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Creative Activism - Voices of Young Change Makers in India (UDAAN)
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan
<b>This post is a short account of what happened at UDAAN in December 2013 — a conference that gathered 100 youth from across the country to discuss pressing environmental issues and creative strategies to tackle them. We conducted a survey to map the perspectives of these young change-makers and get a glimpse of how India's youth is now framing and going about making 'change'</b>
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<pre><strong><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/copy_of_UDAANlogo.jpeg/image_preview" title="logo" height="91" width="400" alt="logo" class="image-inline image-inline" />
CHANGE-MAKERS: </strong>Youth (India)
<strong>
EVENT</strong>: UDAAN 2013 organized by 350 India: a global organization building grassroots movements across the country.
<strong>
METHOD OF CHANGE</strong>: Behavioral change, solidarity networks and creative activism.</pre>
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<h3 align="right" style="text-align: right;"><em>“Change or making change is to bring about a paradigm shift in the way we do certain things. To alter our general way of life as it remains now into something that is positive and ideal.”</em></h3>
<p align="justify"><br />This is one of the many responses we collected from UDAAN participants on what it means to make change in India today. So
far, in <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/">previous articles</a>, we have looked at organizations working
with specific demographics and themes. On this opportunity, we are
exploring the ideas behind a group conformed by individuals coming from
different walks of life, who embody an array of historical,
linguistic and cultural understandings of the world, yet still find an intersection at their intents for change. We addressed
the core questions raised in the project's thought piece: Whose
Change is it Anyway: <em>“What is the understanding of change with
which we were working? What are the kinds of changes being imagened?
Whose change is it, anyway?”</em> -to start touching base with the ideas
underpinning their actions, and identify how -or whether- it
introduces new ways to define this concept. </p>
<h2>UDAAN 2013</h2>
<p align="justify">I had the privilege of joining this inspiring group during a four day conference and got the opportunity to share with students, activists and entrepreneurs from 13 states of India (chosen from a pool of 2000 applicants) involved in social change practices across the country. Despite the diverging world views among participants, the sense of a common purpose was almost undisputed. Every attendee was committed to mitigate the detrimental impact of climate change in their cities, protect vulnerable populations and advocate for justice. However, the most interesting points of contention lied on how to translate this commitment into individual and collective <em>action, </em>create conditions that enable change, and encourage community participation in environmental, political and social issues.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">With these questions in mind, the conference focused on providing strategies of action and the attendees explored all sorts of lobbying and political participation mechanisms through its workshops. Three main elements stood out for me. First, the cocktail of tactics provided by experienced campaigners: from direct resistance and non-violent action to story-telling and street theater; participants were inspired to experiment and re-conceptualize activism.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/IMG_1972.JPG/image_preview" alt="Space Theatre" title="Space Theatre" class="image-inline image-inline" align="centre" /><br />Space Theatre Ensemble</p>
<p align="center"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Gamification.jpg/image_preview" title="Gamification" height="266" width="400" alt="Gamification" class="image-inline image-inline" /></p>
<p align="center">Educators Collective</p>
<p align="justify">Second, the use of gamification in the workshops, facilitated by the experiential learning group <a href="https://www.facebook.com/educatorscollective?ref=ts&fref=ts">Educators Collective</a>, was the key to introduce values of leadership, solidarity and sustainability into individual behaviour and team practices. And finally, the add of 'unconference slots' to the program empowered attendees to share their methods, initiatives and projects in an open platform. This fostered peer-to-peer learning and more importantly reinforced the net of support and the immense amount of admiration (that grew exponentially between participants) for each other's work.</p>
<h2 align="JUSTIFY"><strong>Youth and Activism in India</strong></h2>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Coming from the perspective of our research project: <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/hivos-knowledge-programme-june-14-2013-nishant-shah-whose-change-is-it-anyway">Making Change</a>, it was second nature to me to question frameworks utilized around "making change". I was pleasantly surprised to find an array of perspectives and experiences floating around panels, workshops and keynote presentations. They were definitely seeking consensus, yet in a way that did not inhibit diversity of thought, intellectual curiosity and self-reflection. This sparked the idea of collecting these views and use them as a sample of the current status of youth activism in India. Particularly considering how many of the strategies taught at UDAAN, while incredibly powerful, require a set of resources (including capital, time and energy) that are not readily accessible for all aspiring activists in the country.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">These thoughts are consistent with a couple of articles I referred to for context on Indian youth and activism. Starting with the IRIS Knowledge Foundation and the UN-HABITAT's report: <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/www.esocialsciences.org/General/A201341118517_19.pdf">"State of the Urban Youth, India 2012: Employment, Livelihoods, Skills"</a>. It states that in only seven years, India will become the youngest country of the world with a median age of 29 years old. This, coupled with the fact that India's youth is the largest group in the working-age population — in a country that is expected to become one of the world's next major economic powers (Ilavasaran, 2013) — has, according to Padma Prakash, led demographers and economists to consider youth as the future of the country's economic growth. Having said that, these promising prospects do not reflect that 87.2% of the unemployed of the country are youth, only 27% of Indian youth is literate and 64% is located in rural areas. These facts display a constant negotiation between precariousness and hope, and particularly the high level of dissonance between the expectations and opportunities surrounding this group. Furthermore, as put by Prakash, despite the amount of economic information we have on this group, we lack a deep understanding of the social constructs underpinning their motivations and actions. On one hand, Ilavasaran suggests precariousness is the trigger behind both their unrest and their activism. On the other, the path they end up taking will depend on how they understand making change and their role within this process.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">This dilemma was quite evident at UDAAN. Youth from all over India came together to fervently speak about the grievances climate change is causing in their regions and share the stories behind their struggles. On this note, the conference represented an incubator for their ideas and frustrations. and one of its main goals was to steer all this energy towards a path of constructive positive change. Carpini on his work on civic engagement (2000) outlines three factors that lead to participation: motivation, opportunities and capabilities; and how the interplay of the three result in different patterns of change-making. Hence, what is left to answer is how will this chaotic ecosystem shape youth's ideas of creating change? And to what extent will these conditions determine their motivation, opportunities and capacities of participating in the process? The survey we sent out to participants is only a starting point to reflect on these points. It did not aim to resolve these questions, but instead gather a snapshot of how politically and socially active young citizens are locating change and framing some of the biggest challenges of its generation.</p>
<h2 align="JUSTIFY">Online Survey</h2>
<div>About 25 people participated in the survey. The survey had five questions that explored three concepts analyzed in the Making Change research project: change, civic engagement and methods of change. It was divided into three sections:</div>
<p align="JUSTIFY">a) <strong>Definitions:</strong> Participants were asked how they understand 'change' and 'making change'.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">b) <strong>Actors:</strong> Participants were asked to reflect on their role and the role of youth in the process of making change. It also touched on concepts of active citizenship and engagement.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>c) Methods: </strong>This section looked at the practices and methods preferred by youth for making change. Participants were asked to think about strategies and tactics discussed at the UDAAN workshops or other initiatives of interest, and how ICT/technology affect the process.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The purpose was to collate as many ideas and perspectives around change-making from this group and hence, the questions were broad and open-ended. The participants remained anonymous and details about their age, religion, region, socio-economic status, etc., were not disclosed. The language barrier and access (and frequency of access) to social media platforms was a big limitation to obtain a larger sample but the responses still reflected interesting patterns, which were later classified and categorized using a keyword system. </p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The results were displayed on the info-graphics found below:</p>
<ul style="text-align: -webkit-auto;"><li>Infographic 1* reflects the different ways participants outlined change-making: definitions of 'change' and 'making change', type of change (positive, neutral or confrontational), location of change (individual, society or system) and time of change (now, future, long-term).</li><li>Infographics 2* and 3 outline the profiles of a change-maker and an active citizen.</li><li>Infographic 4 lists their preferred methods of change -in no particular order. The bottom section reflects the spectrum of opinions around the use of technology.</li></ul>
<p>*The percentages reflect the portion of respondents who reflected this view and the texts are excerpts of the respondents' answers.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">This presentation format was chosen for three reasons: first, to facilitate the consumption of raw data collected from the survey and make visual associations between themes. Second, to put into practice some the recommendations from the storytelling workshop to make research more accessible to the public. And third, as a somewhat self-serving experiment to measure a) the ability of a graphic designer rookie, with no previous experience (like me), to create visual aids and graphics with free online tools, and b) explore empirically some of the methods I have encountered through my research: <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-to-conceive-condense-social-change">Methods for Social Change</a>. Hence, the following results will not be of an academic nature as previous posts, but will instead clarify some of the patterns, evident in the original responses, that may have been lost in graphic translation. </p>
<h2>Locating Change: Definitions</h2>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em style="text-align: left;"><strong> "Change is any alteration from an established status-quo. Making change is creating a system that is self-sustaining and capable of surviving over a long period of time"</strong></em></p>
<p>In spite of including both concepts on the same question, most respondents differentiated them in their answers. Approximately 50% of the sample responded 'change' was either an irreversible process or an outcome to a process, while the other 50% implicated themselves in the 'change' process, stating it means to shift and modify how we act and think. A similar spirit was reflected about 'making change'. About 29% of the participants acknowledges a break from previous practices, and 29% considers we are implicated through the adoption of a new model of action. Interestingly enough, only 5% considers making change a duty or a responsibility. This low percentage signals making change is understood as non-compulsory which does not affect active politically involved citizens but leaves the more passive and idle off the hook when it comes to acknowledging their role in the process of change. </p>
<p align="justify">Moving on to type of change: 38% of the respondents consider making change a neutral process that does not guarantee a positive change (as considered by 33% of the sample). It was defined as an event that merely breaks the norm or from usual practices. A possible reading of this is that a group is not mobilizing its efforts with a plausible positive alternative in mind. Instead, it seeks difference without a deeper considerations of <em>how</em> will it differ from the conditions it is breaking from. This fits into the 'politics of hope' paradigm brought up by Shah in the piece: This approach to change and the idiom 'making a difference' is "so infused with the joy of possibilities" that it doesn't evaluate whether the outcome will lead to further assurance or precariousness, when compared to the earlier structure. This approach limits structural, systemic and sustainable change, an issue that was also evident in the results of the time-line. 0% thinks change must be made immediately but the rest of the sample was divided into making plans for the future (19%) and a smaller number on securing a self-sustaining system (10%) to replace the former. </p>
<div align="center"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/MakingChange2/image.jpg"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/MakingChange2/image.jpg" alt="MakingChange2 title=" height="805" width="628" /></a></div>
<p align="center"><strong> Infographic 1: </strong>Making Change (Generated using: <a style="text-align: left;" href="http://easel.ly">easel.ly-</a>)</p>
<p align="justify">Finally, on the question of where is change located, we find the first instance of a pattern that was evident throughout the survey. On this category 38% finds change must occur externally: either in society and others (19%), or through the shift from a status quo that is perpetuating inequality (19%). Yet the largest group (24%) identified that change must occur internally first. The role of the self was also very prominent in the following sections as well. </p>
<h2>Agents of Change</h2>
<p>After
locating change, the project also intends to understand who are the
main actors and stakeholders lumped into the category of 'citizen' or
'citizen action'. On this survey, these actors were dubbed
'change-makers'. Respondents were free to describe what they
understood by the term and the social construct determining the model
they were working towards (as aspiring change-makers themselves). The
second actor we inquired about was 'active citizen'. The concept of
citizenship is ambiguous terrain, yet there seems to be a connection
between the identity confered by the 'citizen' status and the
respondents' inner call for action. </p>
<h3><strong>a) The Change-Maker:</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong><em>"I think that all of us can be change-makers. We need to be sure of what and why we need to change and have a vision of how the world will be after making the change</em>"</strong></p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">The Change-Maker (Infographic 2) was defined by the four characteristics outlined below.</p>
<div align="center"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/ChangeMaker2/image.jpg"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/ChangeMaker2/image.jpg" alt="ChangeMaker2 title=" height="507" width="657" /></a></div>
<p align="center"><strong> Infographic 2</strong>: The Change Maker (Generated using: <a style="text-align: left;" href="http://easel.ly">easel.ly</a> )</p>
<div align="justify">Each characteristic was coupled by actions that reinforce this behaviour. For example, understanding the issue (33%) comes hand-in-hand with inciting motivation through information: <em>'If one aspires to change, then one must first understand what is to be changed, how it is to be changed and what would replace the changed system. The primary step is to realize and acknowledge the problem, educate others and then action” </em>(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) Another interesting example is how the 28% that identified the individual as the source of change, also recommend self-reflection on how to create the most impact: "[My role as a change-maker is]<em> practicing what I preach and learning to critique myself constructively and in a manner that helps me improve"</em> (Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) This brings a different light to Carpinis categorization of 'capabilities' in social change. It is no longer about participation in an external movement but more about how the individual secures sustained change through his own consistent and coherent behaviour.<br /><br /></div>
<h3><strong>b) The Active Citizen</strong></h3>
<p style="text-align: right;"><em><strong>"An active citizen is who follows the constitution, understands and takes responsibility for himself and for influencing his family and community for the betterment of life's social, economic and environmental issues"</strong></em></p>
<div align="justify">
<div align="right">
<h3></h3>
</div>
<p align="justify">Self-awareness was a key point in how the active citizen was personified. It was one of most emphasized points, placing more responsibility on the role of the citizen as opposed to on the issue at hand. Attitudes such as 'realizing the problem', 'taking responsibility' and 'taking initiative' reflect that the individual is finding motivation on taking ownership of his choices and decision-making power. The individual is focusing less on antagonizing the structure and is instead elevating his identity to a fearless, noble status -the citizen is becoming the hero of its own narrative. This ego-emphasis, is also motivating the citizen to invest on increasing its own knowledge capital and attain a thorough understanding of the issues, to then heighten individual and collective awareness around them. The objective is either local -give back to its community- or normative -work towards justice and equity- but there seems to be consensus on the starting point. </p>
<p align="center"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/ActiveCitizen/image.jpg"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/ActiveCitizen/image.jpg" alt="ActiveCitizen title=" height="805" width="628" /></a><br /><strong> Infographic 3 -</strong> The Active Citizen (Generated using: <a style="text-align: left;" href="http://easel.ly">easel.ly</a>)</p>
</div>
<h2><strong>Methods for Change</strong></h2>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>“<em>By going out there and making the change! Get down and dirty. Then use those examples in the form of story, pictures, etc. and inspire others around you to first change themselves and then help change society!”</em></strong></p>
<div align="justify">Finally, infographic 4 displays a mapping of the methods brought up by participants. Again, awareness and behavioural change were the most popular, placing information and the individual at the epicenter of change-making. The impact of the theater and story telling workshops on participants was also evident, on several mentions to the power of 'artivism'.<br /><br />
<div align="center"><a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/Methods/image.jpg"><img src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/easel.ly/all_easels/277883/Methods/image.jpg" alt="Methods title=" height="840" width="656" /></a></div>
<div align="center">Infographic 4: Methods for Social Change (Generated using: <a style="text-align: left;" href="http://easel.ly">easel.ly</a> )</div>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><br />In regards to communication and technology, I was surprised to find that many respondents find it insufficient. They instead recognize the need for strong offline communities making sure activism online translates into the offline realm. “<em>[online platforms] are vital in building quick connections amongst those who feel alike towards bringing change. But eventually, all struggles for change have to be offline [...] technology could be the first step that eventually leads the path to more offline and personal connections.”</em>(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) <em>: </em>Others were wary about its power and they recognize it can be used to both help and contain the activist with the same intensity: <em>"Technology can either blind people or give them sight."</em>(Anonymous survey respondent, 2013) These views reflect youth has moved on from the tech hype that pervades the digital activism discourse. The role of technology was not excluded from the conference's tactic package and the group perceives technology as a powerful complement, yet it still places a lot more emphasis on creating sustainable change through education, behaviour and offline interactions than through digital interventions.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><em></em></p>
<h2 align="JUSTIFY"><strong>Conclusion</strong></h2>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Comments at the aftermath of the event reflected participants had undergone a collective mental shift on how to create social change. We arrived looking outwards: accustomed to pointing fingers and scouting for common enemies that personify the misdoings of inequality perpetrators. Five days at Fireflies later and after UDAAN's intervention, I can safely say we left looking inwards. We are now determined to seek information and identify the most effective ways to mainstream it and make it accessible; we are impelled to reconnect with our creative and artistic selves and put them at service of communication; we are encouraged to share our personal stories and have them inspire solidarity and movement in our communities, and above all, we will continue to pursue the level of behaviour-action consistency that legitimizes our efforts at making change. The conference turned out to be a very organic experience and it provided all of us with a space to connect with ourselves and one another in a time of growing loneliness and isolation in the digital age.</p>
<p align="JUSTIFY">Furthermore, the
thoughts that surfaced on the survey are important pointers to
continue uncovering what drives civic engagement among youth. Seeing
these activists locate change in the self was a refreshing break from
the times we used to overindulge in the possibilities of
technology-mediated change. It seems that the digital is already so
embedded in our interactions and ecosystems that it has not only has
ceased to be novel, but it is recognized as insufficent, and hence,
the attention has returned back to the user and its offline
communities. With this in mind, the group that attended UDAAN, as
part of the demographic who represents "the promise and future
of India's growth", is taking up the challenge of strengthening
ideas of making change in their networks. Have them succeed, and this
'growth' will be met by a current of better informed, better armed
young activists working to secure a self-sustaining system for the
generations to come. </p>
<div style="text-align: center;"><em><strong>**</strong> Thanks to everyone who participated on the survey, Special mention to UDAAN organizers, Educators Collective and the wonderful UDAAN 2013 group<strong>**</strong></em></div>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong><br />Sources:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>HABITAT, UN. "State of the Urban Youth, India 2012.", (2013)</li>
<li>Ilavarasan, P. Vigneswara. "Community work and limited online activism among India youth." <em>International Communication Gazette</em> 75, no. 3 (2013): 284-299.</li><li><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? </span><em style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">Hivos Knowledge Program. (</em><span style="text-align: -webkit-auto;">April 30, 2013).<br /><br /></span></li></ol>
<p align="JUSTIFY"><strong>Resources:</strong></p>
<ol>
<li>Easel.ly: To create and share visual ideas online: <a class="external-link" href="http://www.easel.ly/">www.easel.ly/</a><cite></cite></li>
<li>Info.gram: Create infographics: <a href="http://infogr.am/">infogr.am</a></li>
<li>More on UDAAN: <a class="external-link" href="http://world.350.org/udaan/">http://world.350.org/udaan/</a></li>
<li>More on Global Power Shift (350) - <a class="external-link" href="http://globalpowershift.org/">http://globalpowershift.org/</a> </li></ol>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/young-voices-udaan</a>
</p>
No publisherdenisseResearchers at WorkMaking ChangeWeb Politics2015-04-14T13:21:22ZBlog EntryWorkshop on Archival Standards and Digitisation Workflow
https://cis-india.org/raw/workshop-on-archival-standards-and-digitisation-workflow
<b>P.P. Sneha attended a workshop on Archival Standards and Digitization Workflow organised by the British Library at NCBS, Bangalore, on August 19 - 20, 2019. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The workshop largely focused on the BL's various archival projects and broader digitization strategy, and included some interesting discussions on management of collections, and access and reuse of archival data. We also had a short practical session on OCR; please see attached documents and the previous email for guides on the same. <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/files/ncbs-workshop-participants-list">Click</a> to view the programme schedule.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/workshop-on-archival-standards-and-digitisation-workflow'>https://cis-india.org/raw/workshop-on-archival-standards-and-digitisation-workflow</a>
</p>
No publisherAdminResearchers at Work2019-08-22T02:04:42ZNews ItemEssays on #List — Selected Abstracts
https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts
<b>In response to a recent call for essays that social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the #List, we received 11 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 4 pieces to be published as part of a series titled #List on the r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts. The call for essays on #List remains open, and we are accepting and assessing the incoming abstracts on a rolling basis.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>1. <a href="#manisha">Manisha Chachra</a></h4>
<h4>2. <a href="#meghna">Meghna Yadav</a></h4>
<h4>3. <a href="#sarita">Sarita Bose</a></h4>
<h4>4. <a href="#shambhavi">Shambhavi Madan</a></h4>
<hr />
<h3 id="manisha"><strong>Manisha Chachra</strong></h3>
<h4><em>MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces</em></h4>
