Centre for Internet and Society

Multimedia Storytellers: Panel Discussion

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:26:51Z

This post brings three storytellers together to find points of intersection between their methods. The format will be that of a panel discussion and it features: Arjun Srivathsa from Pocket Science India, Ameen Haque from the Storywallahs, and Ajay Dasgupta from The Kahani Project. They discuss technology, interpretation and action in storytelling.

CHANGE-MAKERS: Arjun Srivathsa, Ameen Haque and Ajay Dasgupta

ORGANIZATIONS:Pocket Science India, The Storywallahs and The Kahani Project

METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling

Over the last couple of weeks, I had the privilege of interviewing three storytellers. What struck me the most, besides from their fascinating ideas about storytelling, was how many of their ideas overlapped. As much as I would love to sit all of them in the same room and enjoy the fireworks, there are a number of logistical constraints that shut my storyteller reunion daydreams down; so for this post, I decided to be a self-appointed liaison between you and them. I will mimic this discussion by putting my conversations with them side by side, in the format of a panel discussion. Their interaction will have to happen in the realm of your imagination.

The questionnaire I used for my interviews was open-ended. I was curious to hear what they wanted to share about their work, as opposed to filtering and steering the conversation in a certain direction; so I let them take their own turn. While I clearly inquired about the relationship between storytelling and making change, it was fascinating to see each storyteller reach the question of ‘social impact' through different channels; testimony of the influence of their education and professional backgrounds in their work.

If I were to bring them together, the topic of the discussion would be: 'Technology, Interpretation and Action in Storytelling'. We briefly discussed mediation and semiotics[1] in the Pre-Production section of the Storytelling as Performance post. We mentioned then:

"mediums are combined to enhance the visibility of the message and the power of the experience of stories. [...] Each medium: video, audio, text, music, etc.- becomes “a new literate space” or “symbolic tool” storytellers use to portray narratives about the self, community and society (Hull, 2006)”

These thoughts were triggered by the work of the French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, who considers our self-identity a result of sign mediation and interpretation. Other themes in his work include: discourse and action, temporality, narrative and identity; also useful and relevant when exploring how storytelling and reality intersect. For example, how does building a narrative develop into a discourse that mirrors our context and existence? How does the medium chosen to carry this narrative define the language system of our discourse? Finally, let’s not forget this discussion is happening amid the digital question: how does the mediation of digital technologies enable or constrain our narratives of change?

Against this background, I would like to propose a discussion around five points of intersection that came up organically* during my conversations with them.

a) The power of storytelling:
What makes it a powerful vehicle of communication? How does this practice break from more traditional strategies of information dissemination?

b) Storytelling as a vehicle to make change:
How does the practice of storytelling intervene in the social imagination of its audience? Is it the experience or the content of stories what drives the message of change forward? Where does change happen: at the value, behavioral, community or macro level?

c) The role of technology in storytelling:
What is the part technology plays in storytelling vis-a-vis traditional storytelling? Is it a static infrastructure or does it shape the force and direction of the story? How does technology influence and impact their work

d) Translating awareness to action through stories:
Can you guarantee the ideas and values imbued by the story will translate into action in the public space?

e) Influence of stories on citizenship and political participation:
Can the power of stories be leveraged to instill a sense of responsibility in the audience?

* With the exception of Arjun Srivathsa, who addressed these points in a conference I attended. He later responded to a questionnaire in which I inquired about the intersections specifically.

Introductions

We first have Arjun Srivathsa. He has a Masters in Wildlife Biology and Conservation and currently works as a Research Associate for the Centre for Wildlife Studies (CWS India). In tandem, he started Pocket Science India, an initiative that combines wildlife science with art and cartoons to promote conservation in India and disseminate information from scientific journal articles. He aims to bridge the gap between the work of scientists and people using art and humour.

Arjun: I find the world of science and scientists very cool. Finding new things, discovering and inventing ways to understand the world better is an awesome way of life. I chose a career in science for this reason, second only to my love for nature and wildlife. But the essence of science, according to me, is not just to discover, but also to communicate. Even though wildlife research in India has progressed massively in the past few decades, the only notion people have is that of exaggerated scenes from television documentaries. When I discovered that most of the work by Indian scientists on wildlife and conservation of India is making no difference to people (mostly because they are unaware), I decided to use the easiest way to bridge the gap: through humour and art.

Second speaker is Ameen Haque from The Storywallahs. In what he calls his past life, he worked for 18 years in Advertising and Brand Strategy Consulting. Ameen also has a background in theatre and now works as as storyteller for The Storywallahs.

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Finally, we have Ajay Dasgupta, the founder of The Kahani Project, who also has a background in theatre and believes listening to stories is a fundamental right of children. His team works to capture stories in audio format and make them accessible.

I will now invite them to share their thoughts on the points described above. Each panelist will respond to the questions using a different medium: Arjun will comment with text and images, Ameen will comment with video and Ajay will comment using audiobytes. The idea is for each storyteller to use the medium and language they use for their own storytelling: cartoons, body language and audio respectively, as we explore how this choice mediates how they conceptualize change. I will act as a moderator and comment on common themes in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s characteristics of narratives.

1. The Power of Storytelling

What makes it a powerful vehicle of communication?

“narrative attains full significance when it becomes a condition of temporal existence” Time and Narrative

The first characteristic of narratives according to Ricoeur is: the ability to bring independent elements and episodes together into a plot within a specific context and time. The relationship between time and narrative is addressed by the philosopher in his work 'Oneself as Another,' in which he frames narratives as the most 'faithful articulations of human time'. This leads to an understanding of time as a framework where we can locate unique events and patterns, trajectories and sequences. Our three storytellers comment on how stories are an effective mean to communicate information, and how this information resonates because it can be located in the frame of our human existence.

Arjun: Storytelling really is the nascence of any communication technique. As kids we were all told stories with bees and birds, which spoke and thought. The moral life lessons and similar “information” were served to us on these fascinating platters.

Dugongs are closely related to whales and dolphins. They are peaceful mammals that swim around gracefully and feed on sea grass.
They are categorized as “VULNERABLE” because there are not too many of them left in the world.

Find full cartoon here

At some point in life, we all seem to stop appreciating the power of storytelling. Plain reporting of information has been done to death. Even an amazing discovery written as a formal report will fail to excite audience. It is time we all get back to appreciating stories. They sell. Movies generally do better than documentaries don’t they?

Ameen:

Ajay:

2. Storytelling as a vehicle to make change

How and where does change happen?

“All action is in principle interaction [...] change happens through interaction, as others are also encouraged to change” From Text to Action

The second characteristic of narratives is how the episodes in our narratives involve contingencies that will be shaped and reformulated through the development of the story. The narratives are constructed in such a way that induce us to imagine possible events in the future and how we would act in said circumstances. This characteristic is supported by Ricoeur's understanding of the 'self' as an 'agent', who can act and influence causation by taking initiative or interfering[2] in the story. Even if the listener cannot necessarily influence the outcome of the story (unless it is participatory storytelling), it triggers thoughts about its capability to act and its ability to change future realities, as he imagines himself n the situation of its characters. This out-of-body experience is what turns story into experience.

Our storytellers comment on how stories can influence and activate our agency and enable listeners to act towards creating change.

Arjun: Of course! Like I said, it is easier to influence people when you are not being preachy. Storytelling sidesteps the moral high ground that change makers are often blamed to occupy and takes a pleasantly shrewd path, as silly as it may sound.


#2: Increase in wildlife tourism has been brought about by the increasing population of the ‘Tourist’. This species is easy to recognize (see figure). The species has created an ecosystem of its own. It eats any kind of high or low profile food. Lives in resorts. Seeks charismatic animals like the tiger. Its daily activity involves excessive use of its camera. This species facilitates wildlife tourism	#9: Wildlife tourism is an excellent way to expose people of India and abroad to its rich natural heritage [...] We definitely need to regulate the number of tourists to avoid crowding in the forests, but we also need to educate tourists, especially the first-timers, about wildlife and its conservation. The tourist can be an important tool in conservation – let’s not let it go waste!"

#2: Increase in wildlife tourism has been brought about by the increasing population of the ‘Tourist’. This species is easy to recognize (see figure). The species has created an ecosystem of its own. It eats any kind of high or low profile food. Lives in resorts. Seeks charismatic animals like the tiger. Its daily activity involves excessive use of its camera. This species facilitates wildlife tourism

#9: Wildlife tourism is an excellent way to expose people of India and abroad to its rich natural heritage [...] We definitely need to regulate the number of tourists to avoid crowding in the forests, but we also need to educate tourists, especially the first-timers, about wildlife and its conservation. The tourist can be an important tool in conservation – let’s not let it go waste!"

Find full cartoon here.

To the question of where we locate change, it depends on what this change is. Through my work, I often target individuals and smaller communities (say students, villagers etc.). I don't necessarily grab my paintbrush and declare that I will change the world. My idea of change is a tailored, targeted and therefore an efficient influence on individuals.

Ameen:

Ajay:

3. The role of technology in storytelling

How does technology influence and impact your work?

Ricoeur’s thoughts on the relationship between text and action, makes us reconsider how we think about ‘text’ and how this reading can be applied to technology. According to him, the distinction between text and action is not at the linguistic, but at the discursive level. This is how he differentiates language from discourse:

	Language	Discourse
Structure	A system: timeless and static	Located at a given time and moment
Composition	A sequence of signs	A sequence of events that describe, claim and represent the world
Meaning	Refers to signs	Refers to the world
Communication	Provides codes for communication. Necessary but not sufficient	Communicates

Using these working definitions, we can understand the medium as a language: a system that provides us with signs and codes for communication. A creative use of language and mediums will hence, enable us to create narratives and produce meaning (which will be generated and negotiated by the audience). Technology is in this case our language, and how each storyteller uses it determines new ways to create meaning: experiences, connections and associations with and within their stories. We now ask them if/how the use of this 'language' mediates and impacts their work.

Arjun: Technology is the best facilitator in the realm of my science-art-communication. I depend on it extensively, to first educate myself. Then to create artwork (computer, tablet, smartphone). And then eventually I depend heavily on social media to broadcast my work. I will definitely credit the power of technology for fostering and enabling effective communication.

# 11: The story of Ajoba was carried far and wide in newspapers, television news and the internet. Find full cartoon here.

In my capacity, I feel most confident targeting students and urban youth. But thanks to the power of social media, putting my work out there has grabbed the attention of change-makers who are capable of things that is beyond my scope. This has led to collaborations through which the reach has become wider. Teachers use my art work in their classes, some organisations are using it in forest department buildings to educate visitors, some local groups have translated my work into regional languages.

Ameen:

Ajay:

4. Translating awareness into action through stories

Can you guarantee the ideas and values imbued by the story translate into action in the public space?

