Centre for Internet and Society

Consultation on Figures of Learning in the Digital Context - Report

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:37:04Z

The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society organised a consultation on ‘Figures of Learning in the Digital Context’ on September 22, 2014 in Bangalore.

Conducted as part of its ‘Making Methods for Digital Humanities’ project, the discussion was an attempt to examine changes in the learning environment with the advent of digital technologies and new modes of knowledge production by mapping concepts and changes around a set of figures of learning, old and new, to understand the discursive shifts that produce and locate them in the contemporary moment. (See the concept note here).

The Making Methods project seeks to make specific interventions in structures of learning, methods of storing and documenting information, and processes of interaction and interface design, in an effort to describe and queer the contours of what we understand as the field of Digital Humanities today.

The consultation brought together a small but diverse set of people from different fields. Participants presented on figures of learning drawn from their own fields of research and practice. Archana Prasad, artist and founder of JAAGA, Bangalore spoke about the organisation and its growth as an alternative space for learning through collaborative processes in art, design and technology – the studio space made of pallet racks, its various projects and groups that converge at JAAGA reflect this diversity and interdisciplinarity. She spoke about changes in her own role from being a facilitator for diverse groups to come together, to becoming more of a mentor in the later years, the problems of sustainability of such a space and the efforts made through different projects in emphasising learning though peer-to-peer methods. Interesting projects in focus were the participatory artwork and reality game called Investmentzone which is an effort to collaboratively work and transform public spaces and the JAAGA residential study programme. The discussions were useful in understanding processes that can be used to foster alternative and participatory learning environments.

Asim Siddiqui, Ph.D. student at the Manipal Centre for Philosophy and Humanities, used the figure of the ‘performer’ to talk about his research enquiry into the philosophy of performative art traditions and the role of the body, performance and practice in learning. He spoke about the relative passivity of the body in the classroom, and the predominance of certain normative discourses within which teaching-learning practices operate and therefore produce a sort of instrumental form of knowledge, which he found problematic. He drew from examples of embodied action in dance, theatre and music to look at how some of these nuances and conflicts may be brought into classroom pedagogy to make it more illustrative and inclusive. This led to an interesting discussion around problems with current teaching-learning practices and the lack of adequate measures to make them contextual and relevant to students’ lived experience. The digital now bringing in a different dimension to learning and the lack of an understanding of the body in the digital space as preventing the possibility of a somatic element to knowledge was also discussed. The problem of disciplinary constraints and the separation of humanities and social sciences came up with reference to technology becoming more prominent in classrooms.

Bitasta Das, instructor and coordinator of the UG Humanities programme at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore spoke further on this issue of separation of the disciplines from her experience of teaching in the UG programme. Her presentation on the ‘distracted inventor’ focussed on the role of technology in the classroom, and how there is a need for teachers to constantly innovate to keep students engaged, particularly in a course such as this. The notion of distraction was a useful contrast to the attention economy debates that have become increasingly prevalent. The possibility of distraction as serendipitous and productive, particularly in science which is also a space of invention and discovery was discussed as one way of taking the idea forward. Some of the work done by students in the programme, under the larger rubric of integration of disciplines, was also presented in the consultation.

Nishant Shah presented on the idea of the production of error in computing, which is also the result of a deliberate and long process or history which can be traced from scribes copying texts to print culture and now to the machine itself, which also produces or re-produces error. He spoke about the gap between the interface and the information that a person consumes in the digital context, which is contrary to what is understood by abbreviations such as Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO). He sought to critically examine this notion of transparency that the digital supposedly provides, when in effect the notion of error is as much present, but is being effectively effaced in various ways. The production of error therefore is an interesting process in signifying the limits of knowledge, and he proposed the idea of using the figure of the hipster to further explore this process of error or the glitch as a productive one.

Ekta Mittal , media practitioner and one of the founder-members of the media and arts collective Maraa presented on the figure of the worker, drawing on her research and work on a film on the Bangalore Metro construction workers. The attempt was to break through the existing discourse and simple binaries to present multiple meanings of the city, migrant labour, development, and new narratives of freedom and pleasure. Through documentation of the lives of labourers who belong to different parts of the country and their stories of migration, some of them illegal, and the question of identity and livelihood the film tries to dislocate the figure of the worker from a certain predominant discourse of the marginalised and invisible. The figure of the worker as a ghost, poet, wanderer, and now a lurker who often favours his condition of anonymity and invisibility is something that the presentation also focussed on as a way to take these ideas forward.

The consultation brought together a small but interesting set of people and ideas, this time specifically looking at diverse art and classroom teaching - learning practices. It also brought to the fore several unconventional processes of learning such as gamification, distraction, performance and embodied action that are outside the traditional notion of learning in the context of digital technologies. These ideas would contribute to further initiatives in engaging with larger questions about technology and processes of knowledge production.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/consultation-new-figures-of-learning-in-digital-context

Life of a Tuple: National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Reform of Citizen Identification Infrastructure in Assam

sumandro — 2023-04-27T16:54:24Z

We are proud to announce that a research grant from the Azim Premji University has enabled us to initiate a study of the updation process of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, and the resultant reform of citizen identification infrastructure in India. The study is being led by Khetrimayum Monish and Ranjit Singh, along with Sumandro Chattapadhyay.

The research focuses on two specific aspects of the NRC update:

Challenges of legal citizenship: In this context, we will investigate the constitutional acts and provisions for making citizenship claims in India, the historical narratives of identity politics in Assam and its culmination in the exercise of updating the NRC.

Challenges of procedurally implementing the NRC update: Here, we plan to explore the subsequent design process of updating the register.

Starting with the first aspect of legally defining Indian citizenship, the project will document and discuss the various legal processes of defining the bureaucratic process of updating NRC that emerge along two sets of concerns at different levels of Indian government. First, at the state level, we will explore the socio-political tensions around illegal immigration from Bangladesh and the history of identity-based politics in Assam. Second, at the level of the central government, we plan to investigate the constitutional and legal rules and provisions that are used to define citizenship in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/life-of-a-tuple-nrc-assam-citizen-identification-infrastructure

Archive and Access: Call for Review

praskrishna — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

The Archive and Access research project by Rochelle Pinto, Aparna Balachandran and Abhijit Bhattacharya is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The project that attempts to look at the ways in which the notion of the archive, the role of the archivist and the relationship between the state and private archives that has undergone a transition with the emergence of Internet technologies in India has been put up for public review.

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.

The monograph has emerged out of the "Archive and Access" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 15 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/archive-and-access

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

Asha Achuthan — 2012-03-22T04:11:42Z

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

Rationale

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

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

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

Methodology

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs/the-cyborgs

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

kaeru — 2012-12-14T12:15:23Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-cyborgs

Information Structures for Citizen Participation - Janaagraha

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:28:47Z

In our efforts to understand how change is conceptualized in the digital era, we find a growing emphasis on the role of effective information structures to empower the citizen and the government. We interview Joylita Saldanha from Janaagraha to answer questions around information, participation and e-governance.

CHANGE-MAKER:Interview with Joylita Saldanha

ORGANIZATION: Janaagraha - I change my city

METHOD OF CHANGE: Online platforms to enable communication between the citizen and the government.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:Empower the government -create resources to help them do what the citizens expect them to do.

10 posts into the project, we are identifying the most outstanding patterns between processes of change. One of the themes that comes up often is: information management. How do we translate data to information, and information to knowledge? What is the best way to produce, consume and disseminate information? How does visible information lead to better mechanisms of participation in democracy? As the topic recurs in my conversations with change-makers, I have even reflected about the way that I display the research outputs of this project, and have adapted the format of these articles to make them as interactive and accessible as possible. Why? Because we believe this research is an entry point for a wider conversation around different ways to understand ‘making change’, and in order to produce this knowledge we need different actors to take part in the conversation. Hence, the format of our information must be (visually) persuasive enough to sway the readers into at least reading the article, and encourage their engagement, interaction and participation.

This is also the rationale behind digital information platforms, including e-governance. Governments, authorities and organizations are devising new ways of presenting their information and making their services more accessible and interactive for the public. According to the UNESCO’s definition, e-governance is the public sector’s use of information and communication technology with the aim of:

Improving information and service delivery
Encouraging citizen participation in decision-making processes
Making governments accountable, transparent and effective

What is e-governance?
By the IDRC and IdeaCorp

India has its own National e-governance plan in place. It’s ambitious in scope:

“a massive country-wide infrastructure reaching down to the remotest of villages is evolving, and large-scale digitization of records is taking place to enable easy, reliable access over the internet. The ultimate objective is to bring public services closer home to citizens”.

Information and Urban Governance

(This section will be revised)

The question on information management is key in the analysis of citizen action in emerging information societies. This project acknowledged from its inception that the information flow of networks is changing and shaping the dynamics of state-citizen-market relationships (Shah, 2014). I will refer to Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks, to revisit the information economy, as it has been a recurrent reference in my analyses throughout the project, and it will be a useful benchmark to cross-reference findings in the future. On this opportunity, I would like to highlight his views on the role of information flow in democratic societies:

“The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use, opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies-individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice” Benkler, 2006

Enabling a smoother and more transparent information flow, according to his work, has the following effects on citizen’s participation:

1. Autonomy: Access to information enables citizens to perceive a wider range of possibilities and options against which they can gauge their choices. This is particularly important when the citizen participates in decision-making processes.

2. Democracy: The emergence of an information economy, creates information structures that are not only an alternative to mass media, as Benkler states, but I would like to add are also alternative to government-run e-governance platforms that cannot fully cater to citizens' need for participation and debate. Creating an accessible and participatory information structure also creates a space that fosters public discussion, and hence, the expression of our political nature. (Visit Storytelling as Performance Part 2 for a larger exploration of the political in the public space)

3. Human justice: The freedom to access basic resources and services, allows us to fulfil our capabilities in society, including producing our own information, as well as improving our well-being by accessing information about health, education, public infrastructure, etc.

These three characteristics can be very well tied up with the three objectives of e-governance outlined above: wider information delivery, citizen participation and government accountability. Citizens aspire to access information that enables them to make good choices and participate in conversations that affect their livelihoods. For this reason, we find a common goal among the change actors (interviewed in the series), is devising new modes to engage with government-related information that complement or replace government-owned platforms.

Civil Society' and E-governance

One of the best known examples of these initiatives have been spearheaded by the Bangalore-based NGO: Janaagraha. the Centre for Citizenship and Democracy.

Image courtesy of Duke University website

The organization works to improve the quality of life in Indian cities and towns, by improving the information around infrastructure and services; and citizenship. We interviewed Joylita Saldanha, who works for the NGO’s leadership team to learn more about Janaagraha’s views on the role of information for urban governance, based on the experience of platforms such as I change my city. Her perspective c aught me off guard, as she framed the problem in urban governance from a somewhat unconventional angle:

Joylita Saldanha

Janaagraha's Leadership Team

Experience conceptualizing and
building Mobile and Web products in Los Angeles and Bangalore

Believes technology is a great lever and enabler.
Sees potential in technology to drive community action at the ground level

Whenever we talk about social change, participation and democracy, we root for the discourse that works to empower the citizen. Janaagraha finds this assumption incomplete. Saldanha suggests it is our role to find new ways to empower the government and help them do their job: "One citizen cannot be always an agent of change so we need communities coming together [...] We want to look at how to get citizens involved, because we can’t keep blaming the government if we don’t participate. We need to help them do what they do".

Read this short interview to get a glimpse of the information structures Janaagraha is building to empower the government.

Interview:

In order to gauge the extent to which Janaagraha is empowering and enabling the government to make information accessible for the public, we will look at how their online platforms are improving e-governance, based on the three characteristics outlined in the UNESCO definition and the three characteristics of effective information economies outlined by Benkler.

Stage 1: Improving information delivery

How does I change my city tackle this information crisis?

JS: Janaagraha wants to improve the quality of life in two ways:

Improving the quality of infrastructure.
Improving the quality of citizenship and citizen engagement.

We look at I change my city as something that enables citizens and governments to be more transparent for each other. Janaagraha can’t be everywhere, but technology crosscuts all the programs to allow us to roll it out to other cities.

How does Janaagraha know what information people need?

JS:We have a Net Plus Roots approach:

Stage	Roots: Information transactions at the grassroots level	Net: Information transactions through technology
Process	Reach out to communities and engage with them Community outreach and advocacy teams contacts the government Get the government and the citizen connected Send out citizen reports to government Follow up with the government to get responses Share responses with the citizens	We take all learnings from the grassroots and apply them to technology. The design/product team in place does customer research. Look at google keywords and try to understand what people are searching for Disseminate that content with citizens
Example	Crisis: Low voting turn out. Roots intervention: Look at where people go to enroll for voting and how we can clean up the electoral role at the grassroots level. Net intervention: Jaagte Raho: A portal People can register online to vote.	Crisis: How to get a driving license in Bangalore. Roots intervention: People were not getting them because they don’t know the correct process or what to do. They don’t know the hows or the whys. Net intervention We created a section called How To and put the process of a) How to get a driving license b) why do you go and get a driving license c) what are the documents you need to carry.

Right now we are playing the role of facilitator, but eventually we don’t want to be those facilitators. We want these platforms to be bridges between the citizen and the government.

