Centre for Internet and Society

Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures: Mapping the Data Supply Chain in the Healthcare Industry in India

2024-01-05T02:38:22Z

The Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures project, supported by a grant from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, aims to study the Al data supply chain infrastructure in healthcare in India, and aims to critically analyse auditing frameworks that are utilised to develop and deploy AI systems in healthcare. It will map the prevalence of Al auditing practices within the sector to arrive at an understanding of frameworks that may be developed to check for ethical considerations - such as algorithmic bias and harm within healthcare systems, especially against marginalised and vulnerable populations.

There has been an increased interest in health data in India over the recent years, where health data policies encourage sharing of data with different entities, at the same time, there has been a growing interest in deployment of Al in healthcare from startups, hospitals, as well as multinational technology companies.

Given the invisibility of algorithmic infrastructures that underlie the digital economy and the important decisions these technologies can make about patients' health, it's important to look at how these systems are developed, how data flows within them, how these systems are tested and verified and what ethical considerations inform their deployment.

The Unpacking Algorithmic Infrastructures project, supported by a grant from the Notre Dame-IBM Tech Ethics Lab, aims to study the Al data supply chain infrastructure in healthcare in India, and aims to critically analyse auditing frameworks that are utilised to develop and deploy AI systems in healthcare. It will map the prevalence of Al auditing practices within the sector to arrive at an understanding of frameworks that may be developed to check for ethical considerations - such as algorithmic bias and harm within healthcare systems, especially against marginalised and vulnerable populations.

Research Questions

To what extent organisations take ethical principles into account when developing AI , managing the training and testing dataset, and while deploying the AI in the healthcare sector.
What best practices for auditing can be put in place based on our critical understanding of AI data supply chains and auditing frameworks being employed in the healthcare sector.
What is a possible auditing framework that is best suited to organisations in the majority world.

Research Design and Methods

For this study, we will use a comprehensive mixed methods approach. We will survey professionals working towards designing, developing and deploying AI systems for healthcare in India, across technology and healthcare organizations. We will also undertake in-depth interviews with experts who are part of key stakeholder groups.

We hereby invite researchers, technologists, healthcare professionals, and others working at the intersection of Artificial Intelligence and Healthcare to speak to us and help us inform the study. You may contact Shweta Monhandas at shweta@cis-india.org

Research Team: Amrita Sengupta, Chetna V. M., Pallavi Bedi, Puthiya Purayil Sneha, Shweta Mohandas and Yatharth.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/unpacking-algorithmic-infrastructures

Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai

Larissa Hjorth and Genevieve Bell — 2015-10-24T13:41:47Z

From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.

The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition. The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and pervasive.

As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011). However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011) area of the everyday.

Locating the Mobile seeks to address this knowledge gap by undertaking close studies of locative media in three locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both developed and developing contexts.

These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller & Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping new narratives of place.

Locating the Mobile seeks to collect and analyse some of the emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:

Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.
Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.
Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.
Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.

By bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art towards nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices.

Significance and Innovation

The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth 2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.

Locating the Mobile is original in its topic, method, outcomes and industry collaboration. Firstly, it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies internationally to explore locative media over time in specific locations. Secondly, it deploys a variety of methods (such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone, iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D) (Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or Eurocentric in focus. Thirdly, through multi-site analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and transnationalism. Fourthly, by pioneering the first multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual, group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of significance and innovation. We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media. In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility, migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive, the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’ generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media; the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace, the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media, ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and Shanghai—exploring locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place.

We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is, data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan University,

Locating the Mobile seeks to contextualise the research in terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies (see below for more details).

We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth 2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications (apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased accessibility to augmented
reality (AR). Instead of replacing the analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up ‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative media augment and simulate in everyday practices.

We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream, questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of ‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and consumption, the Asia-Pacific.

National Research Priorities: With the rise of smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned. And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals, communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative, cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.

Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile

Not a Goodbye; More a ‘Come Again’: Thoughts on being Research Director at a moment of transition

nishant — 2014-06-15T02:17:06Z

As I slowly make the news of my transition from being the Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to taking up a professorship at the Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany, there is a question that I am often asked: “Are you going to start a new research centre?” And the answer, for the most part, is “No.”

Not because I don’t see the value of creating institutional spaces like these or that starting and running CIS has been anything short of a dream, but because I don’t how to. When I tell people I don’t know how CIS came into being, they suspect that I am being either facetious or dismissive. But I am not. If somebody asked me to write an Origin Story for CIS, I would be baffled – or probably sum it up by saying that it happened. There was the germ of an idea, a whole lot of people who responded to it, and like the great Tolkienian epic, it was a story that grew in its telling.

I was 27, when Sunil Abraham, the now Executive Director and I met together in New Delhi, to talk about what a research organisation that represents the public interest at the intersections of Internet & Society would look like. We spent three days in the Delhi heat, coming up with the most fantastic ideas about methods, structures and core areas of interest. It was one of those divine exercises where you build the template for your dream work and then, like a fairy-tale, we had incredible people who came and supported us to make that dream a reality. In six months of that first conversation – I had just turned 28 and was completing the last drafts of my Ph.D. dissertation – CIS got officially registered and with some of the most incredible people, who have been with us, both in their generous affective investment as well as in their intellectual and professional support, we kicked-off a research centre, that has become not only hard to ignore but also significantly important in bringing about scholarly and practice based research around the different facets of how the emergence and widespread reach of the Internet is changing the ways in which we become human, social and political in emerging information societies of the Global South.

In the 7 years since that first conversation started, I have learned so much from CIS and the networks that built around it, that it would be impossible to write an exhaustive account of it. However, as I now take up a new position at the CIS as a member of its board, and continue to collaborate with the on-the-ground teams intellectually, from my new position as a Professor, there are five things I want to dwell upon, more to remind myself of important lessons learned, but also as approaches that the new director and team might want to reference:

Research cannot be individually focused
One of the things that academic training does is that it promotes the idea of an individual researcher. We write, publish, seek grants and present our work, taking individual credit and building a body of work that is centred on us. True, we collaborate and we participate and we are opening up more distributed modes of learning and research, but at the end of the day, there is still an imagination of a research community that is built of individual scholars who work in a happy symbiosis and synthesis.

