Centre for Internet and Society

Digital Native: Double Speak

nishant — 2018-09-04T15:22:59Z

Aadhaar’s danger has always been that it opens up individuals to high levels of vulnerability without providing safeguards.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 12, 2018.

This has been a month of Twitter drama. In the latest episode, Twitter exploded once again with RS Sharma, the chief of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). Sharma revealed his Aadhaar number on Twitter and challenged the world (#facepalm) to do their worst. The Twitterati moved quickly and decided to go 50 Shades of Grey on Sharma.

In less than 24 hours, French security researcher Elliot Alderson, who has been systematically showing vulnerabilities in Aadhaar’s technical infrastructure, fished out Sharma’s personal address, birth date, email, alternate phone number, and PAN number. A few other ethical hackers got hold of his bank account details and used Paytm apps to transfer money to one of his bank accounts. Sharma made a grandstand of how this information is not “state secret” and that this was already peppered across the internet for anybody to find. The UIDAI, while calling his tactics a cheap hack, announced that the Aadhaar database was not “hacked” to retrieve this information and that our precious private data is safe in those hands.

What remains really bizarre, in both the responses from Sharma and the UIDAI, however, is their willing blindness to what networked information systems do and look like. There are three main points to consider here. Sharma, marked by privilege, protected by power, and confident in his ability to protect himself in case of threat, might dismiss this private information as non-critical. However, what he fails to realise is that the same data, for somebody in a precarious condition might be sensitive enough to have their life collapse on them. On the nefarious digital worlds of the Indian web, where women are regularly threatened with rape and death as a form of silencing them, where queer people are stalked and followed in real life for blackmail and abuse, where resistant actors find their families threatened, this information in the public domain could literally be a matter of life and death. In the past, with much less information available, we have seen how specific communities could be targeted in times of communal tension and violence. The fact that the head of TRAI cannot look beyond his gilded privilege to the conditions of precariousness that data leaks like these could lead to is shameful.

Perhaps, even more alarming is the UIDAI’s consistent myopic focus on what constitutes safe data. While I have no doubt that the incredible engineers and security experts are working hard to keep the Aadhaar data secure, the Twitter ethical hackers were not making claims of hacking a database at all. They were merely demonstrating why centralised unique ids, which perform acts of causative correlation, have the capacity to build surveillance states without even meaning to. Their data exposure is indicative of the fact that while Aadhaar itself does not carry much information, the linkages it makes with multiple other databases — tax offices, bank accounts, public services, emails, phone numbers, etc. — can expose information profiles without our consent. In fact, the danger of Aadhaar has never been that as a technical system it doesn’t work. The threat that it posits is that as a social and a cultural transaction system it opens up individuals to high levels of precariousness without building privacy safeguards for those who might fall through the cracks.

What remains the most disappointing in this entire piece of melodrama is that the conversations keep on unfolding at two different registers. The Aadhaar activists have been asking not for a dismantling of the system but to build ethical, compassionate, flexible and constitutional checks and balances at the core of the system. Ever since its inception, the demand has been clear: build privacy, security, safety, and human care into the DNA of the system, and not in its afterthought. The UIDAI has persistently neglected and willfully dismissed these demands, thus privileging the security of their infrastructure and data over the safety of their citizens.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-12-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-double-speak

Plenary Talk at Jyothi Nivas College Research Symposium

sneha — 2018-10-03T16:46:03Z

I gave a plenary presentation on new reading and writing practices in the digital context, and emerging questions for digital humanities and literary studies at a research symposium organised by Jyothi Nivas College, Post Graduate Centre, on September 28, 2018.

Click to download the Invite

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/plenary-talk-at-jyothi-nivas-college-research-symposium

Digital Native: #MemeToo

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:20:15Z

An old meme shows the need for emotional literacy in our digitally saturated age. Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 9, 2018.

Memes, like regrettable exes, have the habit of resurfacing at regular periods. This week saw the return of the “Qajar Princess” meme across social media and institutional news media outlets as well. For those late to the viral party, Princess Qajar first made its appearance towards the end of 2017, when the world was riding high on its pop-feminist assertions and the revelations of the #MeToo movements — a photograph of a person dressed in a gown with dark long hair, thick eyebrows and a moustache, as she gets her portrait shot. The caption identified this person as Princess Qajar who was a “symbol of beauty in Persia” (now Iran), and also stated how “13 young men killed themselves” because she rejected their advances.

Everything about the meme was click-bait worthy — from the defiance of feminine standards to the possibility of a woman scripting her own narrative of beauty and empowerment. It fed perfectly into our female emancipation narratives.

There was only one problem with this meme — it was completely made up. There was quick debunking of all its claims. Excellent websites like Abitofhistory and many investigators on Reddit showed that everything about the meme was a fabrication. While it did seem to respond to the political zeitgeist and celebrate women’s bodies and desire — also giving us a non-Western narrative of beauty — it was all just #FakeNews. The meme had more or less died its timely death by the time 2018 rolled in, but, surprisingly, it has come back again on Instagram and Facebook news where equal parts admiration and ridicule are expressed at the cost of the person in that image.

The meme does not have any immediate problematic actions associated with it, though it carries both the oriental prejudices of framing the Persian region as “freaky”, and the misogynist framing of a woman’s body as something that is available for shameless analysing and commenting. This obvious piece of disinformation does belie the volatile nature of news and information circulation that we live in, in the age of information overload. I was in Jakarta in late August, sitting with 30 news media professionals, information activists, and policy actors from Asia, where we were discussing the surfeit of such disinformation, and our apparent incapacity to engage with it.

As we went through various workshops and talks curated by the Digital Asia Hub, one thing was increasingly becoming clear. People do not have a rational relationship with information. In fact, historically, the regulation of news media has been focused on how to create a rational, evidence-based narrative so that information consumers can be trained into developing a rational relationship with the information that comes to them. However, as information production and consumption patterns change, with the proliferation of new info sources and authorship, these old regulations are collapsing. We have tried very hard, even in artistic platforms like cinema, to distinguish between factual information and emotional information.

Especially in countries like India, where such disinformation has resulted in vigilante justice and lynch-mob violence, the question of how we manage the emotional tenor of our information consumption is critical. Information management giants like Facebook and its messaging service WhatsApp have come under severe scrutiny because they have become platforms of unfettered disinformation. Especially with newly-literate digital users engaging with this information on sites which are not informational but social, the viral trigger and emotional responses has been quick and uncontrolled. The tech companies have started introducing a variety of solutions — limiting the number of people a message can be forwarded to, establishing filters that mark messages as possibly suspicious, restricting the powers of group broadcasting to moderators and introducing forward marks to signal authorship.

