Centre for Internet and Society

Datafication of the Public Distribution System in India

Sameet Panda — 2024-02-12T12:07:40Z

In this study, we look into the datafication of social protection schemes with a special focus on the Public Distribution System in India. Proponents of datafication claim that the benefits will reach the right person and curb leakages through the automation and digitisation of all PDS processes. Aadhaar is the most important link in the datafication; supporters claim that it makes technology people-centric. This study looks at the status of PDS datafication and its impact on the delivery of the scheme in Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. We also try to understand to what extent the stated objective of portability has been met and how far the challenges faced by the rights holders of the PDS have been resolved.

Read the full report here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/datafication-of-the-public-distribution-system-in-india

Designing Domestic Work Platforms

Divyansha Sehgal and Yathrath — 2022-08-13T06:31:47Z

This research was conducted by The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) with funding from Association for Progressive Communication (APC) through the Feminist Internet Research Network (FIRN), supported by International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The authors are deeply grateful to the platform workers who talked to us and shared their experiences of finding work through Urban Company. Their responses shaped our research and their insights guided the creation of this final report.

According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), there are between 20 million and 80 million workers engaged in domestic work in India. Domestic work has traditionally been an informal sector with customers and workers depending on local and community networks to be connected with each other. Over the last few years, digital platforms have gained ground in connecting domestic workers with tech-savvy urban dwellers.

These platforms promise customers the ease and convenience of moving yet another aspect of their lives online, while they promise to give workers more flexibility, control over their time and increased earnings.

However, we show that this introduction of technology brings with itself the same problems that haunt other sectors of platform-mediated gig work. On-demand platforms seek to exert control over most points of the service delivery process, including job distributions, client selection, worker pay and performance evaluation, all the while relegating workers to an independent contractor status.

Click to download the full report

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/apc-cis-divyansha-sehgal-yathrath-designing-domestic-work-platforms

Indic Scripts and the Internet

Dibyajyoti Ghosh — 2015-07-10T04:23:35Z

This post by Dibyajyoti Ghosh is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Dibyajyoti is a PhD student in the Department of English, Jadavpur University. He has four years of full-time work experience in projects which dealt with digital humanities and specially with digitisation of material in Indic scripts. In this essay, Dibyajyoti explores the effects the English language has on the Internet population of India.

Internet Usage Statistics in India

According to the latest statistics [1], while the rural mobile tele-density in India is 47.78%, the urban tele-density for mobile phones is 143.08% (which means, more than one registered SIM card per person and this phenomenon is thus also reflected in the rural figures). On the other hand, roughly only 6.5% of the population has access to ‘broadband’ Internet (>= 512 kbps) through a phone or a dongle and only 1.23% has access to a wired-broadband connection. However, roughly 20% of India’s population is roughly connected to the Internet [2]. Thus, roughly 12% of the population has access to low-speed Internet. What these figures do not reveal is the quantum of consumption of data. It can be safely assumed given the comparatively high costs of mobile Internet usage and the difficult method of feeding large tracts of data through a mobile phone, that the quantum of consumption is significantly higher in the case of computer Internet users as opposed to mobile users. Though as these statistics reveal, the chances of India being connected to the Internet depends largely on mobile phones, rather than desktop/ laptop computers.

Thus, the status of the Internet in India is still that of a niche medium. Other than the cost-factor of having access to a device which can access the Internet and paying for the Internet data package, some other factors also hinder the growth of the Internet in India. One of them is the issue of language. Whereas the 1990s saw an over-domination of English on the Internet given the linguistic communities which were developing the world of computers and the world of the Internet [3], by 2015, some of the disparity with offline linguistic patterns has been reduced [4]. However, for Indic scripts, much less development has taken place. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is studying it in English.

Languages the Indian Internet User Encounters Both Online and Offline

What does this hold for the future of these Indic scripts? Given the multi-lingual skills of Indian school-goers and the increasing amount of daily reading time of those connected to the Internet (which is somewhere between 12% and 20% of the population) being devoted to reading on the Internet, chances are reading is increasingly in English.

The importance of English-language skills in India, as indeed in the rest of the world, in 2015 is undeniable [5]. English is also a signifier of class in India. However, despite the three-language policy adopted by schools, schools which offer courses primarily in other Indian languages suffer from an inherent disadvantage that students face when these students enter colleges and universities where the medium of teaching is usually English, and later on take up jobs which require official reports to be written in English. Thus, Indian languages other than English offer much less incentive for parents and students to encourage their study. Whereas oral conversation among the Indian population is largely conducted in languages other than English, written conversation is increasingly being conducted in English. Language is not only a political issue but also a subject of social study, not to mention the issues of linguistics. The larger socio-political issues of language are perhaps too vast to be discussed in connection to Indic scripts and the Internet. Thus, apart from this basic point about the bias towards English, I am not delving into it further.

Indic Script Software and Data Entry

Let me start with discussing natively-digital material. In the digital domain, entering text in Indic scripts is a difficult task. Indic scripts are primarily abugida scripts, which are writing systems ‘in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as a unit: each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel notation is secondary’ [6]. This contrasts with the Latin script used to write English, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with abjad scripts such as the script used to write Arabic, in which vowel marking is absent or optional. Similar difficulty is also encountered in entering texts in other non-Latin scripts such as Chinese. Mandarin Chinese may be the world’s most-spoken language and China may be one of the software and hardware giants, but supposedly even Chinese is not particularly amenable to the Internet [7]. Entering Indic scripts on a computer is difficult because it usually involves the addition of new software or tweaking existing software which is slightly difficult for the novice/ casual user.

ISIS, developed by Gautam Sengupta of the University of Hyderabad and sponsored by the Government of India, is an early example of Indic script input software [8]. It is available online for free. It is not fully phonetic. iLEAP, developed by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC), a Government of India funded agency, is now no longer extant but CDAC have produced other input software thereafter. Google too offers an Indic language input tool now [9]. For languages such as Bengali, there have been software such as Bijoy, which was made by Mustafa Jabbar of Ananda Computers, Dhaka, Bangladesh, and is sold commercially [10] and the free softwares BanglaWord and Avro. Avro was created in 2003 by Mehdi Hasan Khan of Mymensingh, Bangladesh, and subsequently developed by a team at Omicron Lab, Dhaka [11]. Such software exists for other individual Indic languages. Operating systems such as Windows [12] and Ubuntu [13] offer Indic script input as well, and make use of the InScript keyboard [14] too.

When it comes to mobile phones, prior to the introduction of touchscreen smartphones, text messaging had little option to use the Indic script. With the introduction of multiple keyboards in touchscreen smartphones, there are a few options to use the Indic script. Both Android and iOS offer Indic script keyboards. Yet these are even less easy to use than computer keyboards as one needs to toggle between several sets of keyboards to access all the characters required for Indic script input. Google has recently started handwriting input which supports Indic scripts [15]. It remains to be seen how much the feature is used.

In spite of this availability of input tools in recent years, the most common method of entering Indic language is through transliteration. Just like Pinyin for the Chinese script, Indic scripts too have official transliteration standards. The Indian National Bibliography (Kolkata: Central Reference Library, 2004) maintains one such standard. However, such transliteration mechanisms require diacritical marks, which are again difficult to enter. Thus, more often than not, these transliteration standards are not followed except when one is maintaining strict academic standards.

The point that I am trying to make is that despite the availability of tools for entering Indic scripts and even well-defined standards for transliterating Indic words in the Latin script, neither is universally followed. The reason is it involves extra labour, as opposed to simple transliteration without any standards. Thus, what often one ends up with in casual written communication (which outnumbers formal written communication by a wide margin) in the digital domain, be it in the form of SMSes, messages in Whatsapp or other instant messaging applications or emails, is Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. The introduction of SMS lingo and standards two decades back had already prepared the way for the wider acceptance of Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. When one comes to a semi-casual/ semi-formal medium, such as blogs and social networks, where the receiver of the message is usually more than one, the forms of expression are slightly different.

Mimetic Desires on Public Platforms

Digital, crowd-sourced public platforms, such as blogs and largely social networks, offer a different kind of discourse. On the one hand, private habits spill into the public realm. Thus, Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet are a common practice. On the other hand, the public nature of such platforms offers a space for a kind of mimetic desire. Despite the availability of the user-interface of the most commonly accessed sites such as Gmail and Facebook in Indic languages, most prefer to retain their user-interface in the default English mode [16]. It is a different issue that enabling browsers to render Indic scripts correctly is often a difficult task and sometimes despite following every instruction in the manual, the problem remains unsolved. The overall English language and English script overdose on social networks such as Facebook generate a kind of desire to mingle in with the crowd. Thus, instead of typing Indic words in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet, the data entered is actually more often than not in English. Often, other than formal job reports and letters, social networks are the only platform that a lot of Indians get where they can produce verbal communication in English. Thus, in addition to a mimetic desire to fit in with the English-writing crowd, social networks also offer a semi-public platform to write one’s thoughts in English, a platform which for a lot of Indians was perhaps last available to them when they had to write essays for their compulsory English-language paper in high school. Both of these desires further hamper the incentive to write on the Internet using Indic scripts.

Blogs occupy a space somewhere in between formal websites and casual for-the-nonce social network posts. Both the structure of blogs (more structured than a social network but less structured than a website) and the status of blogs lie somewhere in between these two major platforms. Also, with the rise of social networks, the rate of growth of blogs has decreased. Thus, blogs are usually less popular than both websites as well as social networks. On blogs, the content is usually more formal, as is the presentation. Also, the mimetic desire generated by a social network is perhaps less heightened in the case of blogs. Blogs present a more one-to-many approach as opposed to a social network which largely presents a many-to-many structure.

Spelling Skills in Indic Languages

At the other hand of the social class in India, is the class which went to an English-medium school and writes predominantly in English. Oral communication is often carried out in other Indian languages but these languages are not often used for written communication. Even when casual written communication in the digital domain, such as SMSes and other instant messaging applications or emails, is carried out using Indic words, it is in non-standard transliteration into the Latin alphabet. For this class, the problem is the lack of exposure to reading and writing in Indian languages other than English. Thus, even this minimal writing in transliteration mode may further weaken their spelling skills in these Indian languages.

There are of course other categories into which one can group Internet users in India. The equally strong multi-lingual Indian, the equally weak multi-lingual Indian and the Indian strong in one language are three such categories. Irrespective of which class the Indian Internet user belongs to, the Internet user’s exposure to material written in Indic scripts on the Internet is low. So far I have discussed natively-digital resources.

Digitisation of Pre-Digital Resources

Let me now turn to digitsation of pre-digital resources. Digitisation of such resources is a task involving a lot of money and labour. There are several organisations in India which are involved in such tasks. The Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) is one such organisation. The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, Kolkata is another such organisation [17]. The Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata too is actively involved in digitisation of such material [18]. The West Bengal Public Library repository on Dspace [19] and the Digital Library of India [20] are also significant repositories, as is the portal of the National Archives of India, titled Abhilekh Patal [21]. There are some digital archives focussed on the output of a specific person, such as the MK Gandhi portal [22]. There have been a few instances of making public searchable text files from such digitised material, such as those by the Society for Natural Language Technology Research [23] and Bichitra: Online Tagore Variorum [24]. Other digitisation programmes are in progress, such as the long-running National Mission for Manuscripts [25]. Yet, in spite of this, such efforts are miniscule compared to databases, albeit commercial and not open-access, such as Early English Books Online or Eighteenth Century Collections Online. The Internet, while it offers the opportunity for an equitable digitisation of pre-digital resources in English as well as Indic scripts, does not contain as many resources in Indic scripts as it does in the Latin script. The reasons are because whereas Indic script resources are primarily digitised by Indian organisations where the money needed for such tasks is not available in great amounts, resources in English are digitised from a number of economies with a high per capita GDP. Given the more basic needs of enhancing the reach and level of primary, secondary and tertiary education in the country, an economy with a low per capita GDP such as India does not have the financial means to digitise vast quantities of pre-digital resources, be they in the Latin script or in Indic scripts.

When it comes to electronic books in Indic scripts, the refusal of major platforms such as Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing to list books in Indic scripts [26] is a major barrier for individuals to create e-books in Indic scripts. Whereas most major newspapers in Indic scripts have online editions, the case is not so for major book publishers. Unlike a newspaper which primarily relies on advertising for its revenue, book publishers depend on book sales. There is no infrastructure in place for selling electronic books in Indic scripts. The publishers perhaps also feel that the market for consumption of e-books in such languages is not of a significant scale, and thus do not feel incentivised enough to encourage the creation of e-books. Thus, the entire Kindle reading population in India (which is not very large in the first place [27]) is deprived of the chance of buying e-books in Indic scripts. If they read e-books in Indic scripts on Kindles and tablets, then such e-books are usually pirated scanned copies. There are some sites which make available pirated scanned copies of books printed in Indic scripts. However, such sites and the number of such books is so small, that they make no major dent to the revenues of the Indic-languages publishing industry.

Effects on the Indian Internet User

As a result, casual Indian Internet researchers and readers often depend on material written in English instead of material written in Indic languages. It is true that the serious researcher will of course make the effort of visiting physical libraries and archives to access books in Indic languages. But for casual reading and research, it is too much of a trouble. For such Internet users, not only are undigitised Indic verbal texts invisible, but the lack of engagement with such texts lead to the effacement of such texts from the public discourse and domain.

For Indian school students studying in schools where the medium of instruction is not English, the absence of such texts from the Internet means that they engage less with the Internet for academic purposes. For them, the Internet becomes more of a resource meant for non-academic purposes if they have trouble reading texts in English. It is true that English is one of the three languages that school students learn yet as the state of education goes, it is not fully satisfactory [28]. On the other hand, given the English language and English script overdose on social networks, the mimetic desire forces students to generate texts in English, not only the script but also the language. As a result, what is generated is often English of a less than satisfactory standard. A political strain of thought treats the language that people generate as ‘the language’. Measuring such an output against other standards of English is considered politically incorrect. In fact, the regional acceptance of such local sub-groups of English has led to the wider acceptance of English and its growing presence across the world. Yet, as the notion of class in India based on the command over English shows, such sub-grouping also leads to the creation of separate classes.