The biggest lesson I learned with the CIS was that research requires collectives – peers, supporters, and critics – that can help materialise a vision. Instead of trying to do ‘my’ research, it was the first time that I was enabling others’ research. I had a say in building the research vision, and establishing protocols of rigour and review, but to have a dream, and then to share it with others, so that it becomes a collective dream was an incredible experience. It was the beginning of a method that I hope informs all my work, where research methods are constantly going to accommodate for and be shaped by collective visions and approaches rather than just the individual as a lone warrior. More than anything else, it reassures us that we are not alone, either in our triumphs or our road-blocks, and it builds a community of thinkers that is more important than just the single authored outputs that we bring out.
Research requires infrastructure
Institutions are infrastructure. However, our jobs are so segregated, that we don’t always realise the incredible effort that goes into building such institutions and then making them work as efficient infrastructure to support research. It is very rare, in research publications that we thank our everyday office staff, the accounts team that processes the complicated bureaucracies of research funding, the programme managers who create networks and evaluation formats, or the numerous people who perform ‘non-research’ jobs so that we can do the research.

I had worked in project and programme manager positions before CIS. I had also worked as an independent researcher and consultant before that. But this was the first time I actually took the dual responsibility of not only initiating research but also providing the infrastructure for it. And I know that I am a wiser person for it. The intricate world of fund-raising, managing and developing networks, of implementing and monitoring research projects and contracts, and the need to constantly find sustainable options for the research programmes is something that requires an incredible amount of effort and resources. The researchers often are kept away from this world, or we often just ignore the intense quotidian activities that give us the privilege of doing our work, and my time with CIS taught me not only to appreciate this, but also to recognise these tasks as research.
All research must try and answer the ‘So What?’ question
Within academic circles, research has inherent value. We do have the freedom to develop new frameworks and ideas that might not have any immediate relevance and might in fact even fail without seeing the light of day. Academia is privileged because as long as we perform our pedagogic tasks, we have the space to experiment and often work on areas that might not benefit anybody outside the disciplines that we are located in.

At CIS, working at such close quarters with colleagues who are experts in policy and regulation, research became critical for me. It wasn’t research for research’s sake. It was research with a cause. At the same time, making the research relevant was not an exercise in dumbing it down so that it can be reduced to easy implementation. The effort required at making academic and intellectual research accessible, while still retaining its complexity has been a heady experience for me. Since CIS, I have tried to make sure that all research is able to answer the ‘So What?’ question, and every time, it has made the research more robust, more rigorous and having a greater audience and impact than it would otherwise have.
To be a research organisation is to be unafraid
One of the most fantastic things about being a young research organisations was that we were not afraid to voice our opinions and voice them loud. In the last 6 years, CIS has evolved into a strong voice that is not unanimous, but is still clear. We have had disagreements with established research and policy actors. We have critiqued decisions taken by policy and development institutions when we felt that they were flawed. We have provided a critical commentary to different instruments of law and regulation when necessary. We have challenged academic researchers in their methodology as well as in their disconnect from the ‘real world’. And we did it, because early on, the people who guided us, taught us, that research organisations have to be unafraid.

Unafraid, not just to ask tough questions of those outside, but also of asking tough questions internally. The team, as it has grown, has been a smorgasbord of disciplinary and stakeholder locations. We don’t necessarily speak the same language. We don’t also, agree on many critical points. But we never tried to be a consensus generation institute. Instead, we learned to coexist and even collaborate in our differences – it was something that external partners often had problems with. How can one set of people work towards critically opposing a phenomenon when others might actually write in favour of some of the aspects of that same phenomenon? How is it possible that some in the institute have great collaborations with a network that the others critique persistently in their work? These tensions, for me, have been generative and I hope that they continue, both in the institution but also in my future work.
Researchers are people too
This is one of the strangest things to realise, but it is a good lesson to remember. Academia and research work through abstractions. At some point, the researchers become names. They become only a body of work, a certain number of words. But dealing with researchers is to deal with human beings. We have to remember that researchers, while they are often driven and passionate and unable to extricate their lives from their work, do have lives and bodies and socialities that need to be managed. Institutions often get driven by matrices of measurement and politics of promotion and evaluation, at the neglect of the people who actually build it. The constant push at CIS was to recognise that we are all too human in our everyday lives. And to build work environments, relationships and spaces that nurture the people we work with is the primary responsibility of all research.

These points are probably too vague, but this blog post is already too long. I just wanted to take this opportunity to write some ‘Notes to the self’ about things that have been the most important to me in being the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society. And now, it is time for me to move on. I want to place myself in an academic setting where I learn, I get some headspace to think and write, and do the one thing that I enjoy the most – teach. Starting 1st October 2014[*] I am stepping down as the Research Director and taking up a professorship in a new and exciting university, designing courses and research agendas at the intersections of internet studies, media studies, culture studies and aesthetic studies, bringing together some of my most passionate areas of interest. However, I continue to be interested and invested in CIS’ institutional growth. I shall be a part of the search committee as we invite a new Research Director in the Bangalore office, I shall be a part of the Board that governs the CIS, and I shall always think of CIS as my home, continuing mentoring and implementing existing collaborations but also building more, especially towards the pedagogic and knowledge production side of things.

When the final decisions about this transition were made last week, I had thought I would be emotional and heart broken. Instead, I only feel excited. I have a wonderful set of colleagues in Bangalore, and they, in turn, are at the centre of networks of support, love, empathy and trust. CIS will benefit from having a new Research Director who will bring new visions, new methods, new processes and infrastructure to the table, and I hope that as my own academic career grows, I shall find myself returning to CIS in different capacities and roles, both for what I could contribute to it, but also for what I continue to learn from the rich range and variety of activities that it anchors.

[*].For me, this is not a goodbye, but just a change in roles at the CIS. I will continue to use my CIS credentials and email address, and will be found on the existing contact details there for any queries or interactions with and on behalf of the CIS. So no need to change your address books, just yet.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again

Living in the Archival Moment

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:27:34Z

The archive has been and continues to be a key concept in Digital Humanities discourse, particularly in India. The importance of the archive to knowledge production in the Humanities, the implication of changes in archival practice with the advent of electronic publishing and digitisation, and the focus on curation as a critical and creative process are some aspects of the debate that this blog post looks at.

In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, published in 1968, Walter Benjamin dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting — books in this particular case — on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in Digital Humanities - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector — a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that the Digital Humanities seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the ‘digital humanist’, when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector — a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.

The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archiviation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory. Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as ‘a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said’,[1]thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, histories are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries.[2]The issue of access is what several archival and digitisation projects in the early phase of Digital Humanities in the West seemingly sought to address, by ‘opening up’ and animating the archive in some sense through the use of digital technologies, which has allowed one to envisage a model of the networked or conceptual archive developed through a process of sharing and collaboration. However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship. (For more on a theoretical overview of the concept and function of the archive, see the post on ‘Archive Practice and Digital Humanities’ by Sara Morais).