“what must be the nature of action...if it is to be read in terms of change in the world?” From Text to Action

So far they have told us about the power and content of stories. However, we have yet to find out what is it in stories that make listeners translate fiction into real life action. Ricoeur's final characteristic of narratives points us in the direction of empathy and interpretation.

Like discourse, action is open to interpretation. He posits that characters of our stories rise to the status of ‘persons’ when we evaluate their actions, including their doings and sufferings. This ethical verdict determines the identity of the character in the eyes of the audience (above any other physical or emotional characteristics) and this is what ultimately adds meaning to the events of the story, as it inspires the audience to emulate or reject this behavior through their actions.

We asked our storytellers their thoughts on how to translate stories' messages into meaningful action, or if it was even possible to guarantee this transition to begin with:

Arjun: I don’t [know]. One never does, I feel. But a lot of good awareness programs have made me change little things in my life. The people or groups who initiated those campaigns don't know of this, do they? This is somewhat similar. I believe that even if ONE person in the thousand who view my work gets influenced into making little changes, then it was worth my time and effort.

Ameen:

Ajay: (Ajay commented on the impact of stories while we were discussing how to gauge the impact of his work. In our first conversation he said: "Change is happening but there are no tests that can measure it and quantify it." and he elaborates on this idea below:)

5. Influence of stories on citizenship and political participation

Can the power of stories be leveraged to instill a sense of responsibility in the audience?

"You can only achieve power in common by including the opinions of as many people as possible in the discourse"

Finally, as stated in the brief of the project on methods for change, we are also interested in defining how political participation should be manifested in the public space. Ricoeur frames political action as a result of discourse and political deliberation.For a brief discussion of the relationship between storytelling and our political identity visit Part 2 of Storytelling as Performance.)

This last section captures the storytellers' point of view on how stories may affect our sense of citizenship and political responsibility.

Arjun: We are living in a society which is becoming increasingly insensitive and arrogant. There seems to be no time to stop and see the big picture: what are we doing? are our demands and lifestyles sustainable? Is the future generation secure? Impacts of our actions on the natural world.


#1: Most of us love seafood. And why shouldn't we? It tops the charts as some of the most delicious delicacies in the world! It so happens that we rarely think about what goes on “behind-the-scenes” and take many things for granted. The story behind how food reaches your plate is quite a scary one!	#12: So next time you feel like a getting a seafood dinner, do it with some perspective.

Find full cartoon here

Ameen:

Ajay:

Closing Remarks

I hope you enjoyed reading, watching and listening these three wonderful storytellers share their ideas on technology, interpretation and action. The question that remains unresolved is whether the effect of the story is shaped by the use of technology or not. At the end of the day it is the interpretation of stories -more than what it is said and how it is being said- what will determine the sustainability of these intents for change. The answers of our storytellers reinforce the notion that technology is a system, a language, a medium that transports our messages and intentions, but that inherently lacks the ability to provide guarantees for action and sway users into a lifestyle of responsible citizenship the second they pull out from their cartoon, screen or mp3.

The box below includes a quick run through the main ideas discussed throughout the post:

1. On the power of storytelling:

Arjun argues that storytelling is the origin of all communication techniques, and this makes it extremely attractive for the public.
Both Ajay and Ameen bring up the ability to influence behavior, shape the minds of people and transmit experiences, values and beliefs.
Both also brought up how dominant religions, ideologies, markets governments use storytelling to build movements and sustain their support
Finally Ajay comments on the issue of access: stories are powerful yet only a small share of stories are being told Hence, the need for this method to become more pervasive.

2. Storytelling as a vehicle for change:
Each storyteller locates change in different yet complementary spaces:

Arjun believes it must occur at the community level and hence the approach (stories) must be tailored and targeted in order to achieve an effective influence. His approach to change is very contextual.
Ameen locates it at the behavioral level; in our ability to make decisions and choices. His approach to change is based on how we use information from stories to interact with our surroundings.
Ajay locates it at the value level: He believes stories should influence us to adjust our values and only then, we will shape our behavior accordingly.

3. Role of technology:
We approached technology as a 'text' and as a 'language' that creates new possibilities for meaning and interpretation.

For Arjun and Ajay, technology enabled them to connect with other organizations and increased possibilities for partnerships and collaborations.

The three of them believe technology is an accelerator of the journey of stories and that it enables them to reach a larger audience.
Ameen argued that each medium requires different fluencies, and that the language of each medium should be adapted for the story. For example, a story will be told in different ways if using body language, video, audio, etc. He uses the example of the Twitter adaption of the Mahabharata.
Ajay closes by noting that although technology enables, it cannot replace the storyteller.

4. Translating awareness into action

Arjun and Ameen comment on the power of effectively and positively influencing one person. They believe the impact will exponentially spread and grow through that person's network or community.
Arjun believes you can guarantee it will turn into action.
Ameen believes you need to move them and inspire them through your characters to the point they feel they can be the hero of that story and act accordingly.
Ajay takes a more pragmatic approach towards action and shares some of the activities The Kahani Project uses to complement his storytelling sessions, such as: story-thons, story-booths and interactive storytelling, where they engage the audience in the production of their own stories.

5. Impact of storytelling on citizenship and political participation

Arun and Ajay believe this will come as a result of self-reflection and an evaluation of our impact in the world.
Ameen believes effective stories transmit the 'responsibility of action' through rhetoric. He uses the example of the popularity of India Against Corruption movement.
Ajay believes storytelling is a humanizing force that has the power of healing. He recommends institutions should utilize this method to spread confidence and inclusion among society and particularly with excluded groups.

Footnotes

[1] Semiotics is defined as the study of signs and symbols and their use or interpretation. It is the study of making meaning and is essential to understand communication processes. While we will not look at any specific semiotics theory, we will focus on how stories create meaning through different signs and mediums, and how this meaning can be leveraged for making change.

[2] Refer to Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s page on Paul Ricoeur and the section on ‘Selves and Agents’ to learn more about how action is mediated by causation, interference and intervention. Some interesting thoughts that inspired the above post

“What must be the nature of the world … if human beings are able to introduce changes into it?. Ricoeur adopts the analysis of interference or intervention that G. H. von Wright gives in Explanation and Understanding, and shows that for there to be interference, there must be both: an ongoing anterior established order or course of things and a human doing that somehow intervenes in and disturbs that order. Moreover, interference is always purposeful. Hence an interference is not merely ascribable to an agent. It is also imputable to the agent as the one whose purpose motivates the interference.”

“The second crucial question about action is “What must be the nature of action … if it is to be read in terms of a change in the world?” Ricoeur argues that every action involves initiative, i.e., “an intervention of the agent of action into the course of the world, an intervention that effectively causes changes in the world” (Oneself as Another, 109, translation modified). Initiative requires a bodily agent possessing specific capabilities and vulnerabilities who inhabits some concrete worldly situation.”

Sources:

Dauenhauer, Bernard and Pellauer, David, "Paul Ricoeur", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/ricoeur/>.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/multimedia-storytellers

Bridging the Information Divide - Political Quotient

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:28:06Z

On this post, we will unpack 'information poverty'- a problem lying at the very foundation of the crises that inspired this project and a barrier impacting political action. We interview Surabhi HR, the founder director of the political consulting firm Political Quotient, an initiative that seeks to change how youth interacts with politics in India

CHANGE-MAKER: Surabhi H R

ORGANIZATION: Political Quotient

METHOD OF CHANGE: Building an information service for citizen grievances, designed to keep elected representatives accountable for what happens in their constituency.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE: Building a new breed of politically conscious youth in India through technology and an interdisciplinary approach to change.

The deeper we delve into this project, the more the ‘information question’ rises to the surface as the decisive factor shaping political participation in democracies. Most of the initiatives we have learned about are focused on providing spaces, resources and opportunities to enable voices, participation and richer exchanges of information and knowledge. Yet, framing these as ‘empowering’ overlooks citizens who are trapped in an information gap or suffocated by an information overflow. People who find themselves in either side of the spectrum, are for the most part discouraged from engaging with this information, participating in public discussions (Jaeger, 2005), and do not have the same political opportunities as people with wider and freer access to information.

As we continue to explore how youth is redefining civic action in digital and information societies, we must thoroughly understand the different ways in which information barriers are affecting political action. On this post, we will go over a short glossary of terms that will help us understand information poverty better- a problem lying at the very foundation of the crises that inspired this project. These terms will be somewhat similar to each other, but will be unpacked from three different points of view, describing the implications of information poverty for social justice, technology disparity and democracy. The glossary will be coupled by our conversation with Surabhi HR, the founder director of the political consulting firm Political Quotient, an initiative that seeks to change how youth interacts with politics in India. Her background in Economics added new nuances to our analysis, as we explore the workings of political action through the lenses of economic theory.

Political Quotient

Political Quotient wants to “build a new breed of politically conscious youth that engages with the political system and equips them with the necessary skills to do so”. They have been running two programs: the ‘Political Internship Programme’ where young people have the opportunity to join party lines and support with legislative research, performance auditing, media management and event organization. And the second program is ‘Politicking’, in which they organize Google hangouts and panels between student leaders, political commentators, and party heads to debate and discuss policy-making and politics.

Now PQ is moving on to a new phase, in which they recognize it is not only youth who must be empowered. Similarly to Janaagraha, they also believe there must be an information structure in place to support elected representatives, who have been chosen to govern without the resources to effectively do so. “Things are changing, elected representatives are being held accountable, asked to be more transparent and to be more active, but the honest truth is they don’t have the necessary support to do this” comments Surabhi on the situation that led her and her team to develop a set of services and products to engage people in direct conversation with their elected representatives. These including the following:

a) A grievance addressing service: designed to keep elected representatives accountable for what happens in their constituency. Citizen grievances can be sent by e-mail, smartphone, sms, etc. to the elected representative’s office, where it will reach a multi-platform software that redresses the grievance to the right department; (for example, if the grievance is related to a tree fall, it will be redressed to the forestry department as opposed to staying in the MLA office). The whole process will be transparent, as both the citizen and the MLA will be able to track the status of the complaint, from the day it was issued to the day it was implemented, using technology.

b) A government schemes and subsidies information service: Citizens will have access to information about schemes through digital technologies, and find out if it is reaching the right beneficiaries.

Glossary:

(or crash course on concepts we should be familiar with when discussing making change in information societies)

To understand what information poverty is and how Political Quotient’s intervention in the information landscape will impact political action, will refer to the work of Johannes Britz, Doctor in Information Science and that of Anthony Downs, Economist specialist in public policy and public administration. This choice is inspired by a natural tension in our research as we continue to negotiate: what change ‘should’ look like from the lens of social justice and sustainable development, and what the ecosystem of change actually looks like when we deconstruct the political and economic structures enabling and constraining intents of change.

