Centre for Internet and Society

Research Programmes

nishant — 2009-01-15T12:02:51Z

The Research Portfolio at the Centre for Internet and Society seeks to develop new pedagogic practices, plural and unique knowledges, multidisciplinary perspectives, and reflexive interventions in the field of Internet and Society.

Context

We work on the premise that very little work has gone into understanding or exploring the internets in their plurality, leading to simultaneous mythification and demonisation of the internet. However, instead of trying to define what the internet means or enumerating its many manifestations, the Centre for Internet and Society is invested in producing new pedagogical devices and frameworks to analyse the various layers of the internet as it interacts with socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

Most frameworks that address questions of Internet and Society work with borrowed terminologies (of older technologies and technological forms) and institutional perspectives (arising out of traditional disciplines and interventions of earlier paradigms) that are no longer adequate for serious engagement with the complex relationship between internet and society. We recognise three dominant strains that are influential in most of the research and intervention in the field of Internet and Society.

The first is a focus on the science and technologies of the internet -- looking at innovation, experimentation and development of the technologies to build a faster, more effective and more robust web of applications and protocols. The second is a sustained philosophical engagement that explores the aesthetic and ethical implications of the digital worlds, networks, communities and identities that cyberspaces evolve. The third is an instrumental approach to technology that focuses on the effects of the internet and its growth as well as the potential it has for further development and impact.

These approaches create a schism between internet technologies and social structures, obscuring the inextricable nature of their intertwining. The focus is either on the purely technological, where the social fades into the background, or on the severely socio-cultural, where internet technologies are looked upon merely as instrumental in nature. The Centre for Internet and Society, instead of making this either-or choice, seeks to invest its energies in emphasising and excavating the processes, transactions, negotiations and mechanics by which internet technologies engage with society.

CIS Research Programmes

The Research Portfolio currently houses three different research programmes, each aimed at different audiences and researchers:

The CIS-RAW: The Centre for Internet and Society’s Researchers At Work programme encourages innovative ideas and perspectives that emerge from dialogue and exchange, structured around a theme that changes every two years. The CIS-RAW is targeted at established scholars willing to engage with the specific themes that CIS is immediately interested in. It offers full financial support towards quantified academic productions. To know more about the CIS-RAW programme, please click here.
The ICT4A Fellowships: The Centre for Internet and Society recognises that some of the most innovative ideas and experiments with philosophical concepts and practice based projects are in the intersections between Information and Communication Technologies and the Creative Arts. Artists experimenting with form, shape, installations, processes and pedagogy create significant projects with high intervention and public value while forcing us to revisit the relationship between the internet and society. The ICT4A (Internet and Creative Technologies of Art) Fellowships are for artists who are interested in examining the aesthetics, politics and pragmatics of internet technologies and their relationships with different socio-cultural and geo-political phenomena. To know more about the ICT4A Fellowships, please click here.
Collaborative Projects Programme: CIS sees its role as that of an enabler and think tank for new ideas, methods and frameworks within the field of Internet and Society. Given the scope of internet technologies and the persuasive way in which they embrace various facets of contemporary life, we envision various disciplines engaging with the concerns of Internet and Society in the future. The Collaborative Project Programme is structured to provide initial head-space, ideation resources, and intellectual infrastructure to senior researchers and/or practitioners to work towards a larger project that intersects with our vision. The Collaborative Projects Programme offers CIS an opportunity to enter into a financial, intellectual and administrative collaboration for up to six months with individuals or organisations who are looking at funding for the inception work towards a project (research, intervention, or otherwise) in the field of Internet and Society. To learn more about the modalities, CIS’ involvement and the nature of support for the Collaborative Projects, please click here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/research-programmes

Conferences & Workshops

nishant — 2009-07-10T07:28:21Z

The Centre for Internet and Society firmly endorses the model of collaboration, consultation and feedback, and looks upon conferences within various disciplines, which engage with questions of Internet technologies and their bearing upon the times we live in, as extremely fruitful forums of engagement with the peers. This is where we document the different conferences that we are institutionally or individually participating in and the ideas that emerge out of them.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences

Identity, Identification and Media Representation in Video Game Play: An Audience Reception Study

nishant — 2011-04-04T07:22:52Z

Adrienne Shaw from the Annenberg School for Communication, who is a visiting fellow at MICA is giving a public talk on research on representation in video games on 27 November 2010 at the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore.