These technical solutions are only going so far in tackling the fundamental question of emotional information. Technical solutions fall back on the management of factual information. It can provide a series of safeguards that could insert a pause between the first delivery and immediate action, but this presumes that the person receiving and sharing the information is interested in that pause. What we need, and haven’t paid enough attention to, is how we can train people into developing an emotional literacy for the age of information overload. While the technology development has to continue its filtering and managing, what we perhaps need is a people’s movement that focuses on how to give voice to and recognise the emotional expression and manipulation that these new information regimes are ushering in.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-9-2018-digital-native-meme-too

The Right Words for Love

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:23:58Z

Queer love is legal. Which means that all of us are finally free to find a language that can match our desires.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 23, 2018.

I don’t think, in all my years of growing up, I ever had my parents say “I love you” to me. Not because they did not love me, but because in Gujarati, the language we predominantly use at home, there is no possibility of saying it. Any attempt — ‘Hoon tane prem karu chu’, or ‘Mane tara par prem che’, would sound bookish, and thus, empty. But Gujarati has lots of words for love. The love between father and son is pitrutva, that of a mother towards her child is mamta, and of the child for its parents is vatsalya; the sister’s preet finds a brother’s whal, and siblings are bound in sneh. But these words have no translation outside the rich tapestry of sociality they exist in, and this is the same for almost all of our Indian languages.

These are words that are nouns and it is difficult to use their verb forms. They remain ideal types of feeling rather than descriptions of action. So, it wasn’t a surprise to me that our parents didn’t — not till long after we left home and English entered our family spaces — ever tell us that they love us. We did not have the vocabulary for the precise sentiment, and so we never said it. Instead, it manifested in the touch, the embrace, the smile and the active intimacy of actions which stood as testimony of the love that we could not define.

The lexicon of touching — the natural expression of love for me — was the vocabulary of intimacy, trust, affection and acceptance in my sociality. The clap on the back between friends, the hand on the shoulder or the exuberant hug were manifestations of love. Who you can and cannot touch was linked closely to who you can and cannot love, and how. While the expression “I love you” waited for a reciprocal response, the hand held in silence demanded no answer. Love in India, be it social, familial or romantic, has always had that sense of the tactile. Perhaps, that is the reason why kissing came to Bollywood so late, because to kiss was to also claim and express love. To kiss without love was obscene. Love, in India, is a physical verb.

Queer love, then, is no exception. It also did not have a local vocabulary or language to express itself in. Our myths, legends, fables, and epics are filled with queer practices — male gods taking female forms, consummating their desire with same-sex persons, changing their sexuality and genders in a fluid allegory of social intimacy. These were not merely practices. They were the physical verbal languages, signposts and registers of desire and love.

In implementing Section 377, the British ensured that they colonised not only our country but also our bodies. They imported shame and put it on practices and desires, which were accepted and celebrated in the country. They insisted that the only acceptable love is one of penile transaction that essentially leads to procreation — a violent law that not only denied the actions of love between consenting adults of same and different sexes, it alsoactively disallowed any local grammar of love to emerge in the country.

The judgment decriminalising consensual sex between adults, irrespective of their orientation or sex, is momentous because it doesn’t just condone an action. It suggests that we are finally free to locate and celebrate a language that can match our desires. The British law criminalised our many ways of claiming love. This judgment elevates our right to love as a fundamental right, and continues our Swaraj movements by decolonising our intimacies.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality, then, is not about queer love. It is about all love. It is about recognising that as a society we can only grow strong if we learn to love at intersections. In our increasingly polarised times when actions of hate — lynching, murdering, intimidation, bullying, trolling, and abuse — are on the rise, this judgment reminds us that the only counter to such violence is going to be in our right to love without fear, and, in any form that brings happiness in our lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-23-2018-the-right-words-for-love

Digital Native: Hardly Friends Like That

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:28:10Z

Individual effort is far from enough to fool Facebook’s grouping algorithm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 30, 2018

Lately, my Facebook timeline is flooded with people who are trying to “hack” Facebook’s friendship algorithm. Ever since Facebook took away the option from its users, to view their posts in reverse chronology, and made us slaves to its algorithms that pick and choose, based on opaque rules, what we see on our timeline, people have been frustrated with it. When your newsfeed is compiled by an algorithm that selects and decides what is good for you to see and what will be your interest, it doesn’t just mean that you have lost control, but that you are being manipulated without even noticing it, responding to only certain kinds of information that triggers specific responses from you.

This has led to a lot of people trying to “fool” the Facebook algorithm and taking their agency back. One of the most popular version of this is a meme that announces that Facebook algorithms only show us particular kinds of information from a certain kind of people, thus creating an echo chamber where all we do is see pictures of cute cats, dancing babies and holidays. The post suggests that if we all just talk to each other more, then we will have meaningful conversations — like, you know, about dancing cats, cute babies and where we wish to go on a holiday.

It is true that based on the nature of interaction, Facebook seems to designate some connections as strong connections. So, if we are chatting on Messenger, liking each others’s posts a lot, have many friends in common, are tagged together in the same pictures, Facebook makes a logical deduction that we have a lot in common in real life, and that we would be interested in each other more than other low-traffic connections. The meme asks people to leave a message on the post, start a conversation, and with this clever ploy, upset the Facebook algorithm. Now that we have chatted once, it suggests, Facebook is going to think we are the best of friends and is going to show us more diverse sources on the timeline.

This meme, and many like it, are attempts at taking agency in how we curate and consume our social media. Both of them are romantic, human, and absolutely flawed. They seem to think that Facebook’s algorithms follow human logic, and that they work on simple principles which we can counteract with simple actions. What they fail to take into account is that in the world of big data connections, Facebook’s algorithms draw their causal and correlative powers from more than a 100 data points which create a unique profile for each of its users. They fail to recognise that this message of resistance is still subject to the same principles of “traffic generating capacity”, and will be showed more often only for a temporary period until people stop interacting on that thread. With time and waning interest, it will die and people will be distracted by other information. They also don’t recognise that Facebook is still going to show your post largely to the same people that it has been showing your pictures to, and even if new people show engagement with it, it is not going to radically change your timeline.

While these posts are fun conversation starters, they cannot possibly be taken seriously. If Facebook’s algorithms were this easy to fool, every advertiser worth their salt would be busy manipulating the stream without spending any money on the platform. More importantly, individual actions are not going to circumvent the automation of our digital collective behaviour. To pretend that there is scope for such actions in the age of extreme customisation and profiling is a fool’s paradise. It also deflects our attention from the fact that if these are critical concerns, the responsibility of changing these conditions is not on the users but on companies like Facebooks and the governments that have to hold them accountable.

You and I, with all our good intentions, are not going to be able to “hack” Facebook’s algorithms or “fool” them into giving us results that we want. The only thing that can produce this change is strong regulation, robust policy, and taking the social media behemoth to task about how it addresses the questions of human agency and choice. So, the next time you want to produce real change, join the campaigns and ask our government to do something so that we can control our social media life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that

Digital Native: Time to Walk the Talk

nishant — 2018-11-01T05:58:30Z

#MeToo has turned victims into survivors, but social media remains an unsafe space.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 14, 2018.