1.Information poverty:
According to Johannes Britz, : “the situation in which individuals and communities do not have the skills, abilities or material means to obtain efficient access to information, interpret it and apply it.”

Britz believes that information poverty must be addressed from a social justice perspective that considers the social, political and economic consequences of lack of information for our ability to fulfill our capabilities and freedoms. He posits a 'fair information society' as an ideal, in which social institutions work towards eradicating the four main characteristics of information- poor societies (See box below)

Characteristics of information-poor societies

1. Lack of essential information
2. Lack of financial capital to access information
3. Lack of technical infrastructure to access information
4. Lack of intellectual capacity to filter and evaluate
the benefits of information

The third characteristic: 'inefficient information infrastructures' is the main gap, both Janaagraha and Political Quotient, are addressing in urban India. They are both providing services to connect the citizen with their elected representatives; establishing a reliable exchange of information between parties, and as a consequence, more autonomy, transparency and accountability in the governance process.

How does Political Quotient brings us closer to a fairer information landscape in governance? Surabhi responds: “The [grievance addressing] system is using the benefits of filling the information gap to create tangible assets: greater accountability, interaction, participation in the citizen-elected representative relationship and thereby fundamentally changing the way they interact.”

Following Britz's reading of John Rawls' categories of justice[1]. PQ’s work addresses social justice in the following ways:

Recognition and participation: Enhancing the citizen’s ability to file a complaint is in itself an act of recognition of the citizen’s power to affect its own environment and his possibility to participate in the governance process.
Reciprocity: The system enables interaction between the elected representative and the citizen, setting forth reciprocity, transparency and a horizontal platform for exchanges where both parties manage the same information.
Development of capabilities: Assuming a successful implementation, grievances addressed imply the realization of the power of the citizen and a more functional infrastructure that enables their development as individuals.
Distribution and enablement: Assuming all citizens in Karnataka have access to ICTs, this service distributes power and bridges the distance between them and the government.

"In a society where we depend on the creation, access and manipulation of information, [lack of information] questions the fundamental freedoms of people”. Britz, 2004

While all these are highly idealistic assumptions, the last one is the most problematic (in a country where the Internet and mobile penetration rate remain as low as 16% and 26% respectively). While information and communication technologies do play an important role in bridging the gap between those who have access and produce information and those who don’t, as Britz outlines, the growth of ICT’s takes information poverty to a “whole new dimension”; in most cases dividing the info-haves and the info-have nots even further. Britz ideal of an fair information society is what we aspire to, yet there are structural limitations in place which might prevent information-based initiatives, such as Political Quotient, from achieving its social justice objectives.

2.Information Poverty
Information poverty can also be thought of as ‘information inequity’, which for the last 20 years has been strongly correlated to the digital divide. From this perspective, we can define it as the “economic inequality between groups in terms of access to and use of knowledge and ICTs.”

Analyzing information precariousness from the technology perspective brings us to the elements contributing to the digital divide and how they are affecting our ability to be informed by and of digital technologies. According to Britz, the three main elements contributing to the divide are the following:

Factors Contributing to Digital Divide

a) Connectivity: Lack of infrastructure and material access to ICTs
b) Content: Inability to access content because it is unaffordable, unavailable or unsuitable.
c) Human approach: Lack of education and digital literacy to understand and use information and data as knowledge.

This is a paramount consideration for Political Quotient if they aspire to reach all the constituencies in Karnataka; both rural and urban. Surabhi recognizes the firm will have to overcome the socioeconomic barriers that impede a pervasive adoption of her product. “When one travels between rural and urban, the differences are many. Nothing has been done on the ground and there is a lot of potential. What is encouraging is that they want to learn.” This limitation is conflicting with the amount of information the stakeholders of this project need to handle in order to successfully bridge the information gap (between the elected representatives and the citizens) and have it be a “mutually beneficial relationship between the voter and the voted” as they envision:

Information stakeholders need in order to use this service
Infographic generated using info.gram

While the service PQ is developing seeks to leverage technology to bridge this gap, digital illiteracy might not only prevent citizens from using the system, but could potentially exclude them further from the democratic process. As Shah posits in the project’s thought piece (on increasing the access to ICTS): “the analogue citizen is expected to transition to the emerging new paradigms: earlier categories of discrimination or exclusion are now replaced by technology exclusion.” The team plans to work with their clients (representatives) in digital technologies and organizational skills capacity building, yet an information inequity strategy needs to be put in place in order to guarantee the fulfillment of all the stakeholders’ capabilities -particularly equitable participation from the citizen’s front.

3. Information Poverty:
Information poverty can also take the economic avatar of ‘imperfect knowledge’. According to Anthony Downs, “lack of complete information on which to base decisions is a condition so basic to human life that it influences the structure of almost every social institution”.

Downs' perspective is based on public choice theory, which is “the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems in political science”. This is a subset of positive political theory, that models voters, bureaucrats and politicians as self-interested. He posits in his work ‘Economic Theory for Political Action in a Democracy’ that political parties in democracies formulate policy and serve interest groups merely as a means to gaining votes.

Surabhi and her team align with this thinking: “Politics is not benevolent; ours is a for-profit model that seeks to engage with the elected representative in providing him a mechanism to ensure that he gets more votes. At the same time, we also engage with citizens in ensuring that their interests and issues are looked into. Our basis is that politicians work for votes and the same should be leveraged to solve problems”. Downs’ thesis is that given these assumptions, a democracy –a political system where the parties compete for the control of the government –can only function to its fullest potential when there is perfect information and information is costless. This is what makes democracy the gold standard of governance and the great model on paper that promises to secure our equality and freedoms.

Yet, democracy does not cease to bring disappointment and a sense of helplessness towards politics amongst youth. The advent of digital technologies has been a glimpse of hope for their political engagement, and this entire research is grounded on the question of how is it they can renew trust and mobilize youth towards civic engagement. A first step towards this direction is assuming the inherent faults in the system, as opposed to focusing on citizen apathy. Democracy has been implemented in a system where there is imperfect knowledge and where there is a high degree of both voluntary and involuntary ignorance [2],. This, according to Downs, means that:

Consequences of imperfect knowledge in governance

Parties do not know what citizens want
Citizens do not always know what the government is doing or should be doing
Information to overcome this gap is costly

“Ignorance of politics is not a result of unpatriotic apathy, rather it is a highly rational response to the fats of political life in a large democracy” Downs, 1957

If information is costly, so is democracy. The highest risk of deeming citizens apathetic is ignoring the information barriers that prevent them from participating fairly in decision-making processes. Political Quotient cannot intervene by encouraging citizens to be informed, but it can provide them with tools to bring them closer to constituency related information, bringing down the costs of both participation and information. As put by Surabhi: “We want to be an ally of the political system. They need to do good. They are there for 5 years and need to do something.”

Making Change

While my glossary of terms may seem repetitive (I did define the same term three times), I want to make an emphasis on how important it is to unpack our concepts through various lens of analysis. We started this project exploring multi-stakeholderism and partnerships on the ground, however we are naturally moving on to spaces of knowledge collaboration where change is conceived through the amalgamation of different disciplines. These convergences do not necessarily happen in the most visible ways though, and one of the project’s objectives is to identify undocumented yet significant interventions to make change in the landscape of information societies.

Political Quotient’s initiative breaks the following paradigms in the discourse of 'change in the digital era':

a) It removes the spotlight from the citizen: while the focus of the project is to level citizens-citizen and citizen-government power relations (in terms of access to information), the political firm is focusing on improving the efficiency of the government apparatus, which brings new light to how 'citizen action' unfolds in the context of urban governance.

b) Political Quotient’s methods are far from what we see in the ‘spectacle imperative’ where the intent for change is scaled up through visibility in the public sphere. The firm was conceived in the private sector and its work will take place from within the elected representative’s offices.

c) The firm, in the same way as Vita Beans, applies an interdisciplinary approach to the design of its technology. (Fun fact: Political Quotient is working alongside Amruth’s team to create mobile applications for the service; which means the infrastructure will include both behavioural science and economic thinking behind its design. Read one of our previous posts, to learn more about Amruth's approach to change and digital design)

d) Technology is indeed framing their understanding of change, but in this case, the question is how technology can be amplified by human behaviour and education, as opposed to how technology determines or amplifies our ability to make change as it is commonly conceived.

Not including an analysis of information poverty, and how it both inspires and limits intents of change, devoids the project from understanding the dynamic nature of information and how it interferes in social justice and political action. Furthermore, info-poverty is not a condition characteristic of digital and information societies. Our ability to access information has always determined our dexterity to navigate institutions and infrastructures; indistinctive of what technologies are available at the time. We hope that Political Quotient’s initiative locates not only the information gaps, but also the inherent obstacles the digital divide might represent for their work, and as stated by Surabhi in their theory of change, take them “as an opportunity for a solution. Going from mere ideas to action”. We wish them the best and will follow up on them after June, once the new elected representatives are in office, to see the extent to which information poverty has been addressed through their service.

Footnotes:

[1] Britz based his categorization in John Rawls work on principles of justice. Particularly on 'A Theory of Justice' a work of political philosophy and ethics where he discusses inequality, distributive justice and his theory of Justice as Fairness. We did not refer to his work for this post, but it is worth a read in the context of the digital divide and the question of fair redistribution of digital technologies.

[2] Read more on voluntary or involuntary lack of knowledge in Downs' work on economic theory and political action. Particularly his reading on persuasion, ideologies and rational ignorance -in a context of imperfect knowledge and democracy. Some interesting ideas on persuasion: "Persuasion can only occur in the midst of ignorance; reality is: there are votes who are less informed than others and they need more facts; and we are mostly approached by biased versions of facts" and on rational ignorance: "when information is costly, no decision-maker can afford to know everything [...] ignorance of politics is not a result of unpatriotic apathy; rather it is a highly rational response to the facts of political life in a large democracy".

Sources

1. Britz, Johannes J. "To know or not to know: a moral reflection on information poverty." Journal of Information Science 30, no. 3 (2004): 192-204.

2. Downs, Anthony. "An economic theory of political action in a democracy." The Journal of Political Economy (1957): 135-150.

3. Jaeger, Paul T., and Kim M. Thompson. "Social information behavior and the democratic process: Information poverty, normative behavior, and electronic government in the United States." Library & Information Science Research 26, no. 1 (2005): 94-107.

4. Norris, Pippa. Digital divide: Civic engagement, information poverty, and the Internet worldwide. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

5. Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/information-divide-political-quotient

From Taboo to Beautiful - Menstrupedia

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:25:59Z

On this post, we take a look at 'menstrual activism' -a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism, remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism. We interview Tuhin Paul, the artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world.

