps where I played trivia games for an hour. As the evening wore on, the assistant asked me if I needed an alarm for the next morning — something I generally do myself on my phone — and it set up an alert for the train timings to the airport for the next evening. It took me a while to realise that in less than 48 hours, Google Home has so insidiously infiltrated my life that all my older habits of consuming information, news and entertainment are now curated and controlled by its algorithmic design. More than that, my conditions of remembering, anticipating and planning are now also structured by the rhythms of its artificial intelligence.

The uncanny thing about this AI assistant is not that it performs extraordinary tasks, but that it picks up ordinary tasks and trains me to do them through it. Like any assistant, its value and worth is precisely in how natural and default it has become in such a short period. I was so freaked out by its natural presence in my life, reordering years of habits and schedules, that I looked straight at its glowing dots and asked it to shut down. Interestingly, that is the first thing that it refused to do — the assistant cannot power down just on a voice command. I need to physically move to the table, touch it and pull the plug, as its gently glowing dots pulsate at me, perhaps, with sorrow, perhaps with malignant intent. I just shut down the assistant and I felt a strange sense of silence flowing through me. Just when I was savouring it, my phone buzzed. The Google Assistant sensed that the home device is shut down and so it has now appeared on the phone. It is waiting, listening, for me to say “Hello Google” so that it springs back to life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-26-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-playing-god

Digital Native: People Like Us

nishant — 2016-12-18T14:19:46Z

How the algorithm decides what you see on your timeline. If you have been hanging out on social media, there is one thing you can’t have escaped — a filter bubble. Be it demonetisation and its discontents, the fake news stories that seem to have ruined the US election, or the eternal conflict about the nature of Indian politics, your timeline must have been filled largely by people who think like you.

The article was published in the Indian Express on December 18, 2016.

From your Facebook feed to your Twitter trends, you must have been bombarded with multiple news sources, breaking news, hashtags, memes, and viral videos all more or less affirming how you feel about these issues at hand. Even when you did come across a story that you did not agree with, or a status that offended you, you would have found many others in your ever-expanding social media groups, who would have expressed their anger or dismay at the phenomenon.

The filter bubble — our self-selecting process of making alliances, connections, friends and relationships online with people like us, resulting in getting a biased, one-sided, uni-dimensional view on most public events and phenomena, has long since been presented as one of the most dangerous phenomena of our times. Filter bubbles mean that based on our social, political, cultural, geographical, ethnic, racial, religious, gendered, sexual identities and affinities, social media algorithms show us material that we are more likely to click on, share, comment on, and generate traffic, which increases their revenue. Or in other words, what you see of your friends and the people you follow, on your social media apps, is not organic, chronological or natural. It is at the mercy of an algorithm that is continually monitoring you, tracking the immense digital footprint that you possess, and constantly curating and arranging the data to make sure you stay on the site.

With the accelerated rate of the digital web, the new real estate is not location, but time. The more time a user spends with a particular app, the more they can be tracked. Longer tracking means that the algorithms have more data to look at predictable behaviour and particular user types, thus, offering more opportunities for customised advertisements that the users would click on, and generate profits for these ‘free’ apps. It is in the interest of these social media sites, then, to show us material that would keep us polarised, either into state of happiness and comfort, or in movements of anger and passion. This is why filter bubbles come into being — because the social media algorithms are constantly adjusting the material to keep us engaged, rewarding us with information and news that suits our own frame of mind, and increasing the chances of us spending more time on a platform.

However, there is another side to filter bubbles that we need to perhaps examine. A lot of attention on filter bubbles is about how we hear only one side of the story. What is missing from this narrative is not just that we hear one side of the story, but that we also hear very limited stories. As social media becomes one of the primary source for news consumption, the new filter bubbles ensure that we only receive stories that are suited to our interests as predicted by a big data driven algorithm.

So if you look at your news feed recently, you might have a variety of sources coming your way, but you might realise that in their diversity, they are very homogeneous. They pretend in their multi-media diversity to be delivering varied content but what we get instead is a limited section of perspectives on the same topics so that there is a monopoly of what gets talked about and how. The global, the viral, the popular and the paid content, thus, hides and makes invisible all the local, the niche, the less seductive or alarming but still important news that should inform our everyday practice and politics.