Effects of the Internet on Indic Scripts

Does the Internet alleviate or exacerbate the problem caused by the hierarchy of English over other Indic languages? I guess that the answer is not a simple nod in either direction. On the other hand, I conclude that the Internet increases the mimetic desire to generate written communication in English. Failure to communicate in English according to certain standards of English further exacerbates the creation of the classes based on the command over English. While the Internet, to a certain extent, helps in improving English spelling skills owing to a greater exposure to English, at the same time, it leads to a greater deterioration in spelling skills in Indic languages. Owing to the lack of availability of pre-digital resources in Indic scripts in the digital domain, there is a slow effacement of such resources from the public discourse at large.

Possible Measures to Enhance the Status of Indic Scripts on the Internet

These are some of the effects that the Internet in India has had on Indic scripts. Given that the Internet is a niche medium and those shaping the general discourse are more likely to have access to the Internet in the first place, the low visibility of Indic scripts on the Internet is a cause for concern. However, it is true that with the growing accessibility of the Internet in India, the resources in Indic scripts are bound to increase. It is perhaps dependent primarily on those in power, such as the central and state governments to ensure that their websites and mobile phone applications are in Indic scripts as well and the Indic script versions of their digital resources do not lack any feature of the English-language version of such resources. The private sector, especially the publishing industry also needs to create a market for electronic publication in Indic scripts. Just like e-commerce in India did not come after the entire infrastructure was in place, but rather the infrastructure kept building up as e-commerce kept growing, similarly the publishing industry also needs to create a digital Indic-script market, and then keep building it up. E-commerce, which perhaps has the greatest incentive to build resources, can also significantly alter the scenario by offering e-commerce in Indic scripts. Snapdeal has very limited components of their website in two Indic scripts. Other major e-commerce companies have not followed suit and neither is Snapdeal’s inclusion particularly effective. Yet, as the Flipkart-owned apparel company Myntra’s recent decision to go app-only and completely do away with their website has shown, e-commerce has its ways of incentivising customers to change their habits in a drastic manner. It is with such hope that I would have liked to end this brief essay on studying the Internet in India. Yet, as the language of this essay shows, such hopes are not particularly strong, as most scholarly writing in India on the Internet continues to be in English. Scholarly journals and research platforms in Indic scripts on the Internet continue to be so limited in number that it is hard to find particularly high-impact publications from among them. If one is studying the Internet in India, chances are one is both studying and writing in English.

Endnotes

[1] http://www.trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/PressRealease/Document/PR-34-TSD-Mar-12052015.pdf

[2] http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users-by-country

[3] Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado and Álvaro Blanco, Twelve years of measuring linguistic diversity in the Internet: balance and perspectives, UNESCO publications for the World Summit on the Information Society (2009), http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001870/187016e.pdf

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_used_on_the_Internet and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

[5] https://hbr.org/2012/05/global-business-speaks-english

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida

[7] http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117608/chinese-number-websites-secret-meaning-urls

[8] http://isis.keymankeyboards.com/

[9] http://www.google.com/inputtools/

[10] http://www.bijoyekushe.net/

[11] https://www.omicronlab.com/

[12] http://www.bhashaindia.com/ilit/

[13] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ibus

[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InScript_keyboard

[15] http://googleresearch.blogspot.in/2015/04/google-handwriting-input-in-82.html

[16] There is no open-access data for this from either Google or Facebook. Third-parties conduct such studies. A study can be found here: http://www.oneskyapp.com/blog/top-10-languages-with-most-users-on-facebook/

[17] http://www.jaduniv.edu.in/view_department.php?deptid=135

[18] http://www.savifa.uni-hd.de/thematicportals/urban_history.html

[19] http://dspace.wbpublibnet.gov.in:8080/jspui/

[20] http://www.dli.ernet.in/

[21] http://www.abhilekh-patal.in/

[22] https://www.gandhiheritageportal.org/

[23] http://www.nltr.org/

[24] http://bichitra.jdvu.ac.in/index.php

[25] http://www.namami.org/index.htm

[26] https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=A9FDO0A3V0119

[27] http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/Ebook-readers-fail-to-kindle-sales-in-India/articleshow/45802786.cms

[28] Annual Status of Education Report (Rural) 2014, facilitated by Pratham, pp. 81-82, 86, 88-89, http://img.asercentre.org/docs/Publications/ASER%20Reports/ASER%202014/fullaser2014mainreport_1.pdf

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/blog_indic-scripts-and-the-internet

Users and the Internet

Purbasha Auddy — 2015-07-10T04:20:54Z

This post by Purbasha Auddy is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Purbasha is a SYLFF PhD fellow at the School of Cultural Texts and Records (SCTR), Jadavpur University, with more than eight years of work experience in digital archiving. She has also been teaching for the last two years in the newly-started post-graduate diploma course in Digital Humanities and Cultural Informatics offered by the SCTR. In this essay, Purbasha explores the constructions of the ideas of the Indian Internet users through the advertisements that talk about data packages, mobile phones or apps.

A baby [1] is refusing to be born as (as we learn later, ‘his’) parents cannot afford high-speed internet for smartphones but wi-fi plans offered by an internet service provider satisfy the baby as if the baby is being born for the internet.

The baby [2] comes out of the womb, searches the net on a smartphone, cuts his own umbilical cord, takes a selfie with the nurse, opens every possible social media- account, takes his blue baby boy balloons and finds his own way out of the building leaving behind dumbstruck parents.

The two unreal situations that are described above are the two storylines of two advertisements of the same company trying to sell an internet connection. No, this article will not talk about the aesthetic appeal of these ads, but will look into such creative ways to locate the explanation of the internet and its users instead; to be precise internet and its Indian users.

The two ads described at the beginning do not show any Indian-ness but makes the viewer wonder about how far this ‘born for the internet’ baby can travel with an internet-enabled smartphone. Are these two ads trying to define the internet as a smart product or are they trying to classify the users of the internet rather as smart? Moreover how does one define the internet? It means more than a conglomeration of networks. At this point as I am trying to coin a definition of the internet on my own, my thought-process is occupied with the activities I do on the net but I fail to define it.

A personal note…

In 1995, when VSNL launched the internet in India, I was 10, and engrossed in story books and comics. As I was growing up, I was discovering the world around through books, television, radio and newspapers. I was totally unaware of the practicality of the internet and it remained a fact of general knowledge. Not only me! Not a single friend of mine happened to use the internet or discussed keenly about it. My school did not offer a computer course either. After my +10 board exam, I requested (read demanded) my parents to enroll me in a computer training center which was near my house and had a government affiliation. I learnt basics of computer applications, the programming language Foxpro and basics of the internet. I even got to know how to create a basic webpage. Only when I was required to write a dissertation for my graduation, did I start going to a cyber café to type my dissertation and surf the internet. My parents were really apprehensive about what I was doing in a cyber café which was costing 30 rupees per hour!

Though my parents are still uneasy with the fact that ‘my generation’ remains glued to the internet most of the time, they are amazed on the other hand; how we do net banking, shop online, study, Facebook, exchange email, call a cab or order pizza etc. from the internet. They are happy to remain on the other side of the digital divide.

It has been twenty years that the Indian society has seen the ‘wrong side’ of the internet like hacking, phishing and other grave matters related to social networks. India is a complex society and so is the internet. But India, being the one of the largest potential markets, various services related to the internet are encouraging the probable consumers. Through the advertisements and publicity measures, they are trying to cleanse away the negative notions. They are capturing stories and characters that one can relate herself or himself to, very promptly. Even the ideas of Indian-ness, national integrity and the dreams of aspiring Indians are getting linked with the internet as mobile internet is penetrating very fast to balance the digital divide. Various events of online forgery, hacking and getting access to dicey websites (read pornography) and those matters which came as some sort of a cultural shock, made people less confident to use the internet.

Overcoming the fear…

Recently, these notions have been countered by commercials by an antivirus company. The commercial shows a mother [3] who is no longer anxious to let her son surf the internet because now the antivirus allows her to enable parental control. It is helping the mother as she no longer has to keep constant vigil on the internet-related activities of her son. Other commercial shows a retired old man [4] is not sceptical anymore that his son sends money using online banking. His son and the man use the antivirus which offers safe online banking.

There are two more advertisements I want to describe; the first one features a young man [5] shopping online and updating the viewers that an antivirus protection means safe online transactions. In the second ad, a fashion designer [6] is not bothered to use pendrives as the antivirus scan will protect her computer. These four commercials attempt to confront the fear that pesters the minds of the potential consumers. No beautiful models, male or female, no beyond the world creativity, but simple and set with regular characters discussing vital issues were chosen to reach out to these potential customers.

The next commercial I would like to refer to is about an antivirus for smart phones. The ad creates a euphoria that portrays a bunch of college goers [7] who have the power to protect themselves from spyware and malware and can download various applications seamlessly. Thus the point of overcoming the ‘fear’ of the unknown and the uncontrollable is very important. Maybe the two ads featuring the ‘born for the internet’ baby I begun with, find relevance here. And the question should be asked here again: that how far can one travel along the path of life by means of a smartphone with an internet connection? The adverts suggest a very intelligent and exciting life for those who can access to internet. Everything is sorted if you can stay online. A lonely individual [8] can be a Twitter celebrity. Someone can showcase her or his talent [9] through social media; like one ad shows a girl becoming an online singing sensation by garnering lots of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’.

As mobile phones remains with us most of the time, accessing the internet from it is easier (compared to a computer) and a mobile phone is thus able to furnish prompt services. There are quite a few service providers that woo us with different approaches. Compared to selling internet connections, it is perhaps far less complicated to produce campaigns for fast moving consumer goods. At least in the case of FMCG it is easier to explain the product which is within range of our four senses. But it is quiet a troublesome project to explain the internet given the social back drop in a country like India. This article will not take names of any of the service providers. Instead it will point out the strategies they are adopting to touch an emotional chord for the probable consumers keeping the existing ones. Furthermore, it would like to find out the nature and meaning of the internet and outlook of its users in the Indian scenario.

Power redefined…

The internet providers proclaim through the advertisements that an internet connection on one’s mobile is a ‘power’ for her or him. The power that has the ability to bring all the nuances that is available around. Only the burning questions are:

How to use the power? Whether to play online games, immerse oneself in social networking, and use a search engine to search for the unknown or perhaps read an academic article from Jstor? There are immense possibilities to the power.
How long can the power be used (read limited or unlimited connection)?
How much time does it take to get the result of the power (read the speed of the connection)?
And lastly and very importantly how much does this power cost?

These uncertainties are answered by adverts with creativity and almost 20% of the Indian population tries to grab this power. But of course a large segment is still to be included (inclusion may be harder due to various socio-economic conditions that are deep-rooted within the Indian scenario) in the benefit-circle of this power called the internet. The following storyline of another television commercial shows the power called the internet which can allow pictures or videos to be exchanged instantaneously. An ad shows that the internet is a great help for a mother as she sends a picture of her wailing son after a hair-cut, to her husband. As soon as the mother reaches home with her sad boy, the father having got the same hair-cut also returns and is ready to soothe the boy.

Confidence building apparatus…

Thus, through creative commercials, internet service providers are trying to tell that one should keep an internet connection handy to be confident so that Indians cannot be fooled by anybody anywhere. Several adverts are showcasing the following events that will not occur if one has a mobile internet connection. Such events are quite common and thus one can easily associate oneself with them.

Not a single person on earth can fool you [10].
A corrupt political leader cannot go way without fulfilling the promises s/he made [11].
Baseless prediction of religious leaders can be countered [12].
And one of the ads went even further ahead to suggest that the population of India can be controlled if married couples spend time doing various activities that the internet has to offer [13]!

Self-learning tool…

The ads promote that one of the activities could be self-learning. There is an enormous package of everything available and it is a flexible way to learn. A slow learner [14] in school may not be given special attention in order to overcome learning difficulties but the internet is very patient and it will not complain. Learn how to write poems [15], how to cook, how to make a drone [16], learn French [17]. Furthermore these ads suggest that an internet user is a self-sufficient human being who can find her or his own way using a Google map! Just like two friends learning culinary skills from internet and opening up a restaurant.

An institution…

At this point, the creative pursuit of the commercials take a leap and declare the internet (or the internet connection the particular company is providing) as an institution which is very much inclusive in nature. Those who are barred from getting admission in schools, colleges or universities, are welcome to learn through the institution called the internet and can establish themselves in mainstream society or can learn for the sake of learning. In this case, these ads have pointed out girls are not allowed [18] to go to school, a eunuch [19] is refused everywhere. But they are learning from the internet and compete with the more privileged in mainstream society. Other cases show a mother could not complete [20] her study in law, and her daughter is encouraging her to complete it through the internet. Lastly, these ads try to convince that the institution of the internet is cheaper than regular institutions.

Utility…

Besides the ambitions of the internet stated above, the internet influences human minds in several other aspects. For example, generation gap can be healed if the society takes the bridge of the internet. About two years ago a commercial was produced with the one-liner: ‘Made for the young’ [21]. This ad shows an old man who parties with young boys, has a social network account, plays online games late at night, does video chat. These activities of the elderly character, who has a very optimistic approach towards life, are set in a mundane surrounding. Here it seems, the internet is bridging the generation gap by bringing into its fold and into the mainstream those people who might not have thought of using the internet in real life.

The notion of a huge expense that is incurred in maintaining an internet connection was busted when some service providers brought out ads which said that it was letting people watch a video for only one rupee. Very precisely, this one rupee campaign enacted the frequent quarrels [22] between a taxi-driver and his passenger over loose change and the taxi driver somehow not returning one rupee but instead showing a popular video to the passenger from his phone in lieu of that one rupee. The basic point of all the campaigns is to intensify the market and push the consumers to pay for it anyhow as an internet connection can bring magic to the consumers’ lives as the service providers claim. But who will pay for the internet connection? So they bring out campaign such as a family plan campaign [23] in which the earning member of the family is being encouraged to pay the cost for the internet packs of the other mobile connections in the family which are also provided by the same mobile service operator. These adverts show a family consisting of a super-lazy boy, an ever-angry father, a protective mother and a sweet, little sister needing the internet more than any other services like roaming, calls, or SMS [24].

