Centre for Internet and Society

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Closing Remarks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:27:31Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multi-disciplinary scholars and practitioners. The aim of the workshop is to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Nishant Shah closed the Habits of Living Thinkathon in Bangalore by disclosing that there truly was no blueprint planned for the event, as all of the participants were so diverse. There are future events already planned, and a repeat event with the same participants was mentioned for a year’s time from now.

Some of the next steps suggested by Nishant are the creation of a course based on the Habits of Living events run by the same participants and a publication of sorts on the work and themes that were discussed over the course of the event. Oliver discussed some future events that he will be involved in that he hopes some of the participants will be able to become involved in. Following this, Nishant suggested that some structure of circulation, feedback, interaction and/or sharing be set up so the participants can continue to stay updated and involved in each others’ work. Tumblr and wikipages were suggested.

Participants were interested in creating a digital publication on the discussions that took place during the Thinkathon. The creation of a course, and even a textbook, was also well received by the participants.

Gita Chadha felt that the process of the event and the discussions was very useful and conducive to sharing and reflection without being overwhelmed. She felt very strongly that the event was very helpful in helping her to draw parallels and connection between her work and the themes of the Thinkathon. She also felt that inviting an economist, even a political economist, might bring an interesting view to future events.

Nishant suggested that each member write a guest blog for the website on their presentations, which the participants felt was an excellent idea. Nishant also suggested requesting blogs from the invited participants who could not make it to the Thinkathon, as well as extending the invitation to anyone the participants felt would be able to bring useful viewpoints to the discussions.

The participants expressed gratitude at their involvement in the event and excitement for future events and activities with the group, and Nishant was thanked heartily by the group.

CIS would like to thank Brown University and the Brown Indian Initiative for supporting the Thinkathon, and Wendy Chun for making it possible. We would also like to thank the participants for taking part in the event and for making it a huge success! Thank you!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-closing-remarks

Back When the Past had a Future: Being Precarious in a Network Society

nishant — 2013-02-12T06:16:12Z

We live in Network Societies. This phrase has been so bastardised to refer to the new information turn mediated by digital technologies, that we have stopped paying attention to what the Network has become. Networks are everywhere. They have become the default metaphor of our times, where everything from infrastructure assemblies to collectives of people, are all described through the lens of a network.

This article by Nishant Shah was published in a peer-reviewed newspaper Researching BWPWAP. The write-up is on Page 3.

We are no longer just human beings living in socially connected, politically identified communities. Instead, we have become actors, creating archives of traces and transactions, generating traffic and working as connectors in the ever expanding fold of the network.

The network is an opaque metaphor, conflating description and explanation. So it becomes the object to be studied, the originary context that produces itself, and the explanatory framework that accounts for itself. In other words, the network was our past – it gives us an account of who we were, it is our present – it defines the context of all our activities, and it is our future – where we do everything to support the network because it is the only future that we can imagine for ourselves. It is this flattening characteristic of networks that are diagrammatically mapped, cartographically reproduced, and presented outside of and oblivious to temporality, that produces a condition of the future that can no longer be imagined through our everyday lives.

Networks neither promise nor deliver a flattened utopia of coexistence and decentralised power. Networks are, in fact, quite aware of the structures of inequity and conditions of privilege they create and perpetuate: the only way to recognise the existence of a network is to be outside of it, the only aspiration to belong to a network is to be kept outside of it when you recognise it. Networks create themselves as simultaneously ubiquitous and scarce, of everpresent and ephemeral, creating a new ontology for our being human – an ontology of precariousness, contingent upon erasure of our histories, archives of our present, and unimaginable futures; futures we are not ready for, and don’t have strategies to occupy.

I remember the times, before networks became the default conditions of being human, when kids, negotiating the variegated temporalities of their past-present-futures, would often begin their speculations on future, by saying, "When I grow up...". In that hope of growing up, was the potential for radical political action, the possibility of social reconstruction. In network societies, though, time has no currency. It has been replaced by attentions, flows of information and actions, and do not offer a tomorrow to grow into.

There is no future to help mitigate the exigencies of the present. And with the overwhelming emphasis on archiving the present, there is no more a coherent future that can be accounted for in the vocabulary that the network develops to explain itself, and the hypothetical world outside it.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/aprja-net-researching-bwpwap-nishant-shah-back-when-the-past-had-a-future

Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects

nishant — 2013-01-26T09:49:07Z

Brown University is organizing an international conference that elucidates the networked conditions of our times, how they produce ways, conditions, and habits of life and living, how they spread local actions globally. The conference will be held from March 21 to 23, 2013 at Brown University, Rhode Island.

Nishant Shah is participating as a speaker in this event. Read the full details published on the Brown University website. Also see the Thinkathon page.

Through a series of workshops, art residences, and dialogues, Habits of Living seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed.

Conference: Habits of Living

This international conference will bring together prominent and innovative scholars and artists at Brown University. There will be ninety-minute panels (each with two speakers), a keynote address by the RAQs Media Collective, a series of concurrent "unconferences" (informal sessions to be run by the audience), a scrapyard challenge, and an exhibition of work running in parallel. Speakers include Ariella Azoulay, Elizabeth Bernstein, Biella Coleman, Didier Fassin, Kara Keeling, Laura Kurgan, Ganaelle Langlois, Colin Milburn, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Elias Muhanna, Lisa Parks, Raqs Media Collective, Nishant Shah, Ravi Sundarum, Tiziana Terranova, and Nigel Thrift.

This event is designed as a large public conference whose major segments are participant-driven "unconferences." Unconferences are fluid events of casual five-minute "lightning" presentations and informal dialogue generated through group interactions. To facilitate discussion around networked societies, the multiple unconference sessions will focus around topics generated in advance by all the participants in the audience who will be guided through a quick and easy sign-up process. The unconferences are meant to take a more improvisational form, so the themes and locations will remain flexible, and entirely driven by audience participation.

Attendance at the conference is free, but please register here.

Habits of Living is generously sponsored by Brown University via the Dean of the Faculty, The Malcolm S. Forbes Center for Culture and Media Studies, The Cogut Center for the Humanities, The Humanities Initiative, The Vice President for International Affairs, and The Brown India Initiative. Additional sponsorship provided by RISD Digital + Media.