While the focus of Digital Humanities debates in the West now seem to primarily encompass methods of visualising data that the archive is an important source for, in the Indian context it is the ‘incompleteness of the archive’ that still seems to be a bone of contention. Many scholars and practitioners we spoke to see archive creation as one of the key questions of Digital Humanities as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Dr. Aparna Balachandran and Dr. Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation. The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to now being within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, speaks about this change. From a time even twenty years ago, when it was difficult to define the archive, it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for preservation. The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, have also been important in this shift to archiving the personal and the everyday, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive.

The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies also contributes to a ‘problem of excess’, and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta, Professor of English and director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an ‘age of altruism’, where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the Digital Humanities discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of digital humanities to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Media and Design, Bangalore and the Centre for Public History (CPH) speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. One of the approaches of Digital Humanities may be address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material.

The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.

The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, who also initiated the Sarai programme speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of ‘mailing lists’ that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities, like the Pad.ma archive for example which works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, the Indian Memory project and Osianama. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or ‘trace’. However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is a crucial question. Arjun Appadurai, in an essay titled ‘Archive and Aspiration’, which was also reproduced as part of a research art project,[3] traces the growth of the migrant archive and how electronic mediation shapes collective memory and aspiration. He points out that ‘The archive as a deliberate project is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and, thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervention, but is its first step. Since all archives are collections of documents (whether graphic, artifactual or recorded in other forms), this means that the archive is always a meta-intervention. This further means that archives are not only about memory (and the trace or record) but about the work of the imagination, about some sort of social project. These projects seemed, for a while, to have become largely bureaucratic instruments in the hands of the state, but today we are once again reminded that the archive is an everyday tool. Through the experience of the migrant, we can see how archives are conscious sites of debate and desire. And with the arrival of electronic forms of mediation, we can see more clearly that collective memory is interactively designed and socially produced." In another essay reproduced as part of the same project, Wolfgang Ernst talks about the change in the notion of archive from ‘archival space’ to ‘archival time’, in a digital culture, in which the key is the dynamics of the permanent transmission of data. Cyberspace or the internet, according to Ernst produces a new kind of memory culture, which is devoid of organisational memory that is essentially the premise of the traditional text-based archive. He says "In cyber ‘space’ the notion of the archive has already become an anachronistic, hindering metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical terms, replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence. The old rule that only what has been stored can be located is no longer applicable.13 Beyond the archive in its old ‘archontic’ quality, the Internet generates, in this sense, a new memory culture. Digitalization of analogous stored material means trans-archivization. Linked to the Internet rather than to traditional state bureaucracies, there is no organizational memory any more but a definition by circulating states, constructive rather than re-constructive. Assuming that the matter of memory is really only an effect of the application of techniques of recall, there is no memory. The networked data bases mark the beginning of a relationship to knowledge that dissolves the hierarchy associated with the classical archive."

One can therefore trace the definite shift in the concept and nature of the archive from being a static repository to a critical intervention and creative exercise, and technology being quite integral to its imagination. Most significantly perhaps, the change has been one from the notion of record to that of affect. Archive-building as an affective practice, which has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The notion of the archive or as in this case data as an affective object becomes pertinent here. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data or big social data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. The matter of immediate import here would then be the changes in modes of reading and writing that are brought about by the proliferation of and engagement with big social data. How do we read data, what are changes in reading practices, how do they affect writing and visualisation and what is the nature of the reader thus constructed form some of the areas of exploration for the Digital Humanities, and will be taken up in the forthcoming blogs.

[1]. Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004), p.18.

[2]. Ibid.

[3]. Archive Public is a research art project that looks at bringing together archival art and solidarity actions. See http://archivepublic.wordpress.com/ for more on this.

References

Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library”, in Illuminations, trans.Harry Zohn, Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schoken Books (1969) pp 59 - 67.
Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (1995).
Manoff, Marlene:” Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” In: Libraries and the Academy, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–25. Copyright © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218. accessed May 5, 2014 :http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment

Intermediary Liability in India: Chilling Effects on Free Expression on the Internet

Rishabh Dara — 2012-12-14T10:22:24Z

The Centre for Internet & Society in partnership with Google India conducted the Google Policy Fellowship 2011. This was offered for the first time in Asia Pacific as well as in India. Rishabh Dara was selected as a Fellow and researched upon issues relating to freedom of expression. The results of the paper demonstrate that the ‘Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011’ notified by the Government of India on April 11, 2011 have a chilling effect on free expression.

Intermediaries are widely recognised as essential cogs in the wheel of exercising the right to freedom of expression on the Internet. Most major jurisdictions around the world have introduced legislations for limiting intermediary liability in order to ensure that this wheel does not stop spinning. With the 2008 amendment of the Information Technology Act 2000, India joined the bandwagon and established a ‘notice and takedown’ regime for limiting intermediary liability.

On the 11th of April 2011, the Government of India notified the ‘Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules 2011’ that prescribe, amongst other things, guidelines for administration of takedowns by intermediaries. The Rules have been criticised extensively by both the national and the international media. The media has projected that the Rules, contrary to the objective of promoting free expression, seem to encourage privately administered injunctions to censor and chill free expression. On the other hand, the Government has responded through press releases and assured that the Rules in their current form do not violate the principle of freedom of expression or allow the government to regulate content.

This study has been conducted with the objective of determining whether the criteria, procedure and safeguards for administration of the takedowns as prescribed by the Rules lead to a chilling effect on online free expression. In the course of the study, takedown notices were sent to a sample comprising of 7 prominent intermediaries and their response to the notices was documented. Different policy factors were permuted in the takedown notices in order to understand at what points in the process of takedown, free expression is being chilled.

The results of the paper clearly demonstrate that the Rules indeed have a chilling effect on free expression. Specifically, the Rules create uncertainty in the criteria and procedure for administering the takedown thereby inducing the intermediaries to err on the side of caution and over-comply with takedown notices in order to limit their liability; and as a result suppress legitimate expressions. Additionally, the Rules do not establish sufficient safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse of the takedown process to suppress legitimate expressions.

Of the 7 intermediaries to which takedown notices were sent, 6 intermediaries over-complied with the notices, despite the apparent flaws in them. From the responses to the takedown notices, it can be reasonably presumed that not all intermediaries have sufficient legal competence or resources to deliberate on the legality of an expression. Even if such intermediary has sufficient legal competence, it has a tendency to prioritize the allocation of its legal resources according to the commercial importance of impugned expressions. Further, if such subjective determination is required to be done in a limited timeframe and in the absence of adequate facts and circumstances, the intermediary mechanically (without application of mind or proper judgement) complies with the takedown notice.

The results also demonstrate that the Rules are procedurally flawed as they ignore all elements of natural justice. The third party provider of information whose expression is censored is not informed about the takedown, let alone given an opportunity to be heard before or after the takedown. There is also no recourse to have the removed information put-back or restored. The intermediary is under no obligation to provide a reasoned decision for rejecting or accepting a takedown notice.

