Centre for Internet and Society

Love in the Time of Tinder

nishant — 2016-10-17T02:07:05Z

Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.

The article was published in the Indian Express on October 2, 2016.

Last week, I met somebody who narrated their digital fairy tale to me. He was waiting in between trains, waiting at a train station, for the connection to arrive. Bored, he opened the dating app Tinder. He swiped right. There was a match. They started chatting. The conversation became interesting. She offered to leave work early and come to the train station to meet him for coffee. They had a five-hour long date. He missed many connections and stayed back with her to spend more time. When he left, they stayed connected using all the digital apps of connection that you can imagine. They started travelling weekends to be with each other. Three years later, he moved countries and jobs to be in the same city as her. Last week, they got engaged to be married. And everybody raised a toast to the resilience of their love, and how they have worked hard at being together. They thanked all the people who have been involved and supportive in helping them through this period. And at the end, she said, she wanted to thank Tinder and WhatsApp, without which they would have never met been able to continue this connection. They were being facetious, but they were also reminding us that we live in appified times.

Apps are everywhere and they have become so natural and ubiquitous that we have forgotten what it means to live without them. In the case of this fairy tale couple, their very meeting was ordained not by fate and destiny and romantic godmothers, but by a smart app. This app, based on algorithms that judged them to be a good match, drawing from what they like on Facebook and what they share with their friends, presented both of them to each other, causing the first swipe. The app, designed around the principle of FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), made sure that in the 40 minutes that he was at the train station, both of them looked at their phones, swiped right and had the conversation that began it all. The app created habits that ensured that they trusted each other to meet after a 20-minute chat, to miss trains for the joy of the first extended date. People fell in love, and their love was managed entirely by smart apps.

These apps are designed to assist us in our mundane lives. Behind their seductive design and intuitive interfaces are scripts, norms, rules, protocols and intentions that are influenced and shaped by corporations and individuals, who have a specific interest in expanding their market domains. The creation of profiles on Tinder required both these people to give Tinder access to a wide variety of their personal activities and profiles. As their romance progressed, they involved more apps in their activities. Personal planners, reminders, e-shopping platforms, social media testimonies, deals to buy cheap tickets — all came into play. And even as they came together in a monogamous relationship, the apps encouraged them into data infidelity, wantonly sharing their data, making it speak with strangers, interact with unknown shadows in the dark, morphing and fusing with predatory algorithms that continued to not only follow them but also predict what their needs are. These smart apps might come with friendly interfaces and helpful suggestions, but they do it by making us transparent — they mine our information and distribute and share it in ways that we cannot imagine to ends that we cannot fathom.

As the apps become a daily part of our lives, holding our hands and comforting our souls, it is good to remember that behind the apps is a pipeline of service providers, data harvesters, information aggregators, who are learning more and more about us, and then without our consent, in the guise of being helpful, are sharing those secrets with things and people we do not know.

While they do help us celebrate the moments and make beautiful human connections, they also continue to make oily suggestions and innuendos, gently guiding us into buying more and consuming more. I came home from the engagement party and woke up the next morning with my face being tagged in about 30 pictures on four different social media apps. And each app suggested different things I can do to celebrate this event — buy a new suit for the wedding, buy an engagement gift for the happy couple, get help with planning a bachelor’s party, and get the services of a wedding planning app.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder

Who Owns Your Phone?

nishant — 2016-09-18T16:18:35Z

The capacity of companies to defy standards that work tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 18, 2016.

We have a conflicted relationship with our digital devices. On the one hand, everything we own is cutting-edge — your regular smartphone does computation that is more advanced and powerful than the computers currently functioning on the space probe on Mars. On the other, everything that we own, is almost on the verge of becoming old — by the time you are used to your phone, a new model with a different letter or a number is in the market. The TV screen which was the crowning glory of your house now feels old because it is not thin enough, sleek enough or big enough; waiting to be replaced by the Next Big Thing.

Strangely, the Next Big Thing is never really big enough for it to have longevity. The next phone that you buy, the new laptop you covet, the app that you update, will already feel temporary. Patricia Fitzpatrick, a historian of new media, calls this phenomenon “Planned Obsolescence”. It means that private corporations think of their digital products as fast-moving and ready to die. They might sell the phone with a 10-year guarantee, but the only guarantee that exists is that in 10 years, they will have discontinued all support for that phone, and you will have forgotten that you owned that device. Planned Obsole-scence is a marketing strategy, where everything that is introduced as a technological innovation has a limited shelf-life and is made to be replaced by something new.

What is interesting about this strategy is that it doesn’t mean that your device has become redundant. In fact, even as you desire the new, you know perfectly well that your existing device has many years of functionality. Hence, the companies often produce the new as path-breaking, innovative and futuristic. They want you to feel primitive or out-of-touch by introducing features that you don’t need, transforming the familiar and the habitual device with something that becomes alien, enchanting and mystical.

While planned obsolescence has its value — it propels innovation and pushes at the boundary of what is possible — it also needs to be understood as a marketing strategy that keeps us consuming as part of our digital habits. One of the best examples to understand this trend is Apple’s latest announcement that it has removed the standard earphone jack from its new iPhone7 and is presenting us with wireless earplugs that work with the new phone. Apple insists that this is the future, and in its hyperbolic presentation, announced that by removing one of the most enduring industry standard for audio hardware, they are revolutionising the future of music listening.

This comes particularly as a shock because ever since the 1990s, Apple’s iconic presence in the music industry has been the white dangling ear-bud wire against black silhouettes, marking the Apple music device as a sign of privacy, maturity, creativity, and elite affordability. By replacing recognisable image with a new one is the company’s way of signalling that every Apple device you now own is ready for trash. It is letting you know that your older Apple music player now needs to be replaced by a new one that uses the wireless ear buds. That the only way you can now listen to music on an Apple iPhone is on Apple’s own standards, so that the regular industry hardware will no longer work with this unique phone that eschews universal standards and seeks to create private monopolies.