Conference Schedule

Thurs., Mar. 21

1:00-5:00pm	Scrapyard Challenge—Katherine Moriwaki and Jonah Brucker-Cohen
7:30-9:00	Raqs Media Collective

Fri., Mar. 22

9:00-10:20am	Nigel Thrift and Laura Kurgan
10:30-11:50	Elizabeth Bernstein and Didier Fassin
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Nishant Shah and Kara Keeling
4:00-5:20	Nick Mirzoeff and Ariella Azoulay

Sat., Mar. 23

9:00-10:20am	Tiziana Terranova and Ravi Sundarum
10:30-11:50	Elias Muhanna and Speaker TBD
1:00pm-2:20	UNCONFERENCES
2:30-3:50	Lisa Parks and Ganaele Langlois
4:00-5:20	Colin Milburn and Gabriella Coleman

Speakers

Ariella Azoulay, Department of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media, Brown University Ariella Azoulay studies revolutions from the 18th century onward and investigates how civil historical knowledge can be portrayed from photographs and other visual media. The Israeli political regime has been a primary focus of her work. Recent books: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (Pluto Press, 2011), Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Verso, August 2012) and The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008); co-author with Adi Ophir, The One State Condition: Occupation and Democracy between the Sea and the River (Stanford University Press, 2012). Curator of When The Body Politic Ceases To Be An Idea, Exhibition Room – Manifesta Journal Around Curatorial Practices No. 16 (folded format in Hebrew, MOBY, 2013), Potential History (2012, Stuk / Artefact, Louven), Untaken Photographs (2010, Igor Zabel Award, The Moderna galerija, Lubliana; Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Architecture of Destruction (Zochrot, Tel Aviv), Everything Could Be Seen (Um El Fahem Gallery of Art). Director of documentary films Civil Alliances, Palestine, 47-48 (2012), I Also Dwell Among Your Own People: Conversations with Azmi Bishara (2004), The Food Chain (2004), among others.
Elizabeth Bernstein, Associate Professor of Sociology and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University Professor Bernstein is the author of Temporarily Yours: Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex (University of Chicago Press, 2007), which received two distinguished book awards from the American Sociological Association as well as the 2009 Norbert Elias Prize—an international prize which is awarded biennially to the author of a first major book in sociology and related disciplines. Her current book project is Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the Politics of Freedom, which explores the convergence of feminist, neoliberal, and evangelical Christian interests in the shaping of contemporary global policies surrounding the traffic in women. Her research has received support from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Social Science Research Council, the NSF, the AAUW, and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy at Columbia University. At Barnard and Columbia, she teaches courses on the sociology of gender and sexuality, on trafficking, migration, and sexual labor, and on contemporary social theory.
Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Parsons MFA in Design & Technology and Parsons School of Art, Design, History, and Theory (ADHT). Dr. Jonah Brucker-Cohen is an award winning researcher, artist, and writer. He received his Ph.D. in the Disruptive Design Team of the Electronic and Electrical Engineering Department of Trinity College Dublin. His work and thesis is titled "Deconstructing Networks" and includes over 77 creative projects that critically challenge and subvert accepted perceptions of network interaction and experience. His work has been exhibited and showcased at venues such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOMA, ICA London, Whitney Museum of American Art (Artport), Palais du Tokyo,Tate Modern, Ars Electronica, Transmediale, and more. His writing has appeared in publications such as WIRED, Make, Gizmodo, Neural and more. His Scrapyard Challenge workshops have been held in over 14 countries in Europe, South America, North America, Asia, and Australia since 2003. Portfolio and Work: http://www.coin-operated.com Scrapyard Challenge Workshops: http://www.scrapyardchallenge.com Twitter: @coinop29
Gabriella Coleman, Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, Department of Art History and Communication Studies, McGill University Trained as an anthropologist, Gabriella (Biella) Coleman teaches, researches, and writes on computer hackers and digital activism. Her work examines the ethics of online collaboration/institutions as well as the role of the law and digital media in sustaining various forms of political activism. Her first book, "Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking" has been published with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Source: http://gabriellacoleman.org/
Didier Fassin, James Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Director of Studies, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris Didier Fassin was the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Research Institute for the Social Sciences (CNRS — Inserm — EHESS — University Paris North). Trained as a medical doctor, he has been Vice-President of Médecins sans Frontières and is President of the Comité médical pour les exilés. His field of interest is political and moral anthropology, and he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state through a study of policing and the prison. His recent publications include: De la question sociale à la question raciale? (with Eric Fassin, 2006), Les politiques de l’enquète: Épreuves ethnographiques (with Alban Bensa, 2008), Les nouvelles frontières de la société française (2009) and Moral Anthropology (2012) as editor; When Bodies Remember: Experience and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (2007), The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (with Richard Rechtman, 2009), Humanitarian Reason: A Moral History of the Present (2011), and Enforcing Order: An Ethnography of Urban Policing (2013), as author.
Kara Keeling, Associate Professor of Critical Studies (School of Cinematic Arts) and African American Studies (Department of American Studies and Ethnicity), University of Southern California Kara Keeling’s current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, The Witch's Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life. Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and (with Josh Kun) of a collection of essays about sound in American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled "From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema". Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling was an Assistant Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and American Quarterly, where she is a managing editor, and she is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of the journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).
Laura Kurgan, Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab (SIDL), Director of Visual Studies, Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning, Columbia University Professor Kurgan's work explores things ranging from digital mapping technologies to the ethics and politics of mapping, new structures of participation in design, and the visualization of urban and global data. Her recent research includes a multi-year SIDL project on "million-dollar blocks" and the urban costs of the American incarceration experiment, and a collaborative exhibition on global migration and climate change. Her work has appeared at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Altria, MACBa Barcelona, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and the Museum of Modern Art (where it is part of the permanent collection). She was the winner of the United States Artists Rockefeller Fellowship in 2009, and named one of Esquire Magazine's ‘Best and Brightest’ in 2008. She has published articles and essays in Assemblage, Grey Room, ANY, Volume, and Else/Where Mapping, among other books and journals. Source: http://www.spatialinformationdesignlab.org/people.php?id=10
Ganaele Langlois, Assistant Professor of Communication, Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Associate Director of the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media Professor Langlois has recently published a co-authored book entitled The Permanent Campaign – New Media, New Politics (Peter Lang).
Colin Milburn, Associate Professor of English and Gary Snyder Chair in Science and the Humanities, UC Davis Professor Milburn's research focuses on the cultural relations between literature, science, and technology. His interests include science fiction, gothic horror, the history of biology, the history of physics, video games, and the digital humanities. He is a member of the Science & Technology Studies Program and the Center for Science and Innovation Studies. He is also affiliated with the programs in Cinema and Technocultural Studies, Cultural Studies, Performance Studies, and Critical Theory, as well as the W. M. Keck Center for Active Visualization in the Earth Sciences (KeckCAVES). Since 2009, he has been serving as the director of the UC Davis Humanities Innovation Lab, an experimental offshoot of the Digital Humanities Initiative. Source: http://english.ucdavis.edu/people/directory/milburn
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication, New York University My work is in the field of visual culture. In recent years it has fallen into four main areas. First, I have been working on the genealogy of visuality, a key term in the field. Far from being a postmodern theory word, it was created to describe how Napoleonic era generals "visualized" a battlefield that they could not see. Applied to the social as a whole by Thomas Carlyle, visuality was a conservative strategy to oppose all emancipations and liberations in the name of the autocratic hero. My book The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality was published by Duke University Press (2011). Second, I produce texts and projects that support the general development of visual culture as a field of study and a methodology. The third Visual Culture Reader was published in 2012 by Routledge, The second fully revised edition of An Introduction to Visual Culture was published in 2009 by Routledge, with color illustrations throughout and new sections of Keywords and Key Images. Third, I work on militant research with the global social movements that have arisen since 2011. Finally, I am working on a new project on the cultures of climate change in conjunction with the not-for-profit Islands First. Source: http://www.nicholasmirzoeff.com/bio.html