The Rules in their current form clearly tilt the takedown mechanism in favour of the complainant and adversely against the creator of expression.

The research highlights the need to:

increase the safeguards against misuse of the privately administered takedown regime

reduce the uncertainty in the criteria for administering the takedown

reduce the uncertainty in the procedure for administering the takedown

include various elements of natural justice in the procedure for administering the takedown

replace the requirement for subjective legal determination by intermediaries with an objective test

Click to download the report [PDF, 406 Kb]

Appendix 2

The above documents have been sent to:

Shri Kapil Sibal, Minister of Human Resource Development and Minister of Communications and Information Technology
Shri Milind Murli Deora, Minister of State of Communications and Information Technology
Shri Sachin Pilot, Minister of State, Ministry of Communications and Information Technology
Dr. Anita Bhatnagar, Joint Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology
Dr. Ajay Kumar, Joint Secretary, Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Ministry of Communications & Information Technology
Dr. Gulshan Rai, Scientist G & Group Coordinator, Director General, ICERT, Controller Of Certifying, Authorities and Head of Division, Cyber Appellate Tribunal

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/chilling-effects-on-free-expression-on-internet

Digital Design: Human Behavior vs. Technology - Vita Beans

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:29:23Z

What comes first? Understanding human behavior and communication patterns to design digital technologies? Or should our technologies have the innate capacity to adapt to the profiles of all its potential users? This post will look at accessibility challenges for digital immigrants and the importance of behavioral science for the design of digital technologies. We interview Amruth Bagali Ravindranath from Vita Beans.

CHANGE-MAKER: Amruth B R

PRODUCT:
Vita Beans and Guru G

METHOD OF CHANGE:
Borrow elements from behavioral science and social marketing to make technology more intuitive.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
Make technology easy to use, fun and effective.

Chirptoons: Create Cartoons in a Jiffy. Designed by Vita Beans
(The animation seems to be skipping a few lines. Check box below for a transcript)
Design your own here: http://bit.ly/1dOEpPo

Transcript of animation:

Ajoy: Hi!
Usha: Hi! What will we talk about today?
Ajoy: We will learn to design digital stories!
Usha: What do you mean by digital stories?
Ajoy: What we are doing right now!.
Telling a story through a digital medium.
Usha: Oh! But what is so complicated about that?
You write a story and then you post it online What’s
the big deal?
Ajoy: This is true. But you want everyone to access
your story right?
Usha: Yes! Of course!
Ajoy: Then you need to think about your audience!
Are you sure they all know how to use this technology?
Usha: Well...no, not really.
Ajoy: Do you know what makes it challenging for them?
Or how to adapt technology to make it easier?
Usha: Eh, no...no clue :(
Ajoy: Then read on.Today we will take a step back.
We must think about human behaviour first!
and then design our technology accordingly.
Usha: Sounds good! Let's do it.

First off, apologies for such a feeble and sad animation. When I was given access to Chirptoons, I was quite confident I would be able to produce a somewhat interesting introduction to this post and get you excited about our next interview. However, between first-time user friction and a couple of glitches in the program, I found myself -a semi-savvy digital native who has been using technology, almost every day of her life, for the last 15 years- struggling to create the cartoon and clearly failing at it. The biggest challenge was translating what I had in mind into a digital format (The demo was very straightforward. I was just particularly inept), and it was frustrating to the point I decided to drop it, leave it as is, publish my unfinished cartoon and turn this post into a reflection on 'design challenges behind digital storytelling', so I could move on with my life.

What I experienced with Chirptoons is what many users: both digital natives and immigrants constantly face due to the pace at which new digital technologies are emerging. While the privileged demographic who has physical access to technology has a decent knowledge of basic web browsing and document processing features, there is still a very large gap in accessibility in terms of how to navigate more complex formats. At the end of the day, producers retain the creative power and determine the functions and flexibility of the technologies we use in the day to day. Just think of Facebook and its constant interface updates. We have all felt the wrenching need for that 'dislike' button to make our interactions a tad more honest, yet we have no power to create it or change Facebook's format to one that enables our needs better.

So far, we have explored information from different angles: as activism, as visual design, as stories; and how digital technologies have been used strategically to disseminate it. However, our analysis is lacking a better understanding of the digital. We have been focusing on citizens as technology 'consumers', and we have not looked at whether digital infrastructures are accessible enough for users to become 'producers'. The question is: how do we do this: how do we engage different users with different digital literacy levels, skills and aptitudes in the production of digital content? With this post we bring a new topic into our series: accessibility and Information infrastructures. This one will focus on design and the role of behavioural science. Our interview with Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, brought a very unique perspective into the conversation, from which I would like to highlight three points:

a) The importance of behavioral science for design. Amruth stressed why we need a thorough understanding of behavioral and cognitive science in the design of digital technologies and how crucial it is to investigate the decision processes and communication strategies of humans to make technologies user-friendly and context appropriate.

b) How public relations and social marketing concepts can also provide insight on how to target and engage potential users more effectively. This point starts to answer some of the questions we raised on the Information Design post: thinking about the citizen as a consumer. This point also works as an alternative take on how to target civic engagement through technology.

c) How to engage different type of users: not only the digital native, but also digital immigrants[1]

who still play crucial roles as information gatekeepers in fields such as education or urban governance.

Vita Beans

We interviewed Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, Founder of Vita Beans to answer some of these questions. Vita Beans’ mandate is to create inspiring, easy-to-use applications in areas of education and human resources, to share knowledge in innovative, fun an effective ways. The logic behind their technological framework is trying to mimic the profile of the human brain linked to decision making -including economic, evolutionary, emotional, and psychological elements- and design their applications based on these patterns. Some of the products they offer are cognitive skill development applications, game based learning applications, educational technology research, among others, and their latest educational product: Guru G was chosen by the Unreasonable at Sea program (by Unreasonable institute & co-founder of Stanford d.school) as one of the 11 companies changing the world.

"We are trying to adapt to how the user wants to use something, rather than expecting the user to learn. This is essential in the education space to make things work".

Guru G is a "gamified teaching, teacher training & open certification platform", that aims to democratize access to technology for quality teachers. Rather than focusing on the student as most education technologies do, Guru G believes that teachers are the most important element of the education system. Enabling teachers, means quality education will reach the lives of hundreds of students during their professional life time, and with this in mind, Vita Beans designed a platform that is engaging, easy to use and intuitive, designed specifically with teachers, schools and governments in mind.

Unreasonable Barcelona: Anand Joshi, Guru-G from Unreasonable Media on Vimeo.

