Centre for Internet and Society

Clicktivism & a brave new world order

nishant — 2011-04-02T01:02:51Z

THE FIRST decade of this century has been one of accelerated change. The proliferation of the Internet has ushered in ubiquitous transformations in the way we live. And yet, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Certain human values remain sacred. As a result, more and more people have come out to voice their support for equality, justice and non-discrimination. The last ten years have seen the rise of individuals empowered by the Internet to effect change around them. Across the world people have used the power of the digital revolution to fight for issues that are relevant to them. From human rights advocacy to fighting corruption, from mobilising masses for greater participation in the electoral process to campaigning to save the environment, cyber activism has taken many shapes. These instances are shaped as much by the peoples intentions as they are by the regional contexts of the interventions. You too can become a cyber activist, but first, you must first grasp the four principles that power the participation of citizens in the processes of social change and political transformation.

The FOAF Phenomenon

As our lives become more networked because of Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, our contact lists have become more prolific and diverse than the little black book of phone numbers. We have always belonged to different groups, but now digital networks have introduced a phenomenon that is popularly called Friend of a Friend (FOAF). When you add people to your social network, you gain access to their networks and groups, forming weak but significant ties. Most people in the networks inherit at least seven levels of FOAF, thus expanding the scope of their reach. This ability to disseminate messages and ideas across a vast number of people — going viral — is the basis of cyber activism.

Power of Clicktivism

In the digital world, people who might not have the time or resources to participate directly in causes they believe in, find a way of being valuable. Platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr offer participants the ability to relay information and messages to create awareness. People who think of clicktivism as a way of shirking responsibilities in the real world fail to recognise that these clickers have been behind mass mobilisations of opinions and resources.

Virtual Reality Imitates Life

Cyber activism does not mean that the actions remain confined to online spaces. Most successful cyber activism campaigns collapse the real life-virtual reality differences. They seamlessly work in the physical and digital domains, playing on the strengths of both the spaces. They invite and mobilise people to perform actions that range from signing petitions and participating in policy making, to performing random acts of kindness and coordinating flash-mobs as signs of protest.

No Information Fatigue Please!

Even as we droop with information fatigue, there is no denying that the information highway has given us new ways of thinking about the world around us. It is easy now to find an audience for our opinions through blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Blogspot, and the rise of user-generated content sites like Wikipedia and YouTube enable people to question their own assumptions. As a multiplicity of ideas emerge, it paves the way for the rise of a more conscious citizen, aware of their rights and keen for change. At the end of the day, cyber activism is a reminder of the fact change, like charity, begins at home. And the Internet helps in building S.M.A.R.T. (Simple. Moral. Accountable.

Responsible. Transparent) structures that empower citizens to stand up for what they think is right. It reminds us that there is power in words and that powerful words can lead to transformative actions. Cyber activism foregrounds the fact that we do not inherit the world from our ancestors, we borrow it from the future generations, and that we have the power to protect and preserve it.

Read the original article in Mail Today here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/clicktivism-a-brave-new-world-order

Click to Change

nishant — 2012-01-03T09:35:56Z

From organising political protests and flash mobs to uploading their versions of Kolaveri Di, people brought about change with the help of the internet, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in the Indian Express on 1 January 2012.

2011 was a year of connections. At the turn of the last decade, there were many qualms that we are all becoming “alone together”. There was fear that digital webs are building societies of isolated individuals. It was presumed that as cellphones become ubiquitous, broadband becomes affordable, and the digital realm emerges as a significant arbitrator of our everyday life, human connections will lose out to digital connectivity. However, the course of the year has shown that the wide and democratic access to digital and internet technologies has led to creative forms of connections between people. Researchers have proved that the social web has decreased the social gaps between people — the six degrees of separation is now reduced to 4.7 degrees of distance.

Here is a look at five areas that changed dramatically in 2011 as digital proximities shaped closer human relations.

The Political: From the Arab Spring and the iconic gathering of people at Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, to the unprecedented mobilisation of people who came out in support of Team Anna’s anti-corruption campaign in India, to the Occupy movements across the world, people reshaped themselves as citizens in 2011. The ability of social networking sites to pass messages, and to share ideas and inspire people to take to the streets has changed the world as we know it. Instead of being passive observers of political protests, thousands of people took to the streets, demanding their rights and expressing their opinions on the politics of their countries.