#MeToo movements from around the globe have found a cultural and public force. As victims of sexual and gendered violence and abuse, especially in the workplace and professional fields, use the pseudo-safe space of the internet to give testimony to their pain, grief, trauma, and despair, the world has been forced to listen, and acknowledge that these experiences are real, and the lingering scars that they leave on the lives of these survivors need to be acknowledged and addressed. With this one hashtag, the digital web has transformed victims into survivors — giving them not just a public voice, but also a collective space for support, the relief of finding care, and the catharsis of being heard and seen, and to ask for accountability and justice for their experiences.

Every survivor who has spoken using this hashtag, has done it not only as a personal expression but also as an heroic civic duty, exposing the often seen but never named problem of gendered and sexual violence. Every hashtag has also exposed these survivors to backlash which disbelieved, ridiculed, or bullied them into silence and shame. Every person who has spoken up, to re-enact the violence which they live with, has made themselves vulnerable to further attacks and stigmatisation from the communities that they are speaking against.

The hashtag is important also because it is not just a platform for survivors to speak but also for allies to come in. The responsibility of addressing the question of gender and sexual violence cannot lie only on the survivors. Hashtags are connectors — they are digital objects that consolidate many different disparate elements and gives them a common identity. #MeToo has made sure that the allies, the activists, the people who are introspecting their own behaviour and their complicity in naturalising these actions, all find a space to come together. It is a ringing reminder that oppression and violence are intersectional, and so our fights and resistances and communities will also have to be intersectional. It reminds us that gender and sexual violence are not “women’s problems” but social problems where women often get victimised.

When the #MeToo first became global news, what was refreshing was the number of voices from India who decided to speak in support of the survivors. A wide variety of people acknowledged that this is not just an American problem but a problem that has even deeper roots in the country. Woke Bollywood bros, new age silver screen feministas, progressive creatives, and liberal audiences all came in unity to talk about the state of gender and sexual violence in our everyday lives.

But it just needed one puff of truth for the house of cards to collapse. As Tanushree Dutta took the step to call out what we all know — that Bollywood is a cesspit of exploitation and sexism — the tinsel town squirmed. Apart from a handful of voices, most established veterans either abstain from responding, feign ignorance, or rush to the defence of a person who is now accused of sexual violence. The do-good Twitterati, happy to comment on far-away foreign cases, is suddenly hemming and hawing when the problem knocks at their doors and comes out of the closet. The Dutta-Patekar conversations on social media are a startling reminder that we remain still a space that is unsafe, hostile, and intimidating for survivors to come out and tell their truth.

The digital hashtag allows you to connect to extensive distances and stand in support of them. We travel with the hashtag to far-away lands and add our voice and support to problems we might not immediately be living through. It is good to remember, though, that hashtags also travel. What was once distant will eventually come close to home. When it does, the people who could perform their speech will have to move to action. It might be a good idea to look at the Twitter history of every big shot who had used #MeToo to extend their support against Weinstein, and ask them, to do the same now. They need to be reminded that politics is not in speech but in action. And if they do not stand up for Dutta now, they will have not just failed Dutta but every woman who might have wanted to come out and speak her truth against those who have abused their power to demean and diminish the dignity of their lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-14-2018-digital-native-time-to-walk-the-talk

Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue

nishant — 2018-11-01T06:04:25Z

It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 28, 2018.

Information overload is our new default. We don’t just slip into a condition of overload, we live in it on a daily basis. Every minute, surrounded by digital devices that buzz, beep, chirp, blink and notify us about the various information streams that shape us, we experience a sensory overload that is unprecedented. One of the reasons for this information overload is that digital networks work on traffic. Traffic — the data that travels in bits, bytes, and packets, over the network edges of our computation systems — is the lifeline of a network. A network without traffic is dead. The network exists to circulate information and transfer information. Take that away and the network is just a whole lot of dead hardware.

So, if a computational network is our default mode of existence, then we will have to accept that these networks will continue to incessantly circulate traffic and keep the edges that connect us as nodes, busy, with a continued information stream. This is why our machines are in a state of continued update, and this is why we expect to receive and share new information in all states.

This state of information overload has led to some alarming signals about human relationship with information: We find our attention now shallow, because even before we have processed the first stream of information, something else comes and dislocates that information. Information intensity is replaced by information scale, so we are no longer invested in a deep engagement with the information that comes to us. For information to keep our attention longer than the click, we need information to be repeated, consolidated, and updated over and over again, so that we can keep focusing on the same topic, but on multiple screens and interfaces.

The hashtag is a great example of this. Even though a hashtag excites us, inspires us, and motivates us to engage with an information stream, hashtags immediately dislocate us to other hashtags and other tangents. It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die by infusing them with misinformation which makes the user disengage from the stream. Hashtags can make things go viral, by being shared, and they can hold attention only if they are fed by multiple and many voices that keep them alive.

While viral hashtags have public attention and hold, they also lead to a different phenomenon — what I call #hashtag fatigue. We get bored of the hashtag, because the same few ones show up so many times, that even when they have new material, we presume that we already know what accompanies them. We also get tired of the hashtags, because they fill up almost all our attention span. We get desensitised, often ignoring the individual and collective experiences they consolidate. We learn to ignore hashtags, because as more people share it, the more it seems to be everyday, losing easily to other information sets that are screaming for eyeballs.

We see this in the way #MeToo is developing in India. As more women come out, naming their abusers and enablers, we see a hashtag fatigue stepping in. We already see people raising an emoji eyebrow and rolling their digital eyes while there are abusers who are maintaining silence hoping that this will phase out soon. There are people who have started making jokes about how everything is now #MeToo, and this also feeds into the patriarchal powers who are using this moment to paint themselves as victims of vindictive women, dismissing their collective and individual trauma. We see many survivors getting overwhelmed by the scale of voices trickling in, feeling deafened by the continuous traffic that surrounds the hashtag, but also creating an isolated island where nothing else trickles in. We see news media already finding either new angles or other controversies, because in the lifeline of the news cycle, this is already old news.

In order for #MeToo to remain a sustainable social justice movement and a long-standing solidarity, we will have to find other ways of engaging with this movement. While the digital offers the first platform and catalysis, we will have to find other spaces for the movement and its ambitions to survive. It is time for us to simultaneously find forms that will capture the urgency but move beyond the viral fatigue of the #hashtag.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListInterface

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:19:12Z

Details of a session proposed by Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

We would, as a starting point like to consider the conditions of possibility for the ‘list’ to emerge as the core thematic for this year’s Internet Researchers’ Conference. The proposal call provides several motivating questions and anchoring reasons foregrounding the list as an object for analysis and discussion. Broadly these may be divided along two lines - one pertaining to the qualities of the list (who makes it, why are they ephemeral, what makes lists this or that) and the other pointing to certain critical questions that emerge on our political landscape, with the list or practices of listing central to this politics.

Segment 1 [15 minutes]

In our session, the first item on the agenda (this also is a list!) is an outline of the way lists are thought of in 2 contexts:

Bureaucratic processing/management (lists and their relationship to documents, files in offices, and also, everyday lists such as shopping lists).
List as a technological object in networked technological systems ie the list-interface.