CHANGE-MAKER: Tuhin Paul, Aditi Gupta and Rajat Mittal
ORGANIZATION: Menstrupedia
METHOD OF CHANGE: Storytelling and comics
STRATEGY OF CHANGE: To shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding
 menstruation, by delivering accessible, informative and entertaining 
 content about menstruation through different media.

Most of us think we know what menstruation is; except...we don’t. Many of my male friends still cringe at the mention of the phrase “I’m on my period”, or use it as a derogatory justification for my occasional cranky mood at the office: “It’s that time of the month, isn’t it?” Poor menstruation has been the culprit of femininity; always bashful, tiptoeing for five days straight, trying its best to remain incognito. The social venture Menstrupedia is committed to change this. Aditi, Tuhin and Rajat want to shift how we look at menstruation and remove the stigma that haunts the natural, self-regulation process women undergo to keep their bodies healthy and strong to sustain life in the future.

Now, if you are already wondering what menstruation has to do with internet and society, just wait for it. This post manages to bring art, punk, menstruation and technology together, all within the scope of the Making Change project! Before though, we shall start with some definitions. Let us first lay conceptual grounds about menstruation and Menstrupedia, to then locate and unpack their theory of change.

What is menstruation?

It can be defined as:

Menstruation is the periodic discharge of blood and mucosal tissue (the endometrium) from the uterus and vagina. It starts at menarche at or before sexual maturity (maturation), in females of certain mammalian species, and ceases at or near menopause (commonly considered the end of a female's reproductive life).

And it looks something like this:

But, I believe, most women will agree the following are much more accurate depictions of the spectrum of thoughts, emotions and sensations that menstruation spurs:

The Beauty of RED

My Periods: A Blessing or a Curse

By Naina Jha

My periods
Are a dreadful experience
Because of all the pain.
Myths and secrets make it a mystery
What worsens it most though, are members of my family
Especially my mother, who always make it a big deal
They never try to understand what I truly feel
I face all those cramps and cry the whole night long
None of which is seen or heard or felt by anyone.

Instead of telling me, what it is,
They ask me to behave maturely instead.
Can somebody tell me how I am supposed to
Naturally accept it?
My mother asks me to stay away from men
And a few days later, she asks me to marry one!
When I ask her to furnish
the reason behind her haste
She told me that now that I was menstruating,
I was grown up and ready to give birth to another.

I don’t know whether to feel blessed about it
Or consider it to be my curse.
For these periods are the only reason for me to be disposed.
Since my childhood, I felt rather blessed to be born as a girl
But after getting my periods now,
I’m convinced that it’s a curse...

Find it in Menstrupedia's blog.

Despite all this, it is still perceived as a social stigma in society. There is clearly a dissonance between the definition, experience and perceptions around menstruation, that calls for a reconfiguration of the information we are using to define it.

Stigma as a Crisis

However, re-defining 'menstruation' is no popular or easy task. The word belongs to a group of contested terminology around womanhood and is the protagonist of its own breed of feminist activism: menstrual activism. [1] Although I would consider many of the stigmas surrounding menstruation to be quite self-explanatory (we've all experienced and perpetuated them in one way or another -and if they are not, then you are the product of an obscenely progressive upbringing for which I congratulate your parents, teachers and all parties involved), I will still outline the main reasons why menstruation is a source of social stigma for women, and refer to scholarly authority on the subject to legitimize my rant.

Ingrid Johnston-Robledo and Joan Chrisler use Goffman's definition of stigma [2] on their paper: The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as a Social Stigma to explain the misadventures of menstruation:

Stigma: 
stain or mark setting people apart from others. it conveys the information 
that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their 
appearance or identity

Among the various negative social constructs deeming menstruation a dirty and repulsive state, this one made a particular echo: “[menstruation is] a tribal identity of femaleness”. Menstruation is the equivalent of a rite of passage marking the lives of girls with a 'before' and an 'after' on how the world sees them and how they see themselves. From the dreaded stain on the skirt and the 5-day mission to keep its poignant color and smell on the down low, to having to justify mood and body swings to the overly inquisitive; menstruation is imagined as inconvenient, unpleasant and unwelcome. As Johnston-Robledo and Chrisler point out: the menstrual cycle, coupled with stigmas, pushes women to adopt the role of the “physically or mentally disordered” and reinforce it through their communication, secrecy, embarrassment and silence (Kissling, 1996).

Why does it matter?

Besides from strengthening attitudes that underpin gender discrimination and attempting against girls' self-identity and sense of worth, there are other tangible consequences for their development and education. I'm going to throw some facts and figures at you, to back this up with the case of India.

An article published by the WSSCC, the Geneva based Water supply and Sanitation Council, shows the Menstruation taboo, consequence of a “patriarchal, hierarchical society”, puts 300 million women at risk in India. They do not have access to menstrual hygiene products, which has an effect on their health, education (23% of girls in India leave school when they start menstruating and the remaining 77% miss 5 days of school a month) and their livelihoods.

In terms of awareness and information about the issue, WSSCC found that 90% didn't know what a menstrual period was until they got it. Aru Bhartiya's research on Menstruation, Religion and Society, shows the main sources of information about menstruation come from beliefs and norms grounded on culture and religion. Some of the related restrictions (that stem from Hinduism, among others) include isolation, exclusion from religious activities, and restraint from intercourse. She coupled this with a survey where she found: 63% of her sample turned to online sites over their mothers for information, 62% did not feel comfortable talking about the subject with males and 70% giggled upon reading the topic of the survey. All in all, a pretty gruesome scenario

Here's where Menstrupedia comes in

The research ground work attempted above was done in depth by Menstrupedia back in 2009 when the project started taking shape. They conducted research for one year while in NID and did not only find that awareness about menstruation was very low, but that parents and teachers did not know how to talk about the subject.


							Facts about menstruation awareness in India. Video courtesy of Menstru pedia Youtube channel.

Their proposed intervention: distribute an education visual guide and a comic to explain the topic. They tested out the prototype among 500 girls in 5 different states in Northern India and the results were astonishing.

A workshop conducted by MJB smriti sansthan to spread awareness about mensuration.
Find full album of Menstrupedia Comic being used around India on Menstrupedia's Facebook page.

"To my surprise, they [the nuns] all agreed that until they read the information given in the Menstrupedia comic, even they were of the opinion that Menstruation was a ‘dirty’ and 'abominable' thing and they wondered 'why women suffered from it in the first place'? But after reading the comic book, their view had changed…now they felt that this was a 'vital' part of womanhood and there's nothing to feel ashamed about it! The best part was while this exercise clarified their ideas, beliefs, concepts about menstruation, it also helped me to get over my innate hesitancy to approach such a sensitive issue in ‘public’ and boosted my confidence for taking this up as a 'mission' to reach out to the maximum possible girls across the country."

Ina Mondkar,
on her experience of educating young nuns about menstruation.

Testimonial after a workshop held in two Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh.

Their mandate today reads: ‘Menstrupedia is a guide to explain menstruation and all issues surrounding it in the most friendly manner.’ They currently host a website with information about puberty, menstruation, hygiene and myths, along with illustrations that turn explaining the process of growing up into a much friendlier endeavour than its stigma-ladden alternatives.

Snipbit of the first chapter. Read it for free here.

Through the comic and the interactions around it, Menstrupedia strives to create a) content that frame menstruation as a natural process that is inconvenient, yes; but that should have no negative effects on their self-esteem and development; and b) an environment where girls can talk about it openly and clarify their doubts.

Technology's role in the mix

"We want to reach out to as many girls as possible”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

The role of digital technologies basically comes down to scalability. Opposite to The Kahani Project's views on scaling up, Menstrupedia makes emphasis on using technology to reach a larger audience. Currently they have a series of communication channels enabled by technology that include: a visual quick guide, a Q&A forum (for both men and women), a blog (a platform of self-expression on menstruation), a you tube channel (where they provide updates on their progress) and the upcoming comic.

Upon the question of the digital divide and whether this expands the divide between have and have nots, Tuhin was very set on the idea of producing the same content in both its digital and print form. “parents or schools should be able to buy the comic and give it to their daughters, so whenever they feel like it, they can refer to it”. The focus is on making this material as readily available as possible, in order to overcome the tension between new and old information: “workshops are conducted but the moment they go back home, their mothers impose certain restrictions. It becomes a dilemma. But if you provide [The girl] with a comic book, she has something she can take home and educate her mother with”

And here's why it works

More than the comic book itself, what is truly remarkable about Menstrupedia is Tuhin, Rajat and Aditi’s guts to pick up such a problematic theme in the Indian social imaginary and challenge the entrenched, stubborn beliefs surrounding the issue. The comic book, asides from being appealing to the eye and an accessible format of storytelling (a method we have unpacked in previous posts), fits right into the movement of menstrual activism and what it stands for.

“We thought of creating something: a tool that can help girls understand menstruation without having to rely on anybody else”. Tuhin, Menstrupedia

First, it is a self-reliant resource. Once the comic book leaves Menstrupedia's hands and lands on those of kids and adults, it takes its own journey. The format of the comic is accessible enough for someone to pick it up and learn about menstruation without the intervention or the support of a third party. This makes Menstrupedia's comic highly flexible and mobile. It can be shared from teacher to child, from mom to daughter, from peer to peer: “[it should teach] how to help your friends when they get their period” (Tuhin) However, it has the autonomy to also take roads less travelled: from mom to dad, from child to teacher, from boy to girl. The goal at the end of the day: a self-reliant, solidarity-based community where information circulating about menstruation highlights its capacity to give life and overshadows its traditional stigmatized identity.

This self-reliance is characteristic of previous manifestations of menstrual activism. Back in the 80s, the feminist movement, tightly linked to punk culture, embraced the do it yourself movement,[3] that enabled women to materialize personalized forms of resistance. They published zines promoting “dirty self-awareness, body and menstrual consciousness and unlearning shame” through “raw stories and personal narratives” (Bobel, 2006). According to Bobel using the self as an example is a core element in the “history of self-help” within the DIY movement. The role of the Menstrupedia blog is then crucial to sustain the exposure and production of “raw narratives”. Tuhin adds: “We don't write articles on the blog. It is a platform where people from different backgrounds write about their experiences with menstruation and bring in a different perspective”: For example,

Red is my colour by Umang Saigal

Red is my colour,
To make you understand, I endeavour,
Try to analyse and try to favour.
It is not just a thought, but an attempt,
To treat ill minds that are curable.

When I was born, I was put in a red cradle,
I grew up watching the red faces for a girl-children in anger,
Red became my favourite,
But I never knew,
That someday I would be cadged in my own red world.

Red lover I was,
All Love I lost,
When I got my first red spots,
What pain it caused only I know,
When I realized, Red determined my ‘class’

I grew up then, ignoring red,
At night when I found my bedsheet wet,
All day it ached,
All day it stained,
And in agony I would, turn insane.