<p>The advent of LoSHA and MeToo era witnessed an intriguing intersection of technology, politics and gender. The list and name-shame culture of social media has not only displayed changing power dynamics in digital space but an increasing movement towards engendering of internet spaces. The social, political and economic matrix defined by power relationships -- a patriarchy reflected in internet spaces, percolating in our interactions confronted a major challenge when women rose up to claim the same space. Internet space cannot be called a virtual reality as it is a sharp mirror into what is going in the power dynamics of society and politics. My paper broadly seeks to examine this engendering of spatial reality of digital space by looking at various conversations that took place on Twitter around MeToo in Indian journalism. MeToo has been widely understood as narration of one’s tale and how that experiential reality is connected with other women. However, a universalisation of such an experience often neglects intersectional reality attached to women’s experiences -- belonging to different caste, class, ethnicity and other
kinds of differences. My paper attempts to question how far MeToo in digital space accommodated the differential aspects of woman as a heterogeneous category. The spatial realities of technological spaces function like a double edged sword-- liberating as well as mobility paralysing. I use the term mobility paralysis to denote a contradiction in digital space-- which might be equally available to all sections of women but not fairly accessible. The accessibility is often a reflection of deep rooted patriarchies and kinship relationships that bind women in same
voiceless zone. MeToo in Indian journalism is a case study of how women of different backgrounds access digital spaces in questioning this mobility paralysis and inch towards a certain kind of emancipatory politics. Examining MeToo from the perspective of a social movement emerging on Twitter and Facebook, I aim to scrutinise scope of rehabilitative justice for the accused. The emergence of lists, and claiming of spaces is attached to the question of justice and being guilty or innocent of allegations. Online spaces in the recent times have also emerged as platforms of e-khaps (online khap panchayats with certain gatekeepers of the movement) where screenshot circulation, photoshop technology could be used to garner a public response against a particular person. It is interesting how after MeToo the question was not whether the person is guilty or accused rather how they should abandon their social media accounts and probably go absent virtually. In such a context, it is crucial to question the relationship between justice, one’s digital identity and who owns this identity. If rehabilitative justice is not an option, and apology-seeking is not available, what are we hoping from MeToo? The aim of any name-shame movement must be to reclaim digital space, narrate experiences and also to leave scope for others to respond, and seek justice. The question of justice is also closely linked with how women from intersectional backgrounds access internet, and emancipate
themselves.</p>
<h3 id="meghna"><strong>Meghna Yadav</strong></h3>
<p>For most people, the Internet is now synonymous with social media. Likewise, consumption of content on the Internet has shifted. We’ve moved from an earlier design of explicitly going to content-specific websites, to now, simply “logging in” and being presented with curated content spanning multiple areas. The infrastructure for consuming this content, however, remains predominantly screen based, implying a space constraint. Websites must, hence, decide what content users are to be presented with and in what order. In other words, social media must
generate itself as a ranked list of content.</p>
<p>In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this essay, I propose to look at ranking of content as a social choice problem. Ranking rules of different social media platforms can be studied as social welfare functions for how they aggregate the preferences of their voters (i.e. users). Current listings of content could be modelled as the results of previously held rounds of voting. Taking examples, Reddit is built on a structure of outward voting, visceral through ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’, constantly displaying to users the choice they have to alter content ranks on the website. TikTok, on the other hand, relies on taking away most of the voting power of its users.</p>
<p>As the Internet tends towards centralisation, studying how different list ranking rules aggregate our choices and in turn, alter the choices presented to us, becomes important to design a more democratic Internet.</p>
<h3 id="sarita"><strong>Sarita Bose</strong></h3>
<h4><em>Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list</em></h4>
<p>The ‘Explore Nearby’ feature in Google Maps has three sections – Explore, Commute and For You. Of this, ‘For You’ section contains ‘Lists based on your local history’ as mentioned by Google itself. The Google Maps auto tracks a user’s movements and creates a digital footprint map and lists up events, programmes, restaurants, shops etc for the user. This research will focus on the ‘For You’ feature of Google Maps and its cultural and social dimensions. The work will focus on how the mapping is done and the logic behind drawing up the list. It will try to find out how the economy of Google Maps works. Why some lists shows up while some doesn’t. What kind of ‘algorithm – economy – user’ matrix is used to make up the list? The work will also try to understand cultural dimensions based on mind mapping techniques of Google. This research will follow three dimensions. The first is the mapping of user’s footprints itself and how the distance covered by a user becomes the user’s own digital existence. The Google Maps automatically asks for reviews of places the user might have visited or passed. The question is what algorithm is Google using to ask for the review? Is it pre-pointed or post-pointed? Thus, we come to the second part. Is Google only listing places that paid it or is it trying to digitally map a user’s area of geographical reach in general. If so, why? This brings us to the third dimension of the research work. What kind of cultural mapping is done of the user? The list the user gets is based on his own history and as more data is added, the more mapping is done. These three dimensions are intricately woven with each other and the work will try to establish this relationship.</p>
<h3 id="shambhavi"><strong>Shambhavi Madan</strong></h3>
<h4><em>List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory</em></h4>
<p>Lists make infinities comprehensible, and thus controllable. By virtue of the ubiquity of cyberspace and the digitized information infrastructures curating reality within these infinities, we are increasingly subjected to curatorial efforts of individuals as well as codes – algorithmic and architectural.</p>
<p>Statistical lists are Foucauldian technologies of power in modern societies; tools for the functioning of governmentality – not just in terms of state control over population phenomena but the governmentality of groups or individuals over themselves. The framework of biopolitics identifies a bureaucracy imposed by determining social classifications through listing and categorizing, within which people must situate themselves and their actions (Foucault, 2008). Thus, the authorship of lists is often reflective of power that allows for the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of social reality, making the lists themselves sites of struggle.</p>
<p>This paper seeks to contextualize (public-oriented) lists as forms of biopolitical curation that often lie at points of intersection between collective consciousness and social order, through an approach that problematizes the socio-technics of agency and the subjective objectivity of authorship. Although list-making acts such as the National Population Register, NRC, #LoSHA, the electoral roll, the census, and Vivek Agnihotri’s call for a list of “Urban Naxals” all differ in terms of content, intent, and impact, and contain different asymmetries of power, the lowest common denominator lies in their role as producers of public knowledge and consequently, infrastructures of public memory. This approach allows for a reinterpretation of the fundamental duality of lists of and within publics: <em>the functionality of enforcing/maintaining social order, and the phenomenological practise of publicly self-presenting with a (semi-material) manifestation of a collective identity</em>. The former sees the use of lists as tools of population management, enacting citizenship and belonging through forms of inclusion and exclusion; the latter is reflective of the workings of self-autonomy – redefining the authorship of justice and punishment – in networked societies. Thus, a secondary theme in this paper would be to question the change and significance in the role of authorship through a phenomenological comparative of lists that are institutionalised practice versus those that are open and collaborative.</p>
<p>Both the act of list-making and the lists themselves are framed as coalescences of material and imaginary, by juxtaposing the idea of infrastructures as primarily relationalities – i.e. they can’t be theorized in terms of the object alone (Larkin, 2013) – with Latour’s relational ontology of human and non-human actors. The list itself is a non-human object/actant that after emerging as a product of co-construction, takes on an agential role of its own (Latour, 2005). Each of these lists can be considered as a quasi-object, a complex convergence of the technological and the social. Both #LoSHA and the NRC are not mere placeholders being ‘acted upon’, but real and meaningful actors acting as cultural mediators and not intermediaries. The integration of a socio-technical, infrastructural approach with one that emphasizes upon the aesthetics of authorship and public memory allows the subject to be seen as constitutive of an embodied, relational experience as opposed to just existing as a dissociative (re)presentation.</p>
<p><strong>References:</strong></p>
<p>Foucault, M. 2008. <em>The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979</em>. Trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.</p>
<p>Larkin, B. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructural." <em>Annual Review of Anthropology</em>. 42:327-343.</p>
<p>Latour, B. 2005. <em>Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-list-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersneha-ppResearchers at WorkListRAW BlogFeaturedInternet Studies2019-09-03T13:38:12ZBlog EntryDigital mediation of domestic and care work in India: Project Announcement
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement
<b>It is our great pleasure to announce that we are undertaking a study on digital mediation of domestic and care work in India, as part of and supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The study is exploring the ways in which structural inequalities, such as those of gender and class, are being reproduced or challenged by digital
platforms. The project sites are Delhi and Bangalore, where we are conducting interviews with workers, companies, and unions. In Bangalore, we are collaborating with Stree Jagruti Samiti to collect qualitative data from different stakeholders. The outputs of the research will include a report, policy brief, and other communication materials in English, Hindi, and Kannada. This study is being led by Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Feminist Internet Research Network: <a href="https://www.apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network" target="_blank">apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network</a></h4>
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<h3>Introduction to the Project</h3>
<p>This project seeks to investigate the mediation of domestic and care work through digital platforms in India. These forms of labour fall within the informal economy, which employs the largest share of non-agricultural workers in the global South [1]. Workers and economic units in the informal economy differ widely in terms of all metrics, including income levels, size and type of enterprise, and status of worker. According to the International Labour Organisation’s Resolution on decent work and the informal economy, it refers to “all economic activities by workers and economic units that are - in law of practice - not covered or insufficiently covered by formal arrangements” [2]. What this implies in practice for workers in the informal economy is greater vulnerability to poor work conditions, poverty, and violation of labour rights [3].</p>
<p>Women, particularly those with intersectional marginalities, including that of caste and class, are overrepresented in the informal economy globally and in India. Domestic work in particular has been stratified along the lines of caste and gender historically. Further, class has become more salient in producing stratifications in labour relations following urbanisation and gentrification. These intersections have shaped employment relations in the sector in different ways, which range from feudal to contractual models. Digital platforms are increasingly becoming intermediaries in this space, mediating between so called ‘semi-skilled’ or ‘low-skilled’ workers from lower classes, and millions of middle and upper class employers in tier I cities. This is expected to shift the stratification of workers and employment relations in key ways.</p>
<p>Through a feminist approach to digital labour, our project aims to examine platforms offering domestic or reproductive care work. This will be situated within larger feminist critiques around the devaluation and invisibilisation of women’s labour within patriarchal-capitalist economic discourse. The project further seeks to unpack technocratic imaginaries of the platform economy by looking at access and meaningful use of technology and qualifying narratives around labour market optimisation, empowerment, and agency. We will include within this
scope two kinds of platforms: marketplaces for workers to post their profiles; and on-demand platforms with algorithmic matching of workers and employers.</p>
<h3>Research Questions</h3>
<p>Our hypothesis is that platforms are reconfiguring labour conditions, which would empower and/or exploit workers in ways qualitatively different than non-standard work off the platform. In order to interrogate this further, we will study wages, conditions of work, social security, skill levels, and worker surveillance off platforms. This will be used to develop contextual knowledge around the conditions of work among (a) domestic workers on and off platforms in particular, and (b) informal sector workers joining the web-based gig economy in general.</p>
<p>The overarching question that the research will address is, <strong>what are the ways in which structural inequalities are challenged or reproduced through the growth of digital platforms in reproductive and care work?</strong></p>
<ul><li>How are relations of social inequality, including along the axes of caste and gender, reworked through digital platforms, especially in a context where domestic and care work remains historically undervalued and dominated by women workers with intersectional marginalities?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How do workers on platforms envision the role of the state, market, and informal networks of kinship in intervening in employment relations?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How is inequality and exploitation in informal labour reconfigured through platforms, with specific reference to work conditions (including hours of work, and physical and mental demands of the workplace), wages, social security, and surveillance?<br /><br /></li>
<li>What strategies of negotiation are being and have been adopted by care workers on and off platforms?<br /><br /></li>
<li>Is collectivisation an aspiration for care workers across different models of employment?<br /><br /></li>
<li>How can negotiation and collectivisation strategies inform the ongoing challenges faced by both care workers and platform workers?</li></ul>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p>[1] International Labour Office, (2018). Women and men in the informal economy: A statistical picture. Third Edition. International labour Organisation. <a href="https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu-&#xA;ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf" target="_blank">https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/docu-
ments/publication/wcms_626831.pdf</a></p>
<p>[2] International Labour Organisation, (2002). 2002 ILC Resolution and Conclusions on Decent Work and the Informal Economy. <a href="https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm&#xA; target=">https://www.ilo.org/global/topics/employment-promotion/informal-economy/lang--en/index.htm</a></p>
<p>[3] Ibid.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement</a>
</p>
No publisherAmbika Tandon and Aayush RathiDigital EconomyDigital LabourResearchResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2019-10-10T08:09:34ZBlog EntryDoing Standpoint Theory
https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory
<b>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power. In this essay published on the GenderIT website, Ambika Tandon and Aayush Rathi [1] discuss the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>Cross-posted from <a href="https://www.genderit.org/articles/doing-standpoint-theory" target="_blank">GenderIT</a>, September 1, 2019</h4>
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<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/CatalinaAlzate.jpg/image" alt="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" class="image-left image-inline" title="Catalina Alzate - Speech Bubbles" /></p>
<h6>Image description: Three speech bubbles on different textures. Artist: <a href="https://www.genderit.org/users/catalina-alzate" target="_blank">Catalina Alzate</a><br /></h6>
<p>Feminist research methodology has evolved from different epistemologies, with several different schools of thought. Some of the more popular ones are feminist standpoint theory, feminist empiricism, and feminist relativism. Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power [2]. Feminist empiricism does not eschew traditional modes of knowledge production, but emphasises diversity of research participants for feminist (and therefore also rigorous) knowledge production [3]. Relativists have critiqued standpoint theory for its tendency to essentialise the experience of marginalised groups, and subsume them into one homogenous voice to achieve the goal of ‘emancipatory’ research [4]. Relativists instead focus on multiple standpoints, which could be Dalit women, lesbian women, or women with disabilities [5]. We will be discussing the practical applicability of these epistemologies to research practices in the field of technology and gender.</p>
<h4>Standpoint theory holds the experiences of the marginalised as the source of ‘truth’ about structures of oppression, which is silenced by traditional objectivist research methods as they produce knowledge from the standpoint of voices in positions of power.</h4>
<p>As part of the Feminist Internet Research Network, the Centre for Internet and Society is undertaking research on the <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">digital mediation of domestic and care work in India</a>. The project aims to assess shifts in the sector, including conditions of work, brought on by the entry of digital platforms. Our starting point for designing a methodology for the research was standpoint theory, which we thought to be the best fit as the goal of the project was to disrupt dominant narratives of women’s labour in relation to platformisation. In the context of dalit feminis, Rege warns that standpoint research risks producing a narrow frame of identity politics, although it is critical to pay attention to lived experience and the “naming of difference” between dalit women and savarna women [6]. She asserts that neither ‘women’ nor ‘dalit women’ is a homogenous category. While feminist researchers from outside these categories cannot claim to “speak for” those within, they can “reinvent” themselves as dalit feminists and ally themselves with their politics.</p>
<p>In order to address this risk of appropriating the voices of domestic workers (“speaking for”), we chose to directly work with a domestic workers’ union in Bengaluru called Stree Jagruti Smiti. Bengaluru is one of the two cities we are conducting research in (the other being Delhi, with very few registered unions). This is meant to radically destabilise power hierarchies and material relations within the research process, as benefits of participatory research tend to accumulate with the researchers rather than participants [7].</p>
<p>Along with amplifying the voices of workers, a central objective of our project is to question the techno-solutionism that has accompanied the entry of digital platforms into the domestic work sector, which is unorganised and unregulated. To do so, we included companies and state labour departments as participants whose standpoint is to be interrogated. By juxtaposing the standpoints of stakeholders that have differential access to power and resources, the researcher is able to surface various conflicts and intersections in dominant and alternative narratives. This form of research also brings with it unique challenges, as researchers could find themselves mediating between the different stakeholders, while constantly choosing to privilege the standpoint of the least powerful - in this case the workers. Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors. This can also be done by ensuring that workers have agency to shape the agenda of researchers, thereby producing research which is instrumental in supporting grassroots campaigns and movements.</p>
<h4>Self-reflexivity then becomes necessary to ensure that the project does not slip into an absolutely relativist position, rather using the narratives of workers to challenge those of governments and private actors.</h4>
<p>Feminist participatory research itself, despite its many promises, is not a linear pathway to empowerment for participants [8]. At the very outset of the project, we were constantly asked the question by domestic workers and unions – why should we participate in this project? Researchers, in their experience, acquire information from the community throughout the process of data collection by positioning themselves as allies. However, as all such engagements are bound to limited timelines and budgets, researchers are then often absent at critical junctures where the community may need external support. We were also told that all too often, the output of the research itself does not make its way back to the participants, making it a one-way process of knowledge extraction. Being mindful of these experiences, we have integrated a feedback loop into our research design, which will allow us to design outputs that are accessible and useful to collectives of domestic workers.</p>
<p>Not only domestic workers and their organisations, many corporations operating these online portals and platforms often questioned the benefits of participating in the project. However, the manner of articulation differed. While attempting to reject the hierarchical nature of the researcher/participant relationship, we increasingly became aware that the underlying power equation was not a monolith. Rather, it varied across stakeholder groups and was explicitly contingent on the socially constructed positionalities already existing outside of the space of the interview. Companies, governments and workers all exemplified varying degrees of engagement with, knowledge of, and contributions to research. Interviews with workers and unions, and even some bootstrapped (i.e. without much external funding) , socially-minded companies, were often cathartic with an expectation of some benefits in return for opening themselves up to researchers. This was quite different for governments and larger companies, as conversations typically adhered to the patriarchal and classed notions of professionalism in sanitised, formal spaces [9] and the strict dichotomy between public and personal spaces. Their contribution seemingly required lesser affective engagement from the interviewee, thereby resulting in lesser investment in the outcome of the research itself.</p>
<p>The cathartic nature of interviews also speak to the impossibility of the distanced, Platonic, school of research. We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought. Workers and representatives from platform companies alike would question our motivations with the research and challenge us by inquiring about the benefits accruing to us. Again, both set of stakeholders would often ask differently about how other platforms were; workers already registered on a platform would wonder if another platform would be ‘better’ and representatives of platform companies would be curious about competition. This is perhaps a consequence of attempting to design a study that is of use and of interest to the workers we have been reaching out to [10]. At times, we found ourselves at a place in the conversation where we were compelled to respond to political positions for the conversation to continue. There were interviews where notions of caste hierarchies (within oppressed classes) as a justification/complaint for engaging/having to engage in certain tasks would surface. Despite being beholden to a feminist consciousness that disregards the idea of the interviewer as neutral, we often found ourselves only hesitantly forthcoming. At times, it was to keep the interview broadly focused around the research subject, at others it was due to our own ignorance about the research artefact (in this instance, platforms mediating domestic work services). This underscores the challenges of seeing the interview as a value ridden space, where the contradictions between the interview as a data collection method and as a consciousness raising emerged - how could we share information about the artefact we were in the process of collecting data about?</p>
<h4>We were often asked politically charged questions, our advice solicited and information sought.</h4>
<p>The fostering of ‘rapport’ [11] has made its may into method, almost unknowingly. Often, respondents across stakeholder groups started from an initial place of hesitation, sometimes even suspicion. Several structural issues could be at work here - our inability in being able to accurately describe research itself, the class differences and at times, ideological ones as well. While with most participants, rapport was eventually established, its establishment was a laboured process. Especially given that we were using one-off, in-depth interviews as our method, securing an interview was contingent on the establishment of rapport. This isn’t to suggest that feminist research mandatorily requires the ‘doing of rapport’ [12], but that when it does, it’s a fortunate outcome and that feminist researchers engage with it more critically.</p>
<p>Building rapport creates an impression of having minimised the exploitation of the participant, however the underlying politics and pressures of building rapport need to be interrogated. Rapport, like research itself, is at times a performance; rapport is often not naturally occuring. Rather, rapport may also be built to conceal the very structural factors preventing it. For instance, during instances of ideological differences during the interview, we were at times complicit through our silence. This may have been to further a certain notion of ‘objectivity’ itself whereby the building and maintenance of rapport is essential to surfacing a participant’s real views. This then raises the questions: What are the ethical questions that the suppression of certain viewpoints and reactions pose? How does the building, maintenance and continuance of rapport inform the research findings? Rapport, then, comes in all shapes and sizes and its manifold forms implicate the research process differently. Another critical question to be addressed is - why does some rapport take less work than others? With platform companies, building rapport came by easier than it did with workers both on and off platforms. If understood as removing degrees of distance between the researcher and participants, several factors could play into the effort required to build rapport. For instance, language was a critical determinant of the ease of relationship-building. Being more fluent in English than in colloquial Hindi enabled clearer articulation of the research. Further, familiarity with the research process was, as expected, mediated along class lines. This influenced the manner in which we articulated research outcomes and objectives to workers with complete unfamiliarity with the meaning of research. Among workers, this unfamiliarity often resulted in distrust, which required the underlying politics of the research to be more critically articulated.</p>