The late media theorist Cornelia Vismann is our guide among others, including Umberto Eco and Foucault’s notion of the ‘statement’.

Segment 2 [15 minutes x 3 => 45 minutes]

In the second part of our proceedings, we would like to consider 3 problems pertaining to the list:

‘List’ as a mode of presentation in various user-interfaces, such as the whatsapp screen and its relationship to the subjective experience of time : It's winter and you've opened the Amazon app to buy one winter jacket. You open the app on your phone and begin to search for one, only to realize you've been endlessly scrolling for the last half an hour looking for jackets without buying a single one and if your friend hadn't called you to break you out of that flow, you would have most probably continued to scroll for another half an hour. I could make a similar point about how you keep scrolling through Instagram endlessly without stopping or how you similarly keep scrolling endlessly through Netflix or YouTube videos without touching to watch a single one. A common theme that connects these interfaces is their "no dead end" feature. They are arranged in the form of “lists” keep going on without a stop, structuring the user’s experience of subjective time.
The #MeToo movement is, as the proposal call says, a few years old, but it is only with the publishing of this list that it erupts into the terrain of the political, at least within the context of academic institutions. We would like to examine the conditions that make this political emergence possible. As first pass, we will note here that the #LoSHA is a list that refuses to process (Other facebook posts for example, are read, ‘liked’ or commented on and then passed over, ie processed).
Social media platforms - sites of media exchange are organized structurally as lists. There’s a list of posts, responses to ‘posts’ are also lists and even interactive features are available as lists -“Like, Share and Subscribe” at the end of a youtube video for example. On Facebook, audiences would be asked to “Like, Comment and Share” in that order of increasing activity. In the recent past, “Likes” have been expanded further to “reacts” which gives a list of “reacts” (including emotions, example-sad), a list or sequence of sentiments which people use to register their response. Similarly, there are such structures present in the forms of lists across platforms, built into the keyboard to be able to structure our immediate response or sentiment (emoticons, stickers gifs etc). These are attempts to codify emotion or more broadly, affect. The 3rd problematique in our panel will consider the process of structuring affect in online environments through the listing of signs such as the ‘like’, the ‘react’ etc.

Segment 3 [30 minutes]

Following our presentation of these problems and modes of analytically situating ‘lists’ in everyday practices in online spaces, we will open the floor for discussion.

Session Team

Bharath Sivakumar graduated with a B.Sc (Research) degree in mathematics from Shiv Nadar University and currently works for Loonycorn where he's part of the team that creates technical courses. He has eclectic tastes ranging from mathematics to philosophy to Anthropology and feels at home in the hills. He enjoys trekking, loves performing on stage and aspires to be a stand up comedian one day.

Rakshita Siva is a researcher at IIIT Bangalore in the faculty of Digital Society. She graduated with a Mechanical engineering major and a minor in Sociology from Shiv Nadar University. Her interests relate to the digital, questions of self, interiority and the psyche. Rakshita is a singer and enjoys a good jam.

Deepak Prince is a course instructor and Phd candidate in the Department of Sociology, School of Humanities and Social sciences at SNU. His thesis research seeks to grapple with the 'explosion' of smartphones and touchscreens in practices of everyday sociality through the conceptual categories of the screen and the interface. Deepak's key research interest revolves around technics, the history and philosophy of technical objects. He also takes an interest in questions of anthropological disciplinarity, the history of ideas and political anthropology.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-listinterface

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #EnlistingPrivacy

sumandro — 2019-01-08T09:56:31Z

Details of a session proposed by Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

This session offers a provocation to advance the conversation on privacy in India. Privacy is at once a legal right, a technological/design feature and an everyday practice of managing our social and personal lives. What do we mean when we invoke privacy in our everyday conversations? Privacy conjoins opposing impulses to engage in online public sociality and expressing a desire for limits on data sharing. We trade privacy for convenience. When we skip lengthy terms and conditions of apps, websites and other online agreements we enter into an agreement without much concern for what we are agreeing to when we tick the box at the bottom of the contract. Privacy is a right we cannot not want. As much as privacy remains a subject of, and subject to impassioned speech, it becomes a cognitive burden when we are called upon to read the privacy policies before signing up for an online service.

In this session, we invite participants to tell stories on privacy based on their life experiences. The session aims to employ the concept of a list liberally to understand how privacy continues to be on a to-do list of sorts for lawmakers, technologists and users who are constantly being informed to manage their online account settings, to constantly make certain things private and to care about privacy. Even as privacy has finally joined the list of fundamental rights in India, its meaning continues to be contested. What may be the politics of privacy at play in the circulation of the #MeToo list? Privacy itself may be spoken of as a list of values and affordances: as dignity and bodily integrity of rights subjects, as confidentiality of certain information, the integrity of data flows, self-determination and individual autonomy. The list of all things privacy will evolve with new, privacy-by-design technologies in a rapidly evolving information technology global landscape.

The objective of the session is to bring the examples of potential and actual privacy violations from our daily life in the public domain. We plan to invite three to five participants to engage in a small roundtable-format discussion on privacy and the metaphor of list. Pawan Singh (New Generation Network Fellow, Deakin University) and Pranjal Jain (Masters student of Design, Srishti School of Design) will facilitate the session. We plan to invite participants from our academic and professional networks at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore, NUMA co-working space and Digital Identity Research Initiative (DIRI) at the Indian School of Business (ISB).

We plan to contact interested participants through email in December 2018. In order for this roundtable-format session to be productive, we plan to invite participants from diverse backgrounds who can share their perspectives.

The intent of the session is to make a repository of examples from daily life on privacy at the intersection of online space and social life. The repository of examples can be a dynamic list that grows as participants, attendees and others add to the conversation on privacy. It may be maintained as a digital artefact or an online resource.

We are looking for participants who questions what is privacy to them and still in the process of figuring out what is privacy? We also welcome the participants who do not know what is privacy but curious to discover it.

Session Team

Pawan Singh: New Generation Network Scholar at Deakin University. Works on issues of identity, representation, privacy and the costs of social justice in India and globally. Current project on Aadhaar, data privacy and social media in India.

Pranjal Jain: Human-Centered Designer from Srishti Institute of Art, Design & Technology. Currently in the 2nd year of Master in Design and research assistant at Digital Identity Research Initiative, Indian School of Business. Believe in Ethical Data Practices. Works on designing for online privacy through speculative and critical design.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-enlistingprivacy

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ButItIsNotFunny

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:12:36Z

Details of a session proposed by Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

Exactly a year after #LoSHA (List of sexual Harassers in the Academia) was compiled by Raya Sarkar in 2017, the second wave of #MeToo began when writer Mahima Kukreja accused comedian Utsav Chakravarty of sending her unsolicited pictures of his private parts. This sparked a barrage of tweets by her with screenshots from other women who had been in similar situations with him, and in one case, also a minor.This was the beginning of the second wave of #MeTooIndia.