The Social: This was also the year of the flash mob. After the first excitement in 2003, when the first flash mob was orchestrated in Mumbai, the idea had fizzled out, facing legal opposition and social disinterest. However, in 2011, the flash mob came back with a vengeance — from the ‘slut walks’ which addressed public sexual harassment in our cities, to the organised and ‘permitted’ dance performance at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai. Planned and executed through viral media, social web and cellphone messages, flash mobs allow people to explore new relationships with malls and roads.

The Cultural: Bollywood took to the digital world this year, with celebrity blogs and tweets about their personal lives (remember the craze around the Bachchan baby), professional relationships and upcoming movies. Movies like Ra.One experimented with social media integration, producing gaming platforms and interactive environments for fans. However, it was all eclipsed by the rage that asked the simple question: “Why this Kolaveri Di?” What started off as a promo for an upcoming film became one of the most shared videos of the year, leading to thousands of people uploading their versions of the song, recorded with cheap digital video devices.

The Economic: Perhaps one of the most dramatic changes has been the way corporate houses have started harnessing the power of the Web to go beyond just selling. While advertorials and commissioned bloggers are still going strong, there is a clear recognition that the social web might be one of the ways to influence people towards becoming more responsible citizens. Big Cinema’s magnificent “silent” national anthem that captures children with speech and hearing disability performing to Jana Gana Mana stole our hearts at the beginning of the year, and was followed quickly by Aircel’s campaign, Save Our Tigers.

The Personal: 2011 was a year of crises: natural disasters that destroyed cities in the US, Thailand, New Zealand, the nuclear crisis at the Fukushima prefecture in Japan, or the bomb blasts in Mumbai and Delhi. No matter where, netizens emerged as heroes. They created Facebook pages to mobilise resources, built Twitter hashtags to offer help, organised information mashups to keep people updated and offered help to those who needed it. People of the year, this year, were people, who showed how their spaces of leisure and entertainment are also spaces through which they can reach out to strangers online.

If 2011 has shown us anything, it is that technologies in themselves are neither the problem nor the solution. It is the people who use them and inhabit them that shape the futures of our technology landscapes. And we might be spending more time behind an interface but that seems to make us only more human.

Read the original published by the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/click-change

CIS Publications

nishant — 2010-07-28T04:50:15Z

Recent Publications in the field by the staff and members of the Centre for Internet and Society including coverage in the press.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/publications-automated/cis

Chutnefying English - Report

nishant — 2009-08-27T06:03:23Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

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

China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai

nishant — 2009-09-21T14:09:16Z

Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY

Change has come to all of us

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:38Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original column can be read in The Indian Express

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

Cao Ni Ma plushies

nishant — 2010-02-23T11:09:33Z

The Cao Ni Ma became so popular that plushies were sold in the markets.

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

Call for participation: Conference @ Bangalore - 'WikiWars'

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:43:41Z

Call for Participation: Conferences and Reader on critical insights and experiences on the Wikipedia

CPOV - Critical Point Of View : WikiWars

Call for Participation: Conference and Reader

CPOV (Critical Point of View) Context: The Wikipedia has emerged as the de facto global reference of dynamic knowledge. Different stakeholders – Wikipedians, users, academics, researchers, gurus of Web 2.0, publishing houses and governments have entered into fierce debates and discussions about what the rise of Wikipedia and Wiki cultures means and how they influence the information societies we live in. The Wikipedia itself has been at the centre of much controversy, pivoted around questions of accuracy, anonymity, vandalism, expertise and authority.

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) and the Institute of Network Cultures (Amsterdam, Netherlands) are working together to produce a critical Reader on Wikipedia and to build a Wikipedia Knowledge Network. Under the rubric CPOV, we propose two events that bring together different perspectives, approaches, experiences and stories that critically explore different questions and concerns around Wikipedia. The proceeds from these two events will result in a Reader that consolidates critical points of view about Wikipedia.