The missing headphone jack in the iPhone 7 is a resounding testimony to what happens when we make our digital hardware subject to closed development and production. Instead of building phones that are more durable, more efficient, more connected, more affordable, and more versatile, Apple just showed us how a private company can arrogantly define the future, by turning almost every existing device into “primitive” or “incompatible” with the new phones that it is making. The capacity of companies like Apple to defy standards that work and build their own unique hardware tells an alarming story of what we lose when we lose control of our devices. The digital cultures scholar Wendy Chun had once sagaciously written, “the more our devices turn transparent, the more opaque they become”. And Apple’s move towards making your new iPhone seamless and without holes, mimics how the phone is being designed to both kill fast and die early, promoting corporate ambitions over public interest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-18-2016-who-owns-your-phone

Quarter Life Crisis: The World Wide Web turns 25 this year

nishant — 2016-09-16T13:25:38Z

With the unexplained ban on websites, the state seems to have stopped caring for the digital rights of its citizens.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 3, 2016.

The World Wide Web turned 25 this year. A quarter of a century ago, the first website went live, and since then, the world as we know it has changed. The internet is probably the fastest way a new technology has become old. There are generations who have never known the world without it being connected. And yet, it is safe to say that if put into a corner, most of us might have a tough time trying to exactly describe what the World Wide Web is, and how it operates. Like many massification technologies, the internet has quickly evolved from being the playground for geeks to tinker with and build digital networks, into a blackbox that we access through our seductively designed interfaces.

At a technological level, the internet was a standardisation protocol that allowed for distributed databases on remote computers to interact with each other using digital connections. At the heart of the internet was the impulse to share, and to share safely, new information that would lead to collaborative knowledge production and stronger network communities. The World Wide Web saw this potential of sharing information quickly as one of the most promising aspects of human futures. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, in his first vision of the WWW, had proposed that the capacity to share information, without loss of quality, would create new societies of equality and equity. In this vision, the website was a way of sharing information, expression, political desire, personal longing and social ideas, thus creating connected societies that would be able to consolidate the sum total of all human experience.

That historical moment of the technological architecture and the ideological articulation of the internet and the WWW are critical because as the internet has become increasingly privatised, with intermediaries, Internet Service Providers, and content producers claiming more and more of the digital turf, we have seen continued attack on the principles of sharing. We have, in the last few years, seen draconian crackdowns on people sharing their political views on social media, arresting young people for their political dissent online. We have witnessed the emergence of paywalls that close down content, criminalising students trying to access new knowledge towards their education. We have seen the policing of online creative spaces, monitoring users who engage in cultural production, forcing them into repressive intellectual property regimes that they do not necessarily want.

Most of these attacks on sharing have been fuelled by private companies who see the economic benefits of creating media monopolies out of the internet. These attacks have been particularly vicious because they also recognise the potentials of digital connectivity to completely disrupt the extraordinary powers of crowds who can co-create the biggest encyclopaedia in the word and undermine the corporatisation of cultural objects. And yet, in the interest of profits, there has been persistent lobbying from the private owners of the public goods of the internet, to crack down on sharing and access through legal punishment.

Like many developing countries, India has been resisting the enforcing of Intellectual Property Rights promoted by private lobbyists. In doing so, it recognises that emerging geographies need more open, universal and affordable access to information and that the true potential of digitisation lies in the capacity of the web to enable unfettered access to knowledge and cultural artefacts. Despite pressure from global lobbies, the Indian state has continued to emphasise that access for public good overrides the interest of private right holders, and has favoured the digital user’s right to access material which they might not always have the economic rights for. Some scholars say that this is where the state emphasises that the moral rights of access to information supersede the legal rights that close the possibilities of access.

Or at least, the Indian state recognised the need of its still-being-connected population to have free access till recently. With the new law that enforces a block on torrent and file sharing sites, warnings of punitive action, and an unexplained ban on websites that most users have been using for knowledge and cultural products, the state seems to have buckled under private lobbying and also stopped caring for the rights of its citizens. There will always be a split vote when it comes to figuring out the pros and cons of piracy, and it is important to recognise the right of the cultural and knowledge producer to protect their economic interests. The debates have been interesting because it was difficult to take sides and required a balancing act of negotiation between different parties.

However, with this new intervention, the Indian government seems to have taken sides, and made up its mind, that for the future of Digital India, it is going to favour the corporation, the company, the private profit making entity over the individual, the collective, and the public that sought to access information through the fundamental principle of the digital web — sharing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year

Do I Want to Say Happy B’day?

nishant — 2016-08-22T09:53:03Z

When it comes to greeting friends on their birthdays, social media prompts are a great reminder. So why does an online message leave us cold?

This article was published in Indian Express on August 7, 2016

Every morning, I wake up to a Facebook notification that reminds me of the birthdays in my friends group. A simple click takes me to a calendar view that shows me people who are celebrating the day, prompting me to wish them and let them know that I am thinking of them. Just so that I don’t miss the idea, the notifications are surrounded by ribbons and balloons in gold and blue. The message is simple. Somebody I know has a birthday. Social convention says that I should wish them and Facebook has designed a special interface that makes the communication so much simpler, faster, easier.

And yet, every morning I seem to face a small crisis, not sure how to respond to this prompt. Now, I am notorious for forgetting dates and numbers, so I do appreciate this personalised reminder which has enabled me to wish people I love and care for. But I generally find myself hovering tentatively, trying to figure out whether I want to greet these people.

This has perplexed me for a while now. Why would I hesitate in leaving a message on Facebook for people who I have added as “friends”? Why would I not just post on their wall, adding to the chorus of greetings that would have also emerged from the automated reminder on Facebook? I went on to the hive-mind of the social web to figure out if this was a unique problem, customised to specific neuroses, or whether this is more universal. It was a great surprise (and relief) to realise that I’m not alone.

When trying to figure out our conflicted sociality on social media, several conversations pointed to three things worth dwelling on. Almost everybody on that long discussion thread pointed out that the entire process is mechanised.