Service provides are also trying to entice the consumers by providing some utilitarian services which are needed in day to day life. The following are examples of the storylines of a few other advertisements that help its service-takers to transfer money without even going to the banks. The service provider keeps the notion of flexibility of the internet, which can be used according to the need of the people of every segment of the society: a taxi driver [25] from the city sends money to his father in the village; a husband sends money to his pregnant wife [26], a college-going boy [27] requesting his elder brother to send money for mending his scooter. These characters are common and can be found in our everyday surroundings but such characters may be afraid to use such an online service for transferring money. The soothing and caring tone of theses adverts try to assure people to use the service.

As some of the adverts aim to clear the dilemma among prospective consumers, another set of ads celebrate friendship and urge consumers to go back to their roots. In this regard, a storyline of another commercial can be taken into consideration. It tells a story about some school friends [28] who become successful in their own vocations and who remain connected with the help of smartphones and internet connections. One of them locates an old ice-cream vendor in front of the school they used to study in. They came together to meet that vendor from whom they used to buy ice-cream to help him in his business. Here the online activities result in something meaningful.

This article tried to weave one narrative out of many narratives created by several internet service providers. The main intention of the article was to find out how the internet has been defined in the Indian context and how the users are being defined in the commercials. It is found that the internet may seem super-real (if we are not aware of the technical aspects, it is a real wonder!) at first glance but the commercials through the dramatizing efforts are trying to prove its usefulness in many ways. Just like when a young woman [29] finds out someone is retiring from her office, she starts sending photos of the man to their colleagues and instantly it creates a chain of forwarded messages and then everybody gathers to arrange a surprise farewell party. A happy picture indeed!

However something not bright and prosperous also needs to be mentioned. The internet service providers have been offering high speed internet and portray a happy smart life of Indians irrespective of social background and vocation but almost 80% of India remains untouched and are yet to receive the benefits of an internet connection.

Endnotes

[1] MTS India. 2014. "MTS Internet Baby Full Version." YouTube. February 24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rg37kafMsWk.

[2] Premium Adverts. 2015. "Baby - MTS TV Commercial Ad." YouTube. February 18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3krdHUji8A.

[3] Mukherjee, Pamela. 2014. "Quick Heal - TVC (Hin) Mother’s VO." YouTube. November 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-bjUuErBQ.

[4] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'OLD MAN.'" YouTube. July 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1kOcz_1Ra8.

[5] Thoughtshop Advertising & Film Productions Pvt. Ltd. 2014. "QUICK HEAL 'COOL DUDE.'" YouTube. July 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ot0J4ps4A.

[6] Subarna Enterprise. 2014. "Stay protected from virus infected pendrives with Quick Heal Total Security." YouTube. April 10. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rLh0ng70Lc.

[7] Quick Heal. 2013. "Quick Heal Mobile Security TVC (Hindi)." YouTube. March 3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWiomVUHVHk.

[8] MTS India. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE ‘Always On’ LATEST TVC - Anupam Mukerji." YouTube. July 24. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfyHMbKtsg.

[9] afaqs. 2012. "MTS MBLAZE TVC - Shraddha Sharma." YouTube. July 17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsaJtPYTUF8.

[10] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Anthem TVC." YouTube. August 8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhXSnJ8sXY.

[11] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Politician TVC." YouTube. March 13. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OahDrQDU24k.

[12] Idea. 2014. "Idea ‘No Ullu Banaoing’ Baba TVC." YouTube. May 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mf2hYaHtBF4.

[13] Celeburbia Entertainment Media. 2011. "Idea 3G Funny Ad Campaign - India Over Population - Abhishek Bachchan Sir Ji Ad Series." YouTube. July 23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqtB-IaeEo8.

[14] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Slow Learner 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXFk4VL9rWM.

[15] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network (IIN) Military 25 sec TVC." YouTube. May 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwAP6PmGzRs.

[16] Neela, Pradeep. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN TV Ad - Drone wala." YouTube. January 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPTC945gsDo.

[17] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Guide 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkQma9Tyt8E.

[18] Falguni, Vineet. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Haryanvi 25 sec TVC." YouTube. January 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdVRGxw4ROI.

[19] iDiotube. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Eunuch 25 second TVC HD." YouTube. April 26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIZS_-Qm5Ro.

[20] Idea. 2015. "Idea Internet Network IIN Mother Daughter 20 sec TVC." YouTube. May 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBHtLU7QGbE.

[21] Indian Tv Commercials. 2013. "Vodafone Commercial(Sep 2013)-Network(Latest Indian TV Ad)." YouTube. September 28. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6ULTFCWBQw.

[22] Airtel India. 2013. "airtel Re 1 Mobile Video - Taxi Ad (TVC)." YouTube. May 22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hpi2sOOfeIw.

[23] Airtel India. 2015. "Airtel my plan Coffee TVC." YouTube. February 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ElCIhsobXc.

[24] Airtel India. 2014. "airtel money TVC - Pay Electricity Bills." YouTube. January 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFHurfXS9uI.

[25] Vodafone India. 2015. "Vodafone m-pesa™– Babuji – HD." YouTube. March 16. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ktgDPTlFxsU.

[26] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Cable TV – HD." YouTube. June 12. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIMYZDzyHeM.

[27] Vodafone India. 2014. "Vodafone m-pesa™ - Scooter – HD." YouTube. June 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQAtnQktHLI.

[28] Advartisement. 2015. "Uncle’s Ice Cream Airtel Network In India." YouTube. March 27. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFsG1G7Ombo.

[29] Nirvana Films. 2015. "VODAFONE – Farewell." YouTube. March 19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqZVO815MiM.

The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

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Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi

Sarah McKeever — 2015-07-16T08:22:13Z

This post by Sarah McKeever is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Sarah is a PhD candidate at the India Institute, King’s College London, and her work focuses on the impact of social media on contemporary political movements. In this essay, she explores the increasingly hierarchical system of activism on the Internet, based on Western corporate desire for data, and how it is shaping who is seen and heard on the Internet in India.

Background

I will preface this post by stating that as an American, my personal experience of the Internet has been shaped by nearly 18 years as an active user. My experience with digital interfaces, websites, and social media has been formed through my experiences during the Internet revolution in the United States. Academic and personal training have shaped what I determine to be trustworthy, useful, and credible when searching for information. This post is based on field research I am conducting in New Delhi from January through June 2015.

With these preconceptions and standards in mind, I began to research organisations that I felt were credible enough to approach for interviews in January 2015. My current research project investigates the impact that social media has had on the issues of corruption and violence against women in New Delhi, following the social movements on these issues in 2011-2012 and 2012-2013 respectively. I started at an organisational level in order to research the impact that social media and the movements themselves had on organisations working on these issues. Areas of interest include any changes in issue engagement and discourse around gender violence and corruption. I focused exclusively on organisations that have an office in New Delhi and engage in activism in an urban context. Many of these organisations also have a presence in other states and include rural as well as urban projects. I conducted semi-structured interviews in order to engage with the changes wrought by the digital on a qualitative rather than quantitative basis.

Activism and Digital Hierarchy: A Divided Internet?

While conducting initial research, I began to investigate two separate but related areas of inquiry. The first was relatively straightforward: what type of differences were there between groups which actively engaging with the affordances of the Internet and Web 2.0? In my research I examined online awareness groups and campaigns as well as more traditional advocacy and awareness groups that were struggling to translate their work onto the Internet and on social media.

While engaging with the first question, I quickly discovered that the divide between how organisations leveraged the affordances of the Internet - and social media in particular - was stark. Earl and Kimport (2011) write that organisations that directly translate previous advocacy on the ground onto the Internet fail to fully leverage the affordances of the Internet. Organisations that effectively utilise the strengths of the Internet - including flash tactics, crowd-sourcing, and networked leadership - have in fact transformed the world of activism. They have created a new type of “digital activism” through the use of an increasingly digital networked society (Castells 2010, Rainie and Wellman 2012). While this is a simplification of the overall argument – and I personally would argue that in actuality organisations work on a range of digital capabilities and the idea of a spectrum rather than a binary division would be more appropriate at this point – it was clear that both sides were struggling to reach some sort of equilibrium between each other’s capabilities when I conducted interviews with them.

The second inquiry stemmed from my engagement with the first: how was the “active” use of the Internet and social media by an organization translating into an interpretation of their effectiveness? In other words, was an “active” social media presence and a slick website contributing to an impression that they were somehow more impactful than the organisations which lacked these features and is this phenomenon creating a new hierarchy of activism in Delhi?

Many of the organisations that I spoke with who used the Internet and social media “well,” attracted foreign attention and funding. It is clear there is a monetary incentive for organisations to be present and easily accessible via search engines and social media platforms. And while social media has become a huge selling point in India - including in last year’s Parliamentary elections - much of the funding and attention appears to come from outside of India in these particular cases. While social media has become a popular tool for outreach in New Delhi, the emphasis placed on it is possibly being driven by forces outside of India in the activist sphere.

Organisations that had been involved in advocacy and grassroots activism before the Internet boom in India discussed the struggle to make effective use of the affordances of the Internet. My participants unilaterally expressed a desire to engage with the digital audience in India – an audience of approximately 310 million users according to Internet Live Stats (2015) – but were often ill equipped to do so. Stated difficulties included a lack of a dedicated communications and media strategist, lack of experience with social media and web design, and difficulty translating nuanced discussion onto social media sites which are not necessarily designed to facilitate complex and controversial discussions. Some participants directly stated that an online presence, whether it was effective or not, had become essential to obtaining foreign funding and attention, as a digital presence represents a tangible deliverable when applying for foreign grants.

It is clear from any cursory examination of social media sites that the mediums demand an increasing amount of content from its users. Simply put, the more you post, the more you are seen and heard above the increasing noise and chaos of social media. And if being seen and heard represents success, the message itself can get lost in translation. Click bait, sponsored posts, and buzzy headlines attract far more attention and gain more traction than any post attempting to create nuance and demand deeper engagement, at least in the cases I have personally observed and in my experience with activist groups.

The growing popularity of social awareness campaigns and organisations designed for the online world were quite obviously far more successful in utilising social media and web pages to draw attention to a specific issue. These campaigns especially were extremely popular with Delhi youth in particular and effectively used visual displays - such as crowd-sourced images and provocative posters - to highlight issues of gender violence and corruption. Occasionally some participants were outwardly dismissive of older advocacy groups, which they felt were out of step with the times and content to stay in their comfort zones.

In spite of the success of many online campaigns on the issues I researched, few were able to translate the momentum generated by the campaign into a broader discussion and deeper engagement on their chosen issue. While some participants stated this was not necessarily what they desired to do - some chose to remain purely as an awareness campaign without moving into advocacy - other participants stated a desire to do more and engage with the complex cultural, societal, and political constructs surrounding gender and corruption in India. When they attempted to engage in this more nuanced conversation, they often lost momentum on social media and occasionally stopped their campaign efforts altogether.

The rift was clear, and the struggle to merge worlds and effectively translate a variety of skill sets into effective advocacy was fairly well delineated. What troubled me was the implicit assumption that was being made around “effective” and “good” use of the Internet and social media. Why did a glossy website and an “active” social media presence appear to translate into organisational effectiveness? What was driving that assumption? It was an assumption I occasionally found myself making when researching organisations and even in some of my earliest interviews. Why did daily Facebook posts, likes, multiple Tweets, and followers translate into an interpretation of success and impact?

As Western, and in the case of Facebook and Twitter, American publically traded companies, there is a clear business prerogative in encouraging ever-increasing usage of their sites. More posts and tweet equals more data, which can then be analyzed or sold to a variety of different entities that want to utilise this data to create wealth. Facebook and Twitter also happen to be sites that can be used to generate conversation around key issues and act as an easy way to aggregate thousands, if not millions, of users behind a cause. The Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the Delhi Rape case mobilisations are only some of the hundreds of cases where social media sites have played a key role in mobilizing political, social, and cultural change.

However there is a corporate prerogative at work that is often ignored in these narratives. It is in a social media companies’ best interest to encourage frequent usage, as this is how free services generate revenue. Those who post the most win the race to be seen and heard. Those who do not - or do not have the funds to pay for sponsored posts or tweets - get lost in the shuffle, viewed as out of step and struggling to adapt to modern urban India, regardless of the quality work they may be doing offline. The “good” user is the most active user, regardless of what the content actually is. It can easily be termed as a binary between quantity versus quality, but this diminishes the extremely effective and thoughtful work of some digital media campaigns, which demands a different type of quality to actually become an impactful movement. It is therefore a more complex phenomenon than blindly generating massive amounts of content, but this is certainly a critical piece to digital success.

My conclusion, and one which was discussed and inspired by an early participant, was that it was the social media platforms – including key sites like Facebook, Twitter, and to a lesser extent YouTube - were partially generating and multiplying the aura of effectiveness around organisations and groups which had heavily emphasized social media as a core part of their outreach strategy. This is not to deny the very real success that several of these campaigns have had in generating conversation and change around critical issues in India. It instead questions why our notion of success and effectiveness has been altered so quickly, especially in an urban and digital context.

Based on my fieldwork, I encountered a digital hierarchy in three different aspects in activist groups. These divisions emerge at the level of search engines and ranking, web page aesthetics, and finally social media usage and statistical data. I will briefly examine these levels in the following sections.

Level I: Search Engines and Page Rankings

The first was generated at the level of the search engine. Higher ranked and frequently visited websites appear higher on any search engine page, based on the search algorithm. In the first searches I conducted, several organisations with well-developed and easily navigable websites always appeared high on the search page, and were the first organisations I made contact with. As I began to dig deeper into partner organisations and get recommendations from my participants, I discovered new organisations that had never appeared in any search I had conducted, in spite of their clear links to the issues I was researching. These organisations have less of an audience and less of a digital voice from the very beginning. This is not even engaging with the issue of language on the Internet, as all of my searches were in English and not in Hindi or any other language spoken in India and were focussed initially only on organisations with an office in Delhi.