In this session, we propose to look at the implications of “List” being circulated in relation to the comedy industry in particular and study the discourse surrounding it. While Raya Sarkar’s was structured as a list and circulated on social media as one too (albeit a dynamic one), the second wave of the movement was nothing of the sort. Sarkar has still refused to divulge details of the assault as shared with her in the interest of those that came forward with their stories. The second wave, involving primarily the media and entertainment industry, was about naming and shaming the perpetrators, mainly by specifying details of every case of harassment while keeping the survivors anonymous. In this case, there was no physical, tangible list, but host of people on social media sharing screenshots of the accounts and retweeting the same. Each of the panellists will be presenting papers and engaging with the interpretative idea of “list” as they understand it in relation to the comedy industry in India.

Apart from such “controversial” issues being brought forth in the media, comedy, or comedians have not necessarily featured as a genre of academic study in India. Although the content performed by the stand-up comedians today has been about challenging the status quo with regard to questioning hegemonic narratives, the idea that at the end of the day “it is just a joke”, unfortunately leads to dismissal of comedy as serious business. It is with this objective as well that we want to foreground the stand-up industry and the ways in which it contributes to dominant progressive as well as regressive discourses especially with respect to gender.

The session is intended to be a panel discussion that would foreground the multivalent possibilities of what “The List” entails with respect to comedy. Both the panelists would be presenting individual papers followed by a discussion of their findings with each other as well as to be thrown open to the audiences.

Paper 1: Sexual harassment in comedy: When Twitter threads are treated as “legitimate” testimonials [Madhavi Shivaprasad]

In my paper, I will be focussing on the characteristics of “The List” circulated by Mahima Kukreja and the reasons people began to consider that the #MeToo movement had “arrived” in India.

There are two main aspects to the way in which it played out in India. At first, it was mainly about showing solidarity with other women, make people aware of the “magnitude” of the problem, the pervasiveness of it. The second was the naming and shaming in the hope of taking away the power harassers hold over the women, banking on their silence.

However, there is also a third aspect to it that needs to be considered with much seriousness: that of the details of the sexual assault itself. These accounts were circulated widely and in reading these details is where the “virality” of the posts lay. It was almost as if digital media houses were having a field day reporting one harassment case after another. Thanks to unimaginable speeds of the internet, reports would be filed within hours of posting the tweet online. New names were being added every day, new lists being made.

It is also interesting that it was the “lack” of a conventional list that ended up making the list of comedians accused of sexual harassment go viral. The list here manifests in the form of multiple Twitter threads by different people associated with the comedy industry. So much so that it became difficult to keep track of who was saying what.

In this paper, I ask questions such as what specific characteristics of the stand-up industry made it possible for it to become the first to come to the limelight. At the same time, I speculate about effect of the #MeToo movement for the men and women who are a part of the comedy industry today. What does it mean for their careers now that some have been outed as harassers? How are the women dealing with the threat, and at the same time comfort of having #MeToo as a resort to made their concerns public?

The questions I ask therefore are these: How does the “List” initiated through Twitter threads become pervasive in its absence as a conventional sequence of items? Is it just the solace afforded by what the list represents that encouraged women to make their stories public? What other structures were in place which made it effective at such a magnitude? What implications does it hold for the larger feminist movement in the wake of so many comedians being dropped off the rosters of large media conglomerates such as Amazon Prime?

Paper 1: The list on YouTube: An analysis of the comments manifested by the Indian stand-up routines on street assaults [Sonali Sahoo]

There has been a shift from the mainstream idea of the essentials of a comic woman (Tuntun, Upasana Singh, Archana Puran Singh on the celluloid and Supriya Pilgaonkar and others on television) who are portrayed from the point of view of the male (for the script has always been written by males). The essentials of the comic woman shall be elaborated upon by tracing the evolution of the idea of the female comic on various settings such a films and television, live performances posted online during the discussion. Today, the noticeable shift has been the female comedians have not remained just the face in a comedic plot but also the voice along with the face (the stand-up comedian writing and performing her own script) in a comedic setting. However, the female stand-up comedians have faced a rebuttal at this juncture. They have been called out for not aligning to the dominant ideals of the topics to be included in a stand-up routine. Their issue-based humour associated with the body, and hegemony politics has been openly reprimanded on Twitter, other social media. One tweet invited a lot of criticism in December 2017 which said “female content bra, boobs, period.” People were agreeing with it but also disagreeing and defending it by saying “so what?” In this paper, though, the scholar in not interested not in the Twitter conversational list rather, she is looking at the comments section on YouTube to understand the reactions people have to content posted by these comedians on their YouTube channel. Following is the explanation of the objective of the discussion.

The list has existed in various forms, here I intend to look at the comments section on YouTube as a list, and look at the implications of it through over a period of 2 to 3 years. (on the YouTube channels of Radhika Vaz, Vasu Primlani, Daniel Fernandes, Karunesh Talwar amongst a few others) To be particular, how are the commentators influencing the comedians or are they really?

How is the list formulated by the commentators different in concern to male and female stand-up comedians when they incorporate street assault or harassment against women in their stand-up routines? (a common ground)
How does it bring out the ideology of the commentators?
Discussion of the impact factor determined through its reach by referring to various newspaper articles that apparently are the voice of a collective group of people in the Indian society.

Hence, the whole point of the scholar is to look at the “list” of YouTube comments as deeply rooted misogyny in the society which have come to the limelight only due to the female stand-up routines on street assaults.

In the end of this session the scholar would discuss the potential of stand-up industry as an important medium to start the discourse on the sexual assault. These comedic routines can also be looked at as to be the first of the incidences discussing their personal accounts of harassment on the comedic stage.

Session Team

Madhavi Shivaprasad is currently a Ph.D scholar in the Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies at TISS, Mumbai. She also teaches full-time in the English department at Mount Carmel College Bangalore. Her areas of interest include gender and studies, humour studies, as well as disability studies.

Sonali Sahoo has an M.A. in English language and literature from St. Joseph’s College for women, Vizag. She is currently pursuing an M. Phil in English studies from Christ (Deemed to be University). Her area of interest include cultural, gender and humour studies in particular.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-butitisnotfunny

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #PowerListing

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:03Z

Details of a session proposed by Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

#PowerListing: Approaches towards an understanding of power dynamics of knowledge creation and agency behind ‘listing’ as exercised by the State, Individuals and Corporations

‘Lists’ come with an ontological mandate of organising information in a structured and hierarchical manner. This has a deliberate aspect with respect to the question of power. Our panel attempt to investigate the question of power in terms of who wields it and what implications, philosophically and materially, this lands on the stakeholders thereof. The questions of power have different insinuation when the agency of the ‘listing’ rests with the state, the individual or if it is folded within the operational matrix of a corporate service.

