Centre for Internet and Society

The Right Words for Love

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:23:58Z

Queer love is legal. Which means that all of us are finally free to find a language that can match our desires.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 23, 2018.

I don’t think, in all my years of growing up, I ever had my parents say “I love you” to me. Not because they did not love me, but because in Gujarati, the language we predominantly use at home, there is no possibility of saying it. Any attempt — ‘Hoon tane prem karu chu’, or ‘Mane tara par prem che’, would sound bookish, and thus, empty. But Gujarati has lots of words for love. The love between father and son is pitrutva, that of a mother towards her child is mamta, and of the child for its parents is vatsalya; the sister’s preet finds a brother’s whal, and siblings are bound in sneh. But these words have no translation outside the rich tapestry of sociality they exist in, and this is the same for almost all of our Indian languages.

These are words that are nouns and it is difficult to use their verb forms. They remain ideal types of feeling rather than descriptions of action. So, it wasn’t a surprise to me that our parents didn’t — not till long after we left home and English entered our family spaces — ever tell us that they love us. We did not have the vocabulary for the precise sentiment, and so we never said it. Instead, it manifested in the touch, the embrace, the smile and the active intimacy of actions which stood as testimony of the love that we could not define.

The lexicon of touching — the natural expression of love for me — was the vocabulary of intimacy, trust, affection and acceptance in my sociality. The clap on the back between friends, the hand on the shoulder or the exuberant hug were manifestations of love. Who you can and cannot touch was linked closely to who you can and cannot love, and how. While the expression “I love you” waited for a reciprocal response, the hand held in silence demanded no answer. Love in India, be it social, familial or romantic, has always had that sense of the tactile. Perhaps, that is the reason why kissing came to Bollywood so late, because to kiss was to also claim and express love. To kiss without love was obscene. Love, in India, is a physical verb.

Queer love, then, is no exception. It also did not have a local vocabulary or language to express itself in. Our myths, legends, fables, and epics are filled with queer practices — male gods taking female forms, consummating their desire with same-sex persons, changing their sexuality and genders in a fluid allegory of social intimacy. These were not merely practices. They were the physical verbal languages, signposts and registers of desire and love.

In implementing Section 377, the British ensured that they colonised not only our country but also our bodies. They imported shame and put it on practices and desires, which were accepted and celebrated in the country. They insisted that the only acceptable love is one of penile transaction that essentially leads to procreation — a violent law that not only denied the actions of love between consenting adults of same and different sexes, it alsoactively disallowed any local grammar of love to emerge in the country.

The judgment decriminalising consensual sex between adults, irrespective of their orientation or sex, is momentous because it doesn’t just condone an action. It suggests that we are finally free to locate and celebrate a language that can match our desires. The British law criminalised our many ways of claiming love. This judgment elevates our right to love as a fundamental right, and continues our Swaraj movements by decolonising our intimacies.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality, then, is not about queer love. It is about all love. It is about recognising that as a society we can only grow strong if we learn to love at intersections. In our increasingly polarised times when actions of hate — lynching, murdering, intimidation, bullying, trolling, and abuse — are on the rise, this judgment reminds us that the only counter to such violence is going to be in our right to love without fear, and, in any form that brings happiness in our lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-23-2018-the-right-words-for-love

Digital Native: Hardly Friends Like That

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:28:10Z

Individual effort is far from enough to fool Facebook’s grouping algorithm.

The article was published in the Indian Express on September 30, 2018

Lately, my Facebook timeline is flooded with people who are trying to “hack” Facebook’s friendship algorithm. Ever since Facebook took away the option from its users, to view their posts in reverse chronology, and made us slaves to its algorithms that pick and choose, based on opaque rules, what we see on our timeline, people have been frustrated with it. When your newsfeed is compiled by an algorithm that selects and decides what is good for you to see and what will be your interest, it doesn’t just mean that you have lost control, but that you are being manipulated without even noticing it, responding to only certain kinds of information that triggers specific responses from you.

This has led to a lot of people trying to “fool” the Facebook algorithm and taking their agency back. One of the most popular version of this is a meme that announces that Facebook algorithms only show us particular kinds of information from a certain kind of people, thus creating an echo chamber where all we do is see pictures of cute cats, dancing babies and holidays. The post suggests that if we all just talk to each other more, then we will have meaningful conversations — like, you know, about dancing cats, cute babies and where we wish to go on a holiday.

It is true that based on the nature of interaction, Facebook seems to designate some connections as strong connections. So, if we are chatting on Messenger, liking each others’s posts a lot, have many friends in common, are tagged together in the same pictures, Facebook makes a logical deduction that we have a lot in common in real life, and that we would be interested in each other more than other low-traffic connections. The meme asks people to leave a message on the post, start a conversation, and with this clever ploy, upset the Facebook algorithm. Now that we have chatted once, it suggests, Facebook is going to think we are the best of friends and is going to show us more diverse sources on the timeline.

This meme, and many like it, are attempts at taking agency in how we curate and consume our social media. Both of them are romantic, human, and absolutely flawed. They seem to think that Facebook’s algorithms follow human logic, and that they work on simple principles which we can counteract with simple actions. What they fail to take into account is that in the world of big data connections, Facebook’s algorithms draw their causal and correlative powers from more than a 100 data points which create a unique profile for each of its users. They fail to recognise that this message of resistance is still subject to the same principles of “traffic generating capacity”, and will be showed more often only for a temporary period until people stop interacting on that thread. With time and waning interest, it will die and people will be distracted by other information. They also don’t recognise that Facebook is still going to show your post largely to the same people that it has been showing your pictures to, and even if new people show engagement with it, it is not going to radically change your timeline.