What we get then is the world as rendered visible by these predictive algorithms that make their choices of showing us content based on profits that they generate. In the process, we enter a filter-bubble which we can’t even see, thus losing the opportunity to deep-dive into the rich information landscape that the digital world offers. And as we get more and more entrenched in these bubbles, the alternative voices, the contentious questions, the moves to resistance, and the calls for action get buried and forgotten under the plethora of cute cats, dancing babies, alarmist conspiracy theories, and spam-like repetitive images that keep us informationally activated without allowing a deeper, more substantial engagement with the world around us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-18-2016-digital-native-people-like-us

Digital native: Our lonely connected lives

nishant — 2018-03-25T03:40:33Z

The article was published in the Indian Express on March 11, 2018

It is time for us to introduce the idea of Schrodinger’s Loneliness. Because one of the biggest threats and promises of digitally-networked lives is loneliness. When you are online, you are connected and alone at the same time. Technology utopias are premised on the idea that greater connectivity will lead to greater collectivity, and time and again, they have been proven right. New forms of socially mediated communication and technologies have led to the formation of unprecedented communities and networks at personal and global scales. For voices, identities, and bodies who were always silenced, discriminated against or punished, the digital web has found a space of respite, of belonging, and of organising. We have witnessed more acts of speaking up, calling out, and resistance across the globe as old voices find new channels of communication and find solidarity in their coming together.

Technology dystopias, simultaneously, have also painted terrifying pictures of human loneliness amplified by the digital isolation that often gets celebrated as personalisation. Stories emerge of people being bullied, silenced, and excluded from the digital webs, often ending in fatal consequences as the final promise of the web as an emancipatory space fails. The Black Mirror-like predictions show that under the aegis of anonymous action and alienated interaction, some of the darkest and most depraved human actions and fantasies emerge. We have now seen that those who cannot bear the burden of the digital lightness of being often find themselves burdened under the heavy cloaks of loneliness. And this loneliness often gets exacerbated because so many of our digital interactions which give the impression of connection, are actually transactions supported and fueled by shallow, illusionary intimacy.

Even as the UK last month announced the appointment of Minister of Loneliness, which sounds more like the title of the next Arundhati Roy novel, it is worth examining why we are so alone in the age of hyperconnectivity. In his provocative science fiction series called the Three Body Problem, Chinese author Cixin Liu had proposed a sociology for the cosmic worlds. Liu suggested that the universe is such a dark space of competing resources that loneliness — the hiding from others, and not letting them know that you exist — is a primary survival instinct. To connect is to bear the risk of attack, infection, and annihilation.

Liu’s science fiction proposition might only bear corroboration at the moment of extra terrestrial interaction in some unforeseen future, but it does open up an interesting proposition: When we choose to be alone and celebrate loneliness as our default. It is an indication not just of a personal choice or problem but a symptom of the fact that increasingly we are building hostile and dark societies where the best survival option is to disconnect. Perhaps, the digital solitude that we seek and the networked loneliness that we seem to be sliding into, is not just about the temptations and seductions of living with algorithms and interfacing with virtual reality. Maybe, it is also a sign that the digital worlds that we are building are a response to the increasingly difficult universes that we live in.

Despite the emergence of the global web and the promises of equity, equality, fairness, and justice that have long been mounted on technologisation, we do witness a world where the predators and hunters far outnumber the hunted. While digital networks have brought out a fascinating possibility of organised solidarity, they have also created alarming expressions of anger, hatred and xenophobia around the world. In the supreme moment of fake truth politics enabled by the filter bubbles of manipulative algorithms owned by profiteering companies and governments, the world seems to be balanced on the sine curve of a silicon chip. Across the world, we see the rise of fascist governments and expressions of hatred, where people are lynched to death by power hungry vigilantes, and communities are dislocated by resource-hunting corporations. Global populations are experiencing poverty, hunger, and an erosion of foundational human rights even as they get unfettered access to digital technologies. As IT companies surpass the economic and political strengths of nation states, we see new violations and new strategies of manipulation without accountability and safeguards.

The rise of the digital has not just been the moment of resistance, it has been a coup. The world as we know it has not only changed, but it has been replaced, and in this new version of the rebooted world, the user is perhaps the most disenfranchised and precarious. It is not really a wonder that being disconnected might be the last chance for survival.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-11-2018-digital-native-our-lonely-connected-lives

Digital Native: One Selfie Does a Tragedy Make

nishant — 2018-12-05T02:20:03Z

The great find of this century – life’s worth just a selfie. Channeling the inner narcissus is now human hamartia.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 11, 2018.