<p>By and large, the feminist engagement with research methods has been quite successful in its resistance and transformation of traditional forms. Since Oakley’s conception of the interview as a deeply subjective space [13] and Harding’s dialectical conception of masculinist science through its history [14], the application of feminist critical theory has increasingly subverted assumptions around the averseness of research to political motivations. At the same time, it has made knowledge-production occur in a more equitable space. It is in this context that standpoint theory has had wide purchase, but challenges persist in its application. As the foregoing discussion outlines, we have been able to achieve some of the goals of feminist standpoint research while missing out on others. We also found the ‘multiple standpoints’ approach of relativists to be useful in a project involving multiple stakeholders - thereby also avoiding the risk of essentialisation of the identities of domestic workers. However, unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses. Through this hybrid theoretical framework, we are seeking to make knowledge production more equitable. At the same time, the discussion around rapport shows that this may nevertheless happen in a limited fashion. Feminist research may never be fully non-extractive. The reflexivity exercised and choices made during the course of the research are key.</p>
<h4>Unlike the tendency of relativists to focus on each perspective as ‘equally valid truth’, we are choosing to focus on the conflicts and intersections between emerging discourses.</h4>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p>[1] The names of the authors are in alphabetical order.</p>
<p>[2] Harding, S. (2003) The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader: Intellectual and Political Controversies, Routledge.</p>
<p>[3] M. Wickramasinghe, Feminist Research Methodology: Making meaning out of meaning-making, Zubaan, 2014</p>
<p>[4] Pease, D. (2000) Researching profeminist men's narratives: participatory methodologies in a postmodern frame. In B. Fawcett, D. Featherstone, J. Fook ll)'ld A. Rossiter (eds) Restarching and Practising in Social Work: Postmodern Feminist Perspectives (London: Routledge).</p>
<p>[5] Stanley, L. and Wise, S. (1983) Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousness and Feminist Research (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).</p>
<p>[6] Rege, S. 1998. ” Dalit Women Talk Differently: A critique of ‘Difference’ and Towards a Dalit Feminist Standpoint.” Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 33, No.44, pp 39-48.</p>
<p>[7] Heeks, R. and Shekhar, S. (2018) An Applied Data Justice Framework: Analysing Datafication and Marginalised Communities in Cities of the Global South. Working Paper Series, Centre for Development Informatics, University of Manchester.</p>
<p>[8] Stone, E. and Priestley, M. (1996) Parasites, pawn and partners: disability research and the role of nondisabled researchers. British Journal of Sociology, 47(4), 699-716.</p>
<p>[9] Evans, L. (2010). Professionalism, professionality and the development of education professionals. Br. J. Educ. Stud. 56, 20–38. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8527.2007.00392.x</p>
<p>[10] Webb C. Feminist methodology in nursing research. J Adv Nurs. 1984 May;9(3):249-56.</p>
<p>[11] Berger, R. (2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qual. Res. 15, 219–234. doi:10.1177/1468794112468475; Pitts, M. J., and Miller-Day, M. (2007). Upward turning points and positive rapport development across time in researcher-participant relationships. Qual. Res. 7, 177–201. doi:10.1177/1468794107071409</p>
<p>[12] Dunscombe, J., and Jessop, J. (2002). “Doing rapport, and the ethics of ’faking friendship’,” in Ethics in Qualitative Research, eds T. Miller, M. Birch, M. Mauthner, and J. Jessop (London: SAGE), 108–121.</p>
<p>[13] Oakley, A. (1981). “Interviewing women: a contradiction in terms?” in Doing Feminist Research, ed. H. Roberts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), 30–61.</p>
<p>[14] Harding, S. (1986). The Science Question in Feminism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory'>https://cis-india.org/raw/doing-standpoint-theory</a>
</p>
No publisherAmbika Tandon and Aayush RathiDigital EconomyGenderDigital LabourResearchPublicationsResearchers at WorkDigital Domestic Work2019-12-06T04:59:35ZBlog EntryDomestic Work in the ‘Gig Economy’
https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116
<b>The CIS and Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) are hosting a discussion on the ‘gig economy’ and domestic work on Saturday, November 16 at Student Christian Movement of India, Mission Road, Bangalore. This event is a part of a project supported by the Feminist Internet Research Network led by Association for Progressive Communication (APC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada.</b>
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<p style="text-align: justify;"><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/FutureofWork.jpeg" alt="Domestic work in the gig economy, 16 December 2019, Student Christian Mission of India, Bangalore" /></p>
<p> </p>
<h4>Presentation: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-and-platforms-presentation" class="internal-link" title="Domestic Work and Platforms Presentation">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Concept Note: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/cis-dwru-apc-firn-domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-concept-note" target="_blank">Download</a> (PDF)</h4>
<h4>Venue: Student Christian Movement of India (29, 2nd Cross, CSI Compound, Mission Road, Sampangi Rama Nagara)</h4>
<h4>Date and Time: Saturday, November 16, 3:00-5:30 pm</h4>
<h4>Location: <a href="https://goo.gl/maps/dCnQhid1eiyLG3DE6" target="_blank">URL</a> (Google Maps)</h4>
<h4>Feminist Internet Research Network: <a href="https://www.apc.org/en/project/firn-feminist-internet-research-network" target="_blank">URL</a></h4>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">Over the last few months, the Centre for Internet and Society, India (CIS) and the Domestic Workers’ Rights Union (DWRU) have been doing research on the platformisation of domestic work in India. In the first phase of the research, we gathered data through interviews with several stakeholders. More information about the project can be found here: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement" target="_blank">https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-domestic-work-india-announcement</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">We now find ourselves in the second phase of the research in which we have prepared a preliminary report and are seeking feedback and inputs from experts. For this, we invite you to a roundtable discussion on domestic workers in the ‘gig economy’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The participants at the roundtable will comprise of representatives from key stakeholder groups including platform workers (i.e. domestic workers sourcing jobs through platforms), platform companies, domestic workers organisations, civil society researchers and the state labour department.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The event will begin with a presentation of the project and our initial findings. The rest of the time is set aside for a semi-moderated discussion between all participants. To ensure a focused discussion, we are also limiting participation to 30, and are hoping to have a good mix across stakeholder groups.</p>
<h4>If you will be joining us, please RSVP to Aayush Rathi at aayush@cis-india.org.</h4>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116'>https://cis-india.org/raw/domestic-work-in-the-gig-economy-20191116</a>
</p>
No publisheraayushDigital EconomyRAW EventsDigital LabourResearchers at WorkEventDigital Domestic Work2019-12-06T04:52:11ZEventSequoia India’s Designathon 2016
https://cis-india.org/raw/sequoia-india-designathon-2016
<b>Along with their annual hackathon, Sequoia India organised a designathon in Bangalore on September 10-11, 2016. The participants picked one of three tracks - gamification, information visualisation, and smart acceleration - and developed an interface design or clickable prototype or a demo video. Sumandro Chattapadhyay was invited to participate as a mentor for the information visualisation track.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>URL: <a href="http://www.sequoiahack.com/sequoia-design/">http://www.sequoiahack.com/sequoia-design/</a></h4>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/sequoia-india-designathon-2016'>https://cis-india.org/raw/sequoia-india-designathon-2016</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroPracticeResearchers at Work2016-09-17T13:39:12ZBlog EntryWho Owns Your Phone?
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone
<b>The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/who-owns-your-phone-3035925/">published in Indian Express</a> on September 18, 2016.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We have a conflicted relationship with our digital devices. On the one hand, everything we own is cutting-edge — your regular smartphone does computation that is more advanced and powerful than the computers currently functioning on the space probe on Mars. On the other, everything that we own, is almost on the verge of becoming old — by the time you are used to your phone, a new model with a different letter or a number is in the market. The TV screen which was the crowning glory of your house now feels old because it is not thin enough, sleek enough or big enough; waiting to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.<br /><br />Strangely, the Next Big Thing is never really big enough for it to have longevity. The next phone that you buy, the new laptop you covet, the app that you update, will already feel temporary. Patricia Fitzpatrick, a historian of new media, calls this phenomenon “Planned Obsolescence”. It means that private corporations think of their digital products as fast-moving and ready to die. They might sell the phone with a 10-year guarantee, but the only guarantee that exists is that in 10 years, they will have discontinued all support for that phone, and you will have forgotten that you owned that device. Planned Obsole-scence is a marketing strategy, where everything that is introduced as a technological innovation has a limited shelf-life and is made to be replaced by something new.<br /><br />What is interesting about this strategy is that it doesn’t mean that your device has become redundant. In fact, even as you desire the new, you know perfectly well that your existing device has many years of functionality. Hence, the companies often produce the new as path-breaking, innovative and futuristic. They want you to feel primitive or out-of-touch by introducing features that you don’t need, transforming the familiar and the habitual device with something that becomes alien, enchanting and mystical.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><iframe frameborder="0" height="260" scrolling="auto" src="http://content.jwplatform.com/players/faRwxnwA-xe0BVfqu.html" width="320"></iframe></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While planned obsolescence has its value — it propels innovation and pushes at the boundary of what is possible — it also needs to be understood as a marketing strategy that keeps us consuming as part of our digital habits. One of the best examples to understand this trend is Apple’s latest announcement that it has removed the standard earphone jack from its new iPhone7 and is presenting us with wireless earplugs that work with the new phone. Apple insists that this is the future, and in its hyperbolic presentation, announced that by removing one of the most enduring industry standard for audio hardware, they are revolutionising the future of music listening.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This comes particularly as a shock because ever since the 1990s, Apple’s iconic presence in the music industry has been the white dangling ear-bud wire against black silhouettes, marking the Apple music device as a sign of privacy, maturity, creativity, and elite affordability. By replacing recognisable image with a new one is the company’s way of signalling that every Apple device you now own is ready for trash. It is letting you know that your older Apple music player now needs to be replaced by a new one that uses the wireless ear buds. That the only way you can now listen to music on an Apple iPhone is on Apple’s own standards, so that the regular industry hardware will no longer work with this unique phone that eschews universal standards and seeks to create private monopolies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The missing headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is a resounding testimony to what happens when we make our digital hardware subject to closed development and production. Instead of building phones that are more durable, more efficient, more connected, more affordable, and more versatile, Apple just showed us how a private company can arrogantly define the future, by turning almost every existing device into “primitive” or “incompatible” with the new phones that it is making. The capacity of companies like Apple to defy standards that work and build their own unique hardware tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices. The digital cultures scholar Wendy Chun had once sagaciously written, “the more our devices turn transparent, the more opaque they become”. And Apple’s move towards making your new iPhone seamless and without holes, mimics how the phone is being designed to both kill fast and die early, promoting corporate ambitions over public interest.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital GovernanceResearchDigital MediaRAW ResearchResearchers at Work2016-09-18T16:18:35ZBlog EntryHow Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
<b>This essay by Aishwarya Panicker is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author draws attention to the fact that there is little data, debate, analysis, and examination of the environmental impact of the internet, which is true especially for India. She explores four central issue areas. First, as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India? Second, are there any regulatory provisions that give prescriptive measures to data centres and providers? Third, do any global standards exist in this regard and finally, what future steps can be taken (by the government, civil society and individuals) to address this?</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>Groceries at your doorstep, data on your fingertips, an Uber at the tap of a button and information overload- human negotiations with the internet have definitely changed drastically over the past few decades. Research in the area, too, has transformed-covering not just its evolution and impact, but also assessing innovative and revolutionary ideas in terms of access, internet infrastructure as well as governance to name a few. With over 3.2 Billion internet users in the world <strong>[1]</strong>, and over 400 million of these from India <strong>[2]</strong>, this is no surprise. How can we move beyond particular fascinations with the internet and engage holistically with it? - by moving towards a dimension of internet infrastructure studies that has large policy and sustainable development benefits. This paper, then, will seek to elucidate one central issue area: as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India?</p>
<p>It is widely recognized that India still has miles to go before it reaches complete internet connectivity – be it at the rural or urban geographies. With millions still on the fringes of the online/offline world, it does seem that having access to the internet is still a privilege. However, with over 400 million (around 35 % of the total population) active users, and a fast growing young user base, the implications are vast. The message here is clear, India’s communications reality is changing, and it is changing at warp speed; second, there are constant reassurances to convince us of its growth. At a policy level, the national government has put in place an $18 billion Digital India Initiative that has an outlay of ₹70,000 crore for creating a high-speed Internet grid that will help bridge the rural-urban online divide. At a consumer level, more people are beginning to realise the benefits of using the net for their own daily needs. This should mean that more people will be able to avail the multitude of benefits from this wide web (using less paper, banking online, travelling less for shopping, for example), doing things that are obviously good for the environment, right? Yes, and no.</p>
<p>Measuring or assessing environment impact, for any particular product or service, requires a look into the cost foregone by using that particular product or service. In order to get a wider look into the environmental impact of the internet, we need to check the data available for hardware usage and waste generation, infrastructure provisions and finally, accurate data generation.</p>
<p>Climate change and carbon footprints are terms that have been used as buzzwords to death this past decade, but while environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of many-a-government, there is little data/ debate/ analysis/ examination of the environmental impact of communication systems connected to the net. This is true especially for India. In 2011, Joel Gombiner wrote an academic paper <strong>[3]</strong> on the problem of the Internet’s carbon footprint, with a premise based on the lesser known fact that the ICT industry has been ‘responsible for two to four percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions’- an area that the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report <strong>[4]</strong> had focused on back in 2008 as well. Clearly this is a war on the environment that is yet to receive large-scale attention.</p>
<h3>“What a Waste”</h3>
<p>‘By 2020, a third of the global population will own a PC, 80% will own a mobile phone, and one in 20 households will have a broadband connection’ <strong>[5]</strong>. What does this mean? It means that as demand increases for internet-capable machines, it is vital to look at cycles of ownership and disposal. Wifi access routers, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, optic fibre infrastructure, Ethernet cables- all of these products individually and together, add to the constant waste creation cycle. With mobile ownership at a massive 1009.46 million (as of May 2015), and 2G/3G/4G services on the rise, in addition to the already 400 million strong online community owning laptops/desktops, e-waste is now regarded as one of the largest growing problems in India. While about ‘2.7 million tons of electronic waste are being generated annually’, a large portion of this is from mobile phones/laptops/desktops. With high turnover of new products, as well as obsolete machines, and largely unregulated practices of waste collection, there are areas of where extremely hazardous contents are entering the air, underground water and soil from our city landfills. About 80 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by India currently-these emissions only add on to the total carbon dioxide and other noxious emissions created at the manufacturing stage as well as from the use of devices. While several recycling factories have come up to tackle the gargantuan task of using e-waste, there are of, course, other areas that require immediate attention- this includes mining safety, human rights of workers, natural mineral resource excavation and risk control measures. While rules are in place for the re-use and sorting of e waste (which include suggestions that plants be set up for the sorting, dismantling and processing of waste so that hazardous parts can be treated while the rest is recycled), the reality is far from it. E waste landfills are usually “processed” or mined by manual labor who wear little to no protection from the tiny parts/components that can cause them bodily harm- often causing them musko-skeletal, respiratory or gastro intestinal illnesses. A study done by the NGO Chintan, which studied over 2000 wastepickers, found that they had no idea about the health risks their livelihood poses <strong>[6]</strong>. This urban informal workforce are at the forefront of the waste management cycle and but their current status raises the question- whose responsibility is it to make e-waste recycling safe? The contractors who hire the manual workers, the recycling plants who buy the materials from them, or the manufacturers who create the products?</p>
<h3>Order in Chaos – The Internet Infrastructure Landscape</h3>
<p>Another way to assess environmental impact is by understanding the current internet infrastructure landscape – the supply structure. Under the Digital India initiative, the Central government plans to lay 700,000 km (434,960 miles) of broadband cable connecting 250,000 village clusters in the next three years and constructing 100 new "Smart Cities" by 2020 <strong>[7]</strong>. More connectivity also equals more data centres, larger servers, network equipment, cooling equipment, constant electricity usage and generators. A report by Gartner stated that data centres on average, ‘account for a quarter of the energy consumed by the entire ICT sector’.</p>
<p>As more and more data is generated- what is called our digital footprint- more information is sent back and forth to servers within data centres.</p>
<p>More data = more servers = more electricity = more emissions.</p>
<p>Data storage is being called one of the ‘primary drivers of emissions’ in the ICT industry. According to Gartner, about 6.6 million sq feet of data centre capacity exists today in India. Of course, their benefits do seem to override the electrical cost- using big data for research, social networking, new forms of information processing are just some of them. In addition, some steps are being taken by companies to cut down their environmental (and financial) cost by merging to form collocation spaces. In India, there are, in total, over a hundred collocation data centres in India <strong>[8]</strong>. These collocation spaces are data centers in which businesses can rent space for their servers and other computing needs.</p>
<p>For the mobile broadband industry, connecting millions more to the Internet also means a jump in the device emissions through routers, modems, cell towers etc. These cell towers and data centres perform at a sub optimal level due to the pervasive power deficit across India. Increasing times for load shedding in the semi-urban and rural areas also means a greater burden on generators which are usually diesel, and tend to greatly increase energy costs. Telecom towers, a study (ibid) says, consumes 2 billion litres of diesel a year, accounting for almost 5 million tons of CO2 annually <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>However, studies are being done on programs that uses renewable energy to power these towers- potentially cutting down emissions considerably. With the growth of Smart Power Grids, Energy Proportional Behavior and the rise of internal ‘Green Code’ with ICT companies, there is hope for energy efficiency methods to allow for greater utilization of machines and infrastructure at lower environmental cost.</p>
<h3>Data Aggregation</h3>
<p>Having tried a few websites that allow you to trace your own carbon footprints <strong>[10]</strong>, (depending on which household item/ type of transport/ you want to check it for) it does still seem to be quite complicated and opaque. Especially since most of these websites ignore the usage of particular technology/ other products that leave a footprint, and are hence, skewed in the data they provide. I was unable to pinpoint a footprint for my history of computer/laptop usage, and while HP and other companies do maintain online calculators, magnifying this to all gadgets that utilize the internet across entire populations that use it, is definitely a gargantuan task. Until this area is more user friendly and accurate, it will be quite impossible to research this aspect of the internet’s impact on the countless products owned by individuals.</p>
<p>Besides inaccurate and vague data generated at an individual level, there is also little to no information on a per-click basis, what an individuals’ contribution is. What does my time surfing the internet truly imply? Does my constant connectivity to the net from my phone/ laptop for over 15 hours a day mean something more than what I use it for? The information I found zeroed in on the terms direct and indirect emissions- that the company manufacturing my phone or laptop have resulted in direct emissions but that there are indirect emissions as well, all the things that happen for the laptop/mobile to have reached me have an impact, the hundreds of websites I scour in a week have an impact, right down to the staff of software companies I have downloaded from, have an impact. While this seems too minute to calculate, too cumbersome to pin down, it brings us to the point where any metric to have a final and definite number attached to our internet usage can never be accurate. In their book, <em>The Burning Question</em>, Duncan Clark and Mike Berners-Lee put forth the view that it is because of the infrastructure and mental lock - in that the world has put itself in, a state which disallows a wider understanding of real issues, that prevents any new energy efficiency technologies to be put in place.</p>
<p>India has become a big player in ICT industry worldwide- especially in the research and development areas. With our participation in the Global ICT Standardization Forum, it is vital that there is continued effort towards sustainable methods of tackling e-waste, ensuring that the growth of internet infrastructure and governance follow particular guidelines. The internet, of course, plays a crucial role in bringing us closer to a low-CO2 based world-but do its environmental benefits outweigh the end impact? Maybe/ Maybe not. While there are increasing number of advocates of the low- energy impact of the web <strong>[11]</strong>, it is not possible to live in a vacuum of its benefits, but to also engage with the wider web of its functioning and operations. The significance of well informed opinions and actions should be based on correct data - more in depth research in this field is how we can come closer to it. If sustainable and inclusive development has to go hand in hand with Smart cities, and if India is serious about it, it is high time we made ICT a more environment friendly industry as well as a research friendly industry. Should you as an individual stop everything you do with the internet? No! But it is time to think, talk, question and research about it.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> International Telecommunications Union. 2015. ‘ICT Facts & Figures- The World in 2015’ <a href="https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf">https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> IAMAI. 2015. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490">http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Gombiner, Joel. <a href="http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57">http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57</a> (last accessed on 01/08/2016).</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Global E-Sustainability Initiative. 2008. <a href="http://www.smart2020.org/publications/">http://www.smart2020.org/publications/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Singh, Om Pal & Pratibha Singh. IJERMT. 2015. <a href="http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf">http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> India Climate Dialogue. 10th December, 2015. <a href="http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/">http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Financial Express. ‘Govt has grand IT Plans for India’. April 2015. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/">http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> <a href="http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html">http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Smarter 2020 - The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future. <a href="http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf">http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> For example - <a href="http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx">http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Think Progress. ‘Debunking the myth of internet as an energy hog’. June, 2010. <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/</a>.</p>
