Centre for Internet and Society

‘Mobile’ voters may sway polls

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:55:24Z

BABALAL Patel’s tiny tea stall in Mumbai is a long way from Silicon Valley. It is not even that close to Bangalore, the Indian equivalent.

The article by Avantika Chilkoti was published in BDlive on March 5, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

But one night this month, this ramshackle shop became the venue for a social media experiment that highlights the hi-tech face of electioneering in India, the world’s largest democracy. A crowd gathered outside to watch two television screens showing a live broadcast with politician Narendra Modi as he answered questions the audience submitted by text message.

Similar "tea parties" were held across India, designed to ram home Modi’s humble background as a tea seller and his technological credentials. The nationwide event, organised by using mobile technology more commonly seen in US presidential campaigns, signals a shift in Indian politics.

For decades, political campaigns in India have centred around colossal rallies and billboard advertising. But a growing population of young people, rising internet use and the ubiquity of cellphones mean this year’s battle is playing out equally fiercely online.

"We are moving far ahead of saying that we are building ‘likes’ on social media," says Arvind Gupta, head of information technology and social media for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

"Organisation is being done using digital. So if I’m going to tell everybody there’s an event tomorrow, it can be posted on Facebook, websites, on SMS, on WhatsApp, though the real meeting is happening on the ground."

These techniques, which became familiar during the Arab uprisings of North Africa, are an increasingly important part of communication strategy ahead of a national election that must be held in the next three months, and of which the outcome many believe will be close.

Gupta believes parties are fighting what he calls a "postmodern election" for up to 160 — largely urban — seats out of a total of 543. More than half the 50-strong team working on communications for the BJP are dedicated to digital campaigning.

India’s internet user base reached a point of inflection last year, exceeded 200-million. While that is a fraction of the 1.3-billion population, prompting many to question the power of social media, use is far greater among urban and young voters, millions of whom will be eligible to vote for the first time.

"Social media is suddenly becoming important, not for all constituencies, but for urban constituencies, because for the first time the urban youth and the educated class are very much glued into the election and showing interest," says Rajeeva Karandikar, a statistician and election analyst.

Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, has adapted particularly quickly to the changing environment. He captured the public imagination by using holograms to address rallies and Google Hangouts to interact with the diaspora. He has 3.4-million Twitter followers and more than 10.6-million "likes" on his Facebook page, thanks in part to a slick social media team led by high-profile technology entrepreneurs.

By contrast, Rahul Gandhi, the reticent, undeclared candidate for the incumbent Congress party, does not even have a verified Twitter account.

Some were disappointed by low attendance at the national "tea parties", but the events were lauded for being interactive and, perhaps most important in a country where newspaper readership remains high, grabbed column inches in the press. The audience could speak directly to Modi at venues with a two-way video link and the footage was immediately available on YouTube.

"While answering each question, Modi has a point of view," says Pratik Patel, 28, a chartered accountant who organised the event at his grandfather’s tea shop. "He doesn’t have two ways of looking at the same thing — this helps him to be more decisive and forward thinking."

Social media provide swathes of information to India’s political parties, as they copy the sophisticated data analysis used by US President Barack Obama’s campaigns.

From its offices in suburban Mumbai, digital marketing group Pinstorm tracks social media discussions at constituency level and identifies significant supporters or critics. It describes the service as an early warning system or "social radar", which allows parties to mobilise workers rapidly to oppose or support a point of view.

Sceptics argue, however, that social media have insufficient traction in India to affect results of the coming poll. But the size of the user base does not reflect its full power. Educated, influential Indians use these digital networks and the online debate shapes views in traditional media that reach a wider audience.

"The theory is that since the elites are connected and have more time to spare on social media, let us use social media and the internet more generally to influence discourse through these elites," says Sunil Abraham, executive director for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. "It’s an indirect route to the vote."

However, an adviser to the Obama campaign warns that, given differences in funding and the environment, India’s politicians should be wary of using the US presidential race as a model. This year, a simpler technology may prove the best tool for campaigns in India: the cellphone.

"Folks look to the Obama campaign for this sort of stuff," says Ethan Roeder, who worked on data for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns. "But a lot of these international campaigns would do best looking elsewhere for a model.… No campaign in the history of the world has ever spent that much money to elect a single individual to a single office."

India’s version is markedly cheaper, thanks to the roadside chai wallahs and armies of volunteers, pulling in the new breed of voters.

"I have never attended a political rally in my entire life," says Patel, who helped to organise Modi’s nationwide "tea party". "If people want to connect with me they need to connect with me on social media or via e-mail."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/bd-live-avantika-chilkoti-march-5-2014-mobile-voters-may-sway-polls

India’s ballot battle will also run through Facebook

praskrishna — 2014-03-05T11:49:29Z

Facebook on Tuesday launched its widely awaited “election tracker” for the upcoming general elections, a move that signals the growing importance of social media as a political tool in a rapidly urbanizing India.

The article by Zia Haq was published in the Hindustan Times on March 4, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

India’s 2014 ballot battle will run through the social-media world, which could likely influence electoral outcomes by swinging 3-4% votes, as more and more young Indians go online to make sense of politics, according to two new surveys.

In these mostly urbanising seats, social-media usage is now “sufficiently widespread” to influence politics, according to the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI). An offline study conducted by market research firm TNS and Google India suggested similar shifts.

The Facebook tracker (http://on.fb.me/1g6ZJ3k) will help India’s 93 million Facebook users to see which parties and candidates as well as issues are trending.

Social-media platforms are likely to be influential in 160 of India’s 543 Parliament constituencies, making Facebook and Twitter users the nation’s newest voting bloc, according to the IAMAI survey.

These are constituencies where 10% of the voting population uses social media sites such as Facebook, or where the number of social media users is higher than the winning candidate’s margin of victory at the last election.

Research shows that social media is more persuasive than television ads. Nearly 100 million Indians, or more than Germany’s population, use the Internet each day. Of this, 40 million have assured broadband, the ones most likely to have at least one social media account.

“Unlike Obama who used social media directly for votes, Indian politicians have tended to use it more to mould public discourse,” says Sunil Abraham, the CEO of The Centre for Internet and Society.

“I think these trends are over-hyped and the impact, if any, would only be marginal,” said Communist Party of India MP, Gurudas Dasgupta, who created a Facebook account only last month.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-zia-haq-march-4-2014-india-s-ballot-battle-will-also-run-through-facebook

India ‘tea parties’ enable politicians to woo urban youth with technology

praskrishna — 2014-03-06T12:13:36Z

Babalal Patel’s tiny tea stall in southern Mumbai is a long way from Silicon Valley. It is not even that close to Bangalore, the Indian equivalent.

The article by Avantika Chilkoti was published in the Financial Times on February 26, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

But one night this month this ramshackle shop became the venue for a social media experiment that highlights the high-tech face of electioneering in India, the world’s largest democracy. A crowd gathered outside to watch two television screens showing a live broadcast with Narendra Modi, prime ministerial candidate for the opposition Bharatiya Janata party, as he answered questions the audience submitted by text message.

Similar “tea parties” were held across the country, designed to ram home Mr Modi’s humble background as a tea seller and his technological credentials. But the nationwide event, organised using mobile technology more commonly seen in US presidential campaigns, also signals a shift in Indian politics.

For decades, political campaigns in India have centred around colossal rallies and billboard advertising. But a growing population of young people, rising internet use and the ubiquity of mobile phones mean the 2014 battle is playing out equally fiercely online.

“We are moving far ahead of saying that we are building ‘likes’ on social media,” says Arvind Gupta, head of IT and social media for the BJP. “Organisation is being done using digital. So if I’m going to tell everybody there’s an event tomorrow, it can be posted on Facebook, websites, on SMS, on WhatsApp, though the real meeting is happening on the ground.”

These techniques, which became familiar during the Arab uprisings of northern Africa, are an increasingly important part of communication strategy ahead of a national election, which must be held in the next three months, and which many believe will be close.

Mr Gupta believes parties are fighting what he calls a “postmodern election” for up to 160 - largely urban - seats of the total 543. More than half the 50-strong team working on communication for the BJP are dedicated to digital campaigning.

India’s internet user base reached a point of inflection last year, passing 200m. While that is a fraction of the 1.3bn population, prompting many to question the power of social media, use is far greater among urban and young voters, millions of whom will be eligible to vote for the first time this year.

“Social media is suddenly becoming important, not for all constituencies but for urban constituencies because for the first time the urban youth and the educated class is very much glued into the election and showing interest,” says Rajeeva Karandikar, a statistician and election analyst.

Mr Modi, chief minister of Gujarat, has adapted particularly quickly to the changing environment. He captured the public imagination by using holograms to address rallies and Google Hangouts to interact with the diaspora. He has 3.4m Twitter followers and more than 10.6m “likes” on his Facebook page, thanks in part to a slick social media team led by high-profile technology entrepreneurs. Meanwhile Rahul Gandhi, the reticent, undeclared candidate for the incumbent Congress party, does not even have a verified Twitter account.

Some were disappointed by low attendance at the national “tea parties”, but the events were lauded for being interactive and, perhaps most importantly in a country where newspaper readership remains high, grabbed column inches in local media. The audience could speak directly to Mr Modi at venues with a two-way video link and the footage was immediately available on YouTube.