A second issue at the level of the search engine was that the organisations that appeared highest on the list had links to larger partner organisations in Europe and the United States, and occasionally had head offices in New York or London. The larger global presence may have had an impact on page ranking, as they were more likely to be searched for and recognised globally. The dominance of English on the Internet may also play a role, limiting the potential set of results, though again I made this decision consciously. Language choice has had a demonstrable impact on what a person sees on the Internet and what appears using the same search term. The burden of visibility influencing potential digital impact is clear, and practically forces some organisations to invest in a digital presence without a clear digital strategy. This can prove extremely detrimental – especially if the web page proves difficult to navigate and use, which I discuss in the following section - and move investment away from advocacy and programmes on the ground. Visibility is also a key concern for groups that exist purely as a digital campaign, as their potential success is based almost solely on how easy they are to find. Failure leads to diminished searches and lower rankings outside of the first results page from a search engine, which few people click beyond, thus dramatically limiting the impact an organisational webpage can have from the very beginning.

Level II: Webpage Aesthetics

The second area consisted of the content and ease of use of the website. As a researcher, I was compelled to look into every recommended organisation that engaged with the issues I was researching. That being said the organisations with more developed websites caught my attention and implicitly created the impression that it was a more desirable contact. This is quite obviously not the case in reality, and often the organisations that had less advanced websites and appeared technologically less capable proved to be highly credible sources doing commendable work. However the difficulty of navigating some of the websites, which included issues such as broken hyperlinks, difficult interfaces, and offered very little information on the activities of the organisations would prove deeply unappealing to an observer with less motivation than myself. Going against my own training and experience and trusting the power of the network of recommendations on the ground proved to be just as useful as fairly random web searches. In terms of first impressions, it is difficult to move beyond these issues of navigation for an outside observer which expects a quality organisation to have a quality website.

Again, organisations with head offices based in the United States or Europe often were easily navigable and had high quality webpage design, representing a clear trend and highlighting the emphasis placed on the digital aboard. It was also very clearly which organisations had started on the Internet, based purely on design and functionality, though there was a certain bias as the Internet campaigners I spoke too had all had had great success as an online campaign. Finding failed campaigns would have added a key counterpoint to my work, but the difficulty of doing so proved insurmountable for this particular project. Design and navigability are key indicators of skill and investment in digital presence from an outsider’s perspective. It is less than representative of the story on the ground and the success of an organisation, especially if it is not a purely digital entity.

Level III: Social Media Use and Statistics

The third and final level I encountered was determined by social media use. For every organization or participant I met I did cursory research on the various social media platforms they used, how many likes or followers they had near the day of my interview, and roughly how often the organization posted and tweeted. About 90% of my participant organisations had a least a Facebook page and a Twitter account. The number of followers varied widely, from about 200 to nearly 200,000 on Facebook and Twitter. Daily posts and variety of content was a key component to the success of the more widely followed groups online. It was immediately clear that groups that posted sporadically and without immediately stimulating content did not generate or gain nearly as much digital attention.

Many organisations discussed the struggle to move beyond a closed and familiar network, to reach out to the audience they know is there. But without a clear strategy, and even more importantly without a dedicated communications position, their digital engagement often mirrored their offline audience; a closed network of individuals already dedicated to change in the area the organisation was working in. They often failed to meet the incessant demands of the medium for easy content and had difficulties expanding their reach or message beyond their previously established networks of influence.

Those organisations which were able to attract digital attention on social media, while feeling it was an important tool for outreach – especially for youth in Delhi – and places where conversations on key issues could take place, also discussed the importance of social media statistics as a measurable deliverable. Donors, especially foreign funders, placed an emphasis on growth on social media sites as an indicator of success and growing influence. Whether social media growth can actually be an indicator of influence is still up for debate, but it is indicative of the notion that success means quantity, rather than quality, similar to the Western corporate prerogative of growth. That this is the new measure and standard of success for an activist organization is a troubling trend, and one unlikely to change in the near future.

Conclusion

I have argued that corporate strategies and imperatives are creating this new class system of activism in India. I labelled it a “Western” corporate strategy, based on the American origins of the main players Facebook and Twitter, which are the predominate mediums my participants engaged with and have some of the largest audiences in India. Facebook had 108 million users of May 2014 Twitter has around 19 million users (Statista 2015) in India, though these are estimates and in all likelihood there has been an increase in users. The new hierarchy masks the reality that impact and results cannot be measured by likes and retweets. While there is indeed power in these particular sites, the difficulty in documenting what influence actually translates into in the offline world is a well-documented debate. I do not doubt that the Internet and social media, in urban and increasingly in rural India, have great affordances. But these advances do not have to come at the expense of equally important organisations whose ability to translate these messages digitally is more limited than others, especially when this hierarchy is partially generated by corporate sensibilities whose sole aim is profit generation.

While this hierarchy has been explored as an issue of second-level digital divide- where the issue is not lack of access but lack of training and knowledge of the digital world – I do not believe this is the only issue at stake. The increasing power of large companies to determine the way we interact and the rules of effective communication and transmission are deeply troubling, and leaves little room for alternatives. Collaboration can be an effective way of mitigating some of the differences, but this option is not always available to every group.

While these are questions that require further examination, it is clear that there is a divide between organisation’s digital strategies and whether they are able to leverage the affordances of the Internet and social media applications. I have argued that the operational aspects of social media sites increase this divide in particular, as they demand increasing amounts of data to generate profit. A strong digital presence is increasingly linked to an idea of effectiveness and impact, without investigating offline realities. This in turn can lead to a new hierarchy of activism, which limits the voices of some and magnifies the digital voices of others who are clearly better at manipulating the advantages of the Internet. I do not wish to say that offline activism is more effective than online activism and that we should not engage with digital mediums to promote. I only seek to question how this increasingly digital reality is creating a hierarchal system that is not reflective of offline reality, question what knowledge might be left behind in the process, and critically examine the underlying structures and platforms underlying the growing field of digital activism in India.

References

Castells, M. (2010) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press

Earl, J. and Kimport, K. (2011) Digitally Enabled Social Change: Activism in the Internet Age Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Internet Live Stats (2015) www.internetlivestats.com Accessed 23 May 2015

Rainie, L. and Wellman, B. (2012) Networked: The New Social Operating System, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Statista (2015) www.statista.com Accessed 25 May 2015

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Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights

Deva Prasad M — 2015-07-22T04:18:37Z

This post by Deva Prasad M is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Deva Prasad is Assistant Professor at the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore. In this essay, he analyses key public discussions around Internet related issues from the human rights angle, and explores how this angle may contribute to understanding the features of the Internet discourse in India.

Introduction

The significance of Internet as an important element and tool in day-to-day life of mankind is an established experiential fact. The intrinsic value that Internet brings to our lives has transformed the access to Internet as a necessity. Internet’s intrinsic value acts an enabling tool for information, communication and commerce to be effectively and expeditiously carried forward. It is to due to this enormous intrinsic value attached with Internet that there is an emerging trend of exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights. Moreover, Internet as a medium also helps in furtherance of human rights [1]. Social movements have attained a new lease of life with the digital activism over Internet. Arab spring is an epitome of this phenomenon.

There is an emerging positive trend of linking established norms of human rights with Internet. The Report of the Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression has vividly explained the possibility and feasibility of extending and extrapolating the right of freedom of opinion and expression to Internet medium (Article 19 of the UDHR and the ICCPR) [2]. The Special Rapporteur also highlights the need to have access to Internet for effective enjoyment of right to freedom of opinion and expression in the digital sphere. The UN High Commissioner on Human Right’s report on‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’ also explicitly highlights the significance of protecting the right to privacy in the internet medium in light of extensive “surveillance and the interception of digital communications and the collection of personal data” [3]. The extensive interception and blocking of the online communication is also a pertinent reason, which calls for human right protection to be extended to Internet.

The WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society [4] and the Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet [5] also have played a significant role in furthering the inter-linkage between human rights and Internet.

The Internet and human rights policy developments have gathered significant relevance in international human rights law and Internet policy fora. But it is interesting to note that the Indian government and state institutional mechanisms have not yet pro-actively accepted relevance of applying human rights norm to the Internet medium in India.

As an essay in the Studying Internet series, it is important to highlight how human rights acts as underlying factors in many socio-political issues pertaining to Internet in India. Analysis of these issues helps us to understand that, even though the Indian state turns a blind eye to the human rights element in the various socio-political issues relating to Internet, the digitally conscious Indian’s have realized their rights and even fought their own battle for exercising their rights.

In recent years, the Internet discourse in India has witnessed many socio-political concerns. This essay would be exploring the pertinent socio-political issues in Indian context and the underlying link to human rights thread. Globally, exploring Internet from the perspective of human rights brings out multitude of issues, which requires application of established human rights norms of right to privacy, freedom of expression, access. The story in India is no different. In this regard, three socio-political issues relating to Internet, which gained much attention in India roughly in last one year, are being analyzed. Interestingly, all three issues have an underlying thread of human right perspective connecting them and need pertinent deliberation from human rights perspective.

Section 66A and Freedom of Speech and Expression

The lack of freedom of expression on Internet and Section 66A of Information Technology Act, 2000 is an interesting case study. Indian government used Section 66A as a tool for extensive surveillance and had taken criminal legal action against the Internet and social media users for posting the offensive comments and posts. But Section 66A was badly drafted allowing the government to initiate criminal legal action in an arbitrary and whimsical manner. Thus such a provision could be misused by the state for curbing the freedom of expression in the Internet sphere. The rampant usage of the Indian state machinery of Section 66A had led to sharp reaction amongst the Internet and social media users in India. The vagueness in language and unconstitutionality of Section 66A were criticized by legal experts. The action of state machinery in arresting a cartoonist, a professor and two girls in Maharashtra [6] (and many others) for comments and post on social media against politicians, had made it evident the lack of respect for freedom for speech and expression on Internet by the Indian state machinery (Most of these incidents took place during the year 2012). These incidents led to wide spread protest for violation of human right to freedom of speech and expression by the digital media users. When the Public Interest Litigation [7] filed by Shreya Singhal led to the Supreme Court striking down the Section 66A on 24th March, 2015 for lack of due process being followed, it was a water shed moment for internet discourse in India. The significance of human rights (especially the freedom of speech and expression) in the Internet medium got asserted.

Net Neutrality and Internet Access Issue

The recent net neutrality debate in India has also evoked deliberation about the right of equal access to Internet and the need to maintain Internet as a democratic space. The net neutrality debate on keeping Internet a democratic space that is equally accessible to everyone has got much vogue in India. An important point that needs to be emphasized in the debate regarding net neutrality in India is the equal access question being raised. The equal access question is more a product of the lack of regulatory clarity regarding TRAI’s (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) capacity to regulate the Over-the top (OTT) services; coupled with the lack of well stipulated right to internet access in the Indian context.

The net neutrality rides on the premise that the entire data available on the Internet should be equally accessible to everyone. No discrimination should be allowed regarding access to a particular website or any particular content on the Internet. Tim Wu, a renowned scholar in Internet and communication law has mentioned in his seminal work, Network Neutrality and Broadband Discrimination, that network neutrality signifies “an Internet that does not favor one application” [8].

In this regard, there has been a constructive dialogue between the Federal Communication Commission in United States and the various stakeholders. An interesting development was a proposition, which attempted to classify broadband internet service access as a public utility [9]. There is much relevance for such debates in the Indian context. India also needs public participation (especially strong voices from internet user’s perspective) to highlight these access concerns regarding Internet. Human right’s concerns regarding Internet should be pro-actively brought to the attention of regulatory institutions such as TRAI. There is need to balance the economic and for-profit interest of service providers with the larger public interest based on equal access.

The pressure created by public opinion through online activism upon the TRAI’s proposal to regulate the OTT services helps in understanding the power of public participation in the pertinent human rights issues relating to Internet [10]. The broader design in which the principle of human rights in the context of Internet medium would have to be asserted in India is also vividly seen in the case of protest against OTT regulation.

Right to be Forgotten in EU and Repercussions in India

The repercussions of ‘Right to be Forgotten’ judgment of European Union also had led to debate of similar rights in Indian context. The Google v. AEPD and Mario Cosjeta [11] is an interesting case decided by the Court of Justice of European Union, where the court held that based on the right to privacy and data protection, persons could ask databases (this case was against the search engine Google) on Internet medium to curtail from referring to certain aspects of their personal information [12]. This is basically referred to as ‘right to be forgotten’.

Viktor Mayor Schonberg in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age has elaborated the problem of how the digital age coupled with the Internet has led to store, disseminate and track information in a substantially easy way and advocates for the more informational privacy rights [13]. In this judgment, the Court of Justice of European Union has furthered the information privacy rights in the European Union with the ‘right to be forgotten’.

In the Indian context, it is important to note that information privacy rights are yet to evolve to the extent that of European Union with definite privacy and data protection law. But interestingly, there was a request made to a media news website by a person attempting to enforce the right to be forgotten [14]. Even though the application of right to be forgotten is not directly applicable in the Indian context, this event throws light to the fact that Internet users in India are becoming conscious of their rights in the Internet space. The way Indian news media gave relevance to the right to be forgotten ruling also is an example of how there is an implicit recognition of the interlink between human rights and Internet that is slowly seeping into the Indian milieu.

Internet Discourse in India and Human Rights

Discussion of the three issues mentioned above points out to an important fact that human rights are not pro-actively applied to the Internet medium by the Indian state machinery. Even though the international human rights law and various Internet policy organizations are pushing the Internet and human rights agenda, the same is yet to gain momentum in India.

