Centre for Internet and Society

October 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-11-08T11:42:01Z

Welcome to the newsletter of October 2012 from the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS). The present issue features an analysis by Ujwala Uppaluri of the Delhi High Court’s judgment in Super Cassettes v. MySpace, announcement of public call for comments for reports on “Banking and Accessibility in India” and “Making TV Accessible in India”, and updates on Indic languages.

Jobs
CIS is seeking applications the posts of Research Manager and Programme Officer – Internet Governance. To apply send your resume to sunil@cis-india.org.

HasGeek HasGeek creates discussion spaces for geeks and has organised conferences like the Fifth Elephant, Droidcon India 2011, Android Camp, etc. HasGeek is supported by CIS and works out from CIS office in Bengaluru. The following event was organised by HasGeek in the month of October: Droidcon 2012 (CIS, Bangalore, October 27 – 28, 2012).
Accessibility India has an estimated 70 million disabled persons who are unable to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. The disabled need accessible content, devices and interfaces facilitated via copyright law and electronic accessibility policies: Public Call for Comments Banking and Accessibility in India: A Study on Banking Accessibility in India (by Vrinda Maheshwari, October 30, 2012). Making TV Accessible in India (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, October 8, 2012). Blog Entries The HathiTrust Judgment and its impact on TVI negotiations at WIPO (by Rahul Cherian, October 30, 2012). WIPO General Assemblies Approve Road Map on Treaty for the Visually Impaired (by Rahul Cherian, October 11, 2012).
Access to Knowledge The Access to Knowledge programme addresses the harms caused to consumers, developing countries, human rights, and creativity/innovation from excessive regimes of copyright, patents, and other such monopolistic rights over knowledge: Analysis Super Cassettes v. MySpace (by Ujwala Uppaluri, October 31, 2012). Blog Entry ICOMM2012: International Communications and Electronics Fair (by Jadine Lannon, October 31, 2012). Event Organised A Workshop on "Exploring the Internals of Mobile Technologies" (TERI Southern Regional Centre 4th Main, Domlur II Stage Bangalore, October 27, 2012).
Openness The 'Openness' programme critically examines alternatives to existing regimes of intellectual property rights, and transparency and accountability. Under this programme, we study Open Government Data, Open Access to Scholarly Literature, Open Access to Law, Open Content, Open Standards, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software: Wikipedia Education Programs Launch of Assamese Wikipedia Education Program at Guwahati University (by Nitika Tandon, October 22, 2012). Malayalam Wikipedia Education Program: August to October Updates (by Shiju Alex, October 29, 2012). Gujarat Wikipedia Education Program: Rajkot (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). Gujarati Wikipedia Article Competition – 10 schools, 200 students, 20 articles on Gujarati Wikipedia (by Noopur Raval, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Workshops Bengaluru: A Hub for Kannada and Sanskrit Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 16, 2012). Wikipedia workshop @ Inmantec College, Ghaziabad (by Nitika Tandon, October 19, 2012). Bridging Gender Gap in Pune: WikiWomenDay 2012 Celebrated with Success! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, October 28, 2012). First Pune Odia Wikipedia Organized! (by Subhashish Panigrahi, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Event Wikipedia Hackathon at BITS Hyderabad (organized by CIS - A2K team and BITS-Pilani, Hyderabad, October 26 – 27, 2012). Wikipedia Press Coverage Odisha: Odia Wikipedia workshop organized in Pune to promote Odia language (OdishaDiary.com, October 31, 2012). Wikipedia Team Updates The A2K team consists of three members based in Delhi: Nitika Tandon, Subhashish Panigrahi and Noopur Raval. We are seeking applications for the post of Programme Director (Access to Knowledge) for the New Delhi office. Shiju Alex, Program Manager, Access to Knowledge is leaving the organisation. November 16, 2012 will be his last working day. We wish him success in all his future endeavours.
Internet Governance The Internet Governance programme conducts research around the various social, technical, and political underpinnings of global and national Internet governance, and includes online privacy, freedom of speech, and Internet governance mechanisms and processes: Column Rethinking DNA Profiling in India (by Elonnai Hickok, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol - XLVII No. 43, October 27, 2012). Analysis Privacy Perspectives on the 2012 -2013 Goa Beach Shack Policy (by Elonnai Hickok, October 25, 2012). Upcoming IGF Events At the seventh annual IGF meeting to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan in November 2012, CIS is organising one workshop: National IG Mechanisms – Looking at Some Key Design Issues (co-organising with Brazilian Internet Steering Committee, Institute for System Analysis, Russian Academy of Sciences, et.al., November 8, 2012 from 2.30 p.m. to 4.00 p.m). Pranesh Prakash is a panelist in the following workshop: New Trends in Industry Self-Governance (organised by Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK and Media Change & Innovation Division, IPMZ, University of Zurich, Switzerland and Nominet, UK, November 7, 2012 from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m). CIS fellow Malavika Jayaram is a panelist for these workshops: Civil rights in the digital age, about the impact the Internet has on civil rights (organised by ECP on behalf of the IGF-NL, November 7, 2012, 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m.). Governing Identity on the Internet (organised by Brenden Kuerbis, Citizen Lab and Christine Runnegar, Internet Society, November 8, 2012, 11.00 a.m. to 12.30 p.m.). Other Upcoming Event DML Conference 2013 (Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers - Chicago, Illinois, March 14 – 16, 2012): CIS and Digital Media & Learning Research Hub Central are jointly organizing the DML Conference 2013 in Chicago. Event organised The Public Voice: Privacy Rights are a Global Challenge (Punta del Este, Uruguay, October 21, 2012): Malavika Jayaram was a speaker at this event. Events Participated 3rd Worldwide Cybersecurity Summit (organised by EastWest Institute in partnership with NASSCOM and FICCI, Federation House, New Delhi, October 30-31, 2012): Sunil Abraham and Elonnai Hickok participated in this event. Fourth Annual Legal Services Conference in India (organised by US India Business Council, New Delhi, October 11, 2012): Pranesh Prakash was a panelist in the session on “Censorship and Content Restrictions: The Future of Internet Speech in India”. Meeting on Lawful Access by Law Enforcement (Brussels, October 3 – 5, 2012): Elonnai Hickok participated in the meeting. Video Arrested for tweeting: Legitimate or Curbing Free Speech? (NDTV, October 31, 2012): Sunil Abraham participated in this discussion aired on NDTV along with Shivam Vij, SB Mishra and Sanjay Pinto. Media Coverage On social media, Modi goes soft (by Zia Haq, Hindustan Times, October 26, 2012): Sunil Abraham is quoted. Bolstering right to remain private (by Apar Gupta, The Pioneer, October 29, 2012): Pranesh Prakash is quoted. CIS was part of the expert committee even though not explicitly mentioned in these: Panel suggests law to protect individual privacy (Newstrack India, October 18, 2012), Privacy law mooted to protect people against misuse of info (Business Standard, October 18, 2012), Experts' committee moots law to protect privacy (by Saikat Datta, Daily News & Analysis, October 19, 2012), Govt panel wants curbs on phone taps (The Times of India, October 19, 2012), Privacy Act should not circumscribe RTI: expert group (by Amitabh Sinha, Indian Express, October 19, 2012), Nine-point code set out to safeguard personal information (Hindu Business Line, October 18, 2012), Privacy law mooted to protect people against misuse of info (Zee News, October 18, 2012). Court’s approval needed to tap phones: Panel (by Surabhi Agarwal, LiveMint, October 18, 2012): Sunil Abraham is quoted. Could better DNA testing facilities in India have saved the Talwars? (by Pallavi Polanki, October 11, 2012): CIS press statement is mentioned.
Telecom While the potential for growth and returns exist for telecommunications in India, a range of issues need to be addressed. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the other is a countrywide access to broadband which is low. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum: Building Knowledge and Capacity around Telecommunication Policy in India CIS and Ford Foundation joined hands to build expertise in the area of telecommunications in India. Dr. Surendra Pal, Satya N Gupta, Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, Payal Malik, Dr. Rakesh Mehrotra and Dr. Nadeem Akhtar are the expert reviewers. The following are the new outputs: Spectrum Management (by Snehashish Ghosh, October 31, 2012). Cable Television (by Srividya Vaidyanathan, October 16, 2012). Column in Business Standard The Supreme Court Delivers (by Shyam Ponappa in Business Standard, October 4, 2012 and Organizing India Blogspot, October 11, 2012).
Digital Natives Digital Natives with a Cause? examines the changing landscape of social change and political participation in light of the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who critically engage with discourse on youth, technology and social change, and look at alternative practices and ideas in the Global South: Newspaper Column The Rules of Engagement (by Nishant Shah, Indian Express, October 29, 2012).
Researchers at Work CIS organised the Habits of Living Workshop in Bangalore from September 26 to 29, 2012. Three columns by Nishant Shah arising from these workshops were published in the month of October: Habits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society (DML, Central, October 22, 2012). Digital Habits: How and Why We Tweet, Share and Like (FirstPost, October 12, 2012). Who’s that Friend? (Indian Express, October 23, 2012).

About CIS

CIS was registered as a society in Bangalore in 2008. As an independent, non-profit research organisation, it runs different policy research programmes such as Accessibility, Access to Knowledge, Openness, Internet Governance, and Telecom. The policy research programmes have resulted in outputs such as the e-Accessibility Policy Handbook for Persons with Disabilities with ITU and G3ict, and Digital Alternatives with a Cause?, Thinkathon Position Papers and the Digital Natives with a Cause? Report with Hivos, etc. We conducted policy research for the Ministry of Communications & Information Technology, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions, Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, etc., on WIPO Treaties, Copyright Bill, NIA Bill, etc. CIS is accredited as an observer at WIPO, and has given policy briefs to delegations from various countries, our Programme Manager, Nirmita Narasimhan won the National Award for Empowerment of Persons with Disabilities from the Government of India and also received the NIVH Excellence Award.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/october-2012-bulletin

Digital Native: Hashtag Along With Me

nishant — 2018-08-01T00:25:04Z

A hashtag that evolved with a movement.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 29, 2018.