“While answering each question Mr Modi has a point of view,” says Pratik Patel, 28, a chartered accountant who organised the event at his grand- father’s tea shop. “He doesn’t have two ways of looking at the same thing - this helps him to be more decisive and forward thinking.”

Social media also provides swaths of information to India’s political parties, as they copy the sophisticated data analytics used by US president Barack Obama’s campaigns.

From its offices in suburban Mumbai, the digital marketing group Pinstorm tracks what social media users are discussing at the constituency level and identifies significant supporters or critics. It describes the service as an early warning system or “social radar”, which allows parties to mobilise workers rapidly to oppose or support a point of view.
Sceptics argue, however, that social media has insufficient traction in India to affect results of the forthcoming poll. But the size of the user base does not reflect its full power. It is educated influential Indians who use these digital networks and the online debate shapes views in traditional media that reach a wider audience.

“The theory is that since the elites are connected and have more time to spare on social media, let us use social media and the internet more generally to influence discourse through these elites,” says Sunil Abraham, executive director for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. “It’s an indirect route to the vote.”

An adviser to the Obama campaign warns, however, that, given differences in funding and the local environment, India’s politicians should be wary of using the US presidential race as a model. This year a simpler technology may prove the best tool for campaigns in India: the mobile phone.

“Folks look to the Obama campaign for this sort of stuff,” says Ethan Roeder, who worked on data for the 2008 and 2012 US presidential campaigns. “But a lot of these international campaigns would do best looking elsewhere for a model . . . No campaign in the history of the world has ever spent that much money to elect a single individual to a single office.”

India’s version is, of course, markedly cheaper, thanks to the roadside chai-wallahs and armies of volunteers, pulling in the new breed of voters.

“I have never attended a political rally in my entire life,” says Mr Patel, who helped organise Mr Modi’s nationwide “tea party”.

“If people want to connect with me they need to connect with me on social media or via email.”

Modi’s digital army

The team building the digital campaign for India’s opposition Bharatiya Janata party mixes entrepreneurs and veterans from the technology industry, rather than individuals with experience of electioneering alone.

Rajesh Jain, working on electoral technology, is well known in the industry since setting up successful businesses in online news and digital marketing. These include IndiaWorld Communications, a collection of websites which was bought in 1999 by Satyam Infoway, then India’s largest internet service provider.

He has the archetypal curriculum vitae, with a degree from one of the eminent Indian institutes of technology followed by a master’s degree from Columbia University in New York.

Arvind Gupta, who heads the BJP’s IT and social media cell, has a remarkably similar educational background - with an added stint in Silicon Valley to his name.

At the last count, the party had recruited more than 2m volunteers, who are organised online and will provide support in different ways. But there is also a younger generation of advocates who have given up good jobs to join the digital effort. Citizens for Accountable Governance is a non-profit youth organisation co-ordinating nationwide “tea parties” ahead of this year’s national election, where Narendra Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate, interacts with audiences at tea stalls via video link.

About 100 young professionals lead the operation and all come with impressive credentials, including jobs at prominent global consulting groups such as McKinsey, and banks such as JPMorgan.

Beyond that, Mr Modi has had a team working for him personally since he took over as chief minister of Gujarat more than a decade ago.

It is a discreet IT set-up that still functions independently of the party’s operations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/financial-times-february-26-2014-india-tea-parties-enable-politicians-to-woo-urban-youth-with-technology

Will You be Paid to Post a Picture?

nishant — 2014-03-06T11:58:41Z

The wave of free information production on the web is on the wane.

The article was published in the Indian Express on February 18, 2014

The age of volunteerism is officially over. The last decade of the mass adoption of the internet has been fuelled by endless human hours being spent in producing information which is the new currency of our times. The big transition to Web 2.0 began when the individual “user” became more than either an individual or the user. The individual found herself as a part of a collective, finding a voice and a community of others to belong to. Simultaneously, instead of being a passive consumer of the web, the user started producing data — blogs, videos, tweets, content management systems, online discussion boards, massively multiple online role-playing platforms, social network transactions — all of which became a part of the new Web’s widespread popularity.

Almost everything that we understand as the social web today is contingent upon people producing data in their interactions with the world around them. From knowledge producing websites like Wikipedia to entertainment platforms like YouTube, visualisation and data gathering spaces like Pinterest to photographs of self, food and cute animals on Instagram, political and social commentaries on Tumblr to Listicles and memes on Buzzfeed, the internet is a veritable smorgasbord of new information forms, formats and functions that are generated by the users.

What is possibly the most exciting about this burgeoning information universe has been the amount of free labour that goes into it, and often remains invisible. As digital labour scholar Trebor Schulz points out, the internet has become both a factory and a playground, where our leisure time is capitalised into producing work that sustains the new attention and information economies. For instance, the world’s largest social networking site, Facebook, does not produce any of its contents. It is, in fact, a system of information mining and sorting, which works as long as a growing user base continues to produce information on it. Tomorrow, if all of us stop producing Facebook, and only lurk on it, the platform will collapse. Which is why, Facebook continues to acquire new platforms and applications to be integrated into its universe.

Similarly, the real effort that goes into the sustenance of sites like Wikipedia, which has become the de facto reference for global knowledge systems, is carried out by unsung and invisible editors who patiently, meticulously, and without almost any expectation, continue to add, verify, strengthen and curate reliable information that we can use. When the non-profit organisation WikiMedia Foundation prides itself in running one of the least expensive websites in the top 10 most visited sites in the world, it is signalling its deep appreciation for the countless human hours that have made Wikipedia possible.

But, in recent years, there is noticeable stagnation in the wave of free information production on the Web. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We are producing an unprecedented amount of data — we are constantly being watched by surveillance technologies that detect biometric and genetic make-up of all our transactions, or we are inviting people to watch us on social network sites where we reveal some of our deepest secrets and desires, or we are watching ourselves, quantifying everything from things we ate to the number of hours we sleep. And yet, as we live in a world of Big Data, there is a definite decrease in people contributing to production of free information.

As the digital natives move from the web to mobile phones, traditional websites are already facing a crisis. News and media agencies that have celebrated the global citizen media networks have started realising that the individual user is more interested in local networks and information ecologies which are independent of mainstream conglomerates. And people are realising that their time and effort is worth money. They can be easily compensated for their online activities and gain reputation and importance.

The tension only becomes more palpable when people start realising that there are others who are being paid to work on the platforms that they are contributing to. We all knew that this model of depending on free information was not a sustainable one. But it seems the day has arrived, especially with the recent drives on Wikipedia to build specialised knowledge editors. In the last few months, we have seen people in the FemTechNet project — an academic activist feminist project that seeks to remind us of the intersections of feminism and technology in network societies — carry out “Wikistorming”, where students are adding pages of women’s contribution to technologies on Wikipedia. More recently, medicine students at University of Chicago have taken to correcting and adding accurate information to Wikipedia, which is often a source of health information.

Both of these are fantastic efforts to add to the platform that was the underdog that overthrew the mammoth encyclopaedia like The Encyclopaedia Britannica. We hope more specialised users in different locations, fields, disciplines and languages continue to edit and contribute to Wikipedia. However, it is also a signal that the generalist information producer is on the decline. We are transitioning into a new age, where people are going to need rewards, incentives and benefits for performing information transactions on the web. The user is no longer going to be available for free labour, and it is time we started thinking of “paid usership”.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-february-18-2014-nishant-shah-will-you-be-paid-to-post-a-picture

The Dangers Of Birdsong

praskrishna — 2014-02-12T10:29:10Z

Instant gratification? Social media can quickly turn the game into checkmate if you don’t keep your emotions in check.

Namrata Joshi's article was published in Outlook on January 25, 2014. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

“Woke up from a dream in which I had just learned that I was going to keep wickets for India. In my dream, I thought, let me share this news on Twitter. I didn’t, fearing I would be made a laughing stock.” These are few of a series of stream of consciousness tweets about a dream posted this Monday by author-academician Amitava Kumar. Tweets that don’t just have to do with dreaming of a personal achievement, but also about tweeting it. “Twitter has invaded even our sleeping life,” says Amitava on an e-mail but also admits that he didn’t think for a moment that he was sharing something private in a public place while tweeting his reverie. “Instead, perhaps, I was seeking a private connection with a lot of readers.” Which he did rustle up in good measure. He followed it up by tweeting a picture of his son with him, taken by his 10-year-old daughter Ila, as a homage to a similar photostream by author- photographer-art historian Teju Cole.

Amitava’s unfussy and creative candidness about tweeting things personal, which he prefers to see as “grappling with a form of writing” came in the wake of a weekend of vigorous debate on how social media platforms were bringing the private under unblinking public scrutiny—the immediate hook being the sudden, tragic death of Sunanda Pushkar after her no-holds-barred Twitter war with Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar (over the latter’s alleged liaison with her husband Shashi Tharoor, which was consumed with much amusement by their vicarious, at times vicious, followers). The Tharoor incident is not a stand-alone case. Be it a confidentiality clause or diplomatic tact, a professional decision or personal affair or even a death of someone close to you, social media has become a stage to play out the classified and the confidential (see infographic) by the celebrities and the aam aadmi alike. The payback? Spats, comebacks, breakdowns, meltdowns, resignations, embarrassments, humiliations, kerfuffles....