Adrienne Shaw

Adrienne Shaw received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2010. Her research focuses on popular culture, the politics of representation, cultural production and qualitative audience research. Her primary areas of interest are video games, gaming culture, representations of gender and sexuality, and the construction of identity and communities in relation to media consumption.

Abstract

Research on minority representation in video games usually asserts:

the industry excludes certain audiences by not representing them;
everyone should be provided with characters they can identify with; and
media representation has knowable effects.

In contrast, this dissertation engages with audiences’ relationship to gamer identity, how players interact with game texts (identification and interaction), and their thoughts about media representation. This dissertation uses interviews and participant observation to investigate why, when and how representation is important to individuals who are members of marginalized groups, focusing on sexuality, gender and race, in the U.S. The data demonstrate that video games may offer players the chance to create representations of people “like them” (pluralism), but games do not necessarily force players to engage with texts that offer representation of marginalized groups (diversity), with some rare and problematic exceptions. The focus on identity-based marketing and audience demand, as well as over-simplistic conceptualizations of identification with media characters, as the basis of arguments for minority media representation encourage pluralism.

Representation is available, but only to those who seek it out. Diversity, however, is necessary for the political and educative goals of representation. It requires that players are actively confronted with diverse content. Diversity is not the result of demand by audiences, but is rather the social responsibility of media producers. Media producers, however, can take advantage of the fact that identities are complex, that identification does not only require shared identifiers, and that diversity in a non-tokenistic sense can appeal to a much wider audience than pluralistic, niche marketing. In sum, diversity can address both the market logic and educative goals of media representation. I conclude by offering three suggestions bred from this analysis. First, researchers should be critical of this emphasis on pluralism rather than diversity. Second, rather than argue that video games should include more diversity because it matters, producers should include it precisely because representation does not matter in many games. Finally, those who have invested in diversity in games should not just prove the importance of representation in games, but rather argue for it without dismissing playfulness.

VIDEOS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/adrienne

Public Talk by Dr. Ian Brown on Privacy, Trust and Biometrics

nishant — 2011-04-04T07:15:29Z

Trust is hard to build, but easy to lose. What factors affect individuals' trust in new technologies? How can governments create citizen trust in biometric security tools? Can biometrics be designed to be privacy-friendly? And how did these questions lead to the cancellation of the UK's national identity scheme, after a decade of development costing tens of millions of pounds? About the speaker: Dr Ian Brown's research is focused on public policy issues around information and the Internet, particularly privacy and copyright. He also works in the more technical fields of communications security and healthcare informatics.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/ian

Critical Point of View: WikiWars

nishant — 2011-04-05T04:18:33Z

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore), in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam), brings together an international range of scholars, researchers, practitioners, artists and users, to critically think through the emergence and spread of Wikipedia in the last few years. In this two day event that seeks to engage with different aspects of Wikipedia across different disciplines and practices, we invite students, researchers, Wikipedians and interested stakeholders to come and join us at WikiWars

WikiWars brings together more than forty scholars, students, practitioners, artists and experts who have been critically reflecting upon the emergence of Wikipedia in various contexts of education, politics, resistance, art theory and practice, knowledge production, learning, pedagogy and new and alternative forms of interaction and community building.

Dates: 12th, 13th January, 2010.

Venue: The Bangalore International Centre, The Energy and Resources Institute, 4th Main, Domlur II Stage, Bangalore - 560 071 Karnataka

Programme for the event has 40 International and National delegates presenting in panels on Wiki-Theory, Global Politics of Exclusion, Critique of Free and Open, Wikipedia and Education, Wikipedia and the Place of Resistance, Wikipedia and Western Knowledge Production, and Wikipedia and Art.