Inspiration

"Teachers don't use and don't like to use technology"

The idea came from the products Vita Beans had already developed for the education space, such as their text2animation & text2game prototypes. They had produced over 80 collaborative games teachers were using in the classroom. Students play together in teams and learn about different topics through the process of gaming. However, suddenly they realized teachers had great ideas they didn't know how to translate into a digital form because they did not have the knowledge or the skills to create digital content. This is, according to Amruth, the crisis they are trying to solve in the education space: the quality of teachers, access to good teachers and the difficulty for teachers to adopt new technologies were the biggest challenges. "

The design challenge

Their initial prototypes were designed with assumptions based on their gamification experiments with students. "We miserably failed with teachers and we discovered what a good gamification system for teachers looks like by prototyping with teachers and looking at the small things. It was an interesting learning experience." They identified two common reasons why they hesitated to adopt anything new in the classroom.

Teachers don't want to feel like they can't use something a student can.
Teachers can't visualize themselves using that tool, this there is an element of uncertainty and lack of confidence.

It was imperative for Vita Beans to switch focus: "Any tool you design, you expect to train the user to understand your tool, and if they refuse to do that; you blame them." They used their behavioural science background to come up with infrastructural solutions that solve the limitations from the outset.

The solutions

They started prototyping with natural language processing for their text2animation & text2game projects. NLP is a branch of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Teachers articulated their ideas in simple English and the program used NLP to take what they said, try to understand what they were trying to visualize and convert into programming language to build an animated movie out of it (like what we used to open this article -but with hopefully better results). Amruth was very confident about the potential of this prototype and shared with us that UNICEF might take it up and implement it as an open source animated video and game creation tool in Africa.

They also developed an adaptive navigation engine for one of their game based learning platforms; a tool that adapts to what you are trying to do: "There is no fixed way to navigate from one task to another. It tries to learn the closest action that each teacher is trying to do and it executes that. It tries to learn how the teacher wants to use it."' This was a success. They incorporated touch screens to make the product more intuitive and the teachers picked it up quickly.

Amruth claims they are the first in the world to develop a gamification platform specifically for teachers and the reason was their solution to the navigation issue. This experience also indirectly helped in designing Guru-G.

"Amruth Bagali Ravindranath talks about text2animation & text2game prototypes"
Amruth B R, at TedxMcGill. Courtesy of YouTube

These design solutions and the learnings from each project inspired the team to come up with products which have been adopted commercially across 10 states in India, reached 4000+ schools & over 3 million kids internationally through partners in India & North America. They have helped education companies build their primary and secondary school education products, (including one of India's top classroom technologies), have been covered by the media and won several entrepreneurship awards. More information here and on their website. Our question is: what is it about behavioral science that helped Amruth's team arrive to this epiphany in tech design?

Behavioral Science and Social Marketing

Comparing marketing to advocacy is bound to be met by resistance and perhaps controversy. I raised this question when we interviewed Maya Ganesh for the Information Design post, and stated the following in our conclusion: "Our consumption habits in the market are shaping how we process and interact with information in the public space. The possibility of 'consumer behavior' permeating modalities of activism, reinforces the need to explore more interesting strategies for information dissemination." Now that we are starting to look closely at the infrastructure supporting information, I will stubbornly return to the same question: to what extent should we borrow tactics for advocacy from marketing? and add: how much of it should permeate the design of digital technologies?

Amruth made a casual reference during our interview that triggered this thought. We were discussing the importance of understanding behavior patterns, when he brought up Edward Bernays. This man used psychoanalysis, psychology and social science to design public persuasion campaigns and could get masses to choose what he wanted them to without them realizing it. While this sounds awfully dangerous and manipulative, I would like to rescue the idea of understanding human behavior well enough to design technology around it and I will entertain this thought in the context of social change -please, don't judge.

Pillip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, wrote a paper bringing marketing and social change together: “Can social causes be advanced more successfully through applying principles, concepts and techniques of marketing?”. He defines marketing as:

"a sophisticated technology, that draws heavily on behavioral science for clues to solve communication and persuasion related to influencing accessibility. [...] Most of the effort is spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and creating goods and services to satisfy them" (Kotler, 1971)

This definition is a useful bridge to link marketing with accessibility of digital technologies. G.D. Wiebe wrote an influential paper on social marketing, that coined the question: "Why can't you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you can sell soap?", that later influenced public information campaigns by USAID, the WHO, and the World Bank [2] . While he recognized how these models can to an extent commodify human behavior and social principles, he stressed that knowledge of behavioral science is a useful framework for product planning, that must be given a socially useful implementation. He developed the following criteria of considerations:

Criteria	Description
Force	The intensity of the person's motivation toward the goal -a combination of his predisposition prior to the message and the stimulation of the message
Direction	Knowledge of how or where the person might go to consummate his motivation.
Mechanism	The existence of an agency that enables the person to translate his motivation into action.
Adequacy	The ability and effectiveness of the agency in performing its task.
Distance	Estimate of the energy and cost required (by the user) to consummate the motivation in relation to the reward

Considering this framework is part of recognizing how knowledge circulating market networks affects our behavior. Nishant Shah addressed two ideas along these lines in the thought piece. First, he suggests us to recognize the negotiations that take place in the state-citizen-market ecosystem, and how they affect our rights, demands and responsibilities in society. Second, how this leads to a different understanding of the citizen as an "embodiment of these state-market negotiations". Keeping consumer behavior, and the forces shaping, enabling and constraining it in mind, is an interesting framework when we think of ourselves as information consumers -and as Yochai Benkler posits in The Wealth of Networks- in an ongoing transition to information producers. This also depends on how we think of information. We usually define content as information, but the structure and infrastructure are also pieces of 'information' we continuously shape through our interaction with technology. Hence, when we talk about making information accessible, we are also talking about producing legible and intelligible infrastructures.

Linking it back to digital technology

I am aware that the relationship we are trying to draw seems little far-fetched, but Amruth and the Vita Bean's team experience shows this behavioral-science approach, not only has a lot of potential, but is seldom explored in the education technology market. He told us about his success story with a behavior simulation engine. They used neuroscience as a base to build computer based activities and games to predict the behavior of its users on specific situations. They had an accuracy of 86%, which according to Amruth, is larger than every known psychological framework, and according to their testimonial, above most behavioral tests in the market (which only yield 20-40% of accuracy). Amruth said: "That was the first behavior research connection that brought us into the start-up space. Exploring games, exploring human behavior."

Design challenges in
mobile applications**

Make it noticeable
Make it useless if not shared
Manufacture peer pressure
Easy to personalize
Must evolve constantly
(static stories die)

We can also link these ideas back to storytelling. Amruth and I discussed what is the best way to use technology to engage users with digital stories. He made a good point at pairing up both processes: "What makes a storytelling session effective is how you contextualize a story for the person you are sitting with. As kids we are used to a one way process. As adults, stories are more interactive, so you may bring a new dimension, and the story might go in a very different direction. The technology must enable and reflect that." Compelling narratives must motivate the audience to interact with the stories, and digital devices must perform the same function. The infrastructure and interface of technologies must be intuitive, familiar and persuasive enough to sway users into interacting with it.

