Centre for Internet and Society

Subject To Technology

nishant — 2009-07-06T12:06:10Z

This paper is an attempt to examine the production of illegalities with reference to cyberspace, to make a symptomatic reading of new conditions within which citizenships are enacted, in the specific context of contemporary India. Looking at one incident each, of cyber-pornography and cyber-terrorism, the paper sets out to look at the State’s imagination of the digital domain, the positing of the ‘good’ cyber citizen, and the production of new relationships between the state and the subject. This essay explores the ambiguities, the dilemmas and the questions that arise when Citizens become Subjects, not only to the State but also to the technologies of the State. The paper first appeared in the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Journal.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/iacs%20article.pdf

Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:14:45Z

The essay was published in the European Journal of English Studies in a special issue on Multimedia Narratives. Emerging as an epistemological category with the rise of the Information and Communication Technologies, the cyborg leads to a complex set of negotiations about the production of a cyborg identity. This paper looks at the cyborg as a translator, to see the new mechanics of translation that come into play as the cyborg straddles multiple systems of making meaning and producing itself. Analysing the new social networking systems that have emerged in the last few years, the paper posits the cyborg as not only an author of translated texts but also as produced in the processes of translation. Focusing on one particular instance of the production of a cyborg identity, exploring the various players involved in the process of cyborgification and the material consequences of imagining the cyborg, the paper seeks to analyse the new incomprehensibility or illegalities that the cyborg, in its role as a translator, gets produced within.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/material%20cyborgs%20ejes.pdf

The Curious Incident of the People at the Mall

nishant — 2008-12-14T12:13:09Z

The first flash mob in India, in 2003, though short-lived and quickly declared illegal, brought to fore the idea that technology is constructing new sites of defining public participation and citizenship rights, forcing the State to recognise them as political collectives. As India emerges as an ICT enabled emerging economy, new questions of citizenship, participatory politics, social networking, citizenship, and governance are being posed. In the telling of the story of the flash-mob, doing a historical review of technology and access, and doing a symptomatic reading of the subsequent events that followed the ban, this paper evaluates the different ways in which the techno-narratives of an ‘India Shining’ campaign of prosperity and economic growth, are accompanied by various spaces of political contestation, mobilisation and engagement that determine the new public spheres of exclusion, marked by the aesthetics of cyberspatial matrices and technology enabled conditions of governance.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/the%20curious%20incident%20of%20the%20people%20at%20the%20mall%20%20ACS%20Crossroads.pdf

Once Upon a Flash

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:25:38Z

The essay was published as a part of Sarai Annual Reader titled 'Turbulence' and explores the aesthetics, politics and form of the flashmobs and their manifestation in India. It looks at the potentials of the flashmob to produce turbulent physical spaces and identities and their encounter with legalities. The essay is also available at http://www.sarai.net/journal/06_pdf/03/04_nishant_shah.pdf

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Sarai%20turbulence.pdf

Network as a Unit of CMC

nishant — 2009-07-07T06:09:00Z

The paper was presented at the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Conference, on a panel on the Digital DNA. With digital globalization producing cities, spaces, and identities heavily mediated by digital technologies, the Database becomes the interface through which the state regulates and controls cities and bodies to produce new conditions of citizenship. The Network links these databases to produce spaces, cities, bodies, and nation states in new transnational orbits. The Archive serves as a way through which belonging to these spaces and subjectivities become possible. As the Database adopts fluid architecture, mixing different set of informational archives to produce new identities, the Network emerges as an infinite, interminable set of legitimised objects, identities and spaces in new politics of power and economy.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/Network%20as%20a%20unit%20of%20CMC.pdf

(e)Governance by selection

nishant — 2008-11-03T20:37:21Z

The paper was presented at the Technology, Governance, Citizenship conference at the Indian Institute of Bangalore, and explores the processes of urban restructuration, positing of new digital citizenship, and the way in which technologised globalisation is implicated in the process. Looking at the instance of the Sabarmati Riverfront Development Project in Ahmedabad - a part of the Mega City project in India, the paper looks at the tropes of desire, ambition and aspiration as ways by which people relate and belong to circuits of technology but are often made invisible in the popular rhetoric of e-governance policies in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/governance%20by%20selection.pdf

