Centre for Internet and Society

Institute on Internet & Society: Event Report

srividya — 2013-10-15T06:48:00Z

The Institute on Internet and Society organized by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) with grant supported by the Ford Foundation took place from June 8 to 14, 2013 at the Golden Palms Resort in Bangalore.

A total of 20 participants spent the seven days in a residential institute, learning about the fundamental technologies of the Internet and topics on which CIS has expertise on such as Accessibility, Openness, Privacy, Digital Natives and Internet Governance.

The participants belonged to various stakeholder groups and it provided a common forum (first of its kind in India) to discuss and share ideas. Twenty-four expert speakers from various domains came to share their knowledge and speak about their work, so as to encourage activity in the field and supply resources from which participants could learn to increase their accessibility, range and funding possibilities, as well as network with the speakers and amongst themselves.

The Institute has triggered a number of follow-up events — those that the participants organized themselves with the help of CIS staff, including Crypto Parties in Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai, that taught netizens to keep their online communication private. In addition to that, the CIS Access2Knowledge (A2K) team could rope in eight new Wikipedians who will contribute to Wikipedia in Indic languages.

The day wise talks and activities that took place are listed below:

Day 1: June 8, 2013

The seven day residential Institute began on Saturday, the 8th of June with a warm welcome by Dr. Ravina Aggarwal and Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan. They outlined the purpose of the residential institute and briefly went over the topics which would get covered over the week long duration. This was followed by each of the participants introducing themselves briefly and also stating their expectations from the Institute, why they were attending the same and what they hope to get at the end.

Session 1: History of the Internet

(by Pranesh Prakash and Bernadette Längle)

Above is a picture of Pranesh Prakash speaking about the History of the Internet during the first session on Day 1.	The Institute proceedings kicked off with the first session, History of the Internet by Pranesh Prakash and Bernadette Längle. Participants learned where the Internet originally came from and how it is organized, as well as different technologies surrounding the Internet. Pranesh Prakash and Bernadette Längle set the start point of the Internet in the late 50's when the Russians send the first satellite in space (Sputnik) and the US founded the DARPA(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), a research agency that was tasked with creating new technologies for military use. DARPA is credited with development of many technologies which have had a major effect on the world, including computer networking, as well as NLS, which was both the first hypertext system, and an important precursor to the contemporary ubiquitous graphical user interface (GUI). A few years later the first four computers were connected to a network.

After the Network Control Protocol (NCP, later replaced by the TCP/IP) was invented in 1970, the first applications were made: email (connecting people), telnet (connecting computers) and the file transport protocol (FTP) (connecting information) — all of these are still in use today. Participants were surprised to learn that the Web, most commonly used today, known to be invented by one single person in the 90's, actually existed for a long time prior to the '90s.

VIDEO

Session 2: Domestic Bodies and Mechanisms

(by Pranesh Prakash)
After lunch, Pranesh Prakash led the second session about Domestic Bodies and Mechanisms and he started with some of the problems associated with the Domestic Regulatory Bodies:

Lack of coherence and consistency in Internet related policies
Rather than co-operating, the different agencies compete with each other.
Communication with the public is of different degrees and openness of different agencies varies.

Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), is one of the most important public agencies & the CERT-in focuses on issues like malware and content regulation. There is also the STQC (Standard Setting and Quality Setting Body).
The work of these organizations is to govern the Internet, bring about better privacy policies and ensure freedom of speech.
Other governing bodies include DOT (Department of Telecommunications) which governs the telecom and internet policies of India. In India, certain content regulation takes place under a notification as part of the IT Act, 2003.
TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) also looks into the tariff, interconnections and quality of telecom sector, spectrum regulation and so on.
The USOF (Universal Service Obligation Fund) seeks to provide funds for setting up telecom services in rural areas.
Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) has been extending copyright restrictions to online publications.

VIDEO

Session 3: Emerging trends in Internet usage in India

(by Nandini C and Vir Kamal Chopra)
Emerging Trends in Internet Usage with specific focus on BSNL offerings (by Vir Kamal Chopra)
Some of the salient points discussed were:

In 1995, the VSNL provided internet in 4 metros of India, by 1998 DOT had provided internet in 42 cities.
Some of the facilities internet provides include Tele-education, Tele-medicine, mobile banking, payment of bills via mobile internet, etc.
BSNL has got maximum broadband market share in India.
Present Scenario, there are 900 million mobiles in India, 430 million wireless connections with capability to access data.
The total broadband connections are 15 million in country, 10 million provided by BSNL.
Total internet users are 120 million with a growth rate of 30%.
Public access is not only about network intermediaries but about info-mediaries who understand internet.
BSNL lost Rs 18,000 crores from 3G license.
2G to 3G shifting is not seamless and leads to lot of packet loss, and 3G coverage is not as extensive as 2G. Thus 3G is not efficient however; the government has made a lot of money from selling 3G licenses.
Future trends include technology trends for internet access, optical fiber technologies, fiber to the curb, fibre to the home, metro Ethernet, etc.
Internet has created an online Public sphere.
In 2000 Parliament passed the Information Technology Act 2000 and the dot.com boom is seen.

Making internet access meaningful in the Indian Context (by Nandini.C)
(Click to see the presentation slides)
Some of the salient points discussed were:

Status of internet access today sees low level of overall penetration of internet, high rate of household mobile penetration and huge rural-urban divide in internet access.
Relationship b/w women and internet in India
8.4% of women in India have access to internet in India and 43% of women using internet in India perceived it as being an important part of their life.
Some area of concerns include ensuring adequate access of internet for the women, entrenched patriarchies, contextual relevance, the imaginary of ‘public access’.
The importance of an existing strong social support network, ITC itself cannot open up economic/social empowerment opportunities for women
ICT-enabled micro-enterprises may also force the burden of double work on women, who undertake both productive activities for the micro-enterprise and re/productive activities for the household.
The Internet today has created an online public sphere.
Countering the threat of online violence.
Censorship and content regulation.
Women’s rights and the spaces of internet governance.
Arbitrary censorship and self-regulation by the corporate and slide towards an illusory freedom; state is used as a bogeyman by corporate to create an online culture that is suitable to the corporate values.

VIDEO

Activity
Day 1 featured an interesting activity called the Creative Handshake. The goal of the game was to teach the participants the concept of "Handshake" in Internet terms and why it is important to make sure that integrity of data transferred is maintained.

Day 2: June 9, 2013

The focus of the second day was more on the nuts and bolts behind the working of the Internet by Dr. Nadeem Akhtar, Wireless Technologies and a case-study in Air Jaldi by Michael Ginguld, Collaborative Knowledge base building by Vishnu Vardhan and Affordable Devices on the Internet by Ravikiran Annaswamy.

The salient points of each of the talks are listed below.

Session 1: How Internet Works

(by Nadeem Akhtar)
Click to read the presentation slides

Internet structure and hierarchy:
1. Data Networks comprise of set of nodes, connected by transmission links, for exchange of data between nodes.
2. Some of the key principles which underpin data networks include digital transmission, multiplexing and data forwarding/routing.
Data networks through ownership include public and private networks.
Data networks through coverage include local area networks (small area), metro area networks (may comprise of a city) and wide area networks (wide geographic area across cities).
Protocols include:
1. Open systems interconnection (OSI) model divides a communication system into smaller parts. Each part is referred to as a layer. Similar communication functions are grouped into logical layers.
2. OSI model defines the different stages that data must go through to travel from one device to another over a network & this enables a modular approach towards developing complex system functionality i.e. functionality at layer X does not depend on how layer Y is implemented.
Above is a picture of Dr. Nadeem Akhtar speaking on the working of the internet on Day 2
Internet networks or connections.
Internet backbone refers to the principal data routes between large, strategically interconnected networks and core routers on the internet and these data routes are hosted by commercial, government, academic and other high-capacity network centers, the internet exchange points and network access points. The internet back bone is decentralized.
Transit Service - Passing information from small ISP to large ISP.
Peering Service - The passing of information between two similar ISP’s os similar size to let network traffic pass.
Three levels of network Tier1, Tier2 and Tier 3. TATA Company is the only Tier 1 Indian Company.
Backhaul- Transport Links which connects access edge networks with the ‘core’ network. The transmitters have to be mounted on a high level.


Above is a picture of Dr. Nadeem Akhtar speaking on the working of the internet on Day 2

VIDEO

Session 2: Wireless Technologies

(by Michael Ginguld)
Click to read the presentation slides

We are surrounded by electromagnetic radiation
All about transmission waves and there are both advantages and disadvantages of the same:
1. Pros: higher reach for lower price, overcomes topographic challenges, lower maintenance, less to damage/lose
2. Cons: limited resources, maintenance (energy), physical limitations to transfer rates.
Satellite/VSAT is a very small aperture tech: a small satellite dish that connects to a geo-static satellite.
Strength: globally usable, can connect from anywhere.
Weakness: signal problems, relatively high installation charge, upstream connection is lower than the downstream, transmitter on satellite is extremely expensive, hence limitation on transmission capacity of the satellite.
VSATs are not scalable. It is a dead-end tech for usages where data transmission volume is expected to grow.
2G Technology for mobile connection.
Limitation in transfer of data, due to technology and encryption limitations but great availability and reasonable price.
3G Technology has a problem in India; low uptake, leading to low investment, leading to low speed, leading to low uptake. The technology allows for high-speed data transfer but the market condition in India still does not make adequate infrastructural support feasible.
4G license auction.
A company bought the country-wide 4G license in the auction. Mukesh Ambani bought the company after some days.
The present legislation does not allow for VoIP-based Telco operation but that is expected to change soon.
Wifi technology is wireless technology. It is low cost wireless transfer of data. The Public dissemination of the ranges in which data transfer using the WiFi protocol can take place. It was made public in India in January 2005.
1. Limitations: needs line of sight, limit to data transfer.
2. Strength: cheap, de-licensed spectrum usage, easily deployable.
2G spectrum, 3G spectrum and now 4G spectrum all are part of the wireless technology.
Air Jaldi started in Dharamshala; building wifi connection spanning campuses.
Three types of consumer categories: (1) no coverage, (2) under-served, and (3) ‘deserving clients’. #2 is the most common group. #3 are people who should be served but cannot pay fully for the service, hence are cross-subsidised by group #2.
Deployed and managed by local staff, trained by AirJaldi.
Customer premise equipment: Rs. 3-4k.
User charges: Rs 975 per month for 512 kbps, Rs 1500 per month for 1 mbps.
Content: by and large, AirJaldi brings infrastructure on which content can ride on, teams with various content providers (like e-learning, rural BPOs, local e-banking etc) for the content side. The biggest drivers are local BPO, banking and retail. The next big driver coming up is entertainment.
WiMax includes 4g spectrum.