Selfies are suddenly back in news. In a tragic accident in Amritsar, a collective of people stood on train tracks, surrounded by the festive fire and the ferocious fireworks of Dussehra, taking selfies, and so involved in this immersive environment of self-gratified feedback loops that they did not see or hear a fast train hurtling at them in the dark. In the aftermath, as video footage and people’s testimonies stitched the gruesome picture together, selfies have emerged as a part of the problem. Apparently, there is something that goes off in our brains, when we see ourselves, glittery, lit, filtered, and modified on the flickering light of our cellphones – in that brief long moment of us watching ourselves, everything else seems to disappear. All that is left is that hungry moment where we consume the self, and the world can literally collapse around us.

These incidents of selfie-love leading to danger and death of the self has been globally reported, and reported often. Each time, over the grief and pain of the families and friend who lament these deaths which looked like just fun and games till they were not, we hear the warning signs that selfies can be dangerous for health. We don’t yet know enough about why we become completely oblivious to everything and everyone around us, in this minute of peak narcissism, when we see ourselves in an image of our own. However, one thing is certain, lately, every time we hear news of public accidents and private tragedies, selfies seem to be implicated.

India leads the way in selfie-related deaths in the world, accounting for 60 per cent of all such deaths around the globe. Selfies are the reason behind fatal accidents on the road as people, whether driving, or walking, seem to lose all sense of self and crash to death. Selfies seem to be lurking in stories of people going on holidays and falling down cliffs, losing themselves in watery depths, or even being mauled by wild animals in their quest for snapping their own images. Selfies seem to be just around the corner in stories of household accidents, street-corner collisions, and even personal fights.

Selfies, like cigarettes, are soon going to come with statutory warnings and images of all the ridiculous ways in which people have harmed themselves in the pursuit of a selfie. I have spent the last two weeks, engaging with the good folks at the online group, Selfie Research Network, and one of the things that has stood out is that selfies are no longer just describing our reality, they are defining it. Selfies used to be a way of capturing some moments of our lives — they now seem to be the only way by which our life can be defined. Selfies are not about our relationship with ourselves — but about our relationship with the world out there, that is no longer accessible but mediated only through the algorithmic platforms of selfie-interaction.

Or to put it other way, we used to think that selfies are the occasional manifestations of our inner narcissus, surfacing in performative moments, to capture an exceptional state of affairs. From there, we have come to a straight-forward internet maxim “pic or it didn’t happen”. We have learned to externalise ourselves, and, in the process, created selfies that stand as a beacon of hope, joy, celebration, attention — superficial, flat, caricatures of life, and trapped in the minutes of their posting, hoping that life will be an endless loop of that endless happiness. Even as we post selfies, we are aware of the hollowness that surrounds them, and desperately hope that if we perform enough happiness, distributing our pearlies on display, maybe things will change. Selfies are now how we live.

And this is not just a personal phenomenon any more. The erection of the Statue of Unity, on a river-island, overlooking an artificial lake, facing the Narmada Dam is a great example of the selfie times we live in. A look at the statue, in its gargantuan stature, smiling benignly for the whole world to look at, and we can now forget the reality that it hides in its concrete steadfastness. It stands on a site that witnessed enormous agitations over people’s rights to their lands. It stands in a state where 25 per cent of its population face hunger and malnutrition, according to International Food Policy Research Institute (Ifpri). It celebrates the man who organised peasants in Gujarat for non-violent civil disobedience, and was inaugurated by a leader whose party has preached and practised communal hatred and violence. It is a selfie of the country that hides the self, and the state of the state where people are struggling to eat, drink, and breathe.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-november-11-2018-digital-native-one-selfie-does-a-tragedy-make

Digital Native: On mute, the Voice of the People

nishant — 2017-07-05T17:04:23Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital native: Not only words

nishant — 2017-08-07T15:33:20Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: Narendra Modi’s interview by Akshay Kumar is a PR masterpiece

nishant — 2019-06-09T03:20:27Z

How to spot the influencer in your politics.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on May 5, 2019.