Nishant Shah

nishant — 2010-02-05T11:15:33Z

This section contains the different essays which have been published over a period of five years, ranging from questions of Internet pornography, digital subjectivities, cyber communities, techno-social conditions, Internet technology and legality, urban restructuration and IT, globalisation, gender and digital forms like blogging, digital video, social networking systems and MMORPGs.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant

CIS Publications

nishant — 2010-07-28T04:50:15Z

Recent Publications in the field by the staff and members of the Centre for Internet and Society including coverage in the press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis

Cyberspace in its Plurality: Cybercultures Workshop at TISS, Mumbai

nishant — 2008-10-31T10:38:17Z

Cyberspace has become one of the most potent and persuasive metaphors of our times, enveloping and embracing a wide range and scope of areas across disciplines and perspectives. The cybercultures workshop is designed to be an introduction to the multiplicity of cyberspaces and internet technologies and the key questions which have emerged in the almost four decades of cyberculture theory. The workshop is designed across four days; each day dealing with a certain understanding of cyberspace – in its materiality, in its imagination, in its instrumentality – in order to present a comprehensive view of the vast terrain of cyberspace and its intersections with the contemporary worlds we live in.

Workshop @ Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, TISS, Mumbai

The four day workshop at the Centre for Media and Cultural Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, sees CIS engaging with one of the most exciting spaces in the Indian academia; we design and administer an introduction course on cyberspace and its plurality to students of media and cultural studies. The workshop is a part of the Centre for Internet and Society's larger concern on providing a multidisciplinary, multi-media approach towards the internet and contextualising it in India.

Structured on a seminar model, the workshop hopes to bring together the questions in academic debate as well as in the realm of cultural production, for students to understand the internet technologies and cyberspaces as not only important cultural outputs but also crucial forms that shape the world we live in.

Objectives: The four day cybercultures workshop hopes to achieve the following objectives:

To introduce the students to the multiplicity and complexity of ‘cyberspace’.
To introduce ‘cyberspace’ as an epistemological category to emphasise the centrality of cyberspaces in understanding the mechanics of urban survival in the contemporary.
To orient the students towards understanding the textuality of cyberspace; rescuing it from the confines of digital networks and locating it in the transactions of globalization and urbanization in Asia.
To introduce the key debates in cybercultures theory: body, gender, sexuality, authorship, ownership, access and information democratization.

Design: The cybercultures workshop is designed to be conducted over four days with two sessions (of three hours each) per day. Each day is thematically divided to look at a particular idea of cyberspace; the sessions are further sub-divided to introduce a particular perspective on the day’s theme. Each session has its set of individual pre-readings which will serve more as indicators of the stake of the debate rather than as texts around which the class will be centred. The readings shall remain as introductory material, and the class room discussions, while referring to them, will not concentrate on explaining the material.

Day 1: Cyberspace – Form, Textuality and Frameworks

Session 1: Exploring Cyberspace:

Definitions, explanations, locations

Cyberspace and Digital Technologies

Form, text, textuality

Pre-reading: Shah, Nishant, 2005. “Playblog: Pornography, Performance, and Cyberspace” available here

Session 2: The Digital DNA – Database, Networks, Archives

The Database Imperative: Sorting, information, databases

The Networking Impulse: Social Networking Systems and the condition of networking

The Archiving Aspirations: Intention, aspiration and archiving the present

Pre-reading: Manovich, Lev, 2001. “The Database as a Symbolic Form” available here

Day 2: Information technology and human engineering

Session 3 : Gender, Technology and Cyberspace

Gendering of Technology; Gendered Technologies

The body and its boundaries

Physical bodies; Digital selves; cyborgs

Pre-reading: Light, Jennifer, 1999. “When Computers Were Women” available here

Dibbell, Julian, 1991. “A Rape in Cyberspace: How an Evil Clown, a Haitian Trickster, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society” available here

Session 4: Techno-social Worlds

Orkut Deaths : The distributed self

Role playing and identity : The real and the authentic

DPS MMS: The trajectories of selves

Day 3- 4 : Cyberspace and the Infobahn

Session 5: Movie Screening: Good Copy, Bad Copy (followed by discussion)

Session 6: Who owns Cyberspace?

