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Habits of Living Thinkathon — Day 2 Live Blog: Deepak Menon on Water in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-water-in-india
<b>The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Deepak Menon welcomes us into his world by asking a very common question: Why is water in India of such bad quality?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">He begins by pointing out that different groups with different ideologies have varying views on water in India, and very few of these multitudes of groups actually interact with one another to share their knowledge or work together. What is clear, though, is that water is integral to Indian life, and that the major problems associated with water are those surrounding drinking water and sanitation. Most of the drinking water in India is surface water, and most of the surface water is contaminated, which has spurned an interest in using groundwater. Fifteen years ago in Bangalore, apartment buildings were built close to groundwater reserves — now, even some of the most expensive housing is built without proximity to a water resource, so water must be brought in from other areas in large quantities. Groundwater is a large issue as well, as the deeper you drill into groundwater aquifers, the more contaminants are in the water — and they are dangerous to health. Doctors are constantly treating the symptoms of contaminated water without even knowing that the cause is bad water, and this lack of knowledge is widespread across India, except for those that work in the water industry.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The Ministry of Health is not connected or in regular dialogue with the ministry of water management — so no one but the water ministry touches water issues. This lack of knowledge sharing and co-operation is pervasive throughout many Indian spheres, which is why, for Deepak, the process of network creation becomes an important comprehension point. How do we create a network, especially one with the purpose of disseminating knowledge to multiple spheres of society? How do we coordinate multiple actors to mobilize these networks? How do we create both online and offline networks that engage multiple groups? Many associations or appropriate groups are uninterested in talking to one another, so how do we get these groups talking? If we are unable to connect groups within one sector, how will we do it between sectors or even regions?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Deepak is interested in a model of network existence and creation. It's hard to create a network if many basic questions (How much time does it take? How long will it last) have no answers. Issues of structure also complicate the inclusion or participation of particular actors into a network framework — some individuals and groups are not used to working in non-hierarchal environments. How do we form long-lasting networks between different groups? Does the process differ between online and offline networks?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">One participant reflected on the over-drawing of water and its relation with corruption — does corruption enable over-use of water resources? Deepak responded that this happens in both industrial and private use of water, as well as many other spheres in Indian society. The participant also put forth the idea of using mobile technology to collectively map water resources. Deepak pointed out that again, this is an issue of the creation of networks — if we were able to create the collective interest in creating this mapping activity, then it would be very useful, but so far, attempts to create the needed networks have not been successful. Crowd mapping was also suggested, and it was pointed out that thinking about crowd-mapping groups is a good exercise in envisioning the kinds specifics of the networks that need to be created.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Another participant pointed out that much of the dialogue about and interaction with water exists within traditional knowledge systems, so we must be aware of these systems of consumption and understanding when dealing with water in India.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Deepak finishes by asking us to consider the following three questions:</p>
<ol>
<li>When have you felt most networked in your life? When do you experience a network?</li>
<li>List networks that you are part of online and offline.</li>
<li>What are the few defining characteristics that you felt that these networks possessed?</li>
</ol>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While I do believe that networks often become apparent when you are excluded for them, as Nishant discussed on our first day, in my own experience, the identification of a network structure in an environment, I originally thought was hierarchical was when I felt the most networked. However, I have experienced my own belonging to networks before this point, but I believe that I viewed those networks that are relevant in my own life as being predominately social. I tend to see membership to most networks as being involuntary, but I believe that this stems from quite a narrow comprehension of network theory.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As for Deepak’s discussion, I believe that the search for a methodology for the creation of networks could be problematic. If it is true that the moment we see a network in its entirety is the moment that the network falls into crisis, what does this say about the essence of a network that was actively created with a specific goal in mind? Is it sustainable if the nature that connects the nodes of the network is not inherent or invisible, but constructed and clearly understood by all members? And what does this say about the orchestrator or architect of the network? When a tangible entity constructs a network, is this a hierarchical process? Can it result in a network, or is the structure created inherently hierarchical?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If you're interested in being part of this dialogue, please tweet your answers to these questions to #hol12!</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-water-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-2-water-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherJadine LannonLive BlogThinkathonHabits of LivingDigital HumanitiesWorkshop2012-10-09T05:14:53ZBlog EntryHabits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Globalising Lady GaGa