<h3>Author Profile</h3>
<p>Aishwarya Panicker is currently an Independent Consultant, with over 5 years of experience in the development and policy space in India. She has an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College, and a
graduate degree in Global Politics (specializing in Political Economy) from the London School of Economics.</p>
<p>She works closely on the institutional problems of service delivery in the rural and urban contexts - looking at social sector policies, technology, governance, and their impact on citizen-state interactions in India. Prior
to becoming an Independent Researcher, she worked at the Centre for Policy Research for three years. She has also worked with CKS, CII, and FICCI in the past.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly</a>
</p>
No publisherAishwarya PanickerResearchers at WorkRAW BlogEnvironmental Impact2016-09-23T05:02:50ZBlog EntryMobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit
<b>This essay by Sujeet George is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author offers a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and examining the manner and context in which information and ideas are shared, proposed, and debunked, the paper aspires to formulate a methodology for interrogating sites like reddit that offer the possibilities of social mediation, even as users maintain a limited amount of privacy. At the same time, to what extent can such news aggregator sites direct the ways in which opinions and news flows change course as a true marker of information generation responding to user inputs.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Introduction</strong></h3>
<p>It is almost an Internet truism that the comments section on any website is the cesspool that festers the basest of human instincts. Insults and abuses abound, users ‘call out’ each other’s opinions, their choice of words and, on a <del>bad</del> regular day, even each other’s parentage. The spectre of online anonymity, it has been suggested, affords the possibility of channelling opinion without being accountable for it. This is the more cynical outlook on how online opinion forums function; a viewpoint which although credible is limited as it sidelines the more engaging aspects of these forums. Such an interface dynamic has historically offered two modes of checks and balances: the original content to which users commented on was determined (and often written) by the administrators of the website, and in many cases the comments were moderated by those who ran the website.</p>
<p>Social news websites in the age of Web 2.0 have radically altered the means of production of content. By handing over to web-users the keys to the content generation storehouse, news aggregator websites like 4chan and Reddit have supposedly democratized the volume and direction of news flow. Users create (and recycle) content on which other users comment and add more content through memes, sharing of links, pictures and videos. Somewhere along the line, the original post (op) may trigger more specific discussions.</p>
<p>The content generated on a news aggregating website like Reddit can thus, theoretically, range across a broad spectrum. From discussions on current technology and sharing of world news to more specific conversations on gardening or anime, the website brings together diverse interests under a singular platform. Topic-based posts and discussions are categorised into subreddits, subcommunities which converge around similar interests. Thus, a subreddit like /r/cricket may serve as a platform for cricket enthusiasts to share news and views on the game. These subreddits together constitute Reddit as a whole. Only registered users can post submissions or comment on other posts, although unregistered users can access the submissions without being able to comment on them. Registered users can upvote and downvote both the posts submitted and the comments posted by other users.</p>
<p>Any registered Reddit user can create a subreddit to initiate submissions and discussions on a particular area of interest. Reddit has a series of default subreddits, including /r/AskReddit, /r/books, /r/history among others. When an unregistered user accesses the website they are likely to see the current top-voted posts from a combination of the default subreddits. The voting system is inextricably linked to visibility: the more the upvotes a post receives, the more likely it is to be top of the list on the self-proclaimed front page of the internet. The posts are thus sorted as a combination of top-voted submissions from an assortment of default subreddits. Comments on specific posts also follow a similar voting logic whereby users can upvote/downvote a specific comment based on how useful or relevant they find it to the original post. Registered users can curate their own page by subscribing to subreddits of their own interest, and unsubscribing from the default ones.</p>
<p>Being a registered user entails choosing a username under which a user’s submissions and comments are collated. Every user comment receives an aggregate score which is the sum of the upvotes and downvotes the comment has received. The cumulative comment scores for every user, called karma, is visible to every other user, and is often an indicator of the level of (in)activity of a specific user. Karma scores are the veritable fiat currency of the reddit space, with prolific users being visible on multiple popular threads attempting to scale their karma aggregate through comments that employ a combination of wit, hyperbole, cliché and outrage.</p>
<p>Reddit with its two-way dynamism—the users are the creators of content and the very people who comment on it—seemingly throws open the spectrum for content to be self-generated and moderated. Every subreddit has a set of moderators who attempt to maintain a modicum of direction amidst the chaos. Moderators are often users who are active on that particular subreddit, or have volunteered (or have been chosen by the subreddit community) to take up the task of maintaining the decorum and coherence of the subreddit. Reddit’s voting system, where users upvote and downvote submitted content, purports to ensure that the cream can constantly float above the morass. The infrastructural logic of Reddit—an algorithm that ensures that posts do not stagnate on the front page and get regularly refreshed by newer content—seeks to instill a participatory ethos where content created/submitted by users gains traction based on the extent of discussion that it generates among other users <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p>A characteristic of the reddit platform is the Ask Me Anything feature where notable individuals set a pre-determined time slot to answer questions raised by users of a subreddit community. The AMA format offers an interesting take on the possibilities of public engagement and publicity in the virtual domain. A unique feature of reddit, the popular AMAs are held on the default /r/IAMA subreddit. The earliest AMAs were coordinated by the founders as well as employees of the website; to an extent this is true even today although in recent times the public relations team of various celebrities have coordinated AMAs for their clients. It remains one of the most popular modes of user engagement, ironically functioning through external, mediated mechanisms. Most AMAs serve a dual purpose: celebrities offer to answer questions when they are ‘in the news’ or when they wish to publicize a new venture, which also serves as an endorsement of the popularity of the reddit platform in reaching out to a wide, primarily North American, audience. An early instance of an acknowledgement of the reach of the reddit platform was an AMA conducted by/for Barack Obama as he sought to be re-elected during the 2012 U.S. Presidential elections. Other notable ‘celebrity’ AMA sessions include those by Bill Gates, Madonna, and Edward Snowden. While celebrity AMAs remain a popular feature, the AMA format itself is utilised even by relatively less established personalities who have their own unique story to share. While /r/IAMA remains the default subreddit used to reach out to the reddit community, specific subreddits often conduct their own AMAs with personalities relevant to the group.</p>
<p>The India subreddit /r/India, the forum for content “directly about India and Indians,” has been a part of Reddit since 2008. At the time of writing this essay there are over 55000 registered Reddit users (including this writer) who subscribe to submissions posted on /r/India. Of course, there may be many more who ‘lurk’ around, a term for those who may not have subscribed but view submissions posted on the subreddit by visiting the subreddit page. /r/India typically draws in over 2 million page views every month. Over time the community has developed a vocabulary of its own, which is often self-referential and draws on submissions and comments that have been made at an earlier time. Many prolific users with characteristic usernames are recognized by fellow users, the sociality perhaps further strengthened through the annual city-based meet-ups that are planned as part of a larger Reddit tradition.</p>
<p>This essay looks at the mobilization of community opinion on /r/India on the issue of net neutrality, the efforts made by some of the users to raise awareness about it, and the ways in which the community responded and reacted to a wider online movement that sought to maintain a more egalitarian approach to Internet access and availability. Drawing on an analysis of a few posts submitted during a period that witnessed a flurry of activity in connection with the debates around net neutrality in India, the essay attempts to sketch out the contours of the debate around the axis of online activity and participation. It seeks to ponder on the extent to which a forum like the India subreddit offers the possibilities of a civic participation, of mobilizing public opinion and contributing to the decisions undertaken by policy makers. How do purportedly diverse online communities interact, draw consensus and stake a claim to the decision-making processes that involve multiple stakeholders often with conflicting interests?</p>
<h3><strong>The Social in the Virtual Rear-view Mirror</strong></h3>
<p>The form of any subreddit, with its defined purpose and rules of submission, ensures a certain coherence even amidst the cornucopia of memes, images and other web links that may be shared and commented upon. The governing logic of a particular subreddit accords it a certain hue, which most users attempt to conform to or occasionally subvert. The specificity of any subreddit, thus, is a mutually constitutive process where the original tech-interface guidelines are negotiated by the content submitted by users of the subreddit.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_01.jpeg" alt="Tragedy of India" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>.</h6>
<p>User behaviour on new media platforms can be understood as a virtual manifestation of traits that are exhibited in the domain of the social in real life. Consider the discussion sparked off by a post that was submitted about 4 weeks back, and which has catapulted to the top of the all time top voted submissions on the subreddit <strong>[2]</strong>. It contrasts the shoddy construction by the Maharashtra government in 2013 of a section of a fort staircase, with the more stable lasting section built by Shivaji in the 17th century. The user who posted the image commented on the dubious nature of infrastructural work in the present day, blaming corruption for the disparity in the quality of work. Juxtaposing historical nostalgia with an apathy about the present state-of-affairs, the comments and discussions around the post veered from questions of the feasibility of implementing older construction methods, to the widespread nepotism and corruption prevalent in public work contracts in the present day. One user remarked, “I'm guessing Shivaji didn't hand out the contracts for building his forts to the lowest bidder.” Another chimed in that “[no] tender is clean. It's often created, mapped, prepared and executed by the company and middleman willing to shell out the most to the bureaucrats and politicians.”</p>
<p>A popular motif on many submissions on /r/India is a lamentation on the tangled mess between the bureaucracy and legislature. It extends the generic urban middle class antipathy towards governance and its deep suspicion of the probity of the administrative processes of the Indian State. One user-comment tried to explain the popularity of the submitted post—a common indicator of content popularity on Reddit is the number of upvotes it receives and the extent of user participation through comments—to the highly ‘relatable’ nature of the submission.</p>
<p>The character of an online forum, while being shaped by diverse user behaviour, is invariably crystallized by the more dominant modes of representation. The anonymity afforded by the online medium and the potential infinitude of the range of submissions should theoretically stretch the spectrum of representations. Yet user behaviour often conforms in a bid to confirm its own shared identity within the group. What is then understood as relatable is not necessarily a universal, but merely an accommodation of difference through consensus. In the following sections I attempt to make sense of the processes through which such a consensus is drawn by considering the trajectory of discussions on posts pertaining to debates on net neutrality <strong>[3]</strong>.</p>
<h3><strong>The Anatomy of an Online Mobilization</strong></h3>
<p>The discussions around questions of net neutrality, Facebook’s Free Basics, differential data pricing, and restricted access to OTT services have captured the Indian public imagination in the last 18-odd months. Multiple consultation papers shared by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have served as a rallying point for domain experts, media policy analysts and the general public. The series of consultation papers and the questions that have arisen over specific practices of telecom companies are imagined through the essay as a single event punctuated by temporal fissures. It has its own prehistory, a call to arms, and the eventual (fleeting) redemption. The differing discourse around the issue is contextually singular even if separated by chronology.</p>
<p>On February 8 this year, an /r/India user shared a news report about TRAI declaring zero-rated products as illegal <strong>[4]</strong>. Months of collaboration among faceless internet users had managed a key victory in what was repeatedly termed a battle to save the Internet. User comments highlighted the scale of the task accomplished as “a bunch of folks on the Internet [stopped] a $300 billion market cap corporation [Facebook] and a bunch of telecoms with strong lobbying capabilities.” Some users could not see past the irony of the Internet itself serving as a means for the public to halt rapacious tech companies in their stride. The David v/s Goliath analogy seemed apt. The task, though, had just begun, as one user presciently noted: “Mobilizing people is hard. Mobilizing people against a better funded lobby, and on a dry technical topic ? really hard. We are probably going to need a dedicated NGO, mailing lists, donations and members for this and similar issues.”</p>
<p>The debates surrounding net neutrality have sparked a diverse range of questions related to Internet access, differential pricing, restraints on technology, impediments to freedom of expression and questions of consumer choice. The range of issues and stakeholders encompassed within the policy regulation has simultaneously atomised and collectivised the problematic of Internet. As an increasingly everyday technology for many urban Indians, Internet usage has carried the possibility of innovative and easy access to a range of services and information while circumventing hitherto static structures of the administrative machinery. Internet usage in the Indian context can be regarded as both a symbol of egalitarianism and privilege; a conflation of the larger ideal of enterprise espoused by the technological boom and a reluctantly understated reflection of the very technology being of limited wider accessibility. The debates on Internet usage through the very medium thus contains some of the tensions that were echoed in the responses to the questions on net neutrality that were raised on the Indian subreddit.</p>
<p>These debates, circulating across news mediums both print and digital, found their way into the /r/India cosmos through efforts to raise awareness about the issue and to bring about a greater collective bargaining momentum to the efforts in the digital space. A post on December 25, 2014 announced the efforts being undertaken by various media practitioners through the creation of the website <a href="http://netneutrality.in/">http://netneutrality.in/</a> which later became <a href="http://www.savetheinternet.in/">http://www.savetheinternet.in/</a> <strong>[5]</strong>. As a submission in the early life of the net neutrality event the post garnered enough attention to find its way into the vocabulary of the subreddit.</p>
<p>It was, however, not until three months later that perhaps the most comprehensive early exhortation came through a post titled Let's fight for Net Neutrality before it becomes necessary. E-Mail the TRAI now <strong>[6]</strong>. submitted on March 28, 2015 by one of the subreddit moderators. The post called for users to mail the TRAI and join in the efforts to influence upon policy makers on the need for a neutral Internet. User comments ranged from a creating email templates to a brief primer on the meaning and scope of net neutrality. That the public counter fight was still in the planning stage is evident in the numerous user comments volunteering to craft an email template to be sent.</p>
<p>The possibilities of a collaborative enterprise were much more evident in another mod-post, submitted on April 8, 2015 titled <em>Fight for Net Neutrality: The way forward</em> <strong>[7]</strong>. The post assembled the increasing momentum that the net neutrality movement had garnered in the Indian virtual space. Varying email templates to be shared among peer groups were presented, enterprising users created memes and infographics, while more sinister minds listed out companies that openly flouted net neutrality rules. The aim was not just to organise, but to also synchronize the efforts of a purportedly disparate group of users.</p>
<p>Even as user efforts were directed towards raising awareness about net neutrality among a wider audience, the sheer scale of the task and improbable hurdles on the road where highlighted by some. One post speculated on the connection between the timing of TRAI’s consultation paper and the fact that the Director of TRAI was due to retire in May 2015 <strong>[8]</strong>. The user feared that “the decision on TRAI proposal has already been made. The public is asked to comment on the OTT proposal because it is required by norm (not sure about law). They are waiting for Mr Khullar to retire, so they can blame him for the colossal backlash that will happen when the proposal is ratified.”</p>
<p>In the next few months the momentum of the movement ebbed and flowed, with diligent users posting regular updates on the progress. Even as the Internet rights discourse on the forum sought to be balanced with the logic of the market, there emerged a series of reactionary submissions that seemed to combine a distrust of large telecoms with the emancipatory spirit of a virtual civil disobedience.</p>
<h3><strong>Zero Rating the Zero-Rated Apps</strong></h3>
<p>Concurrent with the efforts at the level of governance, /r/India users employed creative means to show their displeasure towards companies who seemed to oppose the tenets of net neutrality. One such instance was when a user galvanised forum opinion to down-rate the Flipkart and Airtel apps on their phones. Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal’s justification for zero-rated apps as sound business practice was turned inside-out as users gave a zero rating to the Flipkart app on their phones. The impact was ostensibly evident as the daily average ratings for the app saw a sharp fall <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>Diatribes against telecom companies and their profit-driven enterprise have now become a regular feature on the forum. The mobile network Airtel, which has been at the forefront of the anti-net neutrality lobby, has faced its share of the community ire. Branded Chortel—an (un)imaginative coinage characterizing the supposed thieving policies of the company—the company along with Flipkart has been subject to a series of memes that invoke ridicule and hint at the sense of disconnect between consumers and the products on offer. The image shown above contrasts a popular biscuit brand Parle-G with the recently launched Airtel 4G Internet <strong>[10]</strong>. It employs Parle’s long unblemished reputation as a brand of reliability; its iconicity a signifier of a purported business of ethics that feels anachronistic in comparison to the business practices of the telecom companies.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_02.jpeg" alt="Chortel Four-G" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</h6>
<p>The movement to generate awareness about Internet policy also sought to initiate dialogues with administrators who are in a position to ensure that the community’s voices are heard. Thus Independent Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar did an AMA at the height of the net neutrality discussions <strong>[11]</strong>. Since the person doing the AMA can choose to answer or ignore from the range of questions posed by the community, the supposed mutuality of participation is often minimal. Nevertheless, Chandrasekhar’s AMA not just points to the interactive (propagandist) possibilities of reddit or any other social media platform but it also asserts the relevance of the medium as a significant domain where policy regulation impacts people whose voices need to be acknowledged. As an entrepreneur who has previously worked in the technology sector, Chandrasekhar symbolizes /r/India’s imagined ideal scenario of a ‘rule of experts’ in matters of governance. That a sitting MP would seek a dialogue with an online forum also hints at the relevance of such mobilizations, where enterprising tech-savvy politicians understand the potential to stir public action through the domain of the virtual.</p>
<h3><strong>Consensus in/and New Media</strong></h3>
<p>At one level, it could be suggested that the discussions which emerged on the India subreddit around the debates on net neutrality hint at the potentials of virtual mobilization of the public. Social media, the Internet and social networking forums like Reddit could potentially widen the level of information access and dissemination where the early groundwork has been laid by the RTI Act. But at stake in the whole discussion is not merely the extent to which an online community can modify the direction of a policy discourse. Even as the development of a ‘networked public sphere’ has transformed the means of consensus building, the elements of its discontent are difficult to ignore. The formation of a public sphere in a virtual environment presents the possibilities of conformity as much as of consensus.</p>
<p>The discourse around net neutrality on /r/India forum is notable for the wide-ranging consensus that it managed to appropriate from the community. Such a consensus could be interpreted in at least two ways. The form of any subreddit as a forum for all things related to a specific context—be it a common activity, nationality, gender identity—contains within itself the language of adequate acceptance and rebuttal. At the same time, the algorithmic technique of determining the visibility of a post through upvotes and downvotes renders real the possibility of consensus through conformity.</p>
<p>It is more interesting to look beyond the veneer of consensus and question the supposed diversity of the group and its implications, rather than infer collective action as a signifier of the rightness of the action. One could suggest that the terms of the debate, of limiting the control that mega-telecos wield over internet policy in India, offered an easy medium to galvanise opinion on the subreddit. Any nuanced stance will however need to read collective action in relation to the (im)possibility of individual opinion-making in a structured environment of an online forum.</p>
<p>An online platform with a voting system linked to visibility offers a peculiar type of consensus. A majority of the top-voted submissions and comments pertaining to the net neutrality debate on /r/India fall within a broad overlap of consensus linked to a participatory, egalitarian technological ethos which is characteristic of the post-liberalization Indian milieu. The possibility of dissent, or even voicing differing viewpoints, is structured in a limited spectrum since what will be shared/read is inextricably linked to what users understand as acceptable within the forum. Such an understanding can inadvertently suggest a consensus, or worse offer a monochromatic presentation of an issue. This is not to discount the possibility of informed discussion, or exaggerate the ‘hive mind’ of reddit. But the link between visibility and popularity of content often ensures that the nuances of a debate get sidelined and unidimensional. Thus, even though aspects of differential pricing may be understood as a means to wider access, or as a way to open Internet services to the vagaries of the market rather than State whims, such viewpoints find less credibility when articulated within a forum like /r/India <strong>[12]</strong>. While discussions may emerge which consider the issue beyond the limited rhetoric of free speech and consumer choice, they often get presented in the ‘anti net neutrality’ garb or as afterthoughts to a debate the terms of which have ostensibly been settled <strong>[13]</strong>.</p>
<p>Communicative technologies, as Lisa Gitelman notes, often converge around an overlapping mental landscape that seeks to make sense of an act/event through synchronized ontologies of representation. Consensus in such an instance is not to be seen as a final validation of the community’s stance on an issue. It should prompt us to be wary of the pitfalls of online mobilization that could be travelling in an echo chamber. The task then would not be to debunk actions drawn on consensus, but to be aware of the limits of inclusivity of such online forums <strong>[14]</strong>.