My only problem with this is that an information structure based and reliant on digital technologies will only allow the interests of the middle class to permeate the system. How will information from other groups feed into the structure?

JS: We definitely want to enable access for everyone, but we don’t want a duplication of efforts. If the road is broken; even if one person complains and gets that pothole fixed then the road will be good for everyone to use. At the end of the day what we want people is to participate. From then we can take it to the next level and ask: ok what are we really missing in terms of planning? where are we missing participatory budgeting? where can we involve everybody: not only the urban but everybody. That’s what it takes it to the next level.

Stage 2: Encouraging citizen participation in decision-making processes

How does access to information improve urban governance?

JS: A very basic important aspect of where you live is to find which is your ward who is your electoral representative and what does he do. People don’t even know which ward they are living in, which is their assembly constituency, etc. Engaging with the electoral representative, then engaging with civic agencies. These are things you need to have in place before we start looking beyond this.

And you are facilitating this information?

JS: Yes, we are trying to map out services in the neighborhood and give more information about this. We have Municipal Commissions in Bangalore, and most people don’t know where these agencies are located, so our survey team went out found the offices and mapped them.

We use maps a lot because we make a lot of emphasis in spatial data. We want people to participate: tell us where their the park or playground is, locate it and then we take this information and find out: what is the budget allocated for this park, when was the last clean up, what is the future of this park, etc. At the same time, we want the citizen to tell us about its state and their wish-lists for this park.

You mention spatial data. What is the best way to use it? and who should manage it?

One thing we see when we interact with civic agencies or electoral, is that most of them don’t have a grasp of the analytics to understand what is the ground level situation, and that is where we come in. We have an information structure in place and we make data accessible. This helps representatives understand what are the patterns: a) what are the trends, b) where are their successes, c) where are their failures. Data needs to play a major role in how we take our decisions. It cannot be intuitively thought out.

Stage 3: Making governments accountable and transparent

How can these resources make the government more accountable?

We need more [information] systems in place to identify what is accessible in terms of services and infrastructures. First step is making things transparent; and making elected representatives, civic agencies, citizens -all these people accountable. We believe that accountability and participation goes hand in hand. You need to participate in order to make it accountable. The process of engagement is empowering for the citizen once they realize they can bring about change."

It takes time to get things done; change happens very slowly. And we can’t keep blaming the government if we don’t participate. We don’t lend them a hand, and let’s be honest, we probably don’t have the resources. So, how do we enable the government? How do we empower them? That’s something Janaagraha works for: helping the government do what they need to do.

***********

The next interview will feature Surabhi HR from Political Quotient, an organization working to redefine how youth engage with politics in the digital era. We will refer back to the characteristics about information economies and e-governance outlined on this post and use Janaagraha's experience as a backdrop, to explore the work PQ is doing: organizing spatial data, improving information structures for the government and bridging communication between citizens and their elected representatives.

Sources:

Benkler, Yochai. The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press, 2006.

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

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/information-structures-janaagraha

April 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T10:45:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India.

Workshops organised in Bangalore

Shadow Search Project (SSP) [CIS, April 18, 2011]
Facebook Resistance [CIS, April 2, 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and 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 want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

Columns on Digital Natives

A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. The following were published in the month of April:

Who the Hack? [Indian Express, April 24, 2011]
One for the avatar [Indian Express, April 3, 2011]

Digital Natives Newsletter

Links in the Chain is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the Digital Natives with a Cause? The first issue of volume IV is here:

links in the chain volume 4 Best Practices

New Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entry:

Cyber Fears: What scares Digital Natives and those around them

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Workshop organised in Hyderabad

Web Sites Accessibility Evaluation Methodologies: Conference Report

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software. Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

Submission

Comments on Draft National Policy on ICT in School Education

New Blog Entry

Towards Open and Equitable Access to Research and Knowledge for Development [PLoS, March 29, 2011]

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Featured Research

Interview

An Interview with Activist Shubha Chacko: Privacy and Sex workers

Workshops organized in Ahmedabad and Bangalore

'Privacy Matters', Ahmedabad: Conference Report [Ahmedabad Management Association, Ahmedabad, March 26, 2011]
Privacy, By Design [CIS, April 16, 2011]

New Blog Entries

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers. CIS campaigns to facilitate this:

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Learning from Fukushima [published in the Business Standard on April 7, 2011]

News & Media Coverage

The Gary Chapman International School on Digital Transformation[International School on Digital Transformation, July 17-22, 2011]
Iraqi delegation in Bangalore to study e-governance projects [Economic Times, April 20, 2011]
Dark waders [Time Out Bengaluru, Vol. 3, Issue 20, April 15 - 28, 2011]
Beyond Clicktivism [Outlook, April 18, 2011]
Gone in a flash [Times of India, April 16, 2011]
How Web 2.0 responded to Hazare [Hindu, April 11, 2011]
EU Commissioner Hedegaard to deliver keynote address at consumer world congress
Net cracker [Time Out Bengaluru Vol. 3 Issue 19, April 1 - 14, 2011]
On the Path to Global Open Access: A Few More Miles to Go [PLoS, March 2011, Volume 8, Issue 3]

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/april-2011-bulletin

The Asian Edge: 2012 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society Summer School

praskrishna — 2012-08-02T13:23:14Z

The 2nd Biannual Inter Asia Cultural Studies (IACS) Summer School will be hosted in Bangalore, India by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies Consortium. The event will be held in the first and second week of August 2012.

The IACS Summer School brings together South and East Asian experts from different disciplines as faculty for graduate and advanced research students to engage with key issues of larger social, cultural and political concerns in Cultural Studies in Asia. Any student registered in a post-graduate degree program is eligible for the IACS Summer School. There are limited seats and students will be selected based on their applications. Students registered at universities participating in the Consortium of Inter Asia Cultural Studies Institutions will be given first preference.

The Summer School 2012 proposes to integrate the teaching with core IACS faculty with the larger realities of change in South and East Asia. It proposes a 10 + 4 day structure.

Core Course: Methodologies for Cultural Studies in Asia: The Summer School offers a 10 day core course that works through seminars, taught classrooms, tutorials, open spaces, field trips and workshops. The core course shall address questions of Cultural Identity, Modernity, Nationalism, Gender, Class, Revolution and Asianism to frame an argument about relocating methods, concepts and ideas in contemporary Cultural Studies in Asia.

Day/Date	Time	Session	Instructors	Readings
Aug 02 (Thu)	09:30-10:00	Introduction to Course/Orientation
	10:00-1:00	Session 1: The Question of Knowledge	Instructors: Daniel PS Goh Nithin Manayath	The Epistemological Value of East Asian Perspective – Sun Ge Knowledge Production in the Era of Neo-Liberal Globalisation – Kuan-Hsing Chen Teaching versus Research? – Meaghan Morris
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Choi, Ji Yeon Ajinkya Shenava Khetrimayum M Singh Vincent Chung Jaime Fang-Tze Hsu
Aug 03 (Fri)		Culture Industries workshop
		Workshop party
Aug 04 (Sat)	10:00-1:00	Session 2: The Question of Culture	Instructors: Asha Achuthan Ratheesh Radhakrishnan	Hind Swaraj – Chs IV, VI, XII, XIII – MK Gandhi Value Typology of Chinese Peasants and Its Transformation in Contemporary China – He Xuefeng An Elaborative Argumentation of a Nong-Country – Zhang Shi Zhao
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Annisa Beta Ying-Tzu, Liu (Eva) Li, Yen-Chieh Sharib Aqleem Ali Li, Cho Kiu (Joseph)	Venue: 1 Shanti Road
	6:00-8:00	EVENING SALON	Tejaswini Niranjana and Kuan-Hsing Chen	Venue: 1 Shanti Road
Aug 05 (Sun)		HOLIDAY
Aug 06 (Mon)	10:00-1:00	Session 3: Nationalism and Modernity	Instructor: Milind Wakankar Student Presentations: Mai Thi Thu Baidurya Chakrabarti Zhang, Bing Musab Iqbal Meng Hsien Lu	On Nation – Zhang Tai Yan Nationalism in India – Rabindranath Tagore New Dominant Ideology and Changes of Urban Space in Today's Shanghai – Wang Xiaoming The Twilight of Certitudes: Secularism, Hindu Nationalism and Other Masks of Deculturation – Ashis Nandy A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor
	3:00-5:00		Instructor: Madhuja M Student Presentations: Pan Yifan Zhang Zhihui Se Young Oh
		EVENING SALON	Stephen Chah and Ashish Rajadhyaksha	Venue: Centre for Internet and Society
Aug 07 (Tue)	10:00-1:00	Session 4: Culture and Economy	Instructors: Radhika P Raghu Tenkayala	In the Margin of the Capital: From ‘Tjerita Boedjang Bingoeng’ to ‘Si Doel anak sekolahan’ The Emergent Culture of Consumption – Chua Beng Huat ‘Bollywood’ 2004; When Was Bollywood – Ashish Rajadhyaksha Peasant Cultures of the 21st Century – Partha Chatterjee
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Chan Ka Yi Kim Yoon Young Tanna Shilpa Shirishkumar Ruchi Jaggi Haesook Yong
Aug 08 (Wed)	10:00-1:00	Session 5: Gender and Culture	Instructors: Navaneetha Mokkil Nitya Vasudevan	Why Culture Matters – Tejaswini Niranjana Prostitutes Parasites and the house of state feminism – Naifei Ding Women and Freedom – Firdous Azim Letters to the Editor: The domestic violence act and conflict Spectralization of the Rural: Reinterpreting the labour mobility of rural young women in post-Mao China – Yan Hairong
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Elmo I-Che Hsu Pang Ka Wei (Janet) Li-Fang Lai Kris Yu-Shiuan Chi Samia Vasa Shwetha D Ryu M-Rye Sabreena Ahmed
	6:00-8:00	EVENING SALON	Firdous Azim and Naifei Ding/Siddharth/Arvind in conversation	Venue: Alternative Law Forum
Aug 09 (Thurs)	10:00-1:00	FIELD TRIP	SURESH JAYARAM – Pettai Tour
Aug 10 (Fri)	10:00-1:00	Session 6: Understanding Popular Cultural Practice	Instructors: Namita Malhotra Nishant Shah	Hong Kong Action film in the Indian B Circuit – SV Srinivas Inter-Asia Comparative Framework: Postcolonial Film Historiography in Taiwan and South Korea Kim Soyoung Fan Bhakti and Subaltern Sovereignty – Madhava Prasad
	3:00-5:00	Student Presentations	Samhita Sunya Khatija Sana Khader Ayesha Maria Mualla Antoreep Sengupta
Aug 11 (Sat)		UNWORKSHOP DAY (Writing)	Evening: Final Party

Optional Courses: 2 Additional 4-days parallel Courses shall be offered to participants interested in specialised inquiries of their research practice.

Course A. The Digital Subject: Science, Technology and Society in Asia

Course Coordinator: Nishant Shah

Course Instructors: Nishant Shah, Lawrence Liang and Ashish Rajadhyaksha

Course B. Research Seminar on Technology, Culture & the Body

Course Coordinator: Nitya Vasudevan

Course Instructors: Tejaswini Niranjana, DING Naifei, Audrey Yue, Wing-Kwong Wong, Hsing-Wen Chang, Nitya Vasudevan

Nandy

A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor

Nandy

A National Culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate – Saadia Toor

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/iacs-summer-school-2012

Digital Humanities and the Alt-Academy

sneha — 2015-11-13T05:29:48Z

The emergence of Digital Humanities (DH) has been contemporaneous to the ‘crisis’ in the humanities, spurred by changing social and economic conditions which have urged us to rethink traditional methods, locations and concepts of research and pedagogy. This blog post examines the emergence of the phenomenon of the alt-academy in the West, and examines the nuances and possibilities of such a space in the Indian context.

From a brief exploration of the problem of new objects and methods of research in the digital context, we have come to or rather returned to the problem of location or contextualising DH, and whether it may be called a field or discipline in itself.

As some of the previous blog posts have illustrated, most of the prominent debates around DH have largely been within the university context, or have least focussed around the university as the centre, and therefore emphasise the move away from more traditional ways of doing humanities, or at a larger level the more established and disciplinary modes of knowledge formation.

In the context of pedagogy, DH seems to be developing in a very specific role, which is that of training in a certain set of skills and areas which the existing disciplines have so far not been able to provide. The university or more specifically the traditional classroom offers a specific kind of teachinglearning experience which may not always have within its ambit the necessary resources or strategies to foster new methods of knowledge production, and a lot of DH work has been posited as trying to plug knowledge gaps in precisely this area.

The notion of a ‘digital classroom’ has been made possible by the proliferation of new digital tools and the internet; with increased access to open access archives and dynamic knowledge repositories such as Wikipedia, there is a move towards a more open, participatory and customised model of learning based on collaboration.