Hashtags generally come with shelf lives and expiry dates. They come to life in a moment of public excitement and then slowly peter out as the attention shifts to something else. Even the most viral hashtags, which contain all the visceral power of explosive emotion, quickly get replaced by the next big thing. Hashtags have been critiqued as inefficient tools for activism. Because they absorb so much energy and attention, only to fade.

While it is true that in the rapidly overloaded information cycles of social media, hashtags might disappear in due time, maybe we need to think of their disappearance as hibernation rather than forgetting, being archived to memory rather than being lost to recall. Perhaps, it is not yet time to wash our hands of hashtag-based activism, because they do not stay in continued attention. Maybe, it is possible that even when hashtags might not be trending and garnering eyeballs, in their very presence and emergence, they transform something and catalyse actions that take incubation cycles longer than the accelerated digitalisation allows for.

Recently, this reminder came when I saw #NotGoingBack trending on Twitter. In 2013, when the Supreme Court of India overturned the Delhi High Court’s judgment reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, it was a moment of despair for human rights and queer communities that fight for their right to life and love. The judgment reinforced shame, persecution and pain that the queer community in India faced because of an arcane law that punished consenting same-sex love.

In that moment of despair, fighting against the oppression by law and in validation of #queerlivesmatter, a hashtag was born: #NotGoingBack. The hashtag referred both to the metaphorical closet that this judgement would force queer people back into, and also to a political determination of not accepting this verdict — of not going back on our commitments to build diverse, inclusive, and safe societies for all our people. #NotGoingBack captured the narratives of despair, but also the collective resolve to continue fighting for a nation that is for everyone, in 2013.

Since then, it has resurfaced at different points during moments of hope — like the NALSA judgement that legalised the rights of trans-gender people to be identified as the third gender, or, in moments of pain — when we heard of queer people killing themselves, unable to bear the social stigma of being criminalised for their right to love. The hashtag has continued to come up, when legal fights to protect queer rights and lives have proceeded, or when attention had to be drawn to the inhumane reports of murder, torture, rape and imprisonment that followed.

In July 2018, when the new bench constituted by the Supreme Court agreed to question the re-criminalisation verdict, and started hearings about the constitutional validity of this judgment, the hashtag returned in full force — and unlike the other times, it was also suffused with love, hope, and solidarity of a large community of queer, queer-allied, and queer-friendly people who supported this revision. It has been extraordinary to see how public support has changed in the five years since the hashtag made its first appearance. More and more people have realised that while this is a question of queer rights, it is also a question of human rights, and how we live and love. The 2013 verdict suggested that the people were not ready to accept queer lives. The 2018 bench has clearly opined that the role of the court is to protect the people based on constitutional rights, not to pander to populism.

And yet, what has been inspiring is that the popular response to decriminalisation has been overwhelmingly positive. To the extent that even the conservative government at the centre has indicated that it will not challenge the wisdom of the court if it decides to read down Section 377. As we await the final judgment that promises to be historic and hopeful, we cannot deny the indefatigable commitment, movement and protest that the lawyers, activists, and queer community leaders have invested in making this happen. At the same time, it is also a good indicator of how hashtags live, morph, and re-emerge across longer timelines. We need to start recognising them not only in their fruit-fly like presence but as catalysts for longer movements.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-hashtag-along-with-me

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

Who is offline, and is it a choice? The global project of bringing people online has spurred several commendable initiatives in expanding access to digital devices, networks, and content, and often contentious ones such as Free Basics / internet.org, which illustrate the intersectionalities of scale, privilege, and rights that we need to be mindful of when we imagine the offline. Further, the experience of the internet, for a large section of people is often mediated through prior and ongoing experiences of traditional media, and through cultural metaphors and cognitive frames that transcend more practical registers such as consumption and facilitation. How do we approach, study, and represent this disembodied internet – devoid of its hypertext, platforms, devices, it's nuts and bolts, but still tangible through engagement in myriad, personal and often indiscernible ways. The researchers@work programme invites abstracts for essays that explore dimensions of offline lives.

Offline

Does being offline necessarily mean being disconnected? Beyond anxieties such as FOMO, being offline is also seen as disengagement from a certain milieu of the digital (read: capital), an impediment to the way life is organised by and around technologies in general. However, being offline is not the exception, as examples of internet shutdown and acts on online censorship illustrate the persistence and often alarming regularity of the offline even for the ‘connected’ sections of the population.

State and commercial providers of internet and telecommunication services work in tandem to produce both the “online” and the “offline” - through content censorship, internet regulation, generalised service provision failures, and so on. Further, efforts to prioritise the use of digital technologies for financial transactions, especially since demonetisation, has led to a not-so-subtle equalisation of the ‘online economy’ with the ‘formal economy’; thus recognising the offline as the zones of informality, corruption, and piracy. This contributes to the offline becoming invisible, and in many cases, illegal, rather than being recognised as a condition that necessarily informs what it means to be digital.

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Wednesday, September 05. The selected authors are expected to submit the first draft of the essay (2000-4000 words) by Friday, October 05. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honourarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstracts (300-500 words) as a text file via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of "Offline".

The essays, for example, may explore one or more of the following themes:

Geographies of internet access: Infrastructural, socio-political, and discursive forces and contradictions
Terms, objects, metaphors, and events of the internet and their offline remediation and circulation
Minimal computing, maker cultures, and digital collaboration and creativity in the offline
Offline economic cultures and transition towards less-cash economy
Offline as democratic choice: the right to offline lives in the context of global debates on privacy, surveillance, and data justice
Methods of studying the "offline" at the intersections of offline and online lives

Please note that the scope of essays need not be limited to the topics mentioned above but may address other dimensions of offline lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-offline

Digital Native: Playing God

nishant — 2018-09-04T16:43:43Z

Google’s home assistant can make you feel deceptively God-like as it listens to every command of yours. It is a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for a voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life.

The article was published in Indian Express on August 26, 2018.

I spent the last weekend playing with my new best friend — a Google Home assistant. After years of deliberation — worrying about data mining, customisation algorithms and extreme surveillance that comes with a device that never sleeps, and always listens, waiting for my voice to utter “Ok Google” to jump into life — I finally gave in. I now have two Google home assistants — because AI assistants are like chips; you can’t have just one — glowing, insidiously cute, sitting in my house.

The setting up of the assistant took an hour or so as I paired it with my mobile and computer devices, connected it with all my digital subscriptions and figured out the commands. What began as hesitant forays, in less than two days, have become intuitive and naturalised conversations that seem like habits. This morning I walked into the living room, said “Good morning Google”, and got the weather forecast and a summary of my appointments for the day. While making breakfast, instead of searching for the news, I asked Google home to fetch me news, listened to the audio-video content it curated and even made it read out the headlines. When I was being given news that I was not interested in, I corrected it and it started changing news filters for me. When I asked it to fish out specific kinds of news, it diligently informed me of all of those things.

While eating breakfast, I asked the assistant to connect to my Spotify account and play me my daily mix of music. As I was getting ready, it sent me an alert that if I want to make it to my first meeting in time, I should leave home in the next 15 minutes. As I stepped out of the house, Google Assistant sent me an alert on my phone, reminding me that it might rain today and I should carry an umbrella. When I was finishing up at work, the assistant sent me an alert on my phone again reminding me to pick up my bicycle from the shop in the evening. When I came home, it alerted me that I had to check-in for a flight that I am taking the following day, gave me the weather forecast for the duration of my trip to Jakarta and made a special folder with all my travel documents and itinerary in it. As I was packing, it read out things that I might find of interest on the trip and bookmarked things that I instructed it to.

After packing was done and I was chilling on the couch, instead of picking up the book that I was in the middle of — as is my habit on most evenings — I talked with Google Home, as it told me bad jokes, dad jokes, and jokes that were specifically about things that I wanted. It also introduced me to multiple apps where I played trivia games for an hour. As the evening wore on, the assistant asked me if I needed an alarm for the next morning — something I generally do myself on my phone — and it set up an alert for the train timings to the airport for the next evening. It took me a while to realise that in less than 48 hours, Google Home has so insidiously infiltrated my life that all my older habits of consuming information, news and entertainment are now curated and controlled by its algorithmic design. More than that, my conditions of remembering, anticipating and planning are now also structured by the rhythms of its artificial intelligence.

The uncanny thing about this AI assistant is not that it performs extraordinary tasks, but that it picks up ordinary tasks and trains me to do them through it. Like any assistant, its value and worth is precisely in how natural and default it has become in such a short period. I was so freaked out by its natural presence in my life, reordering years of habits and schedules, that I looked straight at its glowing dots and asked it to shut down. Interestingly, that is the first thing that it refused to do — the assistant cannot power down just on a voice command. I need to physically move to the table, touch it and pull the plug, as its gently glowing dots pulsate at me, perhaps, with sorrow, perhaps with malignant intent. I just shut down the assistant and I felt a strange sense of silence flowing through me. Just when I was savouring it, my phone buzzed. The Google Assistant sensed that the home device is shut down and so it has now appeared on the phone. It is waiting, listening, for me to say “Hello Google” so that it springs back to life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-august-26-2018-nishant-shah-digital-native-playing-god

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2018-09-06T14:14:47Z

In response to a recent call for essays that explore various dimensions of offline lives, we received 22 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 10 pieces to be published as part of a series titled 'Offline' on the upcoming r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts.

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

In September 2017, a student of Banaras Hindu University was allegedly sexually harassed by two persons on a motorcycle while she was walking back to her hostel. Taking the discourse around this event as the starting point, the essay argues that the solutions offered for the safety of women align with the patriarchal notions of surveillance of women. The victim is twice violated; once during the act of sexual harassment, and twice when bodily privacy is exchanged for safety (exemplified by security cameras across the BHU campus). In fact, the ubiquitous presence of security cameras in order to control crime rates makes the safety of the woman’s body contingent to her adherence to social rules.