Ownership and Possession

Licensing and access

Open source and the gift economy

Pre-reading: UNCTAD essay on copyright and related questions, available here

Session 7: 18 Reasons Why Piracy is Good for You

The need for piracy

Piracy, theft, and property

Session 8: The Cultural Value of Intellectual Property

The Digital Millenium Rights

The Copy Right and the Copy Left

Open Access and the Creative Commons

Outputs

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis/cyberspace-in-its-plurality-cybercultures-workshop-at-tiss-mumbai

Courses Taught and Designed by CIS

nishant — 2011-08-20T22:47:13Z

not only introduce the area to students but also capture technology as crucial to the practices of producing knowledge and of class-room teaching. CIS hopes to partner with different spaces in Indian and Asian academia to design unique courses, workshops and seminars that are geared towards multidisciplinary understanding of technologies and the technologised nature of the world that we live in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula/courses-taught-and-designed-by-cis

Curricula & Teaching

nishant — 2008-10-11T10:28:26Z

Courses designed and taught by members of the Centre for Internet and Society, at different organisations, universities and institutes

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/curricula

WhatsApps with fireworks, apps with diyas: Why Diwali needs to go beyond digital

nishant — 2015-11-23T13:27:37Z

The idea of a 'digital' Diwali reduces our social relationships to a ledger of give and take. The last fortnight, I have been bombarded with advertisements selling the idea of a “Digital Diwali”. We have become so used to the idea that everything that is digital is modern, better and more efficient.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 22, 2015.

I have WhatsApp messages with exploding fireworks, singing greeting cards that chant mystic sounding messages, an app that turns my smartphone into a flickering diya, another app that remotely controls the imitation LED candles on my windows, an invitation to Skype in for a puja at a friend’s house 3,000 km away, and the surfeit of last minute shopping deals, each one offering a dhamaka of discounts.

However, to me, the digitality of Diwali is beyond the surface level of seductive screens and one-click shopping, or messages of love and apps of light. Think of Diwali as sharing the fundamental logic that governs the digital — the logic of counting. As we explode with joy this festive season, we count our blessings, our loved ones, the gifts and presents that we exchange. If we are on the new Fitbit trend, we count the calories we consume and burn as we make our way through parties where it is important to see and be seen, compare and contrast, connect with all the people who could be thought of as friends, followers, connectors, or connections.

While there is no denying that there is a sociality that the festival brings in, there is also a cruel algebra of counting that comes along with it. It is no surprise that as we celebrate the victory of good over evil and right over wrong, we also simultaneously bow our heads to the goddess of wealth in this season.

Look beyond the glossy surface of Diwali festivities, and you realise that it is exactly like the digital. Digital is about counting. It is right there in the name — digits refers to numbers. Or digits refer to fingers — these counting appendages which we can manipulate and flex in order to achieve desired results. At the core of digital systems is the logic of counting, and counting, as anybody will tell us, is not a benign process. What gets counted, gets accounted for, thus producing a ledger of give and take which often becomes the measure of our social relationships.

I remember, as a child, my mother meticulously making a note of every gift or envelope filled with money that ever came our way from the relatives, so that there would be precise and exact reciprocation. I am certain that there is now an app which can keep a track of these exchanges. I am not suggesting that these occasions of gifting are merely mercenary, but they are embodiments of finely calibrated values and worth of relationships defined by proximity, intimacy, hierarchy and distance. The digital produces and works on a similar algorithm, which is often as inscrutable and opaque as the unspoken codes of the Diwali ledger.

There is something else that happens with counting. The only things that can have value are things that have value. I don’t know which ledger counts the coming together of my very distributed family for an evening of chatting, talking, sharing lives and laughter. I don’t know how anybody would reciprocate that one late night when a cousin came to our home and spent hours with my younger brother making a rangoli to surprise the rest of us. I have no idea how they will ever reciprocate gifts that one of the younger kids made at school for all the members of the family.