At times I would think,
Does red symbolize beauty or pain?
But when I got tied, in the sacred knot,
I found transposition of my whole process of thought,
When from dirty to gold, Red crowned my bridal course.

As I grew old,
All my desires vanished and got cold,
My mind still in a dilemma,
What more than colour in itself could it unfold?
What was the secret behind its truth untold?

Is Red for beauty, or is it for beast?
It interests me now to know the least,
All I know is that Red is a Transition,
From anguish to pride
Red is a sensation.

Red is my colour, as it is meant to be,
No matter what the world thinks it to be,
No love lost, one Love found,
Red symbolizes life and also our wounds,
I speak it aloud with life profound,
That red is my colour, and this is what I’ve found.

Submission to the Menstrupedia blog

'Self-expression' is not a concept we usually find side by side with 'menstruation'; however, if we look at what has been done in the past, we find that Menstrupedia is actually contributing to a much larger tradition of resistance. For instance, Menstrala, by the American artist Vanessa Tiegs. Menstrala is the name of a collection of 88 paintings “affirming the hidden forbidden bright red cycle of renewal”.

Another interesting example is American feminist Gloria Steinem's[4] text If Men Could Menstruate.

“What would happen, for instance, if suddenly, magically, men could menstruate and women could not?
The answer is clear:
Menstruation would become an enviable, boast worthy, masculine event:
Men would brag about how long and how much.
Boys would mark the onset of menses, that longed- for proof of manhood,with religious and stag parties.”

Gloria Steinem
[excerpt]

Opportunities like these, enable Menstrupedia's community to actively participate in the reconfiguration of 'menstruation' as a concept and as an experience. By exposing new narratives and perspectives on the issue and by disseminating menstrual health information, the community is able to crowd source resistance and dismantle the stigma together.

Making Change through Menstrupedia

The case of Menstrupedia reminds us of Blank Noise because of its approach to change. Both locate their crises at the discursive level and seek to resolve them by creating new forms of meaning-making. They advocate for a reconsideration of 'givens', for a self-reflection on our role perpetuating these notions and for resistance against conceptual status quos: be it socially accepted culprits like 'eve-teasing', or more discrete rejects like 'menstruation'. Both seek to dismantle power structures that give one discourse preference over others, and both count with a strong gender dynamic dominating the context where these narratives unfold. They are producing a revolution in our system of meaning making, yet only producing resistance in the larger societal context they inhabit.

On the question of where is Menstrupedia's action located, Tuhin replied by pinning it at the individual level: “if a person is aware of menstruation and they know the facts, they are more likely to resist restrictions and spread awareness”. However, they still acknowledge the historicity behind menstrual awareness (as knowledge passed down from generation to generation) that precedes the project. While the introduction of Menstrupedia, to an extent, does shake up household dynamics in terms of content, it also provides tools and resources to sustain the traditional model of oral tradition and knowledge sharing within the community.

In terms of their role as change-makers ,Tuhin stated that the possibility to intervene was a result of their socio-economic status and the resources they had at hand as “educated members of the middle class with access to information and communication technologies”. Is this the role the middle class should play? I asked. To which he gave a two fold answer: First, in terms of responsibility of action: “it is a role that anyone can play depending on what kind of expertise they have. It comes to a point where [intents of change] cannot be sustained by activism if you want to achieve long term impact” And second, in terms of setting up a resilient infrastructure: “I believe we can create an infrastructure people can use and create models that can help low income groups overcome their challenges and become self-sustainable.” Both answers highlight the need for sustainability in social impact projects, hinting a retreat from wishful thinking upon the presence of technology and a more strategic allocation of skills and resources by middle class and for-profit interventions.

As far the relationship between art, punk, menstruation and technology goes; that was just a hook to get you through the unreasonable length of my blog post, but if anything, it represents an effort to portray the importance of contextuality and interdisciplinary we have been exploring throughout the series. Identifying the use of various mediums and language systems, such as different art forms and modes of self-expression, as well the acknowledgement of the theoretical and social contexts preceding and framing the project, as is feminist activism and the cultural and religious backdrop in India, contribute immensely to fill gaps in the stories of how we imagine change making today; especially at the nascence of new narratives, as we hope is the case for menstruation in a post-Menstrupedia era.

Sources:

Bhartiya, Aru: “Menstruation, Religion and Society” IJSSH: International Journal of Social Science and Humanity. Volume: Vol.3, No.6.

Bobel, Chris. "“Our Revolution Has Style”: Contemporary Menstrual Product Activists “Doing Feminism” in the Third Wave." Sex Roles 54, no. 5-6 (2006): 331-345.

Johnston-Robledo, Ingrid, and Joan C. Chrisler. "The menstrual mark: Menstruation as social stigma." Sex roles 68, no. 1-2 (2013): 9-18.

Footnotes

[1] Refer to Chris Bobel's work including New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation. Access it here

[2] Johnston Robledo and Chrisler made reference to Erving Goffman's 1963 work: Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. "According to Goffman (1963), the word stigma refers to any stain or mark that sets some people apart from others; it conveys the information that those people have a defect of body or of character that spoils their appearance or identity Goffman (1963, p. 4) categorized stigmas into three types: "abominations of the body” (e.g., burns, scars, deformities), “ blemishes of individual character” (e.g., criminality, addictions), and “tribal” identities or social markers associated with marginalized groups (e.g., gender,race, sexual orientation, nationality)".

[3] For a short run through on DIY as part of the Punk Subculture, refer to Ian P. Moran's paper: Punk - The Do-it-Yourself culture."Punk as a subculture goes much further than rebellion and fashion as punks generally seek an alternative lifestyle divergent from the norms of society. The do-it-yourself, or D.I.Y. aspect of punk is one of the most important factors fueling the subculture." Access it here.

[4] Gloria Steimen is a journalist, and social and political activist who became nationally recognized as a leader of, and media spokeswoman for, the women's liberation movement in the late 1960s and 1970. Visit her official website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/menstrupedia-taboo-beautiful

Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects

Wendy Chun, Kelly Dobson, Matthew Fuller and Eivind Rossaak — 2015-10-24T13:38:42Z

“Networks” have become a defining concept of our epoch. From high-speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like Facebook that transform the meaning of the word “friend,” from blogs that foster new political alliances to unprecedented globe-spanning viral vectors that threaten world-wide catastrophe, networks allegedly encapsulate what’s new and different.

To understand the impact of networks, most analyses—scholarly, popular, and strategic—have focused on mapping networks. Using network tools to describe networks, this move conflates description and explanation (it assumes that simply discovering the existence of networks is enough) and transforms specific persons/things and relations into interchangeable nodes and lines in a diagram. Not surprisingly, most analyses also privilege technology as the unifying power behind networks: the term “twitter revolution,” for instance, widely used to describe events from Moldavia to Egypt, erases local political concerns in favour of an internet application. Although understanding universal characteristics of networks is important, this emphasis also risks making the concept of a “networked society” a banal cliché, incapable of addressing the differences between various “networks,” or the odd transformation of networks from a planning tool—a theoretical diagram, a metaphorical description—into actually existing phenomena, into lived experiences.

To renew the conceptual power of networks, Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects—a global collaborative project of which the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University will be an important locus—concentrates on changing habits of living. Habits are crucial to understanding networks not simply as broad organizational structures, but also as structures created through constant actions that are both voluntary and involuntary. As Pierre Bourdieu has famously argued, “habitus” is a “system of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function … as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends.”[1]; Habits are things that individuals hold that in turn define and hold individuals: they link the individual to society through repeated actions that also tie a person’s inner state (their mind) to their outward appearance (a habit is traditionally a type of clothing). Habits are ‘man-made nature’: they are automatic seemingly instinctual and at times uncontrollable actions (for instance, drug habits) that are learned. Habits in this sense are closely aligned with “affects”: unconscious emotional responses to environmental stimulants that are central to the formation of individual perception. Thus although habits let us address similarities across human, animal, physical and non-physical realms (the characteristic growth of a crystal is a habit), habits are also uniquely personal and societal, and thus allow us to address important differences usually elided in network analyses. Habits are “glocal”: local actions that spread globally, but not necessarily universally; they spread the effects of local actions elsewhere through specific trajectories.

The point, to be clear, is not to oppose habits to networks, but to understand the subtleties and power of connectivity by bringing these two concepts into dialogue with one another. Habits scale from the individual to the network in a number of ways, from the twitchy 'Lifestream' checking of Twitter enthusiasts, to co-ordination arranged by mobile phone and GPS, to the very conceptual foundation of computer science for which classic problems, such as the Travelling Saleman or Dining Philosophers combine strong technical requirements of resource allocation and network design with fables about everyday life. As the work of Dr. Matthew Fuller (a foundational new media theorist / artist and co-organizer from Goldsmiths) reveals, the cross-over between the technical and the experiential is what produces value and novelty in contemporary computing. The point is also to think through habits of living as possible points of transformation and intervention: as the term habitat makes clear, they also imply a certain sheltering and practice of care, something which the SARAI collective in New Delhi has addressed in their work in new media. This notion of habitat and change has also been further addressed, specifically in terms of “the archive in motion,” by Eivind Rossaak—an international expert in film and media—and his research group at the National Library of Norway, Oslo. Their creative rethinking of the archive and the role of media technologies is crucial to understanding the radical mobilization, perpetuation and preservation of habitual media and memory practices. The work of Nishant Shah—the director of the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and co-editor of the groundbreaking Digital AlterNatives with a Cause —highlights that, to understand how new media affects habits of living, we need to rethink assumptions about “digital natives” and imaginings of “netizens.” He has also started a far-reaching research program investigating the relationship between affect and participation. Dr. Kelly Dobson’s—chair of Digital + Media at RISD and an innovative and much lauded new media artist—work focuses on the intimate “caring” relationship between machines and humans, which emerges from mainly non-intentional interactions, such as noise and vibrations. Lastly, Habits of Living: Networked Affects, Glocal Effects seeks to change the focus of network analyses away from catastrophic events or their possibility towards generative habitual actions that negotiate and transform the constant stream of information to which we are exposed. (This is the focus of my current book project).

As the above paragraph outlines, this inter-disciplinary project will be a global interdisciplinary collaboration. This project initially emerged from discussions between members of SARAI and myself and quickly expanded to include the Center for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Digital + Media Department at RISD, the Bangalore Center for Internet and Society and the National Library of Norway. In addition, we plan to invite participants from: Amsterdam, Buenos Aries, Sao Paolo, Shanghai, amongst other places. At Brown, in addition to faculty in the Department of Modern Culture and Media, we would like to involve people from the Cogut Center for the Humanities, the Pembroke Center for the Study of Women, and the Watson Institute for International Studies.