VIDEO

Session 3: Building Knowledge Bases and Platform via Mass Collaboration on the Internet

Click to read the presentation slides

The session started off with some physical activity in the form of "Kasa Kasa Warte, Chan Chan Warte" to break off the lunch induced sleep and a mental activity where the participants were divided into two groups and both the groups were asked to collect information on "Water". One group was left to itself while the other had some expert inputs from Vishnu Vardhan on how to collaborate and organize the data. After the activity, both teams presented the information that they had collected on "Water". The benefits of collaborative authoring such as "everyone's voice is heard", "various inputs leading to a multi-dimensional thinking" etc were evident as against a single dimensional thought process that was seen from the group that was un-assisted.	Given above is a picture of the participants involved in a group activity

Salient points discussed during the presentation:

The Concept of Knowledge today is not something of modern phenomena, but it is something which has been existent since print culture was developed. Print technology shapes what we consider as knowledge, and hence as knowledge platform
Techno-sociality of knowledge production
The Concept of Knowledge today is not something of modern phenomena, but it is something which has been existent since print culture was developed. Print technology shapes what we consider as knowledge, and hence as knowledge platform
Techno-sociality of knowledge production
Examples of knowledge platforms:
1. Baidu baike
2. English wikipedia
3. Hudong
4. Catawiki
5. Wikieducator
6. Open street map
7. Pad.ma
8. Sahapedia
9. Internet archive
10. Jstor
11. Dsal
12. Dli
In 1994 Cunningham developed the ‘Wiki Wiki Web’ also known as the ‘Ward Wiki’. Basically it is a knowledge platform.
Internet since then has been used for dissemination of information especially in the education sector. Digital Archived have developed over the years which provide information across various platforms like Wikipedia.
The spread of the internet has made possible the building of knowledge bases by seamless and mass collaboration.

Generic challenges for Wikipedia

Quality, relevance, consistency of knowledge
Suitable motivation of the contributors
Another issue is the scalability

Some of the problems faced by Indian Wikipedian pages:

Technical infrastructure for Indian languages
Typing in the regional language
OCR: complexity of Indian language scripts
Various other technical troubles like browser compatibility, font display, etc., which deter new users
Dearth of quality content available in digital format
Different standards/formats/generations (gov.in/DLI)
Relative lack of research/academic standards, which is transferred on to Indic wikipedias.
Lack of knowledge sharing culture.
Building a mass knowledge platform is the need of the hour.
The platform should be user friendly, easily available and adoptable; offline outreach is key to effective use of online platforms.
The programme should have feedback loop key, behavior statistics data, reinvent and replicate the programme, multi-channel awareness, ‘user connect’ programmes.
The people should communicate knowledge sharing objectives, make knowledge sharing fun, appoint ambassadors; virtual volunteer community building looks simple but its complex and leads to failure.

VIDEO

Session: 4 Affordable Devices to access the Internet

(by Ravikiran Annaswamy)
Click to read the presentation slides


Given above is a picture of the speaker Ravikiran Annaswamy giving a demo of the low cost Akash tablet.

Overview of Affordable Mobile Phones such as Lava Iris, Karbonn A1, Nokia Asha, etc.
Overview of Affordable Tablets such as Aakash, Ubislate, Karbonn Smart A34, etc.
The number of Internet users in India is expected to nearly triple from 125 million in 2011 to 330 million by 2016, says a report by Boston Consulting Group.
How Internet Penetration impacts society.
Demo of the devices.
Need for Mobile Internet
Sugata Mitra & Arvind Eye Care examples.

VIDEO

Day 3: June 10, 2013

The third day of the Institute focussed on Wired means of accessing the Internet, the technology involved followed by an assignment time where the participants were introduced to 2 topics and asked to work on an assignment. This was followed by a site visit in the afternoon to MapUnity. MapUnity develops technology to tackle social problems and development challenges. Their GIS, MIS and mobile technologies are used mostly by government departments and civil society organisations and in the R&D initiatives of commercial ventures.

Session 1: Wired Access Technology

(by Dr. Nadeem Akhtar)
Click to read the presentation slides

Some of the salient points discussed were:

Wired and Wireless

Wired:

Separate communication channel for each users
Low signal attenuation
No interference
Fixed point-of-attachment

Wireless:

Shared medium of communication
Signal is attenuated by a number of factors
Interference between adjacent channels
Points-of-attachment can be changed on-the-fly

Ethernet:

A family of computer networking technologies for LANs which was Invented in 1973 and commercially introduced in 1980. The systems communicating over ethernet divide a stream o data into individual packets called frames. Each frame contains source and destination addresses and error-checking data so that damaged data can be detected and re-transmitted.
Ethernet, by definition, is a broadcast protocol
Any signal can be received by all hosts
Switching enables individual hosts to communicate

Digital subscriber line (DSL):

DSL uses existing telephone lines to transport data to internet subscribers and the term xDSL is used to refer to a number of similar yet competing forms of DSL technologies which includes ADSL, SDSL, HDSL, HDSL-2, G.SHDL, IDSL, and VDSL. DSL service is delivered simultaneously with wired telephone service on the same telephone line and this is possible because DSL uses higher frequency bands for data.

Asymmetric DSL (ADSL):

ADSL is the most commonly installed technology and an ADSL tech can provide maximum downstream speeds of up to 8 mbps.

Modem and router:

Modem is specific to a technology
Modem is de/modulator, it takes bits coming from one protocol/technology, demodulates it (converts it into original data), and re-modulated the original data to another protocol/technology.
Router allows creation of a local area network, allowing multiple devices to connect to the network and access internet together through the router. It has very high bitrate DSL (VDSL) and goes up to 52 mbps downstream and 16 mbps upstream. The length of the physical connection is limited to 300 meters and the second generation VDSL (CDSL2) provides data rates up to 100 mbps simultaneously in both direction, but maximum available bit rate is still achieved about 300 meters.

Cable:

Cable broadband uses existing CATV infrastructure to provide high-access internet access; uses channels specifically reserved for data transfer
Support simultaneous access to broadband and TV programs
Cable access tech is built for one-way transmission; hence some congestion takes place for bi-way data transfer, leading to much lower upstream connection relative to downstream connection for data.

Fiber:

It is a generic term for any broadband network architecture using optical fiber; fiber to the neighborhood; fiber to the curb; the street cabinet is much closer to the user’s premises, typically within 300m, thus allowing ethernet or radio-based connection to the final users; fiber to the basement; fiber to the home (BSNL already providing); fiber to the desktop
Passive optical networks (PON)

Advantages of fiber:

Immunity to electromagnetic interference.
Provides very high data rates at long distances.
When network links run over several 1000s of meters (e.g., metro area networks), fiber significantly outperforms copper.
Replacing at least part of these links with fiber shortens the remaining copper segments and allows them to run much faster.
The data rate of a fiber link is typically limited by the terminal equipment rather than the fiber itself.

Assignment
Participants were given two options for an assignment to work on in the coming days and they could choose either one.

Assignment A
The Universal Service Obligation Fund of India has put out a Call for Proposals under two schemes:

Mobile Connectivity and ICT related livelihood skills for womens’ SHGs (http://www.usof.gov.in/usof-cms/pdf21may/Concept_Paper.pdf), and

Access to ICTs and ICT enabled services for persons with disabilities in rural India. (http://www.usof.gov.in/usof-cms/usofsub/Concept%20paper_USOF%20Scheme_PwDs_A.G.Gulati.pdf)

Your NGO is committed to the task of facilitating access to the Internet for women/ persons with disabilities in rural parts of Kerala and wishes to submit a proposal/ project idea in partnership with a service provider to the USOF.

Assignment B
You are a member of the ancient tribe of Meithis residing in Manipur. Over the years, there is a strong feeling in your community that although the Government has rolled out projects to connect the rural areas throughout India, these have not been successful for your tribe and there is still even a lack of basic fixed telephony, let alone mobile and broadband services. You have hence come to the conclusion that there is a need for focused efforts to target such communities as yours and have decided to submit a concept note to the USOF requesting that ‘ethnic and rural tribal communities’ be specifically included within the mandate of the USOF’s activities by defining them as an ‘underserved community’.


Given above is a picture of the participants engaged in a discussion.

Field Trip - Destination: MapUnity.
MapUnity develops technology to tackle social problems and development challenges. Their GIS, MIS and mobile technologies are used mostly by government departments and civil society organisations, and in the R&D initiatives of commercial ventures. MapUnity presented their product offerings to the participants.

VIDEO

Day 4: June 11, 2013

Session 1: Universal Access

(by Archana Gulati)
Click to read the presentation slides

Given above is a picture of Archana Gulati speaking on Universal Access.	Tuesday revolved around questions of access and openness. The day kicked off with Archana Gulati, a policy expert in access to ICTs for people with disabilities talking on Universal Access. Ms. Gulati stressed the importance of ICTs for social development. ICTs are a necessary aid in development structures including education, health and increased citizen participation in national affairs & they provide crucial knowledge inputs into productive activities. However, even with the Telecom boom, there still exists an access gap in India, which cannot be covered by commercially viable systems.

This 'actual access gap' exists because of geographic (scattered population, low income, low perceived utility of service, lack of commercial/industrial customers, lack of roads, power, difficult terrain, insurgency), economic (urban poor) and social inequality (gender, disabilities) differences. To achieve Universal Access or Universal Service, additional efforts must be made, so as to include these groups. However, Universal Access and Universal Service, while they may imply the same thing, are very different approaches to deal with the problematic access gap.

Universal service, a term coined by Theodore Vail, president of AT&T in 1906, argued that the government should enforce the usage of only one network. This approach suggests a monopolization of the market and goes against the liberal market principle.

Universal access on the other hand suggests cross-subsidizing the low and no profit service areas by high profit service areas. However, this results in the urban population to get over-charged while the rich rural areas benefit from rural subsidizing.

So how do we enable a fair and inexpensive network to be able to create access for a large number of people equally?
Ms. Archana Gulati went on to introduce the Sanchar Shakti scheme as a contribution to national access in India. It was initiated with the objective of improving rural SHG access skills, knowledge, financial services and markets through mobile connections and involved several stakeholders like NABARD, handset/modem manufacturers, DoT USOF, Mobile VAS Providers, Lead NGOs, Mobile Service Providers.

This scheme shows how important is, for the commercial, private and public sector to work together on obtaining accessibility to ITCs.

Session 2: Free and Open Internet

(by Pranesh Prakash)
The following session by Pranesh Prakash on Free and Open Internet showed how the internet can still be a restrictive place which does not allow for internet equality. His talk focussed on the concepts of free and open Internet. Prakash started by stating the Freedom of Speech and Expression Article of the Indian Constitution and in an interactive round it was discussed, how these articles are fundamental for securing other basic human rights. This was demonstrated by an example in which the distribution of food did not proceed equally, as misinformation and restrictions led to an inappropriate hoarding of goods. Therefore, it is important for everyone to have that right. In fact, the Indian constitution formulates Article 19 in a positive way, implying not only everyone should have that right, but that the government must promote the upholding of these rights.

However, in the case of Article 66a, the law actually caused a problem with freedom of speech in itself, as it penalizes sending false and offensive messages through communication services. This is a massive impediment on free speech, as outsiders decide upon what is offensive and what is false.

The other side of freedom of speech and expression is censorship. Online, the removal of websites and editing of content often happens quietly and obscures the fact that someone or something is being censored. Unlike book burnings in the past, which were always made a big political spectacle, often websites are simply removed without a trace, or one is faced with a 404 error, when trying to access it. Because of the offensive content law, journals and magazines are quick to remove supposedly offensive content, as it seems more difficult to engage in argument with the people claiming offense. The CIS proposed a counter-law to secure for this to happen less, as freedom of speech includes the freedom to receive that speech.