But at the same time, an interesting development that could be witnessed from the above discussion is the manner in which the Internet users are asserting their rights over the Internet and slowly paving the path for an enriching view towards applying the human rights perspective to Internet. In the first instance, the freedom of speech and expression was not pro-actively applied to the digital space and Internet. This has happened when Article 19 of Constitution of India has clearly provided for freedom of speech and expression. The second instance of net neutrality has thrown wide open the lack of clear policy regarding Internet access in Indian context. The public opinion has pointed out to the fact that there is a public interest demand to ensure that there is no discrimination in the case of Internet access. The third instance of looking at ‘right to be forgotten’ in Indian perspective, provides the understanding that the users of Internet are becoming conscious of their individual rights in the digital space in a more affirmative manner.

Further, the operationalization of human rights in these three instances also needs to be critically looked into. The assertion of the freedom of speech and expression in the Internet medium could be made possible effectively due to the fact that Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950, protects freedom of speech and expression. The vast amount of precedence existing in the field of freedom of speech and expression relating to constitutional litigation and allied jurisprudence has helped in crafting the extension of the right of freedom of expression to the digital medium of Internet. Further, using the social action tool of Public Interest Litigation, the unconstitutionality of Article 19 of the Constitution of India, 1950 could be brought before the Supreme Court.

But interestingly, the net neutrality issue, which is concerning the access to Internet in a non-discriminatory manner, is yet to be perceived in Indian context from a strong human rights perspective. Internet access as a public utility concept is yet to be evolved and articulated in concrete manner in the Indian context. Further, the Indian network neutrality discourse attempts to operationalize through the free market approach. In the free market approach the entire non-discriminatory access has to be ensured by the market competition with the necessary regulatory bodies. In this sense, the human rights angle of access to Internet will have to be ensured by effective competition in the market along with the proper oversight of regulatory bodies such as TRAI and Competition Commission of India. It is important for the regulatory bodies to have broad goals for furthering public interest by ensuring non-discriminatory access to Internet. Further, with the financial and infrastructure led limitations of government’s capability of ensuring access to Internet for all, the market-led model with sufficient regulation might be the right way forward.

Looking at the issue of the right to be forgotten, it could be easily perceived that the Indian milieu is yet to articulate privacy rights to that high standard. Even though the right to privacy is being understood in the constitutional law context through effective interpretation by the judiciary, the concept of digital privacy has not yet evolved in India. There is no collective understanding, till now, that has emerged regarding right to be forgotten in India. Even though individual attempts to assert the right was witnessed, there is much room for an evolved collective understanding in Indian context. Civil society organizations would have a crucial role to play in this regard.

There is an emerging consciousness amongst a set of Internet users in India, who values and gives importance to the Internet being a democratic space, without unwanted restriction from the government machinery or even the private entities. Hence looking at the Internet discourse of India from the perspective of human rights, there is an implicit way in which the human rights are being applied to the Internet space. The lack of a state’s pro-active approach in asserting human rights to Internet space is highlighted by the assertions being made by the Internet users in India.

Way Forward

For Internet to remain as a democratic space, there is need for pro-active application of these human rights norms and clear understanding in Internet governance. At present, the state of affairs in India regarding application of human rights to Internet is far from satisfactory.

This essay which is part of the ‘Studying Internet in India’ series, has till now done a stock taking analysis of emerging dimension of human rights and Internet in India. Lack of interest from government and state machinery to further the human rights and Internet dimension need to be seriously reconsidered. Attempting to intervene in Internet law and policy in India from the rights based approach should be an important agenda for furthering digital rights in India. For this, civil society organizations have an important role to play. Exploring the public interest could be done effectively with public participation of stakeholders. Here in, platforms such as India Internet Governance Forum could play a crucial role.

Apart from the civil society organizations, it is also pertinent for state and governmental institutional mechanism to also take a pro-active stance. For ensuring that the rights based approach to Internet has to be duly included in the Internet law and policy; and there should be institutional mechanism, which could look into areas pertaining to human rights and Internet. It is a well know fact that India lacks institutional mechanism for looking into communication and privacy issues regulation. Further, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) also needs to look at the relevance of human rights for Internet. Inspiration could be drawn from the pioneering work of Australian Commission of Human Rights on applying human rights norms and standards to Internet medium [15]. This essay has only flagged the need to apply the established human rights norms to Internet space. Much more issues such as access to Internet by disabled, safety of children and Internet medium are also pertinent areas.

Moreover, it is important to have digital rights of Internet users in India to be explicitly enshrined in a legal framework. Presently, a gap in law and policy framework regarding human rights and Internet is evident, as highlighted in this essay. The pertinent questions regarding access, privacy and freedom of expression are to be taken seriously by the government and state machinery for which clear and well-defined rights relating to Internet space have to be framed. For Internet and human rights to be taken seriously, it is high time that legal and institutional framework to explore these issues also are evolved.

Emphasizing the Right to Communication in India

Further, the present understanding of right to communication in India, which is perceived in narrow manner, could be re-worked with the help of a pro-active application of human rights norms to the Internet governance. The intrusion into the freedom of speech and expression especially in the telecommunication context has to be highlighted. Protection of communal harmony has been used as rationale for capping the number of the SMS messages that could be sent per day during the exodus of people of Northeastern states origin from Bangalore, Pune and other major cities in India.

This move has been criticized for being unreasonable and universality of capping the number of SMS messages [16]. Further, the telecommunication and Internet services (especially Facebook and YouTube) were blocked in Kashmir for restricting the protest [17]. The telecommunication and Internet services were blocked on the grounds of protection of national security. The reasonableness of restrictions that could be imposed on right to communication is a major concern in the above-mentioned instances. Making a blanket ban applicable in a universal manner undermines the right to communication of various genuine users of bulk messaging and social media sites.

The right to communication especially in the digital and telecommunication media needs to be emphasized. Applying human rights perspective and norms to Internet governance would help in articulating and evolving the right to communication in India. With adequate institutional oversight, the human rights norms could make the digital right to communication an effective right.

To conclude, the Internet discourse in India has already paved path for human rights norms to be applied to Internet space. The seriousness that could be attributed to those rights is evident by the assertions by the Internet users in India. But the state and government machinery in India also should explore the human rights and Internet agenda seriously.

Endnotes

[1] Frank La Rue, Report Of The Special Rapporteur On The Promotion And Protection Of The Right To Freedom Of Opinion And Expression, Available at http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/17session/A.HRC.17.27_en.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[2] Ibid, Special Rapporteur in the Report points out that the language of Article 19 of ICCPR is media neutral and is applicable to online media technological developments also. Para 20 and 21 of the Report.

[3] UN High Commissioner on Human Right, Report on ‘The Right To Privacy In The Digital Age’, Available at http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/RegularSessions/Session27/Documents/A.HRC.27.37_en.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[4] WSIS Declaration for Building of Information Society, Available at http://www.itu.int/wsis/docs/geneva/official/dop.html. (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Article 58, WSIS Declaration reads as follows: “The use of ICTs and content creation should respect human rights and fundamental freedoms of others, including personal privacy, and the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion in conformity with relevant international instruments”.

[5] Charter of Human Rights and Principles for the Internet Available at http://internetrightsandprinciples.org/site/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/IRP_booklet_final1.pdf, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[6] See Section 66A:Six Cases That Sparked Debate, Available at http://www.livemint.com/Politics/xnoW0mizd6RYbuBPY2WDnM/Six-cases-where-the-draconian-Section-66A-was-applied.html, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see, Facebook Trouble:10 Cases of Arrest Under Section 66A of IT Act, Available at http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/facebook-trouble-people-arrested-under-sec-66a-of-it-act/article1-1329883.aspx (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[7] Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, Available at http://indiankanoon.org/doc/110813550/ (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[8] Tim Wu, Network Neutrality, Broadband Discrimination, Available at https://cdt.org/files/speech/net-neutrality/2005wu.pdf (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[9] F.C.C. Approves Net Neutrality Rules, Classifying Broadband Internet Service as a Utility, Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/technology/net-neutrality-fcc-vote-internet-utility.html (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[10] The online campaign by www.savetheinternet.in and the AIB video have played a crucial role in gathering public support.

[11] Court of Justice of European Union, Case C-131/12.

[12] Rising like a Phoenix: The ‘Right to be Forgotten’ before the ECJ, Available at http://europeanlawblog.eu/?p=2351 (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[13] Viktor Mayor Schonberg, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in Digital Age, Princeton University Press (2009).

[14] Right to be Forgotten Poses A Legal Dilemma in India, Available at http://www.livemint.com/Industry/5jmbcpuHqO7UwX3IBsiGCM/Right-to-be-forgotten-poses-a-legal-dilemma-in-India.html, (Last accessed on 25/05/2015). Also see We received a Right to be Forgotten request from an Indian user, Available at http://www.medianama.com/2014/06/223-right-to-be-forgotten-india/ (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[15] Human Rights and Internet, Available at https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/rights-and-freedoms/projects/human-rights-and-internet (Last accessed on 25/05/2015).

[16] Chinmayi Arun, SMS Block as Threat to Free Speech, Available at http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-the-hindubusinessline-op-ed-sep-1-2012-chinmayi-arun-sms-block-as-threat-to-free-speech (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).

[17] Pamposh Raina and Betwa Sharma, Telecom Services Blocked to Curb Protests in Kashmir, Available at http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/telecom-services-blocked-to-curb-protests-in-kashmir/?_r=0 (Last accessed on 15/07/2015).

Author's Note: All the views expressed are my own and in no way are linked to the opinion of my employers. I thank CIS for this opportunity to explore Internet and Human Rights interface in India as part of the Studying Internet in India essay series.

Note: The post is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, and copyright is retained by the author.

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War Driving in Lhasa Vegas

Oxblood Ruffin — 2015-08-17T08:19:56Z

This post by Oxblood Ruffin is part of the 'Studying Internets in India' series. Oxblood Ruffin is a hacktivist and film maker. He joined the CULT OF THE DEAD COW in 1996 as its Foreign Minister. Colonel Ruffin is co-author of the Hacktivismo Enhanced Source Software Licencse Agreement (HESSLA), network curmudgeon, and line cook. He will publish a book on information warfare in 2016. In this essay, Colonel Ruffin traces the history of Internet access in Dharamsala, and the factors at play in shaping it - mundane and maverick, familiar and outlier.

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof”
— Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept
— Dalai Lama

Dharamsala is on the frontline of the Indian internet, fuelled by information activists. Its transition from a sleepy hill station to the residence of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government in exile clearly politicised the region. The Tibetan diaspora was its primary network. Information flowed in and out of Dharamsala along conventional means. Students of Buddhism, backpackers, and tourists began to arrive after reading exotic press reports. And then almost overnight everything changed. The internet arrived and with it an explosion of content and possibility. Dharamsala transitioned again.

In 1959 the Dalai Lama (HHDL) escaped from Tibet to India after the Chinese invasion. And estimated six thousand monasteries and temples were destroyed by the Peoples Liberation Army and up to 1.2 million Tibetans - approximately one sixth of the population - were killed or died of starvation after China invaded Tibet in 1950. A large influx of Tibetan refugees followed HHDL which in turn made Dharamsala a popular tourist destination.

It is equally chaotic. Like much of touristic India it is full of shambolic hawkers in pursuit of the gora dollar; Israeli twenties fresh from the military and hot for bhang; American unicorns stinking of patchouli in their first pair of harem pants; and young Punjabi men drowning in beer on the weekends. Dharamsala is all of these things, and it is more. Dharamshala is a Hindi word loosely translated into English as 'spiritual dwelling' or 'sanctuary'.

The region is surrounded by pine forests. The Dalai Lama’s residence in McLeod Ganj and the headquarters of the Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government in exile, or CTA) are also located in Dharamsala. Some folks from Delhi have remarked that when they’re in McLeod Ganj they have the feeling that they aren’t in India. Much of the architecture is in the Tibetan style and the diversity of town-life is atypical. The local Gaddi [tribal] community is supplemented by Kashmiri merchants and Tibetan vendors. Then there is the steady stream of tourists from every point on earth; many having come to study Tibetan culture and Buddhism. Even though HHDL arrived in this mountain town ten years before the first nodes of the internet were deployed, Dharamsala had become a hotbed of activism waiting to connect.

In the earliest days campaigning was contained within the Tibetan community, and the bustling Dharamsala of today had yet to emerge. But over time, year by year, volunteers from the outside would drift through. Most would work for a few weeks or a few months. Some would never leave. Networks were formed and the technologies of those times were worked overtime. Printing presses, fax machines, photocopiers, tape recorders, photography and, film. Everything was used to get the Tibetan message out, and all of these technologies were used to preserve Tibetan culture in ways that were forbidden in Chinese occupied Tibet. And steadily another technology was developing. The internet.

In 1986 the Education and Research Network (ERNET) was initiated by the Department of Electronics and transmitted India’s first email exchange. But email had rapidly been flourishing years before on military and university networks in the West. The push came from the outside to get Dharamsala on the internet and to think about email as an emerging communications alternative. In 1989 Indira Singh - a New York based computer consultant - envisioned a globally connected Dharamsala. And at the same time Thubten Samdup - a Tibetan living in Montreal - was wrestling with the problem of how to bring communication costs down. Ms. Singh sent the first email message over an ad-hoc telephone connection from Dharamsala to the Office of Tibet in New York.

“Hello from Dharamsala”, it said.

It did not take long to convince officials from the CTA that email and the internet were the future of communications from Dharamsala. While discussions of the technology caused many eyes to glaze over the economics did not: email was cheaper and faster than regular mail. The sell was that simple. Not to mention that Tibetan activists in North America and Europe were already using email. Thubten Samdup founded World Tibet Network News (WTN) on Usenet in 1992; and established eleven different listservs in different languages serving various verticals in the Tibetan diaspora. Although the internet existed in India at the time, it was rather rarefied. Research institutes and military networks primarily in urban centres formed the earliest nodes. The further and mountainous reaches of Dharamsala were not on the drawing board, until they were pushed onto the internet from the outside. In 1993 the International Centre for Human Rights and International Development in Montreal donated fifteen thousand dollars to buy three computers and set up email service for the CTA.

