Centre for Internet and Society

Revisiting Techno-euphoria

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:53:49Z

In my last post, I talked about techno-euphoria as a condition that seems to mark much of our discourse around digital technologies and the promise of the future. The euphoria, as I had suggested, manifests itself either as a utopian view of how digital technologies are going to change the future that we inhabit, or woes of despair about how the overdetermination of the digital is killing the very fibre of our social fabric.

Published in DML Central on July 5, 2012

A way out of it, for some of us working with young people and their relationships with (as opposed to usage of) technologies, is to think of digital technologies as a paradigm through which everyday life is reconfigured, or as contexts within which we evolve new relationships of power and negotiation. Or to put it plainly, it has forced us to think of digital technologies not in terms of tools and gadgets, infrastructure and logistics (though those are also important) but as embodied experiences that reshape the very ways in which we conceptualize our everyday life.

When we talk of digital natives in India, the immediate spaces that they inhabit conjure up images of big crowded IT cities that are transforming into hubs of international outsourcing industries and IT development. We presume that digital natives would be found in the 12% of the Indian sub-continent where broadband access is available. We often narrow our focus to look at urban, middle class, affluent, English speaking, educated youth who occupy extremely privileged positions in their social, cultural and economic practice.

However, the story* I want to share with you today comes from an unusual location in India – from the village of Banni in the desert region of Kutch, located at the North-Western borders of India and Pakistan. In this small village that is about 80 kilometers from the biggest town with amenities like hospitals and schools, almost every household has a smart phone with access to the internet. In the absence of more popular forms like radio, which are disallowed because of the proximity to the turbulent India-Pakistan borders, the Chinese-made smart phones become the de facto interface of communication and cultural production. The phones become not only the life-line in times of crises, but also everyday objects through which the villages stay connected with the world of cultural production and entertainment. The internet services on the phones allow them to access Bollywood songs and movies, images and games, popular television programming and other popular cultural products in the country. In many ways, Banni is probably more digitally connected than many parts of the larger cities in the country.

However, the strong influence of Islam in this fairly homogenized community means differential access for the people who live in it. Women, according to the village doctrines, are not allowed access to technologies for fear of corruption. Hence the smart phones are all exclusively owned by men who have complete access to the information highway whereas the women do not have immediate ownership of such interfaces. And yet, the women in the village are quite updated about the latest news, gossip, politics, information about the weather, and cultural productions like TV soaps and Bollywood movies. This discrepancy between lack of access to digital technologies on the one hand, and a fairly comprehensive access to information of their choice is perplexing at first. Till you turn your attention to the children, who, in their pre-pubertal space, are not segregated so clearly into the technology publics and privates, and hence can navigate the spaces which are otherwise so gender exclusive.

These children would not usually be recognized as digital natives because they are not particularly tech savvy and they do not have direct and unlimited access to the digital devices or connectivity. However, they become interfaces through which the information consumed by the male population permeates and travels to the female population in the village. The children become embodied interfaces, who imbibe the information from these digital devices and re-enact it for the women in their own private spaces. The village now has its own child-stars who not only pass on the local news and information, but also re-enact, on a daily basis, scenes, songs, and story-lines from the soaps and movies that are popular with the women in the village.

While the gendered politics of technology access and the creative ways in which children are able to work as embodied interfaces is interesting – and perhaps needs more space than is afforded here – what remains interesting to me is how this story disrupts the regular narratives of techno-euphoria. It cannot be explained away merely in terms of usage. It cannot be used to claim radical social change in community and gendered relationships. It is difficult to make a technology-empowerment argument though this. What is perhaps most interesting is that it shows how we need to start thinking about digital technologies as producing new ecosystems that reconfigure our understanding of who we are and the roles we play in developing social relationality. The digital natives in these stories are not merely the children – though their embodied interface produces startling insights into how personal relationships with technologies are produced. The men who have access to the phones and have mastered digital literacy in navigating through these phones, the women who become the last-mile consumers who have found creative ways of staying connected despite their lack of access, and the children who become the nodes in this technology-information infrastructure, are all digital natives of a certain kind. They might not have claimed that identity and indeed might never want to. And yet, the very conditions of everyday life, as they are mediated by the presence of digital technologies in Banni, help us understand the social structures and information relationships in ways which are more complex than theorized by our techno-euphoric attention to network visualizations which are heavily determined by usage and action.

This story from Banni is layered and needs unpacking at many different levels. However, it shall always remain, for me, a catalyst to re-think the focus and framework of our technology discourse, and talk about digitally mediated identities (digital natives or otherwise) in a vocabulary that moves beyond usage, infrastructure and access. It emphasizes, for me, the idea that the gadgets and tools we use are, actually, only material manifestations of the digital -- which operates at the level of a paradigm or a context, through which we are slowly reshaping the material, social, and cultural notions of who we are and how we connect to the world around us.

Read Nishant's last post here
Link to the picture here

* I am greatly thankful to my friend Rita Kothari at the Indian Institute of Technologies, Gandhinagar, for first introducing me to this context and its peculiar technology ecosystem.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/revisiting-techno-euphoria

Beyond Anonymous: Shit people say on Internet piracy

nishant — 2012-06-13T14:01:59Z

This post is a series of provocations around piracy, censorship and the state of Internet in India. Like all good tasting things, these observations need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But it is the hope of the author that this serves as a response to otherwise very persistent voices that have been demonizing file-sharing online.

Firstpost published Nishant Shah's column along with the video that CIS and ALF had made on 'shit people say about piracy' as a lead story on June 7, 2012.

9 June is going to be a big day in India, for all concerned with internet regulation, censorship and the current attacks on file-sharing.

The International Hacker group Anonymous – a group that has become iconic with its members wearing Guy Fawkes mask as they mobilise protest and hacker attacks on what they see as tyrannical regimes – has called for marched protests in 16 Indian cities, to demand a free and open Internet.

They have already started launching Denial of Service attacks and taking down websites owned by the Indian government to express their displeasure about the recent regulation of the internet. Whether or not their guerrilla tactics are efficient and effective, in the right or not, is something that has been discussed quite popularly.

There are hordes of people who think of them as the NewAge Mutant Ninja Hackers, who are protecting our digital worlds from being clamped down. There are others who paint them as the Big Bad Wolf who huffed and puffed and will blow our houses away.

You might be sympathetic, suspicious or scared of the emergence of such a ‘crowd vigilante’, sporting the slogan that has spawned Internet memes galore – Y U No Wake up? – But there is no doubt that the rise of such a collective signals how discourse around piracy, rights, and openness is no longer in the domain of the uber-geek and the academic researcher.

These are concepts with very material realities that affect our everyday functioning and require not only better policies but also a more nuanced public discourse. Today, I look at some of the most ludicrous things that have been said about file-sharing, around the world, wondering why this idea of sharing has evoked such startling responses from different quarters.

File sharing and depression: There has always been a concern about the physical well-being of internet users. From Internet addiction rehabilitation clinics in China to online support groups for internet addicts (I swear I am not making this up!), from doctors worried about posture and eye-sight to mothers concerned about violent video games, we thought we had heard it all.