DH has been characterised by many as a space, or method that intervenes in the traditional ‘hierarchies of expertise’ [1] —– not only in terms of people but also spaces, methods and objects of learning — to present a significant ‘alternative’ that is now slowly becoming more mainstream. A rather direct example of this is the growth of a number of ‘alt- academics’ [2] who now inhabit what previously seemed to be a rather nebulous space between academics and an array of practices in computing, art and community development among many others. However, it is the in-between, or the liminal space that holds the potential for new kinds of knowledge to be generated. The connotations of this notion however are many and problematic, as seen particularly in the emphasis on new kinds of skills or competences that is now required to inhabit such a space, as also the narrative of loss of certain critical skills that are part of the disciplinary method and the resistance from certain quarters to the university to acknowledge such a trend. Conversely, it is also reflective of how certain kinds of skills in writing, reading, visualisation and curation have now become essential and therefore visible. It may be useful to explore this change further to arrive at some idea of whether such a space exists in the Indian context, and how it informs the way we conceptualise DH; as practitioners, researchers, teachers or the lay person.

This state of being within and to a certain extent outside of a certain predominant discourse is a peculiar one with several possibilities, and DH, owing to its interdisciplinary content and methods, seems to be a suitable space to foster these new and alternate knowledge-making practices.While the early DH debates in the Anglo-American context seemed to be dominated by certain disciplines like English, media studies and computational and information sciences, practitioners and researchers alike have branched out significantly, with research focussing more on questions of data-mining, mapping and visualisation with an increasing focus on processes and design, and using a diverse range of texts or objects.

In India, which significantly borrows the discourse from the same context, and also is still a multi-layered technological space very much in a moment of transition to the digital, the debates remain largely confined to the English and History departments and to some extent library and archival spaces. Outside of the academic circle however, there are a number of initiatives, such as online archival efforts, media, art and design practices and research (some discussed in the earlier blog posts as well), which would be likely spaces where one may see DH–related work being done. An important part of the discourse in the context of education is the access to and a more substantial and critical engagement with technology in the classroom. Educational or instructional technology has grown by leaps and bounds in the last decade or so in India, as evidenced by the number of initiatives taken to introduce ICTs in the classroom, and this has been supported by several large-scale digitisation projects as well but the digital divide still persists, as a result of which these initiatives come with a peculiar set of problems of their own (as discussed in the earlier blog post on archival practice) the most important being the lack of connection among such practices, research and pedagogy.

While education technology is a separate field which works on better interactions between teaching-learning practices and technology, it does form part of the context within which DH is to develop either as a discipline, practice or a pedagogic approach, and the two areas are very often conflated in some parts of the discourse in India. While moving beyond the ICTs debate — which is premised primarily around access to knowledge, DH has been posited as making an intervention into prevailing systems of knowledge — so that the mode of understanding both technology and the humanities, and the interaction between the two domains (assuming that they are separate) undergoes a significant change.

What then goes into promoting more institutional stability for DH, in other words, in teaching and learning it — will be a question to contend with in the years to come, as more universities take to incubating research around digital technologies and related components and incorporating this into the existing curricula.

Dr. Abhijit Roy, Assistant Professor at the Department of Media, Communication and Culture, Jadavpur University speaks about the changes he sees in pedagogy and research with the advent of digital technologies, particularly in traditional humanities disciplines like History and languages.

While some of these changes are elementary, such as the use of digital technologies in classroom teaching and learning exercises, it is in the practice of research, which he sees even with his students now, through the use of blogs and social media and the possibilities to publish and engage in discussions with other researchers through platforms like Academia.edu or Scalar, that he finds a vast change. It not only makes the process more transparent but also encourages an ethos of constant sharing, dissemination and a network of usage and storage online. This has transformed the way research and pedagogy can be imagined now, and opened up several possibilities.

It is in realising this potential for new research and pedagogical models that universities have slowly begun to adopt digital technologies but the institutional efforts at building curricula specifically around DH-related concerns have been few with the prominent ones in India being the courses at Jadavpur University and Presidency University in Kolkata.

Curriculum development in DH comes with its own issues too, and they stem largely from the fact that one is still unable to understand fully the nature of the digital and its facets — we also inhabit a time when there is a transition from analogue to digital — but the rate of change is faster than with other domains of knowledge, so much so that the curricula developed may often seem provisional or arcane, which makes it doubly challenging to demonstrate its various facets in practice, particularly in the classroom. A useful distinction would be between DH being brought in as a problem-solving approach to address the extant issues of the humanities (thus also seen as a threat to the disciplines themselves), and having its own epistemological concerns which may be related to but also distinct from the humanities - in short to help us ask new questions, or provide new ways of asking old ones.

What this essentially refers to is the alternate modes of knowledge production that an increased interaction with digital and internet technologies now engenders. Wikipedia is an existing example of this, and illustrates some of the core concerns of and about DH as it calls into question notions about authorship, expertise and established models of pedagogy and learning. Lawrence Liang describes this as a larger conflict over the authority of knowledge, [3] the origins of which he locates in the history of the book, and specifically in the print revolution and pre-print cultures of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. He likens the debate over Wikipedia’s credibility, or more broadly over technologies of collaborative knowledge production ushered in by the internet to similar phenomena seen before in early print culture and how it contributed to the construction and articulation of the idea of authority itself. He says: “The authority of knowledge is often spoken of in a value-neutral and a historical manner. It would therefore be useful to situate authority in history, where it is not seen to be an inherent quality but a transitive one 6[4] located in specific technological changes. For instance, there is often an unstated assumption about the stability of the book as an object of knowledge but the technology of print originally raised a host of questions about authority. In the same way, the domain of digital collaborative knowledge production raises a set of questions and concerns today, such as the difference between the expert and the amateur, as well as between forms of production: digital versus paper and collaborative versus singular author modes of knowledge production. Can we impose the same questions that emerged over the centuries in the case of print to a technology that is barely ten years old?”

He further goes on to elaborate that the question of the authority of knowledge should ideally be located within a larger ‘knowledge apparatus’, comprising of certain technologies and practices, (in this case that of reading, writing, editing, compilation, classification and creative appropriations) which help inflate the definitions of authority and knowledge even more.

The above argument throws into sharp relief the notion of the ‘alternate’— often posited as the outlier or a vantage point, or even as being in resistance to a certain dominant discourse or body of knowledge.

While resistance itself is discursive; the ‘alternate’ has also always existed in various forms, such as the pre-print cultures illustrated in the argument above, and particularly in India where several kinds of practices and occupations are but alternatives — from alternative medicine to education — to the already established system in place. As mentioned earlier, these practices may just be increasingly visible and acknowledged now.

The attempts to subsume these alternate practices, which began as and may perhaps have been relegated to the status of a sub-culture for long within academia then seem to be one way of trying to circumvent the authority of knowledge question. Another aspect of this is the invisible ‘technologised’ history of the humanities, which therefore prompts us to rethink the separation between the humanities and technology as mutually exclusive domains. By extension then, the term DH itself therefore may be a misnomer or yet another creative re-appropriation of various knowledge practices already in existence. This is perhaps the underlying challenge to the ontological and epistemological stake in the field.

At best then DH may be seen as the result of a set of changes in the last couple of decades, the advancements in technology being at the forefront of them, whereby certain new and alternative modes of knowledge production have been brought to the foreground, which have also challenged the manner in which we asked questions before to a certain extent. As the field gains institutional stability, it remains to be seen what the new areas of enquiry that emerge shall then be in the years to come.

References:

# Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 Accessed July 27, 2014 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/
Davidson, Cathy N. & David Theo Goldberg, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning) ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010) Accessed March 15, 2014 http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/future-thinking
See Liang, Lawrence “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15^th to the 18^thcentury” in INC Reader#7 Critical Point of View: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011, p.50-62

[1] . See Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo. Goldberg, The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010

[2] . For more on this see # Alt-Academy: 01 - Alternative Careers for Humanities Scholars, July 2011 http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/

[3] . See Lawrence Liang, “A Brief History of the Internet from the 15^th to the 18^th Century” in INC Reader#7Critical Point ofView: A Wikipedia Reader, Geert Lovink and Nathaniel Tkacz (eds), Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2011

[4] Adrian John’s as quoted in Liang. See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-and-alt-academy

Internet and Society in Asia: Challenges and Next Steps

nishant — 2011-12-23T05:56:15Z

The ubiquitous presence of internet technologies, in our age of digital revolution, has demanded the attention of various disciplines of study and movements for change around the globe. As more of our environment gets connected to the circuits of the World Wide Web, we witness a significant transformation in the way we understand the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of the world we live in, says Nishant Shah in this peer reviewed essay published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 11, Number 1, March 2010.

Traces of digital environments and internet technologies are all around us – we can see them in the rise of Digital Natives who are increasingly experiencing and living their lives mediated by digital technologies; we can see them in new forms of social interactions, such as blogs, peer-to-peer networks, internet relay chat, podcasts and so on, which are progressively becoming the primary points of information dissemination and production; we experience them in the tools and techniques of political mobilisation in large scale democratic elections and also in sub-cultural and smaller phenomena, such as flash-mobs and viral networking; we are incessantly reminded of them in the discourse around questions of safety and danger, especially with reference to activities such as internet pornography, child sexual abuse, piracy, identity theft, etc.

Internet technologies have become so intricately entwined with our daily practices and experiences that it is necessary to seriously look at these technologised circuits and the technology mediated identities thus produced. Increasingly, we see many different disciplines extending their methodologies and perspectives to include cyberspaces and digital behaviour in their purview. We already have a new breed of cyber-psychologists who are looking at the interaction between the human mind, the sense of the self and digital environments. The law, perhaps most concerned with questions of property, trade and commerce, is also examining questions of what it means to be human, with the emergence of post-human categories like cyborgs, cybrids, and genetically modified life forms. Anthropologists and sociologists have discovered cyberspace as a site that significantly influences the behaviour and thought of individuals as well as communities that come into being in the digital deliriums of the networked world. Feminism and Gender and Sexuality Studies have found great theoretical and political interest in the ways in which the internet technologies change the way we understand our bodies and practices. New disciplines like Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Cybernetiques, Cyborg Studies, etc. are slowly garnering importance and evolving as the spread of digital technologies increases exponentially. Cybercultures, a discipline (or perhaps, rather, a combination of various disciplines interested in studying cyberspaces) that comes into being because of the rise of Internet Technologies, is now already institutionalised in many universities and research spaces, concentrating on understanding the complex forms of interaction, representation and negotiation that happen in the fluid and rapidly changing landscape of digital cyberspaces.

As Internet Technologies continue to grow and become a more integral part of our lifestyles, cultural production, and forms of social transformation and political mobilisation, there are a few challenges that we face, especially when writing from and about Asia.

Following the trajectory of the development and spread of internet technologies, academic attention and research has primarily emerged in the North-West and slowly penetrated through disciplines and contexts in other parts of the world. It was only after the 1990s, once the digital revolution reached the ‘rest of the world’, that interest in and research on the phenomenon started to feature in studies in Asia. However, the initial research on and the major interest in the relationship between internet technologies and society has been dependent upon the theoretical categories, examples or ideas produced in primarily Western contexts. This has led to the production of a narrative where the digital technologies of information and communication (like the internet) are looked at as being seamlessly exported from the West to the East, without any attention given to the geo-political contexts and socio-cultural changes that accompany this penetration of technologies. There has been a blindsiding of the role that the State, educational institutions and globalised economic powers have played in the introduction, the proliferation and the acceptance of the internet technologies and digitally mediated lifestyles that have become so commonplace in developing Asia today. Research is oblivious to the context within which these technologies emerge and the kind of negotiations and interactions they have with the larger social and cultural fabric of the region.

One of the main reasons why such a narrative gains currency is that we have no vocabulary but that granted by Western scholars and practitioners to talk of the technologies and the technologised socio-cultural productions that emerge in our own local and regional contexts. With the rhetoric of globalisation and homogenisation on the one hand and the logic of the universalising nature of internet technologies on the other, there has been an un-reflexive theorising of digital identities, productions and interactions; this makes Asia more an exemplar for the existing Western ideas and hypotheses than a site where the drama of these technologies is still unfolding. This process is aided and abetted by the accelerated urbanisation that seeks to create nondescript and sterile spaces of consumption and lifestyle that subscribe to the idea of ‘Global’ or ‘Mega’ cities. Hence, across Asia, we see the mushrooming of cities and city-states – Singapore, Tokyo, Shanghai, Taipei, Bangalore – that work at actively erasing histories and producing these bubbles of consumption and globalisation that are disturbingly similar to each other.

Such theorising also reinforces the disconnect that Western Cybercultures has been encouraging between the networked worlds and ‘reality’, which, though affected and changed by the rise of these technologies, still remains strangely continuous and coherent in the midst of transformations. Moreover, it contains most theoretical and political interventions within the zones of urban consumption and change, thus producing a certain middle-class, self-referential work that concentrates on these areas, forgetting other crises and problems that still need attention. It also encourages a view of Asia as a docile, non-agential site upon which technologies are mapped, despite the fact that every year in this new century has seen Asian countries emerging as substantial stake-holders and players in production, proliferation and consumption of internet technologies. Along with the liberalisation of markets, the global digital revolution has also seen boundaries in social norms, cultural mores and political processes being pushed. We have been witness to formerly closed governments attempting to restructure themselves in the global world and to an unprecedented inflation and consumption in the developing Asian countries. We are in the middle of radical reconstruction of academic processes and market economies as public private partnerships become the norm. However, these landmark changes are often ignored or explored from a West-centric view-point, producing extreme and polarised reactions to the spread of Internet Technologies and the changes it entails.