Diwali is about the things, but like the digital system, these are things that cannot be counted. And within the digital system, things that cannot be counted are things that get discounted. They become unimportant. They become noise, or rubbish. Our social networks are counting systems that might notice the low frequency of my connections with my extended family but they cannot quantify the joy I hear in the voice of my grandmother when I call her from a different time-zone to catch up with her. Digital systems can only deal with things with value and not their worth.

I do want to remind myself that there is more to this occasion than merely counting. And for once, I want to go beyond the digital, where my memories of the past and the expectations of the future are not shaped by the digital systems of counting and quantifying. Instead, I want Diwali to be analogue. I shall still be mediating my collectivity with the promises of connectivity, but I want to think of this moment as beyond the logics and logistics of counting that codify our social transactions and take such a central location in our personal functioning. This Diwali, I am rooting for a post-digital Diwali, that accounts for all those things that cannot be counted, but are sometimes the only things that really count.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-indian-express-nishant-shah-november-22-2015-whatsapps-with-fireworks-apps-with-diyas-why-diwali-needs-to-go-beyond-digital

Learn it Yourself

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:08:32Z

The peer-to-peer world of online learning encourages conversations and reciprocal learning, writes Nishant Shah in an article published in the Indian Express on 30 October 2011.

Technologies and learning have always had a close link. In the past, distance learning programmes of higher education through the postal service, remote education programmes using satellite TV and interactive learning projects using information and communication infrastructure, have all been deployed with varied results in promoting literacy and higher education. In the last two decades, the internet has also joined this technology ecology in trying to provide quality and affordable education to remotely located areas through “citizen service centres” envisioned to reach 6,40,000 Indian villages in the future.

These technology-based information outreach programmes expand the ability of traditional formal learning centres like universities, to cater to the needs of those who might not have access to learning resources. This vision of networked education relies on existing systems of centralised syllabus making, teacher-to-student information transfer, grade-based evaluation and accreditation systems, and a degree-centred approach to learning.

I was in New York last week, at an international summit on the future of learning, Mobility Shifts, organised by the New School, where more than 260 speakers from 21 countries discussed the possibility of learning beyond the bounds of the school and university system. Many discussions were around the declining public education system (with huge disinvestment moves from the government), privatisation of education, increasing tuition and fees, and the non-relevance of current education. However, along with this digital expansion of the traditional education system is an emerging trend that challenges the ways in which we understand education and learning – DIY Learning or Do It Yourself Learning.

DIY Learning is a product of the networked condition. It recognises that as more people get onto digital information networks, there is a possibility of producing peer-to-peer learning conditions, which do not have to follow our accepted models of learning and education.

We have seen the rise of various decentralised and democratised knowledge repositories like Wikipedia. The search based algorithms of search engines also take into consideration the idea that knowledge is personal. User generated content sites like eHow.com show that the individual learner is not merely a recipient of information and knowledge. Information seeking spaces like Quora have shown that knowledge-sharing communities can incite new conditions of learning. Our contexts, experiences, everyday practices, aspirations etc. equip us with valuable information, which not only shape how we learn but also what we find relevant to learn for ourselves. DIY Learning picks up on the idea that the infrastructure of education is not necessarily designed towards learning. Learning often happens outside the classrooms, in informal conversations.

Thus DIY Learning offers a new model of learning. It destabilises the established hierarchy of knowledge production and pedagogy and creates an each-one-teach-one model with a twist. Instead of a centralised board of curriculum designer who shape syllabi for the “average” student, you have the possibility of customised, highly individual, interest-based learning curricula where the student is a part of deciding what s/he wants to learn. DIY Learning doesn’t recognise the distinctions between teachers and students, but recognises them as “peers” within a network, encouraging conversations and reciprocal learning rather than information transfer based classroom models. Instead of mass-produced education that caters only to an imagined average, the DIY Learning model recognises that within the same student group, there are different rates and scales of learning, thus offering environments suited to the aptitude of the students.

Within the DIY Learning model, aspects of education, from the design of curriculum and learning methods, to grading and evaluation are geared towards individual preferences and aspirations.