And then came the extraordinary study that suggested that file sharing might lead to depression. Or rather, if you are an avid file-sharer on the internet, you are prone to attacks of depression. This had the twitter world abuzz, where people were trying to make sense of this ‘scientific’ study that connected spending long hours on the interwebz with mental illness. A trending tweet just about summed up the situation, when it said, “File sharers are depressed only because of what is done to them when they share”.

File sharing and jobs: There was a time when the Music and Film Industry Associations (MAFIA) around the world used to protest file sharing by painting a romanticised picture of the independent starving artists, from whose mouths, we stole morsels, as we shared their work without paying for it. But that argument collapsed in the days of Napster (remember that?) and it has been proven over and over again, that the artist almost always benefits from their work being shared.

However, lately, research from respectable universities (expensively funded by respectable interested parties) have started hitting the real you, rather than the imagined artist. Every torrent being downloaded on the web is correlated with a lost job, because these companies can no longer afford to hire as many people as they used to, because of the growing losses. And then it goes into complicated mumbo-jumbo about how that one torrent that sits merrily on your computer, actually affects all the jobs to kingdom come and will be responsible for your children’s unemployment.

They remain silent about the jobs lost because of the funding that went into buying supporting this research.

I am not a Pirate: And lest you go away with the idea that the rest of the junta does not gaff, here are some of the gems that have come our way while working with people in the field. It is common, for instance, for people to take a moral stance on piracy, radiating a holier-than-thou ethical persona, without realising that recording that last IPL match to watch later on your tablet is also an act of piracy.

Then there are those who only consume material pirated by others, happily ignoring the fact that the ring-tone that they copied from their friend is also an act of piracy. Ditto, people who claim “I am not a pirate”, meaning that they haven’t yet figured out the bittorrent system and hence go to the local corner shop to buy pirated DVDs of the latest releases. In their heads, they have paid somebody for the material and hence it must be alright.

Piracy is not a one-point source process. It is a networked ecosystem, and I am still to find that one person who has never shared anything and make a video of them saying “I am not a pirate”. But that is probably just wishful thinking.

There are many more such instances which make your mind boggle and your eyes goggle and you wonder if you heard it right for the first time. Do share your favourite ones if you can. In the meantime you might also want to look at the new meme video ‘Sh!t People say about Piracy’ that captures some of these responses in their absurdity.

Video

(Video by The Centre for Internet and Society , and the Alternative Law Forum)

Follow the video on YouTube

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/shit-people-say-on-internet-piracy

Beyond Sharing: Towards our Digital Futures

nishant — 2012-06-01T04:39:12Z

The battle is not about file sharing and a petty film producer wanting to rake in the box office earnings. It is about the law’s incapacity to deal with post-analogue practices and processes.

Down to Earth published Nishant Shah's Op-ed on May 31, 2012

Unless you have been hiding under an analogue rock, wearing a tin-foil hat and staying away from electricity, chances are you have heard about the recent court order that bans access to a massive number of file-sharing websites from India. A John Doe order by the Madras High Court, following a complaint by the producers of the movie 3, has meant Internet Service Providers across the country have had to deny access to a number of websites that have been listed as providing free access to copyrighted material. In an attempt to ensure box-office collections for their movie, whose claim to fame, ironically, is the viral ‘Kolaveri Di’ song that had captured the country’s pulse last year, the producers have now denied access to something that is the basic function of anybody immersed in Web 2.0 environments–sharing of information.

Much has been written about this ban. The battlelines are clearly drawn and from both sides we have strong arguments being made for and against piracy. Various media and culture industry people are supporting this ban, recounting losses that they have made because of people accessing pirated material online. Hacker and civil liberties groups are decrying this heavy censorship, providing numerous instances of how piracy has actually helped cultural productions gain more fame and money than they would have otherwise. There are yet others, who, while they respect the rights of the right-holders to protect themselves against copyright infringement, are furious that this blanket ban also disallows them to access material which was under a public license and material that they had produced and shared through these networks.

International Hacker groups like Anonymous are mobilising people in large numbers to come to the streets as a sign of protest against such draconian measures.

Most of these debates eventually are at loggerheads, with each side becoming louder and shriller, their positions attaining cult-like devotion and faith. In this cacophony there are some other points which get missed out. This issuance of the John Doe order has betrayed some startling flaws in how the Internet is governed in India and the alarming implications it has to the future of free, open and inclusive information societies.

One thing that this court order has made excruciatingly clear is how the Internet is not the utopian space of exchange, collaboration, crowd sourcing and sharing it was meant to be. Despite the government’s own investments in building digital infrastructure, and its rhetoric of becoming more accountable, transparent and accessible by granting digital access to the citizens, it is obvious that this is still a space that is looked at with great suspicion.

It comes as a shock to many of us that a high court issued an order which does not only impinge on freedom of speech and expression, but also fails to understand the nature of the Internet. In all reality, this ban is a farce. Everybody who has been used to the shared cultures of the online world, has found proxy servers and Internet anonymisers which allow them to hide their identity and continue with their everyday practice online. The cool kids are already doing this anyway. All we have is a stark realisation that the state might be investing heavily in digital technologies but it still has not been able to get out of the centralised broadcast ways of thinking about it.

All sharing is not piracy. Some of it is just actually sharing. All debates seem to centre only around the copyrighted material being accessed through the file sharing websites. It is a concern which is legitimate. What about all the material that is in the public domain, in the commons and available for free? The user generated content, content which might not have direct economic value but is valuable to the people who created and shared it, is also now inaccessible. In order to protect some people from piracy we have also violated the rights of many more to share. And that is a distinction that is worth preserving, as we increasingly move into becoming an information society.

In the Web 2.0 world, we are all producers of data. We not only leave traces but also put out material of cultural significance–from videos of dancing babies to knowledge that we want to share–through these peer-2-peer networks. A sudden collapse of this infrastructure almost seems to show how it is only the money-making material that is important to the state and not the other.

There is not going to be a clear, correct position in this case against file-sharing. The legal technicalities will always be hollow in the face of ideologies of openness and inclusion. The moral indignation will always be countered by facts and numbers. But in the middle of all the fights and discussions, it is also good to pay attention to what is at stake. This battle is not merely about file sharing, though there is nothing “mere” about file sharing. This battle is not about a petty film producer wanting to rake in the box office earnings. This battle is about the law’s incapacity to deal with post-analogue practices and processes.

The way we resolve these differences is going to determine the future of what it means to be public, open, free, and inclusive. Those of us who are fighting to get the word out, are not doing it only because the access to our favourite cultural products has become cumbersome, but because scared that this might well be the beginning of the end of all that we had dreamt of our digital futures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/beyond-sharing

Openness, Videos, Impressions

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:23:13Z

The one day Open Video Summit organised by the Centre for Internet & Society, iCommons, Open Video Alliance, and Magic Lantern, to bring together a range of stakeholders to discuss the possibilities, potentials, mechanics and politics of Open Video. Nishant Shah, who participated in the conversations, was invited to summarise the impressions and ideas that ensued in the day.

The notion of free and open is under great debate even under that, and I think even when you side with a camp, there are going to be further splinters. There are many ways of defining the free and open, and I think that the tension, rather than being resolved, needs to be sustained and creatively perpetrated to keep an internal checks and balances on not getting carried away with it. All the groups did indeed circle around this in different, often tangential ways – that there is need to define, variously and almost endlessly, in defining the context of the free that we are dealing with.