Registration opens on 5th January 2010 and ends on 10th January 2010. Registration is free but limited and available on a first come first served basis.
http://www.cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/wikwarsreg

For more information on WikiWars, click here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/wikiwars

Home images

nishant — 2008-09-25T09:25:05Z

The images to be plugged on the home page. The folder is to be excluded from navigation. ALWAYS

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/home-images

Power to the People

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:35:54Z

The digital revolution has helped make NGOs and civil society more influential, independent and transparent, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on Sunday, May 15, 2011.

The rise and spread of internet and digital technologies has invigorated the voluntary sector in the country, granting them better mobility, access to resources and wider visibility through digital networks. With the rise of the internet, augmented by easy access, civil society needs to claim its stake in the World Wide Web. Visibility and presence have become the buzzwords. There is a concentrated effort to become a Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent (SMART) organisation that doesn’t operate in remote silos but reaches out to an audience and a resource base.

While NGOs in the more developed countries have taken to digital technologies more easily, there is no doubt that the digital revolution has finally come to the civil society in India and it is offering unprecedented opportunities for social change and political participation. From the Bell Bajao campaign, which brought to the fore domestic violence in the urban middle class, to the recent demonstrations for Anna Hazare, we see many examples of the ways in which civil society and NGOs can still mobilise support from the public.

What has also been interesting is how collectives rather than registered organisations have played an important role in the public delivery of such campaigns.

Here is a look at three ways in which engagement with digital technologies, has led to new models of making public interventions and processes of initiating change for civil society collectives and NGOs.

Birds of a Feather

With the networked effect of the digital technologies, something as simple as building a Facebook page puts out the concerns and draws the attention and resources of a larger population. NGOs need no longer confine themselves to finding people in immediate environments and are extending their support base to large online networks. The Bangalore-based Blank Noise Project that started off as a public art intervention by Jasmeen Patheja has now emerged as a large volunteer-based network that harnesses the power of peer-to-peer networks to mobilise young urban dwellers, to talk about gender, safety and urban space. Not yet a formal NGO, it uses blogs, Twitter, Facebook, mailing lists etc. in order to bring people together for public interventions as well as digital dissemination. With more than 4,000 volunteers running the project in different cities, BNP proves the power of the Web to find “people like us” for a common cause.

Beyond Patronage

With the kind of outreach and visibility afforded by the internet, NGOs are turning to public support and individual contributions to carry out their work. Take Kickstarter, for example — a site where any NGO wanting to launch a creative project, can put up a project description and a budget. They can then invite people from around the world to “pledge” money by swiping credit cards, beginning with a contribution of $5. If, within a given time-span, enough people pledge enough money to cover the project’s budget, the organisation receives the money through electronic transfers. They become, thus, accountable not to individual donors or private development agencies. Instead, they become transparent and responsible towards the larger public who, as stakeholders and supporters can now endorse, amplify and track the activities of the organisation.

Transparency Unlimited

With the rise of information technologies, citizens have started asking for more details about organisations that seek to represent them in different sectors. It has become necessary for NGOs to become accountable at two levels — one is at the level of financial integrity and the second is at the level of public responsibility. The consortium Credibility Alliance is one example by which the voluntary sector can disclose certain minimum information to its public in order to build transparent governance structures. NGOs have also become more sensitive to the politics of representation and how to involve communities they work with, in their processes rather than becoming self-appointed vanguards. The field of collaboration has opened up and we see the rise of networks rather than individual players in the field.

Digital and internet technologies amplify, augment and enhance the existing processes. In the voluntary sector, like almost any other walk of life, many of these practices already exist. What these systems of the digital age have done is provide new ways by which the everyday citizen can participate and contribute to the processes of change.

Read the original published by the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/power-to-people

Say 'Password' in Hindi

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:18:19Z

English might be the language of the online world, but it’s time other languages had their say, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published in the Indian Express on June 5, 2011.

On skype the other day, a friend narrated an incident that made the otherwise familiar terrains of the internet, uncanny. His grandmother, who had recently acquired a taste for Facebook, had signed off on a message saying “Love, Granny”. For people of the xoxo generation, this sounds commonplace, in fact it might even be archaic. However, for my friend, who had never thought of his emotions for his grandmother as “love”, it produced a moment of sheer strangeness.