Our panel attempts to bring all these myriad conversations together to try and unpack the various nuances of this discussion on power around ‘lists’. Listed below is the detailed breakdown of this plan:

Paper 1: Digital Lists and List-making in Post-disaster Contexts [Prof. Shubhda Arora]

Looking at crowd sourcing of lists for humanitarian and relief purposes, this paper explores list making and circulation in a post-disaster context, specifically looking at aspects of public list making and its challenges of credibility and duplicity. The paper further examines the interaction between these ‘unofficial’ lists and intervention agencies namely the Government, Army and NGOs, which prepare their own ‘official’ lists for purposes of relief and rehabilitation. Lists of missing people, of people being marked safe, of relief material and centres, of monetary aid, of loss in terms of human life, land and money are the different kinds of lists prepared and circulated through media like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram among others. The constant revision of lists based on localized information and on-ground data, the compilation of master list from various sources of lists and the problem of ‘fake lists’ need further inquiry to understand digital list making after a disaster.

Paper 2: Identity frameworks and #MeToo in India [Prof. Nidhi Kalra]

When Lawrence Grossberg argued that "Cultural studies needs to move towards a model of articulation as 'transformative practice', as a singular becoming of a community", he likely did not anticipate what became the #MeToo movement. Concerns of identity-transformation, community creation, and activism spread over social has been termed as arm-chair slactivism. Yet, we are witness and participant in a movement whose terrains and possibilities are forming as we read and write. Just a few hours before writing this piece news came of Tarana Burke, the founder of #MeToo claims that she is wary that the movement will need "to shift the narrative that it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender, heterosexual, famous women. That has to shift."

In the Indian context, #MeToo has been the vehicle of a movement with many identities linked to it--from scholars, politicians, celebrities, to Dalit female students, to women and men in the Media industry. Considering it is such a historic moment in internet history, it is important for us to use the lens of cultural studies to ask what this wave of activism does vis-a-vis identity production/transformation? What the sites of contestation around the concern of identity as it used in the #MeToo movement in India? This talk will hope to open dialogue about recording, transcribing and understand this moment and it's frameworks of identity.

Paper 3: “Making” the (ethnic) citizen: NRC list as State power and anxiety [Prof. Smitana Saikia]

In borderland regions of modern nation states, the ontological status of legal subjects is often fraught with competing assertions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, this is particularly true due to a historical movement of peoples from Bangladesh (then East Bengal/Pakistan). Assam’s own nativist movement against “illegal” immigrants in 1980s (both popular and an armed resistance) catapulted the issue into national prominence thereby reiterating the anxiety that nation-states feel while defining and interpellating its citizens, in an Althusserian sense. In this context, the NRC emerges as a tool to affect order in what remains a contested terrain of citizenship. This paper thus situates the NRC in the interacting landscape of the Indian nation-state’s attempt to “identify” (and hence create) citizens on one hand, and on the other, the Assamese elite’s attempt to create the ethnic “other” to consolidate and preserve political power. The paper argues that the state’s need to create a register (list) of citizens is at once a display of its hegemonic power, as it is also reflective of an acute anxiety inherent to projects of constructing (nation-) states.

Paper 4: ‘Congratulations you got a match’-- The embedded listing within the dating app ‘Tinder’ & its implications thereof [Prof. Ravikant Kisana]

The process of ‘listing’ involves the act of segregating and organising data. This involves questions of power. Who makes the lists and to what end— the state or the subversive, with what motivations, are important points of investigation and discussion. However, such an operational understanding of a ‘list’ assumes a mechanical agency in the ‘listing’ process. This paper looks to investigate the digital apps and services which are based on automated listing and hierarchical segregation of its subscribers. Google, Facebook, Uber, etc— all contain within the folds of their operational code, an algorithmic listing of data. The researcher will seek to explore this nuance in the context of dating app ‘Tinder’, which now offers three levels possible dating matches that have been ‘listed’ and curated automatically. This paper will seek to interview users of the app and try to map the ideas and anxieties around such a digital listing of their very identity profiles.

Session Team

Dr. Shubhda Arora is currently working as assistant professor of media and communication at FLAME University, Pune after having completed her doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad . Her doctoral thesis is in the area of Environmental and Disaster Risk Communication.

Dr. Smitana Saikia is an assistant professor of Politics at FLAME University, Pune. She has received her PhD from King’s College London and her thesis studied long term state and identity formation processes to explain conflict in India’s northeast. Her research interests include ethnic conflicts, borderlands, federalism, and caste and electoral politics in India.

Prof. Nidhi Kalra has been a learning facilitator since 2008. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities at FLAME University, Pune. Prior to that, she has taught at the English Department in Savitribai Phule Pune University and Gargi College in the University of Delhi. Nidhi has received her MPhil in English Literature from the University of Delhi, for which she worked on problematizing Holocaust memoirs. Her research interests include Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, Oral History, Digital Humanities, and Children’s/Young Adult Literature.

Prof. Ravikant Kisana is currently the Co-Chair of Humanities & Languages at Flame University, Pune. He has previously completed his doctoral studies from MICA, Ahmedabad. His doctoral research focused on the oral histories of Bollywood cinema in Kashmir, and its intersections with Kashmiri nationalism and resistance. His areas of research focus on the sociology of cinema, gender & sexuality intersections with films & new media platforms, as well as investigations into the structural mores of cybercultures.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-powerlisting

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #FOMO

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:17:11Z

Details of a session proposed by Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Session Plan

The broad basis of the discussion would be the lists that address and invoke aspirations to know, particularly what has come to be known as 'listicle'. The focus would also be on social media and other digital platforms, including blogs and fan clubs, which list out cultural objects like books, films, music, etc. that one must not miss. On one hand, many of such listicle-s are essentially advertising devices and, in that way, descendants of the bestseller list and such that one used to encounter on the pages of The Hindu and so on. On the other, we have similar lists made by fans and culture enthusiasts, and the consumers. Both of these play on a specific type of aspiration and the attendant anxiety, expressed in common parlance as FoMo, i.e. Fear of Missing Out, in this specific case the fear of missing out on knowing/knowing about something. But FoMo, as a dominant structure of feeling in contemporary society, in the context of listicle-s, begs many more questions: what is one afraid to miss out and how intense can that fear be? Who is afraid to miss out and what does missing out represent to them? Who decides what can be missed and what not? What is deemed to be the proper content of listicle-s and what is not; and what are the repercussions of the list form on the overall repository of knowledge from which the listicle-s are culled? What is the difference and continuity between lists meant as content that leads to commercial advertisement and lists made by the consumers? What happens when one begins to increasingly learn everything from the list form? Is there a 'list knowledge', the way there is a 'bookish knowledge'? What are the political repercussions of such 'list knowledge'?

The sessions will begin with two presentations/short papers (15 minutes each), mainly to provide an initial guide map for the discussion. The next 45 minutes will be devoted to discussion with the audience, so as to list out the complex factors and facets the conjugation of listicle and FoMo has produced, which will be moderated by both the presenters. The final 15 minutes will be assigned to the summarization of the points discussed by the speakers.