Open video, in that matter, has gone through different iterations, and I think it is nice that different stakeholders have defined it variously, and also looked at the problems that it might lead to. However, for the sake of synthesis, I am going to let you have your own idea of free and open but instead look at five key words which have emerged, in my selective hearing, through the day: Access, Archive, Share, Remix, Repurpose. And it is these five that we need to now imbricate these concepts across different thematic that emerged in the groups today.

Access has been one primary question that almost everybody dealt with; Access has its legacies in the Open and Free culture movements, where technological access, dealing with questions of open standards and content, of bandwidth and infrastructure. More interestingly, in an emerging information society like India, there are other concerns of language, access, privilege, bandwidth, education etc. To contextualise access and to put it into different perspectives is something that different participants have voiced the need for.

Archive is a preoccupation with most people because archiving has close relationships with knowledge and subsequently retrieval and usage. If knowledge is being digitised so that it is made accessible to different people, there are older questions of representation, voice, empowerment, participation, ethics, privacy, ownership etc. Crop up. In education archiving has to do with the curricula building and knowledge production. In networking, collaboration and film making, it is the kind of issues that pad.ma is trying to tackle with. It also leads to notions of access, distribution etc.

Sharing is what is almost defining the spirit of the Open and Free culture movements. There is a need to understand and explore what sharing means. When does it infringe laws and what kind of regulation needs to be advocated so that sharing becomes possible. How does one overcome questions of piracy, stealing, IPR etc? More interestingly, what do we share and who do we share it with? Tools by which sharing leads to innovation? How does it lead to new participation and learning practices and pedagogies? What kind of open distribution models and networks can be built up?

Remix has been of great value because it means that you are being converted into some sort of a stakeholder or a contributor to the process. Networking and nodes, network-actor, collaborator , peer 2 peer – the possibility of looking at questions of internet and digital traces is interesting. Or imagine that the act of sharing is also a remix. Sometimes just putting it into new contexts, making it available to newer constituencies, etc. can also be looked upon as remixing. Remix as a knowledge production aesthetic and mechanics seems to have emerged.

Repurpose is my additional reading of something that perhaps needs no mention to this group, but nonetheless needs flagging. The fact remains, that the technology is not a solution in itself. It is a tool that enables the solutions which one is seeking for. The processes, paradigms, protocols and practices are indeed shaped and mediated by technologies and there are new solution possibilities which are produced. However, there still seem to be anxieties, concerns, questions and problems which are cropping up and need to be addressed outside of technology but within technology ecologies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/OVSreport

The Violence of Knowledge Cartels

nishant — 2013-01-18T07:33:53Z

We are all struck with a sense of loss, grief and shock since we heard of the death of Aaron Swartz, by suicide. People who have been his friends have written heart-felt obituaries, saluting his dreams and visions and unwavering commitment to a larger social good.

The blog post was published in the Hybrid Publishing Lab on January 17, 2013.

Colleagues who have worked with him and have been inspired by his achievements have documented the quirky intelligence and the whimsical genius that Swartz was. His fellow crusaders, who have stood by him in his impassioned battle against the piracy centred witch-hunt have helped spell out the legal and political conditions, which might not have directly led to this sorry end, but definitely have to be factored in his own negotiations with depression. All these voices have enshrined Aaron Swartz, the 26 year old boy-wonder who was just trying to make the world a better place where information is free and everybody has unobstructed access to knowledge. They have shown us that there is an ‘Aaron sized hole’ in the world, which is going to be difficult to fill. These are voices that need to be heard, remembered, and revisited beyond the urgency of the current tragedy and it is good to know that this archive of grief and outpouring of emotional support will stay as a living memory to the legend that Swartz had already become in his life-time.

However, I want to take this opportunity to not talk about Aaron Swartz. I am afraid that if I do, I will end up either factualising him – converting him into a string of data sets, adding to the already burgeoning details about his life, his achievements, and of course the gory court case that has already been the centre of so much rage and debate. I am also afraid that if I do talk about Aaron Swartz, I will end up making him into a creature of fictions – talking about his dreams and his visions and his outlook and making him a martyr for a cause, forgetting to make the distinction that Aaron died, not for a cause, but believing in it. I, like many people who were affected, in many degrees of separation and distance, am taking the moment to mourn the death of somebody who should have lived longer. But I want to take the moment of Aaron’s death to talk about heroisms and sacrifices and everyday politics of what he believed in.

Let me talk about Shyam Singh, who is as far removed from Swartz as possible. Shyam Singh is a 74 year-old-man in India, who runs a corner photocopying shop on the Delhi School of Economics campus in New Delhi. Singh is not your young, charismatic, educated, tech-savvy oracle. He spent a large part of his life – 3 decades – working at the University’s Central Research Library and the Ratan Tata Library, operating unwieldy machines that were panting to keep up with new innovations in technologies of digital reproduction. It took him thirty years of work to muster enough savings so that he could buy a couple of photocopying machines and start a small photocopying shop at Ramjas College in New Delhi. After his retirement, the Delhi School of Economics actually invited him to come and set up the Rameshwari Photocopying shop on the campus, for the students at the school. He had an official license from the University, for which he paid a sum of 10,000 Indian Rupees, to work on a profit model that depended on high volume and low costs. The shop was more or less a landmark for students and professors alike, who would come to get their course material photocopied out of books that they could almost never afford to buy and were not easily available in public lending libraries. The shop keeper also compiled course-packs, which allowed students to buy all the texts prescribed for their curricula (but not necessarily available in multiple or digital copies in the library), at affordable rates.

It came as quite a shock to Singh, when one day, he was told that a consortium of publishers – Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and Taylor and Francis Group – had filed a case in the high court of New Delhi against him, claiming damages of 6 million Indian Rupees for wilful copyright infringement for commercial gains. Singh did not have the ideological apparatus that was available to Swartz, nor the competence to talk about the unfairness of the legal claim. He did, in several interviews, talk about India’s avowed policy on universal education and how he had always thought of himself as helping in that process of equal access to students who would otherwise have been unable to afford the education. The case against Singh is already in the courts, and the High Court has issued an injunction restraining him from providing copies of chapters from textbooks published by the three international publishers who have moved the court. And while he has found support from the academic, legal and student community from around the country, there is no denying that he is going to be fighting an expensive battle against a large Intellectual Property protection conglomeration of publishers who are all ready to make a ‘scapegoat’ and an ‘example’ of this small photocopy shop, in their efforts at enforcing paid access to scholarly and academic material in the country.

I desperately hope that Singh shall not find himself as persecuted as Swartz did, by the publishers, by the public prosecutors, and by an indifferent citizenry who is quite happy to benefit from the fruits that might fall out of this case about loosened Intellectual Property and symbolically support the idea that knowledge should be free, but do not think that this is a problem that affects them in particular. True, in both these instances, we have seen people oscillating between rue and rage, expressing their dissatisfaction with these market driven information cartels which refuse to unleash the information and knowledge that we all believe should be made free. But in those expressions of anger and shock, is also a denial of the fact that we have all been complicit in building, supporting and sustaining these worlds because doing otherwise would inconvenience our schedules, lives and careers. Swartz and Singh, in their own way, had to become the poster-children, the martyrs, for us to take notice about a battle that affects us uniformly but doesn’t feature in our everyday practices and conviction.