Many people think of DIY Learning as an alternative to mainstream learning processes and structures. However, it is perhaps more fruitful to think of DIY Learning as a way of figuring out the problems that beset our traditional educational system. It allows us to rethink the relationships between learning, education, teaching and technologies. It recalibrates the space of the classroom and reconfigures the role of the teacher and the student.

DIY Learning emphasises that merely building schools and universities is not enough to assure that learning happens. Learning happens through experiences, practice, conversations, internalisations and through making mistakes. DIY Learning offers these possibilities in an education universe that is constantly refusing to take risks, innovate and adapt to the needs of the present. By itself it might not be able to take on the roles and functions of the existing education systems. But it does warn us that we are preparing our students for our pasts rather than their futures. And the time to change is now.

The original story was published in the Indian Express, it can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/blog/learn-it

Digital native: What’s in a name? Privilege

nishant — 2017-10-13T00:51:04Z

Anonymity-based internet apps like Sarahah may not be as vicious for those surrounded by the comfort of social status. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 10, 2017.

After days of witnessing the brouhaha around Sarahah, I finally gave in and signed up for an account. Having been a part of the rise and fall of other similar anonymity-based spaces like QOOH, Secret, Yikyak; and, having lived out shamefully long hours on Internet-trawling platforms like Reddit, I was more or less ready for yet another app that invited the world to write to me anonymously, with no option of replying or engaging meaningfully.

When I signed up for it and shared the link on my social networks, I braced myself for the barrage to begin. As I went along with my usual day, with an eye on the app, the notifications started pouring in. Instead of the vicious and vitriolic tripe that I have come to expect from the anonymous message, my app was singing outpourings of love and celebration of different relationships. Friends shared memories that they wanted to re-live. Students wrote in with messages of joy, filling me with proxy pride at the wonderful young people I get to work with. Colleagues and acquaintances sent messages of celebration. One reluctant person regretfully told me that they find my work shallow but if I am successful doing it, then more power to me.

The invitation text on Sarahah says, “Say something constructive”, and it looked like people have been so well-conditioned to listening to bot-messages that they were actually following the instructions to the T. A few days of this euphoric validation from my social networks made me walk on clouds and smile at unsuspecting strangers. I also started thinking why people berate these anonymous app when they are such a wonderful celebration of a mediated social world, where performances of affection and appreciation are dwindling.

It would have been easy for me to dismiss the growing alarm around cases of bullying, harassment, threats, and destructive messages that others have experienced on this app. Absorbed in just my own bubble, I could insist the need for these kinds of platforms, ignoring the experiences of others. I had to remind myself that this super-positive response I have had in the last three weeks is not because of the nature of the app, but because of a confluence of privilege, sociality and demography inherent on my social networks.

As an independent expat living in Europe, with jobs that back me up with cultural and economic capital, and with years of fluency and familiarity with the medium that I am engaging in, I am not an easy target. If barbs, jabs, insults and threats had made their way to me, not only would I be able to take it in my stride and shake it off, but would, possibly, be able to reciprocate in ways where I would find myself on the winning end. I also live in the comfort of knowing that if there was ever a public brawl, I have the cushion of networks, which would not only come to my defence but also protect me from further repercussions of such events. Also, much as I would like to be otherwise, I am not young. I moved out of the digital natives demography a few years ago, and the social networks that I have created around me comprise people who I know to be mature and sensitive. I would have been shocked if any of them had engaged in acts of bullying or vicious attacks.

These are all affordances that might appear natural to me because they are a part of my everyday experience, but I need to recognise these as privileges. If your experience of Sarahah has been positive, it might be good to reflect on your own cultural and social capital. Historically, those who carry the knapsack of privileges with ease, have never found themselves at the centre of bullying, intimidation or harassment. Those are always saved for minorities, people who do not fit, people who are marked by precariousness in a way that does not even give them the voice to narrate their stories or the capacities to deal with the abuse that is sent their way. It is very easy to just look at our experiences, shaped by privilege, and use it to dismiss the pain, sorrow and the turbulence that is often reserved for women, people of colour, people defined by markers of language, literacy, location and class. It is necessary to remind ourselves that the personal is not a symptom of the universal experience. More often than not, it is only a testimony of the extreme customisation that the digital world offers, so that, ensconced in our own filtered bubble, we can easily forget and devalue those who suffer through other conditions.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-10-2017-digital-native-what-s-in-a-name-privilege

One For All

nishant — 2013-03-04T04:13:06Z

The importance of making information accessible and universal.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the Indian Express on February 17, 2013.