Katherine Moriwaki, Assistant Professor of Media Design, School of Art, Media, and Technology, Parsons The New School for Design Professor Moriwaki’s focus is on interaction design and artistic practice. She teaches core curriculum classes in the M.F.A. Design + Technology Program where students engage a broad range of creative methodologies to realize new possibilities in interactive media. Katherine is also currently completing a Ph.D. in the Networks and Telecommunications Research Group at Trinity College Dublin. Her work has appeared in numerous festivals and conferences including numer.02 at Centre Georges Pompidou, Futuresonic, Break 2.2, SIGGRAPH, eculture fair, Transmediale, ISEA, Ars Electronica, WIRED Nextfest, and Maker Faire. Her publications have appeared in a wide range of venues such as Rhizome.org, Ubicomp, CHI, ISEA, NIME, the European Transport Conference, and the Journal of AI & Society. Her project Umbrella.net, in collaboration with Jonah Brucker-Cohen was featured in "New Media Art" by Mark Tribe and Reena Jana in 2006. She has taught at a wide variety of institutions and departments, such as Trinity College Dublin, Rhode Island School of Design, and Parsons School of Design, as has lead workshops on interaction design and the creative re-use of electronic objects around the globe. These "Scrapyard Challenge" workshops have been held thirty-seven times in fourteen countries across five continents. Katherine received her Masters degree from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where people and enabling interaction were emphasized over any specific technology. She was a 2004 recipient of the Araneum Prize from the Spanish Ministry for Science and Technology and Fundacion ARCO. Source: http://www.kakirine.com/?page_id=2
Elias Muhanna, Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Middle East Studies, Brown University Professor Muhanna teaches courses on classical Arabic literature and Islamic intellectual history. He earned his PhD in Near Eastern Languages & Civilizations from Harvard University in 2012, and was a Visiting Fellow at the Stanford University Center for Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law in 2011-12. His current research focuses on classical and early modern encyclopedic literature in the Islamic world, and on particularly on the diverse forms of large-scale compilation during the Mamluk Empire (1250-1517). In addition to his academic scholarship, Muhanna writes extensively on contemporary cultural and political affairs in the Middle East for several publications, including The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, The Guardian, The National, Mideast Monitor, World Politics Review, Bidoun, and Transition.
Lisa Parks, Professor of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara Dr. Parks is a Professor and former Department Chair of Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara, and an affiliate of the Department of Feminist Studies. She also currently serves as the Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at UC Santa Barbara. Parks has conducted research on the uses of satellite, computer, and television technologies in different TRANSnational contexts. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and engages with fields such as geography, art, international relations, and communication studies. She has published on topics ranging from secret satellites to drones, from the mapping of orbital space to political uses of Google Earth, from mobile phone use in post-communist countries to the visualization of communication infrastructures. Parks is the author of Cultures in Orbit: Satellites and the Televisual, and Coverage: Aero-Orbital Media After 9/11 (forthcoming), and is working on a third book entitled Mixed Signals: Media Infrastructures and Cultural Geographies. She has co-edited three books: Down to Earth: Satellite Technologies, Industries and Cultures, Planet TV, and UNDEAD TV, and is working on a fourth entitled Signal Traffic: Studies of Media Infrastructures. She has served on the editorial boards of 10 peer-reviewed academic journals and has contributed to many anthologies and edited collections.
Raqs Media Collective, Jeebesh Bagchi, (b. 1965, New Delhi, India), Monica Narula, (b. 1969, New Delhi, India), Shuddhabrata Sengupta, (b. 1968, New Delhi, India) Raqs Media Collective have been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces, locates them in the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory — often taking the form of installations, online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai-CSDS, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series. Raqs is a word in Persian, Arabic and Urdu and means the state that whirling dervishes enter into when they whirl. It is also a word used for dance. Selected Exhibitions: 2012 Art Unlimited, Art Basel 2012 solo exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery, London 2012 group exhibition of billboards around the city of Birmingham (UK), Ikon Gallery & BCU 2012 solo exhibition Frith Street Gallery 2010 The Things That Happen When Falling In Love, a solo exhibition at Baltic Centre, Gateshead 2010 The Capital of Accumulation, a solo exhibition at Project 88, Mumbai 2010 a group exhibition at 29th Sao Paulo Biennial 2010, Brazil 2010 a group exhibition at 8th Shanghai Biennale, China 2010 The New Décor, a touring group exhibition at Hayward Gallery, London; The Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow 2009 The Surface of Each Day is a Different Planet, a solo exhibition at Art Now Lightbox, Tate Britain, London 2009 When The Scales Fall From Your Eyes, a solo exhibition at Ikon, Birmingham (UK) 2009 Escapement, a solo exhibition at Frith Street Gallery 2008 Co-curators for Manifesta 7, Trentino
Nishant Shah, Founder and Director of Research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore Dr. Shah's doctoral work at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, examines the production of a Technosocial Subject at the intersections of law, Internet technologies and everyday cultural practices in India. As an Asia Scholarship Fellow (2008-2009), he also initiated a study that looks at what goes into the making of an IT City in India and China. He is the series editor for a three-year collaborative project on "Histories of the Internet(s) in India" that maps nine alternative histories that promote new ways of understanding the technological revolution in the country. Nishant’s current research engagement since 2009 has been with the possibilities of social transformation and political participation in young peoples’ use of digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts of the Global South. Working with a community of 150 young people and other stakeholders in Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, he has co-edited a 4-volume book titled Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? and an information kit titled D:Coding Digital Natives. Nishant writes regularly for The Indian Express and GQ India to give a public voice to the academic research. He is currently also engaged in a project that seeks to articulate the intersections of digital technologies and social justice within the higher education space in India. Nishant designs Internet and Society courses for undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of Communication, Media, Development, Art, Cultural Studies, and STS, in and outside of India. He is a founding member of the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium and has also worked as a cyberculture consultant for various spaces like Yahoo!, Comat Technologies, Khoj Studios, and Nokia. Source: http://dmlcentral.net/node/4815
Ravi Sundaram, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Sarai Ravi Sundaram’s work rests at the intersection of the post-colonial city and contemporary media experiences. As media technology and urban life have intermingled in the post-colonial world, new challenges have emerged for contemporary cultural theory. Sundaram has looked at the phenomenon that he calls ‘pirate modernity’, an illicit form of urbanism that draws from media and technological infrastructures of the post-colonial city. Sundaram’s essays have been translated into various languages in India, Asia, and Europe. His current research deals with urban fear after media modernity, where he looks at the worlds of image circulation after the mobile phone, ideas of transparency and secrecy, and the media event. Sundaram was one of the initiators of the Centre’s Sarai programme which he co-directs with his colleague Ravi Vasudevan. He has co-edited the critically acclaimed Sarai Reader series: The Public Domain (2001), The Cities of Everyday Life, (2002), Shaping Technologies (2003), Crisis Media (2004) and Turbulence (2006). His other publications include Pirate Modernity: Media Urbanism in Delhi (2009). Two of his other volumes are No Limits: Media Studies from India (Oxford University Press, 2012) and Delhi’s Twentieth Century (forthcoming, OUP).
Tiziana Terranova, Associate Professor, Sociology of Communications, Coordinator, PhD programme in Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World, Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘L'Orientale’ Tiziana Terranova's Her research interests lie in the area of the culture, science, technology and the economy from the perspective of the intersection of power, knowledge and subjectivation. She is the author of Corpi Nella Rete, Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age, and numerous essays on new media published in journals such as New Formations, Ctheory, Angelaki, Social Text, Theory, Culture and Society, and Culture Machine. She is a member of the editorial board of the journal Studi Culturali (Il Mulino) and Theory, Culture and Society, a regular participant to the grassroots seminars of the Italian nomadic university ‘uninomade’ and occasionally also a writer on matters of new media for the Italian newspaper Il manifesto.
Nigel Thrift, Vice-Chancellor, University of Warwick Professor Thrift is one of the world’s leading human geographers and social scientists. His current research spans a broad range of interests, including international finance; cities and new forms of political life; non-representational theory; affective politics; and the history of time. During his academic career Professor Thrift has been the recipient of a number of distinguished academic awards including the Scottish Geographical Society Gold Medal in 2008, the Royal Geographical Society Victoria Medal for contributions to geographic research in 2003 and Distinguished Scholarship Honors from the Association of American Geographers in 2007. He is a Fellow of the British Academy. Prior to becoming the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Warwick, he was the Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Research and Head of the Division of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Oxford. Source: http://liftconference.com/people/nigel-thrift