Beyond Euphoria and Fear

Most responses to the widespread reach of internet technologies and digital forms have been grounded in euphoria or fear. There is a certain boundless celebration on the one hand, that proclaims the internet as forming the new public sphere, heralding the democratic potential and transparent structures that these networks have within them. The gurus have looked upon the internet in a ‘convergence theory’ mode where they announce, severally and variously, the death of earlier cultural productions like books, movies and music. The ability of digital technologies to aid innovation and creativity, as well as new forms of employment and entrepreneurship, has spurred the writing of many books and essays documenting the process. The roles that internet technologies have played in granting voice, visibility, and expression to many underprivileged communities, and the way they offer social and economic mobility in developing countries, have been unabashedly celebrated. Governments, civil society practitioners and theoreticians have all looked upon the internet as the panacea that will help level the landscape of social justice and political participation around the world.

Simultaneously, there has also been a construction of ‘ecology of fear’ around the rise and spread of internet technologies. Massive global alarm exists around questions of easy access to pornography and other sexual behaviours online, not only for young adults but also for mature audiences of potential behaviour addicts. Online gambling has emerged as a huge concern and has been at the centre of much debate. Cyber-bullying on social networking systems, and cyber-terrorism on a much larger scale, have shocked us as new technologies get implicated in actions that have disastrous results both at the individual and the community level. With the tightening Intellectual Property regimes, there has also been great debate around digital piracy and the ability of the internet peer-to-peer networks to encourage acts of theft and copyright infringement. As the world becomes more digitised, attacks on sensitive information by crackers and scammers are also on the increase in various forms. The internet has been looked at with growing concern and alarm by parents, educators, policy-makers and corporate entities, who are all deeply involved in assuring safety, creating opportunities and catering to the needs of citizens and consumers.

This simultaneously celebratory and pathologised approach often cripples research in the field of Internet and Society, because it constructs technology mediated practices and identities as at once universal (hence general) and unique (hence particular). Research that emerges is, consequently, confined to producing case-studies explaining what happens in each particular incident online and is unable to examine either the conditions within which the technologies emerge or the contexts that circumscribe certain socio-cultural behaviour. Such research, instead of examining the aesthetics and politics of technology mediated identities and practices, keeps on documenting the extremely fluid and rapidly changing landscape of the digital world – documenting fads, evolutions, innovations and the smaller changes therein – thus missing the forest for the leaf; the research ends up in concentrating on the ‘what happened’ rather than treating these happenings as symptomatic of larger paradigmatic changes that they often hint at.

Internet and the Convergence Theory

This is further complicated by the fact that many theorists and analysts seem to treat the internet more as a platform for convergence of old media forms in new digital packages. Such a view of internet technologies and digital cyberspaces leads to the populist descriptions of blogs as extensions of personal diaries, of digital cinema as a continuation of the celluloid image, of digitally morphed pictures as more sophisticated versions of earlier experiments with still images, of social networking systems as evolution of pre-existing social structures, of MMORPGs (Massive Multiple Online Role Playing Games) as merely complex forms of gaming. These descriptions fail to take into account that internet technologies, especially digital cyberspaces, while indeed affecting and transforming existing forms of media and cultural production, also lead to the emergence of new and interesting forms of expression, consumption and interaction.

Just as the field of Cybercultures has only a vocabulary granted by the West, it also lacks a vocabulary that is its own – most research in Cybercultures, especially in emerging information societies, relies on categories, concepts and ideas that were relevant for earlier popular cultural forms like books and movies. Transplanting categories of authorship, production, consumption, distribution, etc., and trying to map them onto the digital world leads to severe confusion and is a futile exercise. For example, if we look at the discourse around the online user generated encyclopaedia – Wikipedia - and use the earlier existing categories of an author, a reader, an editor and an institutional structure of producing knowledge, we immediately realise that the discussion cannot be sustained; the categories presuppose other forms of writing and production which are not as relevant in the digital worlds. Similarly, legal categories like possession, ownership, labour and copying are also being made redundant by the advent of the internet. As these categories fail to capture the new digital worlds, they also fail to explain the human-technology relationship that the field of Internet and Society seeks to explore. Despite investment in terms of efforts, time and money, much of the research becomes redundant because it does not have the vocabulary or the idea that analysis of these new digital spaces entails.

The imagination of the convergent multimedia internet distracts from the fact that what appear to be earlier historic forms like text and moving images are, in the context of cyberspace and the Web 2.0 revolution, actually new forms that need their own vocabulary that does not carry the baggage of earlier popular technologies. It is time to move away from talking about the Internet and its effects in analogies and to seek and create an independent and effective language that takes into account the mechanics and the potentials of the Internet revolution.

Institutional Spaces: Internet & Society

It is within such contexts and to address questions like these that institutional spaces emerge in the field of Internet and Society. As more and more disciplines start focusing on internet technologies and their intersections with areas as diverse as identity, sexuality, governance, cultural production, political mobilisation and social transformation, institutions in this space are faced with the daunting question of what to concentrate on and how to define the scope of their activities. Many global organisations and interventions narrowly define the field through their own disciplinary positions and perspectives. The Berkman Centre of Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, for example, examines the law and its intersections with the new internet technologies and practices. Sarai - a new media organisation in India - concentrates on art and cultural production as affected by digital technologies and practices. The Association of Internet Researchers builds a network of multi-disciplinary researchers and practitioners across the globe to meet annually for workshops and conferences and also share ideas through a mailing list, concentrating on existing phenomena on the World Wide Web. Several Communications and Media Studies schools also have established labs and workshops that focus on the internet technologies from their disciplinary grounding.

The Centre for Internet and Society, a newly established research and advocacy centre founded in Bangalore, India, makes a shift from these discipline-bound approaches to Internet and Society, and inaugurates a multi-disciplinary, interactive space for theorists, researchers, students, practitioners, activists, artists and the larger public to initiate a dialogue in the field of Internet and Society. Rather than adopting a disciplinary framework, it takes the model of Asian Cultural Studies, seeking to produce a sustainable scholarship and methodology to talk of the relationship between emergent Internet technologies and the changes they produce in the Global South. It sets out to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism, public accountability and new pedagogic practices through multidisciplinary research, intervention and collaboration, to understand and affect the shape and form of the internet and its relationship with the political, cultural, and social milieu of our times.

At CIS, we recognise the contexts within which this field has developed and emerged and have initiated many programmes, projects and structures to deal with the questions that this essay has charted. Drawing from the pedagogy and frameworks developed within Cultural Studies in Asia, the research at CIS investigates the local, the contextual, the emergent and the negotiated nature of digital spaces and internet technologies at three levels – At the national level, looking to produce models of research by examining the history, the politics, the growth and the significance of internet technologies in the context of globalised India; At the regional level, focusing on the similarities that global urbanisation and digitisation are bringing to the emerging information societies in Asia and the acknowledging the dissimilarities that need to be addressed in each of these societies; At the global level, engaging with a much larger South-South discourse that strengthens the move to approach internet technologies as integral to our ways of living rather than of foreign import. Such an approach allows us to escape the often restrictive constraints of cybercultures discourse that stays within the domains of internet technologies and produces disconnect between Internet and Society. Instead, we expand the scope of internet technologies to see their relationships with larger political, social and cultural economies, lifestyles and consumption patterns, and identity and transformation structures in the rapidly changing world. In the first two years, for example, we are investing a large part of our research energies into producing the Histories of the Internets in India – inviting different disciplines and standpoints to trace the diverse historically important and culturally significant growth of Internet Technologies in India, thus de-homogenising the internet as well as the discourse within cybercultures.

The policy and advocacy work at the Centre for Internet and Society, also contributes hugely to this localisation and narrativisation of the internet in India, by recognising the law and the State as the largest stakeholders in the growth and proliferation of these technologies. We have initiated campaigns and projects examining national laws regarding intellectual property rights regimes, piracy, e-commerce and security, accessibility and disability, to see how they are subject to modification with the growth of digital technologies. Original field work and ethnography with the consumers, practitioners, stakeholders and law enforcers about the nature of technology, its role in the larger imagination of the globalised Indian State, and the need to make sensitive and informed decisions, has already been initiated, along with dissemination platforms like workshops, seminars, meetings and conferences.

Keeping in tune with our model of collaboration and consultation, the Society Members have also helped us generate a healthy momentum by representing us and helping us find resources around the globe. Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam has been travelling across Asia, Europe and North America, at international policy and activist forums, promoting Open Access to information and knowledge. Lawrence Liang has been involved in teaching both at the local and international levels, apart from presenting original and influential research examining the relationship that internet technologies have with questions of knowledge production, ownership and the law. Achal Prabala has been actively working with the Wikimedia foundation to facilitate user participation in knowledge production online. Atul Ramachandran has been working on developing mobile internet platforms for sharing news and information within the underprivileged communities in India. Vibodh Parthsarthy has been designing academic courses and encouraging research in the fields of internet technologies, governance and democracy.

Because these questions have a much larger regional relevance – with the increasing description of Asia as the Mecca of piracy and digital infractions – we are also in the process of starting projects that do a survey of the laws around intellectual property rights, innovation and access in the Asian region, with Sunil Abraham (Director – Policy) guiding a team of in-house researchers and external collaborators. Cross-boundary research and analysis has also been initiated in terms of dialogues and comparative study of technology, space and globalisation, initiated by my seven month residential project in Shanghai, where we are examining the conditions of technologisation that make global spaces possible, in countries like China and India. Apart from these, the team of seven people has been making interventions in international workshops, conferences and forums, to start dialogues and discussions in the field of Internet and Society.

A significant effort has been spent in starting awareness for the public – from the first documentation on our website of work in progress by our research and policy collaborators to regular contributions to local media sources to organisation of public talks and events – which is aimed at demystifying the internet technologies and giving more ownership and assurance to a larger public. Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, gave a public talk on freedom, expression and the internet, citing anecdotes and examples from the phenomenal success and growth of Wikipedia. In a different media, independent film maker Jamie King screened his movies on the piracy cultures and innovation, in Bangalore, sparking conversations and debates about copyright, creative commons and the domain of cultural expression. Students and visiting artists from different countries, through the Shrishti School of Art Design and the efforts of Zeenath Hassan, came together at CIS for a discussion on fear and gender in public space and how digital technologies contribute to it. The discussion feels timely because only a month later, India saw the right wing cultural police tyrannising Bangalore and other parts of Karnataka, by perpetrating acts of brutal violence against women who they saw as progressive or in defiance of the right wing codes of decorum and behaviour. CIS was an active part of the ‘Pink Chaddi’ and ‘Reclaim the Night’ campaigneering, mobilising and participation at a local and national level, as a response to these acts of regressive violence, using digital environments and platforms to garner support and ‘recruit’ people into showing their protest against such fundamental ideas and practices.

Moreover, in order to develop and establish a more accessible vocabulary and understanding both within research, higher education and practice of internet and society questions, CIS has been investing in building national and regional networks of scholars, students and theorists in different disciplines to come and discuss the area. Courses have been designed and administered for undergraduate, post graduate and research students, in the disciplines of social sciences, management and media studies, journalism and communication studies, cultural studies etc. Networking with institutional and university spaces like the Centre for Culture, Media and Governance at the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi, Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, Christ University, Bangalore, Centre for Media and Culture Studies, at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai. We are also in conversation with regional spaces like the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Shanghai University, The Open Source Initiative, International Development Research Centre, Hivos and the Asia Scholarship Foundation in Thailand, for extending our regional and global networks.

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, is less than a year old and has already embarked upon so many different projects, found a wide range of collaborations, initiated diverse enquiries and has received the support and interest of a varied and credible list of organisations. This warm reception and enthused interest, is as much a sign of the evolving and dynamic nature of collaboration and consultation in Asia, as it is of the need for interdisciplinary spaces like The Centre for Internet and Society, in our times. We see our rapid progress as symptomatic of a much larger need to establish more institutional spaces that can cater to the widely expanding horizon of the field of Internet and Society. While it is indeed laudable that different disciplines have already started showing interest in studying and analysing these often invisible links between Internet and Society, it is also now time, to start looking at technology as more than just an object or platform of study. We can already see how, in the foreseeable future, the internet technologies are only going to become more ubiquitous and central to the crucial mechanics of survival and living. Spaces like CIS help us look at technologies like the internet, as not merely tools and techniques, but as entwined in the politics, aesthetics and economies of the time and spaces we live in.

About the Author

Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director for Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Nishant’s doctoral work examines the construction of technosocial subjectivities in India, at the intersections of digital technology, cyborg identities and globalised spaces. Nishant is the recipient of the Asia Scholarship Foundation’s grant which places him in Shanghai for a project on IT and the globalisation of Asian cities.

Read the original published by Inter-Asia Cultural Studies here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-society-challenges-next-steps

January 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-09T09:36:46Z

Welcome to the Centre for Internet and Society newsletter! In this issue we bring you the updates of our research, events, media coverage and videos of events organized by us during the month of January 2012!