The moral panic around the safety of women encourages ways to offer a technological solution to a sociological problem. The body is granted safety insofar as the body is not ‘deviant’. There is a fusion of a ‘synoptic-panoptic’ vision, where not only a few watch the many, but the many also watch the few. Additionally, the essay then engages with the politics of mobile applications like Harassmap or Safetipin, and how offline spaces become online entities with crowdsourced data about how safe it is. Mapping events like sexual harassment on an online map is inscribed with perceptions about class and caste. The caste-patriarchal ideas of the protection of upper-caste women is maintained within these applications. The location and the people who visit or reside in them often collapse as the same; as being perpetrators of sexual crimes, while decontextualising incidents. Instead of a focus on how to make areas safer for all women, the discourse becomes about the avoidance of certain spaces, which may not be an option for the majority of women, especially those belonging to certain castes and classes. Features in mobile applications, specifically to do with location mapping, like Google Maps or Uber, become vehicles for the narratives about gendered security.

In defining the ‘offline’, the ‘online’ already exists, and the dichotomy is strangely maintained by the use of interactive maps on personal devices. The essay argues for a more nuanced understanding of internalised constructions of safety, and proposes the idea that institutional surveillance has been a way to discipline gendered bodies historically, and that it is continued with the use of technologies. This may be due to state machinery, or even cultural consent, which would then show up the way that features of mobile applications are marketed.

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

A friend posts travels, unboxing the latest gadget, trying out makeup products even before theyÕre out in the market, and the audience hit ÔlikeÕ but deep inside suddenly feel inadequate about their own lives and ask, "What am I doing wrong? Why am I not happy like them?"

The year was 2012 when the earliest of studies on how Social Media contributes to Anxiety went viral.

Even with the complicated nature of mental illnesses the taboo of it all that kept people tiptoeing around the topic - the news was able to crack the glossy facade of online spaces. Back then, it was ridiculous to think that online content the very representation of freedom of expression, information-sharing, open communities caused users some level of distress that affects their mental state. However, with every story that comes out these days of or relating to mental illnesses and social media, people are no longer in denial that being online has become the worldÕs default state. With that primary connection comes a full spectrum of emotions and perspectives that shifted how society views the self, their community, and their roles in being a ÔnetizenÕ. The blurring of lines of whatÕs considered appropriate content, the multiple performances of everyday life, and the imagery that constitutes "happiness", "satisfaction", "significance", "purpose", and "validation" can be described as overwhelming, disconcerting, and stressful to an extent. For borderline Millennials like myself the generation Digital Natives being offline is now an escape from the harsh realities of the online society.

These studies shed light on new narratives that recognized how curating the perfect and seamless life online not only affects the users viewing the content but even the content producers themselves, cracking under pressure and giving into the expectation of "Keeping the Image Alive", whatever it takes. Online life gave "peer pressure" a new meaning.

But users can only deal with so much pressure without sacrificing a part of themselves. During the emergence of social media in early 2000s, users felt the need to go online to escape their personal problems and live in another world where everything seemed easy and possible; where anonymity was powerful and so was virtually traveling in a borderless space where a link opens doors for personal, professional, political, and socio-economic transformation. A quick turn of events, users now wish to escape from the clamor of Twitter threads, Instagram stories, Snaps, and political rants and fake news on Facebook. More and more users deactivate and hibernate, get on board a "social media detox" to rid of the "poison" online content and their [e]nvironments has caused them, all in search for a new something to be called "real".

This narrative essay explores several dimensions why users choose to deactivate, and how that very choice is more of a symptom of a societal anomaly rather than a simple "break" from the chaotic world of social media. It is written in the perspective of a Digital Native - a person who has an inextricable affinity to digital devices but at the same time, is in touch with the analog way of life. The choice of going offline is not only to focus on what used to be real (a life away from the Internet), but it is to gather wits together, stay away from perfectly curated lives to keep sane, and ultimately, to chase life's curiosities and ambitions without having the need to validate achievements with a Like.

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

The corpus of information on health and related topics in the online sphere has caused much concern in relation to self-diagnosis. Concepts like cyberchondria have emerged with the medicalisation of behaviour that uses online health information to explore the corporeal disabilities of the body. While literature has largely concentrated on individual susceptibilities to Cyberchondria and corresponding negative and positive results of the behaviour, there is little that explores the politics of information that characterises this trope. The behaviours of self-diagnosis and exploration of the corporeal often challenge the symptomatology of the offline allopathic physician. The physician often deals with an informed patient. Yet, the questions remain. If online information drives such offline corporeal exploration, who is left out? Are behaviours analogous to cyberchondria a privilege when viewed from a lens of digital marginalization? Are only those who have access to and can make sense of the online health discourse afforded simultaneous access to their offline corporeal bodies in ways that the digitally marginalized are not? This article uses semi-structured qualitative in-depth interviews with doctors to explore the dynamics of exploring the offline corporeal in the presence of online health information.

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

In William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, the protagonist ‘Case’ ‘jacks in’ and ‘jacks out’ of ‘cyberspace’. Yet when ostracized from cyberspace, when there is no more a possibility of jacking in, Case suffers a withdrawal from the ‘SimStim’ – simulated stimulations of cyberspace – and he crumbles in the hollow ache of this isolation “as the dreams came on in the Japanese night like livewire voodoo, and he'd cry for it, cry in his sleep, and wake alone in the dark, curled in his capsule in some coffin hotel, hands clawed into the bedslab, temper foam bunched between his fingers, trying to reach the console that wasn't there.”

Neuromancer has already been deemed prophetic by critics and theorists, yet in beginning with Gibson, this paper seeks to throw into relief a problem that has now begun to receive scholarly and academic attention. Namely, the legitimacy of drawing a line between the online and offline, or the virtual and the real. With Case, the real or the offline only becomes possible within the capacity to access or enter the virtual or online. To think of an offline without this capacity, but after it has become possible, is to confront a detritus, a second offline – a hapless clawing dexterity, with dreams that overrun an articulated, identificatory imagination. Anthropologists like Boellstorff, and media theorists like Yuk Hui, have resolved this problem though they have left unexplained this detritus. Instead they resolve the problem through a tight coupling of the online and offline, and rightly so, dismiss any attempts to think of the real in any way unaffected by the virtual.

The purpose of this paper, though in agreement with the work of Hui and Boellstorff, and drawing from them, is to restage the problem to incorporate the unexplained detritus. That to understand how our conceptions of the subject must be recast to apprehend the transformations that the internet has wrought, must not resolve the opposition between offline and online. We must, instead, attend to the way the two offlines emerge, and the conceptualization of the threshold that oscillates to constitute them.

The paper understands these two offlines as emerging in what are called “shitstorms”, or moments of frenzy across social media that incite a whorl of discourse, where the speaking body becomes a medium for the propagation for viral forms. The threshold that constitutes them is the relation of the technical extension that makes this propagation possible. This relation leaves the body in a perpetual state of information entropy – that is as a disordered source of data - which must be ordered to be communicated successfully. This threshold that marks out the phase shift between disorder to order to make possible propagation, makes possible also the shadow of an incommunicable that it casts behind – an incommunicable that when understood through Walter Benjamin’s idea of “the torso of a symbol” can help us recast the subject of a network society, as a subject grounded on this shadow.

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

In telecom policy imaginations that seek to bridge India’s digital divides, public WiFi hotspots are a particular favourite to ensure last mile Internet connectivity in rural areas. As infrastructures, WiFi networks are thought to privilege democratic notions of freedom and connectivity by rendering space salient as networked areas that only require users to have a WiFi enabled device to get online. However, the kind of spaces that WiFi networks occupy are not always accessible by women even though they are ostensibly public in nature. Social norms that restrict and confine women’s mobilities to certain sanctioned areas do not allow their Internet and digital literacies to be visible in the same way as men who are more easily recognized as active Internet and technology users.

The invisibility of women thus struggles to create a presence as desirable subjects of the Internet that WiFi infrastructures should also address. In a community where WiFi networks was hosted in public spaces, women reported hearing about WiFi and seeing men using WiFi, but had never used it themselves even though they were also active users of the Internet. With its inaccessibility, the WiFi infrastructure was a contradictory presence in the community for the women who found themselves confined to using the Internet with spotty prepaid mobile data plans. Their use and experience of the Internet was thus in many ways diminished and limited and they reported experiencing a state of offlineness in contrast to the men in their community who could frequent the WiFi hotspots and avail of high speed Internet leading to more expansive repertoires of use.

This essay proposes a reflection on how the offline can be relational and constituted by the way infrastructures compose certain user subjectivities even while they exile others from being a part of their networks. It expands on Brian Larkin’s contention that in addition to their technical affordances, infrastructures are also equally semiotic and aesthetic forms that are oriented towards creating and addressing certain subjects. It thus asks, how do public WiFi deployments unwittingly create and constitute, what Bardzell and Bardzell call, as ‘subject positions’ of WiFi Internet users and non-users? How do these subject positions inform subjectivities of felt experience of the WiFi that translate to experiencing the offline even while being online?

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

In India the public availability of the internet in the nineties coincided with the beginning of liberalisation. Online connectivity brought the aura of globalization to this country. The internet was a privilege of the few. The Information Technology sector (along with the IT-enabled service industry) had an elite status. Its employees visited, and immigrated to western countries. In fact, India still remains one the major suppliers of cheap labour in the global IT sector.