In the late 1990s, when I was an undergraduate student studying English Literature, a professor asked me if I could volunteer to write exam papers for a student with visual impairment, Milind, who was one year my senior. It was my first encounter with a student with a visual challenge, and it changed my experience and understanding of education. I had always found comfort in the world of words and stories. When I first met Milind, I soon realised that he was being excluded from this world of reading and writing that I had taken for granted. With most of the prescribed textbooks not available in Braille and none of the reference material in libraries accessible, he was dependent on volunteers and disability support organisations to audio-record the texts so that he could access them. His library was made of audio-cassettes scratched from over-use, which did not offer him the options of re-visiting, annotating, and close-reading. And when I wrote the exams for him, writing as he dictated, I was left humbled and inspired by his strong commitment to educating himself. The phone call I received when he got his English Literature degree, and our celebratory dinner, remain one of my happiest memories as an undergraduate student.

That experience made me realise, for the first time the exclusivity of the world of books and print. While print and paper industries have helped democratise knowledge and provided us access to store and retrieve knowledge through ages and time, they are also technologies of exclusion. Reading has been so naturalised in our everyday life, that we have almost forgotten that it is a visual medium. A book is not easily accessible to people who do not have the privilege or capacity to be literate. A book can also exclude with jargon and dense languages, which are the stronghold of an elite few. And more than anything else, it stays, if you will excuse the pun, a closed book, to people with visual impairment.

Like many who might have encountered second-person disability, I have never done much to change our society. I might have done some volunteer work, or signed petitions for better infrastructure, but the interventions have been minimal and almost non-existent. I think about this today, because on February 7, 2013, one of the strongest and most powerful voices that has been fighting apathetic government systems, moribund policies and indifferent social attitudes towards visually challenged people, Rahul Cherian, died due to ill-health. Cherian, who was the co-founder of the Inclusive Planet Centre for Disability Law and Policy and a fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, where I work, was a disability policy activist who realised the potential of the digital world, to make information and knowledge accessible to those who were previously discriminated against.

Cherian firmly believed that the digital interfaces would provide new access to information and knowledge to those who live with visual disability. If we implement global standards to ensure that the text on the internet can be read out loud by text-to-speech devices, we would have a new democratisation of information that allows people to engage with the Web. His spirit and enthusiasm was infectious as he resolutely worked at persuading technology developers and holding governments responsible for implementing accessibility protocols to make information in the digital age open.

He was committed to digitising printed resources in formats which allowed deeper engagement and manipulation of text through voice and keyboard-based controls. He fought against intellectual property right regimes which disallow books to be converted into formats that can be accessible to open source and free screen readers and text-to-speech engines. Cherian worked at collectively harnessing the powers of the digital towards building a just and inclusive society that made me recognise how deep-seated our blind spots are, when we look at the mainstream and the popular. His work made me understand that the battles for open knowledge and open access are not only economic in nature. That the digital book projects offer new inroads for those previously excluded, into the world of knowledge and information. I feel honoured to have shared conversations and working spaces with him, and know that his passing will leave a large hole, in the lives of those who knew him, as well as the political movement that demands better access for inclusion of people with disability.

Today, I want to take this moment of loss, to remind myself of something that sometimes gets forgotten — the digital technologies that we take for granted and often use just for fun, have a strong potential for social and political change. While it is great that the digital world has offered new spaces for content generation, information sharing, cultural production and social connection, it also has the potential to build safe, just and inclusive information societies. I don't know if we should buy into the rhetoric that the next global war is going to be around information, but we should remember that information is definitely worth fighting for and making accessible to all.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/indian-express-feb-17-2013-nishant-shah-one-for-all