Further research has to consider ways in which individual users negotiate the possibility of presenting an individual stance to the community within interface-induced limitations to the possibility of such an enunciation. This would involve interviews with a pool of /r/India users, examine the types of news outlets and viewpoints that gain credence within the community, look at voting patterns, and perhaps undertake a more thorough examination of a wider range of concerns relevant to the community. This essay has attempted a preliminary gesture towards such an endeavour by picking a particular event and the community’s response to it. Reddit, in contrast to Facebook for instance, offers the possibility of peering into an online space where anonymity commingles with community enterprise and the meaning of accountability is extended beyond individual motive of mere sociality or recognition. As such, it could potentially offer an understanding of online behaviour beyond the limits of the individual-liberal paradigm of action orientation and widen the debate on the functioning of social news websites by being acutely aware of the thin line between the individual and the social.</p>
<h3><strong>Disclaimer</strong></h3>
<p>The writer has been a frequent lurker on Reddit, and the India subreddit since 2011. Beyond voraciously consuming the submissions on /r/India he does not claim to have contributed in any meaningful manner to the online discussions referred to in the essay.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> The literature on reddit is a fast growing domain, with innovative research looking at Reddit’s voting patterns, user behaviour, and news outlets linked to glean an understanding of the news aggregating website. For an examination of questions of identity and anonymity on Reddit see, Shelton, M., Lo, K., Nardi, B. (2015). Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit. In iConference 2015 Proceedings. For an engagement with questions on what motivates Reddit user to contribute see, Bogers, T., & Nordenhoff Wernersen, R. (2014). How 'Social' are Social News Sites? Exploring the Motivations for Using Reddit.com. In Proceedings of the iConference 2014. (pp. 329-344). IDEALS: iSchools.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>. Last accessed on August 2, 2016. Unless stated otherwise, all links posted hereafter have also been accessed on the same day.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> My understanding of social media and the social dimension of new media has been shaped from my reading of Dijck, José Van. <em>The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. For an examination of social media practices see, Ellison, N. B. & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through Social Network Sites. In Dutton, W. H. (Ed.), <em>The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–172.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a>https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/44qddb/trai_to_make_zero_rated_products_illegal/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/</a>. For Kullar’s own views on the issue, see: <a href="http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/">http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> CIS’s note on its position on net neutrality points to the multilayered nature of the policy: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality'>http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016. For a contrarian voice, see: <a href=">http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/net-neutrality-war-is-not-just-facebook-versus-internet-mullahs/story-s9eZpZnomaaiz4De8fYfaK.html</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Consider the discussions that emerged in two separate posts: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/</a> and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Gitelman, Lisa. <em>Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture</em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Especially chapter 3.</p>
<h3><strong>Author Profile</strong></h3>
<p>Sujeet George has an M.Phil from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His research interests are in histories of science and commodities, and new media and digital humanities. He has previously worked with the Mumbai City Museum and The Southasia Trust.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit</a>
</p>
No publisherSujeet GeorgeRedditInternet StudiesRAW BlogNet NeutralityResearchers at Work2016-09-27T04:52:35ZBlog EntryLove in the Time of Tinder
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder
<b>Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/love-in-the-time-of-tinder-3059643/">published in the Indian Express</a> on October 2, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Last week, I met somebody who narrated their digital fairy tale to me. He was waiting in between trains, waiting at a train station, for the connection to arrive. Bored, he opened the dating app Tinder. He swiped right. There was a match. They started chatting. The conversation became interesting. She offered to leave work early and come to the train station to meet him for coffee. They had a five-hour long date. He missed many connections and stayed back with her to spend more time. When he left, they stayed connected using all the digital apps of connection that you can imagine. They started travelling weekends to be with each other. Three years later, he moved countries and jobs to be in the same city as her. Last week, they got engaged to be married. And everybody raised a toast to the resilience of their love, and how they have worked hard at being together. They thanked all the people who have been involved and supportive in helping them through this period. And at the end, she said, she wanted to thank Tinder and WhatsApp, without which they would have never met been able to continue this connection. They were being facetious, but they were also reminding us that we live in appified times.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Apps are everywhere and they have become so natural and ubiquitous that we have forgotten what it means to live without them. In the case of this fairy tale couple, their very meeting was ordained not by fate and destiny and romantic godmothers, but by a smart app. This app, based on algorithms that judged them to be a good match, drawing from what they like on Facebook and what they share with their friends, presented both of them to each other, causing the first swipe. The app, designed around the principle of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), made sure that in the 40 minutes that he was at the train station, both of them looked at their phones, swiped right and had the conversation that began it all. The app created habits that ensured that they trusted each other to meet after a 20-minute chat, to miss trains for the joy of the first extended date. People fell in love, and their love was managed entirely by smart apps.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">These apps are designed to assist us in our mundane lives. Behind their seductive design and intuitive interfaces are scripts, norms, rules, protocols and intentions that are influenced and shaped by corporations and individuals, who have a specific interest in expanding their market domains. The creation of profiles on Tinder required both these people to give Tinder access to a wide variety of their personal activities and profiles. As their romance progressed, they involved more apps in their activities. Personal planners, reminders, e-shopping platforms, social media testimonies, deals to buy cheap tickets — all came into play. And even as they came together in a monogamous relationship, the apps encouraged them into data infidelity, wantonly sharing their data, making it speak with strangers, interact with unknown shadows in the dark, morphing and fusing with predatory algorithms that continued to not only follow them but also predict what their needs are. These smart apps might come with friendly interfaces and helpful suggestions, but they do it by making us transparent — they mine our information and distribute and share it in ways that we cannot imagine to ends that we cannot fathom.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As the apps become a daily part of our lives, holding our hands and comforting our souls, it is good to remember that behind the apps is a pipeline of service providers, data harvesters, information aggregators, who are learning more and more about us, and then without our consent, in the guise of being helpful, are sharing those secrets with things and people we do not know.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While they do help us celebrate the moments and make beautiful human connections, they also continue to make oily suggestions and innuendos, gently guiding us into buying more and consuming more. I came home from the engagement party and woke up the next morning with my face being tagged in about 30 pictures on four different social media apps. And each app suggested different things I can do to celebrate this event — buy a new suit for the wedding, buy an engagement gift for the happy couple, get help with planning a bachelor’s party, and get the services of a wedding planning app.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2016-10-17T02:07:05ZBlog EntryMarch 2017 Newsletter
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2017-newsletter
<b>Welcome to March 2017 newsletter of the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS).</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dear readers,</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Previous issues of the newsletters can be <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">accessed here</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<table class="grid listing" style="text-align: justify; ">
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<th>Highlights</th>
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<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/comments-on-the-draft-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-rules">submitted comments on the draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules</a> for the consideration of the Department of Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities, Government of India.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Anubha Sinha in a blog post has <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/intellectual-property-rights-and-mobile-apps">identified the various kinds of IP in an app</a> and explained the protections available under Indian IPR law. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS-A2K is <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikisource-internship-project-at-new-law-college-pune">conducting a Wiki internship project</a> for students of New Law College, Pune under the guidance of Prof.Dr.Mukund Sarda, Dean and Principal of New Law College. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">In an <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindu-op-ed-sunil-abraham-march-31-2017-how-aadhaar-compromises-privacy-and-how-to-fix-it">Op-ed published in the Hindu</a>, Sunil Abraham has stated that though biometrics may be appropriate for targeted surveillance by the state, it is wholly inappropriate for everyday transactions between state and law abiding citizens.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS has <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/benefits-harms-rights-and-regulation-survey-of-literature-on-big-data">published a survey</a> that draws upon a range of literature including news articles, academic articles, and presentations and seeks to disaggregate the potential benefits and harms of big data, organising them into several broad categories that reflect the existing scholarly literature.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">CIS submitted comments on the Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules, 2017. The <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-information-technology-security-of-prepaid-payment-instruments-rules-2017">comments were in response to the Information Technology (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules 2017</a>. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a consultation paper which called for developing a framework for security of digital wallets operating in the country. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india">have co-authored a paper</a> that presents exploratory research into “data-intensive development” that seeks to inductively identify issues and conceptual frameworks of relevance to big data in developing countries.</li>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>CIS in the news:</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/richa-mishra-hindu-businessline-march-13-2017-the-12-digit-conundrum">The 12-digit conundrum</a> (Richa Mishra; Hindu Businessline; March 13, 2017)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-statesman-smriti-sharma-vasudeva-march-14-2017-evms-how-transparent-is-the-indian-election-process">EVMs: How transparent is the Indian election process?</a> (Smriti Sharma Vasudeva; The Statesman; March 14, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/first-post-march-16-nimish-sawant-nasscom-chief-saying-full-data-protection-isnt-possible-should-wake-us-from-our-digital-slumber">Nasscom chief saying full data protection isn’t possible should wake us from our digital slumber</a> (First Post; March 16, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/one-world-indentity-kaelyn-lowmaster-march-17-2017-privacy-concerns-multiply-for-aadhaar-indias-national-biometric-identity-registry">Privacy concerns multiply for Aadhaar, India’s national biometric identity registry</a> (One World Identity; March 17, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-guardian-march-21-2017-no-id-no-benefits">No ID, no benefits: thousands could lose lifeline under India’s biometric scheme</a> (Guardian; March 21, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/huffington-post-rimin-dutt-ivan-mehta-march-24-2017-why-we-should-all-worry-about-the-mandatory-imposition-of-aadhaar">Why We Should All Worry About The Mandatory Imposition Of Aadhaar</a> (Rimin Dutt and Ivan Mehta; Huffington Post; March 24, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-march-27-2017-amy-kazmin-indias-biometric-id-scans-make-sci-fi-a-reality">India’s biometric ID scans make sci-fi a reality</a> (Amy Kazmin; Financial Times; March 27, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-march-27-2017-discussion-on-aadhaar">क्या आधार पर जल्दबाज़ी में है सरकार?</a> (NDTV; March 27, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-march-27-2017-priya-nair-and-sanjay-kumar-singh-get-an-aadhaar-card-if-you-dont-have-one">Get an Aadhaar card if you don't have one</a> (Priya Nair and Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; March 27, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/hindu-businessline-shriya-mohan-the-aadhaar-of-all-things">The Aadhaar of all things</a> (Shriya Mohan; Hindu Businessline; March 31, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p><b><br />CIS members wrote the following articles</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-march-19-2017-digital-native-lie-me-a-river">Digital native: Lie Me a River</a> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; March 19, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-hindu-businessline-march-31-2017-sunil-abraham-its-the-technology-stupid">It’s the technology, stupid</a> (Sunil Abraham; Hindu Businessline; March 31, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/hindu-op-ed-sunil-abraham-march-31-2017-how-aadhaar-compromises-privacy-and-how-to-fix-it">How Aadhaar compromises privacy? And how to fix it?</a> (Sunil Abraham; Hindu; March 31, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility & Inclusion</a> <br /> ------------------------------------- <br /> India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Submission</p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/comments-on-the-draft-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-rules">Comments on the draft Rights of Persons with Disabilities Rules</a> (Nirmita Narasimhan; March 29, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>----------------------------------- </b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br />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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Pervasive Technologies</p>
<p><b>Blog Entry<br /></b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/intellectual-property-rights-and-mobile-apps">Intellectual Property Rights and Mobile Apps</a> (Anubha Sinha; March 6, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Wikipedia</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> 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).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-bhasha-gaurav-din-celebrations-in-maharashtra">"Marathi Bhasha Gaurav Din" celebrations in Maharashtra</a> (Manasa Rao; March 7, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/women2019s-history-month-sambad-collaborates-with-odia-wikipedia-for-a-two-day-edit-a-thon">Women’s History Month: Sambad collaborates with Odia Wikipedia for a Two Day Edit-a-thon</a> (Sailesh Patnaik; March 16, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikisource-internship-project-at-new-law-college-pune">Wikisource:Internship Project at New Law College, Pune</a> (Subodh Kulkarni; March 28, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p><b>Events Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/womens-day-edit-a-thon-in-pune">Women's Day Edit-a-thon</a> (Co-organized by Sterlite Tech Foundation, Jnana Prabhodhini, and CIS-A2K; Pune; March 10, 2017). Subodh Kulkarni was one of the trainers.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/marathi-wikipedia-edit-a-thon-on-environment-management">Marathi Wikipedia Edit-a-thon on Environment Management</a> (Organized by CSIBER College and CIS-A2K; Kolhapur; March 30, 2017). Subodh Kulkarni was a trainer.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><br />►Openness</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">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.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/national-consultation-on-oer-for-higher-education">National Consultation on OER for Higher Education</a> (Organized by Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia; New Delhi; March 3, 2017). Anubha Sinha attended the event.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/idrc-open-development-book-authors-workshop">Open Development Book - Authors' Workshop</a> (Organized by International Development Research Centre and Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching; University of Cape Town, South Africa; March 11 - 12, 2017). The workshop gathered the contributers to an upcoming book by IDRC on open development. Elonnai Hickok, Gus Hosein from Privacy International and Sumandro Chattapadhyay are writing a chapter for this book.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/indo-french-perspectives-on-digital-studies">Indo - French Perspectives on Digital Studies</a> (Organized by Digital Studies Group; Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi; March 15, 2017). Anubha Sinha was a speaker. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>----------------------------------- </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a> <br /><b> -----------------------------------</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p>►Privacy</p>
<p><b>Submission</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-information-technology-security-of-prepaid-payment-instruments-rules-2017">Comments on Information Technology</a> (Security of Prepaid Payment Instruments) Rules, 2017 (Udbhav Tiwari, Pranesh Prakash, Abhay Rana, Amber Sinha and Sunil Abraham; March 23, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wiser-lecture-sumandro-chattapadhyay-on-deregulation-by-code">WISER Lecture : Sumandro Chattapadhyay on Deregulation by Code</a> (Organized by the University of the Witwatersrand; Johannesburg; March 8, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay gave a talk.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/conference-on-safety-against-online-child-sexual-abuse">Conference on Safety Against Online Child Sexual Abuse</a> (Organized by CID, Telangana and the Department for Women Development and Child Welfare, Telangana; March 16 - 17, 2017). Japreet Grewal was a speaker.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/state-of-digital-rights-in-india-delhi-march-24">State of Digital Rights in India</a> (Organized by Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University, Delhi and the Internet Freedom Foundation, in association with Access Now; India International Centre, New Delhi; March 24, 2017). Japreet Grewal and Sumandro Chattapadhyay took part in panel discussions.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/google-hangout-on-technology-and-jobs">Hangout on Technology and Jobs</a> (Organized by Google; March 24, 2017). Vanya Rakesh was a speaker. </li>
</ul>
<br />
<ul>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/analysis-of-key-provisions-of-aadhaar-act-regulations">Analysis of Key Provisions of the Aadhaar Act Regulations</a> (Amber Sinha and edited by Elonnai Hickok; March 31, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p>►Cyber Security</p>
<p><b>Upcoming Event</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/firstfridayatcisindia-dr-madan-oberoi-digital-forensics-april-07">Digital Forensics and Cyber Investigations</a> (CIS; New Delhi; April 7, 2017). IPS officer Dr. Madan M. Oberoi will give a talk. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<br />
<p>►Big Data</p>
<p><b>Blog Entry<br /></b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/benefits-harms-rights-and-regulation-survey-of-literature-on-big-data">Benefits, Harms, Rights and Regulation: A Survey of Literature on Big Data</a> (Amber Sinha, Vanya Rakesh, Vidushi Marda and Geethanjali Jujjavarapu; edited by Sunil Abraham, Elonnai Hickok and Leilah Elmokadem; March 23, 2017). </li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/the-fintech-disruption-innovation-regulation-and-transformation">The Fintech Disruption - Innovation, Regulation, and Transformation</a> (Organized by Carnegie India; March 28, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay attended the event. </li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><br />
<ul>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">►Freedom of Expression</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Organized</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/essentials-of-building-internet-tools-for-inclusion">Essentials of building internet tools for inclusion </a>(Valencia, Spain; March 6, 2017). A talk jointly proposed by Chinmayi SK and Rohini Lakshané was selected for the Internet Freedom Festival.</li>
</ul>
<b>Participation in Events</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/from-virtual-to-reliable-exploring-freedom-and-facts-in-the-world-of-www-world-wide-web">From Virtual to Reliable: Exploring Freedom and Facts in the World of WWW (World Wide Web)</a> (Organized by Embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands and Adaan Foundation; March 21, 2017). Saikat Datta and Amber Sinha were panelists.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/internet-freedom-festival-2017">Internet Freedom Festival 2017</a> (Organized by IFF; Valencia, Spain; March 6 - 10, 2017). Vidushi Marda participated in the event. Vidushi also attended these sessions: <a class="external-link" href="https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Data_Protection_law_and_is_different_manifestations">Data Protection Law and its Different Manifestations</a>;<a class="external-link" href="https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/The_identity_we_can%27t_change:_a_new_wave_of_biometric_policies_around_the_world"> Using the Ranking Digital Rights Corporate Accountability Index for Advocacy & Research; The identity we can't change: a new wave of biometric policies around the world</a> and <a class="external-link" href="https://internetfreedomfestival.org/wiki/index.php/Enabling_free_speech_online_by_legal_defence:_the_need_for_skilled_lawyers_to_secure_the_free_flow_of_information_online">Enabling free speech online by legal defence: the need for skilled lawyers to secure the free flow of information online</a>: Vidushi channeled a discussion about Shreya Singhal v. Union of India as an important case study in understanding how legal defence has been used to secure rights online.</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
<ul>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<p><b><b>----------------------------------- <br /></b><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br /> </b>CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:</p>
<p><b>Newspaper Column</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-march-1-2017-shyam-ponappa-organisational-hurdles-in-telecom">Organisational Hurdles in Telecom</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; March 1, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; March 2, 2017)</li>
</ul>
<p><b>-----------------------------------</b><br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br /> 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:</p>