In Gujarati, it would have been silly to think of your emotions for family as “love”. There are better nuances. The emotional connect between lovers is different from the affective relationship with parents. The fondness for siblings is different from the bond with friends. And it was unnerving, for him, to have this range of emotions suddenly condensed into “love”. Like many of us polyglots who work in the rapidly digitising world of the World Wide Web, he was experiencing the gap between the mother tongue and the other tongue. It is an experience that is quite common to non-native speakers of English, who have to succumb to de facto English language usage on the global web and often find themselves at sea about how to translate emotions, histories and experiences into a language which does not always accommodate them.

This experience only becomes more intense for people who are fluent neither in the English language nor in international online English. This question of localisation of language remains one of the biggest gating factors of the internet. It also remains, after literacy and skills, the biggest impediment to including people from non-mainstream geopolitics in discussions online. Several global linguistic majorities have dealt with this by producing different language webs. Spanish, Chinese, Japanese and German are among the largest non-English language internets which are in operation now. However, in post-colonial countries like India, where linguistic diversity is the order of the day, the efforts at localisation have been sporadic and not very popular.

There are many facets to the implementation of localisation practices. It requires developing local language fonts so that people don’t have to merely transliterate local words using an English language script. These fonts further need to be made translatable into other languages, identified by machine translations. Keyboards and hardware infrastructure, which grants ease of access to the users need to be built. Tool kits to de-Anglify the computer language, code, browser signs etc. are being developed. There are many attempts being made by public and private bodies in the country to produce this ecology of localisation, both at the level of hardware and software.

And yet, adoption of localisation tools, despite a growing non-urban user base, remains low. Most people engage with the digital and online services through English, even though their fluency with the language might be low. One of the reasons why localisation of Indic language content is facing so much resistance is because of a narrow understanding of localisation as linguistic translation. Most attempts at localisation in the country merely think of translating English terms like “browser”, “code”, or “password” into the regional languages. In many instances, the term is merely rewritten in the local script.

Such an approach to localisation ignores the fact that the language of technology does not only produce new expressions and words, but also new ways of thinking. While localising the English language content, care also has to be given to translating the contexts, which the words and phrases carry. Do a simple exercise. Take the word “Password”. Try and translate this into your local language so that it makes complete sense to a native speaker. You will realise that just saying “Password” doesn’t mean much and that it requires background information to make that word intelligible to a community.

The second is that localisation is not merely about giving rights to generate content online. While the Web 2.0 wave of user-generated content is ruling the internet now, we must realise that most people come online to consume as much, if not more than, what they generate. Policies that promote local language information production, translation projects etc. need to be in place so that the minimum threshold of information is available online in languages other than English. Government documents, state records, public artifacts, etc. need to be digitised and made available in local languages so that people can access data online.

Localisation is not only about language and translations. It is about changing the top-down approach; instead of forcing existing concepts on to material realities which don’t always fit them, it is time to see that the true power of digital technologies is in building bottom-up models where everyday practice can be captured through localised vocabularies that allow for users to say, “I love you,” to anybody, in a language, and meaning that makes sense to them.

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/password-in-hindi

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Uploads

nishant — 2008-11-01T07:59:16Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/uploads

The Digital is Political

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:14:23Z

Technologies are not just agents of politics, there is politics in their design, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in Down to Earth in the Issue of June 15, 2011.

The links between digital technologies and politics, especially in the light of the recent West Asian-North African uprisings, have been well-established. But there is a pervasive belief that the technologies of computing, in themselves, are apolitical. There are two warring groups when it comes to debates around political participation and social change that the digital and Internet technologies have fostered.

On the one hand are people who celebrate the negotiation- and intervention-making power of these technologies and attribute to them great power that can change the world. On the other are those who look at these developments with suspicion, trying to make a case for the power of the human will rather than the scope of technology design.

Both sides remain convinced that there is a cause-and-effect link between technology and politics, but nobody talks about the politics of technology. The functional focus on digital technologies—economic prosperity, time-space shrinkage, transparent interaction and governance—has been overwhelming. This fosters a pervasive belief that technologies of computation and communication are agnostic to politics: there is a disconnect between everyday practices of technology and spectrum of politics within which we operate.

