The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 21 to 35.
Digital native: The View from My Bubble
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-4-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble
<b>In the digital world, the privileged have the power to deny a devastating crisis for the poor.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble/">published by Indian Express</a> on December 4, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For weeks now, my timeline on almost all social media feeds has been dominated by stories of demonetisation. Over the last few years, I have been spending time in countries where I, more or less, live a cashless life. Every transaction is enabled by a digital connection — my contactless debit card pays most of the bills for groceries, my phone works as an automatic wallet at my favourite stores, and the larger purchases are done online, through direct bank transfers. Most days, I leave home with such little cash that I would not even be able to buy a decent meal with it.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the continent is different, this experience is not much different from my days spent in India. I don’t really remember the last time I made huge cash deposits or withdrawals, and the services that I am used to would almost all have facilitated digital transactions, ensuring a smooth continuation of my life except, perhaps, for renouncing the occasional binge on street food, and letting go of the habit of hailing an auto on a busy road.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Hence, like many people who live in the same privileged combination of class, urbanity, education and affordability, my initial reaction to this move was reflective and speculative. In an abstract manner, I was curious about what this means to the theory of value, what this would achieve in the long-term visions of the state, and wondering what the costs of currency re-introductions might be. The earlier debates with family and friends were all marked by this elitist inquiry into the nature of things, feasting our minds on economic and political conundrums, well aware that there is going to be no crisis on the horizon. The social media also reflected this filter bubble. We made pithy jokes and offered polarised opinions about whether or not this is going to achieve the whitening of black money, and what its long term effects on the economic future would be.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Now that we know, however, that this state of emergency is going to last well into the end of this year, and as reports trickle in of the deprivation, exploitation and precariousness that destabilise lives and push them towards the precipice, I take a deep introspective breath. I don’t want to go into the discussions of the impact and measures of this move on lives that I do not live, and people who are so unlike me that I cannot even imagine what it means to live on the edge of a demonetised currency note. My opinions on this cannot be more informed or valid than the millions of voices that have flooded the social web with commentary, discussions and outright abusive fighting around the issue.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Instead, I want to reflect on what it means to consume a lived crisis, an embodied reality, a precarious condition through the mediated bubble of the digital web. For years now, activists have lamented that the web is an alienating medium. It allows people to become armchair clicktivists, removed from the reality of messy life and able to profess care, concern and commitment as long as it does not inconvenience or disrupt their everyday life. However, this has often been seen as a knee-jerk reaction to change, with enough evidence to prove that these technologies of connectivity also produce new collective forms of action, engendering trust, empathy, and care for people who are often made invisible in the systemic violence of everyday life. The debate is unresolved. However, the ways in which the demonetisation crisis — because it has officially become a crisis — is being consumed online, remotely, makes me wonder how the digital web allows a space for performance without experience, and articulation without politics.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Almost unanimously, the continued chatter of how the common man must bear some inconvenience for the greater good of our collective futures comes from people who embody the same privileges I do. From the comfort of their well-stocked kitchens and their insurances that would cover any health crises, these voices continue to parrot the idea that all that this means for anybody is just a bit of a hassle, but nothing to worry about.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the growing face of evidence that the poor are being pushed to the limits of their downward precipitation, they continue to invoke the sacrifices that must be made towards making India great again. Every day, I hear them valiantly champion the Prime Minister for his authoritative decision, and defend the logistics that have failed to protect the economic survival of the silent sufferers in the favour of recovering untold wealth which might turn out to be mythical after all.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And, each time I read these reports, I wonder how the digital allows them, protects them, and produces a performative space from which they can speak, without any experience, about the lives of others, reducing their struggles to lifestyle logistics and ambulatory adjustments.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-4-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-4-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkDemonetisationDigital IndiaRAW Blog2016-12-05T15:15:07ZBlog EntryDigital native: The Voices in Our Heads
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-20-2016-digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads
<b>What if our phones were to go silent? Would you be able to deal with the silence?</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article by Nishant Shah was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads-4383998/">published in the Indian Express</a> on November 20, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">You know it’s going to be a weird column when it begins with how I have a friend, and he has a new parrot. And yet, this is how we begin today. I have a friend, and he has a parrot. Meeting him for coffee this week was a strange experience. We were just sitting there, talking, when the phone rang with a message notification. Giving in to politeness, we both ignored the ring and continued talking. In the next five minutes, the phone rang five-six times. Neither of us was sure whose phone it was. When the seventh buzz came in, we decided that this might be urgent, and sheepishly fished out our phones. To our surprise, both our phones were without any notification.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We were staring at our phones when the notification sound buzzed again. We both looked around, wondering if there are invisible phones waking up to autonomy and taking over the world, when we realised where the noise was coming from. It was the parrot. She looked at us, that look that parrots have, and made the whistle sound that WhatsApp has naturalised in our everyday life. We both laughed, and the parrot, ruffling her feathers, continued to make more sounds, imitating updates, notifications and ring tones, all ending in a wonderful crescendo of phone vibrating on a glass table.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Amusing as the antics of the parrot were, what it reminded me of was the soundscape of the digital world that we live in. As our devices grow smaller, as the Internet of Everything makes smart computers out of everything, as the drones watch us, cameras control us, and the social web envelops us in its seductive embrace, we realise that the digital is disappearing. Additionally, even as we lose sight of the digital, we are also learning to naturalise the sounds of the digital.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">From the gentle whirr of our laptop fans to the chirps and beeps that our phones make, reminding us of our incessant connectivity with the world; from the silent whoosh of mails being sent and messages being received, to the push, pull, and swipe of our fingers dancing on virtual keyboards — the digital soundscape is ubiquitous and jarring, but familiar and reassuring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">For those of us who went online in the ’90s, we still remember that Martian chirruping of the modem as we dialled in to our connections, and the midi sounds that our machines made as they parsed data to render them into visuals on our heated up monitors. From those cacophonous days of machines speaking to each other, we have come a long way where they now speak to us. Fresh from the encounters with the parrot, who doesn’t produce or mimic any human sounds but has mastered the repertoire of digital resonances, I was suddenly aware of the quiet landscape in a Dutch train. The fairly crowded train was silent. Commuters were mostly hunched, peering over their phone, hiding the screen from public scrutiny.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the cone of silence in that train, though, over the rattling of the wheels, and occasional buzz of electricity that passed overhead, you could hear a quiet orchestra of sounds. People were silent but the devices were continually speaking. Keypads jerked to haptic touch; phones vibrated with new connections; chirps, chirrups, beeps and whooshes emerged at regular intervals, games blared out victory tunes, music trickled out of the noise cancellation headphones, and all around, the world sang, spoke and glowed in the soft undulation of the digital. Once in a while, the strange silence of a hundred people all crammed together was punctuated by a phone call, where the speaker made an apologetic face and whispered into the phone, trying not to be too loud. A couple of times when they were loud, saying the most prosaic things like “I am on the train” and “I will be home in 20 minutes”, people looked around in impatience, rolling their eyes, condemning the human noise that was infiltrating their digital bubbles.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I came home. In the evening, as is usually my routine, I sat down with a book, curled up on my couch. And I was caught with an overwhelming urge to hear a human voice. It was too late in the night, though, to make a random phone call. So, I started an app that simulates a coffee environment, a mixture of unintelligible conversations interspersed with the sounds of digital machines, and then feeling comforted, I sat down to read, alone, connected only to the voices in my head.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-20-2016-digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-20-2016-digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2016-11-22T02:23:29ZBlog EntryDigital Native: The Future is Now
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-16-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-future-is-now
<b>The digital is not just an addition but the new norm in our lives, and it might not be all good. There used to be a popular joke among technology geeks when Bluetooth arrived on our mobile devices — everything becomes better with Bluetooth. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-the-future-is-now-reliance-jio-bluetooth-tech-3084089/">published in the Indian Express</a> on October 16, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">A cursory web search for things with Bluetooth have yielded toys, lunch boxes, hair clips, cushion covers and sex toys, just to name a few of the bewildering array of things that seemed to be better with a Bluetooth connection. As the projected future moves towards the Internet of Everything, we are in a similar position where we firmly believe that digital makes everything better. In the spirit of random search queries, one can easily find government, relationships, dating, shopping, shower gels, food and families as things that are enhanced by the digital. Advertisers have no qualms in declaring their products as “e-something” or “cyber-this”, emphasising the touch of technology in the most unexpected of things and processes.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The ubiquity of the digital is undeniable. However, as the digital becomes transparent and everywhere, it also seems to be going through a dramatic moment of invisibility and meaninglessness. There was a time when the digital invoked an image of a binary code flashing in black and green on heated computer screens. The presence of the digital made us cyborgs, with prostheses sticking out of our heads and wires sinuously entwined with our bodies. Digital was tied with precision, with the idea that robotic hands and machines performed tasks that were beyond human capacity or exercise. It gave the idea of acceleration, harnessing the power of high-process computing that helped tasks requiring complex logistics and systems management to be performed faster. It had a futuristic value, making us rethink the idea of intelligence, sapience, and a machine-aided life that would significantly alter the quality and habits of life and living.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Our present is the science fiction future that our pasts had imagined. The promises of the digital have already found fruition and its premises have changed so dramatically that our immediate past feels dated and slow when parsed through the lens of the present. The digital has been reconsidered as a fundamental right, being promoted through plans of universal connectivity like with the latest fanfare around Reliance Telecom’s Jio programme. When the digital becomes an all-encompassing force, it is fruitful to ask what exactly it means. Largely, the question needs asking because there is almost nothing left in our urban connected life that is not digitally mediated. From healthcare and childbirth to relationships and disbursement of rights and money, we depend on silent algorithms of work and survival almost without noticing it. Digital is a part of social, economic, cultural, political and biological production and reproduction and hence to call something digital, as if it is a marker of difference is fruitless.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">If everything is digital, why do we still insist on using it as a special adjective to describe people, processes, and places? The answer is not in the digital divide, that quickly alerts us to the fact that the terrain of digitality is uneven and that there are still large swathes of world population that remain disconnected. Because, when we see the incredible efforts at digital connectivity infrastructure, we realise quickly that this is something that is going to be resolved sooner rather than later.<br /><br />The answer is not in pitching the human against the machine, because we have already formed ecosystems where we live our cyborg, symbiotic lives, where each system of the human and the machine requires the other. The answer is not in a futuristic appeal, waiting for the digital to arrive because our future is now, and already in the making, if not quite there.<br /><br />I would propose then, that we need the crutch of digital descriptors in order to hide the fact that in our quest for digitisation, we have stopped considering and caring about the human user in the digital networks. The human, alarmingly, has been reduced to nothing more than a node, a resource, a set of data, a flow of traffic, connected in these circuits of electronic communication, rescued from itself by the force of digital transformation.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As we look at the digital schemes, policies and programmes that we are nationally embracing, the human only becomes the end point — the last-mile consumer who has to be connected, the individual who has to be enrolled into a database, an information pod that needs to be harvested for data services.<br /><br />Digital Everything is not just a benign description but a clear indication that the digital is not just an augmentation but the new norm. The digital has become the principle around which these shall be shaped, and, perhaps, it is time to worry, when we see “digital”, about what will happen to those who cannot or would not want to afford the promises and conditions of being digitally human.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-16-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-future-is-now'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-16-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-future-is-now</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW BlogDigital Natives2016-10-17T02:12:43ZBlog EntryLove in the Time of Tinder
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder
<b>Service providers and information aggregators mine our information and share it in ways that we cannot imagine.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/love-in-the-time-of-tinder-3059643/">published in the Indian Express</a> on October 2, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">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.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-2-2016-nishant-shah-love-in-the-time-of-tinder</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2016-10-17T02:07:05ZBlog EntryMobilizing Online Consensus: Net Neutrality and the India Subreddit
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit
<b>This essay by Sujeet George is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author offers a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and examining the manner and context in which information and ideas are shared, proposed, and debunked, the paper aspires to formulate a methodology for interrogating sites like reddit that offer the possibilities of social mediation, even as users maintain a limited amount of privacy. At the same time, to what extent can such news aggregator sites direct the ways in which opinions and news flows change course as a true marker of information generation responding to user inputs.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Introduction</strong></h3>
<p>It is almost an Internet truism that the comments section on any website is the cesspool that festers the basest of human instincts. Insults and abuses abound, users ‘call out’ each other’s opinions, their choice of words and, on a <del>bad</del> regular day, even each other’s parentage. The spectre of online anonymity, it has been suggested, affords the possibility of channelling opinion without being accountable for it. This is the more cynical outlook on how online opinion forums function; a viewpoint which although credible is limited as it sidelines the more engaging aspects of these forums. Such an interface dynamic has historically offered two modes of checks and balances: the original content to which users commented on was determined (and often written) by the administrators of the website, and in many cases the comments were moderated by those who ran the website.</p>
<p>Social news websites in the age of Web 2.0 have radically altered the means of production of content. By handing over to web-users the keys to the content generation storehouse, news aggregator websites like 4chan and Reddit have supposedly democratized the volume and direction of news flow. Users create (and recycle) content on which other users comment and add more content through memes, sharing of links, pictures and videos. Somewhere along the line, the original post (op) may trigger more specific discussions.</p>
<p>The content generated on a news aggregating website like Reddit can thus, theoretically, range across a broad spectrum. From discussions on current technology and sharing of world news to more specific conversations on gardening or anime, the website brings together diverse interests under a singular platform. Topic-based posts and discussions are categorised into subreddits, subcommunities which converge around similar interests. Thus, a subreddit like /r/cricket may serve as a platform for cricket enthusiasts to share news and views on the game. These subreddits together constitute Reddit as a whole. Only registered users can post submissions or comment on other posts, although unregistered users can access the submissions without being able to comment on them. Registered users can upvote and downvote both the posts submitted and the comments posted by other users.</p>
<p>Any registered Reddit user can create a subreddit to initiate submissions and discussions on a particular area of interest. Reddit has a series of default subreddits, including /r/AskReddit, /r/books, /r/history among others. When an unregistered user accesses the website they are likely to see the current top-voted posts from a combination of the default subreddits. The voting system is inextricably linked to visibility: the more the upvotes a post receives, the more likely it is to be top of the list on the self-proclaimed front page of the internet. The posts are thus sorted as a combination of top-voted submissions from an assortment of default subreddits. Comments on specific posts also follow a similar voting logic whereby users can upvote/downvote a specific comment based on how useful or relevant they find it to the original post. Registered users can curate their own page by subscribing to subreddits of their own interest, and unsubscribing from the default ones.</p>
<p>Being a registered user entails choosing a username under which a user’s submissions and comments are collated. Every user comment receives an aggregate score which is the sum of the upvotes and downvotes the comment has received. The cumulative comment scores for every user, called karma, is visible to every other user, and is often an indicator of the level of (in)activity of a specific user. Karma scores are the veritable fiat currency of the reddit space, with prolific users being visible on multiple popular threads attempting to scale their karma aggregate through comments that employ a combination of wit, hyperbole, cliché and outrage.</p>
<p>Reddit with its two-way dynamism—the users are the creators of content and the very people who comment on it—seemingly throws open the spectrum for content to be self-generated and moderated. Every subreddit has a set of moderators who attempt to maintain a modicum of direction amidst the chaos. Moderators are often users who are active on that particular subreddit, or have volunteered (or have been chosen by the subreddit community) to take up the task of maintaining the decorum and coherence of the subreddit. Reddit’s voting system, where users upvote and downvote submitted content, purports to ensure that the cream can constantly float above the morass. The infrastructural logic of Reddit—an algorithm that ensures that posts do not stagnate on the front page and get regularly refreshed by newer content—seeks to instill a participatory ethos where content created/submitted by users gains traction based on the extent of discussion that it generates among other users <strong>[1]</strong>.</p>
<p>A characteristic of the reddit platform is the Ask Me Anything feature where notable individuals set a pre-determined time slot to answer questions raised by users of a subreddit community. The AMA format offers an interesting take on the possibilities of public engagement and publicity in the virtual domain. A unique feature of reddit, the popular AMAs are held on the default /r/IAMA subreddit. The earliest AMAs were coordinated by the founders as well as employees of the website; to an extent this is true even today although in recent times the public relations team of various celebrities have coordinated AMAs for their clients. It remains one of the most popular modes of user engagement, ironically functioning through external, mediated mechanisms. Most AMAs serve a dual purpose: celebrities offer to answer questions when they are ‘in the news’ or when they wish to publicize a new venture, which also serves as an endorsement of the popularity of the reddit platform in reaching out to a wide, primarily North American, audience. An early instance of an acknowledgement of the reach of the reddit platform was an AMA conducted by/for Barack Obama as he sought to be re-elected during the 2012 U.S. Presidential elections. Other notable ‘celebrity’ AMA sessions include those by Bill Gates, Madonna, and Edward Snowden. While celebrity AMAs remain a popular feature, the AMA format itself is utilised even by relatively less established personalities who have their own unique story to share. While /r/IAMA remains the default subreddit used to reach out to the reddit community, specific subreddits often conduct their own AMAs with personalities relevant to the group.</p>
<p>The India subreddit /r/India, the forum for content “directly about India and Indians,” has been a part of Reddit since 2008. At the time of writing this essay there are over 55000 registered Reddit users (including this writer) who subscribe to submissions posted on /r/India. Of course, there may be many more who ‘lurk’ around, a term for those who may not have subscribed but view submissions posted on the subreddit by visiting the subreddit page. /r/India typically draws in over 2 million page views every month. Over time the community has developed a vocabulary of its own, which is often self-referential and draws on submissions and comments that have been made at an earlier time. Many prolific users with characteristic usernames are recognized by fellow users, the sociality perhaps further strengthened through the annual city-based meet-ups that are planned as part of a larger Reddit tradition.</p>
<p>This essay looks at the mobilization of community opinion on /r/India on the issue of net neutrality, the efforts made by some of the users to raise awareness about it, and the ways in which the community responded and reacted to a wider online movement that sought to maintain a more egalitarian approach to Internet access and availability. Drawing on an analysis of a few posts submitted during a period that witnessed a flurry of activity in connection with the debates around net neutrality in India, the essay attempts to sketch out the contours of the debate around the axis of online activity and participation. It seeks to ponder on the extent to which a forum like the India subreddit offers the possibilities of a civic participation, of mobilizing public opinion and contributing to the decisions undertaken by policy makers. How do purportedly diverse online communities interact, draw consensus and stake a claim to the decision-making processes that involve multiple stakeholders often with conflicting interests?</p>
<h3><strong>The Social in the Virtual Rear-view Mirror</strong></h3>
<p>The form of any subreddit, with its defined purpose and rules of submission, ensures a certain coherence even amidst the cornucopia of memes, images and other web links that may be shared and commented upon. The governing logic of a particular subreddit accords it a certain hue, which most users attempt to conform to or occasionally subvert. The specificity of any subreddit, thus, is a mutually constitutive process where the original tech-interface guidelines are negotiated by the content submitted by users of the subreddit.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_01.jpeg" alt="Tragedy of India" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>.</h6>
<p>User behaviour on new media platforms can be understood as a virtual manifestation of traits that are exhibited in the domain of the social in real life. Consider the discussion sparked off by a post that was submitted about 4 weeks back, and which has catapulted to the top of the all time top voted submissions on the subreddit <strong>[2]</strong>. It contrasts the shoddy construction by the Maharashtra government in 2013 of a section of a fort staircase, with the more stable lasting section built by Shivaji in the 17th century. The user who posted the image commented on the dubious nature of infrastructural work in the present day, blaming corruption for the disparity in the quality of work. Juxtaposing historical nostalgia with an apathy about the present state-of-affairs, the comments and discussions around the post veered from questions of the feasibility of implementing older construction methods, to the widespread nepotism and corruption prevalent in public work contracts in the present day. One user remarked, “I'm guessing Shivaji didn't hand out the contracts for building his forts to the lowest bidder.” Another chimed in that “[no] tender is clean. It's often created, mapped, prepared and executed by the company and middleman willing to shell out the most to the bureaucrats and politicians.”</p>
<p>A popular motif on many submissions on /r/India is a lamentation on the tangled mess between the bureaucracy and legislature. It extends the generic urban middle class antipathy towards governance and its deep suspicion of the probity of the administrative processes of the Indian State. One user-comment tried to explain the popularity of the submitted post—a common indicator of content popularity on Reddit is the number of upvotes it receives and the extent of user participation through comments—to the highly ‘relatable’ nature of the submission.</p>
<p>The character of an online forum, while being shaped by diverse user behaviour, is invariably crystallized by the more dominant modes of representation. The anonymity afforded by the online medium and the potential infinitude of the range of submissions should theoretically stretch the spectrum of representations. Yet user behaviour often conforms in a bid to confirm its own shared identity within the group. What is then understood as relatable is not necessarily a universal, but merely an accommodation of difference through consensus. In the following sections I attempt to make sense of the processes through which such a consensus is drawn by considering the trajectory of discussions on posts pertaining to debates on net neutrality <strong>[3]</strong>.</p>
<h3><strong>The Anatomy of an Online Mobilization</strong></h3>
<p>The discussions around questions of net neutrality, Facebook’s Free Basics, differential data pricing, and restricted access to OTT services have captured the Indian public imagination in the last 18-odd months. Multiple consultation papers shared by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) have served as a rallying point for domain experts, media policy analysts and the general public. The series of consultation papers and the questions that have arisen over specific practices of telecom companies are imagined through the essay as a single event punctuated by temporal fissures. It has its own prehistory, a call to arms, and the eventual (fleeting) redemption. The differing discourse around the issue is contextually singular even if separated by chronology.</p>
<p>On February 8 this year, an /r/India user shared a news report about TRAI declaring zero-rated products as illegal <strong>[4]</strong>. Months of collaboration among faceless internet users had managed a key victory in what was repeatedly termed a battle to save the Internet. User comments highlighted the scale of the task accomplished as “a bunch of folks on the Internet [stopped] a $300 billion market cap corporation [Facebook] and a bunch of telecoms with strong lobbying capabilities.” Some users could not see past the irony of the Internet itself serving as a means for the public to halt rapacious tech companies in their stride. The David v/s Goliath analogy seemed apt. The task, though, had just begun, as one user presciently noted: “Mobilizing people is hard. Mobilizing people against a better funded lobby, and on a dry technical topic ? really hard. We are probably going to need a dedicated NGO, mailing lists, donations and members for this and similar issues.”</p>