<p><b>Research Paper</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/exploring-big-data-for-development-an-electricity-sector-case-study-from-india">Exploring Big Data for Development: An Electricity Sector Case Study from India</a> (Ritam Sengupta, Dr. Richard Heeks, Sumandro Chattapadhyay, and Dr. Christopher Foster; Global Development Institute, University of Manchester; March 29, 2017). <br /><br /></li>
</ul>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/evaluating-safety-buttons-on-mobile-devices-preview">Evaluating Safety Buttons on Mobile Devices: Preview</a> (Rohini Lakshané and Chinmayi S.K.; March 27, 2017).</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>----------------------------------- </b></div>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br /> 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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a> </li>
<li> Twitter - Access to Knowledge: <a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a> </li>
<li> Twitter - Information Policy: <a href="https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy">https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy</a></li>
<li> Facebook - Access to Knowledge:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a> </li>
<li> E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: <a>a2k@cis-india.org</a> </li>
<li> E-Mail - Researchers at Work: <a>raw@cis-india.org</a> </li>
<li> List - Researchers at Work: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<div style="text-align: justify; ">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.</div>
</div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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 <a>tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><i>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</i>.</div>
</div>
</div>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2017-newsletter'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/march-2017-newsletter</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnaAccess to KnowledgeTelecomAccessibilityInternet GovernanceResearchers at Work2017-05-20T12:47:11ZPageBetween the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism
<b>In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.</b>
<p> </p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span"><em>Cross-posted from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/CDACS-DS-15-v3-fnl.pdf">Democracy and Society</a></em>.</span></p>
<hr />
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.</p>
<p>In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).</p>
<p>This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.</p>
<p>This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.</p>
<h2>Context</h2>
<p>It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[<a href="#1">1</a>] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[<a href="#2">2</a>] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.</p>
<p>Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.</p>
<p>In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.</p>
<p>Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.</p>
<p>While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).</p>
<p>Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.</p>
<p>Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.</p>
<h2>Snapshots</h2>
<p>We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[<a href="#3">3</a>] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.</p>
<p>The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[<a href="#4">4</a>] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.</p>
<p>As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."</p>
<p>Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.</p>
<p>Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."</p>
<h2>Propositions</h2>
<p>These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.</p>
<p>In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.</p>
<p>It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.</p>
<h3>About the Authors</h3>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.</span></p>
<p><span class="Apple-style-span">FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of </span><span class="Apple-style-span">interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.</span></p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">References</span></h2>
<p>Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. <em>Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website</em>. New York: Crown Publishers.</p>
<p>Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.</p>
<p>Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. <em>The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom</em>. New York: Public Affairs.</p>
<p>Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” <em>Foreign Affairs</em> 90, (1); p. 28-41.</p>
<p>Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, <em>Digital Natives Position Papers</em>. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.</p>
<p>West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. <em>Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation</em>. London: Berghahn Books.</p>
<h2><span class="Apple-style-span">End Notes</span></h2>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1">[1]</a> Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="1"> </a></p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="2">[2]</a> Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: <a href="http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site">http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="3">[3]</a> More information about the programme can be found <a href="http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause">here</a>.</p>
<p class="discreet"><a name="4">[4]</a> Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism'>https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism</a>
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No publishernishantDigital ActivismDigital NativesResearchNet CulturesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-10-25T05:58:59ZBlog EntryMaterial Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator
https://cis-india.org/raw/material-cyborgs-asserted-boundaries-formulating-the-cyborg-as-a-translator
<b>In this peer reviewed article, Nishant Shah explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The article was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2008. [1]</b>
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<p><em>Download the paper <a href="https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis/nishant/material%20cyborgs%20ejes.pdf/at_download/file" class="external-link">here</a></em>.</p>
<p><em>Read the original paper published by Taylor & Francis <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13825570802151504">here</a></em>.</p>
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<h2>I, the cyborg</h2>
<p>The cyborg, a combination of hardware, software and wetware, stands as one of the most visible figures of the cybernetic age. A portmanteau of two words: cybernetic and organism, the term cyborg refers to a biological being with a kinetic state that can be transferred with ease from one environment to another, able to adapt to changing environments through technological augmentation. The first living Cyborg to find its way into the human family tree was a rat. Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline – two astrophysicists, in 1960, thought of a ‘hybrid-organism’ system (a rat with an osmotic pump) that provided biological stability to an organism in response to its constantly changing environment. In their paper in Astronautics they wrote:</p>
<blockquote>For the exogenously extended organizational complex ... we propose the term ‘cyborg’. The Cyborg deliberately incorporates exogenous components extending the self-regulating control function of the organism in order to adapt it to new environments. (Clynes and Kline, 1960: 1)</blockquote>
<p>Notwithstanding this, the cyborg is most commonly thought of in a futuristic vein, escaping the confines of the physical body and recreated through various digital forms like databases, networks and archives.</p>
<p>With the emergence of the WorldWide Web, the cyborg has strategically evolved in our imaginations as a metaphor of our times.We are already in the age where the ‘first living cyborg’ (Warwick, 2000: 15) has announced his arrival. In his autobiography I, Cyborg, Stephen Warwick, a professor of cybernetics and robotics, unveils how he became the first human cyborg through a series of path-breaking experiments. He begins his narrative by saying, ‘I was born human. But this was an accident of fate – a condition of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change’ (Warwick, 2000: 5). Cybercultures theorist David Bell, on the other hand, especially with the proliferation of new digital technologies, in his preface to The Cybercultures Reader, locates the cyborg in ‘the crucial mechanics of urban survival’ (Bell, 2000: xxi) that produce everyday cyborgs through digital transactions and technologically augmented practices. Sherry Turkle, looking at the experiments in genetic engineering and reproductive practices, traces the processes of ‘cyborgification’ in the production of ‘techno-tots’ (Turkle, 1992: 154) – a new generation of designer babies who have been augmented by technology to have the perfect genetic composition.</p>
<p>In this paper, I seek to explore the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator, who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat– machine’, ‘digital–physical’, ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. What does the cyborg as a translator add to our understanding of the processes of translation? If we were to examine the formation of a cyborg identity embedded in the digital circuits of the World Wide Web, what is the text of translation? What are the translated objects? Who performs these translations? Is the user the omnipotent translator who brings to this site, her special knowledge of distinct systems to make meaning? When inflected by technology, does the process of translation, performed by the cyborg, enter into realms of incomprehensibility which get translated as illegality? How does the figure of the translating cyborg enable an analysis of the cyborg as materially bound and geographically contained, rather than the earlier ideas of the cyborg as residing in a state of ‘universal placelessness’ (Sorkin, 1992: 217)?</p>
<h2>Configuring the cyborg as a translator</h2>
<p>The cyborg, as fashioned by science fiction narratives, cinema and cartoons, conjures images of human–machine hybrids and the physical merging of flesh and electronic circuitry. Different representations of the cyborg abound in science fiction narratives in print, film, animation and games, from reengineered human bodies showcasing fin de millennia nostalgia for large robotic machines of power and strength to sleek and suave microchip-implanted silicon-integrated human beings who work in their artificially mutated enhancements. The cyborg has covered a wide imaginative range from looking at a happy human–machine synthesis to a degenerate human body made grotesque by machinistic implants to a rise of a potent cyborg community that threatens to overcome the human world of biological certainty and mortality. Some of the most famous instances of cyborgs in popular narratives illustrate this wide spectrum; from Maria the robot in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) to Lara Croft in the The Tomb Raider series (Toby Gard, 1996); from Case in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) to Mr Anderson a.k.a. Neo in The Matrix Trilogy (The Wachowski Brothers, 1999–2003); from Johnny Quest (Hannah-Barbara Cartoons, 1996–7) in the eponymous animated series to avatars created on social networking sites and MMORPGs <a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> like Second Life.</p>
<p>However, with the popularization and democratization of new digital technologies of information and communication (ICTs), we see a certain evolutionary production of the cyborg as an increasing number of people interact with digital spaces and sites and adopt mobile gadgets of computation and information dissemination as an extension of their bodies. The cyborg, as imagined within the digital realms of cyberspace, is imagined differently from the more hyper-real, hypervisible constructs within the fictional narratives.</p>
<p>Arjun Appadurai (1996), in his formulation of post-electronic modernity, explores how electronic media offer new everyday resources and disciplines for the imagination of the self and the world. He argues that the individual body and its ownership are wedded to the logic of capitalism and the notion of ownership that characterized most of the twentieth century. Appadurai suggests that the body becomes a site of critical inquiry and contestation because a capitalist state grants the individual the rights to his/her body and the choice to fashion that body through consumption patterns. When talking of Technoscapes <a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a>, Appadurai posits the idea of a technologically enhanced sphere of activities and identity formation that defy the processes of capitalism and produce new instabilities in the creation of subjectivities.</p>
<p>Cyberspace has become such a site where the individual body, marked in its being (genetically, biologically, socially and culturally) and circumscribed by the (physical, reluctant and cumbersome) space, can free itself from the relentless materiality of a capitalist set of reference points, to create a truly global self and a universally accessible space. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, in their comprehensive history of the origins of the web, mention how in 1968 Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider and Robert Taylor, who were research directors of the United States of America’s Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and who also set in place the first online community (ARPANET), prophesied that online interactive communities ‘will consist of geographically separated members, sometimes grouped in small clusters and sometimes working individually. They will be communities not of common location but of common interest’ (Hafner and Mathew, 1996: 44). This prophesy was realised by the end of the twentieth century, as scholars announce the construction of the ‘discontinuous, global agoras’ (Mitchell, 1996: 27) and the arrival of the new commons shaped within the technoscapes of the internet. The imagination of the internet as the new public sphere of communication, interaction and collaboration also brought into focus the skills that a cyborg requires in order to materially exist on the intersections of various domains. Donna Haraway, in her seminal essay ‘A cyborg manifesto’ (1991), posited one of the most influential imaginations of the cyborg as residing in the ‘optical illusion between social reality and science fiction’ (Haraway, 1991: 151) Haraway’s cyborg hints at the possibility of imagining the cyborg as a translator:</p>
<blockquote>The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household.<br />(Haraway, 1991: xxii)</blockquote>
<p>This cyborg, in the blurring of the public and the private, in the diffusion of the physical and the virtual, and in the yoking together of economic practices and social identities, becomes an agential subjectivity that translates one system into another, using the referents of meaning making and processes of knowledge production in one system for deciphering and navigating through the other system. Haraway’s cyborg is a willing and conscious extension; an illustration of what Judith Butler, in Bodies That Matter (1993) calls the ‘performative’, thus infusing the figure of the cyborg with the ability to negotiate with its immediate environment and shape it through the material practices it engages with. The cyborg as a translator, thus has an interesting role as a mediator between the two systems. The cyborg no longer makes the distinction between an original and a translated text – the two systems occupy equal and often contesting zones of reality and authenticity for the cyborg.</p>
<p>Sandy Stone, in her anthropological study on technosociality – the technologised social order that emerges with ICTs and the social order of the technologised communities – emphasizes this very critical role of the cyborg:</p>
<blockquote>In technosociality, the social world of virtual culture, technics is nature. When exploration, rationalisation, remaking, and control mean the same thing, then nature, technics, and the structure of meaning have become indistinguishable. The technosocial subject is able successfully to navigate through this treacherous new world. S/he is constituted as part of the evolution of communication and technology and of the human organism, in a time in which technology and organism are collapsing, imploding, into each other.<br />(Stone, 1991: 81)</blockquote>
<p>Stone’s idea of the cyborg as collapsing the binary between the organism and technology is indicative of how the cyborg, in its processes of translation, reproduces both the worlds, and in fact allows for a dual process of translation between the two so that systems implode to form a complex set of references that determine the meanings of the text. This dual process of translation produces a critical episteme to revisit the notion of translation where the skills of the translator and the figure of the translator are generally looked upon as residing in a nuanced and close reading of the original text and the interpretative techniques by which it is reproduced in the ‘new’ or translated text, making sure that the original gets suffused with the meaning and ironies of the other language. Stone also adds to Haraway’s conception of the cyborg as she recognizes another distinction that the cyborg as a translator blurs in its being – the distinction between technique and the structure of meaning.</p>
<p>The cyborg as a translator, because it produces its identities through the same techniques that it produces the translated texts, internalizes the very techniques of translation. However, this process of internalization, instead of making the techniques invisible, foregrounds them as essential to the comprehension and understanding of the meanings which have been produced in this dual process of translation. The next section of this paper does a close reading of an instance of particular cyberspatial form – the social networking systems – to illustrate the dual processes of translation and the textuality of the texts involved.</p>
<h2>Lost in translation</h2>
<p>Both Haraway and Stone imagine the cyborg in a process of self-authorship through the interaction with the digital technologies. However, both of them only deal with the conceptual category of the cyborg and do not really examine the specific practices that this cyborg produces. Within cyberspaces, social networking systems, blogs, MMORPGs, multiple user dungeons (MUD), discussion boards, media sharing platforms, p2p networks <a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a>, etc., all create different conditions within which the physical users, through their digital avatars, interact with each other and form complex models of social networking and personal narratives. In this section I look at the notion of this self-authoring cyborg, embedded in the social networking system of ‘Orkut’, to illustrate and examine the discussions in the preceding section.</p>
<p>Orkut, a Google project, is one of the most thriving social networking systems that allows people to reacquaint themselves with people they have known in the past – friends, colleagues, acquaintances, family – who might be distributed across geography and lifestyles. Orkut also enables people with similar interests to form communities and interact, network and form new relationships with strangers in an unprecedented fashion. Orkut follows the AmWay <a name="fr5" href="#fn5">[5]</a> Economic model for its social networking, whereby an individual person inherits the friends of friends, thus often connecting themselves down more than 50 levels of friendship. Such a connection, such possibilities of networking, and the overall feeling of belonging to a dynamic, ever-growing network, gives the users a heady rush of emotions, using Orkut for various personal and professional reasons – from dating to holding meetings, from public performances to professional networking.</p>
<p>Most users within Orkut find themselves members of communities which are created around themes, hobbies, issues, ideas, movies, heroes, idols, books, religions, universities and schools, organizations, institutions, subjects, disciplines and music. One of the pre-requisites for using the various services on Orkut to their full potential is the creation of a profile. The profile, unlike a personal ad, is a concentrated effort at translating the ‘physical’ self of the person into ‘digital’ avatars that refer to the ‘original’ user behind the profile. Because of the pseudonymous nature of cyberspatial interactions, there is also an extra effort at making these avatars more verifiable, more real and more trustworthy. As an increasing number of users use social networking systems to find friends, to connect with partners and form communities that often translate back into the physical world, they spend a lot of effort on their profiles, trying to simulate (or translate) their personal identities and ideas into the digital world.</p>
<p>Most users put pictures of their face, along with populating their own virtual photo album with pictures of their pets, partners, friends, family and places they have visited. Profiles often change, adding ‘new pictures uploaded’ as a caption, to invite friends to visit their space and find out what is new about their virtual lives. Users can also keep track of all the changes that the people in their networks are making to their profiles, thus giving the sense of a fluid and a changing persona rather than a static description. Applications which allow the users to track birthdays, special dates, online calendars and the important events in their friends’ lives, add to the nature of communication and interaction. Most profiles have a fairly detailed narrative, using poetic imagery, exaggerated style, witticisms and pop philosophy to translate the person behind the screen. The profiles are also filled with their favourite activities, TV shows, music and books. This process of mapping a virtual body and producing texts of the physical body is the first level of translation that the users perform. The model of cyborgs that Haraway and Stone posit look upon the possibility of role playing, of fantasy, of adaptation and of authoring the self, in this process of cyborgification, as extremely liberating and subversive.</p>
<p>The social networking system and the related profiles also draw our attention to the dynamic interactions of the translated self within the digital domains. Through a metonymic process, the digital profile – the translated self – comes to stand in for the bodies of the users who not only create the translated self but also mark it with desires and aspirations. The translated self is largely under the control of the physical body. And yet, there are several ways in which the translated self does not allow for the physical body to emerge as the original, the authentic or the primary self within the dynamics of this site. On the one hand, it is the physical body of the user that authors the digital self, and hence it should be looked upon as the primary or the authentic text. On the other hand, the interactions that happen within the social networking system are interactions of the authored/translated self. The responses that the profile receives, the way in which the self is represented, the techniques used to engage with more people or invite strangers to communicate, are all the practices of the digital self.</p>
<p>Within Orkut, the profile of the person is bound to the physical body of the user behind the profile. While it is of course necessary to invoke a virtual avatar, because of the nature of social networking with people one already knows or has known, there is a certain disinvestment of fantasy within Orkut. Several users select pseudonyms which allow them to remain totally anonymous, but most of them have a visible face which tries to approximate their real-life persona online. Unlike the circuits of blogging or role playing games, Orkut emphasizes the need to be a ‘real’ person, thus validating its unique feature of ‘scrapping’. By employing it, users are encouraged to publicly perform their intimacies and relationships, which can be easily documented and tracked by others outside the one-to-one interaction. Thus, there seems to be a specific need to narrativize the self though the profile and the various functionalities available on Orkut. Members of the Orkut community are encouraged to think of themselves as part of a larger database – transmutable, transferable sets of data which they have authored for themselves – and can mobilize their virtual self across different networks to enhance their sense of social interaction and networking.</p>