Session Team

Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti is an Assistant Professor at the Symbiosis Centre for Media and Communication, Pune. Besides receiving his doctoral degree in Cultural Studies from EFL University, Hyderabad, he has also worked in the publishing industry as well as a content editor in the corporate sector. His doctoral dissertation maps the ideological terrain of contemporary Bollywood against the rise of neoliberalism in India. His areas of interests include contemporary film cultures, digital modernity, particularly digital cinephilia, comparative cultural studies, etc.

Pritha Chakrabarti is an independent researcher based out of Hyderabad. She has recently submitted her doctoral dissertation titled Politics of Screen Dance in Indian Cinema in the department of Cultural Studies at EFL University, Hyderabad. A recipient of the ICSSR-CSDS doctoral fellowship, she has worked on the ideology of on-screen choreographic construction and dissemination and reception of film dance as popular culture. Professionally a Content Manager, she has nearly a decade-long experience in marketing content generation, both offline and online.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-proposed-session-fomo

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers

sneha-pp — 2019-01-21T12:11:35Z

Here is the list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) - #List. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019. The conference announcement, along with the final agenda, will be published on Monday, January 7.

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Sessions

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - Call for Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List - List of Proposed Sessions

Selected Sessions

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty (9 votes)

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo (9 votes)

#CallingOutAndIn - Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal (9 votes)

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain (9 votes)

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti (9 votes)

#LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design - Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha (9 votes)

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince (7 votes)

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose (7 votes)

#PowerListing - Dr. Shubhda Arora, Dr. Smitana Saikia, Prof. Nidhi Kalra, and Prof. Ravikant Kisana (10 votes)

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh (11 votes)

Selected Papers

Brindaalakshmi.K

Orinam: An online list archiving queer history, activism, support, experiences and literature

In July 2009, the Delhi High Court legalised homosexual acts among consenting adults. However, in 2013, the Supreme Court of India held that homosexuality between two consenting adults was illegal and reinstated Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. This section was reinstated under the pretext of the LGBTIQA+ community being a minuscule minority. The Supreme Court saw this as insufficient for declaring that Section 377 as going against Article 14, 15 and 21. However, on September 6, 2018, the Supreme Court of India passed the historic verdict reading down Section 377 to decriminalise homosexuality in India. In the time between 2013 and 2018, the LGBTIQA+ community struggled to their presence and rights. Different groups and organisations have worked on this.

One such collectives has been Orinam, an all-volunteer unregistered Chennai-based collective. Started in 2003, Orinam among other things, has also been recording queer experiences on its website since Dec 2005. These experiences of queer people and their families have been recorded in Tamil and English on Orinam’s blog, Our Voices as poetry, fiction, news, views, podcasts and reviews. The website also archives queer events in India through The Orinam Photo archives. Orinam has also been archiving the legal developments with respect to the rights of LGBTIQA+ community. This included legal documents, landmark verdicts, letters written by the family of queer individuals in multiple Indian languages to the Supreme Court to read down Section 377, among others [1]. These listings along with others, in turn also contributed to building the case for the legal battle to eventually read down Section 377.

This paper looks specifically at the functioning of Orinam based in Chennai that uses lists in a way to support a marginalised community acknowledging their realities and also keeping them alive in different ways. This is being done through its support resources, peer support, activism or archiving queer experiences in the form of literature and other media, both online and offline. This paper will trace Orinam’s work through the fifteen years of its existence as a listing and archiving platform supporting the LGBTIQA+ community.

[1] Orinam@15: talk delivered at 15th Anniversary Celebrations. Dec 23, 2018

Brindaalakshmi is a member/volunteer of the Chennai based queer collective, Orinam; and is currently working with the Centre for Internet and Society, India, on a study on 'Gendering of Development Data in India'.

Gayas Eapen

De-duplicating amidst disaster: how rescue databases were made during 2018 Kerala floods

Natural disasters can be crucial time for making lists: of people in need of assistance, rescue, support, relief and other similar disaster-related operations. In lists concerning rescue, being on the list and not being on it could mean the difference of life and death. In which case it is important to consider: how do the processes which make such lists possible come about? How do they ensure that people are not left out of these lists? How they do they sort out redundancies? I study the lists made during the Kerala floods of 2018 to attempt to answer some of these questions.

As rescue requests started piling up on social media, a group of volunteers set up the web portal, keralarerscue.in, which later became the central database of all the rescue requests. The portal was unique in two fronts. First, the developers building the portal were volunteers from the community instead of being the state employees, but, nonetheless, worked in coordination with the the government and rescue agencies along with the feedback they were getting from people. Second, the rescue requests were being crowdsourced from people directly. This led to the duplication of requests, it wasn’t until much later that it was realized that crowdsourced information was not coming directly from the victims, but from people who were placing requests on their behalf.

In this paper I argue how feedback from the community, coupled with the personal investment of the programmers lead to improvements in the structuring and use of the database. I will delineate the concerns of de-duplication (process of removing redundancies) which posed a serious dilemma, of either deleting crucial information hence posing danger to people’s lives, or incurring loss of precious resources in chasing repeated rescue requests.

I argue that the streamlining of programming operations by developing methods such as ticketing system (of labelling the urgency or marking completion of rescue requests by telephonically confirming them) were made possible because of a participatory model of building lists. Those involved in the technical creation of the lists identified closely with the experiences of the people stuck in the flood. The solution, which involved not deleting names of people but instead undertaking another painstaking scrutinizing operation even in a time sensitive environment, can be placed in stark contrast to how lists have been created by state or corporate agencies in similar crucial situations.

Gayas is an assistant professor of English and Journalism (as part of the Resident Expert Panel, 2018-19) at Dayapuram Arts and Science College, Kozhikode, University of Calicut.

Khetrimayum Monish Singh and Ranjit Singh

Making the ‘Other’ Count: Categorizing ‘Self’ using the NRC

This paper focuses on the National Register of Citizens (NRC) as a case study to discuss legal and administrative challenges in categorizing Assamese residents as citizens of India. At a fundamental level, lists manifest a binary of categories: people who are on the list and others who are not. However, the process of achieving this binary distinction, especially in the exercise of updating NRC, has required bureaucratic accounting of a wide variety of Assameseresidents who neither are completely on the list nor completely off it. This paper specifically focuses on instances of inclusion and exclusion of three categories of Assamese residents in the process of updating the NRC: (i) Original Inhabitants (OI), (ii) Doubtful Voters (D-Voters), and (ii) Women applicants who have been excluded from the list because of the lack of appropriate bureaucratic documents. As an administrative exercise, the NRC as a citizen identification project is a moment where temporalities of NRC as a classification system does not map onto the individual biographies of a variety of Assamese residents as outlined above. In such moments of ‘torque’ (Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting things out: Classifications and its consequences, 2000), listing (or the process of making a list) is not simply bureaucratic accounting; it is also a lived experience of mismatch and the struggle that follows in efforts to secure representation through listing. We show that while the NRC update in Assam may itself be driven by anxieties around illegal immigration, the attempts to technologically, legally, and politically categorize the ‘other’ using the information infrastructure of NRC have profound consequences on the ‘self’ of India as a nation state.