It feels like Facebook has a script for us, and we are just supposed to follow through. There is very little effort spent in crafting a message, writing something thoughtful, and creating a specific connection because it is going to get submerged in a cacophony of similar messages. Also, the message, though personal, is public. So anything that is personal and affective just gets scrubbed, and most people end up mechanically posting “Happy Birthday” with a few emojis of choice, finding the whole process and the final performance devoid of the personal.

Another emerging concern was that social media sustains itself on reciprocity. However, it is almost impossible to expect the birthday person to respond to every single message and post that comes their way. In fact, as somebody pointed out, if your friend spends their entire day on Facebook, responding to 500 comments and thanking everybody who spent three seconds writing a banal post, you should stage an intervention because it is a clear cry for help. You should have been a better friend and made their day more special by being with them. So the message feels like shouting in a ravine, expecting an echo and getting nothing. This lack of reciprocity, even when expected, is still disconcerting enough for people to shy away from it.

The most frequent experience that was shared was by people who wanted to make the person feel special and cherished. Facebook and the social media sites are now so quotidian and pedestrian that it seems an almost uncaring space. It was intriguing to figure out that people made choices of whom to wish based on their actual proximity and intimacy with the person. If it is a colleague, a distant acquaintance, or just a companion at work, they throw a quick greeting on their wall and move on. But for actual friends, loved ones, families, they take the prompt but then refuse to follow the script. They take that moment to call, to write, to meet, but not perform it on Facebook.

This need for connectivity and the suspicion of its meaning continues to mark our social media interaction. If it were not for social media networks, a lot of us would feel distinctly disconnected, unable to get glimpses in the lives of the large number of people we know.

At the same time, this thinned out connection that characterises most of social media also seems to make us realise that not all friends are the same friends, and that Facebook might be social media, but it isn’t quite personal media.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday

Book Review: Apocalypse Now Redux

nishant — 2016-08-06T04:16:07Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One Pokémon to Rule Them All

nishant — 2016-07-25T01:16:04Z

America’s head start on the augmented reality game Pokémon Go shows that the interweb is not an egalitarian space.

The article was published in the Indian Express on July 17, 2016

I was busy, writing, when a Telegram message trickled in. It was a friend who asked me if I had looked at the new Pokémon Go game which has been getting more attention than national elections and global warfare in the USA lately. A location-based augmented reality game that involves the users moving around their physical environments “collecting” pokemon characters that appear hiding in different locations has a large part of the American population in a frenzy, leading to aching soles, traffic accidents, and involuntary bumping into things and people as the players move around, their eyes glued to their screens. The global release of the game is still in the pipeline, and so the rest of us will have to make do with the videos and screen grabs of the game.

While a big Pikachu fan myself, I don’t see myself going crazy over this game as and when my geography allows me for it, but the friend who had written to me about it is perturbed. An avid gamer and a self-proclaimed Pokémon fan, he is devastated that the users in privileged geography are going to get a head start in the global leader boards that he can never catch up with. The interwebz is already abuzz with players sharing hacks, cracks, bugs, cheat codes, and tips to collect more Pokémon, discover hidden powers, and rise quickly in the ranks as they drive, walk, run and jog around their neighbourhoods, in the quest of catching those delightful monsters on their phones. While my friend is aware that this cloud-based game will have multiple servers for different geographies, and so there will be relative rankings and customised interfaces for each community of players, he was feeling cheated about living in India and not having access to the first release of the game that has all the attention on the social web right now.

‘It almost makes me want to leave India and move to the USA,’ he said in mock frustration. It made me think about the privilege of geography when it comes to the presumed flatness of the digital world. One of the imaginations of the peer-to-peer architectures of the internet is its promise of flatness. With a series of non-discriminatory principles like #NetNeutrality and #ZeroRating enshrined as the fundamental attributes of the digital internet, we are often led to believe that when we are online, we are equal. This idea is so prevalent that in most of our technology-based development practices and policies, we think of access as the “be all”, if not the “end all”, of our activities. The rhetoric promises that if we get everybody online, we will have an egalitarian society where everybody will have equal access to resources, and equity by participating in the decision-making processes.

Despite overwhelming evidence that the digital world is anecdotally and systemically a space of exclusion, contestation, and intimidation, we continue to propagate the idea that these are “human” problems. Humans, fragile, frail and foolish in their being, contaminate the digital space. Humans, mired in the analogue systems of hatred and abuse, appropriate technologies to perpetuate these older forms of discrimination. The technological structures are imagined as pure, sterile, and committed to constructing parameters of equality through their neutral promises of universal access and seamless connectivity. Technology is clean, the human being is impure. Technology is robust, the human frail. Technology is flat, human hierarchical. These narratives of a neutral and egalitarian technology consequently lead us to put more importance and faith in algorithmic decisions and data-driven governance and policing. We have come to believe that because technologies are neutral, they will do a better job of regulating us than we do ourselves.

Pokémon Go, and its obvious geographical privilege reminds us that the digital is not flat. It is oriented towards a very obvious logic of geopolitical, economic, racial, and identity privileging that continues to promote some parts of the world as favoured standards of first access. The exclusive release of Pokémon Go reminds us that the digital is as subject to Euro-American centrism which treat these erstwhile imperial geographies as the beginning points of all digital activities, slowly expanding their fold to other regions through a trickle-down politics and economics. Whether you are waiting impatiently to join the global bandwagon of Pokémon collection, or are ready to shrug this off as another thing that people do on the web, this differential, preferential, and variable access of the internet is something we definitely want to consider as we continue to push for the digital as the solution to human problems.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-17-2016-one-pokemon-to-rule-them-all

The Gay Pride Charade

nishant — 2016-07-25T01:10:28Z

For most of the milllenials, news is formed by trends, what goes viral, and often open to speculation, projection, manipulation and deceit.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 3, 2016.

The world of social media can be a minefield of misinformation, and it does get difficult to verify facts and ensure the veracity of the information that comes to us on the winged notifications of our apps. This becomes starkly clear in times of crises. Hence, when the historic and heinous shootout at a gay night club in Orlando, USA, shook the world with horror and grief a couple of weeks ago, when the first tweets appeared on my timeline, my initial reaction was denial. Instead of believing those first responders, I was already searching for more credible news lines that could confirm — or hopefully deny — the massacre. It took only a few minutes, though, to realise that #StandWithOrlando was a reality that we will have to accommodate in the story of continued violence and abuse of sexual minorities around the world.