WikiWars Conference: The first conference to be held in Bangalore, called WikiWars, invites participation from users, scholars, academics, practitioners, artists and other cultural workers, to share their experiences, ideas, experiments, innovations, applications and stories about Wikipedia. The WikiWars conference embodies the spirit that guides an open encyclopaedia like the Wikipedia, by referring to the edit battles that users enter into over topics that have many points of view. WikiWars also refers to the contradictory positions adopted by different stakeholders on the various issues of credibility, authority, verifiability and truth-telling, on the Wikipedia. This conference calls for diverse and varied knowledges to come together in a critical dialogic space that informs and augments our understanding of the Wikipedia.

Conference Themes: The possible themes and areas for presentations (projects, experiences, experiments, stories or documentation) can include but are not limited to:

Wiki Theory: Endorse, question/contest or delineate the theoretical approaches and view points on the Wikipedia
Wikipedia and Critique of Western Knowledge Production: The predominance of textual or linguistic cultures, post-western knowledge production systems, and indigenous knowledge systems
Wiki Art: Art that uses Wikipedia models, structures or data to explore and expand the practice of Wikipedia project; and accounts that document Wikipedia based art practices or debates
Designing Debate: Suggestions, innovations, critiques and ideas that focus on the design and form of the Wikipedia, to explore the claims of neutrality, objectivity, emergent hierarchy, control and authenticity on the Wikipedia
Critique of Free and Open: Areas like Wikipedia governance, economic practices of and around Wikipedia, and the nature of freedom in usage, production and participation on the Wikipedia
Global Politics of Exclusion: Exploring questions of non-western material inclusion, language, connectedness, oral histories, women, non-geeks, and alternative material that cannot be documented on Wikipedia etc.
The Place of Resistance: Space of resistance and dissent in the Wikipedia, structures that allow for alternative voices, experiences and ideas
Wikipedia and Education: Wikipedia usage in classrooms as a teaching resource, and its effect on pedagogy, the role of Wikipedia in the knowledge production sector, and mobilisation of academic communities around the Wikipedia

For detailed information on each theme, please go to http://cis-india.org/publications/workshops/conference-blogs/Wikiwars

Who Should Apply: The conference in Bangalore aims to bring together an interesting mix of diverse voices from different cultures, geo-political spaces, and context-based practices from around the world, to start consolidating the approaches, experiences, and impact of the Wikipedia:

Students and Wikipedia users who belong to different local chapters or have editorial/contribution experiences on the Wikipedia,
Academics and publishers who are exploring the changes caused by Wikipedia, both in classroom pedagogy and in knowledge production systems,
Researchers and theoreticians, practitioners and proponents, artists and social activists, who are interested in Wikipedia cultures and their socio-political conditions, should be attending this conference.

How To Apply: To apply for the conference, please send the following information by email to infowiki@cis-india.org by the 15th of October, 2009. 1. A note of interest (450 - 700 words) detailing your ideas and possible contribution 2. Your updated resume 3. A sample of your work (term papers, published articles, peer-reviewed papers, books, art-projects, social intervention projects etc.)

Conference time-line:

Announcement of short-listed proposals – 21^st October, 2009.

Sharing of Detailed Proposals with all participants – 15^th December, 2009

Announcement of Conference Schedule and Logistics – 30^th December 2009

Online Registration for non-presenting participants – 3^rd January 2010

Conference Dates – 12^th, 13^th January 2010

Travel support: Travel support is available for some of the conference participants (national and international). The selected participants will be provided with the basic travel and accommodation costs for the duration of the conference from their home-countries/cities to travel to Bangalore for the conference. If you are applying for travel support, please indicate clearly in your “Note of Interest” any of these three options: 1. Full travel support required. 2. Partial travel support required with estimate. 3. Travel support not required. Travel support will be provided by the conference organisers on a case-by-case basis.

Conference Organisers: Sunil Abraham (Sunil@cis-india.org) and Nishant Shah (Nishant@cis-india.org ), Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. If there are any queries regarding the WikiWars conference please write to us.

Research and Editorial Team: Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer (Amsterdam), Nathaniel Tkacz (Melbourne), Johanna Niesyto (Siegen), Sunil Abraham and Nishant Shah (Bangalore).