VIDEO

Session 3: Openness

(by Sunil Abraham)

Next to ensuring freedom of speech and access, the third session of the day focussed on Openness in terms of Open Source software. Sunil Abraham, CIS executive director, stated the importance of free software and open access of data, as they ensure what he called the four freedoms of internet usage, namely the freedom to use for any purpose, the freedom to study, to modify and to share (freely or for a fee). Proprietary software imposes on these freedoms, as it only has restrictive use and a strong copyright. However, there are alternatives that have moderate copyrights, or so-called copy centred perspectives, or even copyleft, including the above mentioned rights into the terms of the software usage.	Above is a picture of Sunil Abraham speaking on Openness

In alignment with Sunil Abraham’s talk Pranesh Prakash criticized copyright law cutting into accessibility rights, as copyright infringements include translation into other languages, audio versions and also integral parts of education. The key is not to have a "one size fits all" copyright solution, as it is impossible to treat twitter content the same as a blockbuster movie. However, the government of India is doing exactly that and needs to interlink questions of access with copyright law.

VIDEO

Session 4: Open Content

(by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam)
Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam, who led the next session, discussed Open Content. He had seen during the course of his experience India's poor performance in Science & Technology and outlined the reasons for the same. The lack of access to information essential in scientific research and knowledge production, he said, was the major limiting cause.

VIDEO

Session 5: Quick Talk on Copyright Law and Access

This short session dealt with implications of copyright law on internet access.

Activity

The participants were divided into two groups, and they were asked build as huge a network as possible with their personal belongings and present their creations. The participants had good ideas. One group placed their mobiles and laptops into the network to have them as nodes. The other group implemented the re-routing around censorship.

VIDEO


Given above is a picture of the participants in an activity making the longest network possible with their personal belongings.

Day 5: (June 12, 2013)

Session 1: Privacy on the Internet in India

(by Sunil Abraham and Elonnai Hickok)

Click to view the presentation slides

Given above is a picture of Elonnai Hickock speaking about privacy	The following day, June 12th started off with “Privacy” as the theme. The session Privacy on the Internet in India was led by CIS privacy experts Sunil Abraham and Elonnai Hickock. In an exchange of anecdotes, it was made clear how there needs to be a certain degree of state surveillance to secure the citizens safety. This can happen through off air interception and active or passive cell phone towers that can track mobile devices. However, encryption is an important tool to secure one’s own privacy against cyber espionage.

Some of the salient points discussed were:

Off-the Air Interception
Possible to set up active or passive cell phone tower.
The signal strength will be strong and everyone looks for it.
Capacity to identify itself as a service provider.
Interception can begin with encryption Technology today used by security agencies.
NTRO- national technical Research Org and Outlook

VIDEO

Session 2: E-Accessibility

(by Nirmita Narasimhan)
Click to view the presentation slides


Given above is a picture of Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan speaking on e-accessibility

The second session was on “E-Accessibility” led by Dr. Nirmita Narasimhan. Some of the salient points discussed were:

Problems arising out of disability
Accessibility-Infrastructure and ICT
Assistive technologies for PWD’s.
Reasonable accommodation (not available or cannot be and requires extra effort and putting up an accessible copy up) and universal Design (for both for PWD’s and non-PWD’s).
Web Content Accessibility is operable and easily understandable.
Accessibility standards include; Daisy (6 types of books including audio and text books) is all about marking up the documents. Really a good way to read but is expensive and time consuming, also need Daisy tools and player to make it work.
In 1808 the first typewriter was developed to help the blind.
Considerations involved in Web Accessibility
Overlap b/w mobile accessibility and web accessibility.
Example- Raku Raku phone captured 60% of market share in Japan. It has many assistive features.
Relay Services has a middle man who passes on the message b/w different PWD’s in many countries, but it is not yet available in India.
PWD’s communicating with customer care – the issues involved.
Accessibility Policy- very few people are adopting accessible technologies. There is a need to have a strong policy. U.K. and U.S. already have strong policies related to accessible and assistive technology for PWD’s.

Video

Session 3: International Bodies and Mechanisms

(by Tulika Pandey and Gaurab Raj Upadhyay)
Activity
Gaurab incorporated an Activity into his talk to enable the students to have a clearer understanding of International Bodies and Mechanisms.


Given above is a picture of the speaker Gaurab Raj Upadhaya explaining the International Bodies and Mechanisms

Some of the salient points discussed during his talk were:

Definition: “Internet Governance is the development and application by Govt., the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures and programmes which shape the evolution and use of internet.”
It should be multilateral, transparent and democratic
Enhanced cooperation means to enable govt…

Technical issues to keep in mind while talking about internet:

Critical internet resources
Root server locations
Open Standards (CIS leads the initiative)
Interoperability
Search Engines
Internationalized Domain names (in own script & language)
Content

Virtual yet real space and most important question to be understood is that whether, the governance of internet is possible?
Public Policy- to monitor cross-border data flow, Openness vs Privacy
India’s Outlook in internet policies-Pillars of Internet which is not fully addressed by the Indian government today.
Established an Inter- Ministerial Group by including various government departments into the arena.
Layer 0-7 Names and Numbers
Layer 8 and above
Applications and Usage
Legal business, policy, etc.

Session-4: E-Governance

(by Tulika Pandey and Sunil Abraham)


Given above is a picture of the speaker Tulika Pandey speaking about e-Governance

Some of the salient points discussed were:

Making policies in India is difficult because the population is huge and implementation at rural level is difficult.
Bombarded by Techno utopians- who believe in technology’s ability to change lives.
Techno determinants- Corruption solved through technology through open government data. More technology is better, the most sophisticated ones are the best are gross misconceptions.
Bhoomi project tried to deal with corruption at village level. Important policy change made all paper work illegal and digitized the land records etc. every action and request will be logged. But this led to creation of new corruption. Bribes were taken even before data was logged!
UID Project (Cobra Post Scam) around 20 public sector and 30 private banks were involved in money laundering scams.
People who design the systems in Delhi prepare sub-contracts.

VIDEO

Day 6: (June 13, 2013)

Session 1: Critical Perspectives of the Internet

(by Dr. Nishant Shah)
Click to view the presentation slides

The sixth day of the Institute kicked off with Nishant Shah, director of research at CIS, looking into Critical Perspectives of the Internet. Nishant made a very important distinction between the internet as infrastructure and as social network constructing alternative universes. Nonetheless it was important to stress that technology should not be alienated in the process of this separation but seen as an integral part of it, as the digital is as much part of reality as any other technology and has become essential as a technology of change that it brings about not only in scientific but also in social development. Quoting Michel Foucault, Shah argued that technology becomes influential when it changes life, labour and language, which is why research in the field should involve critical ways of thinking about body, space and community.	Above is a picture of Dr. Nishant Shah speaking on Critical Perspectives of the Internet.

The body perception can be perceived through the way bodily agencies change through technology. Technology does not necessarily taint or corrupt the body, but can also be a way to escape its confines. To put it to a point, we are all born into technology and cannot free ourselves from them, as for example pregnancy already starts with nutritional supplements, regulatory diets and exercise and essentially ends with birth technologies that do not necessarily involve only the digital - we must remember, speech is one of the oldest technologies available today.

VIDEO

Session 2: Strategies for Policy Intervention

(by Chakshu Roy)
The second session on “Strategies for Policy Intervention” was led by Chakshu Roy. This session dealt with various ways in which policy intervention can be made and the various factors necessary to successfully engage in policy forums.

VIDEO

Session 3: Profile of Internet Service Providers

(by Satyen Gupta)
Click to view the presentation slides


Given above is a picture of Satyen Gupta speaking about Internet Service Providers

Satyen Gupta during his talk on “Profile of Internet Service Providers” discussed the nature, offerings and profile of various ISPs in India, their market share and dynamics.

The salient points discussed were:

National Broadband Plans
Spectrum Issues “Management”
Reality check of Indian ISPs
Broadband Definition & Penetration
Roadblocks for Broadband in India, Governments Role, Regulation
Institutional Framework for the Indian Telecom
Broadband Access in India- Technology-Neutrality
Satellite based DTH Services offer alternate for the Broadband via Receive Only Internet Service (ROIS)
Broadband using DTH for Receive-only Internet
VSAT has the potential for significant impact on Broadband Penetration in Remote Areas
Fixed Wireless Access- an important access technology
Facilitating Radio Spectrum for Broadband Access
Fiscal measures to reduce the cost of access devices, infrastructure and broadband service
Reduction in the cost of connectivity
National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) -National Internet Exchange of India (NIXI) has been set up on recommendation of TRAI by DIT, Government of India to ensure that Internet traffic, originating and destined for India, should be routed within India.
Emerging Broadband Services
Broadband Commission for Digital Development (BCDD)-UN Targets for Universal Broadband,2015
NOFN India-Existing Fiber Infrastructure and Coverage by Various Service Providers
National Telecom Policy (NTP) 2012- Salient Features
State of Internet Services and ISPs in India:
1. India’s Ranking on Key Broadband Indicators
2. Regulator’s Report – Growth of Internet in India
3. Internet Subscribers Base & Market share of top 10 ISPs
4. Technology trends for Internet/Broadband Access
5. Internet/broadband Subscribers for top 10 states
6. Tariff Plans for USO funded Broadband
7. Contribution of Telcos in Development of Internet Services
8. Incumbent’s Role in Growth of Broadband
9. Plugging rural missing link- BBNL
Internet Subscribers Base & Market share of top 10 ISPs

VIDEO

Session 4: Competition in the Market by Helani Galpaya

Helani Galpaya during her talk on “Competition in the Market” discussed about what competition meant, Herfindahl–Hirschman Index to measure how competitive a market is, what are the dangers of monopoly markets and the landscape of the Telecom market in India.


Above is a picture of Helani Galpaya speaking about Competition in the Market

Day 7: (June 14, 2013)

The final day of the Institute focussed on how the Internet can be used to effect change on society – Activism was the theme.

Session 1: Leveraging Internet for activism

(by Ananth Guruswamy)
Click to read the presentation slides


Above is a picture of Ananth Guruswamy speaking during the session on leveraging internet for activism

Some of the salient points discussed were:

Digital Activism
Target Omar Abdullah. It is about an act called Administrative detention Act. One can be detained without act i.e. The Preventive Detention Act. He directly responded to the threat.
Twitter seems to be a place where the political leaders are actually accessible. This kind of access was not possible in day to day life earlier if one was a common man. This phenomenon is developing. Even in Corporate setup writing a mail directly to the CEO seems possible.
Strengths: Wide reach, Freedom of speech, Data collection is made easy, Issues can be tackled swiftly, Global communities, singular identities have lot of power. Eg: 190 Million people stood up against Poverty; this kind of mobilization impossible without internet.
Besides local issues even Global issues are addressed an collection of funds becomes easy. Onion.com once a struggling publication in U.S., but now with a global audience it is thriving and it has a healthy reader base today.
The Earth Hour helps people connect across space and time.
Weakness: More popularity, more attention; Traditional/Real Protest has become rare and a threat; There is no real action beyond internet, threat of movement is low, there is no real commitment involved in digital activism and just one click is enough to make one ‘feel good’.
Opportunities: Recruitment of protestors for real protests. Diff. b/w real and virtual blurred; anything that affects the mind space is real. The intersection is interesting.
Threats: Total removal of privacy, Government intervention in private issues and there could be misinterpretation of people’s thoughts by certain people.
Traditional vs Digital activism: Traditional fails to provide results whereas clicking a button is as easy as wearing a badge.
Facebook activism: ‘Like Buttons’, People moving away from reading emails, a shift towards use of facebook; creates a sense of belongingness which the traditional activism failed to achieve.
India against Corruption: used mobile phone effectively.
Social Media has changed the way protests happen globally and in India, one example is Twitter. Change.org is a website which gives freedom to anybody to start a petition without any external source; Awaaz.org another such petition website.
Green Peace launched a Green peace X which was a runaway success. YouTube is another platform for the masses. People today are more interested in watching rather than reading.
Pakistan in 2007: “Flash protests”; Free Fraizan Movement on Twitter.
Something to keep in mind regarding while launching a campaign online is to think who the audience is and what we want them to do and how will the campaign help our objectives?
How to measure success of a social media campaign?
Reach
Engagement- likes, tweets, comments, etc.
Influence
Attrition Score

VIDEO

Session 2: Internet Access Activism

(by Parminder Jeet Singh)
The next session on “INTERNET ACCESS” ACTIVISM by Parminder Jeet Singh dealt with how people can contribute to initiatives for improving internet access amongst masses.