And it’s not something confined to India alone. “US Congressman Anthony Weiner’s tweet of his, let’s call it, torso, to a young woman in Seattle is perhaps the most egregious example of a US politician behaving badly online,” says Amitava. No surprise then that Weiner became a butt of late-night comedy shows.

But the larger question here is why. Why this urge and urgency to share it all? What is it about a platform like Twitter or Facebook that makes people bare and dare? Is it that the immediacy, speed and reach allows them the easiest way to extend the boundaries of their secluded, lonely lives, get instant attention and fan the curiosity of someone out there who they don’t even know? And why is propriety and moderation getting thrown out of the window in the world of virtual exchanges? Adman-columnist Santosh Desai calls Twitter a “broadcast system to the universe”. The tweets are often “thought bubbles”, “something you mutter” without a full sense of what public means. “The spur of the moment opinion or feeling acquires public currency,” he says. “The unraveling of the human being, the opening up of the closed box then becomes a new source of stimulation and pleasure,” he says. “I sometimes wonder how we shared before Twitter. We talk about what we like, don’t like at the drop of a hat. At times you are vulnerable and vent things out without an agenda and without knowing the repercussions. We creative bunch are like that,” says popular actress Divya Dutta.

According to Sunil Abraham, executive director of the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, private information is a currency in the global attention economy. “One of the many ways of climbing the attention economy is to divulge private information. Those in public life like filmstars and socialites understand this completely and exploit all traditional broadcast channels and contemporary multicast channels like social media to amass public attention,” he says. Look closely and the online space is no different from the real. There are as many exceptions as there are rules. So for every exhibitionist handle that exploits our latent voyeurism, there is a Natasha Badhwar, one of the most life-affirming presences on Twitter. For her, like Amitava, sharing is a mode of expression. “Sharing gives us agency. We take back the power to tell our story, express our views, share our version in our own words,” she says. According to her, “honest” sharing fuels empathy. “It is contagious, it makes the reader want to share too,” she says. And from that sharing could emerge a new pool of acquaintances, friends and well-wishers. It may not be a virtual escape from the real but a journey and connect back to the actual, an expansion of the human circle than a depletion of it.

But not all our friends and followers need necessarily be sympathetic. Often they are also brutally savage. “The anonymity allows people to say exactly what they want without considering the implications. They don’t realise that it’s not just a handle but a human being they are talking to,” says Nikhil Pahwa, founder of medianama.com. Amitava compares it to drone warfare. “The technology of remote destruction has introduced a new experience of war, and a new logic of killing. You can kill with greater abandon; you can strike in unexpected places; you are confronted with few consequences of your fatal mistakes. Similarly, Twitter allows a mode of social exchange with less culpability. There are very few consequences for trolls, but disastrous ones for their victims,” he says.

But surely that doesn’t mean that you blur all the lines between the private and the public? How to exercise caution? How much to open up (or not) and how much of your core to keep to yourself? Life, after all, is too complex and fragile for blame games and finger-pointing at social media alone. It’s those using it who need to own up. “People need to take responsibility for what they say. It’s like someone telling me how he was abused for 15 minutes on the phone when he could have easily cut the call,” says Nikhil Pahwa. “It’s a modern form of communication which you have to embrace but there’s a line you must draw. For instance, my wife and I never interact on FB or Twitter. I keep the family to myself. Jokes are fine but I don’t abuse or use swear words,” says actor Ashwin Mushran. “There has to be a sense of decorum. I won’t put out what I gossip about with my friends. I have no strategy but am guarded by my own belief system,” says actor Rajat Kapoor.

“It’s normal human nature to express. Be it anger or frustration, as a counsellor I tell people to not suppress emotions but some moderation and etiquette need to apply in cyber space,” says Mukta Puntambekar deputy director of Pune-based Muktangan Rehabilitation Centre. “You have to accept that your followers and friends will have access to details about you. You have to exercise discretion in saving something of yourself for yourself. There are areas that need not be opened up for all,” says actor-comedian Vir Das, who recently posted an open letter on FB—‘Twitter Bad? Facebook Evil? or We Stupid?’—on the pointlessness of blaming social media for the Tharoor family tragedy. To extend the argument further, and add another layer to it, aren’t we also living in times when privacy itself is evolving, asks Rajesh Lalwani, CEO of blogworks and a self-confessed people-watcher. “My grandmother would not even eat in public. But we eat in restaurants, on the streets,” he says.

Privacy is also becoming an ambiguous, vague and complex entity. Getting tagged in a friend’s photo compromises your privacy without your involvement or participation. “The line between private and public has mostly dissolved because of the temporal persistence of digital traces in cyberspace, the global nature of the network and the ubiquitous and pervasive surveillance state,” says Abraham. “On Twitter and FB, things get circulated...what we put up, whether it’s a tweet, an update or a picture, is permanent unlike memory,” says Desai. The digital trail stays online. “We are leaving our digital footprints behind. What we post might be easy but the implications of it are complicated,” says writer, filmmaker and media observer Amit Khanna.

According to him, there is a gap between the progression of technology and society. “There are newer windows but our minds are not growing apace to handle the connected world in a mature way,” he says. So one needs to be additionally circumspect about what we do online, how much of us we put out there. The ‘creative minds’ don’t see it as cut and dried. Natasha thinks that sharing can make people vulnerable to ridicule. “Confronting and embracing that vulnerability is the only way forward. These are not real fears to cling to, these are fears to shed as we grow and realise the extent of our individual power.” Amitava says he has seen several careers destroyed because of a single tweet. But he’d hate to back down and be cautious. As he puts it, “You’ve got to push the envelope and experiment with expression. I hope that when my wrong moment comes, people will be forgiving.” Amen to that.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/outlook-namrata-joshi-january-25-2014-dangers-of-birdsong

Wikipedia Editing as Assessment Tool in the Indian Higher Education Classroom

Dr. Tejaswini Niranjana, Ashwin Kumar A.P. and T. Vishnu Vardhan — 2014-01-30T10:06:40Z

Getting students to create and edit Wikipedia entries in English and Indian languages can be a comprehensive assessment tool at the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels. Both levels of higher education require the demonstration of the ability to present knowledge in encyclopaedic form, which can be done by a good review of relevant literature and the showcasing of key arguments in the field.

Using the Dublin competency level descriptors,[*] we can put down what sorts of higher education skills Wikipedia editing can help evaluate. The most commonly accepted descriptors internationally are:

Demonstration of Knowledge and understanding
Applying knowledge and understanding
Making judgements
Communication abilities
Learning skills relevant to higher education

Wikipedia allows for assessing the ‘depth’ of an article which is the measure of the quality of an entry. The depth is a function of several parameters like the number of edits an article has seen, the length of discussion in the talk pages, the number of footnotes, references, hyperlinks and editors active on that page. In addition to this, providing Wiki-interlinks to key concepts within an article and categorization of articles exposes the students to a "semantic web" of interconnections between various fields of knowledge. Although, it may not be a complete substitute for the more formal modes of assessment, it provides a more rounded form of evaluation for student assessment. The ‘depth’ indicator also shows the relative significance of an article for the larger community of users, thereby providing a better model for student assessment in the long run.

Bachelor's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Bachelor’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Comprehension of the theory, concepts and processes pertaining to a field or fields of learning
Demonstration of knowledge, supported by the use of advanced textbooks and other reading materials, of one or more specialised areas
Ability to apply this knowledge and comprehension in a manner that indicates a thorough and informed approach to the work, and have competences typically demonstrated through devising and sustaining arguments
Ability to gather and interpret relevant data to inform independent judgements which include reflection on relevant social, scientific or ethical issues
Ability to communicate information, ideas, problems and solutions to both specialist and non-specialist audiences [in the case of Wikipedia, the audience would usually be a non-specialist one]

Master's Level

By getting students to edit on Wikipedia at the Master’s Level, you can test the following, and appropriate weightage can be given to each aspect of the work:

Demonstration of knowledge and comprehension that is founded upon, extends and enhances that associated with the Bachelor’s level and is at the forefront of a field of learning
Critical awareness of current problems and new insights, new tools and new processes within their field of learning (ability to do a good literature review, which can be seen through the citations provided for a Wikipedia entry)
Ability to apply their knowledge, comprehension, and critical awareness in broader or multidisciplinary areas related to their fields of study
Ability to integrate knowledge and handle complexity, to formulate judgements with incomplete or limited information, with an awareness of the social and ethical responsibilities linked to the application of their knowledge and judgements
Ability to communicate their conclusions, and knowledge, rationale and processes underpinning these, to specialist and non-specialist audiences clearly and unambiguously
Ability to reflect on one’s own writing by engaging with feedback received from a collaborative network.
Ability to form peer knowledge networks through collaboration and interaction with other contributors

Risks and Mitigation

It is helpful to be aware of the typical risks a faculty may face in using Wikipedia entries as an assessment tool.