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

Bye Bye email?

nishant — 2011-08-23T07:31:51Z

Email might be the default method of communication for most of us, but could it be going the telegram way.

I grew up with the internet in India. I remember the first time I heard the strange and harsh sounds of a dial-up modem back in 1996 and my friend helping me create an email account. It was my first digital identity online — a name and an address to call my own. Cost of internet access was prohibitive and email time was limited to 15 minutes a day. One logged in, downloaded all the emails and immediately disconnected. After reading through the emails off-line, I would write down the replies to all the mails, go online again, send all the mails and then wait for the next day, so that I could see what was in store for me in my inbox.

The World Wide Web has changed a lot since those first interactions with email, on black-and-white monitors. Speed, portability, access and costs have changed the nature of the Net, which is slowly becoming ubiquitous. Trends and fashions of social interaction and information exchange have changed drastically. From social media to professional networking, from discussion boards to micro-blogs, from geo-tagged services to mobile phone-based apps, the topography of the internet has undergone drastic revisions. However, the one thing that has remained constant is the email.

Sure, the email in itself has changed in texture and volume. The emailing services from the early days of AOL to the current trends of Gmail and Facebook messages, have been the backbone of Web 2.0. You needed an email as the primary identity to remain connected with social media, blogs, news services and indeed, with other friends and peers using emails. Notification on the email, for me, is still the primary gateway to the many digital worlds that I occupy, including gaming, digital networks, reading lists et al. For most people who grew up with me, email was here forever.

This faith in the email as the spine of the internet received a rude jolt when I was recently in Mumbai, working with undergraduate students, exploring relationships between digital technologies and social justice. The workshops spanned six days, and looked at how young people from socially and economically disadvantaged classes and communities could use the powers of digital and participatory technologies to effect a change in their environments. Our role as facilitators was to introduce them to new usages of their existing practices and show them the potential for social transformation and civic action in their everyday use of technology. We began, like Maria, in The Sound of Music, at the very beginning — with the email. Which is when the world started unravelling, because, as the participants in the workshop pointed out, email is a thing of the past.

I was suddenly faced with a group of urban youngsters who are all a part of the digital revolution, using Facebook, writing blogs, searching for information online, and keeping in touch through Voice over IP services and Instant Messenger. Their access is through shared public access in college libraries and cybercafés, and for many, also on their smartphones. They log in regularly into their various social media networks and use them for playing games, sending messages, chatting and updating their statuses. And yet, when it came to using the email, they were noobs, some of them didn’t remember their passwords, some had never sent an email, attachments were things they don’t understand and they logged in to their email only when necessary.

This behaviour perplexed me because I had always imagined that the otherwise ethereal world of the cyberspace was held together by the strong and dependable emails. But evidently, for the new kids on the block, email is something that belonged to the world before it went mobile. They do not understand the communication patterns that emails are structured around. The narrative expectations, waiting for replies, accessing it via services, archiving information through attachments are things that don’t make sense to this generation that is growing up with cloud computing. They use emails only as the first source of authentication for different services that demand it. And even there, as one of the students said, "You just need email to open your Facebook account. After that, you just F-connect".

As the interface between mobile phones and the internet strengthens, more and more users seem to be depending on phone-based communication methods. They accept the newer ways of messaging, like IMing, texting. But for digital dinosaurs like me, who were there at the beginning of (digital) time, the world is beginning to look slightly blurred. I shudder to think that in two decades, email might be obsolete because though I complain of information overload, I still cannot imagine what a world without email would look like.

This article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2011. The original story can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/bye-bye-email

Breaks and Ruptures: In the midst of IT

nishant — 2009-12-19T10:12:47Z

In this first story, Nishant looks at the ways in which internet technologies shape multiple imaginations. In the narration of the story, the contextualisation and the responses that the story-tellers make apparent, he located the internet in the midst of contestation, as it restructures social boundaries, traditions and communities. The story of an 'internet wedding' that stands as an iconic landmark for different generations, looking upon the Internet as a radical catalyst for change, lays out the first foundations for the framework of transformation and invisibility this project has embarked upon.