<p>The debates surrounding net neutrality have sparked a diverse range of questions related to Internet access, differential pricing, restraints on technology, impediments to freedom of expression and questions of consumer choice. The range of issues and stakeholders encompassed within the policy regulation has simultaneously atomised and collectivised the problematic of Internet. As an increasingly everyday technology for many urban Indians, Internet usage has carried the possibility of innovative and easy access to a range of services and information while circumventing hitherto static structures of the administrative machinery. Internet usage in the Indian context can be regarded as both a symbol of egalitarianism and privilege; a conflation of the larger ideal of enterprise espoused by the technological boom and a reluctantly understated reflection of the very technology being of limited wider accessibility. The debates on Internet usage through the very medium thus contains some of the tensions that were echoed in the responses to the questions on net neutrality that were raised on the Indian subreddit.</p>
<p>These debates, circulating across news mediums both print and digital, found their way into the /r/India cosmos through efforts to raise awareness about the issue and to bring about a greater collective bargaining momentum to the efforts in the digital space. A post on December 25, 2014 announced the efforts being undertaken by various media practitioners through the creation of the website <a href="http://netneutrality.in/">http://netneutrality.in/</a> which later became <a href="http://www.savetheinternet.in/">http://www.savetheinternet.in/</a> <strong>[5]</strong>. As a submission in the early life of the net neutrality event the post garnered enough attention to find its way into the vocabulary of the subreddit.</p>
<p>It was, however, not until three months later that perhaps the most comprehensive early exhortation came through a post titled Let's fight for Net Neutrality before it becomes necessary. E-Mail the TRAI now <strong>[6]</strong>. submitted on March 28, 2015 by one of the subreddit moderators. The post called for users to mail the TRAI and join in the efforts to influence upon policy makers on the need for a neutral Internet. User comments ranged from a creating email templates to a brief primer on the meaning and scope of net neutrality. That the public counter fight was still in the planning stage is evident in the numerous user comments volunteering to craft an email template to be sent.</p>
<p>The possibilities of a collaborative enterprise were much more evident in another mod-post, submitted on April 8, 2015 titled <em>Fight for Net Neutrality: The way forward</em> <strong>[7]</strong>. The post assembled the increasing momentum that the net neutrality movement had garnered in the Indian virtual space. Varying email templates to be shared among peer groups were presented, enterprising users created memes and infographics, while more sinister minds listed out companies that openly flouted net neutrality rules. The aim was not just to organise, but to also synchronize the efforts of a purportedly disparate group of users.</p>
<p>Even as user efforts were directed towards raising awareness about net neutrality among a wider audience, the sheer scale of the task and improbable hurdles on the road where highlighted by some. One post speculated on the connection between the timing of TRAI’s consultation paper and the fact that the Director of TRAI was due to retire in May 2015 <strong>[8]</strong>. The user feared that “the decision on TRAI proposal has already been made. The public is asked to comment on the OTT proposal because it is required by norm (not sure about law). They are waiting for Mr Khullar to retire, so they can blame him for the colossal backlash that will happen when the proposal is ratified.”</p>
<p>In the next few months the momentum of the movement ebbed and flowed, with diligent users posting regular updates on the progress. Even as the Internet rights discourse on the forum sought to be balanced with the logic of the market, there emerged a series of reactionary submissions that seemed to combine a distrust of large telecoms with the emancipatory spirit of a virtual civil disobedience.</p>
<h3><strong>Zero Rating the Zero-Rated Apps</strong></h3>
<p>Concurrent with the efforts at the level of governance, /r/India users employed creative means to show their displeasure towards companies who seemed to oppose the tenets of net neutrality. One such instance was when a user galvanised forum opinion to down-rate the Flipkart and Airtel apps on their phones. Flipkart CEO Sachin Bansal’s justification for zero-rated apps as sound business practice was turned inside-out as users gave a zero rating to the Flipkart app on their phones. The impact was ostensibly evident as the daily average ratings for the app saw a sharp fall <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>Diatribes against telecom companies and their profit-driven enterprise have now become a regular feature on the forum. The mobile network Airtel, which has been at the forefront of the anti-net neutrality lobby, has faced its share of the community ire. Branded Chortel—an (un)imaginative coinage characterizing the supposed thieving policies of the company—the company along with Flipkart has been subject to a series of memes that invoke ridicule and hint at the sense of disconnect between consumers and the products on offer. The image shown above contrasts a popular biscuit brand Parle-G with the recently launched Airtel 4G Internet <strong>[10]</strong>. It employs Parle’s long unblemished reputation as a brand of reliability; its iconicity a signifier of a purported business of ethics that feels anachronistic in comparison to the business practices of the telecom companies.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/cis-raw_blog_sujeet-george_02.jpeg" alt="Chortel Four-G" />
<h6>Source: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</h6>
<p>The movement to generate awareness about Internet policy also sought to initiate dialogues with administrators who are in a position to ensure that the community’s voices are heard. Thus Independent Rajya Sabha member Rajeev Chandrasekhar did an AMA at the height of the net neutrality discussions <strong>[11]</strong>. Since the person doing the AMA can choose to answer or ignore from the range of questions posed by the community, the supposed mutuality of participation is often minimal. Nevertheless, Chandrasekhar’s AMA not just points to the interactive (propagandist) possibilities of reddit or any other social media platform but it also asserts the relevance of the medium as a significant domain where policy regulation impacts people whose voices need to be acknowledged. As an entrepreneur who has previously worked in the technology sector, Chandrasekhar symbolizes /r/India’s imagined ideal scenario of a ‘rule of experts’ in matters of governance. That a sitting MP would seek a dialogue with an online forum also hints at the relevance of such mobilizations, where enterprising tech-savvy politicians understand the potential to stir public action through the domain of the virtual.</p>
<h3><strong>Consensus in/and New Media</strong></h3>
<p>At one level, it could be suggested that the discussions which emerged on the India subreddit around the debates on net neutrality hint at the potentials of virtual mobilization of the public. Social media, the Internet and social networking forums like Reddit could potentially widen the level of information access and dissemination where the early groundwork has been laid by the RTI Act. But at stake in the whole discussion is not merely the extent to which an online community can modify the direction of a policy discourse. Even as the development of a ‘networked public sphere’ has transformed the means of consensus building, the elements of its discontent are difficult to ignore. The formation of a public sphere in a virtual environment presents the possibilities of conformity as much as of consensus.</p>
<p>The discourse around net neutrality on /r/India forum is notable for the wide-ranging consensus that it managed to appropriate from the community. Such a consensus could be interpreted in at least two ways. The form of any subreddit as a forum for all things related to a specific context—be it a common activity, nationality, gender identity—contains within itself the language of adequate acceptance and rebuttal. At the same time, the algorithmic technique of determining the visibility of a post through upvotes and downvotes renders real the possibility of consensus through conformity.</p>
<p>It is more interesting to look beyond the veneer of consensus and question the supposed diversity of the group and its implications, rather than infer collective action as a signifier of the rightness of the action. One could suggest that the terms of the debate, of limiting the control that mega-telecos wield over internet policy in India, offered an easy medium to galvanise opinion on the subreddit. Any nuanced stance will however need to read collective action in relation to the (im)possibility of individual opinion-making in a structured environment of an online forum.</p>
<p>An online platform with a voting system linked to visibility offers a peculiar type of consensus. A majority of the top-voted submissions and comments pertaining to the net neutrality debate on /r/India fall within a broad overlap of consensus linked to a participatory, egalitarian technological ethos which is characteristic of the post-liberalization Indian milieu. The possibility of dissent, or even voicing differing viewpoints, is structured in a limited spectrum since what will be shared/read is inextricably linked to what users understand as acceptable within the forum. Such an understanding can inadvertently suggest a consensus, or worse offer a monochromatic presentation of an issue. This is not to discount the possibility of informed discussion, or exaggerate the ‘hive mind’ of reddit. But the link between visibility and popularity of content often ensures that the nuances of a debate get sidelined and unidimensional. Thus, even though aspects of differential pricing may be understood as a means to wider access, or as a way to open Internet services to the vagaries of the market rather than State whims, such viewpoints find less credibility when articulated within a forum like /r/India <strong>[12]</strong>. While discussions may emerge which consider the issue beyond the limited rhetoric of free speech and consumer choice, they often get presented in the ‘anti net neutrality’ garb or as afterthoughts to a debate the terms of which have ostensibly been settled <strong>[13]</strong>.</p>
<p>Communicative technologies, as Lisa Gitelman notes, often converge around an overlapping mental landscape that seeks to make sense of an act/event through synchronized ontologies of representation. Consensus in such an instance is not to be seen as a final validation of the community’s stance on an issue. It should prompt us to be wary of the pitfalls of online mobilization that could be travelling in an echo chamber. The task then would not be to debunk actions drawn on consensus, but to be aware of the limits of inclusivity of such online forums <strong>[14]</strong>.
Further research has to consider ways in which individual users negotiate the possibility of presenting an individual stance to the community within interface-induced limitations to the possibility of such an enunciation. This would involve interviews with a pool of /r/India users, examine the types of news outlets and viewpoints that gain credence within the community, look at voting patterns, and perhaps undertake a more thorough examination of a wider range of concerns relevant to the community. This essay has attempted a preliminary gesture towards such an endeavour by picking a particular event and the community’s response to it. Reddit, in contrast to Facebook for instance, offers the possibility of peering into an online space where anonymity commingles with community enterprise and the meaning of accountability is extended beyond individual motive of mere sociality or recognition. As such, it could potentially offer an understanding of online behaviour beyond the limits of the individual-liberal paradigm of action orientation and widen the debate on the functioning of social news websites by being acutely aware of the thin line between the individual and the social.</p>
<h3><strong>Disclaimer</strong></h3>
<p>The writer has been a frequent lurker on Reddit, and the India subreddit since 2011. Beyond voraciously consuming the submissions on /r/India he does not claim to have contributed in any meaningful manner to the online discussions referred to in the essay.</p>
<h3><strong>Endnotes</strong></h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> The literature on reddit is a fast growing domain, with innovative research looking at Reddit’s voting patterns, user behaviour, and news outlets linked to glean an understanding of the news aggregating website. For an examination of questions of identity and anonymity on Reddit see, Shelton, M., Lo, K., Nardi, B. (2015). Online Media Forums as Separate Social Lives: A Qualitative Study of Disclosure Within and Beyond Reddit. In iConference 2015 Proceedings. For an engagement with questions on what motivates Reddit user to contribute see, Bogers, T., & Nordenhoff Wernersen, R. (2014). How 'Social' are Social News Sites? Exploring the Motivations for Using Reddit.com. In Proceedings of the iConference 2014. (pp. 329-344). IDEALS: iSchools.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/4s5bpn/tragedy_of_india/</a>. Last accessed on August 2, 2016. Unless stated otherwise, all links posted hereafter have also been accessed on the same day.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> My understanding of social media and the social dimension of new media has been shaped from my reading of Dijck, José Van. <em>The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. For an examination of social media practices see, Ellison, N. B. & boyd, d. (2013). Sociality through Social Network Sites. In Dutton, W. H. (Ed.), <em>The Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies</em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–172.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> See: <a>https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/44qddb/trai_to_make_zero_rated_products_illegal/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/2qcvhp/i_created_a_site_to_educate_people_about_airtel/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/30lz1p/lets_fight_for_net_neutrality_before_it_becomes/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31vvf2/fight_for_net_neutrality_the_way_forward/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/322iv8/trai_asking_for_feedback_on_their_proposal_is_a/</a>. For Kullar’s own views on the issue, see: <a href="http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/">http://thewire.in/1624/lets-be-practical-about-net-neutrality/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31ykxj/flipkart_and_airtel_are_fucking_with_your/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/3r25gr/chortel_four_g/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> See: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/387req/hi_rindia_i_am_rajeev_chandrasekhar_member_of/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> CIS’s note on its position on net neutrality points to the multilayered nature of the policy: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality'>http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-position-on-net-neutrality</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016. For a contrarian voice, see: <a href=">http://www.hindustantimes.com/columns/net-neutrality-war-is-not-just-facebook-versus-internet-mullahs/story-s9eZpZnomaaiz4De8fYfaK.html</a>. Last accessed on September 9, 2016.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Consider the discussions that emerged in two separate posts: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/31peb4/lets_respond_to_this_anti_net_neutrality_piece/</a> and <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/">https://www.reddit.com/r/india/comments/336u8f/woke_up_to_this_pro_internetorg_article_in/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Gitelman, Lisa. <em>Always Already New: Media, History and the Data of Culture</em>. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Especially chapter 3.</p>
<h3><strong>Author Profile</strong></h3>
<p>Sujeet George has an M.Phil from the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta. His research interests are in histories of science and commodities, and new media and digital humanities. He has previously worked with the Mumbai City Museum and The Southasia Trust.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_mobilizing-online-consensus-net-neutrality-and-the-india-subreddit</a>
</p>
No publisherSujeet GeorgeRedditInternet StudiesRAW BlogNet NeutralityResearchers at Work2016-09-27T04:52:35ZBlog EntryHow Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly
<b>This essay by Aishwarya Panicker is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author draws attention to the fact that there is little data, debate, analysis, and examination of the environmental impact of the internet, which is true especially for India. She explores four central issue areas. First, as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India? Second, are there any regulatory provisions that give prescriptive measures to data centres and providers? Third, do any global standards exist in this regard and finally, what future steps can be taken (by the government, civil society and individuals) to address this?</b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Introduction</h3>
<p>Groceries at your doorstep, data on your fingertips, an Uber at the tap of a button and information overload- human negotiations with the internet have definitely changed drastically over the past few decades. Research in the area, too, has transformed-covering not just its evolution and impact, but also assessing innovative and revolutionary ideas in terms of access, internet infrastructure as well as governance to name a few. With over 3.2 Billion internet users in the world <strong>[1]</strong>, and over 400 million of these from India <strong>[2]</strong>, this is no surprise. How can we move beyond particular fascinations with the internet and engage holistically with it? - by moving towards a dimension of internet infrastructure studies that has large policy and sustainable development benefits. This paper, then, will seek to elucidate one central issue area: as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India?</p>
<p>It is widely recognized that India still has miles to go before it reaches complete internet connectivity – be it at the rural or urban geographies. With millions still on the fringes of the online/offline world, it does seem that having access to the internet is still a privilege. However, with over 400 million (around 35 % of the total population) active users, and a fast growing young user base, the implications are vast. The message here is clear, India’s communications reality is changing, and it is changing at warp speed; second, there are constant reassurances to convince us of its growth. At a policy level, the national government has put in place an $18 billion Digital India Initiative that has an outlay of ₹70,000 crore for creating a high-speed Internet grid that will help bridge the rural-urban online divide. At a consumer level, more people are beginning to realise the benefits of using the net for their own daily needs. This should mean that more people will be able to avail the multitude of benefits from this wide web (using less paper, banking online, travelling less for shopping, for example), doing things that are obviously good for the environment, right? Yes, and no.</p>
<p>Measuring or assessing environment impact, for any particular product or service, requires a look into the cost foregone by using that particular product or service. In order to get a wider look into the environmental impact of the internet, we need to check the data available for hardware usage and waste generation, infrastructure provisions and finally, accurate data generation.</p>
<p>Climate change and carbon footprints are terms that have been used as buzzwords to death this past decade, but while environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of many-a-government, there is little data/ debate/ analysis/ examination of the environmental impact of communication systems connected to the net. This is true especially for India. In 2011, Joel Gombiner wrote an academic paper <strong>[3]</strong> on the problem of the Internet’s carbon footprint, with a premise based on the lesser known fact that the ICT industry has been ‘responsible for two to four percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions’- an area that the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report <strong>[4]</strong> had focused on back in 2008 as well. Clearly this is a war on the environment that is yet to receive large-scale attention.</p>
<h3>“What a Waste”</h3>
<p>‘By 2020, a third of the global population will own a PC, 80% will own a mobile phone, and one in 20 households will have a broadband connection’ <strong>[5]</strong>. What does this mean? It means that as demand increases for internet-capable machines, it is vital to look at cycles of ownership and disposal. Wifi access routers, mobile phones, laptops, desktops, optic fibre infrastructure, Ethernet cables- all of these products individually and together, add to the constant waste creation cycle. With mobile ownership at a massive 1009.46 million (as of May 2015), and 2G/3G/4G services on the rise, in addition to the already 400 million strong online community owning laptops/desktops, e-waste is now regarded as one of the largest growing problems in India. While about ‘2.7 million tons of electronic waste are being generated annually’, a large portion of this is from mobile phones/laptops/desktops. With high turnover of new products, as well as obsolete machines, and largely unregulated practices of waste collection, there are areas of where extremely hazardous contents are entering the air, underground water and soil from our city landfills. About 80 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions are produced by India currently-these emissions only add on to the total carbon dioxide and other noxious emissions created at the manufacturing stage as well as from the use of devices. While several recycling factories have come up to tackle the gargantuan task of using e-waste, there are of, course, other areas that require immediate attention- this includes mining safety, human rights of workers, natural mineral resource excavation and risk control measures. While rules are in place for the re-use and sorting of e waste (which include suggestions that plants be set up for the sorting, dismantling and processing of waste so that hazardous parts can be treated while the rest is recycled), the reality is far from it. E waste landfills are usually “processed” or mined by manual labor who wear little to no protection from the tiny parts/components that can cause them bodily harm- often causing them musko-skeletal, respiratory or gastro intestinal illnesses. A study done by the NGO Chintan, which studied over 2000 wastepickers, found that they had no idea about the health risks their livelihood poses <strong>[6]</strong>. This urban informal workforce are at the forefront of the waste management cycle and but their current status raises the question- whose responsibility is it to make e-waste recycling safe? The contractors who hire the manual workers, the recycling plants who buy the materials from them, or the manufacturers who create the products?</p>
<h3>Order in Chaos – The Internet Infrastructure Landscape</h3>
<p>Another way to assess environmental impact is by understanding the current internet infrastructure landscape – the supply structure. Under the Digital India initiative, the Central government plans to lay 700,000 km (434,960 miles) of broadband cable connecting 250,000 village clusters in the next three years and constructing 100 new "Smart Cities" by 2020 <strong>[7]</strong>. More connectivity also equals more data centres, larger servers, network equipment, cooling equipment, constant electricity usage and generators. A report by Gartner stated that data centres on average, ‘account for a quarter of the energy consumed by the entire ICT sector’.</p>
<p>As more and more data is generated- what is called our digital footprint- more information is sent back and forth to servers within data centres.</p>
<p>More data = more servers = more electricity = more emissions.</p>
<p>Data storage is being called one of the ‘primary drivers of emissions’ in the ICT industry. According to Gartner, about 6.6 million sq feet of data centre capacity exists today in India. Of course, their benefits do seem to override the electrical cost- using big data for research, social networking, new forms of information processing are just some of them. In addition, some steps are being taken by companies to cut down their environmental (and financial) cost by merging to form collocation spaces. In India, there are, in total, over a hundred collocation data centres in India <strong>[8]</strong>. These collocation spaces are data centers in which businesses can rent space for their servers and other computing needs.</p>
<p>For the mobile broadband industry, connecting millions more to the Internet also means a jump in the device emissions through routers, modems, cell towers etc. These cell towers and data centres perform at a sub optimal level due to the pervasive power deficit across India. Increasing times for load shedding in the semi-urban and rural areas also means a greater burden on generators which are usually diesel, and tend to greatly increase energy costs. Telecom towers, a study (ibid) says, consumes 2 billion litres of diesel a year, accounting for almost 5 million tons of CO2 annually <strong>[9]</strong>.</p>
<p>However, studies are being done on programs that uses renewable energy to power these towers- potentially cutting down emissions considerably. With the growth of Smart Power Grids, Energy Proportional Behavior and the rise of internal ‘Green Code’ with ICT companies, there is hope for energy efficiency methods to allow for greater utilization of machines and infrastructure at lower environmental cost.</p>
<h3>Data Aggregation</h3>
<p>Having tried a few websites that allow you to trace your own carbon footprints <strong>[10]</strong>, (depending on which household item/ type of transport/ you want to check it for) it does still seem to be quite complicated and opaque. Especially since most of these websites ignore the usage of particular technology/ other products that leave a footprint, and are hence, skewed in the data they provide. I was unable to pinpoint a footprint for my history of computer/laptop usage, and while HP and other companies do maintain online calculators, magnifying this to all gadgets that utilize the internet across entire populations that use it, is definitely a gargantuan task. Until this area is more user friendly and accurate, it will be quite impossible to research this aspect of the internet’s impact on the countless products owned by individuals.</p>
<p>Besides inaccurate and vague data generated at an individual level, there is also little to no information on a per-click basis, what an individuals’ contribution is. What does my time surfing the internet truly imply? Does my constant connectivity to the net from my phone/ laptop for over 15 hours a day mean something more than what I use it for? The information I found zeroed in on the terms direct and indirect emissions- that the company manufacturing my phone or laptop have resulted in direct emissions but that there are indirect emissions as well, all the things that happen for the laptop/mobile to have reached me have an impact, the hundreds of websites I scour in a week have an impact, right down to the staff of software companies I have downloaded from, have an impact. While this seems too minute to calculate, too cumbersome to pin down, it brings us to the point where any metric to have a final and definite number attached to our internet usage can never be accurate. In their book, <em>The Burning Question</em>, Duncan Clark and Mike Berners-Lee put forth the view that it is because of the infrastructure and mental lock - in that the world has put itself in, a state which disallows a wider understanding of real issues, that prevents any new energy efficiency technologies to be put in place.</p>
<p>India has become a big player in ICT industry worldwide- especially in the research and development areas. With our participation in the Global ICT Standardization Forum, it is vital that there is continued effort towards sustainable methods of tackling e-waste, ensuring that the growth of internet infrastructure and governance follow particular guidelines. The internet, of course, plays a crucial role in bringing us closer to a low-CO2 based world-but do its environmental benefits outweigh the end impact? Maybe/ Maybe not. While there are increasing number of advocates of the low- energy impact of the web <strong>[11]</strong>, it is not possible to live in a vacuum of its benefits, but to also engage with the wider web of its functioning and operations. The significance of well informed opinions and actions should be based on correct data - more in depth research in this field is how we can come closer to it. If sustainable and inclusive development has to go hand in hand with Smart cities, and if India is serious about it, it is high time we made ICT a more environment friendly industry as well as a research friendly industry. Should you as an individual stop everything you do with the internet? No! But it is time to think, talk, question and research about it.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> International Telecommunications Union. 2015. ‘ICT Facts & Figures- The World in 2015’ <a href="https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf">https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/facts/ICTFactsFigures2015.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> IAMAI. 2015. <a href="http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490">http://www.iamai.in/media/details/4490</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Gombiner, Joel. <a href="http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57">http://www.consiliencejournal.org/index.php/consilience/article/viewFile/141/57</a> (last accessed on 01/08/2016).</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> Global E-Sustainability Initiative. 2008. <a href="http://www.smart2020.org/publications/">http://www.smart2020.org/publications/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Singh, Om Pal & Pratibha Singh. IJERMT. 2015. <a href="http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf">http://www.ermt.net/docs/papers/Volume_4/12_December2015/V4N12-190.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> India Climate Dialogue. 10th December, 2015. <a href="http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/">http://indiaclimatedialogue.net/2015/12/10/indias-rising-tide-of-e-waste/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Financial Express. ‘Govt has grand IT Plans for India’. April 2015. <a href="http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/">http://www.financialexpress.com/economy/it-plans-suffer-from-power-cuts-congestion-and-monkeys-in-pm-narendra-modis-varanasi/59770/</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> <a href="http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html">http://www.datacentermap.com/profile.html</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Smarter 2020 - The Role of ICT in Driving a Sustainable Future. <a href="http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf">http://gesi.org/assets/js/lib/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/ajaxfilemanager/uploaded/SMARTer%202020%20-%20The%20Role%20of%20ICT%20in%20Driving%20a%20Sustainable%20Future%20-%20December%202012.pdf</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> For example - <a href="http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx">http://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx</a>.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Think Progress. ‘Debunking the myth of internet as an energy hog’. June, 2010. <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2010/06/21/206254/internet-energy-use-myth/</a>.</p>
<h3>Author Profile</h3>
<p>Aishwarya Panicker is currently an Independent Consultant, with over 5 years of experience in the development and policy space in India. She has an undergraduate degree in Sociology from Lady Shri Ram College, and a