Monish is a Programme Officer at the Centre for Internet and Society, India; and Ranjit is a PhD candidate at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Cornell University, and a Research Associate at the Centre for Internet and Society, India.

Notes

The sessions have been selected based on the votes submitted by all the session teams (that proposed a session for IRC19). Please find details of this process in the Call for Sessions page. The papers have been selected by the researchers@work team.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-selected-sessions-papers

December 2018 Newsletter

praskrishna — 2019-01-08T16:15:38Z

We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) wish you all a great year ahead and welcome you to the twelfth issue of its newsletter (December) for the year 2018:

Highlights

CIS signed a MoU with Odia Virtual Academy to work on drafting an open content policy for the state, to promote use of Wikimedia projects by various user types and to ensure sustainability of Wikimedia projects, and to facilitate development of relevant free and open source software projects. This partnership between OVA and CIS will be carried out from December 2018 to November 2019.
Natalia Khaniejo, in a four-part report has attempted to document the various approaches that are being adopted by different stakeholders towards incentivizing cybersecurity and the economic challenges of implementing the same. The literature review was edited by Amber Sinha.
Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah created an infographic which has mapped the key stakeholder, areas of focus and threat vectors that impact cybersecurity policy in India. The authors have stated that broadly policy-makers should concentrate on establishing a framework where individuals feel secure and trust the growing digital ecosystem.
In April 2018 European Union issued the proposal for a new regime dealing with cross border sharing of data and information by issuing two draft instruments, an E-evidence Regulation (“Regulation”) and an E-evidence Directive (“Directive”), (together the “E-evidence Proposal”). Vipul Kharbanda has analysed how service providers based in India whose services are also available in Europe would be affected by these proposals.
Feminist research methodology is a vast body of knowledge, spanning across multiple disciplines including sociology, media studies, and critical legal studies. A literature review by Ambika Tandon aims to understand key aspects of feminist methodology across these disciplines, with a particular focus on research on technology and its interaction with society.
CIS and design collective Design Beku came together for a workshop on Illustrations and Visual Representations of Cybersecurity. The authors Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu have stated that images play a vital role in the public’s perception of cybercrime and cybersecurity.
A list of selected sessions and papers for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19) has been published. IRC19 will be held in Lamakaan, Hyderabad, from Jan 30 to Feb 1, 2019.

Articles

Private-public partnership for cyber security (Arindrajit Basu; Hindu Businessline; December 24, 2018).
Is the new ‘interception’ order old wine in a new bottle? (Elonnai Hickok, Vipul Kharbanda, Shweta Mohandas and Pranav M. Bidare; Newslaundry.com; December 27, 2018).
Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; December 30, 2018).

Media Coverage

Many sites bypass porn ban (Rajitha Menon; Deccan Herald; December 6, 2018).
How data privacy and governance issues have battered Facebook ahead of 2019 polls (Rahul Sachitanand; Economic Times; December 6, 2018).
Is Aadhaar Essential To Achieve Error-Free Electoral Rolls? (Bloomberg Quint; December 16, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance threatens right to privacy, experts say (Abhishek Dey; Scroll.in; December 22, 2018).
Centre’s order on computer surveillance is backed by law – but the law lacks adequate safeguards (Nehaa Chaudhari and Tuhina Joshi; Scroll.in; December 23, 2018).
Ten Indian government agencies can now snoop on people’s internet data (David Spenser; VPN Compare; December 24, 2018).
Big Brother is here: Amid snooping row, govt report says monitoring system 'practically complete' (Keerthana Sankaran; New Indian Express; December 26, 2018).
MHA snoop order & bid to amend IT rules: China-like clampdown or tracking unlawful content? (Fatima Khan; The Print December 28, 2018).
The dark side of future tech: Where are we headed on privacy, security, truth? (Dipanjan Sinha; Hindustan Times; December 29, 2018).
The constitutionality of MHA surveillance order (Nehaa Chaudhari; Asian Age; December 30, 2018).

Access to Knowledge

Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.

Wikipedia

As part of the project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).

Blog Entries

Punjabi Wikisource Training Workshop, Patiala (Jayanta Nath; December 6, 2018).
Indic Wikisource Community Consultation 2018 (Jayanta Nath; December 8, 2019).
CIS Signs MoU with Odia Virtual Academy (Sailesh Patnaik; December 19, 2018).

Openness

Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.

Guest Lecture

Lecture on Open Access and Open Content Licensing at ICAR (short course) (Organized by ICAR-Indian Institute of Horticultural Research (IIHR) a constituent establishment of Indian Council of Agricultural Research; November 13 - 22, 2018). Anubha Sinha delivered a lecture.

Internet Governance

As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.

Privacy

Guest Lecture

Teaching at Shristi Interlude (Organised by Shristi; Bangalore; December 7, 2018). Shweta Mohandas participated as a mentor.

Gender

Research Paper

Feminist Methodology in Technology Research: A Literature Review (Ambika Tandon with contributions from Mukta Joshi; research assistance by by Kumarjeet Ray and Navya Sharma; design by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

Event Report on Intermediary Liability and Gender Based Violence (Akriti Bopanna; edited by Ambika Tandon; December 20, 2018).

Participation in Event

International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 2018 (Co-organized by Feminist Approaches to Bioethics and Sama; St. John's Medical College; Bangalore; December 3 - 5, 2018). Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon were speakers at the event.

Cyber Security

Research Papers

European E-Evidence Proposal and Indian Law (Vipul Kharbanda; December 23, 2018).
Economics of Cybersecurity: Literature Review Compendium (Natalia Khaniejo; edited by Amber Sinha; December 31, 2018).

Infographic

Mapping cybersecurity in India: An infographic (information contributed by Arindrajit Basu, Karan Saini, Aayush Rathi and Swaraj Barooah; designed by Saumyaa Naidu; December 23, 2018).

Blog Entry

A Critical Look at the Visual Representation of Cybersecurity (Paromita Bathija, Padmini Ray Murray, and Saumyaa Naidu; December 11, 2018).

Participation in Event

India-China Tech Forum 2018 (Organised by ORF and Peking University at the Ji Xianlin Centre for India-China Studies; Mumbai; December 11 - 12, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.

Artificial Intelligence

Participation in Event

Future Tech and Future Law (Organised by Dept. of IT & BT, Government of Karnataka; Palace Grounds; Bangalore; November 29 - December 1, 2018). Arindrajit Basu was a speaker.
AI for Social Good Summit (Co-organised by Google AI and United Nations ESCAP; Bangkok; December 13, 2018).

Researchers at Work

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:

Selected Papers

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): #List - Selected Sessions and Papers (P.P. Sneha; January 2, 2019).

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About CIS
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The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.

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E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: a2k@cis-india.org
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► Support Us

Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.

► Request for Collaboration

We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at tanveer@cis-india.org.

CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/december-2018-newsletter