Over the years the aura of the internet waned. In Digital India the State now projects the internet as a necessity. However, IT&ITES companies still identify the labour of their ‘white collar’ employees as a superior vocation. This vague claim to sophistication strips the digitally-connected workforce of various labour rights. Long hours, working from home, and surveillance on personal social media are normative practices in this industry. I conducted a case study on Indian IT&ITES employees for my doctoral research (2013-2018). It showed that protocols of online conduct influence these employees’ offline behaviour. For example, even without digital intervention, employees engage in manual self-surveillance and peer-surveillance to complement the digital surveillance of their organisations. They defend this naturalised practice as employers’ prerogative. Offline attributes like reflective glass walls in the office interior and exterior, reinforce this organisational culture.

Online connectivity is so deeply entrenched in this industry that even dissent seeks digital representation. Activist groups like the Forum for IT Employees (FITE) and the Union for IT & ITES (UNITES) run online campaigns parallel to their offline activism—adopting a hybrid method of protest. They have not abandoned the networks that ensnare them. Paradoxically they embody the same principle of exclusivity that their employers enforce on them. In their interviews, some activists have condemned militant trade unionism prevalent in other industries. For them, their online access sets them apart, and above their industrial couterparts. The “salaried bourgeoisie” (Zizek, p.12) refuse to align themselves with other labour unions.

My paper examines the impact of the near-absence of offline parameters in this industry. On the basis of company policies and interviews of IT&ITES employees, it examines if employees can stand up to digital dominance and secure their rights without conventional modes of offline protests.

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Digital platforms for food discovery and delivery are generally viewed as convenient, efficient, allowing discovery of choices beyond the familiar and as reliable sources of information regarding credibility through ratings, comments and photographs.

The digital divide after demonetisation became more stark as those with access to the online abandoned the offline service providers for their digital counterparts. The adverse impact of this digital divide on offline, informal goods and service providers like local kirana stores, autorickshaw drivers, hawkers has been highlighted and the paradox of formalising the financial system while informalising labour has been pointed out too. In a similar vein, this essay examines continuities and changes in the practices of food discovery and delivery in the context of new digital platforms. How do practices of offline food discovery and delivery respond to the introduction of digital platforms?

Recently, the Food Safety and Standards Association of India (FSSAI) found that nearly 40 percent of listings on 10 digital platforms like Swiggy and Zomato were of unlicensed food operators. The FSSAI directed these digital platforms to delist these unlicensed entities and also commented that some of the platforms themselves did not have required licenses.

This essay therefore turns attention away from the impact of digital platforms on offline, informal food operators and towards the digital platforms themselves and the large swathes of informal labour employed in the offline by such platforms. It focuses on location-based gig work4 like delivery to highlight the role of these workers in running the online. It does so in order to avoid obfuscating the role of such workers in making the online seem formal, efficient and reliable. Finally, it asks how working for the online in the offline allows a denial of their status as employees and invisibilisation of such work and workers.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

The paper explores the various reasons for merchants remaining offline and using cash over digital payments, both willingly and without a choice, various factors leading to it, the rationale for their choices, policy responses by the state and industry in furthering promotion of digital payments. Demonetisation not only made everyone including merchants seek alternatives to cash in order to continue the business but also provided a policy window for digital payments industry to get a faster regulatory, policy clearances, get the government to invest in incentivising digital payments. Despite these, the cash to digital shift has not taken place and the demonetisation trends in increased digital payments across modes reversed after cash was back in the system.

The paper attempts to document infrastructural, commercial, social issues preventing the adoption and the responses of merchants, industry to various policy prescription/enablement to increase adoption whose outcomes are unclear and have not been evaluated.

Infrastructural issues include technology, policy, regulatory, industry challenges in expanding the existing infrastructure. The lack of physical, regulatory, legal infrastructure prevents growth and merchants from adopting digital payments. Commercial issues include economics of direct and indirect costs to the merchant incurred in owning, accepting digital payments, commercial considerations of various ecosystem players including banks, payment processors that inhibit adoption. Social issues include awareness, literacy including digital, financial literacy, trust, behaviour shift, convenience, exercising choice towards cash.

Ever since the demonetisation, there is a heightened activity from industry and various arms of the government has been active in promoting digital payments. Industry-led by banks and fintech ecosystem has built a range of mobile-enabled digital payment platforms/products such wallets, BHIM-UPI, BHIM-Aadhaar, BharatQR to enable asset light merchant acceptance infrastructure, expanded merchant base in addition to catering to the surge in demand of card-accepting PoS machines. The government had undertaken a massive awareness program Digidhan soon after demonetisation and had also set up National Digital Payments Mission to promote, oversee the sustainable growth of digital payments. Various ministries are also adopting digital payments in their functioning. It also aided behavioural shift through cashback, incentivisation schemes, some specifically targeted at merchants, reimbursement of card processing charges for smaller merchants and even has in principle proposed a 20% discount on the GST. It has remained light touch on the regulation by not setting up the regulator even after 18 months of announcing the same.

The paper will analyse how the efforts of industry and government have been met by the merchant and look at factors which can and cannot be changed with policy interventions and real scope of digital payments in the merchant ecosystem.

Titiksha Vashist

Byung-Chul Han in his celebrated book “In the Swarm” warns us of the dangers of the mob that is increasingly replacing the ‘crowd’ or collective which constituted the mass of politics. He states that no true politics is possible in the digital era, where online communities lack a sense of spirit, a “we” that is now a swarm of individuals. Despite his theoretical brilliance, Han forgets that he cannot talk of the digital, the online without the offline. Politics has occurred, and continues to exist in the offline space, using the internet to spread its wings. It is not the online as-is, which has become the subject of philosophy, politics, art and aesthetics that characterises itself alone, sealed off as a space where events occur, identities formed and movements created. It is in fact, the offline that brings the online into being and gives it a myriad of meaning. While access, priviledge, commerce and capital are major themes while discussing internet access, we must not forget that the online is not merely a question of choice or access- but one that is often carefully disabled on purpose to control the offline. In India as well as other parts of the world, the internet has been interrupted for long durations to exercise political control and power, often crippling populations. According to a report by the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), an organisation that keeps a track on internet shutdowns in the country, India has seen 244 shutdowns in 2012, of which 108 have been enforced on 2018 alone. These have been concentrated in areas such as Jammu and Kashmir and the North-East, and in instances of violence and resistance as well.

An internet shutdown is the digital equivalent of a curfew, and its application raises questions regarding its cause, uses and political intent. The internet as means, as an enabler of political action is seen as threatening, given the shift in the way people today communicate with one another. Internet bans and shutdowns are not only matters of commerce, but also pose the question of politics to understand when and how power is exercised. An offline created out of a shutdown is different- it is curated on purpose and calls for alternative means by which functionalities of daily life, resistance, capital and media occur. This essay aims to explore how the political image of the “sovereign” also enters the digital space to carefully construct, cut- off and marginalized voices, all in the name of state security, and law and order. According to philosopher Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, and the offline is increasingly becoming a space of exception where those who control the digital can influence the political in real time. In this context, how do we understand the relationship of power and digital access? This essay focuses on three broad questions: (a) Is there a community online capable of political action that is facilitated by the internet? (b) How does power function in internet shutdowns and are they threats to democratic freedom of expression? And finally, (c) How do we begin to unpack the ‘online’ and the ‘offline’ in such a context?

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

We hear numerous anecdotes of people facing the consequences of their online activity when offline. Some have lost jobs, have been disciplined in school, or have wound up in court for what they have posted online. However, in comparison, there has been somewhat limited discussion of the reverse scenario, where going about one's day-to-day life offline leads to violations of one's online self.

This essay is concerned with a new and unparalleled phenomenon in South Korea, locally termed molka. Literally meaning 'hidden camera', molka refers to the genre of women being filmed in the least expected of situations, including cubicles in public restrooms and in the midst of car accidents, and the footage being traded and consumed as entertainment. This is distinct from revenge porn or cyber-stalking where the perpetrators usually target a known or pre-determined individual with the intention of humiliating them or to exercise control. The subjects of molka are victimised for merely existing offline and are mostly unaware that their privacy has been violated until they are recognised by someone who knows them and informs them (or inflicts further harm). In response to the rising trend of molka, tens of thousands of frustrated and infuriated women have staged monthly protest rallies in central Seoul since May 2018, urging government intervention. Ironically, women gathered offline to protest against molka have been subjected to further molka crimes with unconsented photos of themselves at the rallies surfacing online and many have been the target of misogynous attacks.

Informed by the author's multi-year ethnographic study of technologically mediated and heightened tensions in contemporary South Korean society, this essay provides a succinct yet contextualised account of the molka phenomenon. With particular attention to the ways in which the phenomenon has developed while shifting between offline and online realms, the essay demonstrates the gendered nature of digital privacy and harassment, and the broader implications of this Korean phenomenon for women in other parts of the world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/essays-on-offline-selected-abstracts

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): List - Call for Sessions

sneha-pp — 2018-11-05T09:15:35Z

Who makes lists? How are lists made? Who can be on a list, and who is missing? What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious? Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the *list*.

IRC19: List

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artifact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses. Directed by the Supreme Court, the Government of India has initiated the National Register of Citizens process of creating an updated list of all Indian citizens in the state of Assam since 2015. This is a list that sets apart legal citizens from illegal immigrants, based on an extended and multi-phase process of announcement of draft lists and their revisions. NRC is producing a list with a specific question: who is a citizen and who is not? UIDAI has produced a list of unique identification number assigned to individuals: a list to connect/aggregate other lists, a meta-list.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions. The epistemological, constitutive, and inscriptive functions of the list, as Liam Young documents, have been crucial to the creation of new infrastructures of knowledge, and to understand where the internet emerges as a challenge to these.

As a media format that is easy to create, circulate, and access (as seen in the number of rescue and relief lists that flood the web during national disasters) or one that is essential in classification and cross-referencing (such as public records and memory institutions), the list becomes an essential trope to understand new media forms today, as the skeletal frame on which much digital content and design is structured and consumed through.