Let me give an example to explain this. Take a blank sheet of paper. To all appearances, it is completely agnostic to the uses it can be put to. It can become a letter of love, it can become a note of dismissal, shattering the dreams of somebody who is fired, it can be a promissory note facilitating legal and economic transactions, or it can become the rag to mop a spill on your desk. It is generally presumed that the piece of paper does not have any design or agency. And yet, it is obvious from history that this sheet of paper did indeed revolutionise the world.

The advent of the printing press, the ability to mass-produce paper, the possibility of sending disembodied messages, the power of the paper to store information which can then be retrieved, has been transforming the world the last 500 years. It is a technologised platform that, by its very design possibilities and limitations, is able to shape, not only how we have communicated with each other, but also how we think. Let us remember the first proof of our identity is not in images or in sounds, but in a document, printed on a piece of paper, that declares us human and alive and legally present—the birth certificate.

We have grown so used to the world of writing and of printing that we have appropriated paper as an integral part of the human socio-cultural fabric. However, technology interfaces and products have not only a political agenda in their design, but also the power to shape the ways in which human history and memory function. The blank sheet of paper, in its inability to capture oral traditions, eradicates them. The tyranny of a piece of paper brings a fixity to articulations which are fluid. To think of the paper as bereft of political design, ambition and destiny, would be to neglect the lessons learned in history.

The digital interface needs to be understood through similar prisms. It is presumed that the digital interface in itself is not political in nature. Or politics is reduced to the level of content. In the process certain significant questions remain unanswered: who owns the digital technologies? Who supports them? Who benefits from them? Who controls them? Who remains excluded? Who is being made to bear the burdens?

Questions about exclusion and discrimination, built into the very structure of technology, are often overlooked. How do technologies determine who gets a voice? How do the digital webs exclude those who shall always remain outcasts? What happens to our understanding of the relationship between the state and the citizen? What are our digital rights? How does the technology design mitigate social evils? How does technology emerge as the de-facto arbitrator of law?

Politics plays a part in the very presence and design of these technologies. It is perhaps time to proclaim that like the personal, the “The Technological is the Political.”

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/digital-is-political

3G Life

nishant — 2012-05-10T10:54:02Z

You can video chat, stream music and watch TV on your phone. Offering high-speed internet access, 3G would change the world of mobile computing. Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on 14 November 2010.

In the days of dial-up connections in the late 1990s, this was the procedure for downloading a picture from the Internet:
Step 1: Switch on the modem and make sure the phone line is working.
Step 2: Press connect on the dialog box and wait with bated breath to hear the sound of the “handshake” connecting the modem to the server.
Step 3: Try three-five times to finally get that connection. Increase your ability in creative swearing in the meantime.
Step 4: Hope that nobody calls on the landline while the connection is running. If somebody calls, go to Step 2. Type the URL, press Enter. Go to the kitchen. Brew a cup of coffee and come back.
Step 5: Click on the link of the picture you want to load. Go for a walk, take a long shower, eat your dinner and get back to the screen. Swear profusely because the connection went kaput in the middle of loading the picture and all you can see are pixellated patterns. Begin at Step 2, promise to be a better person who will be kind to puppies and smile at strangers.

And this is only the truncated version. If your karma was on a particular bad spin, you might have other additional steps (including turning your modem or computer on and off, because it had hung) that would increase your faith in god. To all of us who grew up in those days, the arrival of broadband was an answer to the collective prayers sent by geeks across the (mother)board in the dark hours of internet despair. The world changed with broadband, as email, blogs, sharing of pictures and information, making voice-over IP calls and connecting with people from different parts of the world became a matter of clicks.