Intellectual Property and Openness are seen as legal battles for somebody else to fight. Even with academia and research, which is the most complicit in building these exploitative knowledge industries, there is very little discussion or even recognition of the untenable behemoths that we have been feeding in our quest for tenures, publications and popularity. For an everyday person, as you can imagine, this is even more removed from their quotidian life practices. The distancing and alienation gets even more acerbated by the fact that these battles are often fought silently. We have legal stalwarts fighting it out in court rooms. Academic scholars and researchers are drawing their pens and swords in academic journals. Political activists are championing their causes in conferences and summits. And in all of this, we have produced a gated activism, where the threshold of engagement and investment is so high that unless there are these dying and the wounded to hold out for public scrutiny, the world moves on, grumbling slightly at the restriction on torrent downloads or the unavailability of its favourite book in the local markets, but thinking that it has nothing to do with them. They are not even an audience to these battles. And if indeed, they are audiences, they are the kinds that go to a play, eat loudly out of crinkly wrappers, talk on their cellphones in the middle of the denouement and leave before the play ends, because they don’t want to miss their favourite TV show about dancing animals back at home.

I do not want to hyperbolise and so I will not endorse the often suggested idea that knowledge should be as free as air and water – for a lot of us who have been looking at the private-public nexus in developing globalised countries already know that free air and water are a myth and that there are heavy prices to be paid for them. But I do want to suggest that it is time to think of the knowledge wars as human wars, as deeply implicated in our understanding of who we are, what kind of societies we want to live in, and what worlds we want to build for the future generations to inherit. These are fights that are not only about getting things for free – they are about understanding what is sacred and central to our civilization impulse and disallowing a small clutch of private bodies to make their profits by selling it to us.

It is time to maybe look around and see how manipulations of power and the algebra of survival has made us support corrupt and corrupting systems that restrict free information and knowledge. It is time to learn about the issues at stake – from providing cheap drugs to those in underprivileged areas to offering conditions of affordable education for the masses – when we talk about intellectual property regimes. It is time to organize, question, re-evaluate our own everyday practices, and realise that the fights against intellectual property are not battles that are fought once-every-heroic-death. That these are things that we need to strive for on a daily basis, without the need of an external catalyst or a dramatic death of somebody who died believing in a cause that was supposed to make the world a better place for those in the audience.

The next time, let us not wait for shame, guilt, horror, or surprise to catalyse us in taking note of the growing restrictions on information and knowledge in our world. Let us not wait for the emergence of another Swartz or Singh, persecuted by exploitative knowledge cartels that do untold harm to our sense of being human and being free in information societies. And let us keep our fingers crossed, that wherever he is, Swartz has found peace, solace, and the freedom that he was fighting for, and that Singh does not suffer a fate that might denude him of his livelihood and life’s savings.

Nishant Shah (@latelyontime / nishant.shah@inkubator.leuphana.de )is an International Tandem Partner at the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University, Lueneburg, and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/hybridpublishing-nishant-shah-january-17-2013-the-violence-of-knowledge-cartels

Remembering Aaron Swartz, Taking Up the Fight

nishant — 2013-01-28T04:51:58Z

I encountered the Aaron Swartz memorial the other day that helps ‘liberate’ a randomly selected article from JSTOR, as an act of civil disobedience, to commemorate both the legacy that Swartz leaves behind, but also the high-profile witch-hunt case which was a crucial factor in him taking his own life.

Nishant Shah's blog post was published by DML Central on January 24, 2013.

Much has been said about Swartz and much more will have to be said about him, and about his work, to make sure that the good that men do does not get interred with their bones. And there are people more articulate, closer to him in personal and professional capacities who will do a better job at making sure we have an archive of memories to fill up the ‘Aaron sized-hole’ that his untimely death has introduced into our lives.

So instead of attempting to write a eulogy I am ill-equipped for, I want to mark the tragic loss of Aaron Swartz by talking about causes and everyday politics. And I might have to do it through a mode of collective self-flagellation because it is a point that needs to be driven home. I am sure that almost everybody would agree that the ideals that Swartz held were unimpeachable, even though they might not always agree with his tactics. There would be a general consensus that in our rapidly growing information societies free knowledge leads to better, stronger, and more equitable societies. In fact, there is a whole generation of younger users who are so used to having unlimited and unrestricted access to digital information that they often get frustrated and infuriated when they encounter media cartels and Intellectual Property Regimes that insist on locking up knowledge -- especially publicly funded academic resources -- behind paywalls.

We have all grumbled, at different points, about the essay we wanted to teach in class, the book we needed for a research paper, the movie we wanted to remix, or the song we wanted to sample, locked up behind (often) unaffordable access systems. We recognise that in the building of this gated knowledge landscape, we are creating uneven, corrupt and corrupting hierarchies of information control and access. And yet, when it comes to actually responding to these questions of closed intellectual property, restricted information access and media monopolies exerted by information cartels, we generally have a comfortable sense of distance. These are other peoples’ problems. These are battles somebody else will fight.

Even within academia, where we have been the most active in questioning and contesting the notions of power and knowledge, there is also the highest complicity in creating these monstrous behemoths that we feed regularly with research that is more often than not, publicly funded. In our quest for tenures, careers and popularity, we have voluntarily given up our rights to private and closed access journals that in return give us the symbolic capital to gain power in the system. In the 1980s, when the Subaltern school was writing against colonial legacies and cultural imperialism, Homi Bhabha had described this condition of granted agency and borrowed power as mimicry. In his own hyphenated way, he had suggested that the new subaltern, who is often seen as engaged in critically responding to the colonial masters and their legacies, only exists in a structure of mimicry -- where he emptily gestures towards the problems of colonial inheritance, without any power to actually overthrow or challenge it. Within South Asian feminisms, Kumkum Sangari has described this status of granted agency within patriarchy -- a condition that gives us a sense of power and a space of negotiation, as long as we uphold the very structure that oppresses us in the name of our empowerment.

It is time to realise that within academia, and the social sciences and arts based academia in particular, we have now perfected the art of mimicry. Where we pull our pens instead of our swords and talk (often indecipherably) about conditions of power and geographies of inequality and the need to do something about it. We attend conferences where proceedings go into closed access journals, and publish books with publishing houses that charge us and our students exorbitant sums of money to access the knowledge in those books. We publish not to be heard but to be cited, not to create open publics but closed communities of interlocked interests. And we feel smug about being politically committed, separating the conditions of our knowledge production from the content of our knowledge, as if the two have nothing to do with each other.

In other sectors that I dabble with but am not such a rank (and hence equally complicit) insider, I see similar distances. This alienation of our intellectual work from its political content is just one of the separations we make. The other separation is between our discursive communities and everyday practice. So embedded is our description, explanation and analysis of the world, in languages inaccessible to any but the privileged few who are trained to understand it. The advice we give our students -- follow the grandmother rule: write clearly so that your grandmother will be able to understand it -- is a standard we rarely practice in our academic writing.