graduate degree in Global Politics (specializing in Political Economy) from the London School of Economics.</p>
<p>She works closely on the institutional problems of service delivery in the rural and urban contexts - looking at social sector policies, technology, governance, and their impact on citizen-state interactions in India. Prior
to becoming an Independent Researcher, she worked at the Centre for Policy Research for three years. She has also worked with CKS, CII, and FICCI in the past.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_how-green-is-the-internet-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly</a>
</p>
No publisherAishwarya PanickerResearchers at WorkRAW BlogEnvironmental Impact2016-09-23T05:02:50ZBlog EntryQuarter Life Crisis: The World Wide Web turns 25 this year
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year
<b>With the unexplained ban on websites, the state seems to have stopped caring for the digital rights of its citizens. </b>
<p> </p>
<p>The article was published in the <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/world-wide-web-internet-25-years-3011720/">Indian Express</a> on September 3, 2016.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">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.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-september-3-2016-nishant-shah-quarter-life-crisis-the-world-wide-web-turns-25-this-year</a>
</p>
No publishernishantResearchers at WorkRAW Blog2016-09-16T13:25:38ZBlog EntryThe Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india
<b>This essay by Abhimanyu Roy is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. The author explores how the curious interplays between the arranged marriage market in India the rise of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. The gravity of the impact that such web-based services have on the lives of users is substantially greater than most other everyday web-enabled transactions, such as an Uber ride or a Foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment, newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so that the Indian government has set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites. The essay analyses the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, and the challenges this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to.</b>
<p> </p>
<blockquote><em>A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.</em><br />— Mignon McLaughlin <strong>[1]</strong></blockquote>
<blockquote><em>People say ours is an arranged marriage. In a way, our meeting was arranged by our parents but eventually it was the two of us who decided on the marriage. We met and went out together for a few times. We dated for a while and then agreed to marry...</em><br />— Madhuri Dixit <strong>[2]</strong></blockquote>
<p>Mignon McLaughlin was a pioneer American journalist. Madhuri Dixit is one of the most popular Indian film actresses in recent memory. They are both women who have led very public lives and they have also had long and happy marriages. Yet, their quotes offer an insight into the very different ways in which they began their marital lives. Unlike the West, love is not inextricably linked to marriage in India. A number of factors such as class, race, caste and financial considerations come into the picture in matrimony – it is not far-fetched to think Ms. Dixit’s parents would not have introduced her to her future groom if he did not fulfill certain criteria.</p>
<p>This makes internet-enabled disruption extremely complex. Any system that aims to disrupt needs to take into consideration systemic elements. E.g. Uber needs to consider fuel prices, regulations, economic fluctuations and real-time demand while setting their prices. However, when unpredictable emotions, sociology and psychological states of not just the individuals involved in the union but also others such as their families come into the picture, things become incredibly complicated. This gives rise to a number of unwanted situations from fraud to blackmail. At the same time, websites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com continue to gain more users – an indication that a lot of people have found their life partners on these platforms. To gain an understanding of this situation, let us first ask a question – who is the modern Indian?</p>
<h3>Identity Crash</h3>
<p>In their contribution to the 2002 book <em>Building Virtual Communities</em>, Dorian Wiszniewski and Richard Coyne first put forth the concept of the mask in the context of online interactions. The authors stated that idiosyncrasies of internet interactions – lack of physical presence, relative anonymity etc. – allowed individuals to reveal more about self-identity than conventional social interactions <strong>[3]</strong>. In particular, the authors point out that the choices that online contributors make regarding their profiles, style of writing and topics that they follow represent an ideal version of themselves as opposed to their offline social identity which depends more on the perceptions of others about the individual.</p>
<p>Perhaps no-where is this more evident than the modern online media landscape in India. A look at some of the most popular content on the Indian sub-sections of Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and YouTube presents a revealing picture of modern young India that runs counter to the conventional notion of family-centricity and social conservatism. Channels such as Being Indian on YouTube that has videos asking Bengaluru citizens about penis sizes and Mumbaikars on office romances, content produced by popular Buzzfeed authors such as Rega Jha and Sahil Rizwan and hard-hitting editorials from outlets such as Quartz and Huffington Post regarding love, marriage, sexuality and abuse reflect an undercurrent of social liberalism that is unseen in conventional social circles.</p>
<p>But for all that online liberalism, a 2013 survey commissioned by the Taj Group of Hotels and carried out by market research agency IPSOS revealed that 75% of Indians in the age group of 18 to 35 preferred arranged marriages <strong>[4]</strong>. What explains this apparent cognitive dissonance? A possible answer comes from a study commissioned by the UK government in 2013. The study called ‘What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?’ posits that it is easier to deconstruct online identities compared to offline ones – upload pictures, share content, post status updates. The offline identity, on the other hand, has a sense of permanence associated with it and more difficult to rebuild. In clash between a malleable identity and a permanent one, the permanent one wins out <strong>[5]</strong>.</p>
<p>This gives rise to an interesting conundrum – is it possible for one to take a decision for their offline identity based on information provided by someone who is representing their online self?</p>
<h3>Shaadi</h3>
<p>Anupam Mittal was working in a business intelligence firm in America during the dot com boom. Every year he used to visit his family back in India. On one of these visits in 1997, he had a chance meeting with a match-maker. After wriggling his way out of the encounter (there were many uncomfortable personal questions for his liking), he came up with an idea for a portal where prospective brides and grooms would be able to upload their profiles and cut out the middleman in India’s marriage ecosystem. This idea led to sagaai.com, which would eventually become shaadi.com <strong>[6]</strong>.</p>
<p>By 2008, Shaadi.com was one of India’s five most popular websites. It had over 300 million page views each month and 6000 profiles were added every day <strong>[7]</strong>. Since then, the online matrimony market has become more segmented and numerous clones have cropped up – most notably, Jeevansaathi.com and BharatMatrimony.com. While this has somewhat taken the sheen off from Shaadi’s dominance, the portal still remains the market leader in India.</p>
<p>In the numerous interviews that Mittal has given since the launch of Shaadi, he always attributes the success of the portal to one attribute – it makes the process of marriage easier <strong>[8]</strong>. This statement, however simple it may seem on the surface, actually encompasses a number of factors – a wider pool of prospective spouses, circumventing match-makers, objective representation, and testimonials of satisfied clients. However, collating a large number of prospective brides and grooms and facilitating the union is not a new phenomenon. It has been around for years in India – centuries in fact.</p>
<p>For a very long time, parents who wanted their children to be wedded in India would contact a marriage broker. This individual (or in some cases, agency) would keep on record the details of a large number of prospective life partners. Thereafter, much like a recruitment agency, they would match the details to the request of their clients and arrange a meeting. As news media began to grow in prominence in the nation, matrimony-seekers started to find a way around marriage brokers. This led to the emergence of matrimonial ads in newspapers <strong>[9]</strong>. The main advantage that matrimonial ads had was that they allowed people access to a huge number of prospective spouses – a much larger pool than those of marriage brokers <strong>[10]</strong>.</p>
<p>To understand why matrimonial websites supplanted both brokers and newspaper advertisements one has to look at the deficiencies in both systems. Brokers while primarily only facilitating introductions actually impact every facet of the wedding <strong>[11]</strong>. They would make the wedding arrangements, find the purohit (priest), fix the guest list, determine astrological suitability and (in the past) even negotiate the dowry. In each of these transactions, the broker has a profit motive, which is what makes brokers a very troubling medium – they have an incentive to do what is best for them and not for their clients. At its best, this might involve getting more expensive flowers for the ceremony. At its worst, they may knowingly push a bride into a marriage they know is unsuitable but would yield them greater profits.</p>
<p>Of course, if one wanted to not get into this system, they could always put out a matrimony ad in the newspaper. Except, the greatest advantage of matrimonial ads is also their greatest weakness. While it’s true that putting out an ad in a newspaper opened up a large number of choices for a man or woman, it also opened them up to the general public <strong>[12]</strong>. Instead of having a broker narrow down their options to a few people, the advertisers would now have to sift through a plethora of propositions – many of which they would never even consider. Shaadi was a game-changer in both these aspects. Customizability allowed users to pick and choose who was able to view their profiles on the website – thus eliminating solicitors who did not meet their criteria for a spouse <strong>[13]</strong>. At the same time, Shaadi’s revenue model limited its operations to only facilitating a meeting between the two parties. This kept in check the profit incentive that was inherent to brokers <strong>[14]</strong>. By identifying weak points in both models and catalyzing a beneficial change for the user, Shaadi.com (and other matrimonial websites) were able to gain a foothold in India’s marriage industry.</p>
<p>With over 2 million unions that were initiated online since the inception of Shaadi.com, it would seem as though online matrimony is a success <strong>[15]</strong>. However, there is a dark side to this phenomenon – a 2012 report by the Economic Times found that almost half the divorces in metros were by couples who met through a matrimony website. Unsurprisingly, the main reason for this was misrepresentation of details on online profiles <strong>[16]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the increasing acceptance of online matrimony points to its popularity and the success of decision-making based on the representation of the self-identity of individuals, the high number of divorces suggests that there are clear gaps in the system that can lead to some very uncomfortable situations. An examination of the decision-making process for internet-based tractions is required to understand why online matrimony-seekers make the decisions that they do and the consequences of those choices when it comes to marriage.</p>
<h3>Choices</h3>
<p>Economic theory bases decision-making on the principle of utility maximization <strong>[17]</strong>. Fundamentally, given a set of choices we would pick the option that gives us the greatest benefit for the lowest cost. Individuals weigh benefits on a set of criteria that are subjective in nature and differ from person to person – Akash may like 2 chocolates and 1 ice cream for Rs. 10 but Megha might prefer 2 ice creams and 1 chocolate for Rs. 10 instead.</p>
<p>The basic assumption in this model is that the choices are well-defined, i.e. there is no hidden information that might change the decision-maker’s opinion. Any hidden information changes the context within which the decision is taken – Megha certainly would not prefer to have ice creams if it was very cold that day. This has serious implications for a medium where decision-making is governed by trust on the parties furnishing the decision-maker with the facts upon which to make their choice.</p>
<p>Although there are many factors upon which an online suitor would base their decision to pursue a potential spouse, evidence from the operation of matrimonial websites has found that there are actually six criterions that matter the most – education, religion, age, height, work area and caste.[18] Evidence about misrepresentation among these six factors in Indian matrimony is sparse. However, research into western dating websites suggests that most of the fudging tends to occur for height, age and weight <strong>[19]</strong>. It should come as no surprise that these are the hardest factors to verify – a bride’s family may ask to see proof of the groom’s employment and education but would think twice before asking to measure his height or test his age.</p>
<p>Ensuring honesty on a matrimonial website is a difficult proposition. The profile creators are governed by the same economic theory of decision-making that was laid out earlier. If a prospective suitor thinks he would get a better spouse by increasing their height by a couple of inches or decreasing their age by a few years, why wouldn’t they lie? On the operators’ end, verifying the truth behind any of the claims is also problematic – how do you gauge the veracity of someone’s age by a picture? The problem on the operators’ end goes much deeper though and this is where the situation starts to get murky.</p>
<p>While physical characteristics are the easiest ones to be deceptive about one can also lie about their educational and employment credentials. The mandate of matrimonial websites is to connect brides and grooms. The onus of verifying the truth behind the claims made by either party lies on the opposite group and not on the operators of the medium <strong>[20]</strong>. Besides, verifying whether someone went to a particular university or not or is employed in the same capacity as their claims requires resources that matrimonial websites do not possess. This gives rise to the most troubling aspect of such websites – fraud.</p>
<h3>Deception</h3>
<p>In 2014, a Mumbai-based woman met a man named Michael Williams who claimed to be based in the United Kingdom on BharatMatrimony.com. After some weeks of courtship, Williams had swept her off her feet. In late July of that year, he informed her that he would be visiting India but upon his arrival, he informed her that he had been detained by the customs department for carrying excessive foreign currency and would require an ‘anti-terrorist certificate’ in order to be allowed in the country. He asked her for some money – the customs department required Indian currency – and she obliged. However, after receiving her assistance she did not hear from him again. Williams had duped her out of 2.93 lakhs.</p>
<p>Upon contacting BharatMatrimony.com, the portal informed her that they had suspended Williams’ profile and the responsibility of verifying his claims lay with her. After a protracted legal case, the Mumbai High Court ruled that the portal was not liable for fraud <strong>[21]</strong>.</p>
<p>This is not a unique case. Several cases of fraud, sexual abuse and harassment have occurred on matrimony websites <strong>[22]</strong>. Users have tried several mechanisms to verify the details that they are provided with on these sites. From asking probing questions to discern any possible duplicity to even hiring detectives to find the truth about their possible spouses and (more recently) checking social media profiles, men and women on matrimonial sites go to extreme lengths to determine the veracity of the information that they have been provided with <strong>[23]</strong>. However, not everyone is as vigilant and quite a few times terrible experiences ranging from theft to sexual assault have begun through a meeting on a matrimonial website <strong>[24]</strong> <strong>[25]</strong> <strong>[26]</strong>.</p>
<p>The lack of clear regulation and policy coupled with India’s lax laws governing online transactions make it difficult to draw a line where the responsibility of the websites end and that of the users begin. Fortunately, this situation is changing.</p>
<h3>Oversight</h3>
<p>Governments in most countries have an unusually significant role to play in an institution that is supposed to be between two people. From inheritance laws to prohibition of certain types of unions – most prominently and controversially the Defense of Marriage Act in the United States – governments straddle a complicated middle ground between having too much influence in marital affairs to having too little.</p>
<p>Even so, the Indian government’s involvement in marriage in especially extensive. From anti-dowry legislation to prohibition of child marriage, the government has always had a vital role to play.</p>
<p>In November 2015, the Indian government decided to set up a panel that would make recommendations for the regulation of matrimonial websites in order to check abuse <strong>[27]</strong>. The initiative is an undertaking of the Women and Child Development (WCD) ministry. The panel consists of members from the WCD ministry, Home ministry and Department of Electronics and Information Technology along with representatives from matrimonial websites such as Shaadi.com and Jeevansathi.com. Ministry officials pointed out that the growing number of cases of fraud and abuse occurring on such websites was the prevailing reason for the formation of the panel.</p>
<p>In June 2016, the panel made its recommendations. It was now mandatory for websites to keep track of the IP addresses of its users. Documentation from users would now also be solicited to verify their identity and curb instances of fraud. Matrimonial websites are also required to now explicitly spell out that they are for matrimony and not for dating <strong>[28]</strong>.</p>
<p>While the government has cited that these regulations are to protect users of these websites, the operators of these websites have so far declined to comment on the guidelines (at the time of writing of this essay, the full list of guidelines has not yet been made public and have not formally been presented to the operators of matrimonial websites) <strong>[29]</strong>. However, any protestations from operators notwithstanding, regulation will be an integral part of the future of matrimonial websites in India. This brings us to an important question – what indeed is the future of these websites? Will they withstand the crime that occurs on them or will they become an irreplaceable part of life in India?</p>
<h3>Future</h3>
<p>The online matrimony industry in India is estimated to be worth $225 million by 2017 <strong>[30]</strong>. In 2013 over 50 million new subscribers registered across these websites <strong>[31]</strong>. Despite, the stories of fraud and abuse that start on these portals and end in courts, matrimonial websites are growing and are here to stay.</p>
<p>Operators of these websites are undertaking various market development exercises to bring in new customers. The most visible of these is the segmentation of the market – BharatMatrimony and Shaadi, have launched a number of targeted community driven portals such as PunjabiMatrimony.com, EliteMatrimony.com, Bengalishaadi.com among others <strong>[32]</strong>.</p>
<p>In an interview of February 2015, Gourav Rakshit Chief Operating Officer of Shaadi.com laid out operational changes that the market leader is contemplating implementing. To prevent deceptive information provided by users, stricter guidelines regarding the upload of photographs on the website are being implemented as well as the implementation of a screening procedure for profiles and the development of a stronger relationship with the cyber-crime branch of law enforcement agencies <strong>[33]</strong>.</p>
<p>The final cog in the future of matrimony websites is technology. Mobile and real-time engagement strategies are being actively considered by these websites in their quest to drive up their user base and find new streams of revenue <strong>[34]</strong>.</p>
<p>But this not where the journey of matrimony websites ends. As with every great voyage, its conclusion is the beginning of another great expedition. Just as Shaadi.com and others had rode the early wave of disruption in the Indian wedding industry, so too are a number of new and upcoming internet-based services. Companies such as 7Vachan, Big Indian Wedding and ShaadiMagic offer a host of options for banquet halls, priests, makeup artists, photographers etc. These startups simplify the long process that is planning an Indian wedding. Would-be brides and grooms or their families can easily connect with vendors, make their final choices and organize every aspect of the wedding in a pristine manner instead of the general chaos that ensues while planning a wedding. As these companies prove, the disruption of the wedding industry that was started by matrimonial websites will continue in the foreseeable future <strong>[35]</strong>.</p>
<h3>Conclusion</h3>
<p>In the March 2005 issue of New York magazine, a New York-based author of Indian-origin chronicles her and her family’s trysts with arranged marriage <strong>[36]</strong>. The article titled ‘Is Arranged Marriage any worse than Craigslist?’ is an examination of the experiences of the Indian diaspora with an institution that is deeply ingrained in their identity. In it, the author recalls an experience from her childhood wherein she had fallen out of the window of their home as a baby and had broken her arm. According to her father, the primary concern of her mother was that they should never mention this incident to anyone as it would greatly increase the dowry her family would have to pay her husband. Aside from being an event that shows the contradictions that Indian expats face in a western countries, it also shows how deeply the institution of marriage is rooted in Indians’ identity.</p>
<p>According to UNICEF, 90% of marriages in India are arranged <strong>[37]</strong>. Parents center their children’s lives on the event right from the outset. To industrialize an environment that has such deep emotional connections within it is fraught with dangers and the online matrimony business has had to deal with fraud and abuse. But along the way, they have permanently disrupted the way Indians get married. The growing popularity of these websites are a testament not just to their efficacy but also to the spirit of a new India. Government intervention and the oversight of website operators is bringing about greater improvements in fraud detection and abuse prevention on these websites. As the market continues to evolve, bring in more users and cater to new audiences, online matrimony will continue to thrive in India for a very long time to come.</p>
<h3>Endnotes</h3>
<p><strong>[1]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Mignon McLaughlin. In Wikipedia. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mignon_McLaughlin.</p>
<p><strong>[2]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Madhuri Dixit Quotes. In BollyNook. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.bollynook.com/en/madhuri-dixit-quotes.</p>
<p><strong>[3]</strong> Renninger, K. A., & Shumar, W. (2002). Building virtual communities: Learning and change in cyberspace. Cambridge University Press.</p>
<p><strong>[4]</strong> IANS. (March 20, 2013). Indians swear by Arranged Marriage. In India Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/indians-swear-by-arranged-marriages/1/252496.html.</p>
<p><strong>[5]</strong> Miller, D. (2012). What is the relationship between identities that people construct, express and consume online and those offline?.</p>
<p><strong>[6]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[7]</strong> Challapalli, S. (October 2, 2008). Online matrimonial services open new tech fronts. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/todays-paper/online-matrimonial-services-open-new-tech-fronts/article1638067.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[8]</strong> Pratap, R. (April 18, 2014). Right Click. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/work/right-click/article5925468.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[9]</strong> Anonymous. (March 2015). History of Matrimonial Sites. In HatkeShaadi. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from www.hatkeshaadi.com/blog/2015/03/history-of-matrimonial-sites/.</p>
<p><strong>[10]</strong> Anonymous. (May 17, 2016). Are you contemplating Marriage? If Yes, Then Find A Soul-Mate via Amar Ujala. In myAdvtCorner.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://blog.myadvtcorner.com/matrimonial-newspaper-advertisement/are-you-contemplating-marriage-if-yes-then-find-a-soul-mate-via-amar-ujala/.</p>
<p><strong>[11]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[12]</strong> Ahmed, A. (March 19, 2012). Online Matrimonial Sites versus Conventional Matrimonial Methods. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/356114.</p>
<p><strong>[13]</strong> Anonymous. (n.d.). Understand SimplyMarry Better. In SimplyMarry.com. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.simplymarry.com/matrimonial/faq.</p>
<p><strong>[14]</strong> Anonymous. (April 14, 2014). Matrimonial India sites are better than marriage brokers. In Bharat Bhasha. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://www.bharatbhasha.com/marriage.php/440432.</p>
<p><strong>[15]</strong> Albright, J. M., & Simmens, E. (2014). Flirting, Cheating, Dating, and Mating. The Oxford Handbook of Virtuality, 284.</p>
<p><strong>[16]</strong> Julka, H. and Vishwanath, A. (June 26, 2013). Matrimony portals making serious efforts to counter rising tide of divorces, ensure lasting unions. In Economic Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-06-26/news/40206906_1_portals-online-bharatmatrimony-com.</p>
<p><strong>[17]</strong> Margalit, L. (July 4, 2014). The Rational Model and Online Decision Making. In Psychology Today. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/behind-online-behavior/201407/the-rational-model-and-online-decision-making.</p>
<p><strong>[18]</strong> Anonymous. (May 11, 2012). Shaadi.com’s Anupam Mittal: A Bachelor Finds Success as an Online Matchmaker. In Knowledge@Wharton. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/shaadi-coms-anupam-mittal-a-bachelor-finds-success-as-an-online-matchmaker/.</p>
<p><strong>[19]</strong> Hodge, G. (December 10, 2012). The Ugly Truth of Online Dating: Top 10 Lies Told by Internet Daters. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/online-dating-lies_b_1930053.</p>
<p><strong>[20]</strong> Dhawan, H. (February 2, 2016). ID proof may become mandatory for registering on Shaadi websites. In Times of India. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/ID-proof-may-become-mandatory-for-registering-on-Shaadi-websites/articleshow/50814355.cms.</p>
<p><strong>[21]</strong> Khan, A. (March 29, 2015). HC quashes FIR filed by ‘duped’ woman against matrimonial site. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/hc-quashes-fir-filed-by-duped-woman-against-matrimonial-site/.</p>
<p><strong>[22]</strong> Nair, S. (November 19, 2015). Government panel to check fraud on matrimonial websites. In The Indian Express. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-news-india/govt-panel-to-check-fraud-on-matrimonial-websites/.</p>
<p><strong>[23]</strong> Hema. (September 15, 2012). Tips for assessing genuineness of a matrimonial profile. In Matrimonial Blog. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from http://matrimonialblog.com/general/2012/tips-for-assessing-genuineness-of-a-matrimonial-profile-stop-fraud/.</p>
<p><strong>[24]</strong> Praveen, P. (July 11, 2015). The web of deceit. In Deccan Chronicle. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.deccanchronicle.com/150710/lifestyle-relationship/article/web-deceit.</p>
<p><strong>[25]</strong> Aman, S. (November 24, 2014). Fraud and Cheats Rule Matrimonial Sites. In The New Indian Express. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://www.newindianexpress.com/cities/hyderabad/2014/11/24/Fraud-and-Cheats-Rule-Matrimonial-Sites/article2537595.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[26]</strong> Ameer, T. (August 12, 2015). Matrimonial portals set to face the music over dubious profiles. In Millenium Post. Retrieved August 28, 2016, from http://millenniumpost.in/NewsContent.aspx?NID=145048.</p>
<p><strong>[27]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[28]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[29]</strong> Philip, S. (June 3, 2016). No casual hookups on matrimonial sites as govt lays down rules. In Live Mint. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.livemint.com/Politics/1PFh6Uakl1mhEaQTxzGZuK/No-casual-hookups-on-matrimonial-sites-as-government-lays-do.html.</p>
<p><strong>[30]</strong> PTI. (December 17, 2013). Online matrimony business likely to touch Rs. 1,500 cr by 2017. In The Hindu Business Line. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/info-tech/online-matrimony-business-likely-to-touch-rs-1500-cr-by-2017/article5470871.ece.</p>
<p><strong>[31]</strong> Ganapathy, N. (June 15, 2016). More fraud cases as India embraces marriage sites. In Straits Times. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.straitstimes.com/asia/more-fraud-cases-as-india-embraces-marriage-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[32]</strong> afaqs! News Bureau. (September 9, 2009). Bharatmatrimony.com unveils 250 community based matrimonial sites. In afaqs!. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.afaqs.com/news/story/24904_Bharatmatrimonycom-unveils-250-community-based-matrimonial-sites.</p>
<p><strong>[33]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[34]</strong> Nair, S. (February 16, 2015). Mobile will disrupt matrimonial space in India, says Gourav Rakshit of Shaadi.com. In First Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.firstpost.com/business/corporate-business/mobile-will-disrupt-matrimonial-space-in-india-says-gourav-rakshit-of-shaadi-com-2097637.html.</p>
<p><strong>[35]</strong> Soni, S. (September 19, 2015). The great Indian wedding is now an online affair . In Entrepreneur India. Retrieved August 24, 2016, from https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/250863.</p>
<p><strong>[36]</strong> Jain, A. (March 2005). Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?. In New York Magazine. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/culture/features/11621/index1.html.</p>
<p><strong>[37]</strong> Lai, J. (June 1, 2012). Arranged Marriage: CNN Examines The Age-Old Practice In India. In Huffington Post. Retrieved July 31, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/arranged-marriage_n_1560049.</p>
<h3>Author's Profile</h3>
<p>Abhimanyu Roy is a researcher who specializes in the social applications of emerging technologies for the urban poor. His work has been featured at conferences at MIT and the World Bank and in publications by Harvard University.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india'>https://cis-india.org/raw/the-curious-incidents-on-matrimonial-websites-in-india</a>
</p>
No publisherAbhimanyu RoyResearchers at WorkInternet StudiesRAW Blog2016-08-30T10:52:50ZBlog EntryDo I Want to Say Happy B’day?