Other developments followed apace.

Back in 1989 when Ms. Singh first contemplated an interconnected Dharamsala another computer scientist was sorting out his own vision. Sir Tim Berners-Lee was fiddling with what was to become the World Wide Web. He released the code to the public on Christmas day 1990, and with that the seeds to the mainstreaming of the internet were planted. In 1995 the dial-up internet was introduced for the public in six major cities in India by VSNL. Dharamsala was not included in the rollout, but technical experts in the CTA had been quietly working behind the scenes. In cooperation with North American hackers the CTA’s official Website Tibet.net was launched in 1996 under the stewardship of Thubten Samdup. That same year Sabeer Bhatia, a U.S. based engineer from Bangalore released Hotmail, a free Web email service that garnered 100,000 Indian subscribers within the first three weeks.

The following year five Bay Area technical experts under the supervision of Dan Haig made a forty hour haul from San Francisco to Dharamsala. Their mission was to set up an intranet for the CTA using sixty thousand dollars of their own money, and carrying one hundred and sixty-five pounds of cables and hardware in their backpacks. The mountain had come to Muhammed if that metaphor is not too strained for Tibetan Buddhists. Once again Dharamsala’s international support network kickstarted the local process. Haig and his colleagues wired the seven ministries of the CTA and the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives giving them high-speed intranet connections. The also created and email system and dial-up service for many cultural institutions in the Dharamsala area that were too far away to be on the network.

For a town far away in the mountains full of monks and political refugees, Dharamsala was making great strides on the Indian internet. The next leap forward came in the form of an accidental activist. Yahel Ben-David had been a young officer in the Israeli Defence Forces, a successful Linux entrepreneur, and an avid hiker. When he got a call in 1998 to help the CTA install a satellite dish he jumped. What could be better than a three week working vacation in the mountains? Three weeks turned into three months; eventually he relocated to Dharamsala with his wife where he would spend the next eight years working on tech projects. For the next four years Ben-David developed a Local Area Network (LAN) for the CTA and switched everything to ethernet. Monasteries, the Dalai Lama’s private office, and NGOs were all connected. But Ben-David was still dissatisfied.

Given Dharamsala’s remoteness and the cost-prohibitive realities of proper infrastructure development, the region wouldn’t be seeing a high speed internet any time soon. Radio networks were a technical possibility but the cost of licensed solutions was prohibitive. WiFi could have been a solution but was to be illegal for public use until 2004, and then only indoors. Ben-David put his ham radio knowledge to use by tearing part every Linux SOHO (small office/home office) networking device he could find. He founded the Tibetan Technology Centre (TTC) with Phuntsok Dorjee, a non-profit technology company that would train local talent and develop bespoke routers. And finally in January 2005 the Indian government deregulated WiFi for public use. Within hours of that ruling Ben-David put up the first node of the Dharamsala Community Wireless Mesh Network. It had effectively become the first public WiFi network in the country.

Testing and tweaking the nodes was a continuous process. In addition to the demanding mountainous terrain environmental issues had to be factored in: Four distinct seasons which included a heavy monsoon; daily power outages; and last but not least, monkeys. They are particularly destructive creatures when they discover something new to play with. Ben-David settled on tamper-proof cages to encase the routers. Similarly the power outages were countered with solar panels. TTC was putting itself on the map for its innovations internationally, and Dharamsala began to attract more and more technical talent. The town that had once been the preserve of backpackers and Buddhists was broadening to include networking and security experts and open-source developers. None of this was lost on the Chinese intelligence community.

Dharamsala had been an embarrassment to the Chinese ever since the Dalai Lama escaped in 1959. The town has been constantly monitored as have been prominent activists and all of the Tibetan Support Groups. China was particularly displeased when Tibetan activists in Dharamsala partnered with the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) hacking group to protest Google’s operations in China. Increasingly Tibetans suffered targeted malware attacks. Listservs and networks were compromised and sensitive information about the CTA, Dalai Lama and activists found its way back to the Chinese intelligence community. A typical exploit of the time involved forged email headers appearing to come from a friendly source. It would include a PDF file containing a message of support. Once opened a friendly enough document would appear, however, it contained a modified version of a PDF-Encode vulnerability. The exploit silently dropped and ran a file called C:\Program Files\Update\winkey.exe. It was a keylogger that collected and sent everything typed on the affected machine to a server running in China. By 2008 Dharamsala appeared to be on the frontline of China’s cyber-espionage ambitions.

Security researchers at the University of Toronto were approached by the office of the Dalai Lama to examine its computers. Something wasn’t right. The ensuing investigation confirmed that malware had been installed on these machines. They were able to monitor the commands on the infected computers and discover the names of the documents exfiltrated from Dharamsala. Further investigation pointed to specific correspondence stolen and that those behind the attack had gained control of the email servers in the Dalai Lama’s office. One incident was particularly telling. After an email invitation was sent to a foreign diplomat, the Chinese government made a call to the same diplomat discouraging the meeting. And a young woman working for a Dharamsala group making chat connections between Tibetan exiles and Chinese citizens was stopped by Chinese intelligence officers on her way back to Tibet. She was shown copies of her chat sessions and ordered to stop her political activities. What followed was extraordinary.

The Toronto researchers discovered that the Dalai Lama’s Dharamsala network was completely compromised, and also those of Tibetan exile groups in India, Brussels, London, and New York. And then the kicker. Additionally their investigations revealed that the command and control centre infecting the computers from China had also taken over more than 1300 computers in 103 countries. Much of the malware had been attached embassies and foreign ministries, including the Indian embassy in Washington. What had originally been thought to be Chinese interference in the Dalai Lama’s affairs and those of the Tibetan Support Groups turned out to only be the tip of the iceberg. The researchers uncovered an international spying operation. But even when exposed and caught by compelling evidence, Chinese officials denied any involvement and dismissed the researchers report as propaganda.

Despite China’s cries of innocence, the Tibetan community took some satisfaction from the incident. They had been the objects of Chinese interference for years and now the world could see that they weren’t just being paranoid about Chinese hackers. It also garnered wider support in Dharamsala and the Tibetan diaspora for greater security awareness. Groups like Students for a Free Tibet and Tibet Action Institute who had been offering security workshops for years experienced increasing demand for their services. And one thing should also be noted. While the Tibetan community had been on the receiving end of computer hacking and online harassment for years, they never responded in kind. Dharamsala’s response to Chinese aggression has always been non-violent action, online and offline. Two examples come to mind.

The Dalai Lama had always wanted to be able to speak directly to the Chinese people. Thubten Samdup who had spearheaded a number of internet initiatives organised a group of Chinese speaking Tibetans to engage mainland Chinese via chat online. The strategy was simple. Let people on the other end know that they are chatting with Tibetans, and did they have any questions? The internet probed to be a great leveller and one by one some minds were cleared of disinformation about Tibet and the Dalai Lama. Even though this project met with modest success things were becoming worse in occupied Tibet. Beginning in 2009 Tibetans began self-immolating as a desperate form of non-violent protest. Were it not for a network of monks most of the details of the 138 immolations to date would not be known to the world.

From the first self-immolation China initiated an information blackout in Tibet. Foreign journalists were not allowed into Tibet and all communications networks were heavily monitored. However one man managed to get the message out. Gyanak Tsering is a Tibetan studying at the Kirti Monastery in Dharamsala. He escaped from Tibet in 1999 and began experimenting with the internet and mobile technology. Working with security experts in Dharamsala Mr. Tsering began to covertly transfer information to and from Tibet. Mobile phones are the primary communication devices in Tibet and increasingly smartphones are used to access the mobile Web. Whenever a self-immolation is reported in the press it is because Mr. Tsering has been sent the details from Tibet. When he has verified the details with three separate sources in Tibet he releases the information to the press. Some wags in Dharamsala refer to Mr. Tsering as the Jason Bourne Buddhist.

Technical innovation in Dharamsala has always been driven by necessity. Initially it was because the internet was cheaper and faster than conventional communications. Then WiFi development brought more people online because it was easier to deploy than conventional infrastructure. Whatever challenges were faced in Dharamsala there was always some workaround, and others began to notice. Largely as a result of the Dharamsala Community Wireless Mesh Network (later rechristened AirJaldi) open-source developers began flocking to the region. It is now one of India’s more attractive development hubs with IT conferences, new businesses, coding workshops, and hacker spaces. What was once a sleepy hill station emerged as a Tibetan refuge that adapted to the internet and proved that anything was possible.

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Tech Anthropology Today: Collaborate, Rather than Fetishize from Afar

Geert Lovink and Ramesh Srinivasan — 2017-05-16T14:51:09Z

"That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two." In this interview, Geert Lovink discusses with Ramesh Srinivasan: “how can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

Cross-posted from nettime.org.

“How can we embrace the realities of communities too-often relegated to the margins?”

In Whose Global Village? (NYUPress, 2017) UCLA scholar Ramesh Srinivasan travels the globe in order to find out much techno-autonomy there’s still left. Now that more than half of the world has moved to urban centres, the rural population is literary a minority and is kindly asked to adjust accordingly. This makes Srinivasan’s work even more urgent when he asks “what the internet, mobile phone or social media platforms may look like when considered from the perspectives of diverse cultures.”

The communities Ramesh Srinivasan visits are on the defensive, in a process of fragmentation. “There is a disconnection not just from one another,” he writes, “but also from the common threads of their history and culture. The tribes and villages experience “placelessness, fragmentation of identity, and dissolution of social bonds.” Throughout the study, which took place between 2004-2013, Srinivasan reports from the rising gap between the proposed technologies (such as videos, websites, databases) and the ‘techno-solutionism’ (as described by Morozov) that he wants to prevent. Ramesh is so honest to present this dilemma as an inner struggle of today’s anthropologist with a technology background. Computers and smart phones are an integral part of the everyday life—no matter where we go—and can no longer be presented as liberating tools. This put the ‘ICT for development’ researcher is an awkward position. Post-colonial theories have widely been read and their influence (from Fanon, Said to Spivak) is having an inevitable impact. This in turn leads to a new attitude that I would describe as ‘radical modesty’ (if not ‘vital pessimism’).

While studying the impact of the Tribal Peace system that he and others installed to connect the different Navajo tribes in San Diego County, Srinivasan realises that he has to work with rather than ignore the networks that exist. “It was neither the technology nor institutions that connected the people I had met. Instead, the very few threads of kinship I noted were related to revered individuals, regarded by most with collective respect and as a source of inspiration.” It is with and through the elders that he starts to draw up information architectures (or ‘ontologies’), listing topics, themes, and values across the native reservations. How can ‘lateral networks’ be supported in a a process of what James Carey calls ‘ritual communication’?

Needless to say this approach takes us light years away from Facebook and other social media. This is only in part a question of translating interfaces to local indigenous languages. The proposed systems require the design of its own visual metaphors, reminding us of 1990s multi-media navigation screens, meant to represent digital storytelling. This is dealt with in closed, or semi-open networks, paying respect to the different experiences of time and space. These ideas are put to the test in the last part of the book that describes the encounter with the Zuni tribe (Arizona/New Mexico), where Ramesh Srinivasan worked together with Robin Boast. It is amongst the Zuni peoples that the researchers encounter the distrust against anthropologists. “Our Zuni friends voiced feelings of misrepresentation and anger at their objectification. They explained that social scientists would visit their community, exoticize their traditions and customs, and extract what they could to benefit their own agendas rather than those of the community.”

The gained detachment aims to put the researcher “at the service of our friends and partners.” Important is no longer the one-way transfer of knowledge but the art of listening. Towards the end of his study Ramesh asks: “What would it mean to step away from top-down understandings of the internet and instead ‘splinter’ the way we think about technologies and the communities they may support?” As an activist in Egypt explained: “We do not need another NGO or a new dialogue.com to solve our problems—we just need you to listen, support our voices, an pay attention to what we we do.” Whose Global Village? adequately describes the moral and methodological crisis in the ‘ICT for Development’ field. The wide condemnation of Facebook’s neo-colonial internet.org balloon campaign to bring access (to Facebook) to hundreds of millions of rural poor in India clearly marks a paradigm shift. Access is no longer a benevolent project. It’s clear that ICT for Development as such does not contribute to a redistribution of wealth and makes global inequality only worse. So much for internet charity.

Ramesh admits: “Trained as a designer and engineer, I recognize my innate tendency to valorize my power to come up with a set of solutions for any challenge at hand. Yet every project I have described illustrates the valuable insights gained when I put aside my own agenda and bias as much as possible to open myself to experiences that could not have been predicted from afar.” This modesty sounds like a new starting point. But is it also resulting into new concepts and narratives? This might be too much to ask of a single publication (in fact, the first book publication of this author). The ‘tactical distance’, created out of respect for the communities-in-defence, results into rather sparse information about the places we visit. There are no interview fragments included in the book, and the few local leaders that we encounter do not speak to the reader in a direct manner. The chosen way to report creates a vague cloud of secrecy around the research itself. What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Were more detailed research results published elsewhere or only accessible for donors (a common practice in NGO land)? What happens when we listen but do not acknowledge the Other? Is it too risky to give them a voice? Might their opinions and desires be too ordinary, too radical, or simply not what we want to hear? What if they do not fit our Western expectations? The Others are humans, after all, and, like us, tend not to live up to expectations. These, and more, are some of the questions we encounter once we give up on the development rhetoric.

Geert Lovink: You’ve been in a lucky, privileged position to travel so often and witness events and encounter communities in diverse places such as Cairo during the 2011 uprising, with the Zapatistas Chiapas, doing research in the land of your ancestors, South India and on reservations in the South-West of the United States. The offline encounter in-real-life seems to be constitutional for your theory. In the past scholars travelled through the library and many these days do not leave their screens while processing their ‘big data’. Digital ethnography, on the other hand, seems to require direct exchanges with the Other. This assumption pops in all chapters. Is travelling the new luxury? Or should we say that it is rather dedicated time? Once you arrive elsewhere there is suddenly another time regime.