However, not all deception is bad. One of the most fantastic responses to the shoot-out was from a Quebec-based satirical website called JournalDemourreal.com that published a photoshopped image showing the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau kissing the leader of the Canadian opposition party Tom Mulcair, with a headline that the two, despite their differences, are “united against homophobia”. I know that I liked this fake story four times on different newsfeeds, half-believing, half-wishing that it was true, before I realised that it is a hoax. Morphed as it might be, the doctored image enabled people to talk about the tragedy as demanding a personal and a policy-level action, ranging from acceptance and freedom, to control of guns and protecting the rights of life and dignity for the sexual minorities who continue to remain persecuted in the world.

The image also allowed many queer people in different parts of the world — especially in the countries where homosexuality continues to be criminalised and severely punished — to participate not only in the global grief but also to demand that their governments take more responsibility towards its queer population.

While this photoshopped picture was making the rounds, another tweet showed up on my timeline. This time it was a tweet from our media-savvy PM, Narendra Modi, who claimed that he was “shocked at the shootout in Orlando.”And further added that his “thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved families and the injured”. When I saw this tweet, my reaction again, was that this must be another joke. Because even as queer rights activists in the country struggle to fight for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, through their curative petitions in the Supreme Court in India, PM Modi’s government has continued its hateful diatribe against queer people in the country. His party has called homosexuality “anti-Indian” and “anti-family”. The party’s favourite, Baba Ramdev, continues his hate speech, offering to cure homosexuality through yoga.

Ever since the current government took power, documented hate crimes against queer people have more than doubled in the country. So when the PM decided to offer his condolences to those in Orlando, I figured that either it was a fake Twitter account masquerading as the PM or it was some kind of a hacker troll — maybe Anonymous, the online guerrilla activists, who recently took over ISIS- friendly websites and filled them up with information about male homosexuality as a response to the shoot-out — had taken control of the Twitter account. But it turned out that this piece of information was not photoshopped or hacked. It was actually true, and we were to believe in earnest that while the government doesn’t care about the millions of queer people being denied their rights to live and love in their country, it is heartbroken about what happened in the USA.

It does make you wonder about the world we live in, where a photoshopped image sounded more plausible than an undoctored tweet. It emphasises why Orlando cannot be treated as one isolated instance in another country, but that #WeAreOrlando. For right now, Orlando is also in India. It is a reminder that while we have been fortunate not to have such an instance of dramatic violence, there are millions of people in the country who are forced to live and die in deception for their sexual orientation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-3-2016-gay-pride-charade

Digital native: Control A, Backspace

nishant — 2016-06-05T02:25:45Z

The rewriting of textbooks should not be compared to the collaborations on Wikipedia, which only goes by evidence.

The article was published in Indian Express on June 5, 2016.

I remember the first time I made an edit on Wikipedia — it was almost 10 years ago, and it was a heady feeling, to realise that here is a global encyclopaedia being written, and that I could be a part of it. It felt strange, because I was brought up to believe that authors are special people with specialised knowledge, which can only be validated from special institutions, and that authorship required years of practice and perseverance.

However, a historic experiment by Nature magazine showed, that despite the average age of the then Wikipedia editor as somewhere in the late teens, articles in Wikipedia were not any more prone to error than in other established, institutionalised fountains of knowledge like the Encyclopaedia Britannica. In fact, not only were the non-specialised editors of Wikipedia spot on with their knowledge outputs, but that because of its iterative nature, errors, once spotted on Wikipedia could be immediately corrected, thus leading to a more robust source of knowledge.

Two key principles helped Wikipedia establish this process of reliable and resilient knowledge systems — neutrality of viewpoint, and evidence-based knowledge. In the largely free and open space of Wikipedia editing, the one thing that remained constant is neutrality. Editors, despite their own biases, locations, contexts, experiences or embodied knowledges, could not introduce their opinions or original research into the Wikipedia articles. This necessarily meant that every truth and knowledge claim made in a Wikipedia article needs to be verified through a source. This source could come from different spaces and different formats, but it serves as objective evidence for the information being provided there. In instances — and there are thousands of them, if not more — where two editors disagreed on how to interpret an event, or how to describe a person or a thing, the edit-war was fuelled not by the I-said-You-said never-ending rhetoric, but by relying on the soundness of research conducted by external sources.

For some years now, Wikipedia has become the de facto global reference system, which still relies on volunteers and non-specialised editors to contribute to complex, complicated and very specialised domains of human knowledge production. Even when the editors are experts or scholars, their contribution has value and merit, only when it is supported by externally verifiable source that supports their view points.

Wikipedia has become one of the foundational models of the information web, that makes it clear that knowledge can be freely produced, consumed and circulated, and more importantly, it can be negotiated and contested, thereby making our scientific research practices relevant and pertinent beyond the hallowed and often closed halls of the university. Wikipedia became a prime example of how information can be revised, changed, mutated, updated, upcycled, and subjected to deep scrutiny as long as it is informed by an alignment towards neutrality and supported by evidence produced through research.

I invoke these principles that have fostered one of the most magnificent pieces of collaborative human effort because it directly puts into contrast the revisionist, biased, authoritative and closed practices by which the Indian educational councils seem to be editing textbooks. The removal of the names of historical figures, the rewriting of history to reflect a biased, narrow and unsubstantiated narrative, the erasure of alternative histories and voices of protest and dissent, and the false planting of information which is grounded in the school of “People say” and the university of “I have heard” is an alarming development. Many people unfortunately think of this political revisionism as mimicking the wisdom of the crowds recounting and contestation of information on spaces like Wikipedia.

It is important to note that these attempts at revising known facts and of producing religious histories of exclusion and violence are not the digital mode of information upcycling. These revisions are firmly rooted in a political agenda that seeks to sanctify the discriminatory violences of our neo-authoritarian governments. They remain challenged by the scholars in the field who have enough evidence — of archives, of tracts, of data, and of information — that show that this information is false. They are entrenched in the politics of power that insist that this is the only true account of things, excluding public discourse, and performing acts of censorship that discourage all access to scientific learning.