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday
<b>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?</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>This article was published in <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/facebook-do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday-notifications-2957653/">Indian Express</a> on August 7, 2016</h4>
<hr />
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_do-i-want-to-say-happy-bday</a>
</p>
No publishernishantDigital MediaResearchers at WorkRAW BlogSocial Media2016-08-22T09:53:03ZBlog Entry101 Ways of Starting an ISP:* No. 53 - Conversation, Content and Weird Fiction
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_101-ways-of-starting-an-isp-no-53-conversation-content-weird-fiction
<b>This essay by Surfatial is part of the 'Studying Internet in India' series. It argues that the internet has created a space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive. It actively explores how anonymous and pseudonymous content production may offer a method for exploring and expressing the internet in India, with a certain degree of freedom, and how spam-like methods may prove effective in puncturing filter bubbles.</b>
<p> </p>
<h4>* ISP stands for Internal Surface Provider.</h4>
<hr />
<p>Mainstream institutions for learning, as we see them, are not concerned with the substance and gravity
of the present moment <a href="#B1">[B1]</a>. The professing of experience to aid learning or skill development is largely a perverted claim. There is no actual intention of enabling, nor is there even a desire to personally experience any immersion or penetration <a href="#B2">[B2]</a>. Added to this is the spectre of commodification of experience and learning today, where education has turned into a consumer product. The ivory tower of aloofness is too comfortable to deviate from. The institutionalisation of aloof posturing and the masks of professorships are too smugly fitting the exhausted bodies of those running the ship.</p>
<blockquote>Academics are like <strong>fruit on an inaccessible tree</strong>. It is there, but we cannot eat it. The moon is spoken of by poets and lovers because it is so far away and experientially inaccessible. <strong>Love is a stream</strong> and will never be in a state of harmony forever. It will remain tumultuous and <strong>rocky like the sea</strong> into which an asteroid has just fallen.</blockquote>
<p>We observe that disinterest in engaging in the immediacy of our continuing experience invariably leads us to holding on to selective bits while the rest passes. These selections then get shaped into some semblance of narratives. But how do we talk about the experience of the moment or even acknowledge the presence of what has not been selected? How does an individual’s perception and response direct to a better understanding of experiences that can harbour empathy?</p>
<blockquote>When <strong>telephones get cross-connected</strong>, we hear voices that do not belong to the conversation. What if these voices were to become a part of the conversation? We can talk to strangers. We don’t really need to talk about anything in particular - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS0VCi6Jd7s">we can just get used to each other’s voice</a>.</blockquote>
<p>Surfatial is concerned with knowledge production and has been exploring the format of conversations both online and offline as a space to perform personally experienced sequences of knowledge, and talk about these to others. Somewhere in this process learning emerges. We are currently seeding a platform for the sharing and dissemination of alternate pedagogies and self-woven visions of the world. This desire responds to academia's hangover with the past and its inability to instil processes and incubate practices that can help students in a continual production of content.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image001.png" alt="Can we talk about here and now?" width="250px" align="right" />
<blockquote>Narrative is processed from raw experience and so it is more easy to deal with than the complex mass of experience.</blockquote>
<h3><strong><em>Harnessing Anonymity</em></strong></h3>
<p>The internet offers you a morphing cloak - you can be selective about your identity, you can be online with selective vision and selective speech <a href="#B3">[B3]</a>. What do you choose to see online? What do you choose to reveal? And how much? <a href="#B4">[B4]</a> If you wear the cloak that covers you altogether, are you truly anonymous, or could it be that your true self leaks out as you put your hands against your eyes in an attempt to hide yourself?</p>
<blockquote>Think about a day when <strong>you want to say something</strong> and you feel that the Internet feels like too distant a medium. The Internet is so close to us, so intertwined in our lives that the perception of distance feels like a make-believe construct.</blockquote>
<p>Anonymity has potential to offer <strong>a voice to the invisible identity</strong>, the silenced perspective, the overlooked persona, the taboo desire. Could it also be harnessed for accessing and expressing that which is experienced in the present? Could anonymity be that filter which stands with the least amount of obstruction to experiencing the present as it unfolds, does it offer that means to experience more freely?</p>
<blockquote><em>Why are you online? What are you looking for online? <strong>What do you see?</strong> How does a visually impaired person experience the internet? What does that feel like? And then, what do you say online?</em></blockquote>
<p>From awkwardness and discomfort as the minimum level of experience, we are moving to anger, disinterest and boredom <a href="#B5">[B5]</a>. This social reality is being exacerbated by the manifestation of our realities on the internet. Anger is a mode of communication that rejects existing <strong>content in the pipeline</strong> and allows a relentless push mode of transmission. Disinterest is a lack of empathy that we are privileged to employ, while, at the same time, displacing and dismantling existing systems of falsehood and decay that are populating the system. Boredom is disengagement that comes from an immunity to words that don't mean anything - <strong>floating in the air</strong>, timed to music or masquerading as knowledge.</p>
<blockquote>If we keep an open mic near a flock of passionate birds, will the flapping and other sounds become a cacophony to form an interesting soundscape? Do <strong>birds become conscious</strong> of an open mic?</blockquote>
<p>Surfatial works for the frustrated seeker, seeking nourishing clarifying content on the internet. The
internet has become a shopping mall, but this doesn't mean that we can't walk around and talk to people.</p>
<p><a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatial/production">What to do? How to act? What to produce?</a> What should the lost and wandering tribes of the world do to express with diversity? <strong>Is there some secret pathway</strong> to knowing what to do that is only accessible to deviants?</p>
<blockquote>Production means to render an output, from the flux that we encounter in our experience. We can also choose not to produce but then we end up with a mass of material and no narrative.</blockquote>
<p>Does deviation from the norm guarantee some kind of clarity? Why can't ordinary people know? Why do
they have <strong>to be inspired and awake</strong>ned and creative to know? Is there nothing that flows in the narrow channels of propriety?</p>
<blockquote>Deviation does guarantee a unique pool of content being made for us to access. But the question is
how this access is setup <strong>for a kind of secondary process</strong> - one that is possible only after the ordinary has been dealt with and has led to something. Deviant content leads us further away from the sugar-coated annals of the plain world that is meant for mass-consumption.</blockquote>
<p>We live in echo chambers online and off. An infrastructure needs to be in place for the flow of a lubricant
<a href="#B6">[B6]</a> within echo chambers so that the <strong>conversation in the closed loop</strong> becomes smooth enough, and when a disassociation from the self or a disparate viewpoint happens, it is less painful. The echo-chamber becomes the social space when multiple levels of echoes are able to inter-mingle in ambiguous
contexts and containers.</p>
<blockquote><em>If we were not productive beings we would not be able to deal with ourselves. We would be strangers to our own legacies.</em></blockquote>
<h3><em>Spaces for Speculative Content Production</em></h3>
<p>Surfatial offers an online stage for self-enactment, where there can be friction without producing sparks. As a producer of assembly line infrastructure around access to knowledge, we find denial very useful. Denial of identity, denial of social constructions, denial of expected modes of speaking in conversations. We find that we create even the room for conversation around the need for alternatives after allegiances have stopped being in existence.</p>
<blockquote>The internet is not a pool, it is a cesspool. Everyone who is trying to navigate the space feels stuck and lost. So we avoid navigation and jump from node to node in order to escape from the boiling cesspool that gets too hot if we remain in the same place for a long time.</blockquote>
<p>When the shadows of dependencies on systemic corruptions have disappeared the real possibility of ‘being’ arises. We care about this possibility. We are making access to knowledge universal, since access based on the question of privilege and capacity sets a very low bar for conversations in terms of what is allowed to be spoken, which directions of verbal exploration are politically acceptable, and who gets to abuse whom with which epithets. We are concerned with formats that are open to every participant’s perspective equally and their individual approach to contributing to the collective voice.</p>
<blockquote><a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatial/denial"><em>The play never ends. Laugh at yourself<br />
Seek a new denial... the shift of power is a natural process</em></a>.</blockquote>
<p>Anonymous and pseudonymous forms of content production offer a method for exploring and expressing with a certain degree of <a href="http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/sanctuary/freedom/freedom-to-be-deluded">freedom</a>. How free we feel depends partly on how free we are allowed to feel <a href="#B7">[B7]</a>, and depends in equal parts on the level of our own disinhibition. Through degrees in the opening up, passionate potentialities are demonstrated.</p>
<blockquote>Who are you? And who are we? We do not know, we are nobody at all sometimes and then we wake from our slumber and feel like doing something again.</blockquote>
<p>Anonymity is a double edged sword. Can virtual freedom of expression lead to any insight that can transfer into real life interaction? How difficult is this jump from virtual to real life? Virtuality has evolved beyond the world of simulation, where it is now possible to experience multiple mechanisms of meaningful relationships with people. We believe there is a level of balance between virtual and physical engagements that can be struck in order for bringing one closer to a semblance of self-realisation.</p>
<blockquote>Why do players choose anonymity, if they do? Fake profiles sometimes are an expression of a desire to
play. Those who play can succumb to joy. Joy becomes a tempting emotional state. The more joyful you are, the more comfortable you feel in any garb. This could be a liberating experience, when the blurring of identities occur.</blockquote>
<blockquote>“Putting aside the baggage of ego and identity has a freeing effect on which part of our persona we
express.”<br />— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.</blockquote>
<h3><strong><em>Harnessing pseudonimity</em></strong></h3>
<p>Being playful becomes possible if role-play and make-believe are accepted as valid forms of narrative ploy with a functional purpose in the everyday. The role assumed during play sometimes becomes more enjoyable than the dry person of absolute dimensions. As the rules of play are adopted, disassociation and immersion happen. The player has a choice to deny their outside-play persona and remain fully entrenched in the dynamics of play. This denial helps in the player’s engagement with our system of accessing knowledge. If the gravity and consciousness of your plain existence is lost, then communicating with you becomes easier. In short, your shadow becomes what you could never become. The being and presence of your playtime persona are much stronger than what you can ordinarily muster.
In our space, you get to deny the world outside play and conversely render your world as play.</p>
<blockquote>“being fictional is you without your physical being. If we take away the physical beings from this world, we are left with imagination, ideas and their interpretations.”<br />— Raavi Georgian, a Facebook user.</blockquote>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image002.png" alt="Play tricks." width="250px" align="left" />
<p>The garb of comedy allows you to listen with a certain distance. The Indian internet landscape is no stranger to this choice of presentation. Several personas dot the scene, there is Norinder Mudi, there is Gabbar Singh or the Cows of Benaras. In an era of cathartic sharing, where all manner of mental chatter finds channels of expression, comedy can be a balm for controlled experiments in taking potshots at sociopolitical power structures. Some platforms incentivise identity in order to legitimise the online experience, for instance, Facebook seems to place a premium on profile pictures by giving them a default public setting, and the user-base is advised by sundry guidelines about the “perfect profile pic” to adopt clear frontal images for maximum effect. Others have a policy of anonymity, like Reddit.</p>
<blockquote><a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatial/denial"><em>Forget who you are. Just be someone else.<br />
And then you can be the one,<br />
Holding the mic in your hand</em></a><em>.</em></blockquote>
<p>The existing mechanism of algorithms make it seem like there is free and open access to information, even customised for the user’s convenience. But this customisation in fact filters information based on working out the user’s bubble. One way to beat the bubble is to role-play. This would require receivers to adopt pseudonymous/ alternate roles to have access to content outside of their own filters. A loosening of the self can expand the algorithm.</p>
<blockquote>Loosening of the self is a safe idea. The ideal is to have no cognisance of one’s identity. The network
converts you into an IP - an anonymous VPN blurs your IP, nobody knows who you are. Behaviours found in the online community show that there are several aspects of blurring in identity and the presentation of information.</blockquote>
<h3><strong><em>Harnessing disinhibition</em></strong></h3>
<p>Disinhibition is not necessarily rendered as a condition of the external ecosystem (physical and virtual
ecosystems). It has more to do with the actor’s persona and how she has framed and declared her persona. What is the pitch of the actor’s voice? What does it say? What kind of response becomes necessary?</p>
<p>The opportunity for denial emerges from the confidence gained from play. If random social play does not
cause huge rescissions of norms and contracts already in place, its extension to become a fundamental
behavioural pattern changes nothing.</p>
<blockquote><a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26683259/SURFATIAL_public/Denial-(text).pdf"><em>We will convince you that when we step on your toes and snap back at you in response to your idiotic and subservient social conduct, <strong>we are just playing</strong>. And if you accept it, then we can tell you the harshest and most unpleasant truth about you on your face and get away with it</em></a>.</blockquote>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image003.png" alt="flip & blip" width="250px" align="right" />
<p>Surfatial designed a conversation game called flip & blip <a href="#A2">[A2]</a> which has the objective of enhancing empathy and sociability, via role play and assuming personas. The purpose of role-play is to help people step put of themselves and play out situations <strong>through alternate lenses</strong>. In any situation, how does another feel? <a href="#B8">[B8]</a> We are either intuitive, or we are clueless. This game opens up the space between. It uses question cards and persona cards as triggers to present scenarios to the players. The goal was to have a conversation while wearing a persona, and then to have the same conversation while being oneself. The players then reflected on the occurrence of any shifts in perspective during this process <a href="#B9">[B9]</a>.</p>
<p>A game is a format <strong>for play that has rules</strong> <a href="#B10">[B10]</a>. Even while these rules are very important, sometimes it becomes possible to play with them. The extent to which we enjoy the game depends on our interpretation of these rules. Now, socially acceptable rules of conduct are considered to be good behaviour. And if our physical social lives are viewed as some kind of a game with rulesets and interpersonal <strong>protocols of engagement</strong> (a game with heavy consequences for not playing by the rules), perhaps our online lives offer that outlet for exercising freedom from this oppressive structure, and perhaps the freeing online experience can translate into incorporating playfulness into strict routine interactions?</p>
<blockquote>“Human social structures built upon transactional attitudes don't have space for free expression, since free expression means disregarding façades and notions of "propriety" as well as hierarchy"<br />— Mithya J., a fake profile on Facebook.</blockquote>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image004.png" alt="Even if the rules keep changing, it is still a game." width="250px" align="left" />
<p>Access might supposedly <strong>require a filtration system</strong>. But we are opposed to the construction and use of filters. We are of the opinion that we need to be able to access the core content directly - no envelopes, no braces, and no reduced-sets. <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26683259/SURFATIAL_public/Access%25252520(Lyric).pdf">People fear dealing with the naked world because they fear engagement, immersion and getting overwhelmed</a>, while at the same time craving first hand knowledge, craving a removal of gatekeepers who shield them from <strong>the naked truth</strong> using agenda-coloured filters.</p>
<p>Surfatial has been working with several formats for harnessing anonymous content production and for playful engagement, via our structured study groups that actively discourage the elaboration of direct personal identification. The emergence <strong>of individual identities occurs</strong> only through the exchange of perspectives during conversation <a href="#B11">[B11]</a>.</p>
<blockquote>The study group derives itself from a group of individuals who are interested in remaining sharp as a group. The group’s concern will always be to aid others as well as itself by challenging every perspective that seems superfluous.</blockquote>
<h3><em>Our study groups</em></h3>
<p>Our study groups <a href="#A1">[A1]</a> are webinars hosted on Google Hangouts on Air, with a framework of philosophical questioning and <strong>a self-reflective exchange</strong> of individual experiences. These are structured conversations that are completely open to participation and listening, with one to three anchors. Each study group is centred around a topic, and three pre-determined questions relating to that topic are posed to the participants. The tone is detached, with not much encouragement for sharing of personal information. <strong>The conversation is fluid</strong> and anyone who has anything to say is able to start speaking. We do not follow the common conventional etiquette of introducing the guests or apologising for intrusion. Due to this it becomes rather freeing and divorced from any mode of social behaviour. The illusion we often chase is of the study group being just a set of <strong>“voices in the head”</strong>.</p>
<p> </p>
<iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/lOSvW84GMM8" frameborder="0" height="315px" width="560px"></iframe>
<p> </p>
<blockquote>When an idea oversteps the terrain that it has been assigned to, it acquires the garb of being a trespasser. Ideas trespass when they uncover surprising connections. which they might otherwise not be related to in any direct way. Such connections cannot be predicted. They emerge out of the process of exploring something else. Trespass happens at perspective boundaries—one never meant to hear another’s perspective, but now that they are in a space together, one must; encroachment will invariably happen.</blockquote>
<p>Study groups have anchors who stand with markers for conversation transition points. Anchors could be Surfatial members or guests. Guest anchors are invited with the intent of extending Surfatial’s sphere of engagement and to alter the threads that connect the conversations.</p>
<blockquote>Anchors are not moderators. They are literally anchors for the discussion. They make sure that the discussion deals with the issues that it raises before moving onto other issues. Anchors seek out questions and figure if they have been answered. They are like accountants of a currency of ideas.</blockquote>
<p>The archive of all these study group conversations <a href="#A8">[A8]</a> is treated as a dynamic space for re-engagement in order to consistently pursue alternate methods of presenting it—through text, posters, books, soundtracks, videos and <a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatialposters">conversation games</a>.</p>
<h3><em>How messages are presented</em></h3>
<p>When we start seeding a message, we feel the pull of invisible attractors. The vestiges of messages are either offered at their face value or they are so thin, light and loosely packed that they do not offer sufficient <strong>flesh to sink teeth into</strong> <a href="#B12">[B12]</a>. The least we demand from the producers of noise and meaninglessness in our environment is that they give us sufficient depth of material to bite into and suck the juice out. Density is the key.</p>
<blockquote>In compression lies our only hope. If you have to speak, speak less and mean more. If you have to produce material of any kind, make sure it is densely packed with fissile material which can all combust together to yield a message.</blockquote>
<p>By packaging our formats in diverse forms they become appealing to people in different ways.</p>
<p>But there is a danger of package and content being divorced in the process of design. Design facilitates skimming of content by packaging its appearance as eye-candy; packaging runs the danger of dissuading immersion into content. We look to destabilise this tendency, and offer value in the packaging itself. We are interested in packages with embedded content, to save the viewer the trouble of unwrapping any external cover.</p>
<blockquote><a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatial/access">Access to free exchange is sometimes denied</a>. Free exchange ensures that ideas get modified and challenged. They grow and so it is an essential process that is needed in order for them to be change and offer strength garnered from this free exchange.</blockquote>
<p>Then what is the way? How do you get past institutional filters? If limits have been drawn, if the surfaces of knowledge are guarded, how do messages get out of the perimeter of control? Spam—unsolicited communication, yielding messages where none are requested or expected—is the answer. Spam and spam-like methods are the only tools that can get past the filters. There are no constraints which are fine enough for the <strong>fine specks of spam</strong> to be swatted out.</p>
<blockquote>We are going to populate compressed messages of the whole world's knowledge onto surfaces of mass display and then circulate them like spam.</blockquote>
<p>Posters <a href="#A9">[A9]</a> are posts that linger <a href="#B13">[B13]</a>. Posters are not just lozenges of information, they are pieces and fragments of a song that gets completed in the reader’s mind. The poster is already present on social media as a format. But not all designers use the poster in the same way. For some it is just a clever punch-line. We believe in the punch but not in the merit of <strong>clever punch-lines</strong>. We attempt a sharp contrast between the text that we write and the general experience offered by the environment for consumption of media. This sharp contrast is conveyed through our choice of the posters’ visual format as well as through the auditory means of a soundscape.</p>
<blockquote>What is a song? Who is singing? A song speaks when words are weak, when humming gets through, when drumming has no beat.</blockquote>
<p>Our tracks <a href="#A7">[A7]</a> emerge out of our words and texts. We put together sounds and speech sometimes post-fact, sometimes in the moment with everyone there in the room. We believe that fragments of words and speech can be agents of perspective shifts if placed within altered contexts and rhythms. We think of our sounds as soundscapes more than music.</p>
<h3><strong><em>Conversation as Currency</em></strong></h3>
<p>To sell, one needs to be invisible. No business survives on recurrent sales to family and friends. Businesses survive and grow because they create markets within which strangers can transact with confidence. For strangers to <strong>transact with confidence</strong>, value needs to be stable and fixed into the form of the product. And for that, products need to develop an intensely tangible form. Value of the product starts and finishes with the form. The form cannot be soft or intangible. It needs to be concrete.</p>
<p>To fix the value for a thing, one needs to have a conversation. The price of a commodity can be arrived at through conversation. But we do not care about the price. Because once we sell, <strong>our conversation is over</strong>. We do not want to end it. Besides, we will all keep having more to say and would like others to have access to it too. These are things of value for all of us. This is what we want to exchange and so, conversation is our currency. We will only transact through conversations.</p>
<p>To buy, one must be desirous. There must be a desire for change, for a perturbation of the status quo. A desire that drives motivation for the mouth to open and the hand to move towards a device that dispenses currency. All this takes a lot of effort. The seller and the buyer both have desires and motivations, but the anxiety of the approach to the final push off of the cliff-face of the mountain of the transaction must be overcome. This is the difficult part. It involves a leap of faith. Can a push be made as effortlessly as possible? Sure. We only need to find a way. Efficiency is a way. We introduce efficiency into the system by reducing steps. If we take away the step of the hand moving, we have already reduced effort. Now only the mouth has to open.</p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image005.png" alt="You are tired of buying, we are tired of selling. Conversation as currency is the only notion of value we know." width="250px" align="right" />
<p>We have made the determination of value into a game, which is in the form of a Book of Conversation Triggers <a href="#A3">[A3]</a>. In this game, we will read each sentence in our book to you and we will ask you if you agree. After we have performed all the sentences to you, we will ask you if you feel like holding on to any sentence, or if any sentence led you to experience a new kind of thought. If you think so, we will offer those sentences to you. You may if you like, in turn play this game with whomever you choose to play it with, in order to have another conversation. You owe yourself that much at least. If conversation is a currency, it wants to grow and spread like a virus. So, <strong>why not go forth and multiply?</strong></p>
<p>What will you, the player, win? You win a sentence you can post on your fridge door or your Facebook wall, you win an insight you can talk about further. You win the memory of a delightful conversation you had with us, which we guarantee you will have again with whomever you choose to play with. This game will give you victory again and again. <a href="#C">Are you game?</a></p>