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and internet technologies, in emerging information societies. The major outputs have been a four book collective asking questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world, a position paper, a scouting study and three international workshops.

Events Organised

Digital AlterNatives Video Contest: The Everyday Digital Native — To Be, To Think, To Act, To Connect

Digital AlterNatives Tweet-a-Review

'Digital Natives with a Cause?' project invites readers to review essays from the 'Digital AlterNatives with a Cause', a four-book collective published by Centre for Internet & Society and Hivos.

Digital AlterNatives: Book Reviews

Alternative Approaches to Social Change

“Observations about intangible aspects of a movement will keep a research from clinging to activism with a capital A, and start seeing a gradation in the social movement practices. It is constructive and opens the door to analyses of multi-dimensional movements such as the Blank Noise initiative (India). Drawing on methods of identifying new developments to the field of social movement, Maesy examines some aspects of it: the issue, strategy, site of action, and internal mode of organization.”
Nuraini Juliastuti, Co-founder, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center

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. This includes persons with blindness, learning disabilities such as dyslexia, cerebral palsy and persons who do not have full control over their limbs. For these people, the material needs to be converted into alternate formats such as Braille, audio or video or electronic formats (text document, word document or PDF) which they can access using assistive technologies. Our key research has focused on a submission to amend the Indian Copyright to the HRD Ministry, publishing a policy handbook on e-accessibility, research on accessible mobile handsets in India and an analysis of the Working Draft of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2010.

Journal Article

Technology for Accessibility in Higher Education, published in the Journal: Enabling Access for Persons with Disabilities to Higher Education and Workplace. Nirmita Narasimhan wrote an article.

Featured Research

Making Mobile Phones and Services Accessible. CIS researched, edited and published this report in partnership with G3ict and ITU. The report contains a foreword, eleven chapters, a bibliography and glossary with contributions from Deepti Bharthur, Nirmita Narasimhan and Axel Leblois.

Upcoming Event

ITU Tutorial on Audiovisual Media Accessibility, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, India International Centre, 14-15 March 2012. CIS is hosting the meeting. The Tutorial will be preceded by the fourth meeting of the Focus Group on Audio Visual Media Accessibility (FG AVA) on 13 March 2012. This meeting will take place at the same venue and will also be hosted by CIS, in cooperation with the ITU-APT Foundation of India.

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. We prepared the India report for the Consumers International IP Watchlist, made submission to the HRD Ministry on WIPO Broadcast Treaty, questioned the demonization of pirates, and advocated against laws (such as PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public funded knowledge.

Event Organised

Gandhi, Freedom, and the Dilemmas of Copyright: To commemorate Mahatma Gandhi's death anniversary, CIS organised a public lecture. Prof. Shyamkrishna Balganesh of the University of Pennsylvania gave a lecture.

Openness

The advent of the Internet has radically defined what it means to be open and collaborative. Even the Internet is built upon open standards and free/libre/open source software. CIS has been committed and actively campaigned for promotion of open standards, open access and free/libre/open source software.

Workshop Reports

Summary of the Minutes of the Workshop on Biodiversity Informatics, organized by the Western Ghats Portal team to explore the contemporary state of biodiversity informatics at Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), Bangalore on 25 November 2011.
Design!PubliC — Innovation and the Public Interest: On the 14th of October, 2011, the Center for Knowledge Societies organized the second edition of the Design Public Conclave, a conversation on how innovation can serve the Public Interest. The conclave was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bangalore.
Report on the 'Open Access to Academic Knowledge' workshop: On Wednesday the 2nd of November, during Open Access Week, the Indian Institute of Science in conjunction with the Centre for Internet and Society held a workshop on Open Access at the National Centre for Science Information, in Bangalore. We recorded the meeting and published it online.

Event Organised

Geekup on Open Data in Bangalore: Hapee de Groot, Hivos, Netherlands gave a talk on Open Data and its use for citizen engagement.

Media Coverage

Wikipedia turns 11 today: The Bangalore event, open to all Wikipedia users, contributors and enthusiasts, is being held at the Centre for Internet and Society at Domlur.
The Hindu, 15 January 2012

Internet Governance

The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society has defined internet governance as the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the internet. CIS partnered with Privacy International and Society in Action Group which has produced outputs in banking, telecommunications, consumer rights, etc., submitted open letters to Parliamentary Committee on UID, feedbacks on NIA Bill, and IT Rules.

Newspaper / Magazine Articles

Keeping it Private
As we disclose more information online, we must ask who might access it and why, writes Nishant Shah in the Indian Express, 15 January 2012.

Click to Change
From organising political protests and flash mobs to uploading their versions of Kolaveri Di, people brought about change with the help of the internet, Nishant Shah, Indian Express, 1 January 2012.

The Quixotic Fight to Clean up the Web
The ongoing attempt to pre-screen online content won’t change anything. It will only drive netizens into the arms of criminals, writes Sunil Abraham, Tehelka Magazine, Vol 9, Issue 04, 28 January 2012.

Sense and Censorship
The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) bills, at the US House of Representatives and Senate, respectively, appear to enforce property rights, but are, in fact, trade bills, Sunil Abraham in the Indian Express, 20 January 2012.

Interview

Our Internet and the Law
Nishant Shah was interviewed by the BBC Channel 5 (Radio) for its Outriders section. Jamillah Knowles reports this. Listen to the podcast online, BBC Radio, 24 January 2012.

Event Reports

Privacy Matters — Analyzing the Right to "Privacy Bill"
On January 21, 2012 a public conference “Privacy Matters” was held at the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai. It was the sixth conference organised in the series of regional consultations held as “Privacy Matters”. The present conference analyzed the Draft Privacy Bill and the participants discussed the challenges and concerns of privacy in India.

Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India
The Higher Education Innovation and Research Application (HEIRA) at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS) and the Centre for Contemporary Studies (CCS) at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc) hosted a two day workshop on 2 and 3 January 2012 on the Future of Integrated Science Education in Higher Education in India at the Centre for Contemporary Studies, IISc. Nishant Shah participated in the workshop.

Media Coverage

Twitter’s Censorship Move Aimed at Regaining China?
"The region-specific blocking was already being used on video hosting websites like YouTube and Hulu, where due to the wishes of copyright owners many videos are not available in India. Twitter is extending this technology to its tweets.”
Pranesh Prakash in International Business Times, 28 January 2012.

Google's privacy policy raises hackles (Times of India, January 26, 2012)
“Storing data makes it prone to misuse by authorities as well as corporations... I don't want my bakery shop owner to know what kind of medicines I buy from the nearby medical store.”
Sunil Abraham in the Times of India, 26 January 2012.

Google to change privacy policy to use personal info of users
“New changes are not good for a consumer's privacy.”
Sunil Abraham in Punjab Newsline, 27 January 2012.

Tangled Web
“We did a policy sting operation wherein we sent fraudulent notices to big web sites...in one case where we asked for the removal of three comments, they removed all 13. So there is already a private censorship underway.”
Sunil Abraham in the Week, 21 January 2012.

POV: Should user-generated content be monitored?
“We should not fool ourselves into thinking that private sector companies like Google will defend our fundamental rights. The next Parliament session is the last opportunity for parliamentarians to ask for the revocation of the rules for intermediaries, cyber-cafes and reasonable security practices.”
Sunil Abraham in afaqs, 19 January 2012.

Indian Internet Lawsuit Puts Spotlight on Freedom of Expression
“These rules have the potential to curtail debate and discussion on the net... They allow for all sorts of subjective tests by private parties and we predicted they would have a chilling effect on freedom of expression online.”
Sunil Abraham in the Voice of America, 19 January 2012.

India: obscene pics of gods require massive human censorship of Google, Facebook
“It’s difficult to establish exactly what is anti-religious: for example, the Hindu profession of belief in multiple gods is blasphemous to Muslims, Christians and Jews.”
Sunil Abraham in ars technica, 14 January 2012.
Is India Ignoring its own Internet Protections?
“The I.T. Act provides immunity to (Internet companies) and that should be the default starting position.”
Sunil Abraham in the Wall Street, 16 January 2012.

India internet: clean-up or censorship?
Sunil Abraham was quoted in Financial Time’s beyondbrics, 13 January 2012.

Twists and turns of the SOPA opera
“In terms of infrastructure, the U.S. controls critical web resources. Contrasting this to the Chinese firewall that blocks content for users within its jurisdiction, the U.S. decision to redirect a link can act as a ‘global block’.”
Sunil Abraham in the Hindu, 15 January 2012.

Activists cry foul against Aadhaar
Sunil Abraham participated in the meet on Aadhaar convened by the Indian Social Action Forum.
The Telegraph, 12 January 2012.

NGO questions people's privacy in UID scheme
“The UID project was allowed to march on without any protection being put in place.”
Sunil Abraham in the Times of India, 11 January 2012.

Revealed: Bangalore’s Basic Instincts
“If you look at the Google trend or any other website, Bangalore does not figure among the top 10 cities that surfs for porn. But that does not mean that Bangalore does not surf porn. It only means that we have a very sophisticated surfer with a very specific type. They don’t go through Google or other websites. They know how to go about it. But whether it affects their personal lives is lot more complicated.”
Sunil Abraham in the Bangalore Mirror, 8 January 2012.

Facebook, Google face censorship in India
“Traditional intellectual property rights holders like movie studios, music companies and software vendors are trying to protect their obsolete business models by pushing for the adoption of blanket surveillance and filtering technologies.”
Sunil Abraham in SmartPlanet, 5 January 2012.

Trail of the Trolls
“Trolling provokes a non-productive argument and as of now it is not considered a criminal offence anywhere in the world.”
The Telegraph, 4 January 2012.

Constitution of Group of Experts to Deliberate on Privacy Issues
It has been decided to constitute a Small Group of Experts under the Chairmanship of Justice A.P. Shah, Former Chief Justice, Delhi High Court, to identify the privacy issues and prepare a paper to facilitate authoring the Privacy Bill. Pranesh Prakash is one of the members.
Published by the Planning Commission, New Delhi.

2011: The year India began to harness social media
“We saw an increased sharing of digital content whether photos, videos, songs, news or blogs pointing to the Why This Kolaveri Di video, which went viral on YouTube with over 1.3 million views within a week of its release.”
Nishant Shah in the Sunday Guardian, 1 January 2012.

Blog Posts

Section 79 of the Information Technology Act by Pranesh Prakash
How India Makes E-books Easier to Ban than Books (And How We Can Change That) by Pranesh Prakash. This was reproduced in Medianama.

Upcoming Events

The High Level Privacy Conclave
Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, Society in Action Group, Gurgaon and Privacy International, UK is organizing the High Level Privacy Conclave at the Paharpur Business Centre, Nehru Place Greens in New Delhi on Friday, 3 February 2012.

All India Privacy Symposium
Privacy India in partnership with the International Development Research Centre, Canada, and Society in Action Group, Gurgaon, Privacy International, UK and Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative is organizing the All India Privacy Symposium at the India International Centre, New Delhi on Saturday, 4 February 2012.

Events Organised

Workshop on the Standardization of Kannada Computing Terminology, 28-29 January 2012, Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.
The Curious Case of Whose Data is it Anyway? The second round of discussions of the Exposing Data Series was co-organized by Tactical Tech and CIS. Siddharth Hande and Hapee de Groot gave lectures.
"ಕನ್ನಡ ಮತ್ತು ತಂತ್ರಜ್ಞಾನದ ಜೊತೆ ಜೊತೆಗೆ..." organised in TERI, Bangalore, 22 January 2012.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. In this connection, Shyam Ponappa continues to write his monthly column for the Business Standard.

Article by Shyam Ponappa

Reversing India's Downward Trajectory
The country can regain growth momentum with rate cuts and telecom reforms, writes Shyam Ponappa in this column published in the Business Standard on 5 January 2012.

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

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

June 2012 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-25T04:56:23Z

Welcome to the newsletter issue of June 2012. The present issue features an updated version of the Unlicensed Spectrum Policy brief for Government of India and a report of the Privacy Matters series organised in Ahmedabad on June 16, 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:

New Blog Entries

The Bots That Got Some Votes Home by Nilofar Ansher: The author gives us some startling updates on the "Digital Natives Video Contest" voting results declared in May 2012.
Hyper-connected, Hyper-lonely? by Nilofar Ansher.

Digital Natives Newsletter

Home Alone: Volume 10, Issue 1, April 2012 of the Digital Natives with a Cause newsletter features Hyper-connected, yet Hyper-lonely. It puts the spotlight on an emerging trope in society and media: the more connected we are to our gadgets, peer network and social media, the lonelier we feel.

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:

Op-ed in the Hindu

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Injunctions (Lawrence Liang, The Hindu, May 23, 2012): “The same ‘Ashok Kumar,' now restrained from infringing the copyright of the film, ‘3,' helped its signature song, ‘Kolaveri,’ go viral by downloading and copying it without any restraints.”

Columns / Articles

ಡಿಜಿಟಲ್ ನಿರ್ಬಂಧಗಳ ನಿರ್ವಹಣೆ (Sunil Abraham, Prajavani, June 9, 2012): Read the English translation here.