New article creation: Wikipedias, especially the English Wikipedia, are closely monitored by thousands of volunteers from across the world. Often, articles created by new users come under a lot of scrutiny. It is advisable to first encourage the students to edit and improve the existing articles before creating a new article all by themselves. Also taking the help of an experienced Wikipedian will go a long way in mentoring the students on the nuances of the Wikipedia platform and the volunteer community that strives in good faith to preserve the quality of entries.
Copyright violation: Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v (i.e., plagiarism) is a major challenge for the higher education sector across the world. Often the students find that copy-pasting the content from various sources is an easy way of doing an assignment. On Wikipedia, plagiarism is taken very seriously and a student editor can get banned from further contribution to Wikipedia, which may de-motivate the entire class. It’s useful for the faculty to give a detailed orientation on this aspect before encouraging the students to take up writing a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. There are numerous resources (text and videos) made available by Wikimedians across the world explaining the problem of plagiarism. These could be used by the faculty.
If you are encouraging students to write an entry in an Indian language Wikipedia, special attention and support needs to be planned to train the students in typing in that particular Indian language script. Wikipedias have a useful tool called Universal Language Selector (ULS) which makes it very easy for the student to start typing in any script using the transliteration method. There is increasing support for Indian language scripts, however. You could check whether your University computer lab has Unicode compliant computers/systems. This will help the students to work offline on their assignment, if required.
One of the biggest challenges for a teacher is to get the student to see the value of taking up a Wikipedia entry as an assignment. Some of the students may see this as an additional task or extra-curricular activity and may not put in a committed effort, which could affect the goals you have set for your course. Faculties are encouraged to find various means of integrating/dovetailing the Wikipedia assignment into the curriculum or course.
Faculty may also feel this as an additional burden on them, especially in terms of evaluation of the assignment. There are various tools available to measure most of the assessment parameters set out above, which will not take much time. It is in fact possible to save faculty time if the evaluation is planned meticulously.
A pragmatic challenge for the faculty would be to deal with a scenario where the entire class submits the assignments on Wikipedia on the last day. This will not only increase burden on the faculty but can also result in a lot of plagiarism. An effective way to address this challenge is to make the Wikipedia entry assignment part of a formative assessment, whereby the student develops the entry over a period of time (e.g. one month or during the course). There are various tools through which you can track the students’ contribution continuously and share feedback with them periodically.

[*].Available at http://www.tcd.ie/teaching-learning/academic-development/assets/pdf/dublin_descriptors.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/wikipedia-as-assessment-tool-in-indian-higher-education-classroom

The net is taking over

praskrishna — 2014-02-04T05:57:16Z

For many days to come, people will speculate what caused Sunanda Pushkar's death last week in a New Delhi hotel. Did Union minister Shashi Tharoor's wife die of poisoning or a drug overdose? Wasn't she unwell? Was it suicide? Or was it murder? No less a matter of speculation has been the social media's role in the whole affair.

The article by Veenu Sandhu and Surabhi Agarwal published in the Business Standard on January 24, 2014 quotes Sunil Abraham.

Writer Suketu Mehta has called it "murder by Twitter". Pushkar's very public spat with Mehr Tarar, a Pakistani journalist, on the micro-blogging site, many psychologists feel, may have multiplied her anguish. Apart from other things, Tarar had tweeted: "The blonde's aqal is weaker thn (sic) her grammar & spellings." Still others believe Pushkar had the premonition that end was near, and it was there for all to see on social media. "Hasta hua jayega," (will go laughing), she had tweeted a few days before her death.

Social media is no longer time-pass in the country, certainly not with over 90 million users. The line that divides online and offline lives has blurred. Networking sites have begun to impact human behaviour. Lives are being lived in the open: open to comment, analysis and abuse. Mahesh Murthy, the founder of digital brand management firm Pinstorm, calls it the "demise of the culture of secrecy". This is the age, he says, "of diversity, of coming out in the open with sexual preferences et cetera. Social media will help slaughter sacred cows. It is a good thing to happen, except for the sacred cows." According to Murthy, the pitfalls of uncensored speech are for those "who think they can control their lives or are insecure".

But pitfalls are showing up. Some time ago, a high-profile couple from Delhi approached marriage and family counsellor Nisha Khanna. Their problem was aggravated by the wife's obsession with Facebook, to the extent that she would put out everything, including the ups and downs of her relationship with her husband, as status messages for the consumption of her social media friends and acquaintances. The husband was livid - he felt exposed. It took six months of rigorous counselling before the wife started controlling, though marginally, her social media behaviour. "We are seeing obsession, irrationality and an inability to spot the very thick line that divides the private from the public," says Varkha Chulani, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and consultant with Lilavati Hospital in Mumbai. People, she adds, are looking for Facebook 'like' buttons even in real life.

Feelings of extreme happiness, depression, loneliness and even suicidal thoughts are being shared not with family and friends but with Facebook 'connections' and Twitter 'followers'. Tweets or status updates that point to suicidal tendencies, in particular, can be telling. Some of these key expressions are "depressed", "feeling abused", "it's over" or "empty inside". A study - Tracking Suicide Risk Factors through Twitter - conducted in the US last year found a strong correlation between the number of tweets that indicated suicidal intentions and the number of suicides committed.

Having realised that the platform is also being used as a medium to vent and express personal trauma, Facebook has, for about a year, been sending reports on profiles of people with suicide risk to Mumbai-based suicide helpline Aasra. "In the last one year, we have received 350 such email intimations concerning Indians," says Aasra Director Johnson Thomas. Aasra then mails that person to subtly and sensitively convey that there is help at hand, in case it is needed. Facebook and Twitter did not offer any comment for this article.

Decoding Social Media Slang

I am an aggregator who has left a cookie crumb trail (while writing this) for a machine algorithm to follow. So, can it point out to my boss the scoops and their origin? In all probability, yes. For an all-devouring algorithm, no crumb, no target, is too small. Algorithms (at their core, a step-by-step method for doing a job) can sound scary, but social media analysts depend on these little-understood, obscure mathematical creatures.

So, information posted publicly on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites are fair game for these data predators. Suppose you click ‘like’ on Facebook, you’re giving away a lot more than you might think. Your ‘likes’ can be pieced together to form an eerily true portrait of yourself. A study of 58,000 volunteers by Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell (University of Cambridge) and Thore Graepel (Microsoft Research, Cambridge) charts the chances of an accurate prediction: 67 per cent for single versus in a relationship, 73 per cent for cigarette smoking, 70 per cent for alcohol drinking, 65 per cent for drug use, 88 per cent for male homosexuality, 75 per cent for female homosexuality, and 93 per cent for gender.

Another point is not all data out there are cold facts. Far from that, most are sentiments and slang: sweet, bitter and often intimate. “Wazup homie!! howz it going!!” is a profound example. “‘Yo, homie, I'll be at my house in case you want to come kick it later” is another. How is a number cruncher such as an algorithm expected to crunch slang and emotions? But experts insist there’s a bull market in sentiments and foul language. And an emerging field known as sentiment analysis is taking shape. The simplest algorithms here work by scanning keywords to categorise a statement as positive or negative, based on a simple binary analysis (‘love’ is good, ‘hate’ is bad). But a more reliable analysis requires decoding many linguistic shades of gray. For example, to get at the true intent of a statement like ‘dude, i'm like......duuuude,’ the software will have to activate several different filters, including polarity (is the statement positive or negative?), intensity (what is the degree of emotion being expressed?) and subjectivity (how partial or impartial is the source?)

“People first thought that emotions expressed on social media were just cute and stupid,” says Sreeju Thankan who has done computer science and engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and is now working at Mango Solutions. “Now, they are recognising it as a rich vein.” But translating slang into binary code can be much tougher. “Sentiments are different from conventional facts,” says Thankan. “There is a long way for slang patrol to go.” For casual web surfers, a simpler sentiment-analysis tool, Tweetfeel, is available. It tells you the numbers of positive and negative tweets on a given topic. It also gives you their percentages. Its analysis is based not just on emoticons, but also words and phrases.

Ashish Sharma

Last October in Mumbai, a 17-year-old college student, Aishwarya Dahiwal, killed herself after her parents barred her from using Facebook. "Is Facebook so bad? I cannot stay in a home with such restrictions as I can't live without Facebook," her suicide note reportedly read. The parents were in utter shock. "Girls are more prone to putting personal and emotional messages on social networking sites," says Manju Chhabra, child counsellor who runs an organisation called Cactus Lily in Delhi. And they tend to get more affected by what people say and how they react. "And comments on this very impersonal medium which we are giving a very personal space can be very cruel."

Seema Hingorrany, a Mumbai-based psychologist, says one of her recent patients is a girl studying in Class 9. Her friend from school had uploaded a photo of herself, which got 200 'likes'. That upset the patient terribly because it reinforced her belief that she was unattractive and she became extremely upset, to the extent that her parents felt she needed counselling. Constant use of Facebook can affect one's self-esteem, if it's already low. Another of Hingorrany's patient was a 30-year-old who took to social media after he lost his job. But seeing other people's photos and updates made him increasingly jealous, and he began posting nasty comments. The recipients of his ire began "unfriending" him, which only made him more withdrawn.

Irrational behaviour can also be seen in the world of random video chat. Sites like Omegle and Chatroulette aim to bring together surfers together with the help of webcams. The promise is irresistible: an endless stream of visitors in your room. When Ashish Sharma (the author of the accompanying article) logged on, he met a gaggle of girls who giggled endlessly, a German painter who was looking for his muse and wanted him to pose in a state of undress, a Swede who danced around and asked him to sing in praise of his bottom, and a man with an iron mask. It was crude and shocking. The excessively sexual behaviour can be unsettling for an unsuspecting (and young) visitor.