<blockquote>A poster can also be a person who posts. A post-writer is often one who reaches the point of saturation, which pushes them to producing compressed text. This act places them in a new period in the timeline of history, of being post-writers.</blockquote>
<h3><em>Publishing sans credits</em></h3>
<p>We work with the idea of credit-less production. post_writer <a href="#A5">[A5]</a> is a twitter-based monthly journal. Each issue consists of six tweets. Four by humans, one by a bot and one by a sponsor. There are only issue-wide credits but no individual credits. Which tweet is by whom is an ambiguity.</p>
<p> </p>
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/Surfatial_2016_Image006.png" alt="Twitter - Post-Writer" />
<p> </p>
<blockquote>As an actor, you can <strong>choose to disengage</strong> from every story you assume you are a part of, then <strong>you deal with the anxiety</strong> of performing for free in an under-documented and under-credited fashion. When this anxiety subsides, awakening might happen.</blockquote>
<p>We look to expand the study group format to have anchors interested in exploring their own questions in a nondescript manner. We are also looking at shorter capsules of study groups which will be podcast, with a question dedicated for an individual’s consideration, to capture their particular perspective of experience sharing.</p>
<p>We would rather model the world as a space swarming with individuals who actively produce content, rather than as a space with an abundance of consumers and a scarcity of commercially viable producers enveloped in the gloss of the culture of page-hits and celebrity <a href="#B14">[B14]</a> <a href="#B15">[B15]</a>. Today we have a competitive marketplace of market-validated content that goes into profiling our consumption. Our profiles are then further recycled as fodder by the market, <strong>to be fed back to us</strong> <a href="#B16">[B16]</a>. We are not valued as producers; we are valued as consumers of products, and vessels for marketing those very products.</p>
<p>The current state of the world has many different sources of validation but does not have a space for the self-validated. If we choose to be blind to the sociality of the content we see, then we have nothing at all. Every package of content is socialised, everything is floating in mediated space <a href="#B17">[B17]</a>. The isolated, untouched (by mind or hand) content has no place in the world. We are surrounded by content which has no fidelity, coils through minds at will, and yields their message to anyone who enquires. There is no knowledge personally reserved for you in this pool of content. Reading is supposed to lead to synthesis and this synthesis is meant to culminate into a development of personal perspectives and opinions. However, in a pool of commonly read content there is more likelihood for the development of <strong>cliques and clouds</strong> of common belief and little space for individualised synthesis. Some get hit more directly by some threads of content and identify the hit as a personal facet of discovery.</p>
<blockquote>“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”<br />— <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/38115">Noam Chomsky, <em>The Common Good</em></a></blockquote>
<p>To hit upon a truly personal facet of content that doesn’t belong to a popular cesspool, a flow of production has to be initiated and self-validated. Entire knowledge-systems need be constructed without any building blocks but with content generated from the knowledge of the moment <a href="#B18">[B18]</a>. Insights gleaned from here and there come together as a granular pool of content that is personal, special and hitherto unseen in our context. A unique association between the individual and message gets formed. And this association is incoherent and unfamiliar in ways, because it doesn't belong to the popularly socialised frameworks of knowledge. This weird fiction gets overlooked and thereby remains safe from being intruded upon or being misconstrued. <strong>The obscure and the hidden</strong> breed mysteries waiting to be tapped.</p>
<p>Time to break <a href="#B19">[B19]</a> from packaged commodified sound byte capsules.</p>
<hr />
<h3><strong>A) Index of Surfatial Projects</strong></h3>
<p><a id="A1"></a>1. Study groups on Google Hangouts on Air</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>Study groups with Surfatial anchors</li>
<li>Study groups with guest anchors</li></ol>
<p><a id="A2"></a>2. Conversation based games: <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/cz23jdonfo9ebs5/AACyd1mrUdpxRHL9l2XEQSWfa?dl=0">flip & blip</a></p>
<p><a id="A3"></a>3. Book of Conversation Triggers: <a href="https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26683259/SURFATIAL_public/Can%25252520we%25252520talk%25252520about%25252520here%25252520and%25252520now.pdf">PDF</a></p>
<p><a id="A4"></a>4. Online Residency on Surfatial’s Facebook page</p>
<p><a id="A5"></a>5. Post-writer: <a href="https://twitter.com/post_writer">https://twitter.com/post_writer</a>.</p>
<ol type="a">
<li>Each issue is based on public contributions</li></ol>
<p><a id="A6"></a>6. Interactive performances and exhibitions</p>
<p><a id="A7"></a>7. Tracks based on our archives of text and audio: <a href="https://soundcloud.com/surfatial/tracks">Soundcloud</a></p>
<p><a id="A8"></a>8. Digital archives of games, performance and study-groups: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjekKNce4kvdoHSyDBmP03g">YouTube</a></p>
<p><a id="A9"></a>9. Poster: <a href="https://web.facebook.com/surfatial/photos/?tab=album&album_id=236317999892398">Facebook</a></p>
<h3><strong>B) References <a href="#B20">[B20]</a></strong></h3>
<p><a id="B1"></a>1. Pulp - “Glory Days” - This is Hardcore (1998)</p>
<p><a id="B2"></a>2. Pink Floyd - “The Happiest Days of Our Lives” - The Wall (1979)</p>
<p><a id="B3"></a>3. Weezer - “The Futurescope Trilogy” - Everything Will Be Alright In The End (2014)</p>
<p><a id="B4"></a>4. Radiohead - “How to Disappear Completely” - Kid A (2000)</p>
<p><a id="B5"></a>5. Nirvana - “Smells Like Teen Spirit” - Nevermind (1991)</p>
<p><a id="B6"></a>6. Pink Floyd - “Empty Spaces” - The Wall (1979)</p>
<p><a id="B7"></a>7. Metallica - “The Unforgiven” - Metallica (The Black Album) (1991)</p>
<p><a id="B8"></a>8. Backstreet Boys - “Quit Playing Games with My Heart” - Backstreet Boys (1995)</p>
<p><a id="B9"></a>9. Sting - “Shape of My Heart” - Ten Summoner’s Tales (1993)</p>
<p><a id="B10"></a>10. Kenny Rogers - “Rules of the Game” - The Gambler (1978)</p>
<p><a id="B11"></a>11. Boyzone - “If We Try” - BZ20 (2013)</p>
<p><a id="B12"></a>12. Bangles - “Mixed Messages” - Doll Revolution (2003)</p>
<p><a id="B13"></a>13. Cranberries - “Linger” - Everybody Else's Doing It, So Why Can't We? (1993)</p>
<p><a id="B14"></a>14. Lady Gaga - “Paparazzi” - The Fame (2008)</p>
<p><a id="B15"></a>15. Eminem - “The Real Slim Shady” - The Marshal Mathers LP (2000)</p>
<p><a id="B16"></a>16. Kraftwerk - “Hall of Mirrors” - Trans-Europe Express (1977)</p>
<p><a id="B17"></a>17. Marshall McLuhan - “The Medium is the Message” - The Medium is the Message (1967)</p>
<p><a id="B18"></a>18. Chicks on Speed - “Utopia” - UTOPIA (2014)</p>
<p><a id="B19"></a>19. Queen - I Want to Break Free - The Works (1984)</p>
<p><a id="B20"></a>20. DJ Shadow - “Right Thing / GDMFSOB” - The Private Press (2002)</p>
<h3><strong>C) Game - 101 Ways of starting an ISP: No. 54</strong></h3>
<p>Instructions for playing:</p>
<ol>
<li><a href="http://bots.post-writer.xyz/RiTaJS-master%202/examples/p5js/HaikuGrammar/">Click here to access the game</a>.<br /><br /></li>
<li>On every left-click, you will receive a new poster.<br /><br /></li>
<li>If you like what you see, right-click and save as an image. (This works on the Google Chrome and Firefox browsers).<br /><br /></li>
<li>You can then choose to share the image on your Facebook or Twitter pages and tag <a href="https://paper.dropbox.com/?q=%25252523Surfatial">#Surfatial</a>. We use conversation as currency, so we will contact you and converse with you to complete the transaction process.</li></ol>
<h3><strong>Authors' Profile</strong></h3>
<p>Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. We use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. We are concerned with enabling disinhibition through the internet, for expressing what may not be feasible in physical reality. We organise internet-based audio conferences called study-groups where we deal with philosophical questions and a self-reflective exchange of individual experiences. We have previously presented our work at <em>Soundphile 2016</em>, Delhi; <em>play_book</em> (in collaboration with Thukral & Tagra), Gurgaon; CONA, Mumbai, and Mumbai Art Room. Our upcoming engagement is with ZK/U, Berlin.</p>
<p>Facebook - <a href="https://www.facebook.com/surfatial">https://www.facebook.com/surfatial</a></p>
<p>Website - <a href="http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial">http://www.museumofvestigialdesire.net/offices/surfatial</a></p>
<p>Twitter - <a href="https://twitter.com/surfatial">https://twitter.com/surfatial</a></p>
<p>Surfatial is Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, Satya Gummuluri, and No.55, a bot.</p>
<h4>Prayas Abhinav</h4>
<p>Prayas is an artist and teacher. He works on his capacity to learn through performance. He has worked in the last few years on numerous pieces of speculative fiction, software, games, interactive installations, public interventions and curatorial projects. He is the initiator of the <a href="http://museumofvestigialdesire.net/">Museum of Vestigial Desire</a>. He has developed his practice with the support of fellowships by Sarai, Openspace, the Center for Experimental Media Arts (CEMA), TED and Lucid. He has been in residencies at Khoj (India), Coded Cultures (Austria) and dis-locate (Japan). He has shared his work at festivals including Transmediale, 48c, Futuresonic, ISEA and Wintercamp.</p>
<h4>Satya Gummuluri</h4>
<p>Satya is an artist originally from Bombay currently based in Germany. She works with music, writing and photography as well as doing freelance translation, editorial and research work. She has lived in Chicago for several years, collaborating, recording, performing and traveling with musicians and dancers in Chicago, NYC and Lisbon, and has appeared with them at the Chicago Jazz and World Music Festivals, and Austin’s SXSW. As a writer and translator, her work has appeared in online and print journals such as Almost Island and SAADA’s Tides magazine. She also works with activist groups engaged with feminism and urban issues in India and the US.</p>
<h4>Malavika Rajnarayan</h4>
<p>Malavika is an artist based in India. Her paintings use the human figure to explore larger issues of collective consciousness. Her works have also been exhibited in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai and Ahmedabad in India and at the 2007 Sosabeol Art Expo in South Korea. She has presented lectures at EWHA University in Seoul, South Korea, College of Fine Arts, Karnataka Chitrakala Parishath, SITE art space, Baroda and conducted short workshops at NID, Ahmedabad and at non-profit organisations for women and children. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Collective Studio Baroda, The Contemporary Artists Centre, Troy, New York and at CAMAC Centre for Art in Marnay sur-Seine, France, supported by the K. K. Hebbar Art foundation and the Indian Council for Cultural Relations.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_101-ways-of-starting-an-isp-no-53-conversation-content-weird-fiction'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_101-ways-of-starting-an-isp-no-53-conversation-content-weird-fiction</a>
</p>
No publisherSurfatialAnonymityInternet StudiesRAW BlogResearchers at Work2016-08-03T12:47:31ZBlog Entry Studying Internet in India (2016): Selected Abstracts
https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts
<b>We received some great submissions and decided to select twelve abstracts, and not only ten as we planned earlier. Here are the abstracts.</b>
<p> </p>
<h3><strong>Abhimanyu Roy</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>The Curious Incidents on Matrimonial Websites in India</em></strong></p>
<p>What is love? Philosophers have argued over it, biologists have researched it and in the age of the internet, innovators have disrupted it. In the west, dating websites such as OKCupid and eHarmony use all manner of algorithms to find its users their optimal match. In India’s conservative society though, dating is fast-tracked or skipped altogether in favor of marriage. This gives rise to a plethora of matrimonial sites such as Jeevansathi.com and Shaadi.com. This is where things get tricky.</p>
<p>Matrimonial websites are different from other internet-enabled services. The gravity of the decision and the major impact that it has on the lives of users brings in pressure and a range of emotions that are not there on casual transactions such as an Uber ride or a foodpanda order. From outright fraud to online harassment newspaper back pages are filled with nightmare stories that begin on a matrimonial website. So much so, that in November of last year, the Indian government decided to set up a panel to regulate matrimonial sites in order to curb abuse. The essay will analyze India’s social stand on marriage, the role of matrimonial websites in modern day India, the problems this awkward amalgamation of the internet and love gives rise to and the steps authorities and matrimonial companies are taking to prevent these issues from occurring.</p>
<h3><strong>Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini Chami, and Deepti Bharthur</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Internet as Sutradhar: The Aesthetics and Politics of Digital Age Counter-power</em></strong></p>
<p>The open Internet is now a feeble, wannabe, digital age meme. The despots have grabbed it and capitalism has colonised it. But the network that engulfs its users is also a multi-headed organism; the predictables have to make peace with the unpredictables, both arising as they do with the unruly affordances of the network. The much celebrated public domain of open government data, usually meant for geeks and software gurus dedicated to the brave new 'codeful' future, has meant little for marginal subjects of India's development project. Data on government websites have been critiqued worldwide for often being too clunky to catalyse civic use or too obscure to pin down government efficacy. However, as an instrument of accountable governance, data in the public domain can help hold the line, fuelling vanguard action to foster democracy. Activists engaged in the right to food movement in India had reason to rejoice recently when the Supreme Court of India pulled up the central government for delay in release of funds under the MGNREGA scheme and violating the food security law. The series of actions leading to this victory enjoins deeper examination of the MGNREGS website, the design principles of the MIS that generates reports based on the data, and the truth claims that arose in the contingent context marking this struggle. <em>What were the ingredients of this happy irony; the deployment of the master's tools to disband the master's house? What aesthetics and principles made for a public data structure that allowed citizens to hack into state impunity? And what do such practices around the digital tell us about the performativity of the Internet - not as a grand, open, phenomenon for the network to access the multitude, but as the inane, local, Sutradhar (alchemist who produces the narrative), who allows truths to be told?</em></p>
<h3><strong>Aishwarya Panicker</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>How Green is the Internet? The Good, the Bad and the Ugly</em></strong></p>
<p>Groceries at your doorstep, data on your fingertips, an Uber at the tap of a button and information overload- human negotiations with the internet have definitely changed drastically in the past few decades. Research in the area, too, has transformed to not just the supply of internet to the masses, but has evolved to include innovative and revolutionary ideas in terms of internet infrastructure and governance. With over 3.2 Billion internet users in the world, and over 400 million of these from India, this is no surprise.</p>
<p>However, while environmental sustainability remains at the forefront of many-a-government, there is little data / debate / analysis / examination of the environmental impact of the internet. This is true especially for India. In 2011, Joel Gombiner wrote an academic paper on the problem of the Internets carbon footprint, with a premise based on the lesser known fact that the ICT industry has been ‘responsible for two to four percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions’- an area that the Climate Group’s Smart 2020 report had focused on back in 2008 as well. Clearly this is a war on the environment that is yet to receive large-scale attention.</p>
<p>How can we move beyond particular fascinations with the internet and engage holistically with the internet? By moving towards a dimension of internet infrastructure studies, that has large policy and implementation benefits. This paper, then, will seek to elucidate four central issue areas: first, as the third highest country in terms of internet use, what is the current environmental impact of internet usage in India? Second, are there any regulatory provisions that give prescriptive measures to data centres and providers? Third, do any global standards
exist in this regard and finally, what future steps can be taken (by the government, civil society
and individuals) to address this?</p>
<h3><strong>Deepak Prince</strong></h3>
<p>One of the most important effects of increasing internet connectivity coupled with universal electronic display screens, multimedia digital objects and supple graphic interfaces, is the proliferation of systems of enunciation. The business letter, typewriter, electric telegraph and radio, each in its own time, transformed how humans make sense in different forms of writing. Some of these survive to this day (forms of address from letters, the abbreviations and ‘cablese’ from telegraph operators etc). Now, we find new spaces of networked sociality emerging at rapid speeds, and everyday, we forget many others that are now outdated, no longer ‘supported’ or desired. How does one study this supple flow of discourse? Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of tracing collective assemblages of enunciation (the structuring structures of discourse) and Gilbert Simondon’s Law of relaxation (where technical elements created by complex ensembles are released into a path of technological evolution where they may or may not crystallize the formation of new ensembles) are two philosophical notions that seek to address this problem. The anthropologist Ilana Gershon suggests that new social media platforms like Facebook have a detrimental effect on sociality because they impose a neo-liberal notion of personhood on its users, through the interface. I take this as my point of departure, and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a new media marketing agency, I attempt to draw out how ‘posting’ is modulated on facebook, about how subjectivity is configured within the complex matrix comprising a constant flow of posts, the economy of ‘liking’, algorithmic sorting and affects that do not cross the threshold of the screen.</p>
<h3><strong>Maitrayee Mukerji</strong></h3>
<p>By some latest estimates, around 35% of the population access the Internet in India using multiple devices. As Indians browse, search, transact and interact online, one can observe the increasing intertwining of the Internet in their everyday lives. But, how much do we know about the influence and impact of the Internet on Indian and in India? Advances in big data technologies provide an exciting opportunity for social science researchers to study the Internet. So, trends can be detected, opinions and sentiments can be calibrated, social networks can be discovered by using technologies for collecting and mining data on people online. But are social science researchers in India equipped enough to do a rigorous and detailed study of the India? Leaving aside debates on epistemology, ontology and methodology of researching Internet using big data analytics, the very first challenge is
limited access to data. A cursory scan of the available research would indicate that the data – tweets, trends, comments, memes etc. have generally been collected manually. The bulk of the data is collected by private companies and available either at a price or by writing programs to access them through APIs. The latter allows only limited extraction of data and more often than not has a learning curve. Access to raw data, through institutional repositories or special permission, if available is only to select few. Legal and ethical issues arise if one considers scrapping websites for data. The essay is an attempt to articulate the challenges in accessing data while making attempts to study the Internet using big data analytics.</p>
<h3><strong>Muhammed Afzal P</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Internet Memes as Effective Means of Social and Political Criticism</em></strong></p>
<p>By looking at the user-generated memes posted from the Malayalam Facebook pages “Troll Malayalam” and “International Chalu Union”, this essay argues that political memes function as effective means of social and political criticism in Kerala. In a society where conversations often tend to feature examples from popular films, memes from these pages use images from popular culture including television to respond to current affairs as well as contemporary social and political questions. Often described mistakenly as 'trolls' by the practitioners themselves, a major portion of the memes have a progressive content in terms of discussing questions related to religion, sexuality, nationalism, etc. It won’t be an exaggeration to state that many Malayalis see these memes as instant 'news analysis' of current affairs. The argument of this essay will be advanced through an analysis of the memes that were produced in relation to contemporary socio-political and cultural questions such as beef ban, the rise of right-wing politics in Kerala, the question of religious conservatism, etc. Through this the essay seeks to investigate how internet memes creatively contribute to social movements and also to see how critical questions in cultural criticism are translated into "the popular.'</p>
<h3><strong>Dr. Ravikant Kisana</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Archetyping the 'Launda' Humor on the Desi Internet</em></strong></p>
<p>Humor on the internet has proven a massive social unifying force for young, upper class Indian millennials. The humor is not just consumed via Western (mainly US) humor collectives such as 9GAG, Cracked, etc - the proliferation of 'Indian' humor pages on the Facebook and the countless YouTube comedy channels is testament to the localisation of this content. However, the humor which is seen as a unifying force is largely 'launda' aka. 'heteronormative-upper caste-male' in its sensibilities. Comedy collectives like TVF, with its popular channel 'Q-tiyapa' had to create a separate handle 'Girliyapa' to cater to feminist themes. The idea is that humor by default is male, and 'feminist humor' needs a separate space.</p>
<p>This essay seeks to study the 'launda'-cultural attributes of online Indian humor. It will seek to document and wean archetypes of comedy tropes which fit this mode. The area of the documentation will be YouTube comedy channels and Facebook humor pages—however, the same can be extended to Twitter handles and the suchlike.</p>
<h3><strong>Siddharth Rao and Kiran Kumar</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Chota Recharge and the Chota Internet</em></strong></p>
<p>Uniform and affordable Internet is emerging as one of the fundamental civil rights in developing countries. However in India, the connectivity is far from uniform across the regions, where the disparity is evident in the infrastructure, the cost of access and telecommunication services to provide Internet facilities among different economic classes. In spite of having a large mobile user base, the mobile Internet are still remarkably slower in some of the developing countries. Especially in India, it falls below 50% even in comparison with the performance of its developing counterparts!</p>
<p>This essay presents a study of connectivity and performance trends based on an exploratory analysis of mobile Internet measurement data from India. In order to assess the state of mobile networks and its readiness in adopting the different mobile standards (2G, 3G, and 4G) for commercial use, we discuss the spread, penetration, interoperability and the congestion trends.</p>
<p>Based on our analysis, we argue that the network operators have taken negligible measures to scale the mobile Internet. Affordable Internet is definitely for everyone. But, the affordability of the Internet in terms of cost
does not necessarily imply the rightful access to Internet services. Chota recharge is possibly leading us to chota (shrunken) Internet!</p>
<h3><strong>Smarika Kumar</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Why Mythologies are Crucial to Understand Governance on the Internet: The Case of Online Maps</em></strong></p>
<p>How does one study internet in India? This essay proposes to provide one possible answer to this question through its central argument that internet, like other technologies, is very much a part of a “mythological” or “fictional” narrative of the history of this country, and without an understanding of these mythologies, the development of internet governance in the country cannot be hoped to be understood. This central argument is traced in the essay through the debates and discussions on law and policymaking around online maps. The essay, in its first part, explores what a “mythological” account of the history of India might mean, and what role technological developments play in it. It does so by tracing the narrative of mapmaking in medieval India and its deep ties with magic, secrecy and mythical stories. It then surveys how modern mapping surveys in the colonial period interacted with the idea of the “native”, and argues that such interactions created a dichotomy between “native” sciences, folklore on the one hand, and colonial achievements, national security on the other. It argues that it is this latter strand of a certain “national security” vision of technology which found dominant voice in the regulation
of maps in India post-independence, yet the sense of the unknown, mystical, or “mythological” in such technological deployment as mapmaking requires, survived. The essay finally uses such evidence to trace how even in online
interactions, and internet governance design in India- this aspect of the mystical and the fear of it often sustains, driven by a (repressed?) memory of mythology, through the use of analogies. And it is within this twilight
zone, within this frontier between “mythology” and nation-building, that a governance design for online maps is being presently constructed in India. The essay then argues that it becomes crucial to understand such mythologies around technology generally and internet specifically and the manner they interact with law and policymaking in order to really get a sense of a 21st century India’s experience of the internet.</p>
<h3><strong>Sujeet George</strong></h3>
<p><strong><em>Understanding Reddit: The Indian Context</em></strong></p>
<p>Even as social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter seek to carve a niche within the Indian social media landscape, the presence and impact of news aggregator website reddit seems relatively unnoticed. Known for its excessive self-referentiality and inability to emerge from a restricted pool of informational flow, reddit nevertheless has come to be a major focal point of convergence of news and public opinion, especially in the United States. The web interface, which allows for users with overlapping interests to converge under a common platform namely the “subreddit,” allows the possibility of understanding questions of user taste and the directions in which information and user attention flow.</p>
<p>This paper seeks to offer a preliminary gesture towards understanding reddit’s usage and breadth in the Indian context. Through an analysis of the “India” subreddit and examining the manner and context in which information and ideas are shared, proposed, and debunked, the paper aspires to formulate a methodology for interrogating sites like reddit that offer the possibilities of social mediation, even as users maintain a limited amount of privacy. At the