A way to do this is by pairing up technologies with the criterion above. In terms of functionality: provide them with a mechanism that translates the users ideas into action, that is efficient at enabling them, and that reduces the 'distance (the cost or amount of energy needed) to perform a task -as has been accomplished with Guru G in India. As for the force and direction of motivation, Amruth brought up some design challenges when discussing adoption of mobile applications [**"by analysing what increases the probability of a solution / campaign growing organically by word of mouth, going viral, and specifically what make something fashionable". See box on the left]. These challenges may vary from one application to the other but, at the end of day, the analysis and conceptualization of the product must be persuasive and empathetic with its users.

Making Change

To close our interview, Amruth and I talked about what it means to 'make change' through digital design. He believes 'making change' is composed of three elements:

Empathy: Your attempt to make change will depend on the amount of empathy you feel towards the people you are trying to create change for. "We spend time interacting with teachers, classrooms, just to get an idea of how the teacher thinks, empathize with prospective users".
Imagination: How you translate this empathy into solutions. "Imagination helps you think of as many solutions as you can to solve the design and adoption challenges"
Action: The most challenging stage according to Amruth: "If your technology is too hard to use, you will lose audience. If it's not impactful enough, it is trivialized. How do you reach a balance in making it effortless and yet, impactful?"

This post took a step back in our analysis of citizen action, to uncover a less visible space where change is also taking place: the intersection of the user with the machine. We seldom look at the relationship: producer-machine-consumer (and its multiple combinations) and how our behavior is being reconfigured by new digital technologies (in this project). The pace at which we need to upgrade our own operation systems, requires a degree of digital literacy that is not being facilitated by the state, the market or even civil society. Vita Beans, is one of the few examples of market actors working towards cutting the middle-man between users and digital technologies. If widely adopted, this model has the potential of re-organizing the state-citizen-market dynamic: from how citizens interact with the technology market to how new ways of producing and using technology might shape citizens' negotiation with the state.

This was also a set of explorations. It is a fairly new area in our research that will lead to more conversations with people who understand technology as an infrastructure and as material, as opposed to us- who often understand it as a practice, a space or an actor. Our goal is to bring content and infrastructure closer together, and make a stronger emphasis on inter-disciplinarity and multi-stakeholderism as a strategy to leverage change.

Footnotes:

[1] Refer to Marc Prensky's Digital Native, Digital Immigrant, for more on the limitations of digital immigrants in the education space; "It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". Access it here: http://bit.ly/IMBu0j

The CIS book : Digital Alternatives with a Cause, is also an interesting and comprehensive read of what comprises a digital native or digital immigrant today: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

[2] The World Bank makes reference to G.D. Wiebe's thinking on their blog: http://bit.ly/1jNZVZA. Also refer to: Baker, Michael (2012). The Marketing Book. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 696 and Lefebvre, R. Craig. Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools to Improve Health, Well-Being and the Environment\year=2013. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 4. for examples of these interventions. Finally, the Wikipedia page on Social Marketing explains the role of G.D. Wiebe in the field: http://bit.ly/1lw4jPV

Sources:

Kotler, P., & Zaltman, G. (1971). Social marketing: an approach to planned social change. Journal of marketing, 35(3).

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

Wiebe, G.D. (1951-1952). "Merchandising Commodities and Citizenship on Television". Public Opinion Quarterly 15 (Winter): 679.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/digital-storytelling-human-behavior-vs-technology

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

asha — 2015-10-24T13:42:16Z

The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.

Rationale

All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and practical design around Internet and Society:

How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
How do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?

We , the Cyborgs, is a first of its kind research inquiry that locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation. In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to technology’. Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.

Methodology

Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care, Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks, ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology. We, The Cyborgs, aims to bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning, Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their fields.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human

Next CPOV Conference in Leipzig

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:27:16Z

Two CPOV conferences have been held so far. The first one in Bangalore and the second one in Amsterdam, the third is to be held in Leipzig.

The Critical Point of View (CPOV), a Wikipedia research initiative organized in partnership with the Centre of Internet and Society (Bangalore, India), has so far successfully produced two conferences: One in Bangalore in January 2010 and one in Amsterdam in March of the same year. Reports, videos, the mailing list and further resources can be accessed at the CPOV website.

A reader based on the conferences is currently being produced and is planned to be released by January 2011 as a part of the INC reader series.

A next conference is foreseen to take place in Leipzig (Germany) 25-26 September 2010 and will be a German speaking CPOV event. For news and updates check the project’s website.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/CPOV-conference-Leipzig

The new language of Internet: A report on the Chutnefying Hinglish Conference

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:10:19Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/Hinglish

CIS – Internet is neither good nor bad

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T12:09:52Z

This post is also available in: French, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil)

The Center for Internet and Society is a non-profit based in Bangalore, India, created by Sunil Abraham, founder of Mahiti. The aim is to understand and shape the internet and its relation with society and politics using research, intervention and collaboration.

The internet is often demonized or mythified and generally misunderstood. It is a good initiative to try to understand it through methodical research and to produce a pedagogical framework that allows us to see as it is.

The CIS is collaborating with researchers in other fields. In fact, studying the internet implies to study its interactions with politics, society, economy… Maybe it is a good way of understanding not only the internet, but also the general current social change of which internet is a symptom. Interactivity, communities, networking, collaboration, collective knowledge, increase of connections, ability to speak out and be heard as an individual… are many changes that our society are living and of which internet is the symptom.

Internet is neither good nor bad. It is just a new tool that has a potential in helping development, increase transparency and social change. The internet is neutral, it is the way we use it which is bad, good, or silly, like any other innovation (see our article on innovation). It is our duty to be conscious of this and to try to push forward the internet in the right direction.

Link to the original article

video

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/Internet-not-good-not-bad

Getting the net out of its web

sachia — 2011-04-02T16:11:22Z

Article by Malvika Tegta in Daily News and Analysis (DNA), 8 March 2009

Artists, academicians, tech heads and lawyers have come together to give the country a voice in technology, study, polity and discourse, says Malvika Tegta

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The Internet has changed lives in ways we haven't stopped to grasp — the real feeding into the virtual and the other way round. Also, how the Internet interacts with individuals varies across cultures and societies. Narratives on the medium originating in the West cannot size up the complexities of the developing world. In the absence of a voice from the "global south" in affecting the direction of the Internet, technologies continue to be designed for a certain kind of end user, with underlying assumptions. "That apart, as the Internet grows, it doesn't necessarily always grow for the better, with things like cyber terrorism, cyber bullying, pornography, identity theft, gambling, internet addiction, being the by-products of the information revolution," says Nishant Shah, director-research and one of the brains behind the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), initiated in August 2008, set up to take note of what we passively allow to direct our lives.