True, there were the irritations of buffering and the heartfelt angst of that slight lag between Send and Receive over IM and email, but the accelerated speeds changed our notions of time and space. Instead of Bulletin Boards, which were more like post-it notes on refrigerators, left and collected within 12-hour intervals, we moved to Instant Messaging, which was like passing notes in the classroom to see immediate reactions and responses. For us in India, the World Wide Web opened up, for the first time, not only as something we consume but we also contribute to, adding data, providing alternative perspectives and questioning the existing views. Since the arrival of broadband, geographies have shrunk, time zones have blurred, lifestyles have become homogeneous, the singular silence of solitary voices has been replaced by the cacophony of multiple presences and everybody knows just a little bit more about their neighbours than is beneficial to anybody.

What broadband did to the snail-paced but exciting world of text-based communication and slow information transfers, 3G promises to do to the burgeoning world of mobile data access. 3G, which stands for third generation, promises to change the face of mobile computing drastically. The interface of the computer has become increasingly mobile in the past few years. Smartphones and PDAs have already unanchored us from the tyranny of sitting in one position to use the Net. Mobile technologies combined with access to the internet have led to interesting ways in which digital natives have straddled physical and virtual worlds. It has also led to new forms of participation where first-hand witnesses, citizen journalism and new interaction channels have resulted in structures of good governance and democracy. Wireless networks of mobile phones also mean that remote areas with poor infrastructure are now able to get on the Infobahn to access information.

The opening up of the 3G spectrum and the easy availability of high-speed data access on devices like smartphones, tablets, laptops, netbooks, e-book readers, etc, promises to accelerate these advantages. With extremely high-speed internet available on mobile devices with rich browsing capacities, one of the paradigm shifts will be in how we visually relate to the internet. We often forget that cyberspace, even though it is a visual medium, is also a text-heavy medium. This emphasis on text means that it excludes a lot of people who might not be conversant with English, the de facto language for most international discussions. It also excludes people who might be visually or print-challenged. 3G is hopefully going to change the way in which we interact with information online and bring in more multimedia, audio and video elements into it. And this means that video chatting on phones is now just a dial away.

In countries like Japan, North Korea, Syria, Singapore and the US, where 3G has been rolled out, there have been dramatic changes. Content generation and cultural production have gone up tremendously. As more inexpensive devices offer internet gateway through 3G, people think of themselves as not mere consumers but also producers of online content. Citizen journalism has flourished and events that are often glossed over by mainstream media find visibility and space in an international dialogue. 3G promises easy, affordable and extensive networking possibilities to communities and people who often exist in remote and isolated areas.

Technologies in themselves do not change the world. However, there is no denying that ease of access, scope of expanse and affordability that the 3G spectrum brings is going to create populations, and eventually generations, who are one step closer to Singularity — the vision of creating perfect networks where human memories, thoughts and ideas work in synchrony with technology networks. This Diwali, when Tata Docomo offered 3G services in 20 cities, the biggest bang was in the noisy silence of data travelling at huge speeds in the ether. New service providers will transform your digital device into a magic box, combining entertainment, interaction, communication and information access to stitch you in better into the fabric of a world that is quickly becoming digital.

The ABC of 3G...
How will 3G change the way I use my phone?

3G enables you to access internet on your phone at extremely high speeds. Which means, you can play a YouTube clip on your phone without buffering; check PDF files and attachments on your BlackBerry with ease; download music and transfer files faster. Video calls from one network to another will become easier, and more popular. You can also watch television on your cellphone.

Will CDMA and GSM phones support 3G?

3G will be available to both GSM and CDMA customers, if you are on a 3G network.

Can I use my existing handset to get 3G speeds?

Only if your handset (whether a smart-phone or not) is 3G or 3.5G-ready.

How can I make video calls?

You will need a 3G-enabled handset and a front-facing camera. The person you are calling should have a 3G handset and be on a 3G network. If you don't have a front-facing camera, you will be able to watch the person you are speaking to, but he/she won’t be able to see you. If your phone supports Skype, you will be able to make free calls to another Skype user.

Is a front-facing camera a must on all 3G phones?

It is if you want to make video calls. If you are only going to use 3G speeds to access email, check Facebook, and share documents, you won’t need it.

How does 3G change entertainment options?

Worldwide, the biggest consumption on 3G networks is of television. And not without reason: there is plenty of bandwidth available and phones with 3” to 4” screens make watching TV on the go a pleasure. Most mobile TV users in 3G countries are people who use public transport. But with many urban Indians still driving to work, I don’t know if mobile TV will catch on. You can, though, check the latest news or catch one over of a Test match between meetings.