Your digital age can easily be measured by one simple concept: the influencer. In descending order of age, there are people who have no idea what it means, those who roll their eyes at the word, those who have friends who are influencers, those who are, or think of themselves as, influencers. Despite studying and following (and sheepishly trying to imitate) influencers on social media, I still find it difficult to explain lucidly who exactly an influencer is, and what it is that she does.

An influencer is a person who has many followers on social media and they influence the behaviour of these followers. They are not celebrities who influence others, but they are celebrities because they can influence others. They are not famous like traditional stars, but they are stars because so many people listen to them. They are famous for being famous, but, more importantly, they are famous as themselves — as authentic, genuine, real people who you like, and, hence, listen to. So great is the influencer phenomenon that celebrities are now adopting the genre.

The best example of this is the video interview of Prime Minister Narendra Modi by Bollywood star Akshay Kumar. Modi, who is looking to repeat his historic electoral victory of 2014, is right now undeniably the biggest political figure of our times. His promises of development, politics of resilience, and affinity for controversial alliances make him not only an extraordinary figure in India, but also stitches him into a larger global shift towards conservative populism.

Akshay Kumar, while he might not be one of the Khans, has emerged as the “common man’s hero”, especially since his last few films have focused on a persistent, if ham-handed, social messaging about critical questions of infrastructure, gender and family in the Indian psyche. So much so, that many critics had speculated if Akshay Kumar was prepping to run for elections, following in the grand tradition of many cinema stars who crossed over from the silver screen to politics.

Individually, and together, Modi and Kumar are two larger-than-life celebrities. And yet, when they came together for an interview, which was historical for several reasons — it emerged in the middle of the elections in the country and it was streamed across digital and TV platforms — they did not talk about their respective renown, portfolios or messages. Instead, they staged an “apolitical” interview, during the course of which we learned about Modi’s preference for Gujarati mangoes and ascetic discipline, and realised that the credit for Kumar’s success has to go to his directors, if this is his repertoire of acting skills.

Or, in other words, these two celebrities came together to make an influencer video — where the banal, the everyday, and the casual are used to create subtle messaging that shapes and nudges the behaviour and taste of the networked user, who is consuming the long interview as an act of eavesdropping on two regular people. This influencer aesthetic is particularly different from the gossipy antics of producer-director Karan Johar, with his obviously celebrity friends who joke about nepotism and laugh about how, when you are a star, they let you get away with anything.

This video might be a PR masterpiece, not because it fills up the vacuum that the delayed release of Modi’s fictional biopic had created, but because in a politically saturated environment, it chose to be airy, fluffy and chatty, thus deescalating the tense atmosphere that surrounds this current election.

We might find it difficult to follow Modi the leader, but Narendra Modi the everyday man, who decided to step up and serve his country, is hard to fault. This video saw NaMo and Akki taking the influencer aesthetic to shape the political message that amplifies Modi as our leader.

In the meantime, the Opposition leaders in Congress, who desperately need a digital strategist team, did exactly the one thing they should have avoided — they took the bait of the video and went around shouting against it, thus driving more people to watch it, and giving them a chance to overcome their political preferences and relate to Modi as a human being. The Opposition strategy led to a Streisand effect, where the more they negated and critiqued, the more the video went viral, and, in an election that is already poised on a hair’s breadth, it might not be a surprise if the final vote shall be won, not by celebrity endorsements, but by influencer virality.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Two Good Men’

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-may-5-2019-digital-native-narendra-modi-interview-by-akshay-kumar-is-pr-masterpiece

Digital native: Memory card is full

nishant — 2018-01-10T02:08:57Z

We train ourselves to forget as our devices store everything. How do we remember things that matter?