VIDEO

Session 3: Ensuring Access to the Internet

(by A.K. Bhargava)
Click to view the presentation
The last session on “Ensuring Access to the Internet” by A.K. Bhargava discussed strategies to enhance access to the Internet in India with special focus on National Optical Fibre Network.

The salient points discussed were:

-    Role of Broadband in Nation Building
-    Policy Aspiration of Broadband - How do we meet aspiration?
-    Telecom Network Layers‐Gaps in OFC Reach
-    BBNL Interconnection
-    NOFN - Bridging The Gap
-    Digital Knowledge Centres (DKCs)
-    Architecture of BBNL
-    NOFN Impact

Societal
- Bridging the digital divide
Business
- Job creation, indigenous industry growth
Sectoral
- Improved connectivity, data growth
Technological
- Differentiators
VIDEO

Speaker Presentation Slides
All the presentation aids/slide shows barring a few have been uploaded to the website at http://internet-institute.in/repository

Presentation of Assignments
The participants presented their assignments which were given to them to work on the 3rd day. The participants were presented with Wikipedia T-Shirts as a token of appreciation.


Given above is a picture of the participants presenting their assignments

Participant Feedback
All participants were asked to fill a "Session Feedback Form" for each of the sessions and also an "Overall Feedback Form". They were also constantly encouraged to come up with suggestions and inputs on how to make the Institute more interesting.

The key findings from the Quantitative Feedback provided are:
(The figures below are averaged scores (out of 5) provided by participants in the Overall Feedback Forms)

S.No.	Parameter	Score (Out of 5)
1	Relevance of Content	3.6
2	Comprehensiveness of Content	3.44
3	Easy to Understand	3.55
4	Well Paced	3.33
5	Sufficient Breaks	3
6	Duration of Talks	3.2
7	Mix between Learning & Activities	3

The key findings from the Qualitative Feedback provided are:

S.No.	Points observed
1	Presentations – Participants felt sessions with accompanying slides/aids were most helpful. Some felt that accompanying notes could also be useful for future reference.
2	Use of Examples/Case Studies – Participants felt concepts can be better assimilated if case-studies/examples are used. Some also felt that for the technological advancements discussed, it would have been better had the social/economic impact of the same was discussed too.
3	Implementation Gaps– One participant, who is working at the field level in Kolkata had a specific thing to say about the talk about BSNL and its offerings– Although BSNL has so many options available on paper to connect to the Internet, common service centres in West Bengal are mostly run on Tata Indicom’s network even though the board outside says “BSNL” etc. She felt that the reality is far different from what exists on paper.
4	Interactive sessions were most appreciated than speaker led sessions.
5	There were many responses to the question “How will you apply this new information in the future” and it is very encouraging. People have given thought to contributing to Wikipedia in their mother tongue, take the knowledge to the field work that they are associated with, continue with their research, change their Internet connections, to help file RTIs, to adopt more open source software, sharing with students, advocacy efforts, etc
6	The responses to the question “What did you learn from the session/workshop that was new?” elicited more responses for the following sessions Domestic Bodies and Mechanisms Case-studies such as Air Jaldi Low cost devices in India USOF Free & Open Internet Copyright laws Privacy Accessibility Digital Natives ISPs
7	Field Trip – One participant said “One or two of the persons from MapUnity could have made the presentation at the institute venue itself. A visit to an underserved or un-served community with interactions with the people there could also have given a good understanding of on-ground challenges and needs.”
8	Follow-up Session –One participant had ideas about having a follow-up session “A follow-up call [webinar?] after 6 months to see if any of these concepts were useful would be an interesting exercise to take up”
9	Assignment – Participants felt that the assignments were good but they needed more time to work on the same.

Other Feedback:

The food and the facilities were enjoyed and appreciated by all.
The remote location of the Golden Palms Resort was a concern for most of the participants.

Participation Certificates
Participation Certificates (template shown below) have been mailed to all the participants in the third week of July 2013.


Given above is the certificate declaring the successful completion of the event

Institute Expenses

A total of Rs. 19, 91,889 (Rupees nineteen lakhs ninety one thousand eight hundred and eighty nine only) was spent towards organizing and conducting the Internet Institute. A breakup of the Institute Expenditures is given below:

S.No.	Type of Expense	Description	Total
1	Venue – Golden Palms Resort	Accommodation for participants, speakers and food	12,91,176
2	Travel	Cost of Air tickets	2,94,515
3	Local Travel	Airport Pickup/Drop, Local City Travel	1,41,001
4	Gifts & Printing	Gifts for speakers and ad hoc document printing charges	24,000
5	Infrastructure	Telephony, Audio, Video, Stage	1,05,000
6	Participant Bags		10,650
7	Reimbursements	Reimbursements to participants and speakers	1,25,547
Total Expenses			19,91,889

What the participants had to say

Sangh Priya Rahul – “One of my organisation's work is more or less related to empowerment of rural areas so knowledge about USOF will be useful there.” (On USOF)

Rashmi. M – “Makes me more sensitized towards the disabled people.” (On e-Accessibility)

Preethi Ayyaluswamy – “Would help me in strategically planning for an online campaign” (On digital activism).

Conclusion

The Institute was highly engaging and enabled the participants to explore the various facets of Internet & Society. As was evident from the feedback forms, participants had given thought to contributing to Wikipedia in their mother tongue, take the knowledge to the field work that they are associated with, continue with their research, change their Internet connections, help file RTIs, adopt more open source software, sharing with students, advocacy efforts etc. There was a very high level of expertise amongst speakers at the Institute which was apparent from the participatory discussions and a lot of insightful perspectives were brought forth. There was a common consensus amongst all participants that inclusive growth across all dimensions would take efforts from all stakeholders.

We hope to learn from the findings of this Institute and work towards a better second Institute.


Above is a group picture of all the participants and the organizers

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/institute-on-internet-and-society-event-report

Essays on 'Offline' - Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2018-09-06T14:14:47Z

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

1. Chinar Mehta

2. Cole Flor

3. Elishia Vaz

4. Karandeep Mehra

5. Preeti Mudliar

6. Rianka Roy

7. Simiran Lalvani

8. Srikanth Lakshmanan

9. Titiksha Vashist

10. Dr. Yenn Lee

Chinar Mehta

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

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

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

Cole Flor

Deactivating: An Escape From the Realities of the Online World

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elishia Vaz

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

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

Karandeep Mehra

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

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

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

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

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

Preeti Mudliar

In WiFi Exile: The Offline Subjectivities of Online Women

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

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

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

Rianka Roy

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

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

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

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

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

Simiran Lalvani

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

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

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

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

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

Srikanth Lakshmanan

The Cash Merchant

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

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

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

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

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

Titiksha Vashist

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

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

Dr. Yenn Lee

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

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

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

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

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

Essays on #List — Selected Abstracts

sneha-pp — 2019-09-03T13:38:12Z

In response to a recent call for essays that social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the #List, we received 11 abstracts. Out of these, we have selected 4 pieces to be published as part of a series titled #List on the r@w blog. Please find below the details of the selected abstracts. The call for essays on #List remains open, and we are accepting and assessing the incoming abstracts on a rolling basis.

1. Manisha Chachra

2. Meghna Yadav

3. Sarita Bose

4. Shambhavi Madan

Manisha Chachra

MeToo in Indian journalism: Questioning access to internet among intersectional women and idea of rehabilitative justice in digital spaces

The advent of LoSHA and MeToo era witnessed an intriguing intersection of technology, politics and gender. The list and name-shame culture of social media has not only displayed changing power dynamics in digital space but an increasing movement towards engendering of internet spaces. The social, political and economic matrix defined by power relationships -- a patriarchy reflected in internet spaces, percolating in our interactions confronted a major challenge when women rose up to claim the same space. Internet space cannot be called a virtual reality as it is a sharp mirror into what is going in the power dynamics of society and politics. My paper broadly seeks to examine this engendering of spatial reality of digital space by looking at various conversations that took place on Twitter around MeToo in Indian journalism. MeToo has been widely understood as narration of one’s tale and how that experiential reality is connected with other women. However, a universalisation of such an experience often neglects intersectional reality attached to women’s experiences -- belonging to different caste, class, ethnicity and other kinds of differences. My paper attempts to question how far MeToo in digital space accommodated the differential aspects of woman as a heterogeneous category. The spatial realities of technological spaces function like a double edged sword-- liberating as well as mobility paralysing. I use the term mobility paralysis to denote a contradiction in digital space-- which might be equally available to all sections of women but not fairly accessible. The accessibility is often a reflection of deep rooted patriarchies and kinship relationships that bind women in same voiceless zone. MeToo in Indian journalism is a case study of how women of different backgrounds access digital spaces in questioning this mobility paralysis and inch towards a certain kind of emancipatory politics. Examining MeToo from the perspective of a social movement emerging on Twitter and Facebook, I aim to scrutinise scope of rehabilitative justice for the accused. The emergence of lists, and claiming of spaces is attached to the question of justice and being guilty or innocent of allegations. Online spaces in the recent times have also emerged as platforms of e-khaps (online khap panchayats with certain gatekeepers of the movement) where screenshot circulation, photoshop technology could be used to garner a public response against a particular person. It is interesting how after MeToo the question was not whether the person is guilty or accused rather how they should abandon their social media accounts and probably go absent virtually. In such a context, it is crucial to question the relationship between justice, one’s digital identity and who owns this identity. If rehabilitative justice is not an option, and apology-seeking is not available, what are we hoping from MeToo? The aim of any name-shame movement must be to reclaim digital space, narrate experiences and also to leave scope for others to respond, and seek justice. The question of justice is also closely linked with how women from intersectional backgrounds access internet, and emancipate themselves.

Meghna Yadav

For most people, the Internet is now synonymous with social media. Likewise, consumption of content on the Internet has shifted. We’ve moved from an earlier design of explicitly going to content-specific websites, to now, simply “logging in” and being presented with curated content spanning multiple areas. The infrastructure for consuming this content, however, remains predominantly screen based, implying a space constraint. Websites must, hence, decide what content users are to be presented with and in what order. In other words, social media must generate itself as a ranked list of content.