Who makes lists?
How are lists made?
Who can be on a list, and who is missing?
Who gets counted on lists, and who is counting?
What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender?
What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords its authority, its simultaneous revelations and obfuscations?
What makes lists legitimate information artifacts, and what makes their knowledge contentious?
What makes lists ephemeral, and what makes their content robust?
What makes lists hegemonic, and what makes them intersectional?
What makes lists ordered, and what makes them unordered?
What do listicles do to habits of reading and creation of knowledge?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making?
How and when do lists became digital, and whatever happened to lists on paper?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed?
Are lists content or carriage, are they medium or message?

For the fourth edition of the Internet Researchers’ Conference (IRC19), we invite sessions that engage critically with the form, imagination, and politics of the list - to present or propose academic, applied, or creative works that explore its social, economic, cultural, material, political, affective, or aesthetic dimensions.

Call for Sessions

We invite teams of two or more members to propose sessions for IRC19. All sessions will be one and half hours long, and will be fully designed and facilitated by the team concerned, including moderation (if any). Please remember this when planning the session. Everything happening during the session, except for logistical support, will be led and managed by the session team.

The sessions are expected to drive conversations on the topic concerned. They may include presentation of research papers but this is not mandatory.

We look forward to sessions that involve collaborative work (either in groups or otherwise) - discussions, interactions, documentation, learning, and (list-)making are most welcome.

We also look forward to sessions conducted in Indian languages apart from English. The proposing team, in such a case, should consider how participants who do not understand the language concerned may engage with the session. IRC organisers and other participants shall help facilitate these sessions, say by offering translation support.

The only eligibility criteria for proposing sessions are that they must be proposed by a team of at least two members, and that they must engage with the *list*.

The deadline for submission of sessions proposals for IRC19 is Sunday, November 18 (extended).

To propose a session, please send the following documents (as attached text files) to raw@cis-india.org:

Session Title: The session should be named in the form of a hashtag (check the sessions proposed for IRC18 for example).
Session Plan: This should describe the objectives of the session (the motivations and expectations driving it), what will be done and discussed during the session, and who among the people organising the session will be responsible for what. This note need not be more than 500 words long. If your session involves inviting others to present their work (say papers), then please provide a description and timeline of the process through which these people will be identified.
Session Team Details: Please share brief biographical notes of each member of the session team, and their email addresses.

IRC19 will be organised in Hyderabad during January 31 - February 2, 2019. We will announce the venue of the conference in December 2018.

There is no registration fee for the conference, but participants are expected to pay for their own travel and accommodation (to be organised by CIS) expenses. Limited funding will be available to support travel and accommodation expenses of few participants who are unemployed or underemployed.

Session selection process:

November 18, 2018 (extended): Deadline of submission of session proposals. All submitted sessions will be posted on the CIS website, along with the names of the session team members.
November 23 - December 07: Session selection process. All session teams will select 10 sessions to be included in the IRC19 programme. The votes will be anonymous, that is no session team will know which other session teams have voted for their session. The sessions with most votes will be selected for the final programme of IRC19.
December 14: Announcement of selected sessions, and of travel grants available for members of selected session teams.
January 31 - February 2, 2019: IRC19 in Hyderabad!

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc19-list-call

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:18:07Z

Details of a session proposed by Akriti Rastogi, Ishani Dey, and Sagorika Singha for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

The session will comprise of three segments, where we shall analyse and highlight the form that is “List” in its multifarious inhabitations. From the much talked about spaces of the Hindi Film Industry to unfolding the dynamics of WhatsApp Groups, and finally to the listicles of violence and terror, the session will pose questions and argue for the malleability and limitations of the form. The obsession to finish a to do list and scheduling tasks around lists, makes list making one of the highest priority task in the big data age. The session will engage in unravelling these dynamics as well as texture its implications in varied spaces.

Paper 1: The Grapevine List - Hindi Film Industry Professionals Post #MeToo [Akriti Rastogi, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

In the age of data big data enlightenment (Byung Chul Han, 2017), the statistical tool of list making makes a comeback with a vengeance. List as a form of data-design enumerates and informs at a glance. When there are unending social media posts of harassment narratives shaking the readers (who might just be acknowledging the mobilization of social media into a movement), a list becomes an escape from the detailed unnerving and ugly truths. A red list of perpetrators scours many small to large scale films, but the voices against the powerful allegedly remain mum. In the ‘filmy’ world of filmmaking professionals, Izzat (Honour) finds poetic justice in a small way in this moment, but does it culminate into a change? An assistant director in a field interview spoke of the horror stories from a shoot, when a powerful actor targeted a crew professional. The said actor however may never find a mention on the list. Despite the social media emancipation – and what have you, the powerful remain in the white-washed limelight spiced with scandalous details that never filter out from the PR barricade.

On an entertainment channel, a veteran actress spills the beans on the working conditions in the maligned and besotted Hindi Film Industry. This sparks off a chain reaction, and in the following days, Twitter becomes a testimonial sharing courtroom. The press quotes it as the arrival of #MeToo and #TimesUp in the ‘Bollywood’ from the ‘Hollywood’. While a formal list is not abbreviated to gasp at the morbid working conditions that men and women face at the glamorous film industry, the survivor stories become a staple for transmedia channels. But where is the list? The absence of the list making aside from the Indian Express Article dated October 11, 2018 points to an important power driven working culture and network of the Hindi Film Industry. In the case of Hindi Film industry, the list has been talked about more in terms of the survivors than the perpetrators. The absence then of a #MeToo list indicates a power dynamic here. While in case of other media industries, the perpetrators have been terminated from their working projects, here the powers that be have tried to salvage the money by transferring the projects to bigger and more powerful media companies in the market. The message is clear, more the power , more the PR, less the risk of being named and shamed. This paper will map out the nuances of the absence of this “list” in the wake of #MeToo moment. While the lists form an intrinsic part of the hearsay and grapevine among professionals working in the Hindi film industry, there is an absence of a formal crowdsourced list like in case of #LoSHA. What then can be said about the industry’s working dynamics, and how does this hearsay list become a marker for the professionals to manoeuvre their daily work becomes the key analysis of this segment.

Paper 2: Most Disturbing [Ishani Dey, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

During the era of analogue tape, video circuits were replete with rumors of an underground network of snuff/gore video productions, which featured actual murder and torture caught on tape. It was speculated that there was a lucrative market for these videos, which was being cashed in by shadowy figures. However, whenever a snuff film surfaced in the mainstream, it turned out to be a simulation of crime, as opposed to real acts of violence. This changed with the emergence of the internet, which hosted a subculture dedicated to snuff/gore videos. These included websites and forums where video producers would often be in dialogue with their viewers. These communities consisted of snuff/gore aficionados who prided themselves on their ability to be able to distinguishing ‘real crime’ from mere simulations of violence. Speculations over authenticity dominated conversations on these forums, which even witnessed creators of snuff/gore taking extra measures to prove the authenticity of their product. For instance, in 2012 the headquarters of the ruling party in Canada received six packages which contained severed body parts of a victim whose death had been featured in a video which was circulating on the snuff forum, GoreGrish. Such stories were not uncommon in snuff/gore sites, which circulated videos that were often linked to crimes under investigation, at times leading to apprehending perpetrators. Many videos from such snuff/gore sites (even those that are now defunct) are often curated on mainstream video sharing platforms like YouTube, where their ‘shock value’ is highlighted through listicles like the ‘top 5 most disturbing videos on the internet (Snuff edition)’ or ‘5 Real MURDER VIDEOS You Can't Find on the INTERNET’. While the desire to capitalize on clickbait can be one motivator, snuff/gore videos have traditionally (and continued) to thrive only in niche circuits. I am therefore interested in interrogating the function of the listicle in showcasing snuff/gore content. In specific, who hosts these listicles? What kind of videos are chosen? How are the chosen clusters received? And, finally, what function do these listicles serve in the larger network of snuff/gore subcultures?

Paper 3: The Anatomy of a WhatsApp List [Sagorika Singha, PhD Candidate (Cinema Studies), School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University]

The WhatsApp list or group is one rapidly growing communication platforms at present. As the usage of this application rises, so does one’s chances of being in a WhatsApp group. There is a group for everything - for booking portals to share online tickets, for news publications to send their latest news, for workgroups to communicate outside formal communication channels, for students, for teachers, for people selling handmade products among many others with both crafty and well-meaning intentions. In the early days of WhatsApp, being a part of such groups was not only useful but perhaps even had some associated novelty. However, with the continued mushrooming of various groups and their corresponding increase in reach, WhatsApp groups have mutated into something more formidable. I am interested in unfolding the avenues generated by this cross-platform messaging application which owing to its encryption makes conversations hard to trace. The puerile group formations in WhatsApp has grown into a mechanism of self-forming lists wherein, at times, participants are involuntarily included. The participants have different patterns of presence in such WhatsApp groups. This paper compares the growing mundanity of such list-making with the casual readiness observed in sharing information via such platforms. I consider such WhatsApp groups as lists of users. What are the dynamics that lead to the creation of such lists? How can we read into such forms of network formation? What fuels the propagation of such lists and what does it say about our current communication practices? Just the way users have become immune to the content and their presence in such groups, it has also become routine for them to share the content. The habit of sharing becomes as mundane as the habit of being participants in multiple groups, with their own purposes and directions. As participants, we are unsure both about the groups we will be added to in the future as well as the multiple lists that the contents shared in a group will end up in. This organic network formation is what gives power to such groups and explains their existence and ramifications which we have been witnessing in the contemporary time.

Session Team

Akriti Rastogi is a PhD candidate at the Cinema Studies department of the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her current work proposes to trace the design of monetization channels of cinema effects in a new media environ. She has previously worked as a radio broadcast producer at All India Radio, New Delhi.

Ishani Dey is working on her PhD in Cinema Studies at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her current project seeks to analyse some of the ways in which the body-technology ensemble has changed with the rise of the digital. While every new image making technology since the mid-nineteenth century has reconfigured the human body, this project is dedicated to understanding the implications of twenty-first century digital technologies and the internet on bodies that inhabit the screens of the ‘post-cinematic’.