These are the issues that led Gibraltar-based Anurag Dikshit, co-founder of PartyGaming, parent company of online poker site PartyPoker.com, to think that "the time had come for India to have a voice in technology study, polity and discourse, as we quickly find ourselves becoming an Information Society". He, along with Alternative Law Forum's legal theorist Lawrence Liang, Shah and Sunil Abraham, brought CIS into being, pooling in the finest minds from the field of arts, academia, law and technology. CIS, since, has set out to produce local and contextual histories of the Internet to make voices "emerging out of Asia more visible in international dialogues around technology".

Their approach: research, awareness and advocacy. Their goal: to make sense of how the Internet is changing the world around us, with India at the heart.

CIS looks at, among other things, the way copyrights, closed standards and an absence of public policy in certain areas have affected access, innovation and kept the Internet from being less democratic and vibrant. "Copyright law is kind of a monolithic thing, like a 'one size fits all' kind of solution for encouraging creativity. It doesn't really work especially when you look at an equitable system of access," says programme manager Pranesh Prakash. He adds: "Copyright proves to be a huge barrier to promotion of accessibility, and in the Indian context needs some kind of relaxation." Programme manager at CIS, Nirmita puts this in perspective, in the particular case of internet access for the visually impaired and those with cognitive disabilities. "A blind person cannot read the written word, so you record an audio cassette or you have an e-version of it and a screen reader reads it for you. That inverts the conversion of a format, which is not permitted legally under the copyright law in India. Every time you want to convert it, you need to take permission of the copyright holder. So what that is essentially doing is depriving you of your right to read," she says. "Our country should have a law that is universal. We have signed United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities that says that everything on the Internet should be in accessible formats, but it's not binding and we don't have a law on it."

In the area of science and academics, copyrights pose another challenge, that of impeding innovation by keeping from the taxpayer, results of at least the research that is funded by tax a notion CIS has been pushing for. "Scientific literature is propounded on the principles like everyone is allowed to review it and that knowledge spreads to a number of people," says Prakash. Both the scientist and the reader want that. But what we see today is that a few publishers control most of all scientific literary output, so most of it is not accessible because a month's subscription sometimes amounts to the entire library budget of an institution. That is especially a big problem for developing countries.

By the end of this year, CIS hopes that individual institutions take up open access policy. "It may not always have to be a top down approach," he says.

In the realm of governance, CIS identifies use of closed standards software as not only unwise strategy, but also socially and ethically a bad decision, and is looking at policy change in the area. Explains Sunil Abraham, director-policy, in his paper: "If I were to store data, information or knowledge in .doc, .xls or .ppt format, my ability to read my own files expires the moment the licence for my copy of Microsoft Office expires." He adds that governments have a responsibility to use open standards, especially for interactions with the public and where the data handled has a direct impact on democratic values. "In developing countries, governments have greater responsibility because most often they account for over 50% of the revenues of proprietary software vendors," he writes.

They are also exploring bridging digital divides without ignoring the "complex interplay, in the case of India for instance, of caste, language, affordability, education, literacy, and in some cases, even religion" and how the Internet is changing the landscape of higher education in India.
As Shah puts it: "Internet technologies are now becoming tools that we think with. We cannot write without the cursor blinking on an empty screen, we cannot talk in public without the aid of a digital presentation..."

It's about time, then, that we thought about the one thing that's becoming one of the bigger movers in our lives and build a discourse around it.

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To read the article in DNA's e-paper, click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/getting-the-net-out-of-its-web

Internet, first source of credible information about A(H1N1) virus

radha — 2011-04-02T15:10:40Z

An article was publised in The Hindu, 16th August '09 on how the internet has evolved as a de facto information system around the world and in India. Nishant Shah, Director- Research, CIS, has provided inputs for the article.

The internet evolved as de facto information system around the world and in India. Dedicated users put out hourly updates.

There was no missing it. Anywhere you turned these past few weeks, the pig was all over the place. At least the virus, once born of swine, now mutated into the A(H1N1) influenza was painting the towns a feverish red.

There was information, and misinformation, about the virus via the TV, newspapers and internet. For much of the community in the cities, at least, the net-enabled community, the www has been a huge source of information. While it cannot be denied that it has contributed to some of the panic that has defined this epidemic or near-epidemic, it has oftentimes also been the first source of credible, scientific information on how to prevent an A(H1N1) infection and to handle it.

The internet has now evolved as the de facto information system for a significant and growing population around the world and in India, says Nishant Shah, Director of research, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

He says that in the last two decades internet technologies have played an important role, both in creating safety havens for people to come, discuss, voice their fears and get responses to their queries, as well as in initiating rumour mills which sometimes create great panic attacks.

Melissa Davies wrote in Nielsen Online (http://blog.nielsen.com) in May 2009 .. the buzz volume about swine flu in the blogosphere was still on its meteoric climb, far surpassing discussion levels for the peanut butter/salmonella scare that happened earlier this year…

She adds that a measure of the extent of Internet engagement regarding swine flu is Wikipedia. The sites page on swine influenza has been updated hundreds of times this week. Wikipedia created a separate page focused on the 2009 swine flu outbreak for current information that page has been updated 119 times as of early on May 1.

Not to leave the social networking sites out of the picture, she mentions that there were more than 500 Facebook groups dedicated to Swine Flu as early as May 1. On Twitter, Swine Flu mentions topped out at a rate of more than 10,000 tweets per hour earlier in the week. Dedicated users such as @Swine_Flu_Vrus, and @CDCemergency put out nearly hourly updates from across the world.

Social networking

Social networking fora also became a sort of platform for those who were quivering with fear to seek advice. G-chat and Facebook status messages were in the flu vein: Have cough. Need Mask? ... I have fever and cold. Is it the S.flu?

Apart from lists of symptoms and helplines, many What to do if you have the Swine Flu kind of advisories cropped up online in no time, some culled from information put out by the World Health Organisation and the CDC. This seemed to have assuaged some in a tizzy about the flu.

Keywords: Internet, A (H1N1), credible information, swine flu, Centre for Internet and Society.

More information is available on the following url: http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article3572.ece

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/internet-first-source-of-credible-information-about-a-h1n1-virus

Net cracker

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T17:11:03Z

Is Facebook taking over our lives? And if it is, so what? In email interviews with new media researcher and user control advocate Marc Stumpel who is conducting a Facebook Resistance workshop this fortnight, and artist and communication designer Tobias Leingruber, the originator of the FB Resistance idea, Akhila Seetharaman attempts to answer these questions. This article was published in Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011.