In the classical theory of social choice, a set of voters is called to rank a set of alternatives and a social ranking of the alternatives is generated. In this essay, I propose to look at ranking of content as a social choice problem. Ranking rules of different social media platforms can be studied as social welfare functions for how they aggregate the preferences of their voters (i.e. users). Current listings of content could be modelled as the results of previously held rounds of voting. Taking examples, Reddit is built on a structure of outward voting, visceral through ‘upvotes’ and ‘downvotes’, constantly displaying to users the choice they have to alter content ranks on the website. TikTok, on the other hand, relies on taking away most of the voting power of its users.

As the Internet tends towards centralisation, studying how different list ranking rules aggregate our choices and in turn, alter the choices presented to us, becomes important to design a more democratic Internet.

Sarita Bose

Mapping goes local: A study of how Google Maps tracks user’s footprints and creates a ‘For You’ list

The ‘Explore Nearby’ feature in Google Maps has three sections – Explore, Commute and For You. Of this, ‘For You’ section contains ‘Lists based on your local history’ as mentioned by Google itself. The Google Maps auto tracks a user’s movements and creates a digital footprint map and lists up events, programmes, restaurants, shops etc for the user. This research will focus on the ‘For You’ feature of Google Maps and its cultural and social dimensions. The work will focus on how the mapping is done and the logic behind drawing up the list. It will try to find out how the economy of Google Maps works. Why some lists shows up while some doesn’t. What kind of ‘algorithm – economy – user’ matrix is used to make up the list? The work will also try to understand cultural dimensions based on mind mapping techniques of Google. This research will follow three dimensions. The first is the mapping of user’s footprints itself and how the distance covered by a user becomes the user’s own digital existence. The Google Maps automatically asks for reviews of places the user might have visited or passed. The question is what algorithm is Google using to ask for the review? Is it pre-pointed or post-pointed? Thus, we come to the second part. Is Google only listing places that paid it or is it trying to digitally map a user’s area of geographical reach in general. If so, why? This brings us to the third dimension of the research work. What kind of cultural mapping is done of the user? The list the user gets is based on his own history and as more data is added, the more mapping is done. These three dimensions are intricately woven with each other and the work will try to establish this relationship.

Shambhavi Madan

List of lists of lists: Technologies of power, infrastructures of memory

Lists make infinities comprehensible, and thus controllable. By virtue of the ubiquity of cyberspace and the digitized information infrastructures curating reality within these infinities, we are increasingly subjected to curatorial efforts of individuals as well as codes – algorithmic and architectural.

Statistical lists are Foucauldian technologies of power in modern societies; tools for the functioning of governmentality – not just in terms of state control over population phenomena but the governmentality of groups or individuals over themselves. The framework of biopolitics identifies a bureaucracy imposed by determining social classifications through listing and categorizing, within which people must situate themselves and their actions (Foucault, 2008). Thus, the authorship of lists is often reflective of power that allows for the perpetuation of hegemonic constructions of social reality, making the lists themselves sites of struggle.

This paper seeks to contextualize (public-oriented) lists as forms of biopolitical curation that often lie at points of intersection between collective consciousness and social order, through an approach that problematizes the socio-technics of agency and the subjective objectivity of authorship. Although list-making acts such as the National Population Register, NRC, #LoSHA, the electoral roll, the census, and Vivek Agnihotri’s call for a list of “Urban Naxals” all differ in terms of content, intent, and impact, and contain different asymmetries of power, the lowest common denominator lies in their role as producers of public knowledge and consequently, infrastructures of public memory. This approach allows for a reinterpretation of the fundamental duality of lists of and within publics: the functionality of enforcing/maintaining social order, and the phenomenological practise of publicly self-presenting with a (semi-material) manifestation of a collective identity. The former sees the use of lists as tools of population management, enacting citizenship and belonging through forms of inclusion and exclusion; the latter is reflective of the workings of self-autonomy – redefining the authorship of justice and punishment – in networked societies. Thus, a secondary theme in this paper would be to question the change and significance in the role of authorship through a phenomenological comparative of lists that are institutionalised practice versus those that are open and collaborative.

Both the act of list-making and the lists themselves are framed as coalescences of material and imaginary, by juxtaposing the idea of infrastructures as primarily relationalities – i.e. they can’t be theorized in terms of the object alone (Larkin, 2013) – with Latour’s relational ontology of human and non-human actors. The list itself is a non-human object/actant that after emerging as a product of co-construction, takes on an agential role of its own (Latour, 2005). Each of these lists can be considered as a quasi-object, a complex convergence of the technological and the social. Both #LoSHA and the NRC are not mere placeholders being ‘acted upon’, but real and meaningful actors acting as cultural mediators and not intermediaries. The integration of a socio-technical, infrastructural approach with one that emphasizes upon the aesthetics of authorship and public memory allows the subject to be seen as constitutive of an embodied, relational experience as opposed to just existing as a dissociative (re)presentation.

References:

Foucault, M. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979. Trans. G. Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Larkin, B. 2013. "The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructural." Annual Review of Anthropology. 42:327-343.

Latour, B. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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

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

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2016-07-04T12:48:15Z

As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – though no longer in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore how do we study internet in India today.

Submission deadline extended to Sunday, July 03.

Source: Leonardo Flores.

How do we move beyond a fascination with new digital things and interfaces that we engage with on the internet, which are increasingly becoming the objects and sites of our research and creative practices? How do we engage with these on their own terms, and perhaps also against the grain? What "new" is being brought in, performed, and afforded by these digital artefacts in our daily lives? How can our concerns and practices benefit from developing an awareness of their aesthetics, functions, and politics?

This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org by Sunday, July 03, 2016. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'

We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on Tuesday, July 05, 2016.

The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (3,000-4,000 words) by Sunday, July 31, 2016. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 6,000.

We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an argument – through text, or otherwise.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india-2016

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2015-08-28T07:09:39Z

As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – and even in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore what it means to study Internet(s) in India today.

We are interested in the many experiences of Internet(s) in India; its histories and archaeologies; how we use it to read, write, create, relate, learn, and share; the data that is produced, and the data that is consumed; the spaces that are created, and the spaces that are inhabited; the forms that political expressions take on the Web; and of course, where and how should one be studying Internet(s) in India?

This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.

Please send abstracts (200 words) to raw@cis-india.org by Sunday, April 26, 2015. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'

We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, May 01, 2015.

The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (2,500-3,000 words) by Sunday, May 31, 2015. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 5,000.

We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the Internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an argument – through text, or otherwise.

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

Call for Essays: Offline

sneha-pp — 2018-08-20T06:58:05Z

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

Offline

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

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

Call for Essays

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Call for Essays — #List

sneha-pp — 2019-10-11T17:07:26Z

The researchers@work programme at CIS invites abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’. We have selected 4 abstracts among those received before August 31, 2019, and are now accepting and evaluating further submissions on a rolling basis.

For the last several years, #MeToo and #LoSHA have set the course for rousing debates within feminist praxis and contemporary global politics. It also foregrounded the ubiquitous presence of the list in its various forms, not only on the internet but across diverse aspects of media culture. Much debate has emerged about specificities and implications of the list as an information artefact, especially in the case of #LoSHA and NRC - its role in creation and curation of information, in building solidarities and communities of practice, its dependencies on networked media infrastructures, its deployment by hegemonic entities and in turn for countering dominant discourses.

From Mailing Lists to WhatsApp Broadcast Lists, lists have been the very basis of multi-casting capabilities of the early and the recent internets. The list - in terms of list of people receiving a message, list of machines connecting to a router or a tower, list of ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ ‘added’ to your social media persona - structures the open-ended multi-directional information flow possibilities of the internet. It simultaneously engenders networks of connected machines and bodies, topographies of media circulation, and social graphs of affective connections and consumptions.

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

What new subjectivities - indicative of different asymmetries of power/knowledge - do list-making, and being listed, engender? How are they hegemonic or intersectional?
What new modes of questioning and meaning-making have manifested today in various practices of list-making? What modalities of creation and circulation of lists affords their authority; what makes them legitimate information artefacts, or contentious forms of knowledge?
How and when do lists became digital, where are lists on paper? How do we understand their ephemerality or robustness; are they medium or message?
Are there cultural economies of lists, list-making, and getting listed? Who decides, and who gets invisibilized on lists?

Call for Essays

We invite abstracts for essays that explore social, economic, cultural, political, infrastructural, or aesthetic dimensions of the ‘list’.

Please submit the abstracts by Friday, August 23, 2019.

We will select 10 abstracts and announce them on Friday, August 30. The selected authors are expected to submit a full draft of the essay (of 2000-3000 words) by Monday, September 30. We will share editorial suggestions with the authors, and the final versions of the essays will be published on the researchers@work blog from November onwards. We will offer Rs. 5,000 as honorarium to all selected authors.

Please submit the abstract (300-500 words), and a short biographic note, in a single text file with the title of the essay and your name via email sent to raw@cis-india.org, with the subject line of ‘List’.

Authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers.

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

An Interview on Internet Governance with Professor Milton Mueller and Jeremy Malcolm

anirudh — 2013-11-12T10:14:58Z

Anirudh Sridhar interviewed Professor Milton Mueller from the Syracuse University School of Information and Jeremy Malcolm, an Information Technology and Intellectual Property Lawyer, regarding current issues and debates surrounding internet governance.

Q1: The extent to which civil society can participate at the proceedings of WCIT’12?

Professor Mueller: I did not attend WCIT-12. Civil society and industry were both influential in the process. CS created a great deal of critical publicity and leaked documents that had formerly been private. Industry and CS both lobbied governmental officials. (I was the first to leak an official ITU document, and this led to the creation of WCIT leaks by some friends of mine who took the idea much farther.)

Professor Malcolm: Actually I did not attend the WCIT’12 in Dubai. I did attend the WTPF in May, but was not permitted to speak. I did distribute a briefing paper by hand and managed to speak to a few delegates. I also contributed some talking points to an intervention by the representatives of the Informal Experts Group (IEG). Undoubtedly the work of the IEG was influential, and the civil society representatives were influential within that group, but the role of the IEG was poorly articulated and its procedures and relationship to the plenary WTPF were quite arbitrary.

Since then, the organization that I represent, Consumers International, has been granted sector membership status of the ITU-T and ITU-D with a waiver of fees, so that next time we will have the opportunity to speak at any meeting that is open to sector members. This is all well and good for us, less so for civil society organisations that do not have expertise in telecommunications and hence would find it more difficult to apply for sector membership.

Q2: What were the central debates at the WCIT’12 conference?

Professor Mueller: The central debates were: 1) the relevance of International Telecom Regulations to Internet governance, 2) the ETNO proposal to have quality of service charging 3) role of the ITRs in "security" 4) to which entity do the ITRs apply (Operating entities, recognized operating entities, etc.)

Professor Malcolm: Proposals that ITU Recommendations should have mandatory status; that it should expand its mandate to include ICTs as well as telecommunications; that it should take over Internet naming and numbering functions from ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers); and that Internet content hosts should share more of their revenue with the operators of telecommunications networks.

Q3: What were some good outcomes and what were some bad outcomes?

Professor Malcolm: None of these proposals succeeded, and not all even officially made it to the table. With the sustained opposition of the United States, Google and other powerful stakeholders, there was never any likelihood that they would.