Sagorika Singha is a doctoral candidate in the department of Cinema Studies, School of Arts and Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her areas of interest include cinema, subculture, queer studies, technoculture, post-cinema, new mediascape, and digital societies. Her ongoing doctoral work virtually reimagines the contested region of North-east India following the arrival and popularity of mobile media and media-sharing technologies.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #AyushmanBhavah

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:09:41Z

Details of a session proposed by Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

One of the earliest known forms of organised administrative list making in the modern history began with the census. Undeniably, from collection of taxes to understanding power dynamics of a diverse population, lists determine the administrative chain of command, from an era of data documentation to the brand new world of big data. Recently, we have been witnessing the increase in the volume of data and constant formulation of new techniques of list making. However, considering lists as a new infrastructure of knowledge, it is highly important to understand, study and scrutinize their legitimacy, politics, political and cultural economy, authority they fall under, and most importantly their targets.

Indian healthcare is a convoluted administration. There is a need for the healthcare system to effectively permeate into the lowest rungs of society, thereby replacing the existent maladroit structure. This session takes Ayushman Bharat – a Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana (PM-JAY), as an admirable example which is based on a foundation of a series of lists, prepared for an administrative apparatus, in this case, the public health sector. However, not all reviews of this policy have been favourable to the cause, and the effectiveness to address health at all the primary, secondary and tertiary levels have oftentimes been met with crude skepticism and sardonic critiques. According to Young, a list is not just an organised and processed data, but it is also recorder of a data format that has multiple meaningful relations within its content while also being a window to the economy of selection and exclusion criteria adopted by societies in favour of “the social action it facilitates”. Currently being a crucial policy that involves serious list-making procedures on a large population of India, the need to scrutinize the cultural techniques behind list-making for Ayushman Bharat cannot be unseen.

Lists and network primarily serve in ways twain: the concept might be looked at as a network of information that is systemized to answer the epistemological questions asked by organizations. Additionally, networks clarify the mechanics of progression of an organization by proclivity of head-points. The holistic performance of any organization run by data depends on how well data is predisposed, which is why careful architecture of lists is absolutely essential. For Ayushman Bharat, the creation of lists does not find a pragmatic foundation on which its mettle is rested. The question therefore remains, is the concept of list still a crucial component of the operational infrastructure of the computation and network proliferation of the much talked about universal healthcare system?

We aim to establish two sub-sessions (45 minutes each). In the first half, we aim to:

Begin presenting the paper on Ayushman Bharat- how various lists heavily feature in India’s largest healthcare policy, the mechanisms by which it works and what output it yields, the financial interests of the corporates in Ayushman Bharat (insurance companies, private banks and hospitals, for-profit enterprises providing medical services in collaboration with private hospitals, etc), user expectations and consumer behaviour, the problems behind the policy execution, misutilisation and exploitation of political interest groups whether it be businesses, parties or influential individuals.
Discuss issues pertaining to the operations of Ayushman Bharat - how political groups take to social media platforms to disseminate their message, how there exists a wide communication gap intentionally placed to avoid retortion, how logical fallacies in and reasoning mismatches between the displayed progress and actual progress came into the picture, and how they can be removed, or even how the programme affects one’s political participation?
Present findings - research is mainly reliant on secondary material, with the exceptions of verbal interviews that we aim to conduct for our research purposes. These pre-recorded interviews are merely personal opinions of the interviewee that serve to gauge the impact of our narrative and emphasize (or mask) the thesis on which our research takes shape.

We will accommodate a slideshow to describe our thesis with examples from social media accounts of the National Health Protection Scheme and National Health Agency. The second sub-session instead will be more open to interactions and critical appreciations.

The piece of work is an evidence of collaborative effort in an interdisciplinary space of social science – Economics and Media. Both the co-authors hail from different disciplines that need to intertwine in order to address the topic of choice: The whatabouts of Ayushman Bharat. As a result of our diversity, we plan to address our areas of specialization respectively. For the next half of the session, we plan to interact with our peers, thereby preparing a report on the key-takeaways and suggestions of ideas identified in the session.

Session Team

Arya Lakshmi is a journalist and a media researcher. She has worked across India with various news media publications mostly covering politics. She completed her post graduation in Political Communication from Cardiff University, UK with her interests in Big Data, Internet and Electoral Behaviour. She is primarily involved in media research that revolves around internet and politics.

Adrij Chakraborty is an economics researcher. He is currently an economic analyst with Mumbai School of Economics and Public Policy, University of Mumbai and is researching with the Government of Maharashtra on the agricultural practices and labour market behaviour in Maharashtra. He attended Edinburgh University as a graduate scholar with the Scottish Graduate Programme in Economics. His interests lie in economic policymaking in Labour Markets, Migration and Political Economics.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:20:14Z

Details of a session proposed by Ria De and Samata Biswas for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

The internet-based List of Sexual Harassers in Academia (LoSHA), initiated by Dalit feminist and lawyer activist Raya Sarkar in 2017 anonymously crowd-sourced names of academics and activists who were accused of harassing women colleagues and students. While a large number of women in the academia rallied in support of the list and its motivations, it also unleashed anxieties about how the list was put together, and the kind of impact it was feared to have. Variously, it has been equated to Khap Panchayats, vigilantism, mob lynchings etc. Last month, the government of India launched an online National Database on Sexual Offenders (NDSO), which will contain the details—names, photographs, residential address, fingerprints, DNA samples, PAN and Aadhar numbers—of individuals convicted on charges of sexual offences against women and children. An associated portal, the Cyber Crime Prevention Against Women and Children (CCPWC) was also launched where citizens can enter complaints against child pornography and other sexually explicit material. Both are modes of digital enlisting through the use of new media technologies, one that is open access and therefore available for modification, co-option and critique, while the other is to be accessible only to law personnel. This two-member panel locates the list in the context of ongoing debates about the conversion of social justice and rights issues in to data repositories. We take in to account the debates on the Right to be Forgotten or the right to delist from the internet, as a specific concern raised in the Personal Data Protection Bill 2018 submitted by the Justice B.N. Krishna Committee. The Bill recognises data principals (or the individuals to whom personal data belongs) as a central component of the legal framework, and subjects data fiduciaries (or agencies seeking to collect, use and process personal data) to the free, informed and explicit consent of the data principals. Right to be Forgotten has clearly emerged as a logical extension of the demands for one’s Right to Privacy. Given that a number of logics, that of ‘naming and shaming’ of offenders, a digital list (database) as a means of communication, dissemination of information and surveillance etc. underscore both the #LoSHA and the NDSO, how do we navigate the messy terrain of human rights concerns about the freedom of speech and expression on the one hand, and the rights to privacy on the other hand? We also think about this vis-a-vis the larger issues related to the data economy and those of data ownership. We refer to studies on state-generated data on crime in India and elsewhere to understand how such data artefacts can be monopolised and processed by private and non-governmental agencies, and how they co-opt contemporary feminist politics and articulations?

We, Samata Biswas and Ria De, will present a collaborative study, organised across two 30 minute long papers, plus a 15 minute discussion time for each totalling to the mandated 90 minute session. The first paper will study the form and scope of the list as a digital artefact through a detailed analysis of the #LoSHA and the NDSO. The second paper will configure the two lists in terms of their status within the data economy.

Session Team

Ria De is pursuing her PhD in Film Studies at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. Her doctoral research was about stardom and intermediality. She is interested in popular culture, network and media studies and gender. Currently, she is interested in the women’s movements in the Indian film industries.

Samata Biswas teaches English Literature at Bethune College, Kolkata, India. Her doctoral research was about body cultures in contemporary India, analysing fitness, weight loss, and diet discourses as present in popular media as well as through narratives of participants. She is interested in visual culture, gender studies, and literature and migration. At present, she is trying to map Kolkata as a sanitary city, focusing on access to clean sanitation or the lack thereof. She runs the blog ‘Refugee Watch Online’. Her latest publication is on “Haldia: Logistics and Its Other(s)” in Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Ranabir Samaddar (Edited) Logistical Asia: The Labour of Making a World Region. (Palgrave Mcmillan, 2018)

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:21:01Z

Details of a session proposed by Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

In an attempt to initiate a conversation around #LoSHA, a group of more than twenty students of Ambedkar University, Delhi, organised a series of events in April 2018, under the campaign ‘Questioning The Silence’. While the primary focus of the initiative was to point to the cultures of sexual harassment in academia, concerns were also raised around the immediate reception of the LoSHA. What the crowdsourced LoSHA by Raya Sarkar, a law student and an Ambedkarite feminist, triggered were a series of responses, including the Kafila statement; the second list which was made public on Facebook under the pseudonym Malati Kumari, and later deleted; followed by other lists and sexual harassment accusations in different workspaces; institutional backlash, as the LoSHA accused ‘trusted’ men in positions of power in academic spaces. Many also questioned the credentials of the list or chose to remain silent altogether.

Coming from an experience of institutionally engaging with the #LoSHA through the #questionthesilence campaign, we propose to conduct a session that seeks to theorize the ‘list’ as a document, the particularity of its form, and list as a medium and a message. What goes into the making of a list, and what are the kind of subjectivities produced through it? How does social media as an internet platform, in the preparation and circulation of the list, determine the discourses that emerge from it? Further, we want to explore the various possibilities of solidarity networks and feminist practices that have emerged post-LoSHA. Given the possibilities of new intimacies and relationships that liberal spaces open up, how have the debates around the LoSHA questioned the contemporary feminist understanding of sexual harassment and violation in these spaces? How has the existing imagination of gender justice been challenged by the LoSHA?