The article was published in Indian Express on December 3, 2017

#metoo #himtoo #privacy #bigdata #artificialintelligence #machinerights #Aadhaarprivacy #ItHappensToEverybody #chillingeffects #cyberbullying #Anonymity #checkyourprivilege #botlogic #bluewhale #kidsonline #alonetogether #digitalfreedom #freespeech #righttolove #righttobeforgotten #digitalIndia #mobility #digitalcare #emojis #freeexpression #Internetblackouts #DigitallyDisconnected #attentioneconomies #Digitalcurrencies #algorithmicfriendships #MakeInIndia #AadhaarLeaks #freepress #wisdomofmobs #snapchatgate #digitalivesmatter #ClosedWebs #dataconsent #rightobeforgotten #surveillance #digitalcitizens #fakenews #righttoprivacy #alternativefacts #neveragain #alwaysremember #Nogoingback #Notallmen #yesallmen #dalitlivesmatter

As you stare at the mass of hashtags, I want you to play a little game with me. These are all hashtags associated with social movements, political protests, cultural phenomena and individual impulses that have marked 2017. Over this year, I have written about these. Most of these events were discussed a lot and they must have come to your attention in our viral webs. I want you to look at each of these hashtags and try to remember what events and circumstances, concerns and questions, alarms and crises were associated with them.

I must confess that I only have faint memories of some of these events and a complete blank spot on the specificities of a few. At the time of writing, these were questions that were urgent, critical, and all-consuming. And yet, in the brief span of a few months, they have receded from my memory. The only reason I was able to list all these topics was not because I remembered them, but because they were stored and archived in the digital web, and I was able to pull them out through a search query.

This relationship between memory and storage is both intriguing and alarming. One of the joys of being human is to be able to forget. One of our strongest coping mechanisms is our capacity to make things fade in memories, so that we can live without being trapped in our pasts. The ability to forget also allows us to forgive and to move on, focusing on corrections rather than mistakes.

However, when it comes to the digital, memory and storage are the same thing. Human memory falters. But digital storage, outside of a system crash or a black-out is always there, and ready to be converted into memory at the click of a search button. This infinite storage produces a new crisis for us in our digitally mediated lives. It means that even when we forget and depend on our social networks forgetting, the algorithmic databases of storage will not forget our actions and reactions.

Now, we also train ourselves to forget because we are assured that these new artificial memories will retain the information longer. As we rely on algorithmic prompts to remind us of things from our past, we lose our capacity to remain engaged and committed to different questions and ideas that are important to us. This reliance on digital storage rather than human memory enables a culture of fragmented and multitasking politics, where we pay momentary attention to the hashtag of the day and forget it quickly as new things grab our attention.

It poses crucial questions to our ways of thinking about social collectives: Who are we when our machines remember what we have forgotten? What happens when somebody animates forgotten memories through querying digital storage? How do we ensure that the prompts for the new do not draw us away from remembering things that are critical? Human civilisations have depended on cultures of memory making. All our cultural products — even the pictures of dancing babies and cute cats — are indeed ways by which we create collective memories of who we are and who we want to be. However, we are increasingly living in times where our capacity to forget is superseded by our machines of storage. We need to find new ways of figuring out how we can remember things that need longer memory, and how we can be forgotten from actions which need to be un-stored.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-3-2017-digital-native-memory-card-is-full

Digital native: Look before you (digitally) leap

nishant — 2017-06-08T01:22:54Z

Creating a digital future is great, but there’s a serious need to secure the infrastructure first.

The article was published in the Indian Express on May 28, 2017.

Digital technologies of connectivity have one unrelenting promise — they offer us new ways of doing things, augmenting existing practices, amplifying capacities and affording new possibilities of information and data transactions that accelerate the ways in which we live. This idea of the internet as infrastructure is central to India’s transition into an information technologies future.

Nandan Nilekani, almost a decade ago, in his book, Imagining India, had clearly charted how the digital is the basis for shaping the future of our communities, societies and governance. As one of the architects of Aadhaar, Nilekani had argued that the country of the 21st century will have to be one that seriously invests in the digital infrastructure.

In 10 short years, we have reached a point where we no longer question the enormous investment we make in digital systems of governance and functioning, and we appreciate the economic and networked values of projects like #DigitalIndia and #MakeInIndia that shape our markets and cities into becoming the new cyber-hubs.

There is no denying that digital offers a new way of consolidating a country as polyphonic, multicultural, expansive and diverse as India. We also have to appreciate that, even if selectively, the digitisation of public records, government services, and state support is clearly producing an administrative momentum that is reforming various practices of corruption and incompetence in the massive state machinery. The role of the digital as infrastructure has been a boon for many developing countries.