<p>Also, the digital self is not translated solely by the physical user. Orkut has a feature of testimonials where the people in the networks of the translated self, also author opinions, observations and endorsements for the profile. Moreover, the public nature of communication and the archiving of this, add to the meaning and the functioning of this translated self. This production of the meta-data introjects the translated self into a circuit of meaning making and producing narratives that is beyond the scope of the physical body. Thus, there is a strange tension between the physical body of the user and the translated self that the user produces, which leads to the emergence of a cyborg identity. The cyborg is neither the physical body nor the translated digital self. It resides in the interface between the two, each constantly referring to the other, creating an interminable loop of dependence. The cyborg, because it is produced by the very technologies of the two systems that it is straddling, makes these techniques or the technologisation of the self synonymous with the processes of producing the narratives or making meaning.</p>
<p>This production of narratives of the self through different multimedia environments is not simply a process of writing biography or making self-representations. The users on Orkut (as well as other social networking sites like MySpace or blogging communities like Livejournal) are authoring avatars or substitute selves which are intricately and extensively a part of who they are. These translated selves do not live independent lives, but are firmly entrenched in the physical body and practices of the users. While there is a certain flexibility in the scripting of the avatar, the projections are more often than not premised upon the possibility of a Real. The avatars are also scripted as engaging in extremely mundane and daily activities to create verisimilitude and to map the physical body on to the avatar. To leave status messages like ‘stepped out for lunch’ or ‘Working really hard’ or ‘I am bored, entertain me’ is common practice for the users. As increasingly more users stay connected but are not always present on these digital platforms, they also let the avatars ‘sleep’ or ‘eat’ or ‘go away for some time’, synchronizing the avatar’s actions with their own.</p>
<p>A look at many other similar sites like blogging communities on ‘Livejournal’, or dating communities like ‘Friendster’, can give us an idea that the first stage in authoring a cyborg rests in creating these profiles, or avatars. Users spend an incredible amount of time trying to create for themselves the best avatars, which will be continued projections of the self. These tend to rely mainly on the visual component, as in games like ‘Second Life’ and chatting platforms like ‘Yahoo!’, but they can also rely on a combination of visual and verbal elements. Thus, the cyborg starts a process of translation whereby both the physical body and the translated self are distilled into data sets that get distributed across different practices and platforms, changing continuously and feeding into each other. Thus, just the first step of translation – the translation of the physical body into the digital avatar – is already a complex state, where we it is not as if the cyborg exists ex-nihilo and then translates from one system to the other but that the cyborg is produced in this very process of translation. Moreover, the translated text is not simply the sole authorship of the cyborg but has other players, who are a part of either of the systems, adding meanings and layers to the text.</p>
<p>The second step in this process is a reverse translation. Even within role playing games, where the alienation of the avatar from the body reaches its highest levels, there is an invested effort on the part of the gamer to provide physical and material contexts to the imagined bodies which they have created. Mizuki Ito (1992), in her work about online gamers, looks at how, with an increased investment in the digital lives, users tend to shape their own physical selves around their projected avatars. Many chronic users of cyberspaces have their language, their social interaction and even the way they dress and behave affected by their practices online. Sherry Turkle, in her analysis of the MUD world in Life on the Screen (1996), points out that an increasing number of users start looking upon their screen lives as a constitutive part of their reality rather than an escape from it.</p>
<blockquote>A computer’s ‘windows’ have become a potent metaphor for thinking about the self as a multiple and distributed system. The hypertext links have become a metaphor for a multiplicity of perspectives. On the internet, people who participate in virtual communities may be ‘logged on’ to several of them (open as several open-screen windows) as they pursue other activities. In this way, they may come to experience their lives as a ‘cycling through’ screen worlds in which they may be expressing different aspects of self.<br />(Turkle, 1996: 43)</blockquote>
<p>In another essay, titled ‘Playblog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace’ (Shah, 2005), I illustrate how the process of ‘reverse embodiment’ takes place in the lifecycle of bloggers. This process entails a mapping of the translated avatar on to the physical body of the users. This process of reverse translation often leads to the users abandoning their avatars, cutting down on their public presence or sometimes actually committing ‘digital suicides’, killing their own selves to start new identities and networks. Julian Dibbell, in his celebrated essay, ‘A Rape Happened in Cyberspace’ (1994) looks at the dynamics of this reverse mapping or inverted translation as well. Dibbell was witness to one of the most popular cases of ‘digital violence’ in the late 1990s, when in an MUD, a particular user called Dr Bungle, devised a ‘voodoo doll’ on the Lambda MOO MUD, which gained control over two of the other users, making them enter into a series of involuntary sexual acts of deviousness and perversion, in a public ‘room’ where all the other users could see them. What might be looked upon as a simple gaming aesthetic of a more powerful player taking over the avatars of two players with lesser power became a topic of huge discussion as the physical users behind the translated avatars complained of feeling violated and ‘raped’. This claim had very serious consequences because it no longer allowed for a linear notion of the physical body being translated into a digital avatar but insisted that the translated avatar is always, because of the users’ emotional involvement but also because of the practices that the avatar initiates, mapped back on to the body of the physical user. This is a process of reverse embodiment where the presumed ‘original’ is now re-shaped and re-configured to suit the translated object. Such a phenomenon is perhaps possible only in the domains of the cyberspace. Also, the cyborg, generally presumed as residing in the physical body, is now relocated in this two-way process, at the borders where it not only facilitates meaning but also realizes itself in the process of facilitation.</p>
<p>The digital transactions in which the users within such spaces engage have huge social, economic and cultural purport. The authoring of these selves, of these digital avatars, leads to the idea of the cyborg as not simply a synthesis – a site upon which the synthesis happens – but as a dynamic situation in which all subjects participate, producing and supporting its own identity. The cyborg exists in the interstices of the different oppositions of the real and the virtual, the physical and the digital, the temporal and the spatial, the biological and the technological. Moreover, the cyborg does not reside simply within the digital domains but becomes and embodied technosocial being, with a material body that enters into other realms of authorship and subjectification. It is necessary to recognize that the cyborg is not simply a self authored identity but is also subject to various other realms of governance. These material cyborgs, then, assert the need for the body as central to their imagination.</p>
<p>This bounded cyborg is also subject to the territories that it resides within. The last section of the paper looks at the State as a critical part of the production of these material cyborg identities and analyses how the incomprehensibility of this particular identity reproduces it in a condition of illegality, rescuing it from the boundless universal imagination and reasserting the geographical and the territorial boundaries that the cyborg exists within. In this particular analysis, because of my own familiarity with the context and also because new digital technologies are still emerging and unfolding into new forms in India, I shall speak specifically of the Indian State but hope that the particular case that I analyse shall have resonances for other geo-cultural and socio-political contexts as well.</p>
<h2>The state of the cyborg</h2>
<p>The cyborg, thus residing on the interstices of so many different paradigms, can no longer be limited to aesthetized representations and narratives, but is becoming a part of everyday practices of global urbanism. The range of human–machine relationships is diverse and increasingly varied. We might not be complete cyborgs but we do deal with ‘intimate machines’ (Turkle, 1996: 142) and live in ‘cyborg societies’ (Haraway, 1991: 179). The cities where we we live constantly remind us of the machinations we are dependent on; sometimes they blind us of our dependence on the technology, sometimes they make it starkly visible. Different organizations like the Military, Space Studies, Medicine, Human Research and Education are using new forms of organism–technology interactions in the increasingly urbanised world. Just like the interactions of the translated avatara and the physical users, David Bell and Barbara Kennedy, in their introduction to The Cybercultures Reader, look at the interactions with various different technologies of communication and transport, and posit the notion of an ‘Everyday Cyborg’ that gets produced in everyday practices:</p>
<blockquote>Taking Viagra, or [using] a pacemaker, or riding a bike, or withdrawing cash from an ATM, or acting out [our] fantasies as Lara Croft in the latest Tomb Raider game or as a Nato bomber pilot blitzing Kosovo, or anyone watching footage from Kosovo live on the late-night news.<br />(Bell, 2000: ix)</blockquote>
<p>In their list, the authors are more interested in looking at human–machine interaction and making historical continuities to the production of a technosocial identity or a cyborg self. This ‘naturalized’ cyborg robs the cyborg of its criticality or importance. It seems to posit the cyborg as simply a coupling of organism and machine, and hence a benign cultural formulation which can now be decontextualized and analysed in the digital domains. The cyborg as a translator – initiating a complex and intricate set of relationships between the different systems of meaning making that it</p>
<p>straddles – questions this trvialization of the cyborg and instead helps produce the cyborg identity as an epistemological category which needs to be analysed to see the processes that produce it and the crises it produces in the pre-digital understanding of text and textuality.</p>
<p>It is with these questions that I begin the analysis of what has popularly been dubbed as the ‘Lucknow Gay Scandal’ in India. In India, under the Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, as a part of larger ‘Unnatural Sex Acts’, homosexual activity is a punishable offence <a name="fr6" href="#fn6">[6]</a>. However, the reading of this particular act has always been invoked in dealing with the act of same-sex sexual behaviour and not to punish a particular identity. However, when the queer rights and gay collectives started gaining momentum because of the rise of digital technologies (Singh, 2007), the production of the queer cyborg produced an anxiety about the fantasies, the digital avatars and the material practices of the users behind the avatars. In January 2006, policemen in the city of Lucknow, masquerading as gay men, registered with a popular queer dating website called ‘Guys4men’. Explicitly a gay dating site, it allows users to create their profiles, add pictures and text, translate their personal data in a scripted space, exchange messages and chat. Like the earlier discussed social networking sites, Guys4men also allows users to search and befriend each other, encouraging public discussions and arranging for physical encounters at a personal or a collective level.</p>
<p>These policemen created profiles and listed themselves as gay men, to start interacting with the members of the site. They solicited sex and meetings and finally invited five men to come and meet them in a public garden in Lucknow. When four of the five men turned up for the rendezvous, they were arrested on charges of obscenity, of soliciting sex in public and engaging in homosexual fantasies. The media reported this as ‘Gay Club Running on the Net Unearthed’ (The Times of India, 5 January 2006). The website was looked upon as a physical space where people indulged in ‘unnatural sex acts’.</p>
<p>The four men were punished, not for anything that they did in public or in the physical world but for their projected fantasies online. They were publicly humiliated, exhibited to the media as a ‘homosexual coup’ and put under arrest by the police. While a large part of the political society in India erupted in fury at the gross violation of the human rights and the punishment of fantasies, leading to a raging court case which still has not found resolution, what this paper hopes to glean from this particular case are four interesting points. Firstly, three of the four men, in their physical existence, were married and had children. They were not suspected to have homosexual inclinations by their family or friends, to whom this came as a huge shock. The evidence of the material practices of their physical bodies was not looked upon as strong enough to acquit them. Secondly, the policemen who were luring these men towards a homosexual encounter were themselves projecting similar fantasies. However, as theirs were sanctioned by some high authority, they gained validity and were not to be punished. It was almost as if the fantasies and the avatars that the policemen had were legitimate, sanctified translations of their selves, which made them different. Thirdly, while the men were caught in the physical meeting space, the charges against them were all based on their online activities. What was being produced was not even the act of translating their physical bodies into digital avatars. What was at stake in the particular case was the fact that, in the processes of translation, a reverse translation was also set into place, where the digital avatars and the circuits of consumption and interaction that these avatars entered into were mapped on to the physical bodies, reconfiguring them and marking them as queer. The men were punished not because they claimed a queer identity or because they had fantasies online which did not subscribe to the State’s directive. These men were being punished for the production of a cyborg self – a self which on the one hand was contained by the physical bodies of the users, thus subject to the processes of governance and administration applicable in the geography that they are located in, and on the other hand produced by the imagined selves – the translated avatars which reside outside of the geo-territorial regimes. It is this production of the queer cyborg, residing on the boundaries of sexuality, of nationality and subjectivity that was sought to be punished in this particular case.</p>
<p>On the whole, this case seems to prove that there is a very definite move, on the part of the State, towards the recognition of online avatars as not only extensions of the self but as more powerful identities than the physical self. The State imagines the users of cyberspace as ‘real’ cyborgs and conceives their online activities, fantasies and role-plays as punishable offences. The State also recognizes their translated selves – their datasets that they authored – as verifiable proof of their existence and actions online. The story of the Lucknow incident brings to the fore the possibility that there might also be reluctant cyborgs. The notion of the translator is always somebody who is in a conscious condition of deploying knowledge in order to bridge the gap between different paradigms. However, as the digital world becomes more democratic and becomes a part of our daily transactions, an increasing number of users enter into conditions of translation which they might not recognize as translation. It is also imaginable that a large number of users might resort to the cyberspace to reach a particular aim, without wishing to produce any elaborate narratives of themselves. They might be completely unaware of the processes of reverse translation which follow. However, because of the State’s investment in digital technologies and its infrastructures, individuals get authored as cyborgs, having to take responsibility for their actions and fantasies online, against their will and outside of their knowledge.</p>
<p>The implication of the State or other State-like bodies in the production of these cyborg identities and texts makes us aware of the fact that processes of translation are not simply about the intention and the effort of the translator, but are also severely embedded in the techniques used for translation and the contexts within which the translator and the translated identities are produced. In earlier discussions of testimonials and scraps on Orkut or commentating and editing on blogging platforms, we had already looked upon how the translated text, even when it is a self-narrative, on the digital interfaces, is already a product of multiple authorships and can no longer be attributed to a single individual translator. Similarly, the cyborg identity that is produced in the processes of translation – the cyborg as a translator – is also not a product of individual desire or intention but is often brought into being through the various other players within the internet as well as within the physical contexts of the users.</p>
<h2>Why cyborg?</h2>
<p>The everyday embodied cyberspace cyborg thus becomes subject to the state as well as the technology. People who enter the digital matrices are made accountable for their actions and travels in cyberspaces. There is an increased anxiety around monitoring these processes of translation, of reverse translation and production of translated cyborg identities that are becoming such an integral part of cyberspatial platforms.</p>
<p>The virtual avatars are re-mapped onto the body of the user, thus reconfiguring the notion of the self and the body. The state, through its efforts, becomes a major player in the authoring of the cyberspace cyborg. Other surveillance technologies like Close Circuit Television (CCTV) for instance, also produce unwilling or unwitting technologized narratives of the users caught under the camera. It is possible to use CCTV in public spaces and capture users in different actions which they can be held responsible for later. However, the cyberspace cyborg differs significantly from this model because the users of cyberspace are willing participants of the spaces which they occupy.</p>
<p>The positing of the cyborg as a translator and as an identity that emerges out of translation practices defines a clearer role for translation and a larger definition for translation as it gets inflected by digital technologies. Instead of the universal hyperreal agent, the cyborg as a translator emphasizes one of the fundamental principles of understanding translation – the context of the translator, the agential negotiations of the translator with the original text, the processes by which the self of the translator get produced and the importance of the technologies within which the translation occurs. The collaborative nature of digital technologies and cyberspatial forms illustrates how the process of translation is not singular and that the relationship between the presumed original and the translated text also need to be re-visited. However, more that anything else, the cyborg as a translator makes it clear that the translated text is not produced in isolation or by a single author. There are various contributions that emerge from the networks within which the cyborg translator operates and from the different technologies of governance that the cyborg translators as well as the translated texts are subject to. On the other hand, to the body of cybercultures which has sustained interest in the production and imagination of the cyborg, the cyborg as a translator offers a different way of locating the cyborg identity – not as an identity produced through cyberspaces, but as an embodied cyborg that emerges as an epistemological category to explain the processes of collaboration, sharing, collective authoring and possession of the new digital spaces.</p>
<h2>Notes</h2>
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>] This paper owes huge intellectual and emotional debt to Rita Kothari who first invited me to contribute to this issue, helping me formulate the germ of the idea and to Elena Di Giovanni who has been an extremely patient editor, guiding me through the many drafts that gave shape to this final version.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>] MMORPG – Massively Multiple Online Role – playing game is a genre of gaming in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. The MUDs that Sherry Turkle studied can be looked upon as the direct antecedents to MMORPGs like Second Life and War of Warcraft – two of the most popular gaming platforms in current times.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>] Technoscapes are the landscapes of technology. They refer to technology as both high and low, informational and mechanical, and the speed at which it travels between previously impassible boundaries. Appadurai uses the idea of Technoscape to imagine a fluid and transmittable topography of technology, where the different transactions and the identities formed online have material consequences in economic flows and societal formations. The cyborg thus produced actively chooses and negotiates its identity. Identities are no longer solid, but become fractured, in that we no longer have to choose the identities or accept the ideas of the local community. We are actively choosing our programming based on that which is available to us. While the cyborg may choose to act in a manner most appropriate or relative to the cultures and geographies it is embedded within, that is no longer the only programming option available to it and many are choosing to look beyond their own cultural arenas.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>] P2P networks – peer-to-peer networks – inherit the cyberspatial aesthetics of decentralized networks; of nodes being distributed across the circuits of the internet and talking to each other, collaborating in projects, sharing information and exchanging digital material. The p2p networks have been under severe focus because they allow for unmonitored piracy and exchange of information</p>
<p>[<a name="fn5" href="#fr5">5</a>] AmWay emerged in the 1960s as the first of its kind of multi-level marketing company where the individuals inherit each other’s customers and profits through a simple system of multi-directional networking.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn6" href="#fr6">6</a>] The Wikipedia entry for IPC Section 377 reads: ‘Homosexual relations are technically still a crime in India under an old British era statute dating from 1860 called Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalises ‘‘carnal intercourse against the order of nature.’’ Since this is deliberately vague in the past it has been used against oral sex (heterosexual and homosexual), sodomy, bestiality, etc. The punishment ranges from ten years to lifelong imprisonment’. The relevant section reads: ‘Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished with imprisonment for life, or with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to ten years, and shall also be liable to fine’.</p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>Appadurai, Arjun (1996). <em>Modernity At Large</em>. New Delhi: Oxford UP.</p>
<p>Bell, David (2000). ‘Introduction I Cybercultures Reader: a User’s Guide’. <em>The Cybercultures Reader</em>. Eds David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London and New York; Routledge.</p>
<p>Butler, Judith (1993).<em> Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex</em>’. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Clynes, Manfred and Nathan Kline (1960). ‘Cyborgs in Outerspace’ 20 November 2002. <a href="http://search.nytimes.com/library/cyber/surf/022697surf-cyborg.html">http://search.nytimes.com/library/cyber/surf/022697surf-cyborg.html</a>.</p>
<p>Dibbell, Julian (1994). ‘A Rape in Cyberspace, or How an Evil Clown, a Haitan Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into a Society’.<em> The Village Voice</em>.</p>
<p>‘Gay Club Running on Net Unearthed’. <em>The Times of India</em>. 5 January 2006. <a href="http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Lucknow/Gay_club_running_on_Net_unearthed/articleshow/msid-1359203,curpg-2.cms">http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Cities/Lucknow/Gay_club_running_on_Net_unearthed/articleshow/msid-1359203,curpg-2.cms</a>.</p>
<p>Gibson, William (1994). <em>Neuromancer</em>. New York: Ace Books.</p>
<p>Hafner, Katie and Mathew Lyon (1996). <em>Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet</em>. New York: Simon and Shuster.</p>
<p>Haraway, Donna (1991). ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century’. <em>Simians, Cyborgs, and Women</em>. New York: Routledge, 149–81.</p>