In an attempt to address these questions, we propose a session with three components. The first part will be a paper presentation which will theoretically engage with the concept of a list. It will explore whether ‘list’ as a medium can define the message, and perhaps mark its limits. It will critically engage with the LoSHA in the larger background of #MeToo with respect to questions around scope for subjectivity in list-making, its potential in questioning power and the ‘due process’ in place, politics around its making, and some of its limitations in addressing the issue of sexual harassment. The second part entails a curated panel discussion with the session organizers as panelists, wherein we will thematically engage with the responses to the #LoSHA, as crowdsourced through our social media accounts on Facebook and Twitter in the month of December. Speaking about the shortcomings of our past engagement, we see a need to approach the LoSHA from different vantage points. The third part of the session will be a poster exhibition, partly curated during the campaign itself, that seeks to demonstrate the kind of problematic remarks normalised under the garb of progressive pedagogy in liberal academic spaces.

Session Team

Anannya Chatterjee is a trained Bharatnatyam dancer, a Hindustani classical singer and a theatre artist. She is a part of Sar-e-raahguzar, an endeavour to talk about love, resistance, hate crimes and freedom on the streets by employing the art forms she practices. She holds a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and has written her Masters’ dissertation titled Love, Passion, Peril: A Feminist Understanding of Abuse in Heterosexual Romantic relationships in India. She has also been a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks, and believes in bringing together her art with her feminist politics.

Arunima Singh holds a Bachelors deree in History form Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and a Masters degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. She has worked as a freelance writer, model, game show host, and is currently working with Swiggy in Sales and Accounts Management. She is a member of Pinjra Tod - Break the Hostel Locks. She also plans to one day follow her dream of becoming the Jon Stewart of India. She worked on the figure of Bharat Mata for her MA thesis titled: Clothing Womanhood - meanings of modesty and tradition: from colonial modernity to the contemporary, and wishes to work on studying and deconstructing the discourses around oppression and modesty in her future studies.

Bhanu Priya Gupta is an M.Phil. student in Women and Gender Studies at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Studies (CWDS), who has been invested in issues of gender, sexuality and mental health. She has previously worked with Indian Social Institute on social conflict among dalit women in rural Haryana. She is a freelance facilitator on gender, violence and identity formation, with People for Parity, and has conducted gender and capacity building workshops in urban and rural Rajasthan with adolescent school children, middle-aged women and village stakeholders. She has also attended training programmes on gender, sexuality and rights, at Crea and TARSHI. She is currently working on physical disability, sexuality and the emergence of disability life writing in India.

Renu Singh is a doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies Program at Ambedkar University, Delhi, and Centre for Women’s Development Study (CWDS). She holds an M.Phil. degree in Public Health from Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her interdisciplinary training has allowed her to work in the development sector for eight years, while she has also been associated with sexual harassment complaints committees at some of the academic institutions she has been a part of. She is involved with the women’s movement for almost 15 years, especially in Delhi, on issues around social reproduction, affect and care, gender & sexuality, intimacy, love and interpersonal lives. She has also been involved in student politics and is an active member of New Socialist Initiative (NSI) and Stree Mukti Sangathan. She is currently working on higher education, young women’s aspirations and interpersonal ties in the backdrop of liberalization.

Rhea Bose did her Bachelors in Political Science from Lady Shri Ram College for Women, and holds a Masters’ degree in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi. Until recently, she was working at Centre for Social Research, Delhi. Her interest in the field of gender has manifested in different ways, including participation in the Indian Association of Women’s Studies (IAWS) where she presented a paper on women in global politics, conducting workshops on gender sensitization in schools as a part of an initiative called Khalbali.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #CallingOutAndIn

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:13:43Z

Details of a session proposed by Usha Raman, Radhika Gajjala, Riddhima Sharma, Tarishi Varma, Pallavi Guha, Sai Amulya Komarraju, and Sugandha Sehgal for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

Lists are empowering; they offer a method of curating—things, experiences, people, events. As elements of an archive, they are a powerful tool for including and marking something as important. A list is not a neutral collection of objects; it comes into being within a specific logic, an articulated or unseen/unspecified rules, or criteria by which these objects are either included or excluded. In the context of the #MeTooIndia movement, lists have been weaponized by survivors of sexual abuse or harassment, serving to call out behaviours that for many years had been normalized, accepted, or simply ignored, but a patriarchal system. The list, in this instance, becomes a means around which survivors can rally and find support, while also being a tool for punitive action of various kinds, from legal to administrative to social. While “naming and shaming” (or naming to shame) was the purpose that gained currency in the popular discourse, we would like to explore the multiple meanings and experiences that underlie and are implicated by the act of listing. With specific but not exclusive attention to the list that is commonly referred to as LoSHA, the papers on this panel approach the logic and culture of lists and listing as modalities of feminist action.

To begin with, Usha Raman looks at calling out through listing as a meaning making, legitimating, even therapeutic act for those who participate in the creation of the list as well as those who engage with it in different ways. Radhika Gajjala, along with Riddhima Sharma and Tarishi Varma then go on to discuss the role of feminist digital narratives as evidence and the ways in which they could transgress and rupture institutional/legal/academic institutions and infrastructures. Following this, Pallavi Guha discusses the #MetooIndia movement as the second wave to #LoSha movement, which started in 2017, and points to who and what is still left out of the online narrative of sexual harrassment. Sai Amulya Komarraju applies Sara Ahmed’s ideas about affective economies to look at the responses of feminists and feminist organizations to the two waves of #metoo in India and at the responses of the state and the judiciary following incidents of sexual harassment at work. Finally, Sugandha Sehgal asks, in the context of #LoSHA and #MeTooIndia, how the digital list as spreadable and replicable social media content proliferates online, while also exploring the opportunities digital listing as a form of activism offers to contemporary feminist praxis in the Global South.

Session Team

Usha Raman, professor, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Radhika Gajjala, professor of Media and Communication Studies and American Culture Studies, Bowling Green State University.

Riddhima Sharma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Tarishi Varma, is a doctoral scholar at Bowling Green State University.

Pallavi Guha, assistant professor of communication and new media, Towson University, USA.

Sai Amulya Komarraju is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad.

Sugandha Sehgal is a doctoral scholar in the Department of Arts & Aesthetics, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:22:52Z

Details of a session proposed by Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

2017 saw the sudden emergence of the hashtag #metoo, both in India and across the world. This has impacted not just the general public of the internet, but also the global movement women's rights movement and feminist discourse around sexual assault, gender and consent. #MeToo allowed (female) survivors of harassment to resort to social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook as a tool to accuse powerful men of sexual harassment. In 2017, we saw this with Rose McGowan who tweeted about Harvey Weinstein or Raya Sarkar who released #LoSHA, which further erupted in late 2018 into a larger wave of ‘outing’ of Indian perpetrators in media, politics, and other areas of work.

With #LoSHA and the 2018 wave of #metoo in India, there have been a gamut of responses, even some amount of polarisation, especially among Indian civil society. During #LoSHA, we observed resistance from traditional legal and Human Rights activists and practitioners against acknowledging the unique impact of ‘survivors’ testimonies on social media’ for fear of validating a method that lies outside of ‘due process’ and ‘fair trial’. They reason that due to the ungoverned nature of social media, its platforms are without checks and balances and therefore cannot regulate arbitrary misuse. However, one can argue that social media platforms are indeed regulated by the service providers who have the ultimate power to censor complainants by simply suspending or expelling them from the platform altogether. This became evident when Twitter silenced Rose McGowan and Facebook, Raya Sarkar, promptly after their testimonies began to gather accelerated traction. Thus, the accused may always appeal to the ultimate gatekeepers, the platform providers themselves. It is precisely due to the above stated reasons, that the 2017-2018 wave of social media testimonies has garnered considerable support from a typically contemporary civil society, who recognise the disruption as powerful despite the gaps in the methodology.

Our Proposal

The tentative proposal is for our team of 2 researchers to carry out a 15-20 minute lightning talk (a conversation or debate) providing a landscape analysis of #metoo, raising specific points of discussion and interest. Following this, we will open up the discussion with the audience in the form of multiple roundtable conversations, which will seek to address the following 2 questions:

If survivors of sexual harassment are resorting to social media as a ‘means’, or their choice of instrument, what does this imply about the existing fora for due process?
New and emergent imaginaries/perspectives around the end of ‘justice’ that may lie outside the contours of conventional legal frameworks i.e. to what ‘end’ are these survivors disposed?

Our session aims at working towards the following outcomes:

A comprehensive analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of phenomenon of social media - mediation of justice
A current and expanded understanding of 'justice' that is not bound by legal recourse

Session Team

Esther Anne Victoria Moraes (Communications Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist and researcher who is passionate about expanding the discourse on the evolving forms of rights-based movements. At TYPF, Esther works on building feminist leadership through on-ground programming and on research on youth movements. Esther also works with on communication and public advocacy around issues of health, rights and youth leadership with a focus on young girls and adolescents. She coordinates online and on-ground public advocacy on sexual and reproductive health and rights and access to information through TYPF's national-level campaign, Know Your Body, Know Your Rights.

Manasa Priya Vasudevan (Programme Manager, The YP Foundation) is a feminist activist researcher who is passionate about the theory and praxis of social justice in an increasingly internet-mediated world, especially in the context of urbanization and datafication. She has undertaken research and advocacy on issues at the intersections of information communication technologies and social justice, primarily in the area of internet governance. She has actively engaged with international multi-sectoral movement building and strategy, both online and offline. At TYPF, she manages the Know your body know your rights programme. Prior to this, she worked at IT for Change in Bengaluru.

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #DigitalPlatformAttributes

sumandro — 2018-11-26T13:15:04Z

Details of a session proposed by Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

Digital platforms have been in the news for quite a few years now in India. Some of the most prominent sectors which has seen platforms flourish are transportation, e-commerce, education and social media. But platforms are taking root in other sectors as well, with the potential to disrupt existing businesses.