There is another side to it. "Twitter posts," says an article posted on rediff.com, "have saved lives. A man lost on a ski slope in Switzerland got help when he tweeted his predicament. Another got bail from arrest as his friends discovered from a tweet that he was jailed in a foreign country." Human resource managers check out the profiles of job applicants on social media. "People might mask many judgmental things in an interview; there is a possibility that they might express it on social media," says Debdas Sen, leader of technology consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers. "Inclusion and diversity are important for us." But job seekers have become wise to it. That's why many airbrush their social media profiles. All politically incorrect posts are removed. Friends are treated lavishly offline so that they write nice posts on Facebook pages. Some even hire professional photographers for as much as Rs 20,000 to paste good profile pictures.

But those who hire have started to see through it. Says Murthy of Pinstrip, "One can easily figure out the truthfulness of your statements by seeing what your friends are saying." One human resource manager says he pays more attention to what people post after 10 pm because "it tends to be more truthful". A senior functionary of a Gurgaon-headquartered firm says that he had hired somebody after he had found nothing suspicious on his LinkedIn profile; it was only later he found out that this person had been involved in some financial misdemeanour in his earlier job. "His LinkedIn profile had no clues, he was not on Facebook. That should have struck me," he says. Of course, the person was asked to leave.

Sunil Abraham, the executive director of Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, says social media has made people forget the distinction between private, semi-private and public statements. "Speech used to be ephemeral, but Internet has given it the power it never had," he says. "Internet never forgets." The fact that traces of a communication may remain in cyberspace even after they have been deleted has prompted a legislation called the Right to Erasure by the European Union. Under the law, earlier called Right to be Forgotten, an individual can request all his data to be erased, including by third parties. India is also mulling a similar legislation under its Privacy Bill.

Those at the bottom of the social pyramid, who have little to lose, express themselves most freely on social media, while those with reputations to protect are cautious. The consequences can be serious, as the Mumbai girl who questioned the city's shutdown after Bal Thackeray's death in November 2012 on Facebook and her friend who "liked" realised: both were called in by the police. It's not surprising why even standup comedians, who can't resist taking potshots at one and all, turn extremely careful before they tweet.

So, is social media good or bad? "Social media can help," Amartya Sen said at the recent Jaipur Literature Festival, "But you must read more books".

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/business-standard-january-24-2014-veenu-sandhu-surabhi-agarwal-the-net-is-taking-over

Social Notworking - 'Murder by Twitter'

praskrishna — 2014-02-04T07:02:30Z

Suketu Mehta (@suketumehta) - terrible news about sunanda tharoor. this is murder by twitter.

The article by Malini Nair published in the Times of India quotes Nishant Shah.

Even before forensic science has declared the reasons behind Sunanda Pushkar's shocking death on Friday night, social media has been accused of murder. Writer Suketu Mehta wasn't the only one to point fingers. "First murder by @TwitterIndia , claps, fellow twitter matured guns!" is how another tweet went. Besides the deadly cocktail of depression, drugs, a strained marriage, questions have been raised about whether the vicious banter and collective howls of derision on social media over her very public meltdown — again on social media — pushed her over the edge.
Have we, the tweeple, in our eagerness to share every detail of our lives over an internet megaphone, not quite understood what the social media can do, especially its pitfalls? Is the line between the public and private blurring too fast? Commentators say that the rules that govern human and social behaviour haven't changed, and the fault lies in how we negotiate the cyber turf.

Can our digital lives have serious offline consequences? Nishant Shah, director, research , Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, says people need to realize that though twitter amplifies everything, but the ability to hurt, be mean, fight, question, critique and bully is not new.

"These are human practices , which replay themselves across different media forms. What is perhaps new is that our most personal and darkest desires have become available for public spectacle," says Shah.

That the twitterati can be brutal has been shown often enough this last year. When Tehelka editor Tarun Tejpal was mired in allegations of sexual harassment, his daughter was hounded on social media. Recently when novelist Lavanya Sankaran wrote an op-ed for New York Times defending the decent Indian man, she was royally derided, so much so that another journalist Rahul Bhatia tweeted in her defence, asking people to lay off.

Sunanda's story hurtled towards a tragedy in a space of 48 hours after she went public. As Shah points out it wasn't as though there were no affairs and scandals before the dawn of social media but the tangle would have spun out differently and less brutally in another time and age. It all began, as Pushkar admitted to some papers and later denied, with the spilling of alleged BBMs sent by Pakistani journalist Mehr Tarar to Tharoor on his twitter account.

Predictably, the effect of the first round of revelations was explosive. In fact, Pushkar herself appeared taken aback by the fact that a twitter spat ended up making front page headlines.

The entire drama which, in another age, would have played out at home or a circle of family, friends and acquaintances — and at the most in far less dramatic gossip columns and on TV— was up on social media, provide enormous vicarious pleasure to thousands of social media bystanders. That Pushkar herself set the virtual assault in motion only adds to the bleak irony of it all. This was also not the first time Pushkar took a spat to twitter. @SPTVrocks tweeted about her fight with a journalist in Dubai earlier this month.

Clinical psychologist Varkha Chulani says it is the personality behind the media usage not the form itself that is to be blamed. "People choose to talk about their private lives to impress others, to get attention. We forget what is real and what is virtual." Shah, however, believes that we live in a world of digital striptease and that the ubiquitous and pervasive technologies that surround us have forever blurred the lines between real and virtual.

Activists have often pointed out that the social media has everything going for it — quick and vast connect and instant response — but what it lacks is empathy. It is easy enough to send out an RIP message, for instance, for someone you don't know or even care for, positioning yourself as a caring, empathetic soul in 140 characters.

Post Pushkar's death, news anchor Barkha Dutt tweeted that we need to limit viciousness , stop judging and use greater compassion on twitter.

Shah makes a similar plea for the human touch.

"We are all so self-involved , creating narratives of our selves, bit-stripping every moment , instagramming every event, tweeting every encounter, and liking all the various things that happen around us, that we don't always have enough time to stop, to respond, to think and reflect upon other people's conditions . We have become jaded, to the various 'great' moments in people's time lines, but we are also becoming jaded to the pain that our involvement in these social networks can bring to those who are the subject of our attention," he says.

With additional reporting by Shobita Dhar

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-january-19-2014-malini-nair-social-networking-murder-by-twitter

Digital Citizens: Why Cyber Security and Online Privacy are Vital to the Success of Democracy and Freedom of Expression

praskrishna — 2014-01-08T04:59:10Z

Michael Oghia will give a presentation which will show why cyber security and online privacy are vital for democracy and freedom of expression.

In the time when Edward Snowden is fighting for both clemency and to be known as a brave whistle blower that exposed government wrongdoing, cyber security and online privacy have never been more important. As Jacob Applebaum discussed in May last year, and CIS’ Maria Xynou presented recently in December, surveillance throughout the world is increasing. With security apparatus’ likethe NSA and now India’s Central Monitoring System, coupled with corporate data centers around the world storing our e–mails, address books, preferences, and passwords, it is easy to see how our online privacy is increasingly being threatened and often, violated.

Indeed, online privacy is inextricably linked to freedom of expression, and freedom of expression is a fundamental civil liberty imperative to democracy. Moreover, online security and privacy are essential to good, transparent, and accountable democratic governance. This is largely because surveillance, censorship, and monitoring ultimately create environments where self-censorship is the norm, as is the fear of the government instead of spaces that allow for freedom of expression and democratic dialogue and dissent.

What I would like to accomplish my speaking at CIS is not to merely educate about the dangers posed to Internet security or to world democracy, but rather to:

Reiterate the importance of digital privacy and cyber security to the success of democracy and the continued protection of free expression.
Encourage citizens, technology specialists, Internet and privacy advocates, and others to see themselves as part of a larger system of democratic governance and civic participation. This means understanding how technical capabilities intersect with civil society, and then use them to advocate for a more open, accessible, and private cyberspace.
Reinforce that digital media literacy education is vital to ensuring a free, open, accessible, and democratic Internet.

Additionally, I want to present ideas and recommendations for what you can do to engage with these problems, and how we can collaborate together to address them.

About the Public Intelligence Project

The Public Intelligence Project is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit think tank conducting research, education, and advocacy on the importance of diversity, critical thinking, dialogue, and freedom of expression. We seek to promote more robust systems of participatory democracy, civic engagement, and conflict prevention in order to create a culture of democracy.

Michael Oghia

Michael is responsible for a new project at Meta-Culture called the Public Intelligence Project, which focuses on expanding participatory democracy, civic engagement, and conflict prevention by conducting research, education, and advocacy on the intersections between diversity, dialogue, critical thinking, and freedom of expression. While new to the conflict resolution field, as a poet, musician, editor, writer, blogger, and activist, he is well-versed in the importance of freedom of expression and participating in the democratic process. He was born in Kentucky to Lebanese-Syrian parents, and after graduating with a BS in sociology from the University of Louisville, he moved to Lebanon to pursue an MA in sociology from the American University of Beirut. There, he had the opportunity to witness the Arab Revolutions first-hand while research about topics such as Internet ownership in the Middle East, social movements, Arab media, globalization, Arab youth and family, and his thesis subject, romantic love in the Arab world. Michael enjoys engaging Twitter conversations, and has an unnatural affinity for crunchy peanut butter.

Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Time: 6.30 p.m. to 8.00 p.m.
Talk by: Michael Oghia
Title: Research & Advocacy Consultant, and Project Manager
Organisation: Meta-Culture / Public Intelligence Project
Websites: www.meta-culture.in <http://www.meta-culture.in> & www.publicintelligenceproject.org <http://www.publicintelligenceproject.org>

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/why-cyber-security-and-online-privacy-are-vital-for-success-of-democracy-and-freedom-of-expression

Rise of the bot: all you need to know about the latest threat online

praskrishna — 2014-01-31T07:16:36Z

In the last week of December, 2013, former union railway minister Pawan Kumar Bansal lodged a police complaint in Chandigarh after witnessing “an unusual rise in his online fan following”. The former minister told the police that his Facebook page had received more than 10,000 likes, within a span of 24 hours. While his allegation that the ‘likes’ were “fabricated” may be true, information technology experts believe a bot was at work.

The article by Danish Raza was published in the Hindustan Times on January 5, 2014. Snehashish Ghosh is quoted.

A bot is a software that mimics human behaviour on the Internet. Bots can be used to create artificial accounts on social media, provide numerous likes on a particular page, send tweets or visit various websites. All this is done without any human involvement.

Bots already constitute a significant percentage of Non Human Traffic (NHT) online, which has, according to some estimates, eclipsed human traffic. Comscore, a US-based Internet technology company noted on its blog that NHT, also known as Artificial Traffic, increased from approximately 6% of the total web traffic in 2011, to 36% in 2012. Last month, a report from Incapsula, a cloud-based security service, which aids the security and performance of websites, stated that more than 60% of web traffic was non-human in 2013. The figure was based on data collected from the 20,000 sites on Incapsula’s network .

Other than bots, NHT on the web includes traffic generated by Internet routers and back end services used by websites to communicate with third parties.

India is not immune to the problem. According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report for 2012, there was a 280% increase in bot infections in India between 2011 and 2012. 17% of bot-infected computers, the highest in the world, are in India and 15% of global bot-net spam is generated here. The report also states that 69 Indian cities are prone to bot infections which includes Bhubaneswar, Surat, Cochin, Jaipur, Visakhapatnam, Indore, Kota, Ghaziabad and Mysore.

Bot spotting
How do you spot a bot? When a bot or its friend is at work, the browser directs you to sites other than the ones you intend to visit, you get full-page pop ups and pop unders, and when you quit the browser, it gets relaunched after a few minutes. Chances are your computer is part of a chain of online events which create NHT on the web, the purpose of which may be to attack a site or a server.

Why you should be wary
Malicious traffic, malware, hacking attempts, viruses slow down the Internet and delay legitimate traffic and services. Used to target systems or take down websites, NHT generates fake clicks on advertisements to increase website statistics.

One of the perils of ignoring artificial web traffic is that it gets counted for real impressions for which clients end up paying. For example, a website owner may hire the services of a digital marketing firm to publicise the site. In the guise of increasing page views, the marketing firm can produce a bill for fake impressions, supplementing actual human traffic to the page with bot usage.

“Unless there is a curb on this practice of malicious NHT, one stands at risk of being duped by marketers, agencies and even clients,” said Chiragh Cherian, director, online PR at Perfect Relations, a brand management firm. Recent studies have estimated bot traffic to be between 4 - 31% of total web traffic in the US, which translates to between $650 million and $4.7 billion in wasted marketing spend. According to Miaozhen Systems, a leading Chinese advertising technology company, NHT caused advertisers in China to lose approximately US$ 1.6 billion between July 2012 and June 2013.

How to combat Non-Human Traffic
Most servers have defence mechanisms to tackle spam and cyber attacks. Websites are also now developing mechanisms such as asking for human authentication which is difficult for a bot to execute. “But even personal computers should be equipped with strong Internet security applications such as anti-virus and anti-spyware to prevent hacking and phishing attempts and to prevent being used as slave machines for distributed cyber attacks,” said Chintu Cherian Abraham, a digital media professional. Figures show that we need to watch out where and how we go online. According to Norton Report, 2013, 61% Indians access their social network accounts from unsecured wi-fi connections, while 42% access bank accounts and 44% shop online using unsecured wi-fi connections.

Social media companies are gradually devising mechanisms to filter bots. “When a page and a fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific page and engaging with that brand’s content. As such, we have recently increased our automated efforts to remove Likes on Pages that may have been gained by means that violate our terms,” mentions Facebook’s site integrity policy.

Agency-client intervention is necessary to ensure that artificial traffic is not presented as real. “It’s also important to make all agencies, advertisers and clients aware of their responsibility to keep the Internet free from malicious NHT,” said Chiragh Cherian.

Government involvement is also needed to control the problem of malicious bots. “A lot needs to be done from the government’s side to tackle bots which can be used to target the country’s critical infrastructure such as banking websites,” said Jiten Jain, a cyber security analyst, adding, “Last year, I highlighted the flaws in HDFC’s net banking website which have been rectified now. They could have been exploited to block the net-banking service.”

Until we have a robust mechanism to filter out bogus traffic from real, it will be difficult to say whether the social media followers of Bansal and other public figures are human or not.

Know your Bots
Not all bots are used with a negative intent. Some help in research and monitoring.

The Malicious
Bots can be effectively used to impersonate and to hack accounts leading to financial losses and intellectual property theft. “Theft of personal details, username and password to operate one’s bank account is a classic example of how bots can lead to financial losses. It is an organised cyber crime,” explained Commander (Retd) Mukesh Saini, former national information security coordinator, Government of India. In May 2013, cyber criminals broke into the Mumbai-based account of the RPG group and siphoned off `2.4 crore. Three people were arrested in the case.

“The rate at which NHT is increasing is alarming,” says Tinu Cherian Abraham. “Any computer connected to the Internet is vulnerable to such attacks. The user will not get to know about it unless he or she has installed an Internet security application.”

Besides bots, computers also generate other kinds of secondary activities, while the user is surfing the Internet. This activity remains in the background and is never seen by the user, unlike the bot-generated pop ups, observes Comscore. For example, your computer might be being used as a channel to reach a server with the intention of hacking it. And you will never know.

The Good
Not all NHT is bad, though. In fact, good bots such as scrapers can be effectively used to conduct research. “Wikipedia can be scraped to investigate the frequency of edits on a Wikipedia page and track the increase in the number of editors,” explained Snehashish Ghosh, policy associate at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society.

Good bots are also used by search engines to track content on websites and enhance their search results. Search bots and other good bots formed 31% of total bots, the Incapsula report noted.

The Social
Apart from malicious and good bots, there are social media bots too. “Extensive analysis is done on social media traffic for monitoring, business lead generation, as well as reputation management. This has amounted to a lot of automated or non-human traffic,” said Abraham.

According to Facebook’s filings published in a Forbes report in February 2012, around 83 million of its users are bogus. “It’s a violation of our policies to use a fake name or operate under a false identity, and we encourage people to report any user they suspect of doing this, either through the report links we provide on the site or through the contact forms in our help centre,” a Facebook spokesperson told HT.

Twitter bots have also made its presence felt on the platform. “Twitter has witnessed very interesting bots which have found appreciation from the community for being funny and creative. The microblogging site cracked down on some harmful bots, but still some of the advanced level bots slip through the net,” said Ghosh.

In August 2012, London-based firm Digital Evaluators, which evaluates social media presence of worldwide companies, released an analysis of Twitter followers of the US Presidential Election candidates Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. 21.9% of Barack Obama’s 17.82 million Twitter followers were found to be bogus.

The Big Brother
Ghosh said that the increase in NHT related to the Internet of things, the concept which enables communication between two or more devices, results in privacy issues. “Take a situation where your mobile device is constantly tracking your location for the purpose of switching on the air conditioner at your home before you reach. Such applications produce huge amounts of personal data and there is no clarity whether this data is being stored,” he said.

“As the new networks link data from products, company assets, or the operating environment, they will generate better information and analysis, which can enhance decision making significantly. Some organisations are starting to deploy these applications in targeted areas, while more radical and demanding uses are still in the conceptual or experimental stages,” noted a McKinsey & Company report on Internet of things.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/hindustan-times-january-5-2014-danish-raza-rise-of-the-bot

Indian government wakes up to risk of Hotmail, Gmail

praskrishna — 2013-12-30T04:24:57Z

Worried by US spying revelations, India has begun drawing up a new email policy to help secure government communications, but the man responsible for drafting the rules still regularly uses Hotmail.

This was originally published by AFP on December 7, 2013, was also mirrored by the Times of India, Livemint, Reuters, Dawn, NDTV, Yahoo News, The Malaysian Insider and Asia One Digital. A slightly modified version was published by Silicon India on December 11. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Like many of his peers in ministries across New Delhi, IT Minister Kapil Sibal's office recently sent an email inviting journalists to the launch of his new personal website using the free email service.

Others, including senior foreign ministry officials, the information and broadcasting minister and the health ministry secretary, also use Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo instead of their government accounts.

When asked why he continued to use his Hotmail for official use, Sibal declined to comment, but a senior bureaucrat in his ministry admitted that he personally preferred Gmail because it is "just a lot easier".

"We keep moving, get different designations, go different places and with that, our emails change. You lose contacts and important emails, which you don't need to worry about with a Gmail account," the bureaucrat told AFP.

"To be honest, the quality of our official mail isn't that great yet. It still needs some work," he added on condition of anonymity.