Breaks and Ruptures: IT and its discontents

In Shanghai, conversations of technology, eventually become conversations about younger users of technology who are looked upon the legitimate users of these technologised spaces, and more conversant with the quickly changing trends and fashions on the internet. As the country invests heavily into ICT development, promotes the making of Shanghai as the global hub of ICT industries and economies, and encourages younger users to extensively use digital technologies in their life, the digital generation gap has never been more visible than in the crowded, buzzing, video-game-like streets of Shanghai.

These Xiao Huangli (Little emperors), who have already been heralded as brats because of China’s one-child policy and the growing up in the liberalised China, are an object of great anxiety and concern for an older generation who doesn’t seem to understand them. Sometimes called The Strawberry Generation (CaoMei Zu), this population of young adults is looked at with derision or wonder – Wonder because of their soft and pink strawberry like appearances which reflect their new ethos and lifestyle expectations, and derision because they are ‘soft’, indulging only in acts of self-gratification which seem pointless, selfish, or sometimes foolish. Stories trickle out from old retired army men who sit in the few public parks playing Mahjong, or the women in the gardens, dancing with their fans and practicing Tai-Chi to keep their spirits in balance, or from the middle-aged men and women who grew up in the time of the revolution, who talk about how their children/grand-children/nieces-and-nephews all seem to occupy a world that is alien, disrupting the harmony of the established Chinese life.

In the Special Economy Zones in Shanghai – What is popularly called the Free Trading Zone – scores of immigrants who have shifted to the new city from rural parts of China, recreate, with nostalgia, the past where children were trained to be responsible and connected to their environments. In these economy zones, where the designer brands have exploded on every street and consumption is the only re-creation, hard working parents who dote on their only child, shake their heads in despair about the way the new generations lead their lives – “they work, they spend and when they run out of money, they borrow from their parents to sustain a life devoted entirely to enjoyment” said one of my subjects – mother to a seventeen year old teenage daughter, who works along with her school and earns enough pocket money to indulge her desires. “There is no saving. There is no worry about the future. And there is no care for the family” her friend, another mother to a twenty year old boy agrees.

In our conversations, they tell me a story which I must narrate to you. For the Chinese families, I have been told, the biggest occasion of celebration is a wedding. Conducted with great gusto, it involves a lot of people, noise, drinking, laughing, dancing, fireworks and grand lavish parties. Especially in Shanghai, weddings are incredibly rich and occasions for the involved families to show their affluence, status, wealth and success to the rest of the communities. Like in India, people in China rarely have marriages – what they have are big elaborate weddings which are almost vertiginous in their opulence. But with technology, and the changing times, especially with the yintewang (one of the many words Mandarin has for Internet), there are young people who are doing strange things.

The story is a few years old, but in the minds of both these women, it is illustrative of how times have changed and the Chinese family, caught in these Hard Times, is on the rocks. The story is quite brief – a young man and a young woman, were wangyou (Internet friends) and had met on a site devoted to a particular automotive brand. Their friendship quickly blossomed into love and they decided to get married. However, instead of having a wedding which their families participated in, they put out an open invitation to strangers on the internet to come and attend the wedding – the caveat? That only those who owned the particular brand of car over which the happy couple fell in love were invited. And thus a Car-Wedding came into being. About a month after the announcement, when the bride and the groom proceeded to the venue of the party, they were at the head of a procession of 97 cars, each one exactly like the other. The parking lot was eventually filled with owners of the cars who had come, bearing gifts and smiles, to attend the wedding of strangers who they never met, but knew because they had the same interest in cars.

For the two women narrating the story to me, this was obviously a symptom of breaking families, traditions and social structures with the introduction of the internet in their lives. Interestingly, not long after I had heard the story from them, I also stumbled across it in my conversations with a younger set of people, largely in high school, and ranging from ages 15 – 19. For them, the story was a fascinating account of how this is a symptom of a break from families, communities, traditions and social structures. It was interesting to me, how they said almost the same things but their tone was more of celebration and joy, optimism and hope rather than the despair and shock that had been expressed by the two women. This dichotomous approach to the internet in Shanghai, for me, becomes symptomatic of the tensions, the imaginations and the problematic that the emergence of Internet technologies and their potentials for subverting the erstwhile dominant is producing.