How does 3G affect the way I interact with my environment?

A friend in Singapore saves approximately $100 every month on parking fees, as his 3G connection tells him about the cheapest parking options in and around his geographical location, at the press of a qwerty key. Similarly, you can find out about places to dine out, the deals the nearest mall is offering or the location of the nearest ATM. In India, such location-based services have not taken off, though some malls and shopping centres send you information about their deals of the day on Bluetooth.

Will I need to pay separately for 3G?

Yes, there will be a subscription charge for data access, above your current voice plan. Though the operators have not revealed price plans, you should typically look at plans in the range of Rs 300 per month and upwards for 3G usage.

Will I be able to use 3G on my PC?

If your phone allows using you to tether its internet connection to your personal computer (or Mac), you can access internet at 3G speeds on your PC. Some laptops now also include a SIM card slot, in which you can slide a 3G SIM to get 3G connectivity. Devices like Apple’s iPad with a 9.7” screen, the Samsung Galaxy Tab (7”) and the Olivepad (7”) can also connect to 3G networks, letting you surf, stream music or videos, or work on the move.

Do I need 3G?

Like with each technology, there will be late movers and early adopters. I know of a lot of people like me who would like to have high-speed internet access on the move. And I also know of people who don’t want to check email more than once a day. It will depend on where and when you want to get connected.

What kind of speeds can I expect?

Depends on your service provider, but you can expect an average of 1 megabits per second download speed, allowing you to stream videos and music without buffering, as well as do high-speed file transfers. There might be a limit of 300 Kbps on upload speeds. So sending large files may still take more time, but downloading will be faster.

What tariff plan should I choose?

If you are going to use 3G mostly for video calls, choose a service provider with a good tariff plan for video calls. If you are going to use 3G to access internet services such as Flickr, YouTube and Facebook, and are a heavy Web user, unlimited data transfer plans make more sense.

What are the 3G plans available now?

Currently, MTNL provides 3G services in Delhi and Mumbai; BSNL offers it across the country. Tata and Reliance have high-speed USB data cards, which work on the 3G platform but provide data access to PCs, not phones. Tata Docomo launched its 3G services in select circles this month. Aircel, Airtel and Vodafone also plan to start 3G services by early next year.

Read the original article in the Indian Express here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/3-g-life

Digital Natives : Talking Back

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:50:19Z

One of the most significant transitions in the landscape of social and political movements, is how younger users of technology, in their interaction with new and innovative technologised platforms have taken up responsibility to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments, relying upon their digital networks, virtual communities and platforms. In the last decade or so, the digital natives, in universities as well as in work spaces, as they experimented with the potentials of internet technologies, have launched successful socio-political campaigns which have worked unexpectedly and often without precedent, in the way they mobilised local contexts and global outreach to address issues of deep political and social concern. But what do we really know about this Digital Natives revolution?

Press Release

Youth are often seen as potential agents of change for reshaping their own societies. By 2010, the global youth population is expected reach almost 1.2 billion of which 85% reside in developing countries. Unleashing the potential of even a part of this group in developing countries promises a substantially impact on societies. Especially now when youths thriving on digital technologies flood universities, work forces, and governments and could facilitate radical restructuring of the world we live in. So, it’s time we start listening to them.

Because of the age bias and the dependence of a large section of Digital Natives around the world, on structures of authority, there has always been a problem of power that has restricted or reduced the scope of their practice and intervention. For younger Digital Natives, Parental authority and the regulation from schools often becomes a hindrance that thwarts their ambitions or ideas. Even when they take the initiative towards change, they are often stopped and at other times their practices are dismissed as insignificant. In other contexts, because of existing laws and policies around Internet usage and freedom of expression, the voices of Digital Natives get obliterated or chastised by government authorities and legal apparatuses which monitor and regulate their practices. The workshop organised at the Academia Sinica brings in 28 participants from contested contexts – be it the micro level of the family or the paradigmatic level of governance – to discuss the politics, implications and processes of ‘Talking Back’.