<p>Ito, Mizuko (1992). ‘Inhabiting Multiple Worlds: Making Sense of SimCity2000TM in the Fifth Dimension’. <em>Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots</em>. Eds Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Licklider, C. R. and Robert Taylor (1968) ‘The Computer as Communication Device’. <em>Science and Technology</em>, 21–31 April. <a href="http://www.cc.utexas.edu/ogs/alumni/events/taylor/licklider-taylor.pdf">http://www.cc.utexas.edu/ogs/alumni/events/taylor/licklider-taylor.pdf</a>. Accessed 5 November 2005.</p>
<p>Mitchell, William (1996). <em>City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn</em>. Cambridge: MIT.</p>
<p>Shah, Nishant (2005). ‘Playblog: Pornography, Performance and Cyberspace’. <a href="http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/the-art-and-politics-of-netporn/">http://networkcultures.org/blog/publication/the-art-and-politics-of-netporn/</a>.</p>
<p>Singh, Pawan Deep (2007). ‘Inside Virtual Queer Subcultures’. MA Thesis. Hyderabad Central University.</p>
<p>Sorkin, Michael (1992). ‘See you in Disneyland’. <em>Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space</em>. New York: Noonday Press.</p>
<p>Stone, Sandy (1991). Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 81–118.</p>
<p>Turkle, Sherry (1992). ‘Cyborg Babies and Cy-dough-plasm’. <em>Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots</em>. Eds Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit. New York: Routledge.</p>
<p>Turkle, Sherry (1996). <em>Life on the Screen: Identity in the age of the internet</em>. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.</p>
<p>Warwick, Stephen (2000). <em>I, Cyborg</em>. London: University of Reading Press.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/material-cyborgs-asserted-boundaries-formulating-the-cyborg-as-a-translator'>https://cis-india.org/raw/material-cyborgs-asserted-boundaries-formulating-the-cyborg-as-a-translator</a>
</p>
No publishernishantBodyResearchCyborgsNet CulturesPublicationsResearchers at Work2015-10-25T05:57:08ZBlog EntryDigital Humanities for Indian Higher Education
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education
<b>The digital age has had a huge impact on higher education in the last decade transforming the modalities of both teaching and research. To discuss these changes and what it means for research work, a multidisciplinary consultation was held at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore on July 13, 2013. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hosted by <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/">HEIRA, CSCS</a>, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/">Tumkur University</a>, the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.tiss.edu/">Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS)</a>, Mumbai the <a class="external-link" href="http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/hpg/ragh/ccs/">Center for Cultural Studies (CCS)</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge">Access To Knowledge Programme</a> of <a href="https://cis-india.org/" class="external-link">Centre for Internet and Society (CIS)</a>, the consultation addressed what it meant to be a Digital Humanities researcher and how to curricularize something that refuses to confine itself to disciplinary boundaries. The introduction note had <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/tejaswini-niranjana">Tejaswini Niranjana</a> of HEIRA-CSCS & TISS speak of the promise of free and democratic education on the Internet, which had so far failed in a sense that scholarship was having difficulties with justifying work produced online. Especially in India the question of integrating scientific work in local languages was of importance, as mainly research is happening in and for the English-speaking world.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as <a class="external-link" href="http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Visdaviva">Vishnu Vardhan,</a> Programme Director, Access to Knowledge at CIS pointed out when taking over the second part of the introduction, projects like the Indian language Wikipedia project are making an attempt to fill that gap. One of the key aspects to digital humanities is that knowledge should be free and open source and providing Wikipedia in Indian languages is a step towards more accessibility. Of course the field is not easy to define. The digital humanities embrace everything technological, which means that often one could be doing digital humanities work without actually realizing it, as Vishnu Vardhan exemplified with the media archive work he had been doing before the term "digital humanities" was properly coined.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">This example serves for one of the many ways in which digital humanities is work that involves not just reading theory but actually "building", as Stephen Ramsay had called it. As has been hinted at in the previous blog posts on digital humanities, this calls for a new set of tools and skill sets for students entering the "field". Again, there is little clarity on whether or not the digital humanities can be seen as a field, however, for the sake of simplicity, I address it as one. It should be stated, though, that this field does not have the classical confines and closed boundaries of disciplines, but is conceived as an open, ever-changing space in which work is being done in a trans-disciplinarily way. Within this field, new questions arise: What exactly is this producing? Is the archive the number one research output? And if yes, what does that mean for the humanities field? As the way archives are produced influences the very content of knowledge, digital technologies being implemented must have an impact on today's knowledge inventory. Passing knowledge and improving scholarship is therefore an important factor for accessibility and an equalizing societal factor.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the first session of the day <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/profile.php?uid=140">Amlan Dasgupta</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/index.php">Jadavpur University</a>, Kolkata addressed the problems of curricularising digital humanities. As it is a field that deals with contemporary social factors, which are ever-changing, it is difficult to set up a course much in advance, which will match the expectations it produces. Nonetheless, the instability of digital platforms is not only negative. While a course should have a certainty about what it needs to deliver, the openness of digital humanities seminars enable venturing into unknown research territory with possibly unpredictable and therefore fruitful outcome. While the internet suggests a world wide collaboration possibility, little research is being done in local Indian languages, as optical character recognition is a problem online. Which is why India has experienced what Dasgupta calls an 'archiving moment', several older texts and research work are being digitally archived so as to make them more accessible and increase the native language portfolio. This is part of what can be called the first wave of digital humanities, where mainly non-digital material are transferred into a field of digital operability.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The so-called second wave of digital humanities focused on things "born" digital, inherently digital experiences, like computer games, 3D modeling, GIS mapping and digital surrogates. In the digital age, all cultural experiences have a digital part. While aforementioned categories are purely digital, cultural and societal objects are not necessarily that easily defined. We are experiencing the merge of the digital and analog, it is impossible to think the one without the other. This is where the digital humanities step in, as they are not only about using these experiences, but actually about making them. Therefore, the field could be about evolving tools, free and open-source tools, which ensure access, build databases and create metadata. It is essential that one develops ones own methods and tools to do digital humanities work. Metadata should be community held and a collaborative process, not only to include many voices but also because authorship is evolving and there is no one single heroic individual who processes data.</p>
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<th><img src="https://cis-india.org/home-images/Ravi.png" title="Ravi Sundaram" height="297" width="397" alt="Ravi Sundaram" class="image-inline" /></th>
<td style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/faculty_ravi_sundaram.htm">Ravi Sundaram</a> from <a class="external-link" href="http://www.sarai.net/">Sarai programme</a> at the <a class="external-link" href="http://www.csds.in/index.php">Centre for the Study of Devloping Society</a> added to that in his talk about intimating the archives by expressing the importance of digitizing the Indian labour archive, calling it one of the important 'doings' of digital humanities. The so-called third wave of digital humanities takes the computational turn for granted and makes big data the rhetoric of the present. Within the digital, a post-device landscape has evolved, which means that objects are dematerialized. The unanswered question is what exactly that means for the user. Squndaram introduces a Sarai-CSDS project, in which the job was not providing access, but publishing online without copyright and<br /></td>
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<td colspan="2" style="text-align: justify; ">therefore generating knowledge, which could be used and transformed according to will and purpose. This happened via bilingual mailinglists even before a designed and visual interface was possible online. In this way, there was a world-wide connection of people doing research work. The information was curated via a peer-review system, which, too, has become an important methodology for digital humanities work. The Sarai archive project has taken it upon itself to curate live digital humanities projects, allowing anyone to post online, from the working class to academic people, in English and Hindi. As publications are more and more taking place online, languages are formed by the gadgets and media that are used to produce them. The digital, as well as literature are being inhabited by multiple authorships and scholarly activity must develop to accommodate these circumstances. Text is being produced on mobile phones and no longer necessarily conforms to classroom rules. Therefore, being a digital humanist includes the attempt to overcome the crisis traditional humanities encounter in the classroom.</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://cis-india.org/about/people/our-team" class="external-link">Nishant Shah</a>, joining in on Skype in digital humanities manner, explained his first encounter with digital humanities arising the hopes of his science fiction dreams finally coming true. The encountered reality, however, faces many challenges amidst the number of possibilities it brings. Digital humanities are complex as the field incorporates the object of study, just as it uses it as a methodology. As it uses the very tools and methods which define its existence, questions of humanities scholarship are getting reframed. Digital humanities rephrase questions of the social, cultural and political, making them more and more about infrastructure, turning the information society mainly into a data society. T<span>he critical skills of human intervention are now being replaced by new skills required in the time of data. This leads to a naturalization of data, which carries the danger of seeing knowledge once again as a given. As was explained in the last blog post, data is just as subjective as information and hiding this factor by neutralization and naturalization is a concern digital humanities need to address, as data has now become a structural component of being. When it was just information we were talking about, it was easy to distinguish between information and reality, as information was </span><i>about</i><span> reality. With data, however, this distinction is no longer possible as the data </span><i>produces </i><span>a reality. Therefore, data is a metaphor, which stands for the structure of our experiences. The problem is that most of the data being created is invisible to the human. What we post, blog or tweet creates a lot more behind the surface of computer interfaces. F</span><span>acebook is not information technology like cinema was. It produces data which is not for human consumption, namely algorithms, which are read only by artificial computer programs. We are in the service of producing data which cannot be neutral as we can not read it. In this way data dislocates the human and traditional humanities work is no longer sufficient. </span><span>So in digital humanities work we need to see what it cannot reflect. How do we translate humanities political idea to data management? This implies that digital humanities are not a continuum from traditional humanities, as digital humanities challenges aspects of humanities skills and beliefs. However, this does not mean that humanities have become dispensable. In fact humanities and digital humanities should not compete with, but add to each other. So the thought process should not be what the digital can do for the humanities, but what the two fields could do for each other. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>Returning to scholarship, </span><span><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy_of_sabah-siddiqui">Tanveer Hasan</a> and <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/staff-cscs/copy2_of_sabah-siddiqui">Sneha PP</a> introduced the Pathways to Higher Education project they had been working on, which focuses on language and technology in the undergraduate space. The aim of the project is to improve the quality of access in higher education and focused on the linguistic and digital divide in India. Workshops were organized on social change and collaborative learning, in which students could look at technology not just as a tool but also as a form of political and critical engagement, raising the question of how that defines the way someone looks at a project. As students are stakeholders in knowledge production, their input is much required and forms academia. There seems to be the perception that the digital is only for a certain group of people and predominantly produced in english. However, the course of the project showed that the digital can be produced in alternative, non-hegemonial spaces and realities. Digital platforms join debates based on global and local knowledges, so it is vital to employ them so as to strengthen community knowledge. However, digital debates are not easily accepted in the classroom, as social media platforms like Facebook are frowned upon by teachers, who see them only as a socializing tool. One of the challenges digital humanities face therefore surely is the skepticism it receives upon trying to produce knowledge outside of classical academic institutions. Related to this the question arose on how this 'doing' in digital spaces translates into 'learning' in an academic sense. Many of the scholars in the project were very happy to produce visual material. However, when they were asked to write in their local languages, text production was reluctant or not happening at all. One suggestion the project made to this was to stop devaluating Wikipedia as a source and scholarly tool, and instead to get students to contribute to its knowledge repositories as it is included in academia.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: justify; ">In a session of participants responding to the presentations, many anxieties in doing digital humanities was addressed. A fear was voiced that digitization might be destroying archives, just as it attempted to reconfigure them. The relationship with text was becoming more difficult, as digital humanities tend to reject written work, feeling it was becoming more and more of just an add-on, which felt artificial. This could result in an analytic vs. artistic divide and the question formed was how to play with text in digital humanities work in a less frontal and confrontational manner.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>It was noted that even as data is becoming synonymous with reality, interpretational challenges persevere. Entering a google search query can generate meaning, however its outcome is obscured by algorithms. A difficulty, especially in India, is that databases are only being implemented in a low percentage, once they are produced. So creating data is not enough to overcome knowledge gaps. Digital humanities are faced with the challenge of making information and data literacy increase. This needs to happen in collaboration with governmental organs, as India's government has difficulties with patent licenses and digital rights. As the perception remains that the digital is natively english-speaking, less value is given to resource material in local languages. As all computer updates, etc., run in english language, the fact that knowledge can and should be produced in one's own native language is obscured. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>The expressive potential of these minority languages is therefore decreasing, a matter of concern for Indian academia. Knowledge production of educational material must be included into scholarly work, to work against this decline. In this sense, the importance of the community was addressed. When experimenting with tools and technology, it is vital to exchange experiences and build a communal exchange. However, it was lamented that often ICT courses remain at a basic office-tools level. The content of digital humanities work cannot remain at a simplistic level but must include values and methods which go into greater detail and implement guerrilla methods. If we are not able to articulate a way of understanding the problem through these contexts, what is the good in sources of voices? The fear is that digital humanities is undergoing a shift from representation to segregation of knowledge repositories.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The digital age does not only influence knowledge repositories in the academic sense. In his talk, <a class="external-link" href="http://cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/faculty-cscs/ashish-rajadhyaksha">Ashish Rajadhyaksha</a> describes the political perspective of digital humanities by the example of the UID project in India as something that has inhabited the digital ecosystem. Within the digital, what used to be public space is now perceived more as public domain – a trend towards making data compulsory. As one can see with UID and the condition of transfer from a state to an e-state in which India seems to find itself, forced digitization can increase the digital divide and marginalize certain groups of people. Rajadhyaksha's "Identity Project" looks at what it means to have a digital identity and how it can occupy space within digital ecosystems. This project is transparently documented under </span></span><a class="external-link" href="http://pad.ma/CIZ/editor/BR">Pad.ma</a><span><span>, encouraging alternative publishing methods, such as QR-codes in text sequences leading to the video interviews they refer to. With this explosion of data being created, it should be considered that it impacts on personal views of privacy. One theory is that the anonymity rises in the sea of data, another could be that personal inhibition thresholds are lowered. It also gives rise to the question, what it means to have free digitization. As we can see with the example of google's data mining, free internet does not mean you are not paying in some way. Apart from the data you provide in exchange for online services, these are of course always gadget-based, forcing users to invest in new appliances. If digital humanities relies on the hardware and software of mainstream corporations, can it express capitalistic critique?</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In several ways the answer to that question remains unclear. While traditional humanities addressed social inequalities and expressed critique, a technologized humanities concept has different aims, as <a class="external-link" href="http://www.cscs.res.in/Members/people-cscs/students-cscs/copy17_of_ashwin-kumar-a.p">Arun Menon</a> of CSCS explains. Digital humanities has a scientific approach which does not reflect in humanities work. The computational turn has taken scientific work towards an affirmative and essentialist perception of truth, which claims to be exact and precise. This is the crisis the humanities are facing and that require a reshaping of the new arising field that is the digital humanities in India. Menon believes that digital humanities does not have content per se, but works along the boundaries of the humanities and the sciences. In this sense it cannot be a discipline or a field of its own, but can address the gray areas being left out by other disciplines and create new research paradigms by co-opting humanities with sciences.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">James Nye addressed the materiality of digital humanities by discussing what it meant to have and to hold them – materially and physically, as well as virtually. Physical resources are not enough but must be provided in local languages and virtual spaces. Good dictionaries are important resources for language knowledges not only on the basis of the commonest meaning but also its social connotations. The need is for librarianship to change to accommodate these diverse features.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>The last presentation of the day had <a class="external-link" href="http://presiuniv.academia.edu/SouvikMukherjee">Souvik Mukherjee</a> addressing the non-boundaries of digital humanities again, stressing the fact that </span></span><span><i>the </i></span><span><span>digital humanities did not exist. Rather, a multiplicity of digital humanities had arisen to incorporate topics like data mining, games studies, software studies and digital cultures. These study areas, rather than disciplines, are not always connected with concerns of humanities, but still make up a large part of digital humanities work. They, too, produce narratives as does any other research, however, often these narratives can be completely fictional and take place in digital realms. Facebook micro story telling serves as an example, just as gaming narratives do. While involved in gameplay, users create, read and write narratives as they play. At the same time they create identity and involvement, which can be diverse according to the digital space that identity is occupying. Therefore it definitely plays a part in deconstructing rigid ideas of identities. Tools like Poll Everywhere, Zotero or Posterous make academic work just as playful in a digital realm and create narratives similar to the ones in videogames as they construct an informational cloud on a discourse, which is not limited to ones immediate peers but invites a collaborative process. The suggestion is that discussions and research will remain fertile as long as they are not limited. Therefore digital humanities should be seen as an emerging field of enquiry rather than a discipline or even a non-discipline, embracing the intellectual culture of convergence that is happening online. </span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Summarizing the consultation, <a class="external-link" href="http://tumkuruniversity.in/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Ashwin-Profile-ENGLISH.pdf">Ashwin Kumar</a> articulated four rubrics under which the single presentations could be grouped. A large part of the presentations discussed digital humanities for and in pedagogy. These talks discussed what digital humanities was doing for the classroom, for teachers and teaching situations and academia in general. A second module saw digital humanities as a research modality and a tool developing discipline. The third rubric formed around seeing digital humanities as a new social skill, which enables a new way of sociality and mirrors society for it to be open for scrutiny. Another fourth rubric was around seeing the digital humanities as a new way of archiving, of storytelling and transmitting knowledge.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The question now is how to collaborate so as to take each of these areas forward and to evolve in the digital humanities under its redefined premisses. The data being produced cannot just be categorized and put on an x/y axis. So when humanities seems to have the systematic problem that it struggles to find the technology to accompany its work, for the digital humanities it seems to be the other way around. This implies a certain lack of content in digital humanities and it is a necessity to look beyond algorithms. The questions of digital humanities cannot simply be how many times a word comes up in a text. Digital humanities will generate this kind of enormous data which in itself is meaningless but will push us to ask the right questions. It will strengthen research by adding a new dimension to data. So anxieties about what it will do to the field are misplaced. Much more, the hope is that it will introduce new objects in questions on the paths we take to find new tools.</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/digital-humanities-for-indian-higher-education</a>
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No publisherSara Morais and Subhashish PanigrahiVideoResearchers at WorkDigital KnowledgeDigital Humanities2015-04-17T10:53:17ZBlog Entry