ಸೃಜನಶೀಲತೆಗೆ ಸಂದ ಗೌರವ (Lawrence Liang, Prajavani, June 9, 2012): Read the English translation here.
Copyright Amendment: Bad, but Could Have Been Much Worse (Sunil Abraham, Business Standard, June 10, 2012): The changes to the Copyright Act protect the disabled — but are restrictive about cover versions and web freedom.
A Ludicrous Ban (Achal Prabhala and Lawrence Liang, Open Magazine, June 2, 2012): Our courts cannot be used as quack-houses to buy pills for imaginary problems. The copyright industry is not a sick patient; it’s just a hypochondriac. Films don’t fail because of piracy; they fail because they’re not worth watching. The most popular films in this country are also the most pirated, and yet they remain money-spinners. The real problem is the unbending inability of this industry to adjust to the world; to the Internet; to the life-changing technologies that human beings have witnessed and embraced and prospered by over the past two decades.

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 Content, Open Standards, Open Access to Law, and Free/Libre/Open Source Software:

Media Coverage

Wiki goes the oral citation way (Cyber Media, Chokkapan S, June 11, 2012): Achal Prabhala who serves on the board of CIS speaks about the Oral Citations Project.

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:

Announcements

Window on the World: Subsequent to the publishing of a peer reviewed essay titled Resisting Revolutions: Questioning the Radical Potential of Citizen Action, CIS has been listed as one of the global organisations working on issues of participation, citizenship and new technologies along with a list of partner organisations. This was published by Palgrave Macmillan.
2012 Internet Freedom Fellows: The names of the 2012 Internet Freedom Fellows were announced on June 19, 2012. This was published by the US Department of State. Pranesh Prakash was selected as a Fellow.

Press Coverage of the Internet Freedom Fellows Event

Internet Freedom Fellows Program Emphasizes Defense of Fundamental Freedoms Online (by Ambassador Eileen Chamberlain Donahoe in DipNote, June 25, 2012).
Internet Freedom At Home: Governments, Companies Need Accountability, Speakers Say (by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch, June 22, 2012).

Peer Forum

Global Networks, Individual Freedoms: A Peer Forum on Internet Freedom and Human Rights: In Connection with the 2012 Internet Freedom Fellows Program, the United States Mission to the United Nations in Geneva invited Pranesh Prakash to a peer forum. The event was held on June 21, 2012, from 9.00 a.m. to 3.00 p.m.

Upcoming & Ongoing Events

Privacy Matters — Consumer Privacy (India International Centre, New Delhi, July 7, 2012): Privacy India, in partnership with the Centre for Internet & Society, International Development Research Centre, Society in Action Group and Privacy International, invite you to a public conference focused on discussing the challenges and concerns to consumer privacy in India.
The Fifth Elephant (NIMHANS Convention Centre, Bangalore, July 27 and 28, 2012): The event was organised by HasGeek and CIS. The first day covered the technology track and talks from business and industry were held on the following day.

Events Organised

Privacy Mattes — Medical Privacy (Yashwantrao Chavan Academy of Development Administration, Rajbhavan Complex, Baner Road, Pune, June 30, 2012): Privacy India in partnership with the Indian Network for People living with HIV/AIDS, Centre for Internet & Society, IDRC, Society in Action Group and Privacy International organised this event. The discussions explored the various types of medical privacy including informational privacy, physical privacy, proprietary privacy and decisional privacy.
GeekUp with Alan Knott-Craig (CIS, Bangalore, June 30, 2012): Alan Knott-Craig, founder of World of Avatar and CEO of Mxit, Africa’s largest social network gave a lecture.
Freedom of Expression & Privacy Roundtable Discussion (University of Goa, June 2, 2012): Lawrence Liang and Chinmayi Arun were participants in the discussion.

Connecting People Apart - Events Series

Post-Media Lab organised this events series at Lüneburg/Berlin from June 20 to June 23, 2012. Nishant Shah participated in the event series as a speaker:

Opening presentation – ‘Talk to Me’ (Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, June 20, 2012): Nishant Shah along with Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits made a presentation.
‘What Would the Community Say?’ (Freiraum, Lüneburg, June 21, 2012): Nishant Shah in cooperation with DialogN reflected on the experiences about the changing face of citizen action in a post-mediatised world.
The Community Complex, A Post-Media Lab conference (Denkerei, Berlin, June 22, 2012): Nishant Shah was one of the participants.

Other Events Participated

India Privacy Meet (Hotel LeMeridien, New Delhi, June 29, 2012): The event was organised by Microsoft, DSCI and Greyhead. Sunil Abraham was a panelist in the session on Citizen Privacy.
Meeting of the two Sub-Groups on Privacy Issues under the Chairmanship of Justice AP Shah (Yojana Bhawan, Planning Commission, June 27, 2012). Sunil Abraham participated in this meeting. The report of the committee will be used in drafting of the new privacy bill.
CENSORSHIP 2020: The Future of Free Speech Online (Communication, Culture and Technology Program of Georgetown University 2nd Floor, Car Barn, 3520 Prospect St., N.W., Washington, DC, June 25, 2012): Pranesh Prakash participated in this event organised by the Internet Society. See the original published by Communication, Culture & Technology here.
Multi-Stakeholder Consultation on ‘Internet Rights, Accessibility, Regulation & Ethics’ (Mirza Ghalib Hall, SCOPE Complex, New Delhi, May 3, 2012): Pranesh Prakash was a speaker in this event organised by Digital Empowerment Foundation, Association for Progressive Communications, Department of Information Technology and National Internet Exchange of India. Watch the video here.
Internet at Liberty 2012 (Washington D.C., May 23 and 24, 2012): Sunil Abraham was a speaker in Plenary IV along with Cynthia Wong, Mohamed El Dahshan and Dunja Mijatović. Watch the video here. The event was organised by Google.
Google Hangout with Ashoka Fellow Sunil Abraham: Ashoka Fellows are leading social entrepreneurs who have innovative solutions to social problems and the potential to change patterns across society. Sunil became an Ashoka Fellow in 1999. Watch the video.
Clear and Present Danger: Attempts to Change Internet Governance and Implications for Press Freedom (National Endowment for Democracy, Washington D.C., June 26, 2012): The event was organised by National Endowment for Democracy. Pranesh Prakash participated in it.
Overview of Google’s efforts to promote Internet Freedom and freedom of expression online, including its work on the following reports: “Google Transparency” and “Enabling Trade in the Era of Information Technologies: Breaking Down Barriers to the Free Flow of Information (California, June 28, 2012): The event was organised by Google. Pranesh Prakash participated in a meeting with Derek Slater from Google.
Stanford University Roundtable Discussion (California, June 28, 2012): IFF Fellows introduced themselves and briefly talked about their background and work in internet freedom and human rights issues. Pranesh Prakash was one of the participants.
EFF’s legislative efforts to defend free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights (California, June 29, 2012): Pranesh Prakash participated in a meeting with Katitza Rodriguez, International Rights Director.
Overview of Twitter’s new censorship policies and its impact on human rights activists around the world (California, June 29, 2012): Pranesh Prakash participated in a meeting with Carolina Janssen, Localization Content Coordinator. This was organised by Twitter.
Best practices in utilizing Ustream’s live interactive broadcast platform to showcase human rights issues (June 29, 2012): Pranesh Prakash participated in this meeting organised by Ustream.

Event Report

Securing e-Governance: Ensuring Data Protection and Privacy (Ahmedabad, Management Association, Ahmedabad, June 16, 2012): Privacy India in partnership with the Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore, International Development Research Centre, Canada, Privacy International, UK and the Society in Action Group, Gurgaon organised a public discussion. Prashant Iyengar and Nisha Thompson spoke at the event. A total of 30 people participated in the event.

Columns in FirstPost

How Facebook is Blatantly Abusing our Trust (Nishant Shah, FirstPost, June 27, 2012): ‘Don’t fix it, if it ain’t broken’ is not an adage Facebook seems to subscribe to... The million dollar question – or maybe a slightly reduced price, given its public listing status on the stock-exchange right now – is that while Facebook might keep us safe from other people using our data, will it also be able to keep us safe from itself?
Beyond Anonymous: Shit people say on Internet piracy (Nishant Shah, FirstPost, June 7, 2012): FirstPost published Nishant Shah's column along with the video that CIS and ALF had made on 'shit people say about piracy' as a lead story. The post is a series of provocations around piracy, censorship and the state of Internet in India. Like all good tasting things, these observations need to be taken with a pinch of salt. But it is the hope of the author that this serves as a response to otherwise very persistent voices that have been demonizing file-sharing online.

Article in the Times of India

The Web of Our Strife (Pranesh Prakash, The Times of India, June 2, 2012): Given the current trend of states individually wielding excessive powers over various aspects of how their citizens access and use the internet, a Committee on Internet-Related Policies may well be what is needed to safeguard democratic principles and innovation on the internet.

Podcast

An Interview with Nishant Shah by Jamillah Knowles (Outriders, BBC Radio 5): “I think what we need to do is perhaps say that there is something happening with the internet in India and then maybe we can move on to figuring out what is happening to Anonymous because we had a series of challenges on freedom of speech and expression and online space in the country.”

New Fellow at CIS

Chinmayi Arun, former Assistant Professor of Law at the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences joined CIS as a Fellow. Chinmayi’s research focus will include privacy, free speech and access to information.

New Blog Entries

CIS entered into a small collaboration with Tata Telecommunications in India to celebrate the IPv6 day on June 6. CIS agreed to write 5500 word vignettes which were sent to their global database consisting of more than 900,000 users in the Asia-Pacific:

News & Media Coverage (International)

India's struggle for online freedom (by Rebecca MacKinnon, Sydney Morning Herald, June 9, 2012): “If you start the drenching early on, by the time you get to 50 per cent [internet penetration], everyone will be well-behaved monkeys.”—Sunil Abraham.

Hackers Take Protest to Indian Streets and Cyberspace (by Shreya Shah, Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2012): “The group attacked the Web site of India’s Supreme Court even when it says it does not attack Web sites used by the common man.” — Pranesh Prakash.
The War for India's Internet (by Rebecca Mackinnon, Foreign Policy, June 6, 2012): “"On free speech I have high faith in the Indian judiciary...There is a good chance to launch a constitutional challenge.” — Sunil Abraham.

News & Media Coverage (National)

No more blocking of entire websites? (by Danish Sheikh, Business Standard, June 24, 2012): CIS research on Intermediary Liability in India is referred to in this article.
UID: Are your biometric I-cards stacked against you? (by M Rajashekhar, Economic Times, June 24, 2012): "If biometrics is used as authentication factor then it would be possible for a criminal to harvest your biometrics — such as using a glass to collect fingerprints — without your conscious cooperation. Or the registrar can cache your biometrics and duplicate transactions." — Sunil Abraham.
Net Loss (Abimanyu Nagarajan, The Telegraph, June 20, 2012): “We sent takedown notices to e-commerce, content hosting, and news media sites...in most cases, we found the intermediaries were very risk averse." — Sunil Abraham.
Cos spying on competitors, staff: Study (The Statesman, June 19, 2012): “Whether or not surveillance is legal, depends on the type... There is some private information a person will expect to remain private, and some information that is expected to be public — like Twitter feeds.” — Sunil Abraham.
Recruitment Tracker: 21 students placed out of the 49 who sat for recruitment in Christ University’s School of Law, Class of 2012 (Bar and Bench News Network, June 11, 2012): CIS recruited Snehashish Ghosh.
PPOs save placement-record as Christ Law’s 2nd graduating batch hosts fewer law firms (by Prachi Shrivastava in Legally India, June 10, 2012).
India: The New Front Line in the Global Struggle for Internet Freedom (Atlantic, June 7, 2012): CIS report on Intermediary Liability in India is quoted.

'Anonymous' hackers to protest Indian Internet laws (AFP, June 8, 2012): The news was also published in NDTV, Jagran Post, The Times of India, LiveMint, and Economic Times on June 9, 2012.
The new Internet watchdogs (Ronendra Singh, Hindu Business Line, June 12, 2012): “The Indian Government is not following the letter of the law and bypassing judicial safeguards in its crackdown on political speech...This aggressive enforcement is also having a chilling effect on access to knowledge and freedom of expression.” — Sunil Abraham.
Concerns raised ahead of proposed India-US trade treaty (Hindu Business Line, June 13, 2012).
Attempts to censor the web ill-advised (by Krishs Fernandes, The Times of India, June 3, 2012).
Poor Guarantee of Online Freedom in India (by Geeta Seshu, Economic & Political Weekly, Vol XLVII No. 24, June 2012).
Tata Communications embraces the change to IPv6 (tech 2, June 7, 2012).
Internet opens doors to trillions more Net addresses with IPv6 (by Aaron Tan, techgoondu): “Despite the larger load of information, IPv6 packets are easier to handle and route, just like postcards with pin codes in their addresses are easier to deliver than those without.” — Nishant Shah.
Biz moving to IPv6 but lower costs, support needed (intellasia.net, June 8, 2012).
Govt websites to get new addresses (The Telegraph, June 7, 2012): “The future of our connected networks is IPv6. Not only is it more efficient and faster than IPv4, which we are currently working with, it is also more reliable and secure.” —Nishant Shah.
Anonymous India’s Takedowns Could Be Counterproductive (by Nikhil Pahwa, Medianama, June 6, 2012).
Watch out for cyber bullies (by KV Kurmanath, Hindu Business Line, June 4, 2012): “It would be very useful if both the government and civil society was more aggressive in awareness raising and triggering change in behaviour. Unfortunately this is a bit like smoking — even though people are aware of the issues — they engage in risky behaviour online.” — Sunil Abraham.
Scared by a spoof? You’ve got to be kidding me! (by Dhamini Ratnam, June 3, 2012). Pranesh Prakash is quoted in this article.
Protest@ censorship.com (by Sandhya Soman, The Times of India, June 5, 2012): “There is corporate and private censorship of internet and it is being done without enough proof of who is violating the copyrights of moviemakers. If these protests create awareness about the larger issues and developments in the areas of e-governance, IT Act and copyright law, then they could be helpful.” — Pranesh Prakash.