These are symptoms I see in other sectors that are also committed to political questioning and change, working towards building better worlds and societies. Specialised lawyers fight their battles in closed court-rooms and write in obscure law journals which are not accessible or intelligible to the common public. Activists often get bogged down into appropriating the same language to be taken seriously. Advocates of causes fear over-simplification of the complex issues, keeping the everyday person outside of these battles around information and knowledge. We have built gated politics where the threshold of investment and engagement is so high, that the only response to that is detachment.

This brings me back to talking about Swartz and his dream of liberating information from the clutches of exploitative information houses. Swartz’s crime was not that he broke the law -- I wonder if the public prosecutor has never pirated material online; statistics would suggest otherwise -- but that he didn’t find allies in spaces which profess political commitment but then mimic it in their content rather than in practice. It is not surprising that even when JSTOR, the affected party, refused to push for criminal or civil charges, the University where the ‘crime’ occurred and the federal authorities decided to pursue him as a felon. Many people have wondered about why a well-loved and popular cult figure like Swartz would feel so lonely as to take this drastic step to end his life, and we now have to take responsibility that this separation of what he believed as the central tenet to life is something that his natural allies have separated out from their work.

Swartz is a folk-hero and he shall live as an icon for the groups working around internet freedom and information openness. But maybe it is time to stop waiting for another martyr to the cause. Maybe it is time to recognise that these battles around knowledge and information are not specialised fights to be played out in sombre tones by zealots on opposite sides. These are human wars, and they affect not only our everyday sense of who we are and the societies we live in, but also who we want to become and the worlds we want to create for future generations to inherit. Swartz embodies a whole generation of digital natives who fail to understand why the ethically wrong and morally reprehensible practice of protected intellectual property, that goes against the very grain of building information societies, continues to find silent supporters rather than vocal protestors. The grief and sense of loss we have with Swartz's passing is not easy to remedy. But Swartz will also be a moniker that every digital native will have to wear, as they traverse a treacherous terrain, persecuted by IP watchdogs and punished for what seems to be a natural order of things in their information worlds.

There is a lot of growing commentary with people expressing anger, shock, and sadness for the 26 year old man who died fighting a battle that we did not even become an audience to. And that commentary is necessary because we need to cope with the fact that we live in a world where somebody who believed in the most beautiful idea of a world that has free knowledge was persecuted to an early death. But at some point, we also need to stop talking and realise that we don’t have to come to arms for a moment only once-every-heroic-death. That the last disservice we will do to this everyday battle against intellectual property regime is to wait for the next icon to be trapped in this Greek tragedy structure of being punished for doing what he felt was right. It is time to start thinking of these questions of knowledge and information in our everyday life, negotiate with them beyond the narratives of convenience, and hope that there will be no more need to produce martyrs for a cause that is not just about books and music, but about being human.

Banner image credit: Maria Jesus V http://www.flickr.com/photos/favina/8377387022/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-jan-24-2013-nishant-shah-remembering-aaron-swartz-taking-up-the-fight

Big Data, People's Lives, and the Importance of Openness

nishant — 2013-07-03T04:23:11Z

Openness has become the buzzword for everything in India right now. From the new kids on the block riding the wave of Digital Humanities investing in infrastructure of open knowledge initiatives to the rhetoric of people-centered open government data projects that are architected to create 'empowered citizens', there is an inherent belief that Opening up things will make everything good.

This blog post was published in DML Central on June 24, 2013.

I am not an Open-data party pooper. In fact, I firmly believe that opening up data – through hardware, through software, through intellectual property regimes on content – and enabling access to information and data is one of the most basic needs of the information age. I also advocate for strong policies that curb corporate and government control and monopolies over data and information. Along with my colleagues at the Centre for Internet and Society, and the many networks we work with, I have thought of myself as an open data advocate and have worked towards examining openness not only at the level of content, but also openness in infrastructure and conditions of access, distribution and storage. More than ever, it is necessary to build systems of Open Data that not only have distributed, collective and ethical ownership but also ensure the fair use and integration of information in our everyday life – especially given the sinister age of relentless remembering, as lives get incessantly archived through ubiquitous and pervasive technologies of portable computing.

Having said that, there is a strange thing happening around Openness right now. Openness seems to have been separated from the fact that it is a response to things being gated and closed. Openness, as it is being deployed right now, in e-government initiatives or rapid digitization processes in university libraries, seems to suggest that Openness is merely about making things in the physical format available in the digital medium. Hence, for example, the National Mission for Education through Information and Communication Technologies, India’s largest flagship government initiative to build learning conditions of the future, is investing almost all of its budget on digitizing historical and local language material in digitally intelligible and legible records that can be easily distributed. While the effort at building the infrastructure and preserving this material is absolutely worth supporting, making it the be-all and end-all of Open data initiatives is symptomatic of what I call the ‘politics of the benign’. We need to realize that Openness is not merely about making already available content in physical formats in the digital domain. Openness is about battles with Intellectual Property Regimes, which charge an extraordinary amount of money for high-value knowledge to anybody who wants to access it. In other words, openness is not about digitizing our grandparents’ pictures; it is about claiming access to knowledge and information hidden behind paywalls and gateways that is often produced using public resources.

As you can imagine, the perpetuation of this politics of benign fits many agendas; there are numerous stakeholders and actors who seek to neuter the radical nature of demands made by the Openness movements while retaining the vocabulary of political change. And that is why, if you look at the ways in which openness debates have changed, they get immediately deflected to questions around infrastructure, access, last-mile, etc. – which are all presented to us as the infrastructure of being political and being open. In the last few years, especially with Digital Humanities emerging as the playground where politics is not allowed, I find too many instances where the Humanities and Social Sciences questions get morphed into similar sounding questions that pretend to be the same but dislocate the political content and intention from the engagement.

One of the ways this works really well is by a separation of data from the lived reality of people. Data is seen as something that is out there – something that is about the real rather than the real. It is seen as an abstraction, which, when it further enters the circuits of pretty visualizations and graphic representations, becomes so entrenched in questions of reading and coding that it often becomes a surrogate for the larger realities that it is supposed to intervene in. So, for example, in India, the concerns around agriculture infrastructure and conditions of the farmers have easily been replaced by agriculture informatics – leading to a strange paradox where the states with the highest community informatics infrastructure also have the highest incidences of farmer suicides. I am not suggesting there is a cause-and-effect relationship here. However, it is a telling story that the community informatics infrastructure which was supposed to change the bleak realities of agriculture and farming in India has definitely not changed the nature of the reality it set out to solve.

Or in a similar vein, the ways in which the landscape of education is changing in the country, because of the emergence of the digital as the new organizing principle and in some instances, the raison de etre for building education infrastructure also needs to be examined. So, for instance, India has seen a rapid improvement of the Gross Enrollment Ratio in education that measures the annual intake and successful completion of education programs by students in the country. The GER shows that with remote education processes, the attempts at building distributed learning environments and the building of digital infrastructure has led to more students in different parts of the country getting enrolled in formal education systems. There is a celebration that more children are entering schools and colleges and are also in a state of socio-economic mobility. There is a clear causal relationship established in producing digital infrastructure and greater access to education and learning resources for an emerging information society like India.