Ramesh Srinivasan: Indeed, I think all of us as researchers and teachers are nothing if not 'lucky' or 'privileged'. And you're certainly on point to recognize that the root of my scholarship and activism locates technologies within an assemblage of other factors - peoples, places, infrastructures, and environments. Yet it is essential that I do not collaborate with (rather than ‘study of’) any community unless I am invited to do so and where our efforts are focused on initiatives that live and are owned by that group itself.

That is why the 'offline' if you will is so critical to understanding the 'online'—because they do not exist in isolation and what we have constructed is an illusory binary between the two. If we want to be of service and understand the complex relationships between technologies, politics, and cultures—as I attempt to do via the multiple case studies discussed in the book, we need to put our bodies and hearts in places rather than our distant gaze. It's critical for me to not step foot anywhere where I am not invited first, and to critically think about my role and power as I enter different environments. Indeed, the book is full of ethnographies of attempting to listen more than make, and how I eschew the 'study of' any community and instead write about what we create and work on together. My goal is to collaborate rather than study, rather than fetishize from afar.

GL: Whose Global Village? has an unusual time span of 10-14 years. First research goes back to 2003-2004. Some case study closed in 2005 while most literature dates from 2012-2013. In between, the 2008 global financial crisis occurred, the smart phone was launched and apps became mainstream. How did you deal with these constant changes? Are you proposing a ‘longue durée’ in media studies and internet criticism’? What are the benefits of this approach? How do you see ‘grassroots storytelling’ dealing with the relentless changes of platforms, interfaces and protocols? Do remote communities have a different approach to the latest fashion and the famous ‘fear of missing out’?

RS: There are some dynamics that don't change no matter what app, gadget or platform has captured the popular imagination. That is—the realities of power over how technologies are designed, owned, and politically or economically appropriated. The book starts with the simple but surprisingly ignored sociotechnical truism - People and societies shape and are shaped by technologies. Yet such a small percentage of Internet users have any power over the design process let alone any sovereignty over what occurs with their data and identities as they are refracted onto digital networks. Those issues are timeless and all the more urgent today. I focus on the political and cultural flashpoints where by users and communities can reign in their blind trust of new digital platforms and instead take power over these in relation to their local concerns and agendas.

GL: As a media activist you have a background in engineering. However, at UCLA you work inside library science (called ‘information studies’). However, you seem to relate most to the role of anthropologist, in that you deeply desire not make past mistakes in encounters with ‘the Other’. In this context you work with Mary Louise Pratt’s theory of the contact zones and apply this to the design of ‘multiple ontologies’. I never hear IT engineers talking about contact zones. How do you want to carry your insights into the tech world? After all, you live in California. Who else is going to do this? What could be a good strategy? How do you look at the Bay Area and the global geek class they still dominate in terms of its global imaginary?

RS: I see myself as a scholar who can contribute to fields that tend to remain mostly distinct in the academy—design, engineering, cultural studies, media studies are but a few. If I was ever an IT ‘geek’ that was decades ago!

To engage in the charge of the book, of locating our understandings of digital networks and systems in relation to diverse cultures and users worldwide, all of these fields are useful to invoke and bring into dialogue with one another. I'm fortunate to be in a department that supports this interdisciplinarity and indeed as you stated, coming from California and trained in engineering here, I believe it is all the more important to question the black boxes not just of Silicon Valley hardware and software platform design but to push these incredibly powerful technologies to open up to an engaged, conversational social contract with diverse publics.

GL: Over the past 10-15 years we’ve seen the closing down of the possibility space of the Web and the rise of the ‘easy to use’ template culture of social media. The technologies that you’ve proposed and built seem to move away from the consumer culture. In South India you’re spread video cameras, elsewhere you’ve developed a dedicated Tribal Peace system interface (as part of a stand-alone website) while for the Zuni communities you’ve utilized the FileMaker Pro Advanced database software. Not Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube (and no wikis either). Can you elaborate on this?

RS: It's important to not assume that naively putting content online is somehow empowering. Indeed, that which we ‘share’ (eg; sharing economy) asymmetrically builds power and value for the platform holder and all those that can monetize it. As a result, we increasingly know that corporate proprietary platforms such as Facebook or Google are hardly designed to directly support a user's sovereignty or agency. The interest, across each of the book's chapters, is to instead think about how the communities with which I collaborate can have their interests served via technologies either that we design together or appropriate/subvert in various ways. Far too often we see examples where such 'participation' actually does little to shape any cultural or political cause from the grassroots. So we think agnostically and critically about the systems, networks and infrastructures we use in relation to our collaborations.

GL: Can you tell us what you’ve been doing over the past few years? Did you continue to work in the same direction? The book indicates that your collaboration with Robin Boast and the work with the Zuni Native American Reservation seems to continue.

RS: My interests lie in that important space between understanding how technologies may aid and support grassroots political movements and diverse user communities. The Zuni collaboration, described in chapter 4, is interested in that cause in relation to the political and cultural sovereignty of a tribe that was not just historically colonized but still faces the objectification and misrepresentation of new forms of coloniality online.

The cases in the book look at both political movements as well as diverse cultures and communities. Currently, I am collaborating with activists and indigenous Zapotec and Mixtec communities in the Oaxaca Mexico region, one of the most biodiverse and culturally/linguistically diverse parts of our world. In this work, I am writing about the Rhizomatica project (invoking Deleuze/Guarttari's rhizome) where these communities are designing their own collectively-owned cell phone networks in cloud forests all around the region. This has massive political and economic effects. What we see here is a rhizome in the making, a set of networks, systems, and infrastructures shaped and produced from the grassroots, by communities and for communities, and not for the major corporations of our world that tend to on the surface exploit and monitor the activities of these people. More on this amazing project, including some videos at www.rhizomatica.org . I believe that as we start to think about this new effort, that Lisa Parks and I describe as 'network sovereignty', we can start to embark on a path I describe in detail in chapter 5 of the book, of getting back the social contract and communitarian potential of technology to serve democratic agendas located in people's politics and cultures.

I am hopeful we can start that conversation now. I attempt to continue it via my soon to be released second book, After the Internet (with Adam Fish, Polity, end 2017) which looks at examples ranging from Iceland’s Pirate Party, hacktivism, the Silk Road, the Arab Spring, and other activist movements that re-imagine new technologies in relation to grassroots power and voice.

Reference

Ramesh Srinivasan, Whose Global Village? Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World, New York University Press, New York, 2017.

Profiles

Ramesh Srinivasan is Associate Professor of Information Studies with a courtesy appointment in Design|Media Arts. Srinivasan, who holds M.S and Doctoral degrees, from the MIT Media Laboratory and Harvard's Design School respectively, has focused his research globally on the development of information systems within the context of culturally-differentiated communities. He is interested in how an information system can function as a cultural artifact, as a repository of knowledge that is commensurable with the ontologies of a community. As a complement, he is also interested in how an information system can engage and re-question the notion of diaspora and how ethnicity and culture function across distance. This research allows one to uncover mechanisms by which indigenously-articulated forms of development can begin to occur, as relating to his current work in pastoral and tribal communities in Southern India. His research therefore involves engaging communities to serve as the designers, authors, and librarians/archivists of their own information systems. His research has spanned such bounds as Native Americans, Somali refugees, Indian villages, Aboriginal Australia, and Maori New Zealand.

Geert Lovink is a media theorist, internet critic and author of Dark Fiber (2002), Zero Comments (2007), Networks Without a Cause (2012) and Social Media Abyss (2016). Since 2004 he is researcher in the Faculty of Digital Media and Creative Industries at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) where he is the founder of the Institute of Network Cultures. His centre recently organized conferences, publications and research networks such as Video Vortex (the politics and aesthetics of online video), Unlike Us (alternatives in social media), Critical Point of View (Wikipedia), Society of the Query (the culture of search), MoneyLab (internet-based revenue models in the arts) and a project on the future of art criticism. From 2004-2013 he was also associate prof. at Mediastudies (new media), University of Amsterdam. Since 2009 he is professor at the European Graduate School (Saas-Fee/Malta) where he supervises PhD students.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/tech-anthropology-today-collaborate-rather-than-fetishize-from-afar

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

sumandro — 2015-08-28T07:09:39Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital native: The Voices in Our Heads

nishant — 2016-11-22T02:23:29Z

What if our phones were to go silent? Would you be able to deal with the silence?

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on November 20, 2016.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-20-2016-digital-native-the-voices-in-our-heads

Digital native: The View from My Bubble

nishant — 2016-12-05T15:15:07Z

In the digital world, the privileged have the power to deny a devastating crisis for the poor.

The article was published by Indian Express on December 4, 2016.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-4-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-the-view-from-my-bubble

Digital Native: People Like Us

nishant — 2016-12-18T14:19:46Z

How the algorithm decides what you see on your timeline. If you have been hanging out on social media, there is one thing you can’t have escaped — a filter bubble. Be it demonetisation and its discontents, the fake news stories that seem to have ruined the US election, or the eternal conflict about the nature of Indian politics, your timeline must have been filled largely by people who think like you.

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

From your Facebook feed to your Twitter trends, you must have been bombarded with multiple news sources, breaking news, hashtags, memes, and viral videos all more or less affirming how you feel about these issues at hand. Even when you did come across a story that you did not agree with, or a status that offended you, you would have found many others in your ever-expanding social media groups, who would have expressed their anger or dismay at the phenomenon.

The filter bubble — our self-selecting process of making alliances, connections, friends and relationships online with people like us, resulting in getting a biased, one-sided, uni-dimensional view on most public events and phenomena, has long since been presented as one of the most dangerous phenomena of our times. Filter bubbles mean that based on our social, political, cultural, geographical, ethnic, racial, religious, gendered, sexual identities and affinities, social media algorithms show us material that we are more likely to click on, share, comment on, and generate traffic, which increases their revenue. Or in other words, what you see of your friends and the people you follow, on your social media apps, is not organic, chronological or natural. It is at the mercy of an algorithm that is continually monitoring you, tracking the immense digital footprint that you possess, and constantly curating and arranging the data to make sure you stay on the site.

With the accelerated rate of the digital web, the new real estate is not location, but time. The more time a user spends with a particular app, the more they can be tracked. Longer tracking means that the algorithms have more data to look at predictable behaviour and particular user types, thus, offering more opportunities for customised advertisements that the users would click on, and generate profits for these ‘free’ apps. It is in the interest of these social media sites, then, to show us material that would keep us polarised, either into state of happiness and comfort, or in movements of anger and passion. This is why filter bubbles come into being — because the social media algorithms are constantly adjusting the material to keep us engaged, rewarding us with information and news that suits our own frame of mind, and increasing the chances of us spending more time on a platform.

However, there is another side to filter bubbles that we need to perhaps examine. A lot of attention on filter bubbles is about how we hear only one side of the story. What is missing from this narrative is not just that we hear one side of the story, but that we also hear very limited stories. As social media becomes one of the primary source for news consumption, the new filter bubbles ensure that we only receive stories that are suited to our interests as predicted by a big data driven algorithm.

So if you look at your news feed recently, you might have a variety of sources coming your way, but you might realise that in their diversity, they are very homogeneous. They pretend in their multi-media diversity to be delivering varied content but what we get instead is a limited section of perspectives on the same topics so that there is a monopoly of what gets talked about and how. The global, the viral, the popular and the paid content, thus, hides and makes invisible all the local, the niche, the less seductive or alarming but still important news that should inform our everyday practice and politics.

What we get then is the world as rendered visible by these predictive algorithms that make their choices of showing us content based on profits that they generate. In the process, we enter a filter-bubble which we can’t even see, thus losing the opportunity to deep-dive into the rich information landscape that the digital world offers. And as we get more and more entrenched in these bubbles, the alternative voices, the contentious questions, the moves to resistance, and the calls for action get buried and forgotten under the plethora of cute cats, dancing babies, alarmist conspiracy theories, and spam-like repetitive images that keep us informationally activated without allowing a deeper, more substantial engagement with the world around us.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-december-18-2016-digital-native-people-like-us

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

sneha-pp — 2017-10-04T11:02:10Z

What do Edward Snowden, the whistle-blower behind the NSA surveillance revelations, and Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, who worked for almost his entire life on Saint Thomas Aquinas, have in common? The simple answer would be: the computer. Things however are a bit more complex than that, and the reason for choosing these two people to explain what the Digital Humanities are, is that in some sense they represent the origins and the present consequences of a certain way of thinking about computers. This essay by Dr. Domenico Fiormonte, lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre, was originally published in the Media Development journal.

Cross-posted from Media Development, Vol. LXIV 2/2017. Published on May 13, 2017.

Although it is true that computer science was born from the needs of calculation (i.e. computing), in other cultures and languages the usual term is “informatics”, or the science of information. The difference is not trivial, and in fact the encounter between the computer and words, or rather with language, can be considered a cultural watershed. Father Busa himself was one of the protagonists of this meeting which came about in 1949 when he visited New York to ask Thomas J. Watson Sr, the president of IBM, for permission to use computers to study the vocabulary of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Jones, 2016). That endeavour is considered by many to have signalled the birth of computer-based “Natural Language Processing”, the inter-disciplinary field behind many of the digital tools that we use in our everyday life: from the technologies of T9 on our smartphone to voice recognition and synthesis, etc.

But these tools, although fundamental, are not the most striking (or perhaps disturbing) results of this age of transformation. Through the gesture of entering words in a computer, Busa framed the basis of a new concept of hermeneutics that was no longer based solely on purely subjective interpretation, but also on automatic processing of linguistic data, and hence in some sense “objective”. Busa’s undertaking founded the discipline of Humanities Computing (although years later it was renamed Digital Humanities), but above all it laid the groundwork for a profound epistemological and cultural transformation. And at the heart of this revolution was the “written document”, the text, understood as an alphanumeric sequence. In an effort to best explain this revolution, I will concentrate on one aspect, the representation of the document, and return to the hermeneutical aspects in the final part.