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-globalising-lady-gaga
<b>The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Maesy Angelina, an independent researcher from Jakarta, Indonesia was the first speaker with her presentation "Subversive Banality: Global Celebrities and Citizenship Practices on Twitter". Angelina first draws our attention to the way we tend to celebrate social media outlets like Twitter as being a site of political and activist resistance (Arab Spring). However, the reality of the situation is that the highest trending topics on Twitter throughout the world are about celebrities. Twitter users, including those in Indonesia where Angelina’s research focuses, are not tweeting about contemporary violence in society (at least directly). While some scholars have suggested that this is indicative of the mindlessness of the masses, Angelina wants to complexify this narrative and offer that perhaps the masses have different tactics to contest notions of citizenship that are not intelligible from a traditional 'activist' or 'academic' schema.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Angelina focuses on a series of protests and debates about international pop sensation Lady Gaga performing in Indonesia from March - June 2012. In reviewing the tweets generated during this time, Angelina finds that most of these messages have nothing to do with Lady Gaga and often include perspectives on culture, nature, and other topics pertaining to citizenship. For example: "Music is universal, but gyrating moves and revealing clothes are not". Angelina argues that the (international) celebrity presents an opportunity, a site by which Indonesian people are able to contest notions of citizenship. She presents the ‘banality’ of this celebrity discourse as actually subversive. She images this discourse as a way of the masses asserting agency.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Angelina’s presentation sparked an important conversation. Most notably, participants were concerned with what it means to view Twitter as a legitimate network by which to make these claims? Is Twitter really representative of the appropriate network to analyse these topics? Conceptual and methodological challenges arise here: what tools do we use to analyse new forms of media when we currently do not have the apparatus and training methods to do so? Participants also noted a serious need for historicity in these types of analyses. While we tend to fetishise the ‘digital’ or ‘social media’ ‘turn,’ we have to acknowledge histories — including fan culture in this case — that shape and structure the advent of these new discourses. Participants called for Angelina to ground her claims within histories of models of citizenship — particularly citizenships based on consumption.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I found Angelina’s presentation and notion of banal subversiveness quite provocative. However, I think we have to all think more critically about what it means that many of these international celebrities that initiate this dialogue are white and American. Considering that citizenship is already a fraught and contested category within formerly colonised areas, how do we incorporate an analysis of (neo)imperialism within our frameworks? How is the (racialised, gendered, etc.) body of the ‘foreign’ celebrity different to that of the ‘local’ celebrity? While it is important to acknowledge the increasing instability of these dichotomies and concede the interconnectivity of global system(s), fundamental questions of power, inequality, and colonialism cannot be neglected in this discussion.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Oliver Lerone Schulz from the Post Media Lab in Lueneburg, Germany spoke next. Schulz’s approach to theory is unique due to his history in traditionally non-academic spaces which generate and approach theory in fundamentally different ways. He is committed to a conception of media that is not fettered by technological media. At its core, Schulz’s presentation sought to assert a conceptual schema, an epistemology to address questions of the visual. He reminds us how questions of the image and the visual have emerged as a specific point of irritation in contemporary theory and have come to represent an unsolved problem or anomaly. Schulz utilises a paradigm of globalisation to grapple with this dilemma.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Schulz asks us how is globalisation visualized? What does it mean to map out globalisation? Schulz reviews relevant literature on the visual domain establishing that a visual is a representation of something that cannot be represented in the first place without efforts to visualise it. Following this, we can recognise that globalisation is presented as a diagnosis of our times, but <i>it is also</i> the object which is being diagnosed. His project is an attempt to locate and establish a visual politics which is not only visual to map, characterise and critique globalisation. He draws the audience’s attention to a series of images and asks: to what extent can you see globalisation?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Schulz’s presentation raises important questions on the efficacy of visual analyses and frameworks. Participants agree that the visual turn is in crisis, and yet why do we still insist on reading the visual? Nishant and Akansha pushed the debate further suggesting that globalisation can be viewed as a series of images. More than the visual itself, it is the stack of visuals that are important. As Nishant reminds us, we need to de-stabilise the visual as the only form that needs to be read. We must read it, but not see it as central.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The most important point that emerged from Schulz’s presentation is that like any other network, globalisation is a diagnosis of the contemporary, but it is also the malady and the cure.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From day one of the conference, the contradictions and paradoxes already emerge.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-globalising-lady-gaga'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-globalising-lady-gaga</a>
</p>
No publisheralokLive BlogThinkathonHabits of LivingDigital HumanitiesWorkshop2012-10-09T05:02:16ZBlog EntryHabits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: PechaKucha