The proponents who want to Make in India, cannot limit their rhetoric only to economic production, but have to extend collaborative and connected making to knowledge and information production. And this entails the unmaking of these authoritarian and fascist attempts at justifying rumours as information, hate speech as free speech, and revisions as conversations.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/indian-express-june-5-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-control-a-backspace

Facebook: A Platform with Little Less Sharing of Personal Information

nishant — 2016-06-05T02:38:22Z

As Facebook becomes less personal, what happens to digital friendship?

The article was published in the Indian Express on May 8, 2016.

Facebook is worried. Even though usage is growing, something strange is happening on the social network. For the first time since it started its journey as a website to rate datable people on college campuses, to becoming the global reference point that defined friendship in the connected age, people are sharing less personal information on Facebook. For a social media network that positions itself largely as a space where our everyday, banal doings become newsworthy articulations, this is surprising news. But it is true. On Facebook, the traffic is high, but most of it is now sharing of external information. People are sharing links to news, to listicles, to videos, to blogs entries, to pictures and to information that they find interesting, but they are writing less and less about what it is that they are doing and feeling.

Ironically, this coincides with the latest change in Facebook’s “response” options, where the ubiquitous “Like” button can now expand to other emojis where you can also be appropriately angry, sad, surprised, or happy about the shared content. Even as Facebook is trying to get its users to qualify how they feel and give emotional value to their likes, people seem to be sharing even less of their private lives on Facebook.

One of the key ways of understanding this drop in people sharing their personal information is through the concept of “context collapse”. It has been a concern since the first instances of disembodied digital communication. In our everyday life, we make sense of information based on the different contexts that surround us. The person who authors the information, the setting within which that information reaches us, the emotional state that we are in when encountering the information, our sense of where we are when processing it, and the preparedness we have for receiving this information are all crucial parameters by which we make sense of the meaning of the information and also our response to it.

In the case of Facebook, the context within which information and transactions have made sense is “friendship”. The site’s USP was that you could bring in a variety of information, but you were always sharing it with friends. You could have a large audience, but this audience is formed of people you know, people you trust, people you add to your friend groups — there is a sense of intimacy, privacy, and casualness that marks the flow of information. You are able to talk, in an equal breath, about what you had for breakfast, your crush on a celebrity, your random acts of charity, and your strong political rant, one after the other, without requiring to think about what you are posting and how others will receive it.

However, Facebook is not really a friendship platform. It is a company interested in selling our interactions and data to advertisers who can target us with content and information based on the patterns of our behaviour. To serve its advertisers better, Facebook started privileging “verified” information trying to ensure news and content producers higher attention and more eyeballs. This was further strengthened by their continued integration with third party vendors, who could push and pull information into the social world of Facebook, and is seen as one of the biggest reasons for this drop. Any newsfeed in the last few months has had equal amounts of professional and amateur content, leading to a context collapse, where you no longer feel like your Facebook feed is a private and intimate conversation with friends.

Similarly, Facebook’s expansive integration of its products —WhatsApp chats, Instagram updates, and Tumblr posts all can collapse into one — produced a confusing space where the personal information that you were once happy to share with your friends, is suddenly being shared along with news and information. Also, digital behaviour works on mirroring, and we often shape our updates to match what we see on our timelines. If we more and more see external content rather than personal statuses, we also start sharing more third party news and links, thus producing a domino effect of everybody shying away from extremely personal or intimate moments.

Facebook, for the millennials, has been the context within which friendship got structured. Its own transitions have now collapsed that context, leading people to think of it as a content aggregator. It is going to be interesting to see what happens to our digital friendships and networks if Facebook is no longer the space where they are housed.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-8-2016-facebook-a-platform-with-little-less-sharing-of-personal-information

Online Censorship on the Rise: Why I Prefer to Save Things Offline

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:26:50Z

As governments use their power to erase what they do not approve of from the web, cloud storage will not be enough.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2016.

It took me some time to trust the cloud. Growing up with digital technologies that were neither resilient nor reliable — a floppy drive could go kaput without you having done anything, a CD once scratched could not be recovered, hard drives malfunctioned and it was a given that once every few months your PC would crash and need a re-install — I have always been paranoid about making backups and storing information. Once I kicked into my professional years, I developed a foolproof, albeit paranoid, system, where I backed up my machines to a common hard drive, made a mirror image of that hard drive, and for absolutely crucial documents, I would put them on to a separate DVD which would have the emergency documents. It was around 2006, when I discovered the cloud.

It began with Google’s unlimited email accounts where you could mail information to yourself and then it would stay there for a digital eternity. I noticed that the size of my digital storage began decreasing. I no longer download videos I find on the web. I don’t save information on a device and I have come to think of the web as one large cloud, relying on the fact that if something is online once, it will always be available to me.

However, over the last couple of months, I have started noticing something different in my usage patterns. These days, when I do come across interesting information, instead of merely indexing it, I find myself making an offline copy of that information. Tweets enter a Storify folder. YouTube videos get downloaded. I make PDF copies of blogs and take screenshots of digital medial updates. I have been wondering why I am suddenly so invested in archiving the web when, theoretically, it is always there.

When I voiced this to a group of young students, I was surprised to hear that I wasn’t alone. The web is becoming a space that is crowded with take-downs, deletions, removals, and retractions which leave no archival memory. The students quickly pointed out that these take-downs are not just personal redactions. In fact, what we personally choose to remove has very little chances of actually disappearing from the web. Instead, these are things that are removed by governments, private companies and intermediaries who are being largely held liable for the content of the information that they make available.

Turkey, recently, demanded that German authorities remove a satirical German video titled Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdogan mocking their President. In response, Germany reminded the Turkish diplomacy of that lovely little thing called freedom of speech, and in the meantime, Extra 3, the group that had released the video on YouTube, added English subtitles to the video. Just for perks. I hope you gave a brownie point to Germany, even as you scrambled to see the video.