same time, to what extent can such news aggregator sites direct the ways in which opinions and news flows change course as a true marker of information generation responding to user inputs.</p>
<h3><strong>Supratim Pal</strong></h3>
<p>India, being a multilingual country, owes a lot to the Internet for adding words to the vocabulary of everyday use in different languages.</p>
<p>This paper would critically examine how Net words like "selfie", "wall", "profile" and others have changed the way Indians write or talk. For example, a word like "nijaswi" was not there in Bengali language five years back but is used across several platforms as a translation of "selfie".</p>
<p>On one hand, computer-mediated communication (CMC) has helped us to express in short messages and on the other, we all have picked up use of punctuation marks like colon or a semicolon to express our emotion - which have got another name, "emoticons".</p>
<p>The paper would be more practical in approach than theoretical. For example, it would feature chat (another example of CMC) conversations 10 years ago when hardly an emoticon was used, and that of today's when we cannot think of a chat without a "smiley" or a "sticker". Even the linguist, David Crystal, probably could not have thought that in 15 years, the language (not just lingua franca, English) would change worldwide since he first tried to theorize Internet language in 2001.</p>
<p>Today, a linguist need not to have a proper publication to introduce a word in any language but Netizens can re-invent words like "troll" or "roast" to criticize one or "superlike" to celebrate an achievement or even "unfriend" someone to just relax.</p>
<h3><strong>Surfatial</strong></h3>
<p>Surfatial is a trans-local collective that operates through the internet. We use conversations to aid learning outside established structures. We are concerned with enabling disinhibition through the internet, for expressing
what may not be feasible in physical reality. What role does partial or complete anonymity play in this process of seeking “safe” zones of expression? Fake profiles on social media offer such zones, while perhaps also operating to propagate, mislead or troll.</p>
<p>Our essay would argue:</p>
<ol><li>That there is a desire to participate in speculative fora in the Indian cultural context and the internet has created space for philosophical questioning among contemporary Indian participants which can develop further, despite common assertions that online spaces are largely uncivil and abusive.</li>
<li>That anonymous and pseudonymous content production offers a method for exploring and expressing with a certain degree of freedom.</li>
<li>Spam-like methods used in sub-cultural outreach efforts on social media have proved effective in puncturing filter bubbles.</li></ol>
<p>Our essay would be drawn from experiments via Surfatial’s online engagement platforms (Surfatial’s Study groups and post_writer project) to examine:</p>
<ol><li>Extent of participation.</li>
<li>Disinhibition facilitation and dialoguing.</li>
<li>Reach.</li>
<li>Emergence and development of ideas.</li>
<li>Creating an archive of internet activity and re-processing it into new forms of presentation.</li></ol>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts'>https://cis-india.org/raw/studying-internet-in-india-2016-selected-abstracts</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroResearchers at WorkFeaturedInternet StudiesRAW Blog2016-07-06T06:24:42ZBlog Entry Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India
https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india-2016
<b>As Internet makes itself comfortable amidst everyday lives in India, it becomes everywhere and everyware, it comes in 40 MBPS Unlimited and in chhota recharges – though no longer in zero flavour – the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society invites abstracts for essays that explore how do we study internet in India today. </b>
<p> </p>
<h3>Submission deadline extended to <strong>Sunday, July 03</strong>.</h3>
<hr />
<img src="https://github.com/cis-india/website/raw/master/img/RAW_Morpheus-Meme-Digital-Genre.png" alt="What if I told you memes are a new digital genre?" />
<p> </p>
<h6>Source: <a href="http://leonardoflores.net/blog/new-digital-genres-writing-for-social-media/">Leonardo Flores</a>.</h6>
<p> </p>
<p>How do we move beyond a fascination with new digital things and interfaces that we engage with on the internet, which are increasingly becoming the objects and sites of our research and creative practices? How do we engage with these on their own terms, and perhaps also against the grain? What "new" is being brought in, performed, and afforded by these digital artefacts in our daily lives? How can our concerns and practices benefit from developing an awareness of their aesthetics, functions, and politics?</p>
<p>This call is for researchers, workers, and others interested in closely – or from a distance – commenting on these topics and questions.</p>
<p>Please send abstracts (200 words) to <a href="mailto:raw@cis-india.org">raw@cis-india.org</a> by <strong>Sunday, July 03, 2016</strong>. The subject of the email should be 'Studying Internet in India.'</p>
<p>We will select up to 10 abstracts and announce them on <strong>Tuesday, July 05, 2016</strong>.</p>
<p>The selected authors will be asked to submit the final longform essay (3,000-4,000 words) by <strong>Sunday, July 31, 2016</strong>. The final essays will be published on the RAW Blog. The authors will be offered an honourarium of Rs. 6,000.</p>
<p>We understand that not all essays can be measured in words. The authors are very much welcome to work with text, images, sounds, videos, code, and other mediatic forms that the internet offers. We will not be running a Word Count on the final 'essay.' The basic requirement is that the 'essay' must offer an <em>argument</em> – through text, or otherwise.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india-2016'>https://cis-india.org/raw/call-for-essays-studying-internet-in-india-2016</a>
</p>
No publishersumandroInternet StudiesRAW BlogFeaturedNoticesResearchers at Work2016-07-04T12:48:15ZBlog EntryThe Many Lives and Sites of Internet in Bhubaneswar
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar
<b>This post by Sailen Routray is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sailen is a researcher, writer, editor and translator who lives and works in Bhubaneswar. In this essay, he takes a preliminary step towards capturing some of the experiences of running and using internet cafes, experiences that lie at the interstices of (digital) objects and spaces, that are at the same time a history of the internet as well as a personal history of the city.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Cybercafé in Bhubaneswar: A Very Personal Introduction</h2>
<p>Till about ten years back perhaps, mustard-yellow coloured STD booths were as common a part of the Indian urban ecosystem as the common crow. But, as of the middle of 2015, the apparently ever ubiquitous STD booth seems to have gone the way of the sparrow, not yet extinct, but rare enough to evoke a visceral pang of nostalgia whenever one comes across a straggling specimen. But nostalgia is perhaps the wrong word to describe the emotion of ‘missing’ a STD booth in a city like Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p>The emotion that such urban change evokes in one is perhaps better described by the Odia word moha-maya (which is a combination of two words – maya and moha) which can connote everything from pity to longing to irrational attachment that causes pain. For this writer, more than the STD booth, what causes the most serious pang of moha-maya are the rapidly disappearing cybercafes, although the latter have not quite evaporated so completely as the STD booth.</p>
<p>This might not sound like too much of a loss for those on the right side of thirty. But to some of us (belonging to what Palash Krishna Mehrotra categorised as ‘The Butterfly Generation’ in the eponymous book) inching towards our first hiccups of an early middle age, this will be just another wry reminder of mortality; all things will fade away, including yours truly.</p>
<p>I do not remember the first day I accessed the internet. Perhaps the experience was not very startling; I like many others in my generation, I lie between the two Indian extremes to technological innovations – the blind fascination welded with incompetence that characterises so much of the generation of the midnight’s children, and the blind acceptance of all technological innovations by the generation born in the 1990s and 2000s. I, for example, also do not remember the first time I used a telephone. But I do remember for sure, that it was at our Sailashree Vihar home (in Bhubaneswar), to which we shifted in October 1992; because, one remembers for sure that one did not have a telephone connection before then.</p>
<p>Similarly, I remember where I accessed the internet for the first time, although the details of that first interface escape me now. It was a place called PAN-NET (or was it PLANNET? I can’t be sure; my memory, unfortunately, is like a bamboo sieve; it holds things, but not too much and not for very long) on the edge of the IMFA park in Shahid Nagar. Within a year of this, at least three cybercafés had opened shop near my house in Sailashree Vihar in the Chandrasekharpur area in North Bhubaneswar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Semi-Public Internet</h2>
<p>Thus, my first experience of accessing the internet, like the majority of Indians of my generation perhaps, was at a ‘public’ place, a cybercafé. What happened as a result, was that the idea of accessing the internet, and not only its usage, as a communal exercise, got embedded deeply inside one’s mind; one saw the internet as a public utility and its usage as public/semi-public acts.</p>
<p>Sasikanta Bose (name changed), a student of philosophy, feels in a similar way. He learnt to use computers and the internet in cybercafés in the Jagamohan Nagar area, near his college in Bhubaneswar. As a regular writer for webzines earlier, he could not have functioned without these. Although now he accesses the internet through a cable connection and a laptop at home, he still uses cybercafés for taking printouts and for scanning. Over the last few years, Facebook is an additional reason for him to be on the World Wide Web, and he is more comfortable accessing Facebook at home, rather than in a cybercafé. But his primary reason for accessing the net remains to access webzines and reading material on the internet, and he feels this is done much more efficiently at a cybercafé since there is an immediate monetary pressure to get the most returns on the money that one is spending. The cybercafé that he uses the most is EXCEL in Sailashree Vihar.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Case of ‘EXCEL’</h2>
<p>EXCEL is a cybercafé established in the year 2001. Mr. Susant Kumar Behera and Mr. Sukant Kumar Behera (two brothers) are the proprietors. It is located on the ground floor of a house in the sixth phase of Sailashree Vihar. It must be mentioned here in passing that Sailashree Vihar is a strange new locality in Bhubaneswar initially planned and constructed by the Odisha State Housing Board; strange, like a lot of other things that came into being in the 1980s. It has only two ‘phases’, phase six and phase seven; I do not think even the Housing Board knows where the other five phases have meandered off to.</p>
<p>EXCEL is located on a service road parallel to the main arterial road of Sailashree Vihar that divides the sixth and the seventh phases. When Excel opened, it was opened primarily as a communication center with the cybercafé and the STD-PCO booth as the mainstays of the family concern. The STD booth reached its peak in 2004 and was almost dead by 2006-2007; the increasingly ubiquitous mobile phone effectively killed the PCO business. A coin-operated system was operational till very recently; it was discontinued in 2013. With the death of the PCO booth, EXCEL moved into the mobile voucher business for pre-paid mobiles; but with only two percent commission being offered by most service providers, this is a high-turnover but low-profit business for the shop, and has not been able to replace the revenues and profits of the PCO business.</p>
<p>Mr. Susant Behera (Bunu bhai to most of his customers and to me as well; and he also happens to be a close friend of one my closest schoolmate’s family friend), says that when they started the cybercafé business, they were very anxious to be a ‘different’ kind of player. Most cybercafés in Bhubaneswar, then offered primarily the illicit joys of pornography as their primary attraction. This was reflected in the very design of the cybercafés; most cybercafés were designed in the form of small cabins with often curtains on their small doors, and the computer screens faced the wall. Therefore, when EXCEL opened shop, I remember it being a refreshingly new kind of cybercafé. All the monitors were placed on reverse ‘U’ shaped tables with the backs of the monitors facing the wall, and the monitor screens facing out towards everyone; there was thus, no privacy. But this completely removed the sleaze that was then associated with cybercafés and the internet, and made the cybercafé popular with new social groups using the internet, such as single young women. EXCEL was and still remains popular with young women as a node for accessing the internet.</p>
<p>Now EXCEL is a very different kind of space from the time I remember it from my college days (1999-2002). It was, even then, popular with the young. But now it is much more of a safe hang-out place for college going young adults and those who have newly joined the work force, with fast moving snacks items such as puffs (called ‘patties’ in Bhubaneswar) and rolls, and ice cream being sold at the shop. It is much more of tuck shop now, with national and international brands of packaged food such as Haldiram and Nestle fighting for rack space. This transformation started in 2003 itself, two years into the opening the business; but whereas earlier EXCEL was primarily a PCO booth and cybercafé where one could get something to eat, it is primary a tuck shop these days. The shop also functions as a travel agent now, and books all kinds of bus, train and flight tickets.</p>
<p>The cybercafé still remains important for this family business and contributes around 20% of its total profits; but this is down from an all-time high of 50-60% in 2006-07 and from 30% when the business started in 2001. In the last ten years, the capacity of the café has come down by ten computers, and now it operates with only six systems; till 2010, the café had 20 systems, and by 2012, the number had decreased to 14. A large part of the revenue is now from the ancillary services provided by the cybercafé, such as scanning and printing; data does not drive the business any longer. Even the six systems now operational in EXCEL stay unused for some parts of the day; it operates at full capacity only in the evenings. During the day, often half of the systems lie idle and unused. But the cybercafé in EXCEL has other roles in the family business; it often provides an entry into other services such as ticketing that are offered; often a customer who steps into the shop to take printouts in the cybercafé, ends up buying a recharge voucher for her pre-paid mobile connection, or picks up a family pack of ice-cream for her home.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Imagining a World without Cybercafés</h2>
<p>Ajay Kumar Puhan (28, from Jajpur district), who works at EXCEL, feels that cybercafés in their present form will survive only for another three to four years. After that period of time they just might survive as glorified ‘printout and scanning’ cafes. He has worked for around nine years at Excel, across the last ten years, since he was 18 years old. Now he is simultaneously studying and is in the final stages of finishing his diploma in mechanical engineering. According to him, the customer profile has drastically changed over the last ten years; only those who cannot and/or do not access the internet through mobile devices come to the cybercafé for their browsing needs. Students also drive demand for the café with their needs for filling up forms. He feels that the situation is very similar in his village as well, with almost everyone who can afford a smart phone has one with an internet pack.</p>
<p>This decline in the cybercafé component of the family business in EXCEL is reflective of a larger churning in the business. Ten years back there were around ten cybercafés in the greater Sailashree Vihar area. Now only three survive, of which EXCEL is one. Elsewhere in Bhubaneswar, the story is a similar one; often cybercafés have added additional services such as photocopiers or have transformed into gaming stations to survive as businesses. This change has been driven by fundamental transformations in the ways in which the internet is accessed in the country and in the city. Mobile phones have become the dominant device for accessing the internet in Bhubaneswar (and in India), and this has had significant effects on cybercafés in the city. The gentrification of many parts of the city and the consequently increasing rents for commercial property, and increases in wages of attendants at the cafes, are the other reasons why cybercafés are increasingly going the way of PCO-STD booths in the city.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Now, the Semi-Private Internet</h2>
<p>Rahul (name changed) uses EXCEL very infrequently. But when he was a student in a big engineering college four years back, he used to sometimes go to the bunch of cyber cafes dotting the area surrounding his college in South-west Bhubaneswar. His visits were infrequent; he would go to a cyber café for some project related work, to quickly check his Facebook account, or to get his fix of porn. Even when internet was available at home, the cybercafés offered a sense of freedom because of the anonymity of the interface.</p>
<p>There was very little regulation of the cybercafés a few years back, and one could get a cabin and access the net without any identity proof. One could have anonymous chats, browse for pornography and watch it in the semi-privacy of a cubicle, or get one’s dose of social networking sites (sometimes registered in a fake name) without the usual fears when one does these from one’s private connecting devices.</p>
<p>But his accessing the internet through the cybercafés was more often than not a very hesitant activity. Quite a few times there would be people making out in the next cabin; more often than not, these would be seniors or batch-mates from his college. In those days cybercafés were infamous for being places where girls and boys, often college students, with no other place to hang out in, would indulge in some heavy duty necking and petting. The owners of the cafes were aware of what was happening. But they would not interfere, as that would mean turning away customers. Raul did not have a problem with people making out in a cabin that shared the same partition as his cubicle; but, he would feel odd and get a nagging feeling as if he was intruding.</p>
<p>For Rahul. The semi-publicity of the cyber-café was manifested by its obverse – semi-privacy. He sometimes misses the hothouse atmosphere of the cybercafés of yore, when you could slice the sexual charge in their atmosphere with a scythe, and reap private moments in ‘public’ places. He has not searched for a cybercafé with any urgency in a long time, because he does not need them for his project work; and his smart phone answers his social networking needs. But he feels a certain moha-maya for the semi-privacies of the internet that existed outside the fully private smartphone and the laptop.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>Moha in sankrit means everything from infatuation, delusion, lack of discrimination, ignorance and falling into error, that are captured in the Odia word as well. The word maya also captures all these meanings in both English and Odia. And moha is a vice, for both Shankara and Buddha. It is a vice for Odia saints such as Achyutananda Das and Arakkhita Das as well, spanning the whole pre-modern experience from the 16th to the 19th centuries. Moha-maya is a feeling, a condition that one has to overcome to arrive at true knowledge – knowledge that simultaneously provides insights into the self and the world. Hence, to be free from moha-maya one needs to stay in the moment; any moha-maya for the past therefore, is supposed to be spiritually debilitating. Therefore, the Odia relationship with the past is a complicated one. One has to honour tradition; yet, one has to be free of moha-maya of the particular, peculiar, material manifestations of the tradition, of the past. This applies as much to dead relatives, as to disappearing socio-technological forms such as the STD booth and the cyber-cafes.</p>
<p>With the attack on the cybercafé continuing in all these various fronts, it is highly unlikely that it will survive into the third decade of the twenty-first century. But like other attacks on communally shared, semi-public/semi-private social spaces, these attacks of ‘inevitable’ forces of technology and market need to be resisted. But there are no easy answers as to how to go about doing it. As for me, even though I have a laptop and a couple of data cards (one personal, and the other official) through which I access the internet, even when I do not have the need to scan or print, I pay a routine weekly visit to the neighbourhood cybercafé. Token gesture, I know; but when one is fighting forces that are infinitely larger than oneself, one perhaps has to resort to all kinds instruments of resistance, including the token, ‘weapons of the weak’. One cannot eliminate death, but one can definitely prolong life. Especially, when the final moha-maya is for life itself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-many-lives-and-sites-of-internet-in-bhubaneswar</a>
</p>
No publisherSailen RoutrayCityInternet StudiesRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-21T05:36:18ZBlog EntryThe Internet in the Indian Judicial Imagination
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination
<b>This post by Divij Joshi is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Divij is a final year student at the National Law
School of India University, Bangalore and is a keen observer and researcher on issues of law, policy and technology. In this essay, he traces the history of the Internet in India through the lens of judicial trends, and looks at how the judiciary has defined its own role in relation to the Internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>On the 14th of August, 1995, the eve of the 48th anniversary of Indian Independence, India began a new, and wholly unanticipated tryst with destiny - Videsh Sanchar Nigam Limited (VSNL) launched India's first full Internet service for public access [1]. In 1998, just a few years after VSNL introduced dial-up Internet, around 0.5% of India’s population had regular Internet access. By 2013, the latest estimate, 15% of the country was connected to the Internet, and the number is growing exponentially [2]. As the influence of the Internet grew, the law and the courts began to take notice. In 1998, there were four mentions of the Internet in the higher judiciary (the High Courts in States and the Supreme Court of India), by 2015, it was referred to in hundreds of judgements and orders of the higher judiciary [3].</p>
<p>The revolutionary capacity of the Internet cannot be understated. It has played a critical part in displacing, creating and enhancing social structures and institutions – from the market, to ideas of community – and its potential still remains unexplored. The Internet has also unsettled legal systems around the world, because of its massive potential to create very new forms of social and legal relationships and paradigms which extant law was unequipped for. The dynamism of the Internet means that legislation and statutory law, being static and rigid, is inherently ill suited for the governance of the Internet, and much of this role is ultimately ceded to the judiciary. In a widely unregulated policy background, the role played by this institution in identifying and dealing with the peculiar nature of regulatory issues on the Internet – such as the central role of intermediaries, the challenges of intellectual property rights concerns, the conflicts of law between different jurisdictions, and the courts’ own role in being a regulator – is tremendously important. In this article, an attempt is made to weave a thread through judicial decisions as well as judicial <em>obiter</em> (or peripheral text) regarding the Internet, to explain how the judiciary has captured and defined the Internet and its capacities, potentials and actors, and what effects this has on the Internet and on society. Inter alia, this article examines how judicial disputes have shaped internet policy in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Internet and the Role of the Courts</h2>
<p>The relationship between the law and technology is reminiscent of the famous paradox posed by the greek philosopher Zeno – Achilles and a tortoise agree to race. The tortoise has a head start, and, by the logic of the paradox, Achilles is never able to catch up to him. Every time Achilles covers the distance between himself and the tortoise at any point, the tortoise has moved ahead some distance, which need to be covered once again. As Achilles covers that distance, the tortoise has once again moved a distance away, and so on, to infinite progression, proving that Achilles can never catch up to the tortoise [4].</p>
<p>The legal regulation of the Internet follows a similar path. The Internet was not an immediate concern for law and policy, which meant that its evolution was largely determined in a space free from centralized governmental regulation. By the time parliaments and courts began to understand the implications of Internet regulation, it was apparent that such regulation would be constrained by the very features of the Internet. The core feature of the Internet is decentralization of control, which is necessarily antithetical to creating a centralized legal regulation with. Moreover, the constant mutation in the function and use of the technology renders statutory law incredibly ineffective in being an adequate regulator. Even where legislatures determined a need to step in and draw special regulations for the Internet, they need to be either so broad or vague that they cede much of the regulatory space to interpreters – the courts – or be so specific that much of the regulation quickly becomes obsolete. Most importantly, the final authority to determine matters of constitutional import such as the content and scope of fundamental rights rests with the higher judiciary. In this scenario, the courts become the <em>de facto</em> policy makers for regulating technology. In light of our current political and social context, where the level of legislative debate on issues of public importance and constitutional import is negligible, the judiciary’s analysis of Internet regulation becomes even more important [5].</p>
<p>The judiciary is thus in a unique position to decide Internet policy and governance. The preliminary question is whether there is even a need to talk about the Internet as a special system with distinct policy concerns. The regulation of the Internet is certainly fundamental to the development of knowledge and education in societies, but do its unique features merit a departure from traditional law? The second and connected question is whether the law can actually play a role in determining how the Internet is shaped, i.e. how does technology respond to the law? The architecture of the system that defines the functionality of the Internet – like the TCP/IP protocol – has embodied certain values such as decentralization, autonomy, openness and privacy [6], which have to a large extent underlined the social and ethical implications of the Internet – the way it is used, the way it functions and the way it grows. These were the values explicitly introduced into the systems we use today to communicate and interact on the Internet [7]. However, there is no <em>a priori</em>, fixed nature of the Internet. The form the technologies that make up the Internet take, depend upon its architecture and its design, which are malleable, and to which laws contribute by incentivizing certain values and encumbering others. The legal regulation of the Internet, therefore critically affects the architecture of the system, and promotes and secures certain values.</p>