Security concerns

IT security expert Sunil Abraham said the use of Gmail and the like was highly risky since the American services had their servers in the US and the National Security Agency has been known to tap into their database systems.

It is unclear how many state and federal public workers actively use popular email services for office, but some of the estimates are startling.

"As much as 90 percent of government officials use private email (services) for official use... that's because their official email is not as stable or speedy," said Abraham, executive director of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society.

In September Sibal's ministry announced a new "Email Policy of the Government of India" in the wake of spying allegations about the NSA revealed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
NSA's tentacles not only crept into the Indian embassy in Washington and its UN office in New York, but also accessed email and chat messenger contact lists of hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens worldwide, according to media reports.

During a single day last year, the NSA's Special Source Operations branch collected 444,743 email address books from Yahoo, 105,068 from Hotmail, 82,857 from Facebook, 33,697 from Gmail and 22,881 from unspecified other providers, The Washington Post said, according to an internal NSA presentation.

The $11 million Indian project aims to bring some five million public employees onto the government's email domain powered by the National Informatics Centre (NIC) as early as mid-December.

It is awaiting clearances and suggestions from all ministries before the proposal goes to the cabinet this month.

J. Satyanarayana, secretary of the department of electronics and IT, dismissed claims that the policy was too late and was a response to the Snowden scandal.

"The policy is not a reaction to any global spying revelations, it was already in the works. It is just a mere coincidence that both came around the same time," he said.

Fresh doubts

Some cyber security experts say bringing millions aboard a centralised server could make a hacker's job easier, with all critical government information available on a single platform.
More than 11,000 Indian websites were hacked or defaced between May and August this year, with a large number of attacks on the ".in" domain whose servers are in India, the Times of India reported last month.

"Making the use of a centralised government server is not the best way to proceed. Having everything on one platform makes it even more vulnerable to cyber attacks and hacking," said Abraham.

"It also brings about new worries of the NIC becoming the local snoop."

Some also predict that the ambitious policy would eventually fizzle out for lack of attention from ministers and bureaucrats, who work in government offices where stacks of yellowing files and papers are still a common sight.

"It's sad but most of these officials don't understand much about technology, so mastering email is something that is miles and miles away," said Vijay Mukhi, a Mumbai-based cyber security expert.

"These guys saw all the snooping news and suddenly they woke up and said 'lets make an email policy'. Enforcing this is not possible on a practical basis."

The IT ministry also plans to conduct workshops to teach employees about email security such as when to change passwords and user names and how to use email.

"Every employee should know how, what and when critical data can be vulnerable... with most work still done on paper, it is important to know the nitty-gritty of using email," Satyanarayana said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/afp-december-7-2013-annie-banerjee-indian-government-wakes-up-to-risk-of-hotmail-gmail

International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice (IV)

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T09:05:40Z

Building on the workshop in Dagstuhl in June-July 2011 (International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice), Beijing (International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice II), and Athens (International View of the State-of-the-Art of Cryptography and Security and its Use in Practice III) that set the stage for discussions on cryptography among a group of key researchers from Europe, Asia, and North America, the one day workshop in Bangalore, following AsiaCrypt 2013 will again bring together internationally recognized scientists to discuss direction and development in theoretical and applied cryptography and surrounding societal issues.

There will be four focus areas:

Real-life cryptography
Standardization
Regulatory requirements
Innovative use cases for cryptography

Each focus area will be anchored in an invited talk and/or panel, but the emphasis will be on discussion. The participants will address broad research directions in encryption and secure computation and their applications in cloud computing, smart grid, mobile and embedded computing, hardware, software, and network security. They will also examine non-technical issues surrounding deployment and adoption of new security technologies using encryption, such as privacy or economic consideration. Approaches and projects in different countries will be discussed, in order to increase awareness of the R&D activities internationally and continue to for a strong community of research and practice and in order to generate new ideas in this field.

Although the workshop will cover a broad spectrum of issues from the list presented below with a specific focus that will be announced shortly. The topics of interest include (but are not limited to) the following subjects:

Secret versus public ciphers
Cipher and algorithm development process
Algorithms maturity and review
Lightweight cryptography
New requirements for cryptography for novel applications
Cipher implementation and interoperability
Standardization
Regulatory initiatives
Privacy enhancing cryptography

8:15 a.m.	Registration
8:30 a.m.	Opening statement (Organizers)
8:40 a.m.	Opening keynote (TBD)
9:10 a.m.	Panel 1 and discussion: Advances in cryptography; new use cases, Participants: Dan Bernstein (University of Illinois at Chicago), Tanja Lange (Eindhoven), Veni Madhavan (ERNET), others TBD
10.30 a.m.	Coffee break
11.00 a.m.	Panel II and discussion: Regulatory environment and standardization: Sunil Abraham (India CIS), Kazue Sako (NEC), Claire Vishik (Intel), others TBD
12.30 a.m.	Lunch
1.30 p.m.	Panel 3 and discussion: Implementation and interoperability for new environments (e.g., smart grid, Internet of things): Reji Kumar (Smart Grid India), other TBD
3.00 p.m.	Coffee break
3.30 p.m.	Panel IV and discussion: Privacy, social networking, ubiquitous connectivity and cryptography: Rene Peralta (NIST), Kumar Ranganathan, others TBD
5.00 p.m.	Thoughts and next workshop
5.20 p.m.	Closing statements (Organizers)
5.30 p.m.	Adjourn

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/international-view-of-state-of-the-art-of-cryptography-and-security-and-its-use-in-practice

A Three-Way Race Draws Delhi’s Young, and Everyone Else, Out to Vote

praskrishna — 2013-12-26T07:03:54Z

The polling stations were supposed to close at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, just after sunset. But with thousands still waiting in the dark to cast their vote in the state assembly elections, the Delhi Election Commission decided to extend the voting until 6:30 p.m. Then to 7:30 p.m.

The article by Betwa Sharma was published in the New York Times on December 4, 2013. Sunil Abraham is quoted.

Finally, the Election Commission said it would wait until 9:30 p.m. to close the polls. At the polling station in the New Delhi district, those waiting in line agreed that a relatively warm winter evening was helping to draw people out to vote.

Though no official data on voter turnout had been released by 9 p.m., it was clear that voters were coming out in unprecedented numbers for this year’s Delhi state elections. Analysts were predicting that this election would break the previous voter turnout record of 61.75 percent in 1993.

Unlike in the past, this year’s contest featured a potential spoiler in the Aam Aadmi, or Common Man, Party. Its leader, the firebrand anticorruption activist Arvind Kejriwal, was battling to dethrone the state’s longtime chief minister, Sheila Dikshit of the Congress Party, and siphon votes from the other establishment choice, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P. (Exit polls by the local media on Wednesday night were showing that the B.J.P. was likely to win the most seats in the state assembly.)

The prospect of upending the political status quo brought out young voters like 23-year-old Hina Kousar, although she had to put up a fight with her family to cast her vote for the Aam Aadmi Party. Her mother lectured her on how governments don’t care about people, but that didn’t deter Ms. Kousar.

“They have the wrong mentality, and young people should change it,” she said. “My granny is 70 years old and I told her to vote.”

Many of the youthful voters turned voting into a social activity, both in person and online. At one polling station, most people cast their votes quietly and left, but many of the young voters came with their friends. They talked animatedly about their choices while leaving the polling stations.

Others called their families to say they had voted. Some clicked photos of each other on their smartphones and posted the images on their Facebook pages.

In less than a year, Mr. Kejriwal, 45, and his party has pasted itself quite literally on city’s consciousness with aggressive campaigns and posters of brooms, symbolizing sweeping away the old order. And that’s why he got Ms. Kousar’s vote.

“The most important thing is that he has promised to remove corruption. The money that is going into Swiss banks is our money. The rising market prices are because of it,” she said.

Several voters between the ages of 20 to 25 who were interviewed by India Ink said they were backing Mr. Kejriwal, who represented a change from the three-term winner Ms. Dikshit. The B.J.P. had no star state candidate that appealed to them, even though its prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, engaged with students at Delhi University earlier this year and is extremely active on social media.

Besides corruption, several young voters, both male and female, said that ensuring women’s safety had to be a priority for any Delhi government.

Another Kejriwal voter, Kavita, a 27-year-old teacher who goes by one name, said that Ms. Dikshit’s government hadn’t effectively improved women’s safety after the gang rape of a physiotherapy student one year ago. “I don’t feel the difference,” she said. “I still feel unsafe on the streets, so let’s see what some new leaders can do to change this.”

Abhilash Sasidharan, 26, after he cast his vote at a polling booth in New Delhi on Wednesday.Betwa Sharma Abhilash Sasidharan, 26, after he cast his vote at a polling booth in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Another Kejriwal supporter, Abhilash Sasidharan, 27, said a safe environment for women is “absolutely” the most important thing to him, but the software engineer also was moved that Mr. Kejriwal had left his lucrative job as a revenue service officer to join politics.

Kavita, 27, after she cast her vote at a polling booth in New Delhi on Wednesday.

“I don’t have the courage to step into dirty politics, but he does and I want to support that,” he said. “Look, Congress has had 15 years, so why not see if someone can do better, and all these parties should feel a threat to do better.”

But not all young people are buying Mr. Kejriwal’s promises of sweeping change. Shiv Raj Syal, 20, called them “flowery and too good to believe,” as he cast his vote for Ms. Dikshit. “He is just very new at this and I don’t think it’s wise to hand over the running of a national capital to a party with no experience,” he said.