On the home front, though, things are not as celebratory. The minister of state for information and broadcasting, Rajyavardhan Rathore, and the head of the BJP’s information and technology cell, Arvind Gupta, have called for action against journalist Raghav Chopra who tweeted a photoshopped image of PM Narendra Modi bending down to touch the feet of a man dressed in Saudi Arabia’s national dress, to make a political comment about the PM’s recent visit to SA.

The two politicos, who have not had much to say about the doctored videos that were used to convict innocent students in JNU or the photoshopping that the government’s Press Information Bureau had indulged in to give us that iconic image of the prime minister doing an aerial survey of #ChennaiFloods, have taken umbrage against an image because it seems (obviously) false, and are demanding its takedown.

My proclivity for saving things offline is perhaps fuelled by this web of partisan censorship and the atmosphere of precarious hostility that governments seem to be supporting. Increasingly, we have seen, in India and around the globe, a rush of political power that exercises its clout to remove information, images and stories that they do not approve of.

Instinctively, I am reacting to the fact that intellectual questioning or cultural critique is being removed from the web at the behest of these vested powers, and that the cloud, light and airy as it sounds, is prone to some incredible acts of censorship and removal. I have found myself facing too many removal notices and take-down errors when trying to revisit bookmarked sites, that I am beginning to feel that the only way to keep my information safe might be to archive the whole web on a personal server.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2016-online-censorship-on-the-rise

A Large Byte of Your Life

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:35:34Z

With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage. We commit to storage to free ourselves from remembering.

The article was published in Indian Express on April 3, 2016.

This is the story of a broken Kindle. A friend sent a message to a WhatsApp group that I belong to that she is mourning the loss of her second-generation Kindle, that she bought in 2012, and since then had been her regular companion. It is not the story of hardware malfunction or a device just giving up. Instead, it is a story of how quickly we forget the old technologies which were once new. The friend, on her Easter holiday, was visiting her sister, who has a six-year-old daughter.

This young one, a true digital native, living her life surrounded by smart screens, tablets, phones, and laptops, instinctively loves all digital devices and plays with them. In her wanderings through her aunt’s things, she came across the old Kindle — unsmart, without a touch interface, studded with keys, not connected to any WiFi, and rendered in greyscale. It was an unfamiliar device. But with all the assurance of somebody who can deal with digital devices, she took it in her hands to play with it.

Much to her dismay, none of the regular modes of operation worked. The old Kindle did not have a touch screen operated lock. It wasn’t responding to scroll, swipe and pinch. It had no voice command functions. As she continued to cajole it to come to life, it only stared at her, a lock on the digital interface, refusing to budge to the learned demands and commands of the new user. After about 20 minutes of trying to wake the Kindle up, she became frustrated with it and banged it harshly on the table, where it cracked, the screen blanked out and that was the end of the story.

Or rather, it is the beginning of one. As my friend registered the loss of her clunky, clumsy, heavy, non-intuitive Kindle, and messages of grief poured in, with the condolence that the new ones are so much better and the assurances that at least all her books are safe on the Amazon cloud, I see in this tale, the quest of newness that the digital always has to offer.

If it has missed your attention, the digital is always new. Our phones get discarded every few seasons, even as phone companies release new models every few months. Our operating systems are constantly sending us notifications that they need to be updated. Our apps operate in stealth mode, continuingly adding updates where bugs are fixed and features are added. Most of us wouldn’t know what to do if we were faced with a computer that doesn’t “heal”, “backup” or “restore” itself. If our lives were to be transferred back to dumb phones, or if we had to deal with devices that do not strive to learn and read us, it might lead to some severe anxiety.

The newness that the digital offers is also found in our socially mediated lives. Our digital memories are short-lived — relationships rise and fall in the span of days as location-based dating apps offer an infinite range of options to choose your customised partner; celebrities are made and unmade overnight as clicks lead to viral growth and then disappear to be replaced by the next new thing; communities find droves of subscribers, only to become a den of lurkers where nothing happens; must-have apps find themselves discarded as trends shift and new must-haves crop up overnight. Breathless, bountiful and boundless, the digital keeps us constantly running, just to be in the same place, always the same and yet, always new.

We would be hard pressed to remember that magical moment when we first discovered a digital object. For millennials, the digital is such a natural part of their native learning environments that they do not even register the first encounter or the subsequent shifts as they navigate across the connected world. Increasingly, we tune ourselves to the temporality and the acceleration of the digital, tailoring our memories to what is important, what is now, and what is immediately of use, excluding everything else and dropping it into digital storage, assured in our godlike capacities to archive everything.

This affordance of short digital memories is enabled partly by the fact that we are subject to information overload, but partly also to the fact that our machines can now remember, more accurately and more robustly than the paltry human, prone to error and forgetfulness. With the digital, memory becomes equated with storage, and the more we commit to storage, the more we free ourselves from the task of remembering.

The broken Kindle is a testimony not only to the ways in which we discard old devices but also our older forms of individual and collective memory — quickly doing away with information that is not of the now, that is not urgent, and that does not have immediate use value. My friend’s Kindle got replaced in two days. All her books were re-loaded and she was set to go. However, as she told me in a chat, she is not going to throw away her old broken Kindle. Because she wants to remember it — remember the joy of reading her favourite books on it. She is scared that if she throws it away, she might forget.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-april-3-2016-nishant-shah-a-large-byte-of-your-life

The Digital is Political

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:58:46Z

To speak of technology is to speak of human life and living.

The article was published in the Indian Express on March 20, 2016.

“You are supposed to write about the internet, why do you keep talking about all this politics?” I was taken aback when I was faced with this question. It is true – since the year has begun, I have talked about digital education and the ways in which it needs to account for unexpected and underserved communities, about net neutrality and why the Indian government needs to build a stronger, safer, and a more inclusive digital ecosystem. I have written about freedom of speech and expression and how this is going to be the year when we stand together to save the internet from vested interests that seek to convert it from a public commons into a private commodity.