However, this particular mode of looking at education, through the lens of access and inclusion, is no longer able to reflect on the core concerns that education institutions in the country were historically supposed to address. If the primary function of education was to address the questions of inequity, uneven modernity, disparate wealth distribution, and widespread socio-cultural conservatism, these are no longer questions that are featured in the Data-Technology driven education programs. These problems, which have been at the center of education debates in the country – leading to widespread affirmative action and violent resistance to it – have now been reformulated around quantifiable parameters of intake, credits, employability, affordability, accessibility, merit, etc. So there is silence about the nature of the students who enter education. There is an implicit push for the disinvestment of the state from education resources in favor of privatization. We remain enamored by the numbers joining the system, without worrying about the categories of discrimination – caste, gender, sexuality, language, location – that have affected the quality, intention and function of education. These issues have become moot points, to be replaced by visualizations and data sets that remain opaque in looking at the negotiations of identity politics and the need to embed education processes in lived realities of the students who enter formal education.

These problems are not new. And the intention of this articulation is not to deny the power of digital technologies or the opportunities they produce. Instead, it is a call to say that we need to stop thinking of data – an abstraction, an artifact, a manual product – as a natural state of being. We need to remind ourselves that engagement with data is not a sterile engagement, rendered beautiful through visualizations and infographics that can make reality intelligible. It is perhaps time to realize that Data has replaced People as the central concern of being human, social and political. Time to start re-introducing People back into debates around Data, and acknowledging that Data Informatics is People Informatics and data wars have a direct effect on the ways in which people live. And Die.

Banner image credit: sugree http://www.flickr.com/photos/73462957

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-june-24-2013-nishant-shah-big-data-peoples-lives-and-importance-of-openness

How Can We Make Open Education Truly Open?

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:45:55Z

I have spent the last month being unpopular. I have been in conversation with many ‘Open Everything’ activists and practitioners. At each instance, we got stuck because I insisted that we begin by defining what ‘Open’ means in the easy abuse that it is subject to.

Dr. Nishant Shah's article was originally published in DML Central on November 22.

It has been a difficult, if slightly tedious exercise, because not only was there a lack of consensus around what constitutes openness, but also a collective confusion about what we mean when we attribute openness to an object, a process or to people. It was easy to define openness as opposed to a closed system – attributes of transparency, ownership, collaboration and a multidirectional panopticon were invoked in trying to understand the form, function and role of openness. However, it was quickly clear that even with people who are on the same side of the battle-lines around openness, there is a disjunction in their imagination of what an Open Society can mean. Hence, the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Government’ for instance, had very little cross-over with the ‘Open’ in ‘Open Education’. Apart from the larger infrastructure industry that supports the various implementations of Open systems ranging from participatory governments to Digital Humanities, there seems to be silos of openness that co-exist but do not converse.

One of the ways of doing away with the cultures of ambiguity that seem to have developed around Openness, where it is the object of inquiry, the process through which inquiries are made, the lens of critique and the aspiration of movements, perhaps need to be unpacked. And one of the ways of doing this would be to shift the focus from Open as an adjective to Open as a verb – to focus not on what it is, but what it works towards. This shift in thinking of Open as a verb, allows to produce a political critique of the Open paradigm, which is otherwise often missed out in the self-avowed goodness of Open movements.

This is probably a good space for me to declare that I am not an Openness dis-evangelist. I appreciate, endorse and celebrate the values of collaboration, engagement, participation, access and empowerment that Open movements work with and indeed belong to quite a handful of them. However, I do want to move away from the Open as self-explanatory and ask the more difficult questions – What is it that we are opening? Who are we opening it for? What is the Open working towards? In whose service and to what purposes? So when I look at ‘Open Education’, I don’t just want to look at how we open up education for mass access but also how do we make transparent the politics that surround the opening up of education.

Open as an Adjective vs Open as a Verb

One of the most celebrated accounts of open education has found its impetus in two distinct narratives – the first is that the University as we have inherited it is in ruins. The University has been described as inadequate, in desperate need of change to fit the requirements of the contemporary times we live in. The second is that education and learning are in a moment of crisis. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does entail the development of new pedagogic and technological structures which can construct new modes of engaging with knowledge practices. Both of these narratives are more or less taken for granted. There are staged battles between those who swear by MOOCs as the answer and those who swear at MOOCs as amplification of the problem; or between those who call for more public investment in education and learning and those who think that privatising education is the way forward. But in all these debates, which often take the tones of sombre zealots who argue over the nature of the divine, there is almost no questioning of the idea that the university is in crisis. Thus, when it comes to Open Education disputants, they never question the narrative of the university in crisis, but merely in how to resolve this crisis.

Sharmila Rege, a Dalit-feminist and an educator at the Pune University in India, who had made it her life work to critically intervene in debates around education and its intersections with social and political processes, suggests that what we need to do is reverse engineer the generation of this crisis. While the University seems to be ubiquitously crumbling across the globe – despite the fact that an historically unprecedented portion of the global population is enrolled in education programmes – this narrative of ruin is not new. Indeed, nor is the narrative of Openness. In Rege’s material history of education and gender in India, she invokes the figure of Savitribai Phule, the icon of India’s modernity, who, as an educated woman dedicated her life to ‘opening up’ education for those who were underprivileged and broken. Along with her husband, a modernist and a social reformer, Phule was the prototype feminist and development worker who radically opened up the modern education system in Maharashtra to those who were the intended beneficiaries but more often than not, excluded from the benefits that the system promised. In fact, as Rege shows us, in Phule’s account of the world, the university was essentially a system that justified its existence through the principles of openness and inclusion which we have now separated from it. While it might be a fallacy to claim these visions for a universal education system, it is still worth recognising that in different forms and formats, the establishment of the public education system has necessarily been one of openness.

When then, did this open system suddenly become closed? When did the university, which was a response to the closed education systems that were limited to the upper castes and classes of India, enter a state of crisis? In India, especially with the huge public discourse around affirmative action, quotas and reservations for different underprivileged communities, and the continued investment in public education infrastructure – the number of private universities, when you compare them with the developed North, is ridiculously low – we really need to figure out what it is that the university failed to do in its visions of openness for itself. Rege suggests that the generation of the crisis narrative for the university is actually a response to the university as an open structure. In the 1990s, with the renewed focus on universal education in the country, especially after the epoch marking agitations against affirmative actions which included massive mobilisations of upper class and caste students against the recommendations of the Mandal Commissions for continued reservation of seats for women and dalits, the university was at its open best. Both in terms of infrastructure, public policy and regulatory mechanisms, we had created universities that invited participation and presence of bodies which were otherwise systemically excluded from education processes.

Over the next two decades, the university then, has become a more inclusive space. It is populated with unexpected bodies and subjects. It has been de-gentrified and has been heralded as one of the few public institutions where a critique of sectarian and preferential politics has emerged. According to Rege, it is this very opening up of the University to women and Dalits, and the ‘vulgarization’ of education that led to the engineering of a crisis in the narratives around the university. This crisis, propelled equally by a neo-liberal development agenda and the need to create exclusive and exclusionary spaces for the elites of the country who did not necessarily want to find their privilege by escaping to the Ivy League universities in the North-West, sustains the idea that the university is in shambles and hence proposes the new Open Education movements, of which the MOOCs and the private universities are the two key embodiments. In a country that is starkly divided across linguistic and technology access lines, it is clear that both these structures, which are the key advocates of Open Education and learning, are in the service of those who can afford it. Or in other words, it is clear that the new openness movements, while they propose to be in the service of mass, distributed and universal education, are actually very urban, Anglophone, and available to a very small fraction of the society that already had privileged access to different and varied education resources historically.