<p>Recognizing the effect of law upon the architecture of the Internet is critical to any balancing exercise that the judiciary has to conduct when it decides disputes about the Internet. The Internet is a unique public resource, in that its participants are (mostly) private actors pursuing a vareity of goals and interests. The values outlined above emerged in this context, where control was decetnralized and regulation depended to a large extent upon how these disparate parties act. However, the same values also disturb existing structures to control information for legitimate causes - such as protecting intellectual property rights or preventing hate speech. Adjudicating these values, often in the absence of any explicit social or political moral framework (with respect to lack of legislative or constitutional guidance on these values), the judicial responses end up as policy directions that shape the Internet. Seen outside a broader, progressive social context, which takes into account the impact of shaping technologies to reflect values, interests on the Internet are generally adjudicated and enforced as proprietary rights between private actors, which ultimately results in changing the dynamics and relative distribution of control over the technologies that make up the Internet. This proprietory conception of interests on the Internet is highly insular, and tends to undermine the intersts of the public as a stakeholder in the regulation of the Internet. This can play out in many ways – from regulation being overwhelmingly determined according to private interests like restricting new technologies in order to protect intellectual property; or with private actors imputed as the focal point of regulation, and therefore given massive control over the Internet. However, the courts can take a different approach to regulating the Internet. The judiciary, especially the Indian Supreme Court, has a generally activist trend, especially in environmental matters [8]. One of the most elegant principles invoked by the courts for the protection of the common environment, has been the public trust doctrine, which postulates that certain (environmental) resources exist for the public benefit and can only be eroded upon to ensure that they develop in the most beneficial way for the common resources [9]. A commons approach to the Internet would require a comprehensive evaluation of the roles played by different actors across different layers of the Internet and how to regulate them [10], but would be principally similar, in that rules of private property would be constrained by potential spillover effects on intellectual information resources.</p>
<p>As a prelude to examining the judicial analysis of the Internet, it is interesting to examine the judiciary’s own perception of its role in Internet regulation. Courts are constrained in their exercise of power by rules of jurisdiction, which become incredibly convoluted on the Internet. A broad assertion of state power over the net can potentially fragment it, which is an obvious problem. At the same time, state sovereignty and protection of the interests of its citizens and laws has to be balanced with the above concerns [11]. The judiciary in India first attempted to grapple with the problem by exercising ‘universal jurisdiction’ over all actions on the Internet, which allowed the Court to claim jurisdiction over a defendant as long as the website or service could be accessed from within its jurisdiction [12]. This broad-reaching standard was antithetical to the development of a harmonized, unfragmented Internet and created problems of jurisdictional and sovereign conflict. As the implications of such a direction became clear, the court evolved different standards for jurisdiction which were based on whether the Internet service had some connection with the territorial jurisdiction of the court in question. The judiciary began to develop caution in its approach towards exercising personal jurisdiction in Internet cases, first applying the ‘interactivity test’ and then the ‘specific targeting’ standards for questions of jurisdiction [13]. However, the judiciary continues to adhere to a ‘long-arm’ standard for copyright and trademark violations, which allows it to extend its jurisdiction extra-territorially under those laws, through rather specious analogies with pre-internet technologies. For example, in <em>WWE v Reshma</em> [14], the Court explicitly analogized sale of services or goods on the Internet with contracts concluded over the telephone. Although analogies provide a comfortable framework for analysis, they also shield important distinctions between technologies from legal analysis. Problems arising from Internet cases – where many actors across many jurisdictions are involved in varying degrees – are unique to Internet technologies and such analogies ignore these important distinctions. Morever, in all the above cases, the judiciary’s assertions of power over the Internet seems to be restricted only by pragmatic regulatory concerns (such as whether personal obedience of the defendant can be secured) and its evolving understanding of questions of jurisdiction are explicitly linked to changes in the use and perception of the Internet and an understanding of interactivity and communication on the Internet.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Early Internet and Judicial Perceptions</h2>
<p>The Internet crept into the judicial vocabulary in 1996; a year after public access was made available, when the Supreme Court first took cognizance of ‘Internet’ as a means of interlinking countries and gathering information instantaneously [15]. Several other cases in the High Courts also spoke of the ‘Information Highway’ [16] and the various services that companies were offering, which could be availed by individuals on the Internet [17]. This corresponded with the popular understanding of the ‘first wave’ of the Internet, mostly relating to business providing services and information to users on the World Wide Web or as a space for limited personal interaction (such as through email) [18].</p>
<p>Some of the earliest cases where the Courts had the opportunity to examine the nature of the Internet were related to Intellectual Property on the Internet, specifically trademark and copyright in the online world. The Domain Name System, which serve to identify devices accessible on the Internet, was one of the first regulatory challenges on the Internet. Domain name disputes were unprecedented in the analog world of intellectual property, since domain names were uniquely scarce goods due to the limitations of the DNS technology. In India, the Delhi High Court in the case of <em>Yahoo v Akash Arora</em> first took cognizance of regulatory challenges of the DNS system on the Internet, a space which it conceptualized as a large public network of computers, and held that domain names serve the same functions on the Internet as trademarks. This case saw the recognition of the Internet as a separate, regulable space, which the Court defined as <em>“a global collection of computer networks linking millions of public and private computers around the world.”</em> The Court recognized some of the core, democratic features of the Internet: <em>“The Internet is now recognized as an international system, a communication medium that allows anyone from any part of the lobe with access to the Internet to freely exchange information and share data.”</em> In this case, the Court upheld traditional trademark rights in the case of use of domain names. The Court’s first recognition of trademark on the Internet heralded the imputation of proprietary interests on the decentralized, shared network that was the Internet, and was a precursor to the many such cases, which mostly focused on private commercial concerns. Even as the Court understood the importance of the Internet commons, i.e. the information and architecture that makes up the Internet, it chose to ignore concerns of public interest in the openness of those commons, in its balancing of proprietary rights for trademark cases. The commercial significance of the Internet was echoed in the <em>Rediff</em> case, where the Bombay High Court opined that <em>“Undoubtedly the Internet is one of the important features of the Information Revolution. It is increasingly used by commercial organisations to promote themselves and their product and in some cases to buy and sell”</em> [19]. Moreover, in these early cases, the law of the analog age was applied wholesale to the Internet, without examining in-depth the possible differences in principle and approach, providing no precedent for the development of an ‘internet law’ [20]. Overly focussed on the proprietary nature of Internet interests, the conception of the Internet as a non-commercial space for collaboration at a decentralized or an individual level is absent from the judicial vocabulary at this stage.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Private Actors and Public Interest</h2>
<p>The Internet permits decentralization in the hands of several private actors, which makes control of information over it so difficult. However, the information and technology that makes up the Internet are also highly centralized at certain nodal points, such as the services which provide the physical infrastructure of the Internet (like ISPs) or intermediaries which create platforms for distribution of information. Since the Internet has no centralized architecture to enable governmental control, these private intermediaries fall squarely in the crosshairs of regulatory concerns, specifically concerning their liability as facilitators of offensive or illegal content and actions. Facebook, Ebay, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube and Google are examples of private actors that have emerged as dominant service providers that host, index or otherwise facilitate access to user-generated content. Other forms of intermediaries, such as software like Napster or torrent databases like The Pirate Bay, are responsible for driving the growth of Internet-based technologies, like new modes of information sharing and communication. These services have emerged as the most important platform for sharing of information and free speech on the Internet. Most of the interaction and communication on the Internet takes place through these intermediaries and therefore they are in a position to control much of the speech that takes place online. The implications of regulating such actors are quite enormous, and its context is unique to the Internet. These private actors now control the bulk of the information that is shared online, and many of them have almost monopolistic control over certain unique forms of information sharing – think Google in the case of search engines. Developing an adequate regulatory mechanism for them is therefore critical to the future of the net. If the laws do not adequately protect their ability to host content without being liable for the same, it is likely that these actors will lean towards collateral censorship of speech beyond that which is prohibited by law, simply to protect against liability. Secondly, such liability would tend to disincentivise the creation of new platforms and services that increase access to knowledge, which have been integral to innovation on the Internet [21]. The issue of intermediary liability at this scale is unique to the Internet. The court has to adequately frame policy considerations which strike at the fundamental nature of the Internet, such as intellectual property and access to information. At the same time, concerns about legal accountability need to also be addressed. The approach that courts have taken towards the role of intermediaries is therefore critical towards any examination of Internet regulation [22].</p>
<p>In India, the first court to explicitly examine the public importance in issues of online intermediary liability was in the context of regulation of pornography, specifically child pornography, which has been a mainstay of regulatory concerns on the Internet. The case prompted legislative action in the form of creating rules to secure intermediary immunity. In this case the Court imputed liability for the listings of certain offensive content upon the owners of the website, Bazzee.com. Hard cases make bad law, and the same was true of this case. Referring to the challenges of regulating content on the Internet, due to the <em>inability</em> of methods to screen and filter such content, the Court held that intermediaries must be strictly liable for all offensive content on their site. The Court held that:</p>
<blockquote>The proliferation of the internet and the possibility of a widespread use through instant transmission of pornographic material, calls for a strict standard having to be insisted upon. Owners or operators of websites that offer space for listings might have to employ content filters if they want to prove that they did not knowingly permit the use of their website for sale of pornographic material…even if for some reason the filters fail, the presumption that the owner of the website had the knowledge that the product being offered for sale was obscene would get attracted.</blockquote>
<p>Intermediaries, therefore, were imputed with the liability of controlling ‘obscene’ speech – a vague and over-broad standard which did not account for the realities of online speech [23]. The above analysis reflects the judiciary’s refusal to take into account the technical concerns on the Internet which ultimately shape its architecture – and the limitations of the judiciary in reflecting upon their own role in policy making on the internet. Ultimately, the decision was overturned by a legislative act, which invoked different standards of liability for intermediaries.</p>
<p>In <em>Consim Info Pvt. Ltd vs Google India Pvt. Ltd</em> [24], the Madras High Court considered “Keyword Advertising” and the liability of search engines and competitors for ‘meta-tags’ that resulted in search engine results which may divert a trademark holder’s traffic. Google’s AdWord programme, which allows purchase of certain ‘keywords’ for the search engine results, and can potentially enable certain forms of trademark infringement, was at issue [25]. Trademarks as AdWords or search terms fulfil and important social utility of information access [26]. However, the Court’s reasoning was conspicuously missing an analysis of the public interest in protecting and promoting search engines, which were important concerns taken into account when these issues were deliberated in other forums [27]. The Court saw this dispute only taking into account private property interests and not public interest considerations, such as the general public benefit of technology which enables new forms of searching and indexing. In fact, an argument by the defendant based on the fundamental right to free (commercial) speech was raised and ignored by the court. The Court therefore ignored the public importance of search engines in favour of protecting proprietary interests which arose in a different context.</p>
<p>Copyright law also has tremendous implications on the Internet. As the Internet became the primary mode for the distribution of different kinds of information and creative content, the very ease of sharing that contributed to its popularity made it prone to violations of copyright, and this created a conflict between the interests of traditional rights holders and the development of the Internet as a means of better sharing of information and knowledge. The problem of holding intermediaries liable for conduct has been compounded in cases where the Court ordered ex-parte ‘John Doe’ orders against unknown defendants likely to be infringing copyright, and imputed the liability for removal of such content on the intermediaries or ISP’s, effectively issuing wide blocking orders without considering their implications or even providing a fair hearing [28]. In <em>RK Productions</em> [29], for instance, when holding that ISPs could be liable for failure to follow blocking orders against infringing content, the Madras High Court described the role of ISPs, such as Airtel and VSNL, as <em>“vessels for others to use their services to infringe third party works.”</em> Once again, the court took a particularly pessimistic view of the Internet’s capabilities, limiting its analysis to the ISP’s function in facilitating infringement and holding that <em>“Without the ISPs, no person would be in a position to access the pirated contents nor would the unknown persons be in a position to upload the pirated version of the film.”</em> In <em>Myspace</em>, the Delhi High Court held that no different standard for secondary infringement (by intermediaries) applied on the Internet, and imputed the same standard as in the 1957 Copyright Act. (In fact, it explicitly compared Myspace to brick and mortar shops selling infringing DVD’s or CD’s) [30]. The Court held that the principles of immunity under the IT Act were overridden by the provisions of the Copyright Act, and then went on to impute a strict standard for intermediaries seeking safe harbor for infringing material, including, inexplicably, that provision of some means to tackle infringement would be sufficient proof of knowledge of actual infringement, and therefore implicating mere passive platforms as infringers. Further, the Court expressly rejected a post-hoc solution for the same, and held that the intermediaries must ensure prior restraint of infringing works to escape liability. The claims that arise in cases of infringement of intellectual property on the Internet, specifically in the liability of intermediaries, are unique, and have unique implications. The inability or refusal of the judiciary to identify claims of freedom of speech and freedom of information of the larger public within the internet commons, in response to broad censorship orders for preventing infringement means that implicitly, policy takes a direction that favours private interests.</p>
<p>An analysis of the above cases shows that important implications of intermediary liability such as the effect on the public’s access to information and the freedom of speech in the context of the Internet did not play a role in the Courts decisions. In particular, the examination of cases above shows that private disputes are now at the forefront of issues of public importance. The Courts have unfortunately taken an insular view of these disputes, adjudicating them as inter-party, without considering the public function that private players on the Internet provide, and how their decisions should factor in these considerations.</p>
<p>However, the recent case of <em>Shreya Singhal v Union of India</em> [31], decided by the Supreme Court this March, hopefully announces a departure from this insular examination of the Internet towards a constitutional analysis, where framing an appropriate public policy for the Internet is at the forefront of the Court’s analysis.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Shreya Singhal and Constitutionalizing the Internet</h2>
<p>In March, 2015, the Supreme Court of India struck down the notoriously abused Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which criminalized certain classes of speech, and hopefully heralded a new phase of Internet jurisprudence in India, which imports constitutionalism into matters of cyberspace. Section 66A, premised on the pervasiveness of the Internet, criminalized online speech on vague grounds such as ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘menacing’. The Court’s examination of the nature of the Internet is particularly important. While dismissing a challenge that speech on the Internet should not be treated as distinct from other speech, the Supreme Court opined that <em>“the internet gives any individual a platform which requires very little or no payment through which to air his views”</em>, and by this reasoning concluded that to a limited extent, specific offences could be drawn for online speech. However, this understanding of the features of the Internet – the democratization of knowledge sharing by making it cheap and expansive, was implicit throughout the Court’s judgement, which upheld the idea of the Internet as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and a space for free and democratic exchange, and struck down the impugned restrictive provisions as unconstitutional, in part because of their vagueness and likelihood to censor legitimate speech, bearing no relation to the constitutional restrictions on free speech under Article 19(2). Moreover, the Court understood the importance of collateral censorship and intermediary safe harbor, although only briefly examined, and read down expansive intermediary liability terms under the IT Rules to include prior judicial review of takedown notices [32].</p>
<p>Hopefully, the Shreya Singhal judgement marks the beginning of constitutional engagement of the judiciary with the Internet. At this moment itself, the Supreme Court is grappling with questions of limitations of online pornography [33]; search engine liability for hate speech [34]; intermediary liability for defamation [35]; and liability for mass surveillance. How the Supreme Court takes cognizance of these cases, how they ultimately proceed, and how they take into account the principles sounded by the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> court, will have a tremendous impact on the internet and society in India.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>This article was an attempt to study the Internet in India, and look at the relationship between the judiciary and the Internet. But ‘the Internet’ is not some fixed, immutable space, and any study has to take this into account. The function of the Internet depends upon the values built in to it. These values can be in favor of free speech, or enable censorship. They can protect privacy, or enable mass surveillance. The growth of the Internet as a medium of free speech and expression has been fuelled to a large extent in the spaces free of legal regulation, but the law is perhaps the most important regulator of the Internet, in its ability to use state power to create incentives for certain values, and to change the nature of the Internet. This study, therefore, charted the dynamic relationship between judicial law and other factors responsible for the regulation of the Internet.</p>
<p>For a technology which is so pervasive in our daily lives, and growing in importance day by day, it is surprising that the Supreme Court of India has only recently taken cognizance of constitutional issues on the Internet. While important internet-specific issues have arisen in disputes before the judiciary, judicial examination has generally ignored technical nuances of the new technology, and furthermore ignored the wider implications of framing Internet policy by applying rules that applied in other contexts, such as for copyright or trademark. Without a clear articulation of political and moral bases to guide Internet policy, a clear policy-driven approach to the Internet remains absent, and the regulatory space has been captured by fragmented interest groups without an assessment of larger interests in maintaining the Internet commons, such as allowing peer-based production and sharing of information.</p>
<p>There is, however, reason to be optimistic about the courts and the Internet. The Supreme Courts reaffirmation and identification of the freedom of speech on the Internet in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, will, hopefully, resonate in the policy decisions of both the courts and legislators, and the internet can be reformulated as a space deserving constitutional scrutiny and protection.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] VSNL Starts India's First Internet Service Today, The Indian Technomist, (14th August, 1995), available at <a href="http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html">http://dxm.org/techonomist/news/vsnlnow.html</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Internet Statistics by Country, International Telecommunication Union, available at <a>http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/stat/default.aspx</a>.</p>
<p>[3] Source: <a href="http://manupatra.com/">http://manupatra.com/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Nick Huggett, Zeno's Paradoxes, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-zeno/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] See: <a href="http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/">http://indianexpress.com/article/india/india-others/a-little-reminder-no-one-in-house-debated-section-66a-congress-brought-it-and-bjp-backed-it/</a>; Publicly available records of Lok Sabha debates also show no mention of this controversial law.</p>
<p>[6] I take values to mean certain desirable goals and methods, which could be both intrinsically good to pursue and whose pursuit allows other instrumental goods to be achieved. See Michael J. Zimmerman, Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Value, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.), available at <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/">http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2015/entries/value-intrinsic-extrinsic/</a>.</p>
<p>[7] Hellen Nissenbaum, How Computer Systems Embody Values, Computer Magazine, 118, (March 2001), available at <a href="https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf">https://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/papers/embodyvalues.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[8] S.P. Sathe, Judicial Activism: The Indian Experience, 6 Washington University Journal of Law & Policy, 29, (2001).</p>
<p>[9] M.C. Mehta v. Kamal Nath and Ors., 2000(5) SCALE 69.</p>
<p>[10] Yochai Benkler, From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access, 52(3) Federal Communications Law Journal, 561, (2000).</p>
<p>[11] Thomas Shultz, Carving up the Internet: Jurisdiction, Legal Orders, and the Private/Public International Law Interface, 19(4) European Journal Of International Law, 799, (2008); Wendy A. Adams, Intellectual Property Infringement in Global Networks: The Implications of Protection Ahead of the Curve, 10 Int’l J.L. & Info. Tech, 71, (2002).</p>
<p>[12] Casio India Co. Limited v. Ashita Tele Systems Pvt. Limited, 2003 (27) P.T.C. 265 (Del.) (India).</p>
<p>[13] Banyan Tree Holding (P) Ltd. v. A. Murali Krishna Reddy & Anr., CS(OS) 894/2008.</p>
<p>[14] World Wrestling Entertainment v. Reshma Collection (FAO (OS) 506/2013 (Delhi).</p>
<p>[15] Dr. Ashok v. Union of India and Ors., AIR 1997 SC 2298.</p>
<p>[16] Rajan Johnsonbhai Christy vs State Of Gujarat, (1997) 2 GLR 1077.</p>
<p>[17] Union Of India And Ors. Vs. Motion Picture Association And Ors, 1999 (3) SCR 875; Yahoo!, Inc. vs Akash Arora & Anr., 1999 IIAD Delhi 229 – “The Internet provides information about various corporations, products as also on various subjects like educational, entertainment, commercial, government activities and services.”</p>
<p>[18] Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks.</p>
<p>[19] Rediff Communication Limited vs Cyberbooth & Another, 1999 (4) Bom CR 278.</p>
<p>[20] Even when the Supreme Court finally recognized these concerns a few years later, when the Internet had morphed into a massive commercial platform and an important forum for free speech, in the Satyam Infotech case (2004(3)AWC 2366 SC), it discussed the unique problem of domain name identifiers and scarcity of domain names, yet went on to hold that an even higher standard of passing off for trademarks should apply in domain names, disregarding the prior standard of an ‘honest concurrent user’.</p>
<p>[21] Jack Balkin, The Future of Free Expression in a Digital Age, 36 Pepperdine Law Review, (2008)</p>
<p>[22] Id.</p>
<p>[23] Avnish Bajaj v. State (NCT of Delhi), 3 Comp. L.J. 364 (2005).</p>
<p>[24] 2013 (54) PTC 578 (Mad)</p>
<p>[25] The judgement also reveals the predominance of Google’s search engine service. The Court defines the operation of “search engines” as synonymous with Google’s particular service – including adding elements like the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ option as defining elements of search engines.</p>
<p>[26] David J. Franklyn & David A. Hyman, Trademarks As Search Engine Keywords: Much Ado About Something?, 26(2) Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, 540, (2013).</p>
<p>[27] Id.</p>