In my head, all these questions — of inclusion, of access, of presence, of rights — are questions of human life and living, but they are also those that are being hugely restructured by the internet and digital technologies. When faced with the query, I was reminded of a deep-seated division that has been at the heart of digital cultures.

Way back in the ’90s, when the internet was still a space of science fiction and the World Wide Web was in its nascent stages, there was a distinction made between Virtual Reality (VR) and Real Life (RL). The presumption in the construction of these categories was that the digital is only an escape, the technological is merely a prosthesis, and the internet is just a thing that a few geeks engaged with in their free time. However, the last three decades have made this distinction between VR and RL redundant.

We live in digital times. The digital is not just something we use strategically and specifically to do a few tasks. Our very perception of who we are, how we connect to the world around us, and the ways in which we define our domains of life, labour, and language are hugely structured by the digital technologies. The digital is ubiquitous and hence, like air, invisible. We live within digital systems, we live with intimate gadgets, we interact through digital media, and even though we might all be equally digital natives, there is no denying the fact that the very presence and imagination of the digital has dramatically restructured our lives. The digital, far from being a tool, is a condition and context that defines the shapes and boundaries of our understanding of the self, the society, and the structures of governance.

The pervasive nature of the digital technologies and internet can be found at multiple levels. For instance, we do not think about going online anymore, because most of our devices are connected 24×7 to the digital web. Even when we are not online, sunk in a bad network connection, or protecting our precious data usage, we know that our avatars and digital identities are online and talking without us.

So established is this phenomenon that we even have a name for the anxiety it creates: FOMO — the Fear Of Missing Out. Similarly, the digital can be located at the level of human understanding. We are used to thinking of ourselves as digital systems. We talk about our primary identity as one marked by information overload. We often complain, when faced with too many demands on our time and space, that we don’t have enough bandwidth to deal with new problems, and we are not referring to digital connectivity.

The digital also has space at the level of policy and governance. If you, like the many millions of Indians, have registered for an Aadhaar card, you have already been marked by a digital identity whether or not you have broadband access. When our government launches Digital India campaigns, it is not merely about an economic model of growth, but it is suggesting that the digital is going to be at the foundations of the new India that we want to build for the future.

If the digital is so central to our fundamental understanding of the self, the society, and the state, then surely it is time to stop thinking that these technologies have nothing to do with politics? There remains a forced imagination of technologies as devices, as tools, as prostheses which do not have any other role than the performing of a function. However, this is a fallacy, because not only do technologies shape our sense of who we are, but they also prescribe new templates and models of who we are going to be. In the process, these technologies take political action, create social structures, mobilise cultural possibilities, and often, because they are technologies that are still elite and available to the privileged few in the country, they enable decisions which are not always fair, open, and just.

Hence, a technological decision cannot be read merely as a technical decisions but as human decisions. To speak of technology is to speak of human life and living. To write about technology is to write about politics, because a separation between the two is not only futile but downright dangerous.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-march-20-2016-nishant-shah-digital-is-political

WhatsApps with fireworks, apps with diyas: Why Diwali needs to go beyond digital

nishant — 2015-11-23T13:27:37Z

The idea of a 'digital' Diwali reduces our social relationships to a ledger of give and take. The last fortnight, I have been bombarded with advertisements selling the idea of a “Digital Diwali”. We have become so used to the idea that everything that is digital is modern, better and more efficient.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 22, 2015.

I have WhatsApp messages with exploding fireworks, singing greeting cards that chant mystic sounding messages, an app that turns my smartphone into a flickering diya, another app that remotely controls the imitation LED candles on my windows, an invitation to Skype in for a puja at a friend’s house 3,000 km away, and the surfeit of last minute shopping deals, each one offering a dhamaka of discounts.

However, to me, the digitality of Diwali is beyond the surface level of seductive screens and one-click shopping, or messages of love and apps of light. Think of Diwali as sharing the fundamental logic that governs the digital — the logic of counting. As we explode with joy this festive season, we count our blessings, our loved ones, the gifts and presents that we exchange. If we are on the new Fitbit trend, we count the calories we consume and burn as we make our way through parties where it is important to see and be seen, compare and contrast, connect with all the people who could be thought of as friends, followers, connectors, or connections.

While there is no denying that there is a sociality that the festival brings in, there is also a cruel algebra of counting that comes along with it. It is no surprise that as we celebrate the victory of good over evil and right over wrong, we also simultaneously bow our heads to the goddess of wealth in this season.

Look beyond the glossy surface of Diwali festivities, and you realise that it is exactly like the digital. Digital is about counting. It is right there in the name — digits refers to numbers. Or digits refer to fingers — these counting appendages which we can manipulate and flex in order to achieve desired results. At the core of digital systems is the logic of counting, and counting, as anybody will tell us, is not a benign process. What gets counted, gets accounted for, thus producing a ledger of give and take which often becomes the measure of our social relationships.

I remember, as a child, my mother meticulously making a note of every gift or envelope filled with money that ever came our way from the relatives, so that there would be precise and exact reciprocation. I am certain that there is now an app which can keep a track of these exchanges. I am not suggesting that these occasions of gifting are merely mercenary, but they are embodiments of finely calibrated values and worth of relationships defined by proximity, intimacy, hierarchy and distance. The digital produces and works on a similar algorithm, which is often as inscrutable and opaque as the unspoken codes of the Diwali ledger.

There is something else that happens with counting. The only things that can have value are things that have value. I don’t know which ledger counts the coming together of my very distributed family for an evening of chatting, talking, sharing lives and laughter. I don’t know how anybody would reciprocate that one late night when a cousin came to our home and spent hours with my younger brother making a rangoli to surprise the rest of us. I have no idea how they will ever reciprocate gifts that one of the younger kids made at school for all the members of the family.

Diwali is about the things, but like the digital system, these are things that cannot be counted. And within the digital system, things that cannot be counted are things that get discounted. They become unimportant. They become noise, or rubbish. Our social networks are counting systems that might notice the low frequency of my connections with my extended family but they cannot quantify the joy I hear in the voice of my grandmother when I call her from a different time-zone to catch up with her. Digital systems can only deal with things with value and not their worth.