The project, will comprise a series of workshops, artist residencies, a large public conference to be held at Brown University, and eventually leading to an edited online and a print publication. Each workshop will be attended by a core group of five scholars/artists who will participate in all the workshops and the conference, as well as group of participants that will vary according to the location. Ideally, this will continue as a three-year project, with each group playing a major role in convening the events for one year.

Collaborators: Wendy Chun (Professor, Brown University), Kelly Dobson, Chair, Digital + Media, RISD, Providence, Matthew Fuller, David Gee Reader in Digital Media, Center for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College, University of London, London and Eivind Rossaak, Associate Professor, Department of Research, National Library of Norway, Oslo.

[1].Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Trans Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1977), 72.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/habits-of-living

Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai

Larissa Hjorth and Genevieve Bell — 2015-10-24T13:41:47Z

From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.

The transition from the analogue to the digital, from dial-up to broadband internet access was dramatic in how it changed our notions of space, catalysing new ways of thought and practice. In the case of locative media the uptake is more accelerated with it already engaging more than ten times those involved in the analogue-digital transition. The spread and usage of locative media is fast and promises to produce an even more dramatic transformation as the net becomes portable and pervasive.

As yet we know little about the impact locative media is having, and will have upon people’s livelihoods and identity, or on public policy around privacy, identity, security and cultural production. Discourse in the field has opened up questions of art, innovation and experimentation (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009; Hjorth 2010, 2011). However, there remains a dearth of nuanced research on locative media that provides in-depth, contextual accounts of its socio-cultural and political dimensions. Little work has been conducted into locative media as it migrates from art and into the ‘messy’ (Dourish & Bell 2011) area of the everyday.

Locating the Mobile seeks to address this knowledge gap by undertaking close studies of locative media in three locations—Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. We aim to capture and analyse the multiplicities of locative media practice emerging in both developed and developing contexts.

These three locations have relatively high smartphones (or copies like shanzhai) usage and are indicative of twenty-first century migration, diaspora and transnational practices. As one of the leading regions for mobile media innovation (Hjorth 2009; Bell 2005; Miller & Horst 2005), the various contested localities in the Asia-Pacific provide a rich and complex case study for mobile media as it moves into locative media. The three locations also show how the presence of digital and internet technologies is ‘flattening’ the globalised landscape and bringing about dramatic changes in the ways in which these cities shape and develop (Shah 2010). We consider how place informs locative media practices and how, in turn, these practices are shaping new narratives of place.

Locating the Mobile seeks to collect and analyse some of the emergent, tacit, innovative and ‘making-do’ practices informing the rise, and resistance to, locative media. Drawing on pertinent issues for the present and future of locative media, Locating the Mobile aims to:

Pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media.
Develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice.
Provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging.
Develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy.

By bringing together an expert team that represent a commitment to probing the social, cultural and community dimensions of technological innovation, Locating the Mobile will develop methodologies that capture the dynamic and mundane features of this emergent media practice. By doing so, Locating the Mobile will move beyond binary debates about surveillance and privacy or ‘parachute’ case studies of locative art towards nuanced and complex understandings of locative media and its implication for future cultural practices.

Significance and Innovation

The nascent field of locative media is impacting upon cultural practice, place-making and policy in ways we can only imagine. While much analysis has been conducted in mobile media (Goggin & Hjorth 2009) and experimental forms of locative media/art (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), the increased ubiquity of locative media through devices such as the smartphone will undoubtedly transform the way in which place and mobility is articulated. Locating the Mobile seeks to substantially expand and contextualise upon the burgeoning area of locative media through a variety of innovative and significant ways.

Locating the Mobile is original in its topic, method, outcomes and industry collaboration. Firstly, it is significant in that it brings depth and innovation to the emergent area of locative media, and its impact upon discourses around mobile media in ideas of mobility and place-making. In the face of parachute nature of many locative art research (de Souza e Silva & Sutko 2009), Locating the Mobile is one of the first studies internationally to explore locative media over time in specific locations. Secondly, it deploys a variety of methods (such as surveys, focus groups, interviews and diaries for scenario of use, overlaid with data-mining) across different devices (mobile phone, iPad) and platforms (Foursquare, Jie Pang) to analyse the local and socio-cultural dimensions of use. With its team of experts in mobile media (Hjorth, Bell and Horst), communication for development (C4D) (Tacchi and Shah), gaming (Hjorth), social networking (Shah, Zhou and Hjorth) as well as a range of methodologies, this three-year study will investigate and contextualise locative media in Bangalore, Melbourne and Shanghai. Despite its ubiquity in many locations in the Asia-Pacific region, much of the locative media literature remains Anglophonic or Eurocentric in focus. Thirdly, through multi-site analysis of locative media practices we will provide innovative ways in which to reflect upon narratives of place, belonging and transnationalism. Fourthly, by pioneering the first multi-site analysis of locative media over time, Locating the Mobile will develop the much missing socio-cultural understandings of locative media and how it impacts upon intimacy and privacy upon individual, group and policy levels. We will now detail these four key areas of significance and innovation. We will pioneer and develop models and templates for comprehending the implications of locative media. In these models we actively address locative media in the transnational context of contemporary feelings about belonging, possession, mobility, migration, and dislocation. As locative media becomes more pervasive, the power of its banality needs further understanding beyond ‘global’ generalisations (see www.pleaserobme.com). Like the rise of mobile media that was accompanied by the ‘subversive user’ (Hjorth 2009), we need to figure out the digital subject who is shaped—both historically and socio-culturally—through the pervasive spread of locative media. As Gabriella Coleman (2010) observes in her review of ethnographic approaches to digital media, there are three main overlapping categories: research on the relationship between digital media and the cultural politics of media; the vernacular cultures of digital media; the prosaics of digital media (and this attention to the commonplace, the unromantic, the quotidian). In the case of locative media, ethnographic approaches—emphasising the situated, vernacular and prosaic—are needed in order to understand the relocations of mobility across a variety notions: technological, electronic and psychological to name a few. Moreover, given the relatively high proportion of Indian and Chinese migrants in Melbourne—and migration in Bangalore and Shanghai—exploring locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place.

We will develop a nuanced and situated understanding of locative media as part of cultural practice through methods that deploy both qualitative (ethnographic) and quantitative (datamining) approaches such as ‘ethno-mining’ (Anderson et al. 2009). With the emergence of ethnomining approaches—that is, data-based mining combined with ethnography—new models for analysing media and mobility can be found. Locating the Mobile addresses this need for innovative methodologies that capture the dynamic nature of locative media by situating it within three legacies: social, cultural and historical mediatisation. Further, Locating the Mobile seeks to frame locative media as evolving through the cultural precepts informing mobile media and urbanity LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 8 of 123 discourses. Drawing upon case studies from a region renowned for divergent and innovative use of mobile media (Hjorth 2009) and gaming (Hjorth & Chan 2009)—the Asia-Pacific—Locating the Mobile seeks to understand the lived and local dimensions of locative media and how it can inform emergent and older forms of place-making, belonging and migration. By focusing upon this nascent but burgeoning area in global mobile media practice—locative media—Locating the Mobile not only places Australia as a forerunner in innovative, original, and challenging methodologies for new media, but also, by bringing together key industry partners, Intel, CIS and Fudan University,

Locating the Mobile seeks to contextualise the research in terms of industry and community outcomes. In this sense, Locating the Mobile clearly addresses the National Priority 3, Frontier Technologies (see below for more details).

We will provide, through multi-site analysis, new insights into the impact of locative media upon narratives of place and belonging through our three case study locations—Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai. Locative media can provide new models for conceptualising the impact of migration, diaspora, and transnationalism on place. Although place has always mattered to mobile media (Ito 2003; Bell 2005; Hjorth 2003), locative media both amplify, redirect and redefine practices around place, community and a sense of belonging—phenomenon that impacts upon cultural policy and media regulation (Goggin 2011). Along with the digital interfaces that overlay our physical experiences as we enter into a state of augmented reality (AR), the presence of these cartographic, geospatial locative platforms also changes the ways in which the cities and how we navigate with them (Shah 2010). With the rise of locative media like Google maps we are seeing new ways to frame and narrate a sense of place through various technological lenses overlaying the social with the informational. This phenomenon is especially the case with smartphones and their plethora of applications (apps) drawing heavily upon locative media—even most photo apps come with locative media. With locative media we see the arrival of increased accessibility to augmented
reality (AR). Instead of replacing the analogue with the digital, the physical with the virtual, they open up ‘hybrid realities’ (a term used by de Souza e Silva to describe AR mobile games) that need new conceptual tools and located frameworks to unravel the dynamics. We are no longer looking at just the technology mediated hypervisual digitality but also exploring what these locative media augment and simulate in everyday practices.

We will develop socio-cultural understandings of the role locative media plays in notions of intimacy and privacy and how we might comprehend locative media’s implications on individual and cultural practices, and regulation. In the second generation of locative media that sees it move increasingly into the mainstream, questions about security, privacy and identity—and how these are shaped by the local—come into focus (Dourish & Anderson 2006). For Dourish and Anderson (2006) locative media can been viewed as a form of ‘Collective Information Practice’ that have social and cultural implications upon how privacy and security are conceptualised. For others such as Siva Vaidhyanathan (2011) locative media like Google maps and street views are about a corporate surveillance. As a burgeoning field of media practice intersecting daily life, there is a need for in-depth situated accounts into locative media and their cultural-economic dimensions to understand the impact they will have on intimacy, privacy, identity and place-making. In Locating the Mobile, by developing and implementing new hybrid models for analysing locative media (Anderson et al. 2009), we consider the role locative media plays in how place shapes, and is shaped by, these practices and the future implications around cultural policy. The comparative dimension brings a rich data-set to bear on our understanding of locative media and the questions it may pose in the future. The outputs are significant not only for Australian mobile communication, gaming and internet studies—by providing a regional context for evaluating the socio-technologies—but also demonstrates internationally Australia’s lead in ground-breaking research into locative media (Priority 3, ‘frontier technologies’) in arguably the most significant sites for global ICTs production and consumption, the Asia-Pacific.