I am going to leave this first story here for the time being. Let us think of this as the foundation of the larger framework that I want to build for you. However, we will come back to that once I have told the other two stories about youth, technology, and the changing shape of Shanghai.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/wedding

Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux

nishant — 2016-08-06T04:16:07Z

My review for Arundhati Roy and John Cusack's new book that captures their encounter with Edward Snowden, 'Things that can and cannot be said' is now out. It's an engaging, if somewhat freewheeling, political critique of the times we live in.

The review was published in the Indian Express on August 6, 2016.

Book: Things That Can and Cannot Be Said
Authors: Arundhati Roy & John Cusack
Publication: Juggernaut
Pages: 132
Price: Rs 250

The title of the book — Things That Can and Cannot be Said — demands an imperative. It is as if Arundhati Roy and John Cusack, aware of their internal turmoil in dealing with a world that is rapidly becoming unintelligible, though not incomprehensible, are demanding an order where none exists. Hence, they are advocating for certainty and assurance, only to undermine it, ironically, through their own freely associative writing that mimics linear time and causative narrative. This deep-seated irony of needing to say something, but knowing that saying it is not going to shine a divining light on the sordid realities of the world that is being managed through the production of grand structures like valorous nation states, virtuous civil societies, the obsequious NGO-isation of radical action, and the persistent neutering of justice through the benign vocabulary of human rights, defines the oeuvre, the politics and the poetics of the book. Written like a scrap book, filled with excerpts from long conversations scattered over time and space, annotated by reminiscences of books read long ago that have seared their imprints on the mind, and events that are simultaneously platitudinous for their status as global landmarks and fiercely personal for the scars that they have left on the minds of the authors, the book remains an engaging, if a somewhat freewheeling, ride into a political critique that makes itself all the more palatable and disconcerting for the levity, irreverence and the dark sense of humour that accompanies it.

Composed in alternating chapters, the first half of the book is about Cusack and Roy laying themselves bare. They spare no words, square no edges, and put their personal, political and collective wounds on display with humble pride and proud humility. Cusack’s experience as a screenplay writer comes in handy — he rescues what could have been a long tirade, into a series of conversations. The familiar narratives are rehistoricised and de-territorialised, put into new contexts while eschewing the older ones, thus providing a large landscape that refers to state-sponsored genocide, structural reorganisation of nation states, the dying edge of political action, the overwhelming but invisible presence of capital, and the dithering state of social justice that treats human beings like things. Cusack, identifying the poetic genius of Roy, gives her centre stage, making her the voice in command.

Roy, for her part, seems to have enjoyed this moment in the soapbox — something that she has been doing quite effectively and provocatively to a national and global audience — and gives it her all. There are moments when the text feels indulgent, when the voice feels a little relentless, when the almost schizophrenic global and historical references become a litany of mixed-up events that might have required further nuance and deeper interpretation. However, the whimsical style of Roy’s narrative, with her sense of what is right, and her demeanour that remains friendly, curious and disarming, saves the text from being heavy handed, even when it does dissolve into cloying poignancy and makes you pause, just so that you can breathe.

Surprisingly, it is the second part of the book, where the two encounter Edward Snowden along with Daniel Ellsberg, the “Snowden of the 1960s” who had leaked the Pentagon papers, that falters. Snowden had jocularly mentioned that Roy was there to “radicalise him”. She does that, but in a way that doesn’t give us anything more than what we already know. While Cusack and Roy were committed to getting to know Snowden beyond his systems-man image, there wasn’t much that they could uncover, either in dialogue or in discourse, that could have told us more, endeared us further to possibly the most over-exposed person in recent times. However, one realises that the genius of the narrative is actually in reminding us how transparent Edward Snowden has become to us. We know all kinds of things about this young man — from his girlfriends past to his actions future, from his values and convictions to his opinion on the NSA watching people’s naked pictures — and yet, what has been missing in the Snowden files, has been the larger arc of global politics, social reordering, and perhaps, a glimpse of the post-nation future that Snowden might have seen in his act of whistleblowing that is going to remain the landmark moment that defines the rest of this century.