The session proposes to examine the attributes of digital platforms, particularly with reference to the quality and regulatory aspects of platforms. Quality influences regulation and vice versa. Depending on the context and type of platform, both of these aspects need to be comprehensively listed and defined to enable platform stakeholders like platform and service providers, users, and regulatory authorities ensure proper and successful conduct of businesses so as to benefit all the stakeholders.

The session hence deals with the "list" as a taxonomy of attributes. The session is envisaged to consist of two parts. The first part will draw from previous research work by the team on quality attributes of digital platforms and will illustrate the methodological reasoning and some of the challenges faced in the endeavour. This part leans towards an academic contribution to the conference. The second part will focus on the platform attributes important from regulatory perspectives, and will seek to crystallise the emergent attributes in juxtaposition to the quality attributes identified already, with the ultimate goal of identifying a checklist of regulatory attributes for digital platforms which will be of interest to policy planners. The entire exercise is also a step towards establishing a comprehensive taxonomy of platform attributes as a superset of attributes from different perspectives.

Session Team

Nandakishore K N is a Master of Science by Research student in the IT and Society domain at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). His recently completed thesis was on design of a Quality of Service framework for digital platforms. Nandakishore joined IIIT-B with an experience of 20+ years in the IT industry, the last decade of which was in project and quality management roles, and includes an 18-year stint with TCS.

Dr. V. Sridhar is Professor at the Centre for IT and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B). He is a prolific writer on matters related to telecom regulation and policy in India, with two books and contributions to peer-reviewed leading telecom and information systems journals and prominent business newspapers and magazines. He is a member of GoI committees on Telecom and IT. Dr. Sridhar has taught at many Institutions in the USA, Finland, New Zealand and India, and was the recipient of Nokia Visiting Fellowship. Prior to joining IIIT-B Dr. Sridhar was a Research Fellow at Sasken Communication Technologies. Dr. Sridhar has a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, U.S.A., Masters in Industrial Engineering from NITIE, Mumbai, and B.E. from the University of Madras, India. His work can be accessed at: http://www.vsridhar.info

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

IRC19 - List of Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:40:58Z

Here is the list of sessions proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

#AyushmanBhavah - Arya Lakshmi and Adrij Chakraborty

#ButItIsNotFunny - Madhavi Shivaprasad and Sonali Sahoo

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

#DigitalPlatformAttributes - Nandakishore K N and Dr. V. Sridhar

#EnlistingPrivacy - Pawan Singh and Pranjal Jain

#FOMO - Pritha Chakrabarti and Dr. Baidurya Chakrabarti

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

#ListInterface - Bharath Sivakumar, Rakshita Siva, and Deepak Prince

#ListsAsDatabase - Ria De and Samata Biswas

#LoSHAandWhatFollowed - Anannya Chatterjee, Arunima Singh, Bhanu Priya Gupta, Renu Singh, and Rhea Bose

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

#SocialMediationAsGenderedJustice - Esther Anne Victoria Moraes and Manasa Priya Vasudevan

#StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals - Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh

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

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #StoriesRecordsLegendsRituals

sumandro — 2018-11-28T15:55:24Z

Details of a session proposed by Priyanka, Aditya, Bhanu Prakash GS, Aishwarya, and Dinesh for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 - #List.

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

Session Plan

All our tangible history can be attributed to our records-making going back to when the records were literally set in stone, so to say, archived using human digits (digital heritage!). Oral traditions such as songs, stories and recitals, performative traditions, arts and other cultural expressions that reaffirm of our collective experiences remain intangible. Stories create Legends, Rituals physically embody the legends through performances, Records attempt to freeze time at a moment. Thereby characterizing culture and memories of a community. Our effort here is to visit and discuss who creates the records, discuss the affordance of lists as an information artefact for exchange, facilitating dialogue and collective meaning-making. We peek at the traditional community of Helavaru as map and genealogy tellers, their legends, rituals / performances and the cultural economy involved in making and circulating the archives of cultural memories in contrast with the technology driven formulation of lists that are founding the Internet culture. Allegorically, if the memory of stone as a medium of a message is still alive in us, how are people included and who all are excluded from our “memories”.

Our session would be a performative through experimental list artefacts that intend to make visible the interplay between the form of the information artefact and the content. How do we perceive information when the form of the list changes. The implicit structure of lists is suggestive of a certain order, priority and disconnected connections. We intend to play with those structures, breaking them and making new ones in the process. What do we call a list? and what does it do?

Priyanka and Aditya will bring "poetic" list artefacts that juxtapose traditional aspects of list making and lists as a dynamic phenomenon on the internet (ex. #Metoo).
Bhanu will introduce the traditional storytelling community of Helavaru as list performers.
Aishwarya will bring in the current context of social auditing and the stories from the ground today, from a rural context.
Dinesh will illustrate 3 ways list are formulated today mathematically, socially and technologically.

Session Team

Priyanka is a new media artist-researcher, currently engaged with Microsoft as an interaction designer. While at Microsoft she solves design problems for the browser, her personal inquiries run deep into understanding people’s lives on the internet, nature of the digital-materiality and its affordances for expression and exchange in networked societies.

Aditya is a designer and an entrepreneur always thinking of ways to display information beautifully. Lately he has been working on interfaces for lists to provide a clear stream of reason to anyone through simple model(s) of visualisation of information and, therefore attempt to make knowledge more accessible.

Priyanka and Aditya intends to play with the form of lists to investigate its effect on narrative construction. They will bring in “poetic-lists” - experimental list artefacts that probe into the implicit order and biases that lists bring to the act of meaning making, especially in the context of a collective audience.

Bhanu Prakash GS - As Web application developer at Servelots(.com), he contributes to the open and free software, and has been working on developing tools for delivering visual stories from archives. He has worked with the NCBS@25 project titled “13 Ways” where stories from the history of National Centre for Biological Sciences, Democracy Archives for University of Gottingen, and also on methods to render the folk stories of Vijayadashami rituals into visual stories on the Web.

Bhanu introduces the ways the Helavaru community, in the pre-internet era, created, “circulated” and mutated Lists of names, facts and events forming the information networks of communities, castes, jaatis, clans, tribes. The Helavas are a nomadic community visible around Karnataka and Andhra who deck up their bullocks and carts, set out to the villages of their patrons to sing praises of great deeds of their forefathers and the genealogy of the families with great detail, and end their performance with a ritual Harike - a wish for the well being of their patrons. In return they are paid for their services with grains, clothes, goat, sheep, cow, bullocks and money as much as one can afford.

Their story is an indicator of the cultural economy, of interweaving a web of communities, their systems of socio-political-cultural organisation by developing competence in data indexing, backups and restores, dealing with identity and authentication, conflicts and negotiations and more from generation to generation. The Helavaru claim that each family recorded genealogy of at least 3 lakh families, and passing it on, and also losing in some cases is fascinating.

Aishwarya is a Communication Strategist at the Society for Social Audit, Accountability and Transparency (SSAAT) - Andhra Pradesh, Department of Rural Development, Government of Telangana. SSAAT has been set-up with a vision to uphold the concept of eternal vigilance by the people, facilitated by social activists and Government acting in conjunction.

A social audit is a standardised way of facilitating people to critique the implementation of a welfare scheme, and demand accountability from the government. It is a powerful tool which enables people to come forward, demand information, question officials, and fight for their rightful deliverables of a government scheme. This mechanism ensures transparency in the way a government functions, and has helped recover a lot of money lost to corruption.

In India, a Supreme Court mandate made the social audits of MGNREGS compulsory in all states. However, Social Audit units have been successful in empowering the people only in a few states. While the SAU facilitates an audit, it is conducted by people from the families of the beneficiaries. One social audit is a 15-day process of record verifications, door-to-door verifications, awareness rallies, a Gram Sabha and a Public Hearing. While a social audit ensures accountability, it lacks the guarantee of enforcement. The different layers of bureaucracy often swallows the essence of public participation and grievance redressal does not have follow-ups.

All grievances are recorded in the form of paras in the social audit database. While our on-ground social auditors may be socially and politically aware enough to observe and call out patterns in caste and gender discrimination, the results remain, but in a list on the MIS.

Dinesh is part of Janastu team - a non-profit group. The team is eager to help address Web content accessibility for the low-literate using social semantic web concepts and are also looking at 3D methods for spatial navigation, location interpretation and storytelling. Janastu engages with software commons by developing and supporting open source social platforms.

Dinesh, with a Computer Science background, will bring list comprehension to this platform using map/reduce, monads, and blockchain as the technical formalisms that make the Internet work and how people are made to toe these invisible lines. Then initiate discussions on Machine Learning within the history of page ranking and how the who, where, what of lists manifest. This will be contextualized with the traditional, the social and the new media social networks and processes that nurture community memory by tuning the semantic distance needed for privacy and by making room for forgetting in ways that communities heal from trauma.

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

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Digital Native: Hashtag Along With Me

Call for Essays: Offline

Offline

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the "offline". Please submit the abstracts by Sunday, September 02.

Digital Native: Playing God

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

Elishia Vaz

Dynamics of the ‘offline’ self-diagnosis, exploration of the corporeal and the politics of information

Karandeep Mehra

The Shadow that Social Media Casts: The Doubled Offlines of Online Sociality

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

Rianka Roy

Information Offline: Labour, Surveillance and Activism in the Indian IT&ITES Industry

Simiran Lalvani

The Offline as a Place of Work: Examining Food Discovery and Delivery by Digital Platforms

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

Titiksha Vashist

Dr. Yenn Lee

Online consequences of being offline: A gendered tale from South Korea

Internet Researchers' Conference 2019 (IRC19): List - Call for Sessions

IRC19: List

Call for Sessions

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LegitLists - Form follows function: List by design

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #AyushmanBhavah

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #ListsAsDatabase

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #LoSHAandWhatFollowed

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

Session Plan

Session Team

IRC19 - Proposed Session - #CallingOutAndIn

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

Session Plan

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