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-networked-affects-glocal-effects

Who’s that Friend?

nishant — 2012-11-04T06:46:10Z

If you are reading this, stand on your right foot and start hopping while waving your hands in the air and shouting, “I am crazy” at the top of your voice. If you don’t, your Facebook account will be compromised, your passwords will be automatically leaked, and somebody will use your credit card to smuggle ice across international waters.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express and in the Financial Express on October 7, 2012.

We have all received messages of this order — if not exactly this much silliness — on the various social networks that we belong to. These are messages that warn us that our security is breached, our data is unsafe, that our transactions are public, and all the sensitive information we have trusted to the different platforms on the Web, is now up for grabs.

The best of us have fallen prey to such messages of alarm, and have “shared”, “liked”, or “retweeted” them, and in retrospect felt foolish when we realised that the message was just a hoax. For those of us who are savvy with the ways of the Web, even when we are sending these messages, there is an instinctive feeling that something is wrong, but we do it nevertheless, joining the ranks of conspiracy theorists who make this world enchanting and mysterious in its quotidian banality. These messages are common, harmless and habit-forming — they spread, even when we recognise that they are not completely plausible — because we have formed habits online, which we immediately perform, before rational thought or reason sets in.

At a recent Thought Marathon on “Habits of Living”, supported by Brown University and organised by the Centre for Internet and Society, a handful of scholars, artists, practitioners and researchers examined how such habits shape the world of the digital. One of the concerns about such habits of viral dissemination is about the design of trust and the nature of friendship in our social networking systems. How do you trust information online? What is the information that uses you as a conduit, disseminating through you into the network? What role do we play in keeping these messages alive, by spreading them, by talking about them, by retracting and discussing them, giving them more value than they could muster on their own?

At the centre of all these questions is the idea of proximity, intimacy and friendship. Within the social Web, we have all become “friends”. The six degrees of separation have fallen — every lurker is a potential friend, just waiting to be authenticated by a system, tagged in a photo, connected by a weak link of interest or closeness. These friends are our social safety nets on the Net. They give us a sense of belonging and safety when we are committing our intensely personal and private data on the publically private digital platforms. Despite knowing that information we produce online is going to be archived in servers over which we have no control, in forms and formats that will outlive our social relations and indeed, our very lives, we constantly produce data that quantifies and marks our social relationships. We commit secrets and private thoughts to “friends” in the network.

However, friendship within the social network is a non-reciprocal one-way transmission of secrets. The covenant of digital friendship on Facebook is that we pass on a secret to a friend, knowing well, that the act of passing on the secret expects a betrayal of that secret. The information that we submit to somebody to show our trust, has already been witnessed, stored, archived and mapped by the code and algorithms that make that system. Which is why, we live in constant fear of our data being compromised by the “system” which is both vulnerable and fragile. Which is why, we are continually bombarded by warnings of glitches in the matrix, outside of our control, reminding us of the fearful precariousness of being on the Web.

And yet, the trolling messages and the way they spread, remind us that in the system, it is the “friend” who is invariably the person who puts us in danger. There are almost no documented cases of a system endangering the person who shares information on the social Web. The leak in the network is always done through a human actor — somebody who is close to us, somebody who we trust — who invariably passes on that secret to another “friend” in the network. Similarly, the chances of your machine getting infected by a random virus by a stranger are very low. The people who infect you are those you trust, because you receive information from them without questioning it. An attachment in the email, a link to a dodgy site, instructions asking for personal details are all safe because we are naturally suspicious of strangers bearing candy. But when these questions come from our “friends”, we drop our guards and accept viruses, share personal data, give out compromising pictures, putting ourselves in conditions of threat.