These Open Education policies now offer alternatives to the public education model by suggesting that it is in crisis and thus finding viable options. These alternatives further demand that the Public University, becomes a professionalised space that produces workers and skilled labour for the new information and knowledge industries, while the more privileged sites of critical philosophy, thought and art move on to safer havens where those with rights of entitlement can study them in peace. The open Digital Humanities projects or the institution of private and satellite university campuses, which continue with their ad hoc, de-skilled, meritocratic logic of working with adjuncts and temporary knowledge workers, invest more in the technological development which is again a masculine domain of privilege even in countries like India where we witness massive mobilisation of people being trained to work in the IT industries.

This reverse engineering of what Open Education can mean in a country like India probably has similar narratives of the context and generation of the crisis across different geographies and time-zones. Openness, with the euphoria and the promise of radical transformation often produces this ellipsis that fails to see the larger structures that inform and shape the open education policies and regulations. In its closeness to the Big Data proponents, it even makes us believe that open education is about data and information management, forgetting that these practices have a direct implication on the material conditions that have been historically shaped. Just like we have developed a critique of well-intentioned development agendas that are purportedly pro-poor but eventually only benefit the wealthy by depositing more power in their coffers, openness in education and in governance needs to be re-examined more closely. Yes, Openness has some fantastic virtues that we need to aspire towards. But to open something, it first needs to be closed. And especially when it comes to the modern education system, we need to question the closeness that is easily attributed to and presumed for the public university. It is time to not only implement open education, but also see the larger constellations of privilege and inequity that often get elided in the blanket acceptance of the Open as necessarily the good or the desirable.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/openness/blog-old/dml-central-nishant-shah-november-22-2013-how-can-we-make-open-education-truly-open

Interns

nishant — 2012-10-07T04:00:26Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/people/intern

Digital Native: There is no spoon, There is no privacy

nishant — 2018-01-10T00:27:24Z

It should be common knowledge by now, in our lived experiences of big data, that digital privacy is a battle ground.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 9, 2017

Like persistent viruses, some things on the social web just resurface. This week it is a disclaimer that’s making the rounds on social media, where people announce that they hereby declare all their material private, and that any unauthorised use of this material for any commercial or non-consensual purpose is not allowed. The announcement has a semi-legalese tone – or, at least the kind of language that non-lawyers think law uses. It cites some random and pointless official sounding clauses which, apparently, reinforce the claim of the user to absolute privacy and ownership of their content.

Much screen space has been spilt in trying to question, mock and educate the people who put out these notices. It should be common knowledge by now, in our lived experiences of big data, that digital privacy is a battle ground. Most of us, as we click on Terms of Services and accept ‘free’ services for our search, browse, connect and share needs, sign off almost all moral and legal rights to the content that we produce online. Most of us would be lucky if suddenly, our Internet Service Provider (or platform and app of choice), didn’t turn around to claim our first borns and our souls — because we might have unwittingly accepted that clause too, when we clicked on “Accept and Proceed”. And yet, most of us, when it comes to thinking of digital privacy, hold on to a romantic idea of how, if we merely say it loud enough, we can reclaim our right to the information about us.

I am curious about where this notion comes from. Because it is definitely not the digital natives who foster these illusions. This year we have been working with a group of school girls between the ages of eight and 13, to understand how they experience and inhabit their digital spaces. Most of these young girls are not on public social media – they are generally not allowed to be there unless they lie about their ages – but, they are all in possession of smart phones and belong to micro social networks like WhatsApp groups and hangouts, where they connect with the people they know and go to school with. Most of them have never encountered strangers on the web, but their social media is saturated with messages and information from friends, families, colleagues and cohorts.

One of the questions posed to these groups was about the kind of material they produce within their networks. Surprisingly (because of their age group) but predictably (because it is the Internet), almost all of these girls told us about how they experimented with sexting and producing images of themselves that they have shared in these groups. We were wondering if they thought it was safe to do this. And almost all of them looked at us as if we were mad, and said “of course not!”. They talked to us that there is no privacy in the digital world – not even if it is in closed and curated groups. They were well aware that once they put out these images in the world, they will spread and be out of their control. They recounted incidents of how, when things did go terribly wrong in a couple of instances, the interventions from parents, teachers, and in one instance, even law enforcement, were of no help — the images continued to spread. What we thought were exceptional cases of loss of privacy and sexual harassment, turned out to be the status quo for these young girls’ experience of being online. As a 9-year-old, at the end of a focus group discussion said, with a rather chilling effect “it happens to everybody!”.

The younger users of the web, it seems, have no fantasies about their privacy and ownership of information. Through experiences and through shared knowledge, they already know that being online is to be in the public eye of unforgiving algorithms that spread you thin, beyond will and consent, over databases that never forget. They are aware of the mechanics of their actions, even if not the consequences. When we showed these user generated disclaimers of privacy to the young girls, they all laughed and joked about how silly these people were. And yet, the privacy disclaimers continue to be all around us. It is almost as if, the older users of the web are in a space of denial, where they refuse to acknowledge that in the corporatization of the web, we have already been sold. That these performative acts of personal protection are not just redundant but also foolish. However, this denial does help these older users to continue abdicating their responsibility towards holding governments and companies accountable for how they deal with our data. Hence the user seems to see no paradox on putting these disclaimers on their Facebook feeds while signing up for Aadhaar numbers, not recognising that the biggest agents of any breach in their privacy are themselves!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-9-digital-native-there-is-no-spoon-there-is-no-privacy

Digital Native: Finger on the buzzer

nishant — 2018-01-10T00:38:24Z

Which Hogwarts House are you? No, you don’t really want to know.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 22, 2017.

Internet browsing histories are dangerous things. One of the reasons why I would not want mine made public is because it will expose the part of my surfing that I am the most ashamed of — click-bait quizzes. No matter how frivolous the quiz might be, I can’t resist taking it. From which Hogwarts House I belong to (Hufflepuff all the way) to which Hollywood celebrity I look like (the last result was Matt Damon! Go figure); from how many books I can name by their first lines (92 on a score of 100) to how many words I can spell correctly (always a 100 per cent). While I know that most of these are completely pointless and a huge distraction from watching videos of hamsters eating carrots and goats butting people, I am a complete sucker for these quizzes. I even have an entire anonymous social media account just to take and share these endless no-sense time-sinks that populate the social web.

Recently, while succumbing to the late-night temptation of answering questions on one of these “tests” that challenged me to identify the correct spelling of the most commonly misspelled words, I erred. I am embarrassed (that was one of the word) that I am always a little confused when it comes to the word “accommodate” — I can never remember if the number of “c”s and “m”s are the same in the spelling and I made the wrong choice. I knew it, in a split second after choosing the option, that I was wrong. However, like the boy scout that I am, I decided to just continue with the test rather than re-doing it, and be content with a less than perfect score.