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:

Telecom Knowledge Repository

Ford Foundation has given CIS a grant of USD 200,000 to build expertise in the area of Telecommunications in India over a period of two years. The programme outline, the modules covered and the profiles and bios of our expert reviewers can be found here:

Broadcasting

Module 7.2.3 (Mobile Television) by Tina Mani
Module 7.2.3 (FAQs)

Emerging Topics

Module 8.3 (Mobile Television) by Tina Mani
Module 8.3 (Mobile Television FAQs)

Featured Research

Unlicensed Spectrum Policy Brief for Government of India (Satya N Gupta, Sunil Abraham and Yelena Gyulkhandanyan): CIS and the Ford Foundation bring you the Unlicensed Spectrum Policy brief for Government of India. The research recommends unlicensed spectrum to the Government of India based on recent developments in wireless technology, community needs and international best practices. (The present report is an updated version of the draft circulated earlier).

Column in Business Standard

Growth, India's Highest Priority (Shyam Ponappa, Business Standard, June 8, 2012): Telecom and spectrum reforms are overdue, as are energy reforms addressing the fuel supply-power generation and distribution-sustainable tariffs chain. In terms of sequence, the next significant effort could focus on the… telecom sector. The empowered group of ministers can decisively abandon short-term government revenues in favour of user benefits, leading in time to even more government revenues.

New Blog Entry

National Telecom Policy 2012 — Issues and Concerns by Snehashish Ghosh: The author throws light on some of the issues and concerns surrounding the recently passed National Telecom Policy 2012.

Event Report

3^rd IJLT-CIS Lecture Series (National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore, May 27, 2012): Prof. Rohan Samarajiva, Chairman and CEO, LIRNEasia gave the inaugural lecture on “Tariff Regulation in South Asia”. The presentation slides can be accessed here.

Foreign Press Coverage

India’s telecom success story turns sour (by Simon Denyer, Washington Post, June 1, 2012): “"There are very strong economic reasons for not auctioning spectrum in developing countries.” — Shyam Ponappa.

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. Over the last four years our 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. With foreign governments we worked on National Enterprise Architecture and Government Interoperability Framework for Govt. of Iraq; Open Standards Policy for Govt. of Moldova; Free and Open Software Centre of Excellence project plan for Saudi Arabia; eGovernance Strategy Document for Govt. of Tajikistan. With the Government of India we have done policy research for 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, Interoperability Framework in eGovernance, Privacy Bill, NIA Bill, National Policy on Electronics and IT Act.

CIS is an accredited NGO 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.

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit our website here

CIS is grateful to its donors, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation and the Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

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

Bangalore Thinkathon Surrogacy: Bodies, States, Networks

Wendy Chun & Nishant Shah — 2012-07-20T06:08:16Z

The first workshop of the Habits of Living project will be a Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) focused on the notion of surrogate structures that have become the visible landmarks of contemporary life and will be hosted by the Centre for Internet & Society, in Bangalore, India.

Scheduled from 26th to 29th September 2012, the event will bring together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners from the Global South. The aim of the workshop is to produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.

The Habits of Living project begins with this workshop in Bangalore because Surrogacy is central to the ubiquity and universality of contemporary networks. A surrogate is "a person or … a thing that acts for or takes the place of another" (OED). A surrogate is a "simplified" substitute that represents and wields power for another: a deputy, an authorized stand-in. In contemporary network science—widely used in (and drawn from) sociology, economics, biology, and industry—networks operate as surrogates. Surrogate structures that transcend the material boundaries of modernist concepts like Nation States and Bodies have emerged as a way by which new social, cultural, political and economic configurations get assembled. The idea of networked information societies has forced us to revisit the ways in which we understand fluid and aporetic structures that facilitate flow of ideas, capital and ideologies in the rapidly globalizing world.

As the influential network scientist Duncan Watts has pointed out, "rather than going out into the world and measuring it in great detail, [network scientists] want to construct a mathematical model of a social network, in place of the real thing…" This substitution means "making drastic simplifications" in which real world phenomena are "represented in almost comic simplicity by dots on a piece of paper, with lines connecting them." These simplifications, which cause us to miss real world details, enables network scientists to "tap into a wealth of knowledge and techniques that will enable us to address a set of very general questions about networks that we might never have been able to answer had we gotten bogged down in all the messy details."

Surrogacy supports the self-referential universe that networks create, where all conditions of exteriority are obliterated and each phenomenon is explained only through its relationality with the other phenomena in that networked condition. This co-dependence promotes the idea of universalized networks which are diverse but homogeneous, and specific but replicable. Simultaneously, there is a contained analytical framework that proposes to offer a comprehensive view but only manages to mimic (Bhabha, reference) the status quo of the dominant power structures. Networks become the reified forms and functions of this condition of Surrogacy.

Surrogacy is thus central to making "networks" universal at both a macro and micro level, for not only do networks stand in for other phenomena, the very basic units of network analyses, nodes and edges, depend on the substitution (and thus universalization) of actors and interactions.

Intriguingly, the direction of this substitution is unstable. Modern networks stem from structures, such as electrical grids and highway systems, deliberately built to resemble nets. Remarkably, though, networks have become both constructed technical structures and actually existing phenomena that are empirically discovered. Systems biology, for instance, presumes the existence of networks in animals, from the genetic to the multi-cellular. Similarly, ecology conceptualizes food webs and less lethal animal interactions—or more precisely the potentiality of these interactions—as networks. This insistence on networks as actually existing empirical entities happens even as network scientists’ analysis itself is framed as an abstraction that replaces real world events with a mathematical model. Networks are thus both theoretical diagrams and things that exist out there. Indeed, they compromise the distinction between the constructed and the natural, the theoretical and the empirical. Like Borges’ imfamous map, the map—the surrogate—has become the territory.

Surrogacy, however, localizes as well as abstracts. A surrogate — something that stands in for more complex and often unsustainable forms of life — is often a potent being that is both temporary and unending. The surrogate emerges as an alternative form of producing specialized life and habits, while also performing a universal viability that stands in for the local specificities. Specific surrogacy networks range from:

Global networks of biological surrogacy and reproductive care that mobilize and orchestrate new conditions of labor (in all senses of the word)
Digital networks that help mobilize certain bodies and skills into the larger conditions of contemporary globalization
New combinations of State-Market partnerships enabled by digital and internet technologies that define the precarious conditions of life and living for the citizen subjects
Complexes of emotional surplus and affective relationships that get codified in massive social network systems, redefining the ways in which we understand relationships and relationality
Consortial state and state-like structures that transgress the territorial sovereignty of the nation-state and produce new forms of governance and belonging

For the Bangalore Thinkathon, we are bringing together scholars and practioners whose work touches on at least one of these types of surrogacy in order to outline and comprehend the work networks do. With a special emphasis the emergence and proliferation of large scale networks enabled by the digital turn, the Thinkathon is designed to start a dialogue between these different un-disciplined perspectives and produce a compendium of perspectives on the changing habits of living in contemporary times.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/bangalore-thinkathon

Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance in Asia and India – Section Outlines

sumandro — 2015-11-13T05:40:49Z

The Centre for Internet and Society has been invited to contribute two sections to the Asia Internet History - Third Decade (2001-2010) book edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon. The sections will discuss the activities and experiences of civil society organisations in Asia and India, respectively, in national, regional, and global Internet governance processes. The draft outlines of the sections are shared here. Comments and suggestions are invited.

In the (draft) Foreword to the Asia Internet History – Third Decade (2001-2010), Prof. David J. Farber writes:

One of the early attempts to extend the reach of the Internet to Asia was via the “Johnny Appleseed” approach. That is a set of people responded to queries by people in Asian countries asking how they could connect with the growing Internet by offering to supply tapes to key people in the requesting countries, often by physically going with the tapes, as well as providing access points to the USA Internet. The people that we, I was one of the seeders, worked, with became the leaders in their nation and founded the initial national networks that blossomed with time and often formed the basis of commercial Internets. The traditions that these network frontier pioneers established lead to the eventual spread of the benefits of Internet access to not only their nations but became models for the spread to the rest of Asia…

I am honoured to contribute to the pioneering series titled Asia Internet History, edited by Dr. Kilnam Chon, by foregrounding a range of other individuals and organisations that often worked outside but in engagement with the national governments, and technical and academic institutions that govern the connecting tapes of the Internet, to ensure mass access to and effective usages of Internet in Asia.

The two sections, to be authored me, provides an overview of ‘civil society organisations’ working across Asian countries that have played a critical role in the shaping of policy-making and discourse around Internet governance during 2000-2010, and then undertakes a closer look at the organisations working in India and their interventions at national, regional, and global levels.

Please read the draft outlines of the overview section and the section on Indian organisations, and share your comments. The comments can be posted on the GitHub page where the outlines are hosted, on this page, or over email: sumandro[at]cis-india[dot]org.

The outlines can also be directly downloaded as markdown files: the overview and the India section.

Asian Civil Society Organisations and Internet Governance

Here is a tentative list of key civil society organisations from Asia that have participated and intervened in Internet governance processes during 2001-2010. Please suggest organisations missing from the list.

Bangladesh

Cambodia

China

Indonesia

EngageMedia, Australia and Indonesia
ICT Laboratory for Social Change (iLab)
Indonesian CSOs Network for Internet Governance
Indonesian ICT Partnership Association (ICT Watch)
Internet Society Indonesia Chapter [website is under construction]

India

Iran

Iranian Civil Society Organizations Training and Research Centre (ICTRC) [URL is not working]

Japan

Centre for Global Communications (GLOCOM) [Academia?]
Internet Society Japan Chapter
Japan Computer Access for Empowerment (JCAFE) [URL is not working]
Japan Computer Access Network (JCA-NET)

Kuwait

iJMA3 - Kuwait Information Technology Society (KITS)

Lebanon

Lebanese Center for Civic Education (LCCE)

Malaysia

Internet Society Malaysia Chapter

Myanmar

Myanmar ICT for Development Organization (MIDO)

Nepal

Internet Society Nepal Chapter

Pakistan

Philippines

Democracy.Net.PH
Foundation for Media Alternatives (FMA) [URL not working
Internet Society Philippines Chapter

Regional

Singapore

Internet Society Singapore Chapter

South Korea

Sri Lanka

Internet Society Sri Lanka Chapter

Thailand

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/civil-society-organisations-and-internet-governance-in-asia-and-india-outlines

Storytelling as Performance: The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise 2

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:30:15Z

This post compares the method of storytelling with performances. To illustrate this, we explore the narratives of the Blank Noise project and The Ugly Indian, two civic groups from Bangalore making interventions in the public space. Part 2 looks at the role of actors and the stage in performances to explore the role of agency and the public space in storytelling.

This is part 2 of our analysis of Blank Noise and The Ugly Indian, two civic groups thriving in Bangalore by making a strategic use of storytelling to intervene in the public space. In the previous post, we explored the mediums and narratives used by these organizations to craft an identity for themselves. This one will look at the impact of this identity on the agency and actions of their volunteers. We will also draw some final conclusions relating the analysis back to the Making Change project.

How to navigate this post:

Section	Performance	Storytelling
Pre-production	Preparing all elements involved in a performance including locations, props, costumes, special effects and visual effects.	Preparing all elements needed to convey the message of the story including: spoken word, text, images, audio, video or other artifacts.
Screenplay	A written work narrating the movements, actions, expressions and dialogues of the characters.	Building a narrative in storytelling
Actors	Actors performing characters in a production.	The relationship between storytelling actors and agency
Stage	Designated space for the performance of productions	The public space as the stage for storytelling
Action!	Cue signifying the start of a performance	When storytelling leads to action

3.actor
ˈaktə/
1. a person portraying a character in [a dramatic or comic] production
2. a participant in an action or process

The cast of a production learns the script from beginning to end; rehearses the lines and internalizes the characters they have been chosen to represent. In the same way actors sustain the narrative of the production while they are on stage, we too act upon the identities we have chosen for ourselves in our day to day (Giddens, 1991). Oggs & Capps call this: constructing agentive identities: “participants assume agentive stances towards present identities, circumstances and futures” (1996; Hull, 2006). Embracing a set of traits and integrating them to the ‘story of the self’ (Gauntlett, 2002; Giddens 1991). This suggests there is a direct relationship between self-identity and agency, that will influence how we conduct ourselves in the public space.