National Research Priorities: With the rise of smartphones becoming ubiquitous, location-based services have burgeoned. And yet, little is known about this area and its impact upon individuals, LP120200829 (Submitted to RO) Dr Larissa Hjorth PDF Created: 16/11/2011 Page 9 of 123 organisations and governments. Given this phenomenon, a comprehensive understanding of the impact upon locative media upon notions of privacy, identity and place-making is needed. In the twenty-first century, locative media will become an increasingly important part of everyday life—for individuals, communities, businesses and government agencies. Thus it is imperative that we have a robust comparative understanding of locative media in Australia and across the region. By conceptualising this impact within the context of the region, Locating the Mobile ensures Australia is at the frontier of new technologies and their impact upon future technological practices and policies. Such an understanding is fundamental to Australia’s technology and cultural sectors, thus contributing to National Research Priority 3 through one of the strongest currencies in twenty-first century global market, mobile media, as well as contributing to the broader long-term project of locating Australia in the region. By drawing on qualitative, cross-cultural longitudinal research into locative media, Locating the Mobile will document, analysis and provide future recommendations for how locative media is impacting upon people’s experience of place and identity. A study like this is important as it is innovative for not only pioneering methodologies to evaluate this media phenomenon but also to understand some of its long-term implications on how mobile media intervenes and even reconfigures experiences and perceptions of place which, in turn, impact upon cultural policy.

Collaborators: Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University, Melbourne), Genevieve Bell (Intel, Shanghai)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/locating-mobile/locating-the-mobile

Production Sprint — A Public Exhibition at CIS

praskrishna — 2015-10-24T14:23:30Z

The Making Change project invites you for a public exhibition of stories of change from all over Asia, where the first of its Production Sprints will take place. The exhibition will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) office in Bangalore on June 7, 2014 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.

Download the event flier [PDF, 402 Kb]

What does 'Making Change' mean to you? What are the processes of change? The infrastructure of change? The actors of change? A round-table discussion and exhibition by 23 change makers from 15 countries in Asia, at the Centre for Internet & Society, Saturday, 7th June, 5 - 7 p.m. Please do come.

The Making Change project questions traditional understandings of change –where change is employed in the name of power, reduced to a ‘spectacle’ by global media and goes largely unquestioned in the public discourse- and aims to build more adequate frameworks to address the idea of change in the context of common knowledge, networked media and information societies.

Making Change is hosting focused, intensive, and production-oriented workshops called Production Sprints to facilitate the convergence of actors and ideas.These will be spaces of knowledge exchange between change-makers around processes, narratives and experiences of change and of experimentation with multi-modal forms and formats of knowledge production (text, image, sound, etc). Participants will be asked to group around four topics: concepts, crises ecologies and networks of change. These visions and practices, we hope will produce new ways of thinking about change.

During the Bangalore production sprint, we will document the various knowledges acquired through the pre-production stage and the 5 day intensive sessions on formats, storytelling and visual presentation modes; and we will close with an exhibition of the resulting narratives of change. We invite you to come and participate in the exhibition.

Date: June 7th, 2014
Time: 5pm- 7pm
Location: The Center for Internet and Society

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis

Digital Design: Human Behavior vs. Technology - Vita Beans

denisse — 2015-10-24T14:29:23Z

What comes first? Understanding human behavior and communication patterns to design digital technologies? Or should our technologies have the innate capacity to adapt to the profiles of all its potential users? This post will look at accessibility challenges for digital immigrants and the importance of behavioral science for the design of digital technologies. We interview Amruth Bagali Ravindranath from Vita Beans.

CHANGE-MAKER: Amruth B R

PRODUCT:
Vita Beans and Guru G

METHOD OF CHANGE:
Borrow elements from behavioral science and social marketing to make technology more intuitive.

STRATEGY OF CHANGE:
Make technology easy to use, fun and effective.

Chirptoons: Create Cartoons in a Jiffy. Designed by Vita Beans
(The animation seems to be skipping a few lines. Check box below for a transcript)
Design your own here: http://bit.ly/1dOEpPo

Transcript of animation:

Ajoy: Hi!
Usha: Hi! What will we talk about today?
Ajoy: We will learn to design digital stories!
Usha: What do you mean by digital stories?
Ajoy: What we are doing right now!.
Telling a story through a digital medium.
Usha: Oh! But what is so complicated about that?
You write a story and then you post it online What’s
the big deal?
Ajoy: This is true. But you want everyone to access
your story right?
Usha: Yes! Of course!
Ajoy: Then you need to think about your audience!
Are you sure they all know how to use this technology?
Usha: Well...no, not really.
Ajoy: Do you know what makes it challenging for them?
Or how to adapt technology to make it easier?
Usha: Eh, no...no clue :(
Ajoy: Then read on.Today we will take a step back.
We must think about human behaviour first!
and then design our technology accordingly.
Usha: Sounds good! Let's do it.

First off, apologies for such a feeble and sad animation. When I was given access to Chirptoons, I was quite confident I would be able to produce a somewhat interesting introduction to this post and get you excited about our next interview. However, between first-time user friction and a couple of glitches in the program, I found myself -a semi-savvy digital native who has been using technology, almost every day of her life, for the last 15 years- struggling to create the cartoon and clearly failing at it. The biggest challenge was translating what I had in mind into a digital format (The demo was very straightforward. I was just particularly inept), and it was frustrating to the point I decided to drop it, leave it as is, publish my unfinished cartoon and turn this post into a reflection on 'design challenges behind digital storytelling', so I could move on with my life.

What I experienced with Chirptoons is what many users: both digital natives and immigrants constantly face due to the pace at which new digital technologies are emerging. While the privileged demographic who has physical access to technology has a decent knowledge of basic web browsing and document processing features, there is still a very large gap in accessibility in terms of how to navigate more complex formats. At the end of the day, producers retain the creative power and determine the functions and flexibility of the technologies we use in the day to day. Just think of Facebook and its constant interface updates. We have all felt the wrenching need for that 'dislike' button to make our interactions a tad more honest, yet we have no power to create it or change Facebook's format to one that enables our needs better.

So far, we have explored information from different angles: as activism, as visual design, as stories; and how digital technologies have been used strategically to disseminate it. However, our analysis is lacking a better understanding of the digital. We have been focusing on citizens as technology 'consumers', and we have not looked at whether digital infrastructures are accessible enough for users to become 'producers'. The question is: how do we do this: how do we engage different users with different digital literacy levels, skills and aptitudes in the production of digital content? With this post we bring a new topic into our series: accessibility and Information infrastructures. This one will focus on design and the role of behavioural science. Our interview with Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, brought a very unique perspective into the conversation, from which I would like to highlight three points:

a) The importance of behavioral science for design. Amruth stressed why we need a thorough understanding of behavioral and cognitive science in the design of digital technologies and how crucial it is to investigate the decision processes and communication strategies of humans to make technologies user-friendly and context appropriate.

b) How public relations and social marketing concepts can also provide insight on how to target and engage potential users more effectively. This point starts to answer some of the questions we raised on the Information Design post: thinking about the citizen as a consumer. This point also works as an alternative take on how to target civic engagement through technology.

c) How to engage different type of users: not only the digital native, but also digital immigrants[1]

who still play crucial roles as information gatekeepers in fields such as education or urban governance.

Vita Beans

We interviewed Amruth Bagali Ravindranath, Founder of Vita Beans to answer some of these questions. Vita Beans’ mandate is to create inspiring, easy-to-use applications in areas of education and human resources, to share knowledge in innovative, fun an effective ways. The logic behind their technological framework is trying to mimic the profile of the human brain linked to decision making -including economic, evolutionary, emotional, and psychological elements- and design their applications based on these patterns. Some of the products they offer are cognitive skill development applications, game based learning applications, educational technology research, among others, and their latest educational product: Guru G was chosen by the Unreasonable at Sea program (by Unreasonable institute & co-founder of Stanford d.school) as one of the 11 companies changing the world.

"We are trying to adapt to how the user wants to use something, rather than expecting the user to learn. This is essential in the education space to make things work".

Guru G is a "gamified teaching, teacher training & open certification platform", that aims to democratize access to technology for quality teachers. Rather than focusing on the student as most education technologies do, Guru G believes that teachers are the most important element of the education system. Enabling teachers, means quality education will reach the lives of hundreds of students during their professional life time, and with this in mind, Vita Beans designed a platform that is engaging, easy to use and intuitive, designed specifically with teachers, schools and governments in mind.

Unreasonable Barcelona: Anand Joshi, Guru-G from Unreasonable Media on Vimeo.

Inspiration

"Teachers don't use and don't like to use technology"

The idea came from the products Vita Beans had already developed for the education space, such as their text2animation & text2game prototypes. They had produced over 80 collaborative games teachers were using in the classroom. Students play together in teams and learn about different topics through the process of gaming. However, suddenly they realized teachers had great ideas they didn't know how to translate into a digital form because they did not have the knowledge or the skills to create digital content. This is, according to Amruth, the crisis they are trying to solve in the education space: the quality of teachers, access to good teachers and the difficulty for teachers to adopt new technologies were the biggest challenges. "

The design challenge

Their initial prototypes were designed with assumptions based on their gamification experiments with students. "We miserably failed with teachers and we discovered what a good gamification system for teachers looks like by prototyping with teachers and looking at the small things. It was an interesting learning experience." They identified two common reasons why they hesitated to adopt anything new in the classroom.

Teachers don't want to feel like they can't use something a student can.
Teachers can't visualize themselves using that tool, this there is an element of uncertainty and lack of confidence.

It was imperative for Vita Beans to switch focus: "Any tool you design, you expect to train the user to understand your tool, and if they refuse to do that; you blame them." They used their behavioural science background to come up with infrastructural solutions that solve the limitations from the outset.

The solutions

They started prototyping with natural language processing for their text2animation & text2game projects. NLP is a branch of computer science concerned with the interactions between computers and human languages. Teachers articulated their ideas in simple English and the program used NLP to take what they said, try to understand what they were trying to visualize and convert into programming language to build an animated movie out of it (like what we used to open this article -but with hopefully better results). Amruth was very confident about the potential of this prototype and shared with us that UNICEF might take it up and implement it as an open source animated video and game creation tool in Africa.

They also developed an adaptive navigation engine for one of their game based learning platforms; a tool that adapts to what you are trying to do: "There is no fixed way to navigate from one task to another. It tries to learn the closest action that each teacher is trying to do and it executes that. It tries to learn how the teacher wants to use it."' This was a success. They incorporated touch screens to make the product more intuitive and the teachers picked it up quickly.

Amruth claims they are the first in the world to develop a gamification platform specifically for teachers and the reason was their solution to the navigation issue. This experience also indirectly helped in designing Guru-G.

"Amruth Bagali Ravindranath talks about text2animation & text2game prototypes"
Amruth B R, at TedxMcGill. Courtesy of YouTube

These design solutions and the learnings from each project inspired the team to come up with products which have been adopted commercially across 10 states in India, reached 4000+ schools & over 3 million kids internationally through partners in India & North America. They have helped education companies build their primary and secondary school education products, (including one of India's top classroom technologies), have been covered by the media and won several entrepreneurship awards. More information here and on their website. Our question is: what is it about behavioral science that helped Amruth's team arrive to this epiphany in tech design?