What did make it through into the final treaty text are two provisions that, given that they are notionally responsible for the refusal of many countries to sign the ITRs, bear that responsibility like a dwarf wears a baggy suit. First, on security – it's worth setting this out in full:

Member States shall individually and collectively endeavor to ensure the security and robustness of international telecommunication networks in order to achieve effective use thereof and avoidance of technical harm thereto, as well as the harmonious development of international telecommunication services offered to the public.

And on spam:

Member States should endeavor to take necessary measures to prevent the propagation of unsolicited bulk electronic communications and minimize its impact on international telecommunication services. Member States are encouraged to cooperate in that sense.

The theory, though it taxes the imagination somewhat, is that these provisions could allow ITU members to justify constraints on Internet content, on the pretext that they are merely addressing security or spam. But the ITU already has work programs on security and spam, and ITU members in turn already heavily regulate these fields, without having an explicit mandate in the ITRs.

Q4: Is the fear of the ITU’s takeover of the internet real?

Professor Mueller:

There is no sudden UN or ITU effort to take over the Internet. There is, instead, a longstanding struggle between the Net and states at the national and international level. The WCIT is just the latest episode; and compared to WSIS, a minor one.

There is no evidence of any recent enlargement of the political support for states and inter-governmental institutions such as ITU. The same players are taking the same positions. There may even be erosion of support for inter-governmentalism, e.g. Brazil’s abandonment of CIRP.

The ITU is a paper tiger. Neither WSIS nor any other international development has strengthened or approved ITU efforts to gain control of pieces of the Internet since 1996.

Professor Malcolm: No: IN THE wake of the anti-climactic conclusion to the World Conference on International Telecommunications (WCIT) earlier this month, readers could be forgiven for being confused about whether all the hype about the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) staging a UN takeover of the Internet had ever represented a real threat, or had just been a beat-up by special interest groups with an agenda to push.

Q5: Does the US, through ICANN exert too much unilateral influence on Internet Governance?

Professor Mueller: Off course. There are many examples of this. For example, the adoption worldwide of policies based on the DMCA and the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, the seizure of domains registered to US-based registrars even if they are foreign-owned and do not infringe foreign law, and the linking of tough IP laws to trade concessions.

Professor Malcolm: Yes, the US exerts too much influence over ICANN, via the GAC and the IANA contract. WCIT (or more accurately, the ITU) is NOT the right track to solve this, because keeping the internet away from the ITU is one of the primary reasons the US exerts unilateral control. Any attempt to solve the problem via the ITU will fail.

Q6: Are there any serious alternatives to ICANN?

Professor Mueller: It is inconceivable that IGF will ever evolve into a body that negotiates binding treaties. Its entire mission and purpose is to be an alternative to that. It is also an extremely weak and poorly funded institution.

Professor Malcolm: There are no longer any alternatives to ICANN that anyone seriously thinks are better. The only argument that people are making nowadays is that oversight of ICANN should become multilateral. Nobody (no longer even the ITU) is seriously suggesting that any other body than ICANN should be making these decisions. At most, the GAC wants more say, but even the GAC is still part of ICANN.

Q7: Can we have a multi-stakeholder process that is truly democratic with legal force?

Professor Mueller: To reconcile legally binding authority with MS, you would need some dramatic institutional changes at the global level that would create new forms of representation. These new institutional forms would have to find some way to represent all the world's people and organizations, not states. Because states are unlikely to give up this power on their own, some kind of revolutionary action would be required to bring that about, roughly analogous to the democratic revolutions of the late 18th and early 19th century.

Professor Malcolm: In the far future, yes. In the near future no, but we still need to start talking about it, because the future starts from now. Mechanisms of multi-stakeholderism are still not well enough developed that they can substitute for the legitimacy of the nation state. But nation states do not properly overlap with those who are governed by transnational rules about the Internet, so eventually change must come.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/telecom/knowledge-repository-on-internet-access/interview-with-milton-mueller-and-jeremy-malcolm

101 Ways of Starting an ISP:* No. 53 - Conversation, Content and Weird Fiction

Surfatial — 2016-08-03T12:47:31Z

This essay by Surfatial is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. It argues that the internet has created a space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive. It actively explores how anonymous and pseudonymous content production may offer a method for exploring and expressing the internet in India, with a certain degree of freedom, and how spam-like methods may prove effective in puncturing filter bubbles.

* ISP stands for Internal Surface Provider.

Mainstream institutions for learning, as we see them, are not concerned with the substance and gravity of the present moment [B1]. The professing of experience to aid learning or skill development is largely a perverted claim. There is no actual intention of enabling, nor is there even a desire to personally experience any immersion or penetration [B2]. Added to this is the spectre of commodification of experience and learning today, where education has turned into a consumer product. The ivory tower of aloofness is too comfortable to deviate from. The institutionalisation of aloof posturing and the masks of professorships are too smugly fitting the exhausted bodies of those running the ship.

Academics are like fruit on an inaccessible tree. It is there, but we cannot eat it. The moon is spoken of by poets and lovers because it is so far away and experientially inaccessible. Love is a stream and will never be in a state of harmony forever. It will remain tumultuous and rocky like the sea into which an asteroid has just fallen.

We observe that disinterest in engaging in the immediacy of our continuing experience invariably leads us to holding on to selective bits while the rest passes. These selections then get shaped into some semblance of narratives. But how do we talk about the experience of the moment or even acknowledge the presence of what has not been selected? How does an individual’s perception and response direct to a better understanding of experiences that can harbour empathy?

When telephones get cross-connected, we hear voices that do not belong to the conversation. What if these voices were to become a part of the conversation? We can talk to strangers. We don’t really need to talk about anything in particular - we can just get used to each other’s voice.

Surfatial is concerned with knowledge production and has been exploring the format of conversations both online and offline as a space to perform personally experienced sequences of knowledge, and talk about these to others. Somewhere in this process learning emerges. We are currently seeding a platform for the sharing and dissemination of alternate pedagogies and self-woven visions of the world. This desire responds to academia's hangover with the past and its inability to instil processes and incubate practices that can help students in a continual production of content.

Narrative is processed from raw experience and so it is more easy to deal with than the complex mass of experience.

Harnessing Anonymity

The internet offers you a morphing cloak - you can be selective about your identity, you can be online with selective vision and selective speech [B3]. What do you choose to see online? What do you choose to reveal? And how much? [B4] If you wear the cloak that covers you altogether, are you truly anonymous, or could it be that your true self leaks out as you put your hands against your eyes in an attempt to hide yourself?

Think about a day when you want to say something and you feel that the Internet feels like too distant a medium. The Internet is so close to us, so intertwined in our lives that the perception of distance feels like a make-believe construct.

Anonymity has potential to offer a voice to the invisible identity, the silenced perspective, the overlooked persona, the taboo desire. Could it also be harnessed for accessing and expressing that which is experienced in the present? Could anonymity be that filter which stands with the least amount of obstruction to experiencing the present as it unfolds, does it offer that means to experience more freely?

Why are you online? What are you looking for online? What do you see? How does a visually impaired person experience the internet? What does that feel like? And then, what do you say online?

From awkwardness and discomfort as the minimum level of experience, we are moving to anger, disinterest and boredom [B5]. This social reality is being exacerbated by the manifestation of our realities on the internet. Anger is a mode of communication that rejects existing content in the pipeline and allows a relentless push mode of transmission. Disinterest is a lack of empathy that we are privileged to employ, while, at the same time, displacing and dismantling existing systems of falsehood and decay that are populating the system. Boredom is disengagement that comes from an immunity to words that don't mean anything - floating in the air, timed to music or masquerading as knowledge.

If we keep an open mic near a flock of passionate birds, will the flapping and other sounds become a cacophony to form an interesting soundscape? Do birds become conscious of an open mic?

Surfatial works for the frustrated seeker, seeking nourishing clarifying content on the internet. The internet has become a shopping mall, but this doesn't mean that we can't walk around and talk to people.

What to do? How to act? What to produce? What should the lost and wandering tribes of the world do to express with diversity? Is there some secret pathway to knowing what to do that is only accessible to deviants?

Production means to render an output, from the flux that we encounter in our experience. We can also choose not to produce but then we end up with a mass of material and no narrative.

Does deviation from the norm guarantee some kind of clarity? Why can't ordinary people know? Why do they have to be inspired and awakened and creative to know? Is there nothing that flows in the narrow channels of propriety?

Deviation does guarantee a unique pool of content being made for us to access. But the question is how this access is setup for a kind of secondary process - one that is possible only after the ordinary has been dealt with and has led to something. Deviant content leads us further away from the sugar-coated annals of the plain world that is meant for mass-consumption.

We live in echo chambers online and off. An infrastructure needs to be in place for the flow of a lubricant [B6] within echo chambers so that the conversation in the closed loop becomes smooth enough, and when a disassociation from the self or a disparate viewpoint happens, it is less painful. The echo-chamber becomes the social space when multiple levels of echoes are able to inter-mingle in ambiguous contexts and containers.

If we were not productive beings we would not be able to deal with ourselves. We would be strangers to our own legacies.

Spaces for Speculative Content Production

Surfatial offers an online stage for self-enactment, where there can be friction without producing sparks. As a producer of assembly line infrastructure around access to knowledge, we find denial very useful. Denial of identity, denial of social constructions, denial of expected modes of speaking in conversations. We find that we create even the room for conversation around the need for alternatives after allegiances have stopped being in existence.

The internet is not a pool, it is a cesspool. Everyone who is trying to navigate the space feels stuck and lost. So we avoid navigation and jump from node to node in order to escape from the boiling cesspool that gets too hot if we remain in the same place for a long time.

When the shadows of dependencies on systemic corruptions have disappeared the real possibility of ‘being’ arises. We care about this possibility. We are making access to knowledge universal, since access based on the question of privilege and capacity sets a very low bar for conversations in terms of what is allowed to be spoken, which directions of verbal exploration are politically acceptable, and who gets to abuse whom with which epithets. We are concerned with formats that are open to every participant’s perspective equally and their individual approach to contributing to the collective voice.

The play never ends. Laugh at yourself
Seek a new denial... the shift of power is a natural process.

Anonymous and pseudonymous forms of content production offer a method for exploring and expressing with a certain degree of freedom. How free we feel depends partly on how free we are allowed to feel [B7], and depends in equal parts on the level of our own disinhibition. Through degrees in the opening up, passionate potentialities are demonstrated.

Who are you? And who are we? We do not know, we are nobody at all sometimes and then we wake from our slumber and feel like doing something again.

Anonymity is a double edged sword. Can virtual freedom of expression lead to any insight that can transfer into real life interaction? How difficult is this jump from virtual to real life? Virtuality has evolved beyond the world of simulation, where it is now possible to experience multiple mechanisms of meaningful relationships with people. We believe there is a level of balance between virtual and physical engagements that can be struck in order for bringing one closer to a semblance of self-realisation.

Why do players choose anonymity, if they do? Fake profiles sometimes are an expression of a desire to play. Those who play can succumb to joy. Joy becomes a tempting emotional state. The more joyful you are, the more comfortable you feel in any garb. This could be a liberating experience, when the blurring of identities occur.

“Putting aside the baggage of ego and identity has a freeing effect on which part of our persona we express.”
— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.