This is the fundamental paradox of the social Web — that those who we trust, are generally the primary sources who put us in danger, and yet, because we think of them as “friends”, we continue to trust them, while remaining suspicious of the systems that are far more benign than the humans in the network.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/financial-express-october-23-2012-nishant-shah-who-s-that-friend

Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like

nishant — 2012-10-23T10:13:36Z

There aren’t always rational explanations for the ways in which we behave on networks. While there are trend spotting sciences and pattern recognition methods which try to make sense of how and why we behave in these strange ways on networks, they generally fail to actually help us understand why we do the things that we do when we are connected.

Nishant Shah's column was originally published in FirstPost on October 12, 2012.

Recently, in a workshop on ‘Habits of Living’, organised by Brown University (USA) and the Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), a collection of researchers, artists, practitioners and educators came together to understand how networks form these habits that we take for granted in our digital lives.

Habits are unthinking, visceral actions that we do for survival within a network. They are things that we do without even realising that we are doing them – Liking a post, retweeting a tweet, sharing an interesting link, adding pictures on an album. These are all things we do without realising that they distract us from our work, need time, energy, and attention which we could have spent on other tasks. Instead of looking at these as actions which can be rationally explained, we might start looking at them as habits that shape the ways in which we trust, transmit and treasure information online.

Networks are everywhere these days. They are the things that we study and the lens through which we study the world around us. In the last week, I have faced three separate instances that reminded me of how we live in networked societies.

There was the scare that the private messages on facebook have suddenly turned public and available on our timelines for everybody to view. The social network, these simulated fortresses of friendships and trust, suddenly became a place of danger. Conversations which were committed as acts of secrecy emerged as potentially compromising public acts. The network was in my face, blinking red, making me suddenly aware of the fact that the network is not merely something I can take for granted. It is something that works seamlessly for most of the time, is actually something that I cope with, negotiate with, and teach myself to live with, without realising it. The relationship I have with my social network is a lot of work but it gets explained away as ‘habits’ , which are such an everyday part of my digital life that I have stopped looking at it as work.

The second incident was when a friend complained about the hostility she faces when she is not on any of the popular social networks. As an outsider, who refuses by choice, to belong to either Facebook or Google Plus or many of the activity networks (like Instagram, for instance) around, she constantly gets a raised eyebrow, a pointed question and a look of incredulity when she confesses it to somebody. More often than not, she gets treated like digital pariahs, social outcast who is no longer ‘relevant’ in the current scheme of things. She was telling me about how hard she has to work to convince people that she belongs to the communities, even though not to these networks. And how, she is constantly afraid that while she plugs out, people might be saying things about her that she might want to hear but never get to know.

The third is perhaps more common than we would agree to but it deals with multiple identities online. In the world of Wikipedia, there are people who use sock-puppets and meat-puppets, using multiple avatars and identities to make their point, to fake support for their arguments, and to build false consensus in order to win the edit wars that they are fighting. These puppets, that stand in as surrogate structures of real people, are not mere surface structures. They are fleshed out, have personalities, have styles and identities which the users invest in quite passionately. While the community frowns upon these false identities, and indeed social network platforms encourage us to shun all role-play and stick to our one authenticated social identity, these flourish and often gain a life of their own as a shadow double of the user. And yet, everybody knows that these identities are a matter of habits, a collection of ‘things that we do’ which emerge as important actors in the networks.

These habits might offer us an explanation of why we participate in memes, sharing and disseminating information virally across the interwebz. They might also give us an insight into why we troll and transmit viruses and spam, to friends in the networks, even when we do not mean to. They might help us understand why we are suffering from such an information fatigue, even when we have smart algorithms and softwares constantly sifting through the information web and filtering customised results for us.

The idea of the network as a series of habits opens up a new way to thinking about all the three instances, which I described above. It shows that the networks become invisible in our everyday practice, thus creating a condition of false crisis, because they are simultaneously transparent and opaque. It shows that networks are not ‘natural’ but take a lot of effort and energy to sustain – something that digital natives might take to easily but are not kind to digital immigrants, settlers or non-inhabitants, who cannot invest as much time in their networked lives, thus creating new demography of exclusion.

And it shows that the network, despite the much acclaimed wisdom of the crowds, can be easily manipulated by those who learn how to fake conditions of life and living within the simulated networked environments. And it would explain why, if I end this column by asking you to go to Google Images and search for “completely wrong”, partly out of curiosity, partly because of expectation, and partly because of habit, you will run the search strings anyway, in the process, supporting the network but also reinforcing your habits of information search and connections.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/first-post-tech-oct-12-2012-nishant-shah-digital-habits-how-and-why-we-tweet-share-and-like

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa

alok — 2012-10-09T05:02:16Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

Maesy Angelina, an independent researcher from Jakarta, Indonesia was the first speaker with her presentation "Subversive Banality: Global Celebrities and Citizenship Practices on Twitter". Angelina first draws our attention to the way we tend to celebrate social media outlets like Twitter as being a site of political and activist resistance (Arab Spring). However, the reality of the situation is that the highest trending topics on Twitter throughout the world are about celebrities. Twitter users, including those in Indonesia where Angelina’s research focuses, are not tweeting about contemporary violence in society (at least directly). While some scholars have suggested that this is indicative of the mindlessness of the masses, Angelina wants to complexify this narrative and offer that perhaps the masses have different tactics to contest notions of citizenship that are not intelligible from a traditional 'activist' or 'academic' schema.

Angelina focuses on a series of protests and debates about international pop sensation Lady Gaga performing in Indonesia from March - June 2012. In reviewing the tweets generated during this time, Angelina finds that most of these messages have nothing to do with Lady Gaga and often include perspectives on culture, nature, and other topics pertaining to citizenship. For example: "Music is universal, but gyrating moves and revealing clothes are not". Angelina argues that the (international) celebrity presents an opportunity, a site by which Indonesian people are able to contest notions of citizenship. She presents the ‘banality’ of this celebrity discourse as actually subversive. She images this discourse as a way of the masses asserting agency.

Angelina’s presentation sparked an important conversation. Most notably, participants were concerned with what it means to view Twitter as a legitimate network by which to make these claims? Is Twitter really representative of the appropriate network to analyse these topics? Conceptual and methodological challenges arise here: what tools do we use to analyse new forms of media when we currently do not have the apparatus and training methods to do so? Participants also noted a serious need for historicity in these types of analyses. While we tend to fetishise the ‘digital’ or ‘social media’ ‘turn,’ we have to acknowledge histories — including fan culture in this case — that shape and structure the advent of these new discourses. Participants called for Angelina to ground her claims within histories of models of citizenship — particularly citizenships based on consumption.