What does it mean to Talk Back? Who do we Talk Back against? Are we alone in our attempts or a part of a larger community? How do we use digital technologies to find other peers and stake-holders? What is the language and vocabulary we use to successfully articulate our problems? How do we negotiate with structures of power to fight for our rights? These are the kind of questions that the workshop poses. The workshop focuses on uncovering the circuitous routes and ways by which Digital Natives have managed to circumvent authorities in order to make themselves heard. The workshop also dwells on what kind of support structures need to be developed at global levels for Digital Natives to engage more fruitfully, with their heads held high and minds without fear, with their immediate environments.

The proceedings of the first workshop in Taipei, 16-18th August, 2010 are available at http://digitalnatives.in/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/talkingback

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/political

Change has come to all of us

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:38Z

The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native.

In this connected world, the geek is everyone — from a grandma on Skype to a teen on Second Life.

Two self-proclaimed digital natives, on a cold autumn morning in Amsterdam, decided to leave the comforts of their familiar virtual worlds and venture into the brave new territories of real-life shopping. Though slightly confused by the lack of click-and-try options and perplexed by the limitations of the physical spaces of shopping, we plodded along, shop after shop, thinking how much easier it is to chat on IM while flying through Second Life as opposed to face-to-face interactions while walking on crowded streets. After we had run out of shops (and patience), we decided that it was time to rely on better resources than our own wits. The Dutch girl fished out her Android smartphone and with the single press of a button, opened up channels of information. She called her mother. She asked for the location of the store that was eluding us. And then she looked at me in silence before bursting into laughter. Her 64-year-old mother, in response to our question, had said, “Why don’t you just Google it?”

We spent five minutes in stunned laughter when we realised that we should have instinctively done that and that we were being asked by somebody from Generation U to “get with it”. Funny (and slightly embarrassing) as it is, it brings into focus, the question, “Who is a digital native?” For those of you who have been reading this column, it has been defined in terms of age and usage. A digital native is generally somebody young, somebody who is tech-savvy, somebody who can perform complicated calisthenics with digital technologies — throwing virtual sheep, having instant relationships, writing complex stories and pirating their favourite movies — in one nonchalant click of the mouse. However, these kinds of digital natives are only stereotypes.

If we move away from these descriptions of novelty, of excitement and of youth, a different kind of digital native emerges for us. A digital native is somebody whose way of thinking (about himself and the world around) is significantly informed because of the presence of and familiarity with the internet and digital technologies. In other words, a digital native is a person who has experienced (and is often led to) change because of their interactions with new technologies.

It can be a middle-aged man whose business changed when he started tracking his supplies using complex and sophisticated databases. It can be a mother of two, finding support and help raising her children on online communities like Bing. It can be a senior teacher re-discovering pedagogy through distributed knowledge systems on Wikipedia. It can be grandparents who interact with their grandchildren over Skype and text messaging, across international borders and lifestyles. It can be a mother telling her digital native daughter to “just Google it!” over the cellphone.

And as things might be, Shamini, my 15-year-old bonafide digital native correspondent from Ahmedabad, recently wrote that she got off Facebook and deleted her account. “It felt like I had retired from a job,” she said. But she was away from Facebook only for four months, dissociated from all the “time, energy and drama that it caused” and was quite enjoying it. After four months of self-imposed exile, she, however, resurfaced on Facebook. And it was to stay in touch with her aunt and uncle, who live in faraway lands, and cannot keep in touch with her unless she is on Facebook. Shamini was surprised at this. After spending much time convincing them about trying to use email and phones to keep connected, she finally gave in and started a new account that nobody knows of. And she asked me the important question: Who is the digital native now?

My grandmother used to tell us, “Nobody is born knowing a language.” I think it is time to start applying the same logic here. Nobody is born with technologies. But there are people — perhaps not yet a generation, but still a population — who are changing their lives and significantly transforming the world by turning Google and Facebook and Twitter into verbs and a way of doing things. So the next time, somebody asks you if you know a digital native, don’t look for somebody out there — it might just be you!

The original column can be read in The Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come