The chief minister had focused on development, the college student said, making Delhi a hub for foreign brands and corporates, and transforming it into an international city.

Abhilash Sasidharan, 26, after he cast his vote at a polling booth in New Delhi on Wednesday.

Despite the appearance of a robust youth presence at the polls on Wednesday, analysts are waiting on the Election Commission’s numbers before declaring this election cycle the year of the youth vote.

Sanjay Kumar, an election analyst from the Center for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, said that as of July, only 68 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 21 had registered to vote, far lower than the 86 percent average of other demographics.

V.S. Sampath, the chief election commissioner in India, said that youth participation in the electoral process had been a priority in recent years, and several efforts including visiting universities and colleges had been made to register them, which had resulted in a “significant increase.”

In 2011, Mr. Sampath said, 119,000 voters between the ages of 18 and 19 were on the electoral rolls in Delhi, which accounted for 0.93 percent of total Delhi voters, but now the numbers had gone up to 405,000, or 3.4 percent.

Election observers have also pointed out that the hype about social media, especially Twitter, becoming a tool for political expression and organization for the youth has not necessarily translated into a surge in voting in that demographic of users.

The political debates on social media could translate into votes by the next elections, according to Sunil Abraham from the Centere of Internet and Society in Bangalore, who describes the Internet penetration as “limited,” and social media use even smaller and dominated by the economic elite.

Mr. Abraham, however, said social media is influencing the political discourse, not by motivating voters, but by influencing the coverage in mainstream media.

Relative to the country’s population, he added, social media users had a “disproportionate influence on discourse.”

But the young voters who spoke to India Ink said that at least for them, social media did play a role in drawing them into politics this year. Mr. Syal, the Congress voter, for instance, said that he had posted a message on his Facebook wall criticizing some of Mr. Kejriwal’s claims, which drew 50 comments.

And Mr. Sasidharan, the Aam Aadmi Party supporter, posted on Facebook a photo of him holding up his finger stained with ink, showing that he voted, immediately after coming out of the polling station. “I hope that it inspires more people to come and vote,” he said.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/nytimes-december-4-2013-betwa-sharma-a-three-way-race-draws-delhis-young-and-everyone-else-out-to-vote

When the virtual world wakes up the real one

praskrishna — 2013-11-30T09:35:06Z

The unprecedented wave of voices speaking up against sexual harassment in recent times has as much to do with technology as the determination to seek justice. From Twitter to Tumblr, and blogs to pastebin, the internet's anonymity, reach and speed allow small, personal stories of abuse to swell into big stories.

The article by Malini Nair was published in the Times of India on November 24. Nishant Shah is quoted.

The outrage over the Tehelka case started with a post on pastebin, an anonymous document sharing site, on Wednesday evening. It contained the email managing editor Shoma Chaudhury had sent to the Tehelka staff with editor Tarun Tejpal's "atonement" letter appended below. A few hours later, the story had ballooned into a heated debate, and the outpouring forced what was being dismissed as an "internal matter" to be treated as a criminal case.

The two women who recently spoke up against harassment at the hands of a retired Supreme Court judge also used Facebook and the blogosphere to tell their stories, ensuring that the real world was actually moved into taking action. "The social web's biggest comfort is that we are no longer alone," says Nishant Shah, director, Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. "No matter what has happened to us, it has happened to somebody else. The possibility of finding credulous and empathetic audiences who but share our pain, understand it, and respond to it is unprecedented." Retweets and comments have often been described as the digital equivalent of holding hands.

Shah's pick of web campaigns that highlighted the problems include Blank Noise which calls women to talk of small, everyday stories of harassment, the Pink Chaddi drive and Why We Need Feminism, a web venture across American universities.

The other reason why the net encourages victims of abuse who might otherwise have stayed quiet to speak out is its "pseudonymity", as Shah terms it. In societies where there is shame attached to talking about sexual assault, the online space saves women from having to put themselves out in the "physical space" while ensuring that the perpetrator is exposed, he points out.

A plus for social web is that it gets other victims to speak up as well, gathering force and magnitude in the process. This happened in the instance of the legal interns. Another instance that surfaced just a month ago was of two American women science bloggers Danielle Lee and Monica Byrne. When Lee refused to write a piece for free for Biology Online, she was called "urban whore" by an enraged editor. She blogged about it and the ensuing storm over social media got her huge support. After Lee's expose, Byrne blogged about an acutely sexual conversation a powerful science writer inflicted on her. The outrage this provoked abated only after he made amends.

As an article in Gender and Culture blog project puts it: "( The digital world provided) a forum for these victims to document their abuse, and a courtroom where the abusers have been judged and found guilty by public opinion".

Of course there are problems with the internet's version of justice — it tends to play judge, jury and executioner with giddy recklessness. In the Tehelka case, the first questionable moment came when the survivor's email was tweeted and re-tweeted with no concern for her requests for anonymity. "The problem with Twitter and Facebook is the incredible and gross violations of privacy of the survivor. And otherwise responsible adults join lynch mobs calling either the survivor or the accused names, making ridiculous allegations, desperately looking for an easy narrative to hang everything on," says author Nisha Susan, who led the Pink Chaddi campaign.

Commentator Santosh Desai says that it is tough to choose between an unbridled but powerful social web and one that is cautious and governed by norms. "Earlier, there were receivers and broadcasters who were few and governed by licenses and a code of behaviour. Now everyone is a broadcaster, everyone is a circulator and everyone is an aggregator. Having no oversight here could be problematic," he says.

Susan says communities need to go beyond social media in such situations. "It should also be a time for us to reflect. On what we would do in such a situation, how we could perhaps prevent it, on the sense of entitlement powerful men have all over the world, on the awful pressures young women face. We should all be reflecting. Instead we are just re-tweeting."

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/the-times-of-india-malini-nair-november-24-2013-when-the-virtual-world-wakes-up-the-real-one

I Just Pinged to Say Hello

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:36:02Z

A host of social networks find us more connected than ever before, but leave us groping for words in the digital space.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on November 24, 2013.

I am making a list of all the platforms that I use to connect with the large networks that I belong to. Here goes: I use Yahoo! Messenger to talk to my friends in east Asia. Most of my work meetings happen on Skype and Google Hangout. A lot of friendly chatter fills up my Facebook Messenger. Twitter is always available for a little back-chat and bitching. On the phone, I use Viber to make VoIP calls and WhatsApp is the space for unending conversations spread across days. And these are just the spaces for real-time conversation. Across all these platforms, something strange is happening. As I stay connected all the time, I am facing a phenomenon where we have run out of things to say, but not the desire to talk.

I had these three conversations today on three different instant-messaging platforms:

Person 1 (on WhatsApp): Hi.

Me: Hey, good to hear from you. How are you doing?

Person 1: Good.

Me (after considerable silence): So what's up?

Person 1: Nothing.

End of conversation.

Person 2 (On an incoming video call on Skype): Hey, you there?

Me: Yeah. What time is it for you right now?

Person 2: It is 10 at night.

Me: Oh! That is late. How come you are calling me so late?

Person 2: Oh, I saw you online.

Me: Ok….. *eyes raised in question mark*

Person 2: So, that's it. I am going to sleep soon.

Me: Ok…. Er…goodnight.

Person2: Goodnight.

We hang up.

Person 3 (pinging me on Facebook): Hey, you are in the US right now?

Me: Yes. I am attending a conference here.

Person 3: Cool!

Me: Umm… yeah, it is.

Person 3: emoticon of a Facebook 'like'. Have fun. Bye.

Initially I was irritated at the futility of these pings that are bewildering in their lack of content. I dismissed it as one of those things, but I realise that there is a pattern here. Our lives are so particularly open and documented, such minute details of what we do, where we are and who we are with, is now available for the rest of the world to consume, making most of the conversations seeking information, redundant. If you know me on my social media networks, you already know most of the basic things that you would want to know about me. And it goes without saying that no matter how close and connected we are, we are not necessarily in a state where we want to talk all the time. The more distributed our lives are, the more diminished is the need for personal communication.

And yet, the habit or the urge to ping, buzz, DM or chat has not caught up with this interaction deficit. So, we still seem to reach out, using a variety of platforms just to say hello, even when there is nothing to say. I call this the 'Always On' syndrome. We live in a world where being online all the time has become a ubiquitous reality. Even when we are asleep, or busy in a meeting, or just mentally disconnected from the online spaces, our avatars are still awake. They interact with others. And when they feel too lonely, they reach out and send that empty ping — just to confirm that they are not alone. That on the other side of the glowing screen is somebody else who is going to connect back, and to reassure you that we are all together in this state of being alone.

This empty ping has now become a signifier, loaded with meaning. The need for human connection has been distributed, but it does not compensate our need for one-on-one contact. In the early days of the cell phone, when incoming calls were still being charged, the missed call, without any content, was a code between friends and lovers. It had messages about where to meet, when to meet, or sometimes, just that you were missing somebody. The empty ping is the latest avatar of the missed call — in a world where we are always online but not always connected, when we are constantly together, but also spatially and emotionally alone, the ping remains that human touch in the digital space that reassures us that on the other side of that seductive interface and the buzzing gadget, is somebody we can say hello to.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-november-24-2013-nishant-shah-i-just-pinged-to-say-hello