I found Angelina’s presentation and notion of banal subversiveness quite provocative. However, I think we have to all think more critically about what it means that many of these international celebrities that initiate this dialogue are white and American. Considering that citizenship is already a fraught and contested category within formerly colonised areas, how do we incorporate an analysis of (neo)imperialism within our frameworks? How is the (racialised, gendered, etc.) body of the ‘foreign’ celebrity different to that of the ‘local’ celebrity? While it is important to acknowledge the increasing instability of these dichotomies and concede the interconnectivity of global system(s), fundamental questions of power, inequality, and colonialism cannot be neglected in this discussion.

Oliver Lerone Schulz from the Post Media Lab in Lueneburg, Germany spoke next. Schulz’s approach to theory is unique due to his history in traditionally non-academic spaces which generate and approach theory in fundamentally different ways. He is committed to a conception of media that is not fettered by technological media. At its core, Schulz’s presentation sought to assert a conceptual schema, an epistemology to address questions of the visual. He reminds us how questions of the image and the visual have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary theory and have come to represent an unsolved problem or anomaly. Schulz utilises a paradigm of globalisation to grapple with this dilemma.

Schulz asks us how is globalisation visualized? What does it mean to map out globalisation? Schulz reviews relevant literature on the visual domain establishing that a visual is a representation of something that cannot be represented in the first place without efforts to visualise it. Following this, we can recognise that globalisation is presented as a diagnosis of our times, but it is also the object which is being diagnosed. His project is an attempt to locate and establish a visual politics which is not only visual to map, characterise and critique globalisation. He draws the audience’s attention to a series of images and asks: to what extent can you see globalisation?

Schulz’s presentation raises important questions on the efficacy of visual analyses and frameworks. Participants agree that the visual turn is in crisis, and yet why do we still insist on reading the visual? Nishant and Akansha pushed the debate further suggesting that globalisation can be viewed as a series of images. More than the visual itself, it is the stack of visuals that are important. As Nishant reminds us, we need to de-stabilise the visual as the only form that needs to be read. We must read it, but not see it as central.

The most important point that emerged from Schulz’s presentation is that like any other network, globalisation is a diagnosis of the contemporary, but it is also the malady and the cure.

From day one of the conference, the contradictions and paradoxes already emerge.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-globalising-lady-gaga

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T04:38:04Z

The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop hopes to generate dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become the visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

The Habits of Living Thinkathon took off today with an introduction by Wendy Chun, who led us through a critical review of the relevant academic theory on networks and network analysis to help us understand how ubiquitous networks have become as a method of conceptualizing and understanding the world around us.

But why networks? What is the explanatory power of networks?

Networks enable us to map the unmappable, to trace the complex, unimaginably big structures that post-modernism left us with, and to be able to define our own unique existence. However, what becomes apparent is that we seem to be forever mapping, but we are no more able to realize our place within the capitalist society we live in, much less escape it. Rather than resolving them, mapping leads to the generation of more networks, and as we become more proficient at identifying and mapping networks, the more static they become. As Wendy Chun says, "We seem to be forever moving and never changing."

Continuing on, Chun asks: why has the network become the end rather than the beginning of the answer? What drives the impetus to see un-seeable networks everywhere? Chun presents the Thinkathon's theme of Habits of Living as an epistemological framework to grapple with these questions. For Chun, the 'habit' works as a particularly useful heuristic to unpack and deconstruct some of the central components of the network. A habit is something that is acquired through time and then forgotten about as it moves from voluntary to involuntary. In fact, a habit can start as something we do and become something we are. With this in mind, we are asked to think: how has the network become habitualised and what are the implications of this? What is the importance of time in the mapping and lived experiences of networks? In looking at networks from this meta-level, we can ask: why do we think networks make us forever moving but never changing?

Chun's presentation is received well, but one concern gets noted early on. This discourse of the 'network' privileges a very particular Western subjectivity, one which may not be applicable to collectivist cultures where communities have always existed with network structures. What becomes apparent is that we need to start collecting alternate discussions and input from a non-Western understanding of a network in order to truly understand what it is to live in a network society.

Following Wendy's talk, Nishant Shah continues the discussion on networks by contributing several other crucial epistemological interventions to begin our consideration of the Habits of Living. Nishant begins by asserting that we — perhaps naively — want to believe that networks have the innate ability to generate change. The way we commonly view networks, especially in a post-Arab Spring world, is with the understanding that the network is the panacea for all of our social ills. However, the body of the network is the only problem that the network can solve. That is to say, the network can only produce an account of itself; it cannot be used to create understandings of things outside of its own boundaries.

Nishant briefly reviews the recent "Northeast Exodus" from the global tech city of Bengaluru, in which the dissemination of SMS messages within various networks caused a panic. The knowledge that moved through the networks terrified people before real information on the events could be consumed. Nishant shows how events like these cause people to claim that something has gone wrong with the network, which is particularly worrying for the state, as how can they fix an issue in a network that they cannot see? Further unpacking this scenario, Nishant shows how the minute the network becomes visible, it is a crisis.

Participants expressed concern about the use of 'network' in this discourse. What actually does the 'network' describe — can it stand as a heuristic for so many different relations? Additionally, what is the truth that the network seeks to expose or reveal? Is there an actual truth that can be unearthed through the network?

Nishant responded that many of these questions will hopefully be answered over the next four days of the Thinkathon — and we are definitely looking forwards to it!

Continue to follow our live blog coverage of the Habits of Living Thinkathon for more thought-provoking discussion!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Wendy Chun on Friends

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:18:59Z

Wendy Chun talked to us today about what it means to be a friend. She began with a brief overview of network theory, with a focus on the dilemmas of the constant mapping. Moving on, she asked us to think about how networks are related to habits, as habits focus us on the duration of events. This is important for the understanding of networks, as networks require the constant generation of associated events that seem stable. Wendy then asked us to think about the difference between communities and networks, and helped us to think about the extent that networks are imagined (in Benedict Anderson’s sense of the imagined). Throughout this discussion, she continues to come back to the theme of “you,” the idea that networks enable us not only to see ourselves and our place in relation to other nodes in the network, but that simultaneous access of a network, a moment of “we,” will actually cause the network to fall into crisis,

Using this “you” framework, Wendy moves onto a discussion of the internet and how it has moved from being seen as a anonymous free space to a semi-private space where freedom stems from private authentication by others in your network. It is at this point that she asks us how we understand the idea of “friend”; are friendships mutual bonds created for support in times of crisis, or are they sometimes one-way affections where the act of requesting friendship creates the connection? How much has friendship become about broadcasting our connections—our place in the network?