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-1-pecha-kucha
<b>The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru, India, from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop aims to generate a dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong id="internal-source-marker_0.3441830750089139">The following are the summaries of the Habits of Living Thinkathon’s PechaKucha presentations. These are short introductions presented by the participants on their research interests and how they are grappling with the questions posed by the themes of the Thinkathon:<br /><br />Rijuta Mehta</strong> begins the discussion on a serious note by bringing up critical issues of violent Hindu nationalism and citizenship, demonstrating how community networks are being formed around injury from an imagined "other". She also argues that technology allows the soldier to become an agent of civic violence, and discusses how networks make civic malfunctions mobile. In a post-9/11 world, internet platforms have created spaces where global and local hate-speech can cross-pollinate. Rijuta grapples with a question posed online: Where is the Hindu Holocaust Museum? For Ritjuta, this museum actually is located in the networks that ask this question.<br /><br /><strong>Joshua Neves </strong>continues the discussion by sharing his thoughts on producing a different kind of self-relationality through media archipelagos. Inspired by island studies, Neves encourages us to think of a set of relations between islands, an alternative cartography of relationships. Drawing from sources as diverse as ephemeral film festivals across the world, Neves ask us: what does it mean to become each others' reference? <br /><br /><strong>Maesy Angelina </strong>brings the discussion to the domain of popular culture. While people try to romanticize networks as a site of activist resistance, the reality of the situation is that the majority of tweets produced are about celebrities. Instead of viewing this as deafening banality of the masses, Angelina questions the claim that pop-culture consumers can only be mindless. She suggests that celebrities can actually serve as a medium for citizenship expression of the masses, especially in the Indonesian context. Celebrities may be surrogates for citizen practice. Her presentation encourages us to think about alternative discourses beyond the lexicon of the Academy and 'activism' as we understand it. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Namita </strong><strong>Malhotra</strong> follows by reviewing cultural texts produced in India, with a particular emphasis on how particular stories of India tie up with meta-narratives of technology. She shows how these texts provide a space in which we can think about our affective relationships with technology. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Deepak Menon </strong>asks: how do we build knowledge networks? This is particularly pertinent for NGO groups like his own who are trying to do their work without necessarily getting into a donor relationship with the groups he works with. He is concerned with what happens to the networks if the donors move out. Deepak challenges us to think about important practical questions about networks, including the historical nature of networks, whether networks create knowledge that is network-specific, and how online networks differ from offline networks. </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Eivind Rossaak </strong>encourages us to think of archives in motion. Archives are traditionally viewed as working towards the preservation of objects and knowledge that are static in time — making the preservation of technological artifacts very difficult for this archival structure. In order to document ideas and items that are constantly in motion, archives need to be in motion, as well. To help us conceptualize this, he challenges us to think of YouTube as both an archive and a site of construction and knowledge creation. Elvind asks us: how do media and social websites forge new associations between 'human' and 'objects'? We have to redefine the notion of 'life' and 'person' to understand these phenomena and construct a new way of thinking about memory, archives, and identities. <br /><br /><strong>Saumya Pant </strong>speaks to us about surrogacy in India, and challenges the mainstream narratives of either understanding surrogacy as a reward or gift that only certain types of women can participate in, or as completely unnatural. To study this, she has spent the last two years recording the stories of Indian women who have been surrogates. Her methods include participatory theater, participatory photography, and life histories. This work is highly relevant, as India is set to pass new legislation on surrogacy in India. <br /><br /><strong>Renée Ridgway </strong>draws our attention to crowd-funding, the idea that 'big society' can function on volunteerism. In a crowd-funding structure, the social funding and subsidies traditionally provided by the state in a socially-democratic society begin to be replaced by groups of people contributing their wealth to particular projects. In this method of wealth distribution, those who need funding for projects solicit financial support from their friends and family in exchange for some kind of incentive (for example, an artist may produce small art objects in return for receiving funding). This solicitation usually takes place through the use of social media networks. Renee is concerned with how our social and familial networks become monetized in this structure of funding.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;"><strong>Oliver Lerone Schultz </strong>brings our attention to counterculture and how these are created by re-interpreting and queering networks. Countercultures can create contradictory space — images that queer and remask and create new alternative geographies. He points out that physical and social creations, especially images, are forms of networks that we create both socially and physically, and that images in particular can be sites of network creation. Everything, from thoughts to highways, can be seen as a node in a network. He is interested in how images relate to global networks, and how they are both created by them and represent these networks. <br /><br /><strong>Akansha Rastogi </strong>compels us to think about the artistic domain. She grapples with questions of networks and surrogacy by asking: how does one creates an exhibition, an archive of space? <br /><br /><strong>Gita Chadha </strong>remarks that the two major affects of modernity are the self and truth. Considering this, she asks: where do we position ourselves in a post-colonial context in feminist science? In the post-modern discourse, both nature and the body becomes completely plastic and unbound. Gita states that there must be a middle ground, especially in feminist studies. We must recycle lineages of thought and think critically of the feminist politics of surrogacy. </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-1-pecha-kucha'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-day-1-pecha-kucha</a>