Once you have gotten over the fact that this is not a book about Snowden, the expectations are better tailored for what is to come, and suddenly, the long prelude to the meeting falls into place. Snowden matches Roy and Cusack in whimsy, irony, political conviction, and the sacred faith in human values that make you want to give them all a fierce hug of hesitant reassurance. What Snowden says, what Roy and Cusack make of it, and how they leave us, almost abruptly at the end, breathless, unnerved, and severely conflicted about some of the 20th century structures like society, activism, nation states, governance, communication, technologies, sharing and caring is what the book has to be read for. The tight screen-writing skills of Cusack meet the perfect timing of Roy’s prose, and all of it becomes surreal, futuristic and indelibly real when it gets anchored on the physical presence of Snowden, who, in exile, talks achingly of the home that has thrown him out and the home that he can never really call his own.

And while there are lapses — fragments, translations and evocations which might have needed more explanations to have their pedagogic intent shine through — there is no denying that, in all its flaws, much like the narrators, the book manages to first immerse you in the cold shock of a sobering reality, clearly positioning the apocalypse as the now, and then drags you out and wraps you up in a warm blanket, opening up forms of critique, formats of intervention, and functions of political commitment towards saying things that have and have not been said. The book should have, perhaps, been titled what could, would, should have been said, but can’t, won’t, shan’t be said — not because of anything else, but because it seems futile.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-august-6-2016-book-review-apocalypse-now-redux

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:47:04Z

In Book 4, To Connect of the Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? series, we try to understand digital natives through their environment. Digital natives do not operate in a vacuum, their actions are shaped by the fast changing geo-political landscape, interaction with other actors and the global architecture of technology. In our Digital Natives with a Cause? research, it has become clear that at the heart of all digital natives discourse lies the question of power. Along with power, questions of race, class, gender and socio-economic situation cannot be ignored when talking about digital natives. We found that on one hand digital natives are destabilising existing power structures and challenging the status quo. On the other, the geo-political context in which digital natives live, affect their activities, beliefs and opinions. Then there are actors that can destroy, influence or support digital native activity which give rise to questions of control that resonate within this new generation

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook4

Book 3: To Act : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:40:51Z

In Book 3 of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? collective, we enter into dialogue with some of the severest and most heated debates around digital natives and their ability to effect change. To Act collides with the discourse on young people’s ability and role in technology mediated processes of change, heads-on. It deliberates on some very dense questions about how digital natives execute their visions of change using new forms of mobilisation of resources and sharing/production of information.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook3

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2011-09-15T14:35:43Z

We started the Digital Natives with a Cause? Knowledge programme, with a series of questions, which were drawn from popular discourse, research, practice, policy and experiences of people engaging with questions of youth, technology and change. Our ambition was to consolidate existing knowledge and to look at knowledge gaps which can be addressed in order to build new frameworks to understand the role that digital natives see themselves playing in their own understanding and vision of change. This Book 2 To Think, takes up the challenge of constructing new approaches and each essay in this book, through case-studies, analyses and divergent perspectives, offers a novel way of understanding processes of technology mediated citizen-driven change.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook2

Book 1: To Be, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

In this first book of the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Collection, we concentrate on what it means to be a Digital Native. Within popular scholarship and discourse, it is presumed that digital natives are born digital. Ranging from Mark Prensky’s original conception of the identity which marked all people born after 1980 as Digital Natives to John Palfrey and Urs Gasser’s more nuanced understanding of specific young people in certain parts of the world as ‘Born Digital’, there remains a presumption that the young peoples’ relationship with technology is automatic and natural. In particular, the idea of being ‘born digital’ signifies that there are people who, at a visceral, unlearned level, respond to digital technologies. This idea of being born digital hides the complex mechanics of infrastructure, access, affordability, learning, education, language, gender, etc. that play a significant role in determining who gets to become a digital native and how s/he achieves it. In this book, we explore what it means to be a digital native in emerging information societies. The different contributions in this book posit what it means to be a digital native in different parts of the world. However, none of the contribution accepts the name ‘Digital Native’ as a given. Instead, the different authors demonstrate how there can be no one singular definition of a Digital Native. In fact, they show how, contextualised, historical, socially embedded, politically nuanced understanding of people’s interaction with technology provide a better insight into how one becomes a digital native.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/dnbook1