Cyber friendship, especially in the Facebook understanding of “friend,” becomes a method that we can use to understand our strange relationship with safety on online spaces—we desire security, and want to trust and authenticate our relationships with friends, but by pursuing this we can often put our friends into danger, or at least into realms that may not always be seen as “safe”, which now is often interpreted as “private.” For example, by “liking” a friend’s link on Facebook, we create tangible information for Facebook to collect and use about both our friends and ourselves. This method of capturing data only works when you are enmeshed in a network of friends. If our need for safety/privacy is what places in danger on the Internet, it is not security that tames networks by personalizing them that will help us; instead, we need to understand and accept that intimacy and danger in online spaces go hand-in-hand.

As a finishing note, Wendy describes to us a phishing attack that she suffered. After clicking a link sent to her by a friend on Facebook, she sent phishing spam to all of her friends—all of the members of her network. This event created a moment of understanding for her, as she realized that her spam messages reminded her friends that they were part of her network, and that she liked them enough to put them at risk.

Participant discussion began with a focus on how theory becomes implicated into networks, and how networks can be used to give oversights of theory. Participants asked: what does theorizing networks do to the networks, and the members in the networks? Can Facebook be seen as theory, particularly in the ideas of the existence of events without witnesses and how friendships are created and understood?

Participants also pointed out that it is wrong to be suspicious of organizations like Facebook, because it is not Facebook that betrays you but your friends. This is the implicit agreement of Facebook friendship—the agreement to be friends implicates the transmission of secrecy/vulnerability. Machines cannot betray, but humans, friends, can and often do, even in ways that may be involuntary.

Further discussion focused on both how friendships and application suggestions give us the ability to understand how we are building and presenting ourselves. This two-way communication with technologies that implicate networks puts us into a state of permanent crisis where we must continue to be active to connect, as connecting becomes the main activity of becoming and staying networked. This moved into a discussion on the creation of traces of networks that are constantly in motion, and constantly on the verge of disappearing.

Wendy’s discussion of friendship as an often one-way activity, particularly on Facebook where one member must request friendship with another, was a completely new way of thinking about the essence of friendship for me. How much does this cyber, “Facebook” method of creating friendship through the declaration of association cut into the real world? Are nonhuman agreements of friendship (i.e.: Facebook friends) reflections of significant real-world events, in the sense that they are often a nonhuman promise to pursue future friendship in the physical world that is made real through its broadcast on the network? What does this mean for real-world meetings that don’t cumulate in “friending”? What happens to the structure of real-world friendship if the promise of friendship that was broadcasted is never followed through? What does “defriending” mean? What does defriending do to networks?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-wendy-chun-on-friends

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 4 Live Blog: Namita A Malhotra on Amateur Pornography

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:23:05Z

We found Namita Malhotra’s presentation on amateur video porn to be particularly stimulating. However, she begins her discussion not with porn but with the Sumeet Mixie, the first mixie made for Indian food. At the time that the Sumeet Mixie had its heyday, it was largely inaccessible to most Indians, even those in the mid-level middle class. The mixie, Namita claimed, was a representation of a crisis of the middle class in India in the 1980s, a representation of the progress that was promised to them through Nehru’s development programs that was still largely out of reach for the average Indian. Namita draws parallels between a picture of her father, a young engineer, with Nehru and the famous picture of Nehru with the Santhali tribal girl, who, at some point after the famous shot of her inaugurating a dam, placed a garland around Nehru and was subsequently ostracized from her village on the grounds that she had become married to him. Namita’s father’s life was also heavily influenced by Nehru and his call for engineers, as he was pressured to become an engineer when he had little interest in doing so.

Both the lives of her father and the Santhali girl were changed by the actions that they were asked to perform for the good of the country. Indians across the country were pushed to change their life, their dreams, and their habits in return for progress, for development, especially that of the Western kind. The reward was liberalization and a move towards consumerism, a duty that was placed upon the middle class as an activity of their earned progression but remained largely impossible. This struggle between the expectation to consume as a function of their hard-earned middle class status and their inability to do so was just one of many crises of the 1980s Indian middle class. Namita describes this period using two iconic phrases: “Life was hard and slow” and “a long afternoon of underdevelopment.”

Moving on from discussions of Nehru and the middle class, Namita presents to us her work, jointly titled: Nehru’s Technologically Enabled Future or It Could Be Me. She enters into the discussion of amateur porn in India by showing us a 2-3 minutes video clip of the women’s section of a bus. The women are standing or sitting, and their activity barely changes over the period of the video. The eroticism, she suggests, could be in the suggestion of activities that could take place. It is the seemingly non-erotic images in India that have become some of the most defining features of amateur porn in India, both currently and in the past.

In past decades, the consumption of porn largely took place in communal male spaces. However, the event of a somewhat non-erotic clip of a teenage couple negotiating the terms of oral sex being auctioned on a website led to what Namita calls a “moment of sexual eureka”: the realization that amateur clips could be shared online. This led to a flood of amateur porn being circulated and shared through online networks. This eventually prompted a response from the state, though the response was largely one of confusion towards who or what was really responsible—the individual, the network or the technology? The state, of course, is not afraid of the content of the clips but the networks and connections that they cannot see nor trace.

Namita then moves on to a discussion of content of much amateur Indian porn. Much of the media that is created and consumed on mobile phones is grainy and low resolution, and even higher-resolution image clips tend to be highly un-staged with little to no focus on performance. There is a creation of anonymity through the way many clips are filmed, with one participant holding the camera and focuses being placed on body parts instead of faces. Where, then, does the eroticism come from? Namita argues that the familiarity and ability to relate and be present as a viewer in these amateur videos creates its own eroticism. The same can be said about the realness of videos whose purpose is not performance of sexual acts by ideal bodies.

This creation of eroticism indicates possible discussion of surrogacy. Erotica stands in for sex, masturbation stands in for sex, etc. Surrogacy may be useful in completing this conversation about eroticism and Indian amateur porn.

Participants were unsure about the connection between Nehru’s paradigms and amateur porn, and felt that it needed a bit more fleshing out. Discussion then moved towards ideas of transgressive epistemologies, and whether or not the culture and networks situated around amateur porn where sites of transgressive practices. There was debate around what the purpose of the transgression is—recovering ground in visual culture? Gaining control over one’s corporeality? Ultimately, Namita was wary of invoking a transgressive framework around these cultures, and put forth pleasure as a more interesting and useful frame, as there is always a sexual layer involved. She felt that a transfessive framework may be limiting in the exploration of these cultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-4-amateur-photography

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Rijuta Mehta on Militant Hindu Nationalist Networks

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:34:59Z

Rijuta Mehta talked to us today about networks of Hindu militant nationalism, which she has termed “Hindutva” networks. Through her back in cultural media studies, she has become interested in the creation and existence of non-citizens as well as the interaction between the state and the stateless person. Using the larger framework of non-citizenship and the media, Rijuta has been trying to make sense of the militant Hindutva movements that are abound in India.