Behavioral Science and Social Marketing

Comparing marketing to advocacy is bound to be met by resistance and perhaps controversy. I raised this question when we interviewed Maya Ganesh for the Information Design post, and stated the following in our conclusion: "Our consumption habits in the market are shaping how we process and interact with information in the public space. The possibility of 'consumer behavior' permeating modalities of activism, reinforces the need to explore more interesting strategies for information dissemination." Now that we are starting to look closely at the infrastructure supporting information, I will stubbornly return to the same question: to what extent should we borrow tactics for advocacy from marketing? and add: how much of it should permeate the design of digital technologies?

Amruth made a casual reference during our interview that triggered this thought. We were discussing the importance of understanding behavior patterns, when he brought up Edward Bernays. This man used psychoanalysis, psychology and social science to design public persuasion campaigns and could get masses to choose what he wanted them to without them realizing it. While this sounds awfully dangerous and manipulative, I would like to rescue the idea of understanding human behavior well enough to design technology around it and I will entertain this thought in the context of social change -please, don't judge.

Pillip Kotler, S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, wrote a paper bringing marketing and social change together: “Can social causes be advanced more successfully through applying principles, concepts and techniques of marketing?”. He defines marketing as:

"a sophisticated technology, that draws heavily on behavioral science for clues to solve communication and persuasion related to influencing accessibility. [...] Most of the effort is spent on discovering the wants of a target audience and creating goods and services to satisfy them" (Kotler, 1971)

This definition is a useful bridge to link marketing with accessibility of digital technologies. G.D. Wiebe wrote an influential paper on social marketing, that coined the question: "Why can't you sell brotherhood and rational thinking like you can sell soap?", that later influenced public information campaigns by USAID, the WHO, and the World Bank [2] . While he recognized how these models can to an extent commodify human behavior and social principles, he stressed that knowledge of behavioral science is a useful framework for product planning, that must be given a socially useful implementation. He developed the following criteria of considerations:

Criteria	Description
Force	The intensity of the person's motivation toward the goal -a combination of his predisposition prior to the message and the stimulation of the message
Direction	Knowledge of how or where the person might go to consummate his motivation.
Mechanism	The existence of an agency that enables the person to translate his motivation into action.
Adequacy	The ability and effectiveness of the agency in performing its task.
Distance	Estimate of the energy and cost required (by the user) to consummate the motivation in relation to the reward

Considering this framework is part of recognizing how knowledge circulating market networks affects our behavior. Nishant Shah addressed two ideas along these lines in the thought piece. First, he suggests us to recognize the negotiations that take place in the state-citizen-market ecosystem, and how they affect our rights, demands and responsibilities in society. Second, how this leads to a different understanding of the citizen as an "embodiment of these state-market negotiations". Keeping consumer behavior, and the forces shaping, enabling and constraining it in mind, is an interesting framework when we think of ourselves as information consumers -and as Yochai Benkler posits in The Wealth of Networks- in an ongoing transition to information producers. This also depends on how we think of information. We usually define content as information, but the structure and infrastructure are also pieces of 'information' we continuously shape through our interaction with technology. Hence, when we talk about making information accessible, we are also talking about producing legible and intelligible infrastructures.

Linking it back to digital technology

I am aware that the relationship we are trying to draw seems little far-fetched, but Amruth and the Vita Bean's team experience shows this behavioral-science approach, not only has a lot of potential, but is seldom explored in the education technology market. He told us about his success story with a behavior simulation engine. They used neuroscience as a base to build computer based activities and games to predict the behavior of its users on specific situations. They had an accuracy of 86%, which according to Amruth, is larger than every known psychological framework, and according to their testimonial, above most behavioral tests in the market (which only yield 20-40% of accuracy). Amruth said: "That was the first behavior research connection that brought us into the start-up space. Exploring games, exploring human behavior."

Design challenges in
mobile applications**

Make it noticeable
Make it useless if not shared
Manufacture peer pressure
Easy to personalize
Must evolve constantly
(static stories die)

We can also link these ideas back to storytelling. Amruth and I discussed what is the best way to use technology to engage users with digital stories. He made a good point at pairing up both processes: "What makes a storytelling session effective is how you contextualize a story for the person you are sitting with. As kids we are used to a one way process. As adults, stories are more interactive, so you may bring a new dimension, and the story might go in a very different direction. The technology must enable and reflect that." Compelling narratives must motivate the audience to interact with the stories, and digital devices must perform the same function. The infrastructure and interface of technologies must be intuitive, familiar and persuasive enough to sway users into interacting with it.

A way to do this is by pairing up technologies with the criterion above. In terms of functionality: provide them with a mechanism that translates the users ideas into action, that is efficient at enabling them, and that reduces the 'distance (the cost or amount of energy needed) to perform a task -as has been accomplished with Guru G in India. As for the force and direction of motivation, Amruth brought up some design challenges when discussing adoption of mobile applications [**"by analysing what increases the probability of a solution / campaign growing organically by word of mouth, going viral, and specifically what make something fashionable". See box on the left]. These challenges may vary from one application to the other but, at the end of day, the analysis and conceptualization of the product must be persuasive and empathetic with its users.

Making Change

To close our interview, Amruth and I talked about what it means to 'make change' through digital design. He believes 'making change' is composed of three elements:

Empathy: Your attempt to make change will depend on the amount of empathy you feel towards the people you are trying to create change for. "We spend time interacting with teachers, classrooms, just to get an idea of how the teacher thinks, empathize with prospective users".
Imagination: How you translate this empathy into solutions. "Imagination helps you think of as many solutions as you can to solve the design and adoption challenges"
Action: The most challenging stage according to Amruth: "If your technology is too hard to use, you will lose audience. If it's not impactful enough, it is trivialized. How do you reach a balance in making it effortless and yet, impactful?"

This post took a step back in our analysis of citizen action, to uncover a less visible space where change is also taking place: the intersection of the user with the machine. We seldom look at the relationship: producer-machine-consumer (and its multiple combinations) and how our behavior is being reconfigured by new digital technologies (in this project). The pace at which we need to upgrade our own operation systems, requires a degree of digital literacy that is not being facilitated by the state, the market or even civil society. Vita Beans, is one of the few examples of market actors working towards cutting the middle-man between users and digital technologies. If widely adopted, this model has the potential of re-organizing the state-citizen-market dynamic: from how citizens interact with the technology market to how new ways of producing and using technology might shape citizens' negotiation with the state.

This was also a set of explorations. It is a fairly new area in our research that will lead to more conversations with people who understand technology as an infrastructure and as material, as opposed to us- who often understand it as a practice, a space or an actor. Our goal is to bring content and infrastructure closer together, and make a stronger emphasis on inter-disciplinarity and multi-stakeholderism as a strategy to leverage change.

Footnotes:

[1] Refer to Marc Prensky's Digital Native, Digital Immigrant, for more on the limitations of digital immigrants in the education space; "It‟s very serious, because the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language". Access it here: http://bit.ly/IMBu0j

The CIS book : Digital Alternatives with a Cause, is also an interesting and comprehensive read of what comprises a digital native or digital immigrant today: http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook

[2] The World Bank makes reference to G.D. Wiebe's thinking on their blog: http://bit.ly/1jNZVZA. Also refer to: Baker, Michael (2012). The Marketing Book. Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. p. 696 and Lefebvre, R. Craig. Social Marketing and Social Change: Strategies and Tools to Improve Health, Well-Being and the Environment\year=2013. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. p. 4. for examples of these interventions. Finally, the Wikipedia page on Social Marketing explains the role of G.D. Wiebe in the field: http://bit.ly/1lw4jPV

Sources:

Kotler, P., & Zaltman, G. (1971). Social marketing: an approach to planned social change. Journal of marketing, 35(3).

Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? Hivos Knowledge Program. April 30, 2013.

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For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/digital-storytelling-human-behavior-vs-technology

We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human

asha — 2015-10-24T13:42:16Z

The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.

Rationale

All of these, in some way or the other, hint at new models of cyborgification which we need to unpack in order to understand a few questions which have been at the helm of all philosophical inquiry and practical design around Internet and Society:

How do we understand ourselves as human? What are the technologies that define being human?
How do conceptualise the technological beyond prosthetic imaginations? How do we understand technology (especially the digital) as a condition?
What are the new challenges we shall face in law, ethics, life and social sciences as we increasingly live in Cyborg societies?

We , the Cyborgs, is a first of its kind research inquiry that locates these questions in a quickly digitising India to see the challenges of being human in the time of technological futures. In her seminal body of work on Cyborgs, Donna Haraway had posited the cyborg as a creature of fiction and ironies; a monster, a trickster, a boundary creature that is irreducible to the existing binaries of human-technology, technology-nature, nature-regulation. In imagining the cyborg as simultaneously fictitious and embodied in practices of care and labour, Haraway was further hinting at a set of questions that have never really entered discourse on cyborgs: Who are we when we become cyborgs? What do we do with the cyborgs we have produced? What are the other kinds of cyborgs? What are the new places them? What are the other ways of understanding cyborgs? Asha Achuthan in her monograph Re:Wiring Bodies, maps these questions along the axes of Presence, Access, Inclusion and Resistance to understand ‘attitudes to technology’. Achuthan talks about a moment of elision where technology is separated from the human body in the space of policy and critique. In those moments of separation, there is the production of a cyborg body that is suddenly vulnerable because it does not have the support of the technological which was an essential part of its bodily experience. How does this body get assimilated in our technology practices? What are the axes of discrimination and inequity that are attributed to these bodies in the process of cyborg making? Who are the actors that play a part in designing these cyborg bodies and selves? In the Indian context, where there has been a legacy of being technosocial subjects and cyborg citizens in the nation’s own technoscience imagination of itself, we need to locate the cyborg in new sites and contexts to see what the regulation of technology and its integration in everyday life.

Methodology

Building upon her work, We, The Cyborgs, seeks to locate the cyborg in India, on 3 interdisciplinary but connected sites to examine how bodies, in their interaction with the design and practice of different processes of regulation and control, are in the process of becoming cyborgs. The inquiry locates the cyborg at intersections of Health Care, Planning and Gender, to start unpacking the different futures of the body-technology relationships that have been posited in terms like post-human, techno-social, simulated bodies, bodies as traffic, etc. In the process, it hopes to unravel the questions of methods, frameworks, ethics and practices of bodies in conditions of technology. We, The Cyborgs, aims to bring together a wide range of researchers and practitioners from different disciplinary locations including but not limited to – Art, Anthropology, Law, Planning, Architecture and Design, Gender and Sexuality studies, Cultural Studies, Life Sciences, Medicine, New Media Studies, etc. – to start a debate around some of the key issues around cyborgs and cyborg-making in their fields.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/we-cyborgs/challenges-for-future-of-human