There’s a lot said about the role of social media in fuelling political revolutions. What do you make of the role of Facebook, for instance, in the recent uprisings in the Arab world?

Marc Stumpel Clearly, social media has been utilised as instruments by citizens in the Middle East to organise and coordinate democratic protests. They have also proven to be important sources for real-time reporting and documenting political events. The use of networked communication in political protests, however, is nothing new. In my view, it’s wrong to assume there is a causal relationship between social media and “political revolutions”. You need “the people” to instigate a revolution; they will unquestionably use any media at hand.

My interest lies more with researching and exposing the political dimension of social media, rather than questioning its relationship with the politics that we are used to talking and writing about. Platforms like Facebook and Twitter are sites of governance themselves, as the user activities, conditions and data distribution are maintained by a particular set of rules and constraints, embedded in the software.

How do social media sites control people, while at the same time giving them more outlets for self expression and communication?

MS Proprietary social networking software like Facebook have many constraints, which means that users have to abide by the laws and strict limits as defined by the software. Where is our ‘freedom’? For example, why not let the users change their background colour or ‘dislike’ something?

There have been many changes to Facebook that have met with widespread opposition and outrage. How does one make sense of these instances?

MS Facebook’s PR communication regarding its immediate software changes has been very deceptive. They’ve repeatedly used a particular vocabulary to create images of Facebook ‘apologising’ for or ‘justifying’ rigid changes. They say, ‘Look! We ‘simplified’ privacy controls, because we care about your privacy,’ while making them more complex instead.

Can you tell us a few things that Facebook users should know but don’t, about the way Facebook uses their stuff?

Tobias Leingruber Realise the nature of the company. Google is not a search engine. Google is an advertising network. Facebook is not a social network – it’s an advertising network. We are the product, ‘the sheeple’. We get to be in a herd, but we pay with our most private data. They shave our wool.

MS Facebook is not transparent about its Web user-tracking activities. Via cookies it saves every website you visit outside of Facebook that has any FB social plugin implemented. We don’t exactly know what FB does with this tracking data.

What is the Facebook Resistance?

MS Our attempt is to resist from within the system by slowly undermining and questioning it. This means we’re not leaving it and building a new one. We’re accepting the fact that Facebook has already ‘won’ for now, and we’re trying to make the best out of it by bending its rules.

Critical talk about social media landscape often borrows from the lexicon of war – with online suicide, tactical media, resistance, etc. How much of a warzone is it?

TL Nice observation! Actually ‘cyberwar’ has become very real this year, as US and Israeli militants created a worm that successfully attacked and physically destroyed parts of the Iranian nuclear research programme.

But more specifically on social media I think those extreme terms are very helpful to get people’s attention. We’re overwhelmed by information, so getting people’s attention is an art form itself.

MS We are not at ‘war’ with Facebook; we are at “softwar”, fighting for internet freedom and the adoption of open standards.

What is the potential of resistance to Facebook? What can be achieved?

TL In theory we could undermine and replace their entire system. For example, the chat – to get rid of the tracking and censorship, the system behind Facebook’s chat interface could be replaced with something else, such as the Jabber protocol through an independent server.

MS Expanding your freedom on Facebook by learning how to impose new rules and features onto the system through internet browser processing (thus, not changing any code on Facebook’s server) and spreading awareness about this possibility.

Photography by Tobias Leingruber

Read the original article here

Download the article here [pdf 3.7 mb]

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/net-cracker

No access to pornography in cyber cafes, declare new rules

praskrishna — 2011-05-01T01:09:50Z

Fresh guidelines, which are part of Information Technology (guidelines for cyber cafe) Rules 2011, will require cyber cafe owners to "tell users" not to surf websites that contain "pornographic or obscene material". Experts termed the rule arbitrary, saying that watching pornography is not an offence in India. This article by Javed Anwer was published in the Times of India on April 26, 2011.

According to the rules notified on April 11, all cyber cafes in the country will have to register with an "agency as notified" by the government. While some of the guidelines deal with the security threat posed by "anonymous internet users", most aim to make sure that people don't use cyber cafes to access pornographic material.

Pawan Duggal, a lawyer who specializes in IT laws, said the new guidelines were arbitrary. "Watching pornography is not illegal in India," he said. "It's absurd to ask cyber cafe owners to tell their customers not to access pornographic material even as law allows individuals to access adult websites unless it's not child pornography. The new rules require a second look."

The new rules suggest cafe owners install filtering software and keep a log of all websites accessed by customers for at least one year. Cafe owners have also been asked not to build a cabin/cubicle with a height of more than four and half feet. In a cyber cafe where there are no cubicles, "owners will have to place computers with the screens facing outward" or towards open space. The move is aimed at reducing privacy a cyber cafe user can get.

Duggal said if implemented earnestly, the new rules will put most of cyber cafe owners out of business.

Internet activists termed the guidelines "unconstitutional". Pranesh Prakash, a programme manager with Centre of Internet and Society, said the rules will violate privacy and will hamper internet users' ability to freely express themselves.

The new rules make it mandatory for user to carry an identity card. Cyber cafe owners have been asked to give user logs to the "registration agency" every month as well keep these records along with the log of websites accessed at the cyber cafe safe for a period of one year. A few cafe owners said that technically, it would be a daunting task to keep a record of every website accessed using their computers for a year.

While minors, if carrying identity cards have been permitted to use computers in a cyber cafe, they won't be allowed inside cubicles if not accompanied by guardians or parents. There is also provision of photographing cyber cafe users using a webcam or other device. The photographs will have to be authenticated by the user. Prakash said that photographing users raises serious privacy questions, especially in the case of children.

Read the original article published by the Times of India here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/no-pornography-in-cyber-cafes

CIS featured in the Report on Research and Funding Landscape within the Arts and Humanities in India

praskrishna — 2011-04-02T11:27:38Z

Centre for Internet and Society has been listed as an area of excellence and innovative research in this report.

Research Councils UK had undertaken a mapping exercise to gain a better understanding of the research and funding landscape within the arts and humanities in India. The India Foundation for the Arts won the tender to undertake the exercise.

The report highlights:

The challenges of definition with the term ‘arts and humanities’ and ‘social science’ in India and subsequently how this affects funding for research in these areas
The strengths, current themes and challenges of arts and humanities (and in some cases social science) research in India
The challenge of creating an accurate arts and humanities archive in India
An overview of the Indian funding and research structures
The challenge of funding fine and performing arts separately from traditional arts research disciplines
A discussion on significant shifts in theory and approaches in some of the disciplines and this impact on the current research landscape
A list of centres of excellence in arts and humanities research in India
A list of centres with potential or those which are working in innovative research areas
An outline of government, non-government and foreign funders

Click here for the Report.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/research-and-funding