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No publisherJadine LannonLive BlogThinkathonHabits of LivingDigital HumanitiesWorkshop2012-10-10T07:15:27ZBlog EntryHabits of Living Thinkathon — Day 1 Live Blog: Introduction
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction
<b>The Habits of Living Thinkathon (Thinking Marathon) is being hosted by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bengaluru from September 26 to 29, 2012. The event brings together a range of multidisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The workshop hopes to generate dialogue on the notion of surrogate structures that have become the visible landmarks of contemporary life, and produce new conceptual frameworks to help us understand networks and the ways in which they inform our everyday practice and thought.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/bangalore-thinkathon">The Habits of Living Thinkathon </a>took off today with an introduction by Wendy Chun, who led us through a critical review of the relevant academic theory on networks and network analysis to help us understand how ubiquitous networks have become as a method of conceptualizing and understanding the world around us.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">But why networks? What is the explanatory power of networks?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Networks enable us to map the unmappable, to trace the complex, unimaginably big structures that post-modernism left us with, and to be able to define our own unique existence. However, what becomes apparent is that we seem to be forever mapping, but we are no more able to realize our place within the capitalist society we live in, much less escape it. Rather than resolving them, mapping leads to the generation of more networks, and as we become more proficient at identifying and mapping networks, the more static they become. As Wendy Chun says, "We seem to be forever moving and never changing."<br /> <br /> Continuing on, Chun asks: why has the network become the end rather than the beginning of the answer? What drives the impetus to see un-seeable networks everywhere? Chun presents the Thinkathon's theme of <i>Habits of Living</i> as an epistemological framework to grapple with these questions. For Chun, the 'habit' works as a particularly useful heuristic to unpack and deconstruct some of the central components of the network. A habit is something that is acquired through time and then forgotten about as it moves from voluntary to involuntary. In fact, a habit can start as something we do and become something we are. With this in mind, we are asked to think: how has the network become habitualised and what are the implications of this? What is the importance of time in the mapping and lived experiences of networks? In looking at networks from this meta-level, we can ask: why do we think networks make us forever moving but never changing?<br /> <br /> Chun's presentation is received well, but one concern gets noted early on. This discourse of the 'network' privileges a very particular Western subjectivity, one which may not be applicable to collectivist cultures where communities have <i>always</i> existed with network structures. What becomes apparent is that we need to start collecting alternate discussions and input from a non-Western understanding of a network in order to truly understand what it is to live in a network society.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Following Wendy's talk, Nishant Shah continues the discussion on networks by contributing several other crucial epistemological interventions to begin our consideration of the <i>Habits of Living</i>. Nishant begins by asserting that we — perhaps naively — want to believe that networks have the innate ability to generate change. The way we commonly view networks, especially in a post-Arab Spring world, is with the understanding that the network is the panacea for all of our social ills. However, the body of the network is the only problem that the network can solve. That is to say, the network can only produce an account of itself; it cannot be used to create understandings of things outside of its own boundaries.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant briefly reviews the recent "Northeast Exodus" from the global tech city of Bengaluru, in which the dissemination of SMS messages within various networks caused a panic. The knowledge that moved through the networks terrified people before real information on the events could be consumed. Nishant shows how events like these cause people to claim that something has <i>gone wrong</i> with the network, which is particularly worrying for the state, as how can they fix an issue in a network that they cannot see? Further unpacking this scenario, Nishant shows how the minute the network becomes visible, it is a crisis.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Participants expressed concern about the use of 'network' in this discourse. What actually does the 'network' describe — can it stand as a heuristic for so many different relations? Additionally, what is the truth that the network seeks to expose or reveal? Is there an actual truth that can be unearthed through the network?</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant responded that many of these questions will hopefully be answered over the next four days of the Thinkathon — and we are definitely looking forwards to it!</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Continue to follow our live blog coverage of the Habits of Living Thinkathon for more thought-provoking discussion!</p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living-live-blog-introduction</a>
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No publisherJadine LannonLive BlogThinkathonHabits of LivingDigital HumanitiesWorkshop2012-10-09T04:38:04ZBlog Entry