Harnessing pseudonimity

Being playful becomes possible if role-play and make-believe are accepted as valid forms of narrative ploy with a functional purpose in the everyday. The role assumed during play sometimes becomes more enjoyable than the dry person of absolute dimensions. As the rules of play are adopted, disassociation and immersion happen. The player has a choice to deny their outside-play persona and remain fully entrenched in the dynamics of play. This denial helps in the player’s engagement with our system of accessing knowledge. If the gravity and consciousness of your plain existence is lost, then communicating with you becomes easier. In short, your shadow becomes what you could never become. The being and presence of your playtime persona are much stronger than what you can ordinarily muster. In our space, you get to deny the world outside play and conversely render your world as play.

“being fictional is you without your physical being. If we take away the physical beings from this world, we are left with imagination, ideas and their interpretations.”
— Raavi Georgian, a Facebook user.

The garb of comedy allows you to listen with a certain distance. The Indian internet landscape is no stranger to this choice of presentation. Several personas dot the scene, there is Norinder Mudi, there is Gabbar Singh or the Cows of Benaras. In an era of cathartic sharing, where all manner of mental chatter finds channels of expression, comedy can be a balm for controlled experiments in taking potshots at sociopolitical power structures. Some platforms incentivise identity in order to legitimise the online experience, for instance, Facebook seems to place a premium on profile pictures by giving them a default public setting, and the user-base is advised by sundry guidelines about the “perfect profile pic” to adopt clear frontal images for maximum effect. Others have a policy of anonymity, like Reddit.

Forget who you are. Just be someone else.
And then you can be the one,
Holding the mic in your hand.

The existing mechanism of algorithms make it seem like there is free and open access to information, even customised for the user’s convenience. But this customisation in fact filters information based on working out the user’s bubble. One way to beat the bubble is to role-play. This would require receivers to adopt pseudonymous/ alternate roles to have access to content outside of their own filters. A loosening of the self can expand the algorithm.

Loosening of the self is a safe idea. The ideal is to have no cognisance of one’s identity. The network converts you into an IP - an anonymous VPN blurs your IP, nobody knows who you are. Behaviours found in the online community show that there are several aspects of blurring in identity and the presentation of information.

Harnessing disinhibition

Disinhibition is not necessarily rendered as a condition of the external ecosystem (physical and virtual ecosystems). It has more to do with the actor’s persona and how she has framed and declared her persona. What is the pitch of the actor’s voice? What does it say? What kind of response becomes necessary?

The opportunity for denial emerges from the confidence gained from play. If random social play does not cause huge rescissions of norms and contracts already in place, its extension to become a fundamental behavioural pattern changes nothing.

We will convince you that when we step on your toes and snap back at you in response to your idiotic and subservient social conduct, we are just playing. And if you accept it, then we can tell you the harshest and most unpleasant truth about you on your face and get away with it.

Surfatial designed a conversation game called flip & blip [A2] which has the objective of enhancing empathy and sociability, via role play and assuming personas. The purpose of role-play is to help people step put of themselves and play out situations through alternate lenses. In any situation, how does another feel? [B8] We are either intuitive, or we are clueless. This game opens up the space between. It uses question cards and persona cards as triggers to present scenarios to the players. The goal was to have a conversation while wearing a persona, and then to have the same conversation while being oneself. The players then reflected on the occurrence of any shifts in perspective during this process [B9].

A game is a format for play that has rules [B10]. Even while these rules are very important, sometimes it becomes possible to play with them. The extent to which we enjoy the game depends on our interpretation of these rules. Now, socially acceptable rules of conduct are considered to be good behaviour. And if our physical social lives are viewed as some kind of a game with rulesets and interpersonal protocols of engagement (a game with heavy consequences for not playing by the rules), perhaps our online lives offer that outlet for exercising freedom from this oppressive structure, and perhaps the freeing online experience can translate into incorporating playfulness into strict routine interactions?

“Human social structures built upon transactional attitudes don't have space for free expression, since free expression means disregarding façades and notions of "propriety" as well as hierarchy"
— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.

Access might supposedly require a filtration system. But we are opposed to the construction and use of filters. We are of the opinion that we need to be able to access the core content directly - no envelopes, no braces, and no reduced-sets. People fear dealing with the naked world because they fear engagement, immersion and getting overwhelmed, while at the same time craving first hand knowledge, craving a removal of gatekeepers who shield them from the naked truth using agenda-coloured filters.

Surfatial has been working with several formats for harnessing anonymous content production and for playful engagement, via our structured study groups that actively discourage the elaboration of direct personal identification. The emergence of individual identities occurs only through the exchange of perspectives during conversation [B11].

The study group derives itself from a group of individuals who are interested in remaining sharp as a group. The group’s concern will always be to aid others as well as itself by challenging every perspective that seems superfluous.

Our study groups

Our study groups [A1] are webinars hosted on Google Hangouts on Air, with a framework of philosophical questioning and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. These are structured conversations that are completely open to participation and listening, with one to three anchors. Each study group is centred around a topic, and three pre-determined questions relating to that topic are posed to the participants. The tone is detached, with not much encouragement for sharing of personal information. The conversation is fluid and anyone who has anything to say is able to start speaking. We do not follow the common conventional etiquette of introducing the guests or apologising for intrusion. Due to this it becomes rather freeing and divorced from any mode of social behaviour. The illusion we often chase is of the study group being just a set of “voices in the head”.

When an idea oversteps the terrain that it has been assigned to, it acquires the garb of being a trespasser. Ideas trespass when they uncover surprising connections. which they might otherwise not be related to in any direct way. Such connections cannot be predicted. They emerge out of the process of exploring something else. Trespass happens at perspective boundaries—one never meant to hear another’s perspective, but now that they are in a space together, one must; encroachment will invariably happen.

Study groups have anchors who stand with markers for conversation transition points. Anchors could be Surfatial members or guests. Guest anchors are invited with the intent of extending Surfatial’s sphere of engagement and to alter the threads that connect the conversations.

Anchors are not moderators. They are literally anchors for the discussion. They make sure that the discussion deals with the issues that it raises before moving onto other issues. Anchors seek out questions and figure if they have been answered. They are like accountants of a currency of ideas.

The archive of all these study group conversations [A8] is treated as a dynamic space for re-engagement in order to consistently pursue alternate methods of presenting it—through text, posters, books, soundtracks, videos and conversation games.

How messages are presented

When we start seeding a message, we feel the pull of invisible attractors. The vestiges of messages are either offered at their face value or they are so thin, light and loosely packed that they do not offer sufficient flesh to sink teeth into [B12]. The least we demand from the producers of noise and meaninglessness in our environment is that they give us sufficient depth of material to bite into and suck the juice out. Density is the key.

In compression lies our only hope. If you have to speak, speak less and mean more. If you have to produce material of any kind, make sure it is densely packed with fissile material which can all combust together to yield a message.

By packaging our formats in diverse forms they become appealing to people in different ways.

But there is a danger of package and content being divorced in the process of design. Design facilitates skimming of content by packaging its appearance as eye-candy; packaging runs the danger of dissuading immersion into content. We look to destabilise this tendency, and offer value in the packaging itself. We are interested in packages with embedded content, to save the viewer the trouble of unwrapping any external cover.

Access to free exchange is sometimes denied. Free exchange ensures that ideas get modified and challenged. They grow and so it is an essential process that is needed in order for them to be change and offer strength garnered from this free exchange.

Then what is the way? How do you get past institutional filters? If limits have been drawn, if the surfaces of knowledge are guarded, how do messages get out of the perimeter of control? Spam—unsolicited communication, yielding messages where none are requested or expected—is the answer. Spam and spam-like methods are the only tools that can get past the filters. There are no constraints which are fine enough for the fine specks of spam to be swatted out.

We are going to populate compressed messages of the whole world's knowledge onto surfaces of mass display and then circulate them like spam.

Posters [A9] are posts that linger [B13]. Posters are not just lozenges of information, they are pieces and fragments of a song that gets completed in the reader’s mind. The poster is already present on social media as a format. But not all designers use the poster in the same way. For some it is just a clever punch-line. We believe in the punch but not in the merit of clever punch-lines. We attempt a sharp contrast between the text that we write and the general experience offered by the environment for consumption of media. This sharp contrast is conveyed through our choice of the posters’ visual format as well as through the auditory means of a soundscape.

What is a song? Who is singing? A song speaks when words are weak, when humming gets through, when drumming has no beat.

Our tracks [A7] emerge out of our words and texts. We put together sounds and speech sometimes post-fact, sometimes in the moment with everyone there in the room. We believe that fragments of words and speech can be agents of perspective shifts if placed within altered contexts and rhythms. We think of our sounds as soundscapes more than music.

Conversation as Currency

To sell, one needs to be invisible. No business survives on recurrent sales to family and friends. Businesses survive and grow because they create markets within which strangers can transact with confidence. For strangers to transact with confidence, value needs to be stable and fixed into the form of the product. And for that, products need to develop an intensely tangible form. Value of the product starts and finishes with the form. The form cannot be soft or intangible. It needs to be concrete.

To fix the value for a thing, one needs to have a conversation. The price of a commodity can be arrived at through conversation. But we do not care about the price. Because once we sell, our conversation is over. We do not want to end it. Besides, we will all keep having more to say and would like others to have access to it too. These are things of value for all of us. This is what we want to exchange and so, conversation is our currency. We will only transact through conversations.

To buy, one must be desirous. There must be a desire for change, for a perturbation of the status quo. A desire that drives motivation for the mouth to open and the hand to move towards a device that dispenses currency. All this takes a lot of effort. The seller and the buyer both have desires and motivations, but the anxiety of the approach to the final push off of the cliff-face of the mountain of the transaction must be overcome. This is the difficult part. It involves a leap of faith. Can a push be made as effortlessly as possible? Sure. We only need to find a way. Efficiency is a way. We introduce efficiency into the system by reducing steps. If we take away the step of the hand moving, we have already reduced effort. Now only the mouth has to open.

We have made the determination of value into a game, which is in the form of a Book of Conversation Triggers [A3]. In this game, we will read each sentence in our book to you and we will ask you if you agree. After we have performed all the sentences to you, we will ask you if you feel like holding on to any sentence, or if any sentence led you to experience a new kind of thought. If you think so, we will offer those sentences to you. You may if you like, in turn play this game with whomever you choose to play it with, in order to have another conversation. You owe yourself that much at least. If conversation is a currency, it wants to grow and spread like a virus. So, why not go forth and multiply?

What will you, the player, win? You win a sentence you can post on your fridge door or your Facebook wall, you win an insight you can talk about further. You win the memory of a delightful conversation you had with us, which we guarantee you will have again with whomever you choose to play with. This game will give you victory again and again. Are you game?

A poster can also be a person who posts. A post-writer is often one who reaches the point of saturation, which pushes them to producing compressed text. This act places them in a new period in the timeline of history, of being post-writers.

Publishing sans credits

We work with the idea of credit-less production. post_writer [A5] is a twitter-based monthly journal. Each issue consists of six tweets. Four by humans, one by a bot and one by a sponsor. There are only issue-wide credits but no individual credits. Which tweet is by whom is an ambiguity.

As an actor, you can choose to disengage from every story you assume you are a part of, then you deal with the anxiety of performing for free in an under-documented and under-credited fashion. When this anxiety subsides, awakening might happen.