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

My own association with Digital Humanities (DH), as for many humanists of my generation, came from philology and textual criticism. My first foray into electronic textuality was in 1990, when it became clear that the confluence of informatics and the humanities would revive an inherent, almost arcane dualism: in the beginning was the data… But I was unprepared to tackle the conflict between information retrieval and interface, or between a textual paradigm based on the idea of information (text=data) and a vision of the textual document as a stratified historical-material reality, visualized not only as information, but also as an object (or series of objects), to be ultimately used and enjoyed. This dualism certainly did not only come about as a result of the encounter between informatics and text, but what we can say is that the process of digitization from this point on would “enhance” certain characteristics of the document at the expense of others.

The problem of the digital document in fact cannot be understood unless one first understands what digitization is and how it works: that is to say, the process of translating what we who undertake the work call “encoding” or more generally “representation”. The pioneers of informatica umanistica in Italy (Tito Orlandi, Raul Mordenti, Giuseppe Gigliozzi, etc.) taught the students of my generation two key concepts: 1) the passage from the analogue to the digital implies a process that formalizes the object of research (from the single character to the more complex structures of the historical artefact); 2) each act of encoding, or rather each act of representation of the specific “object” via a formal language involves a selection from a set of possibilities and is therefore an interpretative act (Orlandi, 2010).

The fundamental difference is that the human language and its writing systems were always many and various, whereas formal computer languages are based on a codex universalis, an Esperanto derived for the most part from the English language. As George Steiner wrote in After Babel, “the meta-linguistic codes and algorithms of electronic communication are founded on a sub-text, on a linguistic ‘pre-history’, which is fundamentally Anglo-American” (Steiner, 1998: xvii). Digital “standards” always reflect a cultural bias, and the act of encoding is never neutral, but tends to assume (and overlap with) universalizing discourses that on the surface are hard to see.

An important standard for character representation with ASCII, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange created in the 1960s. That technology is continued today by Unicode, an industrial standard, which purports to represent the characters of all written languages. Beside the fact that it is directed by the usual mega-corporations, Google, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, etc., Unicode is underpinned by an alphabet-centric logic that penalizes non-Western systems of writing. Given this weakness, it should come as no surprise that it has attracted criticism on several fronts, including the charge of ethnocentrism (Perri, 2009; Pressman, 2014: 151), and also because it ignores the difficulties faced by languages of low commercial value in their efforts to be properly represented (and therefore at risk of extinction). To paraphrase Alexander Galloway, “technical is always [geo]political” (Galloway, 2004: 243).

Even if our lack of awareness as humanists might have deceived us into thinking that the translation from the analogue to the digital was a neutral and painless process, we would soon have realized that, as with any change of format, digital representation can change and influence both the life of the original object and its digital future. And we would have discovered the “multiple biases” inherent in the digitization process. So in one respect we have entered in a post-Busa phase where interpretation is not something you can have without defining both the object and the source of your knowledge.

Busa never showed much interest in theoretical questions or in the link between hermeneutics and epistemology (and even less between semiotics and politics), or between the interpretation of the object and the nature of its representation. Perhaps this was because the question “What do I want to represent, and how?” would have provoked a series of more disturbing questions: “What is knowledge? Who produces it, how, and for what purpose?” These questions probably would have threatened to paralyze his pragmatic approach. On the other hand, it cannot have been easy to ignore the problem, since many philosophers, starting with Plato when discussing the transition from orality to writing, kept asking questions about the formats and systems of knowledge representation (Stiegler, 2006).

As humanists we then begin to understand that the problems information technology appeared able to resolve, soon created new problems which were not limited to a single discipline, like philology or textual criticism. To ignore the epistemological (and also ethical or political) problems generated by the confluence of the humanities and information science was certainly possible: but at what price? The more pragmatic among us would have been content to use machines for what they could immediately offer: the tremendous possibilities and tools for representing, archiving and automatic analysis of humanistic objects and artefacts. This approach seemed prevalent in the first historical phase of DH, reflected in canonical definitions like “the application of computational methods to humanities research and teaching” or “researching the Humanities through digital perspectives, researching digital technologies from the perspective of the Humanities” [1].

But what are the effects of these methods and technologies? The answer to this question coincides with the new phase that DH is actually in at the moment, a phase that forces us to consider the costs of all of the above, the ethical, social, and political implications of the instruments, resources and infrastructure, and the cultural biases inherent in their conception and design.

The social and political implications of DH

Fr Busa’s “hermeneutic” approach has been the main focus of the past 20 years of DH, while the methodological and epistemological concerns have been pushed to one side. The reason for this is fairly simple. Since the overwhelming majority of evidence on which the memory of people is based (particularly in the West) is the written text, the computer, a manipulator of alphanumeric symbols, has been shown to be a powerful agent of their preservation and management. This need to unravel the concept of the “text as data”, as mentioned above, has pushed aside for the moment the question of interface, that is, ways for the text to be used and read.

The materiality of written documents, given their incredible linguistic and cultural diversity, their visual and pragmatic dimensions, etc. (especially holographs and manuscripts) does not marry all that well with the limited possibilities offered by information science – or at least doesn’t fit with what has been produced by those who have guided its development thus far. Therefore, up until the early 2000s, the Digital Humanities focused especially on the design of tools and resources for the analysis and preservation of written documents. The spread of the Web from the mid-1990s, despite the first rumblings on the theme of user interface development (which Busa always considered to be a minor problem), ended by confirming this tendency.

There was in my view a precise moment when this concept of “text as data” reached a point of crisis, by showing its dark side. As humanists we would probably have preferred to continue our work quietly as if nothing had changed, but at a certain point something monumental happened, an event which has changed our relation with the digital dimension of knowledge, and hence of research. And this moment was the 6th of June 2013, when the Washington Post and the Guardian began publishing the documents supplied by Edward Snowden about mass surveillance by the NSA. The immensity of this event was immediately clear: a document published by the US National Security Agency and its British twin (GCHQ), said that in one month alone over 181 million records had been collected, including metadata and content (text, audio and video [Gellman and Soltani, 2013]).

The news that in July 2016 half of Silicon Valley, from Amazon to Google, had been co-opted by the Pentagon (Collins, 2016), and the dynamics of the last presidential elections in the USA confirmed, that the Net has become the field on which the geopolitical balances of the planet are played out. And at the centre of this “new world” is the idea of the “universal archive” where all data (past, present, and future) are stored. It is here that both the hermeneutical and epistemological questions fall down. In modern times, knowledge and interpretation depended on history, which we conceived as a linear process, i.e. based on space and time. But the dynamics of digital data seem to escape the logics of space and time, because the digital archive is ubiquitous and eternally present.

In my opinion, the heritage of Busa is reflected by the obsession with control (collection) and the analysis (interpretation) of data by government agencies and high-tech multinationals. Both have committed to the “hermeneutic” vision (although of the bare bones variety), or rather to the analysis of huge amounts of our data as the basis of their interpretation of the world. Welcome to the fantastic world of Big Data...

The question is no longer what the document is or how it is represented (an epistemological question) or how it is to be interpreted (a hermeneutical question). Even if the better forces of DH have insisted on this point and on the necessity of proceeding in this order (because interpretation of the object is inseparable from the circumstance of its representation), these “humanistic” scruples appear suddenly irrelevant. The actual question is in fact “who are we really?” Or rather not us, but the creation through our digital footprint of an alter ego that the algorithms of Google or Facebook decree is more “true” than the other (which we mistakenly believe still to exist). But who will be able to decipher or take apart these stories (data + algorithms) which we daily write and re-write? And does it still make sense to investigate the instruments of production and preservation of memories and knowledge when we no longer have any control over them?

Geoffrey Rockwell and I recently tried to analyze a commercial surveillance package, Palantir, from the point of view of DH (Rockwell and Fiormonte, 2017). Palantir scans and combines data from “documents, websites, social media and databases, turning that information into people, places, events, things, displaying those connections on your computer screen, and allowing you to probe and analyze the links between them” (Anyadike, 2016). But these kinds of software can be also seen as story-telling tools, because they allow someone to build stories about us and through us. So there seems to be a “literary” and rhetorical side to surveillance software, which the digital humanist seems particularly well-equipped to analyze. After all, the story of Big Data is also our story. There seems to be an “original sin” present in Big Data, i.e. the information retrieval paradigm that treats stories as data and data as a resource to be mined. And this approach is clearly reflected in Busa’s original idea of computational hermeneutics: digitize your texts, get your data, then build an interpretation upon them.

A posteriori we can ask ourselves what happened on that distant morning in 1949 in the heads of Thomas J. Watson Sr. and Father Busa. Was the founder and owner of IBM conscious of what the vision of Father Busa would lead to? And could the Jesuit father have ever expected that his intuition would change not only our means of reading and interpreting history, but also how we construct it? No one can ever know. But history reaffirms once again the great responsibility of science – in this case the responsibility of the “ignorant” humanities. If anyone believes that the humanities do not have a future, it is good to read again how 70 years ago a meeting between Thomas Aquinas and computers formed the basis of a revolution in digital communication. But from now on, the role and responsibility of the humanist will not only be to preserve and interpret the signs of the past, but to engage critically with, and where necessary unmask, the technological, political and social discourses that are shaping our knowledge, memories, and consciousness.

This article was translated by Desmond Schmidt.

Note

[1] Selected responses to the question “How do you define DH?” from Day of DH 2012. Accessed from http://archive.artsrn.ualberta.ca/Day-of-DH-2012/dh/index.html.

References

Anyadike, Obi (2016). Spies Sans Frontières? How CIA-linked Palantir is gaining ground in the aid industry (and why some humanitarians are worried). IRIN, March 7, 2016. Accessed from https://www.irinnews.org/investigations/2016/03/07/spies-sans-fronti%C3%A8res.

Collins, Terry (2016). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos joins Pentagon innovation board. CNet, July 28, 2016. Accessed from https://www.cnet.com/news/jeff-bezos-amazon-blue-origin-pentagon-ash-carter-eric-schmidt-google/.

Galloway, Alexander R. (2004). Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge (MA), MIT Press.

Gellman, Barton – Soltani, Ashkan (2013). NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say. The Washington Post, October 30, 2013. Accessed from https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html.

Jones, Steven E. (2016). Roberto Busa, S. J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing. The Priest and the Punched Cards. London, Routledge.

Orlandi, Tito (2010). Informatica testuale. Teoria e prassi. Roma-Bari, Laterza.

Perri, Antonio (2009). Al di là della tecnologia, la scrittura. Il caso Unicode. Annali dell’Università degli Studi Suor Orsola Benincasa, Vol. II, pp. 725-748.

Pressman, Jessica (2014). Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Rockwell, Geoffrey and Fiormonte, Domenico (2017). Palantir: Reading the Surveillance Thing. Critical Software Stories as a Way of the Digital Humanities. Paper presented at the AIUCD 2017 Conference, University of La Sapienza, Rome, January 26-28, 2017.

Steiner, George (1998). After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Stiegler, Bernard (2006). Anamnesis and Hypomnesis. The Memories of Desire. In Armand, L. and Bradley, A. ed., Technicity. Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, pp. 15-41. Online version. Accessed from http://arsindustrialis.org/anamnesis-and-hypomnesis.

Author

Domenico Fiormonte (PhD University of Edinburgh) is currently a lecturer in the Sociology of Communication and Culture in the Department of Political Sciences at University Roma Tre. In 1996 he created one of the first online resources on textual variation (www.digitalvariants.org). He has edited and co-edited a number of collections of digital humanities texts, and has published books and articles on digital philology, new media writing, text encoding, and cultural criticism of DH. His latest publication is The Digital Humanist. A critical inquiry (Punctum 2015) with Teresa Numerico and Francesca Tomasi. His current research interests are moving towards the creation of new tools and methodologies for promoting interdisciplinary dialogue in the humanities (http://www.newhumanities.org).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/the-digital-humanities-from-father-busa-to-edward-snowden

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

nishant — 2016-09-16T13:25:38Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Digital Native: The Future is Now

nishant — 2016-10-17T02:12:43Z

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.

The article was published in the Indian Express on October 16, 2016.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-october-16-2016-nishant-shah-digital-native-future-is-now

Centre for Internet and Society

Datafication of the Public Distribution System in India

Designing Domestic Work Platforms

Indic Scripts and the Internet

Internet Usage Statistics in India

Languages the Indian Internet User Encounters Both Online and Offline

Indic Script Software and Data Entry

Mimetic Desires on Public Platforms

Spelling Skills in Indic Languages

Digitisation of Pre-Digital Resources

Effects on the Indian Internet User

Effects of the Internet on Indic Scripts

Possible Measures to Enhance the Status of Indic Scripts on the Internet

Endnotes

Users and the Internet

A personal note…

Overcoming the fear…

Power redefined…

Confidence building apparatus…

Self-learning tool…

An institution…

Utility…

Endnotes

Effective Activism: The Internet, Social Media, and Hierarchical Activism in New Delhi

Background

Activism and Digital Hierarchy: A Divided Internet?

Level I: Search Engines and Page Rankings

Level II: Webpage Aesthetics

Level III: Social Media Use and Statistics

Conclusion

References

Studying the Internet Discourse in India through the Prism of Human Rights

Introduction

Section 66A and Freedom of Speech and Expression

Net Neutrality and Internet Access Issue

Right to be Forgotten in EU and Repercussions in India

Internet Discourse in India and Human Rights

Way Forward

Emphasizing the Right to Communication in India

Endnotes

War Driving in Lhasa Vegas

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof” — Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept — Dalai Lama

Tech Anthropology Today: Collaborate, Rather than Fetishize from Afar

Reference

Profiles

Call for Essays: Studying Internet in India

Digital native: The Voices in Our Heads

Digital native: The View from My Bubble

Digital Native: People Like Us

The Digital Humanities from Father Busa to Edward Snowden

The epistemological revolution of the digital document

The social and political implications of DH

Note

References

Author

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

Digital Native: The Future is Now

Monkeys would often climb up the poles to fool around with the routers forcing Yahel to fix a cage around them to make them “monkey-proof”
— Eric Brewer

War is an outmoded concept
— Dalai Lama