As seen in the last section, The Ugly Indian’s self-ascribed identity frames their speech and action:

The Ugly Indian

We are a group of Ugly Indians who feel strongly about the state of visible filth in our cities.
Our philosophy can be described simply as: Kaam chalu mooh bandh. Stop Talking, Start Doing.
We believe in direct action, with a common-sense problem-solving approach. 
We do not finger-point or blame the system. We aim to make a change from within - 
one that sustains because everyone wants it and is comfortable with it.

This means the online identity of the organization (on Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and their website) must be consistent with the offline actions of volunteers in clean drives and TUI inspired activities.

Indira Nagar Rising	Koramangala Rising

TUI Clean Drives (Click to enlarge)
Photos courtesy of The Ugly Indian Facebook Album.
Visit the rest of the album here.

"[Join us] if you think like us, and want to achieve something meaningful in your immediate surroundings."

The Ugly Indian

Given the anonymity of the voices behind the narrative, the ideas and attitudes endorsed by TUI organizers can only remain at the discursive level, and it is TUI volunteers who collectively translate the set of beliefs into action. In other words, volunteers are the agentive extension of the movement, as they use their agency to execute the plan of action designed by the anonymous TUI organizers. The narrative in this case becomes somewhat of a ‘creed’ for responsible civic action, and while most volunteers choose to “stick to the script”, they are not really given the opportunity to explore their own narrative within.

In the case of Blank Noise, if we take another look at its mandate, it is collaborative by definition.

Blank Noise
Blank Noise is a public and participatory arts collective that seeks to
 explore the range of street interactions and recognize 'eve teasing' as
 street sexual harassment/ violence.

The processes to translate the Action Hero identity into action are far more open-ended than in the case of TUI. There is further room for volunteers to interpret what being an Action Hero means to them (as an identity), how they will respond to it (as agents), and how do they fit in the larger context of the Action Hero narrative (in the collective). The role of volunteers is to participate in the construction of a new narrative for the public space, defined by how women feel, what they think and do when they navigate it. It is not conclusive, and each intervention is an invitation for further dialogue.

"Adding agency to the equation gives the actor a purpose and new -revised- conception of the self and aligns its behavior with who he wants to be. "[2]

Blank Noise volunteers take ownership of who they want to be in the public space. Through their testimonials and actions, they do not only draft an identity for themselves, but they create one -or many- for the streets, for women, for men, for sexy, for safety. Stretching out our 'performance' analogy even further, their type of action is what we would deem improvisational theatre: the improvisation and intuition of BN volunteers takes over the dialogue, action and characters, as these are “created collaboratively by the players as [the play] unfolds in present time”[1]

4. stage
steɪdʒ/
a raised floor or platform, typically in a theatre, on which actors, entertainers, or speakers perform.

Finally, the stage. This is the space where actors display these learned identities in front of (or with) members of the audience. While stories are not necessarily presented on a conventional ‘raised floor or platform’, stories are meant to permeate "the stage" of the 'public space'. In spite of what Sartaj Anand told us in his interview: “stories as increasingly personal and local”, in order for them to trigger imagination and public discussion they must also be public and visible. Hannah Arendt posits in Essays for Understanding, that the task of storytelling is to extend the meaning of the actions, symbols and allegories into the public, making them visible to broader audiences and initiating a process of critical thinking among them (Jackson, 2002; Oni, 2012; Arendt, 1994). Hence, the role of storytelling in the public space has two functions:

a) Visibility:

Enhanced visibility is an extremely powerful asset. Narratives produced by activist-oriented storytellers do not only reflect greater autonomy of production, but also enjoy a wider rate of consumption[3] (Vivienne, 2011). From a tech-optimist perspective, multimedia representations of these stories further this visibility, making it also accessible to broader online audiences.

The Ugly Indian in particular thrives on visibility, due to its beautification mission. Its highly visible presence online is used to ratify the work they are doing to erradicate "visible" filth:

"X was a big fan of the Broken Windows Theory – which suggested that if a street looked ugly or neglected, it attracted more anti-social behaviour, while a well-maintained and beautiful street discouraged vandalism and often earned respect from passers-by. [...] Could the ugly Indian’s civic behaviour be a function of the environment and the signals it gives him? If so, could changing the environment change behaviour?" Chapter 7 - Nudge

In the case of Blank Noise, they use online visibility to re-introduce the testimonials collected through their interventions and installations, back into the public space.

Reporting to Remember (2009)

Triggered by the Mangalore pub attack, the report wants to compile a list of incidents involving attacks on/threats to women under the pretext of culture, tradition and religion.

By who:

Political parties
Religious groups
Individuals

2. Nature of attack:

who they attacked
why they attacked
You can also send articles/links explaining that.

3. When: Date

4. Location: Region.

Make a Sign (2009)
Volunteers were welcome to say anything they wanted.

What Blank Noise wants to say:
We are talking of safer cities not feared cities
We are talking of independent women, not paranoid women.
We are talking about collective responsibility- don't tell me to be even more 'cautious'.
We are talking about eve teasing as street sexual harassment and street sexual violence.
We are talking about autonomous women, not just mothers daughters and sisters amidst fathers brothers and sons.

Tales of Love and Lust

The vocabulary project, stems from a need to build a dictionary of 'eve teasing', Blank Noise asked participants to email in to comments and remarks they had heard addressed to them on the street. BN compiled them into an 'eve teasing' vocabulary.

The vocabulary was represented in the form of charts, school-style, simple lettering and graphics, in an attempt to desexualise and remove obscene reference from the terms that are used leerily at us on the streets.

Find the full list of interventions, campaigns and tactics here.

b) Political:

"[Politics is] the space of appearance that comes into being whenever men are together in the manner of speech and action, predating and preceding all formal constitutions of the public realm”

Hannah Arendt (1989) [4]

This visibility also re-conceptualizes how we do politics by creating political spaces. Setting up a ground for public discussion creates the opportunity to flesh out our ability to be political (Rawls 1971 in Sen, 2005). Hence, producing and consuming a story with, for and by the public, should constitute a political experience in itself -especially in the context of civic interventions as is the case of both our productions.

However, this does not seem to be the case for TUI. The identity of The Ugly Indian focuses on action; on collecting manpower to fill voids left by the state in waste management. In the words of Nishant Shah, they are aligning their work with needs and systems that have already identified by the state, as opposed to devising new modes of engagement or participation. Having said that, staying away from politics is an intentional mandate, and their focus today is removing all obstacles that stand between the middle class and their action in the public space; even if that includes extricating the group from its political nature. For now, spreading ‘action’ and its ‘visibility’ in the network is a priority. The bigger their beautification spectacle grows, the better.

Blank Noise has a different view of how to engage the middle class [5]. The group has identified the need to talk about ‘sexual harassment’ in public; a conversation that has not been addressed and is continually dismissed by the state. This void is hence being filled with stories and articulations of the communities involved [6],as a mean of resisting the stronger dominating narrative of silence around the issue. As opposed to TUI, the priority of Blank Noise is to reassert our ability to perform our role as active, visible and political agents in the public space; initiating a larger process of social critique in their network [7]

(We interviewed Jasmeen Patheja earlier in the project and discussed Blank Noise's political nature. Read the article here)

5. action! (and conclusions)
ˈakʃ(ə)n/
something done so as to accomplish a purpose.

As per definition, action must be purpose-driven, and throughout the last two posts, we have unpacked how this sense of purpose can be built using storytelling. We explored this looking at its methods, narrative identities, actors and spaces of action.

In the case of both organizations, storytelling was imbued in their organizational identity, the interaction with their volunteers and; the way in which they disseminate information. Expanding on what we said in the first installment on storytelling: its interactive nature makes it a tool for empowerment. The identities created by both organizations resonated so much with their audiences, that volunteers adapted their own identities and actions in the public space to align with them and participate in their initiatives.

The post also brought attention to the challenges of locating the ‘political’ within the spectacle. Storytelling as a mode of engagement is effective: it captures people’s attention and participation. However, it becomes problematic when the story becomes a creed adopted without question, as is the case of The Ugly Indian. The lack of opportunities to craft new arguments in public discussion leads to an equally passive participation to the one the group intended to eradicate. Citizens get involved without making critical connections with the material realities they are working to reverse. The citizen is trapped in the performance of citizen awakening and they are ceasing to articulate new ideas. In the case of Blank Noise, the political precedes the spectacle, but at the end of the day, it still relies on a visible and manageable network to disseminate its narrative and attract new story-lines and actors into the discourse.

On the issue of visibility: at the outset of the project we asked the question: what is it about the spectacle that makes it so enticing, and what can we borrow from it to strengthen political participation? [8]. This post visited the three elements that, according to Shah, makes an event visible: legibility, intelligibility and accessibility[9]; and started to answer some of these questions.

Performance	Storytelling	Visibility
Pre-production	The mediums chosen to tell the story (images, video, text, digital technologies) are used to give clarity to the message.	Legible
Screenplay	Creating (or borrowing narratives) from history and fiction makes stories easy to relate to, better understood and hence, better received by the audience	Intelligible
Actors	Acting out these identities shows the message was understood and internalized by the audience.	Intelligible
Pre-production	Digital technologies are effective at disseminating the story and making it more accessible in the public online space.	Accessible
Stage	Telling the story in the public (online and offline) space makes participation and interaction more likely.	Accessible

Finally, the main role of technology in storytelling is to provide and enhance visibility for stories (from all three fronts). As much as the thought piece criticizes the spectacle hype and suggests we move beyond it, this research is finding it useful to look further into: why visibility is desirable for advocacy and how it can bring new and different stakeholders into the process. At least, it seems to be working for The Ugly Indian and Blank Noise. Their outreach is for the most part online and digital media continues to be their best friend to scale up their visibility, showcase their actions and/or installations and sustain their narratives.

I will not make a conclusive statement on whether we should use storytelling for social change or not. However, understanding the power of stories and learning how to craft consistent narrative structures is -as Ameen Haque, founder of The Storywallahs told me- as fundamental for storytelling, as it is for activism: At the end of the day, "movements need supporters. Supporters need leaders; and leaders need to be good storytellers".

Footnotes:

[1] Based on the Wikipedia Definition of Improvisational Theatre. "Improvisational Theatre, often called improv or impro, is a form of theater where most or all of what is performed is created at the moment it is performed. In its purest form, the dialogue, the action, the story and the characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script." http://bit.ly/1hnByRp

[2] (Oggs & Capps, 1996; Miller, 1995; Hull, 2006).

[3] Refer to Sonja Vivienne's ethnography: Trans Digital Storytelling: Everyday Activism, Mutable Identity and the Problem of Visibility. She puts forward the experience of activists from the LGBT community who used storytelling to reassert, negotiate and in cases, expose their identities.

[4] Find resources to read more on Hannah Arendt's work on narrative and action here: http://stanford.io/1ge7JkX

[5] While the project does seek to collect voices across traditions, cultures, religions, etc; its reliance on digital technologies to crowdsource stories keeps the practice somewhat gentrified and homogenous. Lack of diversity in public discussion is a huge constraint for democracy, but from our conversations with Jasmeen, we understand this is a challenge to be tackled at a later stage of the project

[6] Refer to Nishant Shah's Whose Change is it Anyway?. (Page 29): "only certain kinds of discourses are made possible through technology-mediated citizen action. This discourse is often alienated from specific histories, particular contexts, and the affective articulations of the communities involved. It leads to a gentrification of contemporary politics that discounts anything that does not fit into the quantified and enumerated rubric of citizen action in network societies."

[7] Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator and philosopher, was a strong proponent of using dialectics to question social structures around class, and stories come across as a way to link issues around power back to our personal experiences Refer to: Shor and Freire, 1987 and Williams, 2003.

[8] Some of the questions we have been exploring in Methods for Social Change: http://bit.ly/OCKrgy

[9] Refer to Nishant Shah's Whose Change is it Anyway?. (

Sources:

Arendt, Hannah (1994) Essays in Understanding Edited with an Introduction by Jerome Kohn. The literary Trust of Hannah Arendt Bluecher.

Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner & Cain, (1998). Identity and agency in cultural worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Hull, Glynda A., and M. Katz. (2006) "Crafting an agentive self: Case studies of digital storytelling." Research in the Teaching of English 41, no. 1: 43.

Jackson, Michael. (2002) The politics of storytelling: Violence, transgression, and intersubjectivity. Vol. 3. Museum Tusculanum Press,

Oni, Peter (2012). "The Cognitive Power of Storytelling: Re-reading Hannah Arendt in a Postmodernist/Africanist Context."

Sen, Amartya. The argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian history, culture and identity. Macmillan, 2005.

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

Shor, I. and Freire, P. (1987) A pedagogy for liberation:dialogues on transforming education. Bergin & Garvey, New York.

Williams, Lewis, Ronald Labonte, and Mike O’Brien. "Empowering social action through narratives of identity and culture." Health Promotion International 18, no. 1 (2003): 33-40.

Vivienne, Sonja (2011). "Trans Digital Storytelling: Everyday Activism, Mutable Identity and the Problem of Visibility” Gay & Lesbian Issues & Psychology Review 7, no. 1.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/storytelling-performance-2

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