Rijuta argues that a good way of understanding these movements is by using a network framework, particularly one that recognizes the integral part that is played by interaction between the various networks and that these networks are characterized by the politics of non-citizenship—that is, those that are excluded from the Hindutva networks are non-citizens. Mehta asks us: What is the form of these networks, and what do they have to do with the persecution of non-citizens in India? To what extent does Hindutva make the form of the network visible in political society and political violence? How do networks of dispossession and externalism give and take form? What is the form of the Hindutva network(s)?

To help answer some of these questions, Mehta walks us through a brief history of the growth of Hindutva groups in India, and describes to us how their characterization has changed over time. Hindutva has moved from being a collection of networks of those who identify as Hindu to a multilevel movement known for its violence against Muslims and those it views as non-citizens. The Hindutva organization is characterized by many branches of networks, which has allowed for the expression of many different beliefs and ideologies within the overarching framework of Hindutva. However, though the networks may appear to be decentralized, the groups are still dependent on a hierarchal stratification of central nodes of power. This complex structure of authority allows for niches for petty/local sovereigns.

Mehta points out at this point that the public often sees networks as being emancipatory, but in the example of the Hindutva, this has to be questioned. We should expect to see networks being created in instances of mediated rule and patron-clientalism, both of which lead to the structure of civil society being characterized by the creation of multiple networks centralized around middlemen. Networked associations such as these tend to enable higher incidences of violence, and can even lead to long-term entrenched violence. Consequently, networks should not be seen as being ultimately emancipatory, as they can be the cause of more established structures of oppression.

Participants were quick to discuss the use of the word “Hindutva” when describing these networks. It was pointed out that in a Supreme Court of India ruling, Hindutva was defined as “the way of life of the Indian people and the Indian culture or ethos,” and that Hindutva could encompass any type of Hinduism. Discussion arose over whether or not there are non-problematic Hindutva networks. Many participants argued that though Hindutva is now associated with the militant right-wing, it may still be incorrect to called the violent or aggressive Hindu nationalist movement Hindutva because the borders between the militant Hindutva networks and various other non-militant or even non-nationalistic Hindu networks are not clear.

Bringing it back to habits and living, discussions were brought up about the similarities between Hinduism as a lifestyle, as being part or a guiding structure to habits and living, and Christianity as a lifestyle. In many places in the USA, many people who are not orthodoxly religious still perform religious activities simply because it is part of their habit and lifestyles, and those practices are so deeply engrained into the culture and everyday life of those Americans. This is where the term Hindutva becomes problematic as simply a term to describe militant nationalist networks, as Hindutva can also be seen as a structure of everyday life for many Indians.

I thought the discussion about the use of the term Hindutva was very important, as the use of an all-encompassing term with unclear boundaries can vilify groups or individuals who do not identify with the popular understanding of Hindutva as a militant nationalist group. I also thought that the point about mediated rule and patron-clientalism is a highly interesting avenue for the research of networks and how network structures interact with the state and the political sphere, as they can influence both the development of a legitimate political regime as well as the creation of citizen and non-citizen identities.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-militant-hindu-nationalist-networks

Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 3 Live Blog: Eivind Rossaak on Archives in Motion

Jadine Lannon — 2012-10-09T06:39:46Z

Eivind Rossaak talks to us today about Archives in Motion, and how networks, especially those created though interaction with technology and social media, have consequences for the way we conceptualize the idea of the archive. He runs us through a brief introduction to archival theory to helps us understand how the purpose, structure, and function of archives and their artifacts have changed over time, and leads us into an exploration of contemporary developments and discourses on archives. Currently, Rossaak is interested in themes of counter-memory practices, software vs. memory, and whether or not social media is a form of archives in motion.

When approaching social media as forms of archives in motion, Rossaak calls on us to think differently about how we understand archival activities. Using the example of Youtube, Rossaak reminds us that we can’t just think of Youtube as a video archive or a repository of confessionary personal information, but instead we should begin to see Youtube as a platform of networked documents, and a site of network creation. Youtube videos are essentially linked; they are not just video logs, but emerge as the expressions of nodes in a complex network database.

Eivind calls upon the example of the Boxxybabe meme to help us understand this new way of being networked. The Boxxybabe video did not just go viral, it cut across many spheres of human interaction and activity, to the point where the identities and activities created by the Boxxybabe meme were experienced in both the online and offline worlds. The Boxxybabe video becomes a technological article in itself, as it testifies to multiple networks. Further, it represents new forms of associations created between objects that are both human and non-human, and motions towards a cyborg turn in the way we become human through the extension of human lives in cybernetic networks. The networks created by this plasticity between the human and nonhuman leads to new methods of social memory creation, and therefore new understandings of archives in motion.

Rossaak’s presentation prompts an ardent response from the participants. Participants discussed issues of anxiety associated with memory failure and how this leads to the desire to preserve. This leads into an exploration of what an archive really is and whether archives require institutionality or can be understood as personal. In this understanding, there is no need for counter-archives because archives are being built everywhere, all the time, and this facilitates the understanding of social media as archives. Participants agree that further study should be pursued around this concept.

Other issues are brought up around subjects that were not addressed in the summary of archival theory, mainly around ideas of locationality and objectivity in the collection of information for archives, selectivity of information that goes into archives, the labor of the archive, and the implication of locationality in the understanding and function of archives.

A large amount of further discussion is centered on the human and non-human elements of archive and network creation, and the activity of becoming human through the creation of non-human networks. Nishant Shah, our facilitator, sums up the main theme of this discussion with the following tweet: “If our idea of the human is mitigated through the non-human, then all attempts at being human will always be about being networked.”

Personally, I thought the concept of archives in motion was incredibly interesting, and I would like to push the ideas of the motion and a recreation of what it is to be human a bit further. I wonder if these structures of social memory and complex offline/online networks that are created through interaction with social media actually represent a movement not only towards our abandonment of the concept of an event or object of being rooted in time, only able to be understood and documented once it has ended (therefore allowing us, using a linear structure of time, to understand it by viewing its beginning point and end point), but also towards viewing ourselves as being in motion, as well. What does it mean to be a human in motion? Does it mean the abandonment of linear temporality? Am I able to see myself, my identity, as not rooted in time but as a node in a network of my self? Can personal conceptualizations of “self” be networked? Is this what it means to be a human in motion?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-3-archives-in-motion