So imagine my surprise, when I got the final results. The test declared I was the next of kin to Shakespeare (which is weird, because he was such an atrocious speller) and that I had a 100 per cent accurate result. The analysis sang paeans (see, I can spell that without a spell-checker!) to my prowess at spelling and how, when it comes to the English language, I am nothing short of a savant. But I knew I had made a mistake, and so I decided to take the test again. This time, I deliberately made more than one mistake, carefully choosing wrong spellings for different words. Lo and behold, my final analysis still announced me as the peer of Shashi Tharoor, with the capacity to confound the Tweetosphere with my verbiage.

The pronouncements of my spelling skills had nothing to do with my ability. No matter how many times you took the quiz — with varying degrees of error — like a doting mother, it insisted that you are the best. Quizzes like these, which pretend to test and give an insight into our own capacities, are the new click bait. These quizzes have nothing to do with content or our skills. They have a simple function: they want us to feel validated so that we share the results as a humble brag with others in our social networks, catalysing an avalanche of people who would perpetuate the cycle. In this indiscreet sharing, these quizzes collect valuable data without our consent.

It is impossible to take such quizzes without signing in through our existing social media accounts and giving access to data that we would otherwise never think of giving to complete strangers promising to tell us our fake futures. These quizzes have identified that the biggest currency of the digital web is personal data, which, then, gets collected, collated, correlated and circulated to other actors who capitalise on it. This is the promise and threat of the big data industries that we live in. I do not want to add to the fear-mongering that often surrounds data theft — if data is the currency, then it is obvious that we are going to have to trade it, guard it, and save it, just the way we do our other currencies.

What I do want to point out is, that if there was a quiz, an app, a programme or a device, which asked to access our bank accounts in order to tell us that we are geniuses, we would be very suspicious of them. Remember, we are still hesitant to even giving our credit card details to websites (you know the premium platforms I am talking about) that have questionable content. We do not easily part with our passwords and keys to Artificial Intelligence scripts masquerading as fake prophets. Similarly, we need to give equal attention to the personal data sets that we give away to seemingly harmless things like quizzes and apps. Indeed, it is fun to indulge in this world of self-congratulatory feedback loops, but it is also good to pay some thought to the cost of this fun. Because when it comes to the world of data driven digitality, the axiom is really simple: if you are having fun for free, you are paying in ways that you cannot see. Often, it is through your personal data and private information.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-22-2017-digital-native-finger-on-the-buzzer

Digital native: Memory card is full

nishant — 2018-01-10T02:08:57Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Just Pinged to Say Hello

nishant — 2013-11-30T08:36:02Z

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

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

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

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

Person 1 (on WhatsApp): Hi.

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

Person 1: Good.

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

Person 1: Nothing.

End of conversation.

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

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

Person 2: It is 10 at night.

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

Person 2: Oh, I saw you online.

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

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

Me: Ok…. Er…goodnight.

Person2: Goodnight.

We hang up.

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

Me: Yes. I am attending a conference here.

Person 3: Cool!

Me: Umm… yeah, it is.

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native

nishant — 2015-04-17T10:40:02Z

The end of the year is supposed to be a happy, feel-good space for families, friends, societies and communities to come together and count our blessings. It is the time to look at things that have gone by and look forward to what the New Year will bring.

The article was originally published in the Indian Express on December 22, 2013.

And yet, when I started writing this piece, my horizons seemed to be eclipsed by the amount of violence we have witnessed in the last year, and the inability of our governance systems to deal with them.

Around this time last year, the nation had woken up to the horrors a young woman suffered as a group of men raped her in a moving bus in Delhi. The inhumanity of the crime, her tragic death, and the fact that despite our collective anger and grief, the year has been dotted with violence of a gendered and sexual nature, should be enough to quell any celebrations. What happened to her and then to many other reported and invisible survivors of sexual violence in the country has seen a dramatic transformation of the digital public sphere.

Spurred by anger, frustration and the realisation that we are often the agents of change, people have taken to the streets and the information highway in unprecedented forms. Every reported incident of sexual violence — from the young intern who was molested by a former Supreme Court judge to the now infamous Tehelka case — sparked great ire on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and collaborative user-generated content sites. Hashtags have trended, videos have gone viral. Men and women have bonded together to speak against the increasingly unsafe spaces we seem to inhabit.

Responding to this public demonstration and outrage, we have seen some positive developments from the governments and judiciary systems which are morally, legally and constitutionally bound to look after us. And yet, we are quickly realising that much of this is not enough. While the law takes its course and tries to craft and enforce more efficient regulation to prevent and protect victims of such violent crimes, we have despaired at how it doesn't seem to change things materially.

The digital spaces that we have used to fight, to protest and to call for action, are also where we have shared the frustration at how little material reality has changed. Hashtags on Twitter have gone through life cycles of anger, protest and despair, as the complex structures of archaic laws, slow judiciary processes, prejudiced judges, and a populist politics which is often superficial, take their toll on processes to establish justice, equality and freedom for our societies.

As tweets and Facebook updates have now clearly told us, through testimonies and witness accounts, these questions cannot be understood in isolation. The social media has consistently reminded us that the December 16 gang rape was not just about one woman. It was about the misogynist societies that we are constructing and the fundamental flaws in systems which encourage the idea that men have ownership of the bodies and lives of women in our country. Across the year, through campaigns by online intervention groups like the Blank Noise Project or through note-card viral memes like "I need feminism" have emphasised the need to acknowledge these not as "women's problems" or "exceptional" problems. These are problems that need to be understood in the larger context of human rights, and our rights to life, dignity, equality and freedom enshrined in our Constitution.

And yet, as another year comes to an end, the social media is ablaze at a decision that has marked one of the darkest days in recent judicial history. On December 11, the Supreme Court of India repealed the landmark historical judgement issued by the Delhi High Court that read down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalises same-sex relationships. Finding this in defiance of our constitutional rights, the well-weighed judgment was celebrated across social media — nationally and globally — for its recognition that the problem of discrimination is never just about one demography or section of the society. As the LGBTQ communities stood in shock, there was something else that happened on social media.

For once, the comments of disbelief, anger and surprise turned into a roar for correcting such a verdict. And it is not only the LGBTQ identified people and activists who are joining this clamour. Straight people, people with families, families with LGBTQ children, are all coming out and finding a common bond of solidarity that works around hashtags and viral sharing of messages. The world of social media has shown how we have learned, that we cannot leave the underprivileged to fight for themselves. Because, if we ignore the discrimination against them, we will have nobody to support us when we are being treated as sub-human and irrelevant in a country that has often done poetic interpretations of what constitutional rights mean.

I started writing this piece with despair. But I slowly realise that maybe there is something to be thankful about this year. That even when our archaic systems of justice are catching up with the accelerated transformations in our lives, the social media does act as a public space where those bound together in their belief for equality and justice can act in solidarity. On Twitter, this fateful day, everybody was queer. And they did not have to identify themselves as men or women, straight, gay or lesbian. Despite our bodies, our differences, our status and practices, we can claim to fight for those whose voices, bodies, lives and loves are being negated in our country. And if you cannot take to the streets to make your support felt, remember that the digital public sphere is active and buzzing. Those in power have no choice but to take into account the collective voice on the internet, which demands and shall build open, fair and equal societies.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-december-22-2013-nishant-shah-digital-native

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