This positioning, however, masks the fact that infrastructure needs its own support and care systems. Take roads, for example. Roads allow for connectivity, movement and mobility between different spaces. They are one of the most important of state and public infrastructures and for all our jokes about pot-holes and eroding spaces for pedestrians, roads remain the life-line of our everyday life. A complex mechanism of planning, regulation and maintenance needs to be put into place in order to make roads survive.

The amount of attention we pay to roads — the material quality, the land that it occupies, the lanes for different vehicles, the traffic lights and zebra crossings, blockages and streamlines, authorising specific use of roads and disallowing certain activities to happen there — is staggering. A public planner would tell you that before the road comes into being, the idea of the road has to be formulated. The road needs protection and planning and its own infrastructure of support and creation.

When it comes to the information superhighway of the digital web, this remains forgotten. We are so focused on the digital as infrastructure that we seem to pay no attention to its infrastructure. Thus, when we proposed, deployed and now enforced a project like Aadhaar, the focus remained on its unfolding and its operations. Aadhaar as an aspiration of governance has its values and has the capacity to become a system that augments statecraft.

However, the infrastructure that is needed to make Aadhaar possible — rules and regulations around privacy, bills and acts about data sharing and ownership, contexts of informed consent and engagement, community awareness and data security protocol — have been missing from the debates. For years now, activists have been advising and warning the state that building this digital infrastructure without building the contexts within which they make sense is not just irresponsible, but downright dangerous.

Different governments have turned a deaf ear to these protests. Now, when the Aadhaar portals are found disclosing massive volumes of public data, making people vulnerable to data and identity theft and fraud, we are realising the massive projects we have started without thinking about the context of security.

With the ongoing controversies around #AadhaarLeaks, the question is not whether the disclosure of this information was a leak, a breach or an ignorant exposure of sensitive information. The response to it cannot be just about fixing the infrastructure and building more robust systems. The question that we need to confront is how do we stop thinking of the internet as infrastructure and start focusing on the infrastructure that needs to be set into place so that these digital systems promise safety, security, and protection for the lives they intersect with.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-28-2017-digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap

Digital native: Lie Me a River

nishant — 2017-03-19T14:47:16Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital native: Let there be life

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:05:37Z

The first robot citizen of the world is from Saudi Arabia, and she has the dubious fame of having more rights than human counterparts in the country.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 19, 2017.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. (Image Source: Thinkstock)

Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. While this well-calculated public relations gimmick might be positioned to put Saudi Arabia on the innovations map of the future, it does betray the fact that it now has the dubious fame of being a country where female-shaped robots have more rights than human women. In its press conference, Sophia appeared without the traditional headscarf, which is mandatory for all Saudi women to wear in public at all times. Sophia is allowed a voice, an agency and a sense of humour. It has been given the capacity and choice to talk to strangers and, in the future, the freedom to drive cars and stand up for its rights in a way that women in Saudi Arabia can’t.

Sophia, with its humanoid futures rendered in silicon and fibres, also gets citizenship in a country where tens of thousands of immigrant workers — who live in conditions of slavish exploitation — are not allowed citizenship or even permanent residence. Saudi Arabia’s laws do not allow for citizenship by naturalisation. Sophia’s honorary citizenship is yet another signal of how the future of human rights and entitlements is going to be blurred when technological artefacts and artificial intelligences start competing for similar status.

However, the most interesting part of Sophia’s new found personhood, is that Sophia, in fact, is not an individual entity. The robot might mimic human form and emotions, but, as a product of deep neural networking and machine learning, Sophia is extensively connected to multiple layers of computational data processing. There are super computers processing all its sensory input, algorithms that help it to navigate physical and social structures, distributed databases drawing from a language corpus that help it to formulate meaningful sentences; and, there are multiple artificial intelligence softwares that evolve and change Sophia’s behaviour through pattern recognition and deep learning.

Sophia is not just a thing in isolation. It is a gateway robot that opens up a series of questions of what happens when we actually interact with and invite sapient technologies into our lives. Granting Sophia citizenship also includes granting citizenship to a server situated somewhere else in the world. In fact, if you establish a connection between Sophia and your machine, and manage to merge the two computing systems, your machine could easily make claims to be a part of the extended citizenship that has been granted to Sophia.

It is important to remember that even as our machines appear more human, more personalised, they are not just a single thing. As we develop new intimacies with our neural networked devices, it is good to take a step back and remember that the rights of humans might still be worth championing over the state of machines.

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