I do want to remind myself that there is more to this occasion than merely counting. And for once, I want to go beyond the digital, where my memories of the past and the expectations of the future are not shaped by the digital systems of counting and quantifying. Instead, I want Diwali to be analogue. I shall still be mediating my collectivity with the promises of connectivity, but I want to think of this moment as beyond the logics and logistics of counting that codify our social transactions and take such a central location in our personal functioning. This Diwali, I am rooting for a post-digital Diwali, that accounts for all those things that cannot be counted, but are sometimes the only things that really count.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-indian-express-nishant-shah-november-22-2015-whatsapps-with-fireworks-apps-with-diyas-why-diwali-needs-to-go-beyond-digital

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

nishant — 2015-05-15T12:08:32Z

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

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

Big Data and Positive Social Change in the Developing World: A White Paper for Practitioners and Researchers

nishant — 2014-10-01T03:52:35Z

I was a part of a working group writing a white paper on big data and social change, over the last six months. This white paper was produced by a group of activists, researchers and data experts who met at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Centre to discuss the question of whether, and how, big data is becoming a resource for positive social change in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs).

Bellagio Big Data Workshop Participants. (2014). “Big data and positive social change in the developing world: A white paper for practitioners and researchers.” Oxford: Oxford Internet Institute. Available online: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2491555.

Summary

Our working definition of big data includes, but is not limited to, sources such as social media, mobile phone use, digitally mediated transactions, the online news media, and administrative records. It can be categorised as data that is provided explicitly (e.g. social media feedback); data that is observed (e.g. mobile phone call records); and data that is inferred and derived by algorithms (for example social network structure or inflation rates). We defined four main areas where big data has potential for those interested in promoting positive social change: advocating and facilitating; describing and predicting; facilitating information exchange and promoting accountability and transparency.

In terms of advocating and facilitating, we discussed ways in which volunteered data may help organisations to open up new public spaces for discussion and awareness-building; how both aggregating data and working across different databases can be tools for building awareness, and howthe digital data commons can also configure new communities and actions (sometimes serendipitously) through data science and aggregation. Finally, we also looked at the problem of overexposure and howactivists and organisations can protect themselves and hide their digital footprints. The challenges we identified in this area were how to interpret data correctly when supplementary information may be lacking; organisational capacity constraints around processing and storing data, and issues around data dissemination, i.e. the possible negative consequences of inadvertently identifying groups or individuals.

Next, we looked at the way big data can help describe and predict, functions which are particularly important in the academic, development and humanitarian areas of work where researchers can combine data into new dynamic, high-resolution datasets to detect new correlations and surface new questions. With data such as mobile phone data and Twitter analytics, understanding the data’s comprehensiveness, meaning and bias are the main challenges, accompanied by the problem of developing new and more comprehensive ethical systems to protect data subjects where data is observed rather than volunteered.

The next group of activities discussed was facilitating information exchange. We looked at mobile-based information services, where it is possible for a platform created around a particular aim (e.g. agricultural knowledge-building) to incorporate multiple feedback loops which feed into both research and action. The pitfalls include the technical challenge of developing a platform which is lean yet multifaceted in terms of its uses, and particularly making it reliably available to low-income users. This kind of platform, addressed by big data analytics, also offers new insights through data discovery and allows the provider to steer service provision according to users’ revealed needs and priorities.

Our last category for big data use was accountability and transparency, where organisations are using crowdsourcing methods to aggregate and analyse information in real time to establish new spaces for critical discussion, awareness and action. Flows of digital information can be managed to prioritise participation and feedback, provide a safe space to engage with policy decisions and expose abuse. The main challenges are how to keep sensitive information (and informants) safe while also exposing data and making authorities accountable; how to make the work sustainable without selling data, and how to establish feedback loops so that users remain involved in the work beyond an initial posting. In the crowdsourcing context, new challenges are also arising in terms of how to verify and moderate real-time flows of information, and how to make this process itself transparent.

Finally, we also discussed the relationship between big and open data. Open data can be seen as a system of governance and a knowledge commons, whereas big data does not by its nature involve the idea of the commons, so we leaned toward the term ‘opening data’, i.e. processes which could apply to commercially generated as much as public-sector datasets. It is also important to understand where to prioritise opening, and where this may exclude people who are not using the ‘right’ technologies: for example, analogue methods (e.g. nailing a local authority budget to a town hall door every month) may be more open than ‘open’ digital data that’s available online.

Our discussion surfaced many questions to do with representation and meaning: must datasets be interpreted by people with local knowledge? For researchers to get access to data that is fully representative, do we need a data commons? How are data proprietors engaging with the power dynamics and inequalities in the research field, and how can civil society engage with the private sector on its own terms if data access is skewed towards elites? We also looked at issues of privacy and risk: do we need a contextual risk perspective rather than a single set of standards? What is the role of local knowledge in protecting data subjects, and what kinds of institutions and practices are necessary? We concluded that there is a case to be made for building a data commons for private/public data, and for setting up new and more appropriate ethical guidelines to deal with big data, since aggregating, linking and merging data present new kinds of privacy risk. In particular, organisations advocating for opening datasets must admit the limitations of anonymisation, which is currently being ascribed more power to protect data subjects than it merits in the era of big data.

Our analysis makes a strong case that it is time for civil society groups in particular to become part of the conversation about the power of data. These groups are the connectors between individuals and governments, corporations and governance institutions, and have the potential to promote big data analysis that is locally driven and rooted. Civil society groups are also crucially important but currently underrepresented in debates about privacy and the rights of technology users, and civil society as a whole has a responsibility for building critical awareness of the ways big data is being used to sort, categorise and intervene in LMICs by corporations, governments and other actors. Big data is shaping up to be one of the key battlefields of our era, incorporating many of the issues civil society activists worldwide have been working on for decades. We hope that this paper can inform organisations and
individuals as to where their particular interests may gain traction in the debate, and what their contribution may look like.

Click to download the full white paper here. (PDF, 1.95 Mb)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/big-data-and-positive-social-change-in-developing-world