<p>[28] Reliance Big Entertainment v. Multivision Network and Ors, Delhi High Court, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/resources/john-doe-order-reliance-entertainment-v-multivision-network-and-ors.-movie-singham</a>; Sagarika Music Pvt. Ltd. v. Dishnet Wireless Ltd., C.S. No. 23/2012, G.A. No. 187/2012 (Calcutta High Court Jan. 27, 2012) (order); See Generally, Ananth Padmanabhan, Give Me My Space and Take Down His, 9 Indian Journal of Law and Technology, (2013).</p>
<p>[29] R.K. Productions v. BSNL Ltd and Ors. O.A.No.230 of 2012, Madras High Court.</p>
<p>[30] Super Cassetes Industries Ltd. v. Myspace Inc. and Anr., 2011 (47) P.T.C. 49 (Del.)</p>
<p>[31] Shreya Singhal and Ors. V Union of India and Ors., W.P.(Crl).No. 167 of 2012, Supreme Court, (2015).</p>
<p>[32] The courts refusal to address important questions of intermediary responsibility has also been criticized, see Jyoti Pandey, The Supreme Court Judgment in Shreya Singhal and What It Does for Intermediary Liability in India?, Centre for Internet and Society, available at <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/sc-judgment-in-shreya-singhal-what-it-means-for-intermediary-liability</a>.</p>
<p>[33] See: <a href="http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/">http://sflc.in/kamlesh-vaswani-v-uoi-w-p-c-no-177-of-2103/</a>.</p>
<p>[34] See: <a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination">http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/search-engine-and-prenatal-sex-determination</a>.</p>
<p>[35] See: <a href="https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/">https://indiancaselaws.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/google-india-pvt-ltd-vs-visaka-industries-limited/</a>.</p>
<p> </p>
<em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_the-internet-in-the-indian-judicial-imagination</a>
</p>
No publisherDivij JoshiInternet StudiesInternet LawJudiciaryRAW BlogResearchers at Work2015-09-09T05:26:50ZBlog EntryGoverning Speech on the Internet: From the Free Marketplace Policy to a Controlled 'Public Sphere'
https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet
<b>This post by Smarika Kumar is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Smarika is a consultant with Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore. She is interested in issues concerning law and technology. In this essay, Smarika explores how through the use of policy and regulation, the private marketplace of the internet is sought to be reined in and reconciled to the public sphere, which is mostly represented through legislations governing the internet.</b>
<p> </p>
<h2>Introduction</h2>
<p>The internet is widely thought to be unprecedented and radically different from the media which preceded it. Interestingly, the internet has been unlike other media, in that it does not have a history of being monopolised by governments. True, certain States have tried to regulate the internet in a manner which allows them to exercise an increased control over it, some others have a greater control over the internet root given the history of development of the internet, but nevertheless no one State can be said to “own” the internet in any jurisdiction, in the manner of telephone or broadcast monopolies. Internet as it stands now, at its essence, is a largely private of networks connecting privately-owned, and occasionally publicly-funded platforms.</p>
<p>This feature of the internet poses an interesting problem when one tries to think about speech. In law and policymaking, an important question remains: Should internet be treated as the marketplace of privately managed avenues for speech, or should speech on the internet be treated within the bigger concept of the public sphere? Moreover, how are law and policy in India currently disposed towards speech on the internet? In the present essay, I hope to discuss some of these issues by looking at the judgement in <em>Shreya Singhal v. Union of India</em> [1], which was pronounced by the Supreme Court of India in March 2015. The judgement is most widely recognised as a culmination of several challenges to Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 which criminalised a wide range of speech on the internet on the grounds of very broad terms like “grossly offensive”, “causing annoyance” and “inconvenience, danger, and obstruction.” Section 66A was challenged along with Sections 69A and 79 of the Act, which lay down the rules for blocking of content on the internet, and for intermediary liability and responsibility to take down internet content, respectively. This challenge was made on grounds of being in violation of the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression and Right to Equality guaranteed by the Constitution of India among others. However, while the judgement struck down Section 66A as unconstitutional, it upheld the constitutionality of the State-directed Internet blocking Rules as well as Intermediary Liability Guidelines. This may pose a paradox if one accounts for the fact that at the heart of it, all—Section 66A, Section 69A and Section 79, were actually legislations regulating speech. Then why strike one down and uphold others? To seek an answer in the present essay, I broadly look at the philosophical origins of regulation of speech on the internet. Two theories in philosophy—John Stuart Mill’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Jurgen Habermas’ Public Sphere have been very influential in liberal democratic traditions and jurisdictions in thinking about the governance of speech. Scholarly work concerning media law in other jurisdictions has also elaborated on how each of these theories can be implicitly used differently in judicial interpretations to serve different ends [2]. In this, the Marketplace of Ideas approach tends to treat speech and platforms for speech as part of the competition within a market context, whereby different kinds of ideas or speech compete with each other to find an avenue for expression. The Public Sphere approach on the other hand, treats different kinds of speech as part of a larger democratic concept of discussion and speech, whereby the aspiration is for representation of diverse kinds and sources of speech, rather than competition between them.</p>
<p>With the utilisation of these different underlying philosophical assumptions, legal implications can be so vastly different. And when that happens, it becomes essential to trace the process of how these philosophical approaches themselves work in legal argumentation. For these reasons, it becomes critical to probe the thinking in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement to understand which philosophical attitude to speech it actually inheres: the Marketplace of Ideas conception, or the Public Sphere approach? I argue in this essay that while traces of both the Marketplace of Ideas and the Public Sphere approach are present in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, neither of these philosophies actually govern the rationale of the judgement. An analysis of <em>Shreya Singhal</em> along with the judgement in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> (1995) [3] which it refers to, shows that it is in fact, a third philosophy, rooted in the impulse of colonial control, which gives <em>Shreya Singhal</em> its philosophical consistency.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>The Marketplace of Ideas in <em>Shreya Singhal</em></h2>
The judgement in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> actually employs the idea of the marketplace in its approach to discuss the implications of Section 66A. It begins by referring to the 2010 Supreme Court judgement of <em>S. Khushboo v. Kanniamal and Anr</em> [4] which had spoken about the concept of the marketplace of ideas, and how employing it is essential to safeguard “unpopular speech” under the Right to Freedom of Speech and Expression in the Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India. The Court marks out this reference to the marketplace of ideas, tracing this concept back to the 1919 American judgement of <em>Abrams v. United States</em> [5]. The Supreme Court states, talking about the Khushboo case:
<p> </p>
<blockquote>This last judgement is important in that it refers to the “market place of ideas” concept that has permeated American Law. This was put in the felicitous words of Justice Holmes in his famous dissent in Abrams v. United States, 250 US 616 (1919), thus: “But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas-that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.” (para 11)</blockquote>
<p>The Supreme Court judgement goes onto trace the history of Marketplace of Ideas in American jurisprudence, and understand its place within the Indian Constitution. The Court holds:</p>
<blockquote>This leads us to a discussion of what is the content of the expression “freedom of speech and expression”. There are three concepts which are fundamental in understanding the reach of this most basic of human rights. The first is discussion, the second is advocacy, and the third is incitement. Mere discussion or even advocacy of a particular cause howsoever unpopular is at the heart of Article 19(1)(a). It is only when such discussion or advocacy reaches the level of incitement that Article 19(2) kicks in. (para 13)</blockquote>
<p>The Marketplace of Ideas then becomes the philosophical tenet which pivots the judgement around its unique jurisprudential concept: the distinction between discussion, advocacy and incitement. This conception of the marketplace holds that State interference in speech on the internet has to be kept off as long as the condition of such speech being incitement is not fulfilled. In a way, this is a hands-off approach to the governance of speech which is solidified in the Court’s declaration of the unconstitutionality of Section 66A. The Court refers to the American judgement of Reno, Attorney General of <em>United States v. American Civil Liberties Union</em> [6] to bring this logic to speech on the internet as well. Citing the district court judgement in this case, it holds:</p>
<blockquote>[I]t is no exaggeration to conclude that the Internet has achieved, and continues to achieve, the most participatory marketplace of mass speech that this country – and indeed the world – as yet seen. The plaintiffs in these actions correctly describe the ‘democratizing’ effects of Internet communication: individual citizens of limited means can speak to a worldwide audience on issues of concern to them. Federalists and Anti-federalists may debate the structure of their government nightly, but these debates occur in newsgroups or chat rooms rather than in pamphlets. Modern-day Luthers still post their theses, but to electronic bulletins boards rather than the door of the Wittenberg Schlosskirche. More mundane (but from a constitutional perspective, equally important) dialogue occurs between aspiring artists, or French cooks, or dog lovers, or fly fishermen. 929 F. Supp. At 881. (at page 425) (para 60)</blockquote>
<p><em>Shreya Singhal</em>’s striking down of 66A then becomes founded in the idea that the State need not interfere in what kind of speech is made in the marketplace of the internet, as long as such speech does not amount to incitement. In a particular sphere of speech which is “not incitement” then, the logic of the Marketplace of Ideas approach seems to work in the <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Recognition of the Limitations of the Marketplace of Ideas and a Move towards Public Sphere</h2>
<p>One would then surmise that the use of the Marketplace of Ideas approach is what makes <em>Shreya Singhal</em> such a pro-freedom of speech pronouncement. But interestingly, the judgement also cites the matter of <em>The Secretary, Ministry of Information & Broadcasting v. Cricket Association of Bengal and Anr</em> [3] which has been remarkable for outlining the limitations of the marketplace in the governance and production of a diversity of opinions and sources in speech. The <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> case was brought forth before the Supreme Court in 1995, after the liberalisation regime in media, to challenge the constitutionality of preventing a private broadcaster to use Indian airwaves in order to exclusively broadcast a cricket match.</p>
<p>The Court, while holding that there was no such exclusive right inhering in a private broadcaster since airwaves had to be allocated and used in public interest, also held that the limitations on a private broadcaster’s right to broadcast also could not extend beyond Article 19(2). In doing so, the Court recognises that the marketplace in a free and competitive system may not always be sufficient enough to make use of the media to generate and represent speech which is in the democratic public interest of discussion and advocacy. <em>Shreya Singhal</em> cites this portion of the judgement in support of its own rationale of striking down Section 66A. It holds:</p>
<blockquote>The right to use the airwaves and the content of the programmes, therefore, needs regulation for balancing it and as well as to prevent monopoly of information and views relayed, which is a potential danger flowing from the concentration of the right to broadcast/telecast in the hands either of a central agency or of few private affluent broadcasters. That is why the need to have a central agency representative of all sections of the society free from control both of the Government and the dominant influential sections of the society. This is not disputed. But to contend that on that account the restrictions to be imposed on the right under Article 19(1)(a) should be in addition to those permissible under Article 19(2) and dictated by the use of public resources in the best interests of the society at large, is to misconceive both the content of the freedom of speech and expression and the problems posed by the element of public property in, and the alleged scarcity of, the frequencies as well as by the wider reach of the media. (para 29)</blockquote>
<p>The recognition in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> that unregulated, the marketplace can lead to “a monopoly of information and views relayed” flowing from the hands of “either a central agency or a few private affluent broadcasters” points to the limitation of the Marketplace of Ideas approach itself. Such recognition culminated into a more participation-focused idea of what it means to live in a democracy: the idea of a Public Sphere where regulation and governance of media is done in order to expand participation of different kinds of ideas and people within public speech. The Court again cites <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> in this regard to state:</p>
<blockquote>When, however, there are surplus or unlimited resources and the public interests so demand or in any case do not prevent telecasting, the validity of the argument based on limitation of resources disappears. It is true that to own a frequency for the purposes of broadcasting is a costly affair and even when there are surplus or unlimited frequencies, only the affluent few will own them and will be in a position to use it to subserve their own interest by manipulating news and views. That also poses a danger to the freedom of speech and expression of the have-nots by denying them the truthful information on all sides of an issue which is so necessary to form a sound view on any subject. (para 29)</blockquote>
<p>In background of this, it could be said that the Marketplace of Ideas, while it forms an important part of the backbone in the striking down of Section 66A, it is not all there is to it. The idea of participation in a Public Sphere is recognised as well, and to an extent it is the barrier to participation in this Public Sphere, which enables the declaration of Section 66A as unconstitutional.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>Public Sphere or the Marketplace? : (N)either, but a Dynamics of Control</h2>
<p>Much of the discourse around <em>Shreya Singhal</em>’s discussion on Sections 69A and 79, has seen it as divorced from the discussion around Section 66A. The discussion on Section 69A and 79 in the judegment has been seen as regressive, or ambiguous, while the portion of the judgement dealing with Section 66A has been largely been pronounced progressive and liberal. It has also been argued that the discussion on Section 66A in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> departs from a myriad previous judgements and their approach towards the governance of free speech [7]. I would like to argue on the contrary, that there is in fact, a deep continuity in the judgement on various provisions, as well as with prior judgements on speech, as far as the approach which is taken towards the governance of speech generally, and speech on the internet, specifically, is concerned.</p>
<p>To understand this continuity, it is of critical importance to note how the approaches of Public Sphere and the Marketplace of Ideas are contrasted in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, and by reference in <em>Shreya Singhal</em> as well—while the former is used to justify regulation for participation of a larger public in reception of information from the media, and the latter to keep off excessive interference by the Government. Moreover, the judgement also seems to conflate the Marketplace of Ideas and the Public Sphere conceptions of speech governance when it states:</p>
<blockquote>It is clear, therefore, that the petitioners are correct in saying that the public’s right to know is directly affected by Section 66A. Information of all kinds is roped in – such information may have scientific, literary or artistic value, it may refer to current events, it may be obscene or seditious. That such information may cause annoyance or inconvenience to some is how the offence is made out. It is clear that the right of the people to know – the market place of ideas – which the internet provides to persons of all kinds is what attracts Section 66A. (para 20)</blockquote>
<p>One notes in the abovementioned extract that the right to know is seen to emerge from the Marketplace of Ideas rather than through participation in the Public Sphere. In light of these observations, one can then ask the question: What is really at the philosophical heart of <em>Shreya Singhal</em> judgement when it can employ both these approaches? One can argue that the focus of the judgement is to balance these two approaches for the governance of speech. But what is the aim of such an attempt to “balance”? Where is it really leading to? The answer may lie in analysing the rest of <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, including its pronouncements on Executive Rules under Section 69A and Section 79, both of which while being regressive, were upheld as constitutional.</p>
<p>The issue under Section 69A concerned the constitutional validity of the Blocking Rules of the internet, while that under Section 79 concerned the liability of intermediaries on the internet. What is interesting is that the Court in its analysis of Rules under both these sections does not go into the grounds which have been prescribed for the blocking of websites, or for pinning intermediary liability. Commenting on the Rules under Section 69A, the judgement holds:</p>
<blockquote>Merely because certain additional safeguards such as those found in Section 95 and 96 CrPC are not available does not make the Rules constitutionally infirm. We are of the view that the Rules are not constitutionally infirm in any manner. (para 111)</blockquote>
<p>Additionally it places emphasis on the premise the satisfaction of the Central Government that it is necessary to block a website, is a valuable assumption to proceed with the blocking of such website within the tenet of Article 19(2). It holds:</p>
<blockquote>It will be noticed that Section 69A unlike Section 66A is a narrowly drawn provision with several safeguards. First and foremost, blocking can only be resorted to where the Central Government is satisfied that it is necessary so to do. (para 109)</blockquote>
<p>Similarly, for the Rules under Section 79, the Court strikes down the premise that private censorship of internet content based on the judgement of intermediaries is constitutionally permissible. (see para 117) However, it upholds constitutionality of removal of content by an intermediary upon knowledge of a court order to this effect, as well as knowledge of notification by the appropriate government. It states:</p>
<blockquote>Section 79(3)(b) has to be read down to mean that the intermediary upon receiving actual knowledge that a court order has been passed asking it to expeditiously remove or disable access to certain material must then fail to expeditiously remove or disable access to that material. This is for the reason that otherwise it would be very difficult for intermediaries like Google, Facebook etc. to act when millions of requests are made and the intermediary is then to judge as to which of such requests are legitimate and which are not. We have been informed that in other countries worldwide this view has gained acceptance, Argentina being in the forefront. Also, the Court order and/or the notification by the appropriate Government or its agency must strictly conform to the subject matters laid down in Article 19(2). (para 117)</blockquote>
<p>In this manner while the power of speech regulation is taken away from private intermediaries existing in the Marketplace of Ideas, it is restored within the organs of the State—the Judiciary and the Executive. This may not necessarily be repressive, as long as these powers of regulations are used to actually expand the Public Sphere, rather than limiting or controlling it. But the architecture of the regulations under both Sections 69A, and 79 suggest that they have been designed for control, rather than promoting discussion in the Public Sphere, as is evident from the strong censorship models they employ.</p>
<p>Such type of speech regulation aimed at creating a State-controlled “Public Sphere” has a long history: It has been additionally opined that the First Amendment to the Constitution which expanded the grounds under Article 19(2) embodies this colonial continuity within the Constitution framework itself [8]. Eminent lawyer, Rajeev Dhavan has analysed the colonial history of laws governing speech in India to observe continuity from the administration then, to the post-independence orientation of speech laws, to point out that an inherent distrust of the media has always existed in the legal structure, be it before or after the Indian Constitution. He traces such form of legal structure to a desire to control, rather than enable the “public” rooted in the context of colonial rather than democratic pressures [9].</p>
<p>This trend also links back to what happens in the case of <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em> which is cited in support of the striking down of Section 66A in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>. In <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, while there is a recognition of the limitations of Marketplace of Ideas in how it can concentrate participation in democratic discussions only to the hands of those with adequate purchasing power,9 it also fails to amend this through a process of greater participation and representation of diverse public on media. What it broadly does instead is conflate the public to the State, holding that it is only through State-administered public broadcasting that greater participation and representation of diverse public on media can happen. Accordingly, Justice B.P. Jeevan Reddy in his judgement states:</p>
<blockquote>Public good lies in ensuring plurality of opinions, views and ideas and that would scarcely be served by private broadcasters, who would be and who are bound to be actuated by profit motive. There is a far greater likelihood of these private broadcasters indulging in misinformation, disinformation and manipulation of news and views than the government-controlled media, which is at least subject to public and parliamentary scrutiny. (para 181, emphasis added)</blockquote>
<p>Such architecture of Government regulation in the governance of speech, visible both in <em>Cricket Association of Bengal</em>, and by extension in the 66A discussion in <em>Shreya Singhal</em>, but also in the Sections 69A and 79 discussion in the latter judgement, aspires not at expanding and creating a Habermasian Public Sphere of unlimited lively discussion, but rather, a pre-defined, controlled sphere of the “public” which behaves in congruence with the interests of the State. While on the surface it may seem to recognise the limits of the Marketplace of Ideas approach in speech governance and aim for reform of the same, in the bigger scheme of things, the criticism of the marketplace is really directed towards putting more control of public speech in the hands of the State machinery [9].</p>
<p>In such a background of the control trend, even a judgement like <em>Shreya Singhal</em> with such a progressive outcome, appears like a flash in the pan. It might allow for some seemingly liberal advancements in free speech, but it does so only within the larger structure of control mechanisms created for speech ingrained within a pre-independence, undemocratic form of governance which was disrespectful of an independent Public Sphere. The question which then needs to be asked is this: While judgements like <em>Shreya Singhal</em> strike down the really repressive, do they actually bring about a structural change in legal assumptions about public speech? Or is the same colonial desire of control which is permeating the most progressive pronouncements of our jurisdiction? Is it moving towards a participatory, diverse and independent Public Sphere, or something which appears close enough to free discussion, but really is carefully monitored to produced “socially relevant” content, whereby what is relevant is defined through a complicated State apparatus? As our speech laws move to the Internet Age, these are some questions we must ask if the hope for the law is to enable involved, democratic citizenry, rather than a colonial-flavoured Internet public.</p>
<p> </p>
<h2>References</h2>
<p>[1] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf">http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/FileServer/2015-03-24_1427183283.pdf</a>.</p>
<p>[2] Stein, Laura. 2006. <em>Speech rights in America: The First Amendment, Democracy, and the Media</em>. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.</p>
<p>[3] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/539407/">http://indiankanoon.org/doc/539407/</a>.</p>
<p>[4] Judgement accessed from <a href="http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1327342/">http://indiankanoon.org/doc/1327342/</a>.</p>
<p>[5] 250 US 616 (1919).</p>
<p>[6] 521 U.S. 844 (1997).</p>
<p>[7] Bhatia, Gautam. 2015. At the Heart of the Landmark 66A Ruling: The Crucial Distinction between Advocacy and Incitement. Scroll. March 25. Accessed from <a href="http://scroll.in/article/716034/at-the-heart-of-the-landmark-66a-ruling-the-crucial-distinction-between-advocacy-and-incitement">http://scroll.in/article/716034/at-the-heart-of-the-landmark-66a-ruling-the-crucial-distinction-between-advocacy-and-incitement</a>.</p>
<p>[8] See: Liang, Lawrence. 2011. Reasonable Restrictions and Unreasonable Speech. InfoChange. Accessed from <a href="http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/freedom-of-expression/reasonable-restrictions-and-unreasonable-speech.html">http://infochangeindia.org/agenda/freedom-of-expression/reasonable-restrictions-and-unreasonable-speech.html</a>. Also see: Acharya, Bhairav. 2015. Free Speech Policy in India: Community, Custom, Censorship, and the Future of Internet Regulation. May 06. Accessed from <a href="http://notacoda.net/2015/05/06/free-speech-policy-in-india-community-custom-censorship-and-the-future-of-internet-regulation/">http://notacoda.net/2015/05/06/free-speech-policy-in-india-community-custom-censorship-and-the-future-of-internet-regulation/</a>.</p>
<p>[9] Dhavan, Rajeev. 2009. Moral Consensus in a Law and Order Society. In Aravind Rajagopal (ed.), <em>The Indian Public Sphere</em>. Oxford University Press. Pp. 92-93.</p>
<p>[10] See the discussion in the previous section of this essay.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><em>The post is published under <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International</a> license, and copyright is retained by the author.</em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet'>https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_governing-speech-on-the-internet</a>
</p>
No publisherSmarika KumarFreedom of Speech and ExpressionJudiciaryRAW Blog69ACensorshipSection 66AResearchers at Work2015-08-28T05:57:55ZBlog Entry