We look to expand the study group format to have anchors interested in exploring their own questions in a nondescript manner. We are also looking at shorter capsules of study groups which will be podcast, with a question dedicated for an individual’s consideration, to capture their particular perspective of experience sharing.

We would rather model the world as a space swarming with individuals who actively produce content, rather than as a space with an abundance of consumers and a scarcity of commercially viable producers enveloped in the gloss of the culture of page-hits and celebrity [B14] [B15]. Today we have a competitive marketplace of market-validated content that goes into profiling our consumption. Our profiles are then further recycled as fodder by the market, to be fed back to us [B16]. We are not valued as producers; we are valued as consumers of products, and vessels for marketing those very products.

The current state of the world has many different sources of validation but does not have a space for the self-validated. If we choose to be blind to the sociality of the content we see, then we have nothing at all. Every package of content is socialised, everything is floating in mediated space [B17]. The isolated, untouched (by mind or hand) content has no place in the world. We are surrounded by content which has no fidelity, coils through minds at will, and yields their message to anyone who enquires. There is no knowledge personally reserved for you in this pool of content. Reading is supposed to lead to synthesis and this synthesis is meant to culminate into a development of personal perspectives and opinions. However, in a pool of commonly read content there is more likelihood for the development of cliques and clouds of common belief and little space for individualised synthesis. Some get hit more directly by some threads of content and identify the hit as a personal facet of discovery.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”
— Noam Chomsky, The Common Good

To hit upon a truly personal facet of content that doesn’t belong to a popular cesspool, a flow of production has to be initiated and self-validated. Entire knowledge-systems need be constructed without any building blocks but with content generated from the knowledge of the moment [B18]. Insights gleaned from here and there come together as a granular pool of content that is personal, special and hitherto unseen in our context. A unique association between the individual and message gets formed. And this association is incoherent and unfamiliar in ways, because it doesn't belong to the popularly socialised frameworks of knowledge. This weird fiction gets overlooked and thereby remains safe from being intruded upon or being misconstrued. The obscure and the hidden breed mysteries waiting to be tapped.

Time to break [B19] from packaged commodified sound byte capsules.

A) Index of Surfatial Projects

1. Study groups on Google Hangouts on Air

Study groups with Surfatial anchors
Study groups with guest anchors

2. Conversation based games: flip & blip

3. Book of Conversation Triggers: PDF

4. Online Residency on Surfatial’s Facebook page

5. Post-writer: https://twitter.com/post_writer.

Each issue is based on public contributions

6. Interactive performances and exhibitions

7. Tracks based on our archives of text and audio: Soundcloud

8. Digital archives of games, performance and study-groups: YouTube

9. Poster: Facebook

B) References [B20]

1. Pulp - “Glory Days” - This is Hardcore (1998)

2. Pink Floyd - “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” - The Wall (1979)

3. Weezer - “The Futurescope Trilogy” - Everything Will Be Alright In The End (2014)

4. Radiohead - “How to Disappear Completely” - Kid A (2000)

5. Nirvana - “Smells Like Teen Spirit” - Nevermind (1991)

6. Pink Floyd - “Empty Spaces” - The Wall (1979)

7. Metallica - “The Unforgiven” - Metallica (The Black Album) (1991)

8. Backstreet Boys - “Quit Playing Games with My Heart” - Backstreet Boys (1995)

9. Sting - “Shape of My Heart” - Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993)

10. Kenny Rogers - “Rules of the Game” - The Gambler (1978)

11. Boyzone - “If We Try” - BZ20 (2013)

12. Bangles - “Mixed Messages” - Doll Revolution (2003)

13. Cranberries - “Linger” - Everybody Else's Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)

14. Lady Gaga - “Paparazzi” - The Fame (2008)

15. Eminem - “The Real Slim Shady” - The Marshal Mathers LP (2000)

16. Kraftwerk - “Hall of Mirrors” - Trans-Europe Express (1977)

17. Marshall McLuhan - “The Medium is the Message” - The Medium is the Message (1967)

18. Chicks on Speed - “Utopia” - UTOPIA (2014)

19. Queen - I Want to Break Free - The Works (1984)

20. DJ Shadow - “Right Thing / GDMFSOB” - The Private Press (2002)

C) Game - 101 Ways of starting an ISP: No. 54

Instructions for playing:

Click here to access the game.
On every left-click, you will receive a new poster.
If you like what you see, right-click and save as an image. (This works on the Google Chrome and Firefox browsers).
You can then choose to share the image on your Facebook or Twitter pages and tag #Surfatial. We use conversation as currency, so we will contact you and converse with you to complete the transaction process.

Authors' Profile

Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. We use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. We are concerned with enabling disinhibition through the internet, for expressing what may not be feasible in physical reality. We organise internet-based audio conferences called study-groups where we deal with philosophical questions and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. We have previously presented our work at Soundphile 2016, Delhi; play_book (in collaboration with Thukral & Tagra), Gurgaon; CONA, Mumbai, and Mumbai Art Room. Our upcoming engagement is with ZK/U, Berlin.

Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/surfatial

Website - http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial

Twitter - https://twitter.com/surfatial

Surfatial is Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, Satya Gummuluri, and No.55, a bot.

Prayas Abhinav

Prayas is an artist and teacher. He works on his capacity to learn through performance. He has worked in the last few years on numerous pieces of speculative fiction, software, games, interactive installations, public interventions and curatorial projects. He is the initiator of the Museum of Vestigial Desire. He has developed his practice with the support of fellowships by Sarai, Openspace, the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA), TED and Lucid. He has been in residencies at Khoj (India), Coded Cultures (Austria) and dis-locate (Japan). He has shared his work at festivals including Transmediale, 48c, Futuresonic, ISEA and Wintercamp.

Satya Gummuluri

Satya is an artist originally from Bombay currently based in Germany. She works with music, writing and photography as well as doing freelance translation, editorial and research work. She has lived in Chicago for several years, collaborating, recording, performing and traveling with musicians and dancers in Chicago, NYC and Lisbon, and has appeared with them at the Chicago Jazz and World Music Festivals, and Austin’s SXSW. As a writer and translator, her work has appeared in online and print journals such as Almost Island and SAADA’s Tides magazine. She also works with activist groups engaged with feminism and urban issues in India and the US.

Malavika Rajnarayan

Malavika is an artist based in India. Her paintings use the human figure to explore larger issues of collective consciousness. Her works have also been exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Ahmedabad in India and at the 2007 Sosabeol Art Expo in South Korea. She has presented lectures at EWHA University in Seoul, South Korea, College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, SITE art space, Baroda and conducted short workshops at NID, Ahmedabad and at non-profit organisations for women and children. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Collective Studio Baroda, The Contemporary Artists Centre, Troy, New York and at CAMAC Centre for Art in Marnay sur-Seine, France, supported by the K. K. Hebbar Art foundation and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_101-ways-of-starting-an-isp-no-53-conversation-content-weird-fiction

10 Ways to Say Nothing New

nishant — 2015-04-14T13:17:52Z

The rise of the listicle, a safe, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on January 19, 2014.

I Always Like to begin the New Year with a self-fulfilling prophecy, assured in the fact that like New Year resolutions, it will quickly be forgotten in the attention deficit times that we live in. Nevertheless, it is always a fun exercise, to play Cassandra, and utter ominous things about the time to come. I am looking at my fasterthan-byte feeds online and trying to figure out the new trend that is going to be the absolute death of us in 2014. I did some research (Google search), consulted some experts (asked friends on Facebook),analysed critiques (trolled on Twitter), and looked at current trends (followed funny Tumblrs) and finally have the answer. The thing that we must brace for is the list — or rather the listicle (an article that is written like a list).

Have you noticed it? Almost anything that is anything on the internet lately has been presented to us as a list. There are lists for everything — of things people say, of things people do, of things people want to say about people who do things. On websites in the business of making things go viral (and slightly fermented), the listicle has emerged as the next best thing.

Now, I don’t want us to run away with the idea (10 ways to run away with ideas — coming soon on Viral Nova) that lists are new. Lists have always existed and have been one of the most basic forms of archiving, sorting and storing human knowledge and information. However, the new lists that are doing the rounds on BuzzFeed, Reditt, Viral Nova and everywhere else need attention. The listicle is an incredible performance of the strange, the silly and the deranged. Like reality TV judges, they are empty, cliché-ridden and yet seductive. They are supposed to produce profound truths, give us insights into our everyday practices, harness the wisdom of crowds and help curate overloaded information feeds to distil what is most relevant and useful. In itself, that is a fantastic ambition and for somebody who is constantly moaning about there not being enough time to follow everything on the internet (way too many videos of pandas making friends with wallabies on Vimeo these days), I appreciate the ability that listicles have of reducing read-time and giving us tweet-sized nuggets of wisdom. Bam! Our lives have changed!

And yet, as you look at these lists, you slowly start realising that listicles are significantly empty. They try to pass on the banal, the boring, the insipid and the extraordinarily common-sense as knowledge, information and wisdom. I am randomly looking at the last five listicles on my timeline — 20 reasons why a 20-something would never survive Hunger Games (right, because that’s the message of the books — get children to kill each other!), 31 insanely clever ideas to remodel your new house (a lot of them using chopped up coke bottles and toilet paper rolls for that intimate ambience), 18 ways of discovering happiness through travel (my first rule is “be very rich”), 25 universal horrors of hair removal (let it grow! Let it grow! Let it grow!) and seven ways of making a to-do list that works (get it? Get it? A list about making an efficient list. May I please say #FacePalm?)

So, snide remarks aside (10 ways to let go of sarcasm?) what does this mean for us? Why are listicles so popular? Why are the tech-savvy, educated people online, who could be overthrowing authority (all hail, Snowden) and feeding starving children in a poor country of their choice — why are they all spending the time with listicles? I am proposing that the listicle is the final death of politics, criticality and thought on the internet. We have already seen how online conversations quickly devolve into an exercise in creative name-calling and racist, bigoted bullying. The internet has already shown us that all debates end in accusations of fascism (Godwin’s law) and that anything that you say online is going to offend somebody who will then come back, like the ghost of Christmas past, and haunt you. In the hostile space that the internet has become, not the very least because everybody is not watching porn, searching for pictures of animals, or pirating music and movies, we are all trained to be the saints who were persecuted for their beliefs. There is no such thing as a bad person on the internet. Everybody is smug, holier- than-thou, and even when wrong, are saintly wrong, and thus martyrs. For a medium that was supposed to encourage conversation, unless you are in the company of people you know, the internet has become a hunting ground, where the only thing you can do safely is make a list. And hence, the listicle.

True, once in a while, there are some really cool listicles (though they might lead to mild electrocution or house burning down, but hey, no pain, no gain, right?) and they do help in visualising and transmitting information very fast. At the end of the day, listicles are the space that conversations go to die. The listicle is a safe, non-offensive, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know, confirms what we had always suspected, and gives validation to the impressive schools of thoughts like “My grandmother says so” and “I have heard that”. It is a way by which we escape deep thought or engaged talk, basking in the enchantment of our own brilliance, no longer in need of thinking anymore, because look, look how beautiful our thoughts look in the listicle, and look, how many people are sharing it! The listicle has risen and it looks like it is just going to get more popular. Maybe it is time to write a listicle about why we shouldn’t be writing listicles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-january-19-2014-nishant-shah-10-ways-to-say-nothing-new