While these posts are fun conversation starters, they cannot possibly be taken seriously. If Facebook’s algorithms were this easy to fool, every advertiser worth their salt would be busy manipulating the stream without spending any money on the platform. More importantly, individual actions are not going to circumvent the automation of our digital collective behaviour. To pretend that there is scope for such actions in the age of extreme customisation and profiling is a fool’s paradise. It also deflects our attention from the fact that if these are critical concerns, the responsibility of changing these conditions is not on the users but on companies like Facebooks and the governments that have to hold them accountable.

You and I, with all our good intentions, are not going to be able to “hack” Facebook’s algorithms or “fool” them into giving us results that we want. The only thing that can produce this change is strong regulation, robust policy, and taking the social media behemoth to task about how it addresses the questions of human agency and choice. So, the next time you want to produce real change, join the campaigns and ask our government to do something so that we can control our social media life.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-30-2018-digital-native-hardly-friends-like-that

Digital Native: Time to Walk the Talk

nishant — 2018-11-01T05:58:30Z

#MeToo has turned victims into survivors, but social media remains an unsafe space.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 14, 2018.

#MeToo movements from around the globe have found a cultural and public force. As victims of sexual and gendered violence and abuse, especially in the workplace and professional fields, use the pseudo-safe space of the internet to give testimony to their pain, grief, trauma, and despair, the world has been forced to listen, and acknowledge that these experiences are real, and the lingering scars that they leave on the lives of these survivors need to be acknowledged and addressed. With this one hashtag, the digital web has transformed victims into survivors — giving them not just a public voice, but also a collective space for support, the relief of finding care, and the catharsis of being heard and seen, and to ask for accountability and justice for their experiences.

Every survivor who has spoken using this hashtag, has done it not only as a personal expression but also as an heroic civic duty, exposing the often seen but never named problem of gendered and sexual violence. Every hashtag has also exposed these survivors to backlash which disbelieved, ridiculed, or bullied them into silence and shame. Every person who has spoken up, to re-enact the violence which they live with, has made themselves vulnerable to further attacks and stigmatisation from the communities that they are speaking against.

The hashtag is important also because it is not just a platform for survivors to speak but also for allies to come in. The responsibility of addressing the question of gender and sexual violence cannot lie only on the survivors. Hashtags are connectors — they are digital objects that consolidate many different disparate elements and gives them a common identity. #MeToo has made sure that the allies, the activists, the people who are introspecting their own behaviour and their complicity in naturalising these actions, all find a space to come together. It is a ringing reminder that oppression and violence are intersectional, and so our fights and resistances and communities will also have to be intersectional. It reminds us that gender and sexual violence are not “women’s problems” but social problems where women often get victimised.

When the #MeToo first became global news, what was refreshing was the number of voices from India who decided to speak in support of the survivors. A wide variety of people acknowledged that this is not just an American problem but a problem that has even deeper roots in the country. Woke Bollywood bros, new age silver screen feministas, progressive creatives, and liberal audiences all came in unity to talk about the state of gender and sexual violence in our everyday lives.

But it just needed one puff of truth for the house of cards to collapse. As Tanushree Dutta took the step to call out what we all know — that Bollywood is a cesspit of exploitation and sexism — the tinsel town squirmed. Apart from a handful of voices, most established veterans either abstain from responding, feign ignorance, or rush to the defence of a person who is now accused of sexual violence. The do-good Twitterati, happy to comment on far-away foreign cases, is suddenly hemming and hawing when the problem knocks at their doors and comes out of the closet. The Dutta-Patekar conversations on social media are a startling reminder that we remain still a space that is unsafe, hostile, and intimidating for survivors to come out and tell their truth.

The digital hashtag allows you to connect to extensive distances and stand in support of them. We travel with the hashtag to far-away lands and add our voice and support to problems we might not immediately be living through. It is good to remember, though, that hashtags also travel. What was once distant will eventually come close to home. When it does, the people who could perform their speech will have to move to action. It might be a good idea to look at the Twitter history of every big shot who had used #MeToo to extend their support against Weinstein, and ask them, to do the same now. They need to be reminded that politics is not in speech but in action. And if they do not stand up for Dutta now, they will have not just failed Dutta but every woman who might have wanted to come out and speak her truth against those who have abused their power to demean and diminish the dignity of their lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-14-2018-digital-native-time-to-walk-the-talk

Digital Native: Hashtag Fatigue

nishant — 2018-11-01T06:04:25Z

It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die.

The article was published in Indian Express on October 28, 2018.

Information overload is our new default. We don’t just slip into a condition of overload, we live in it on a daily basis. Every minute, surrounded by digital devices that buzz, beep, chirp, blink and notify us about the various information streams that shape us, we experience a sensory overload that is unprecedented. One of the reasons for this information overload is that digital networks work on traffic. Traffic — the data that travels in bits, bytes, and packets, over the network edges of our computation systems — is the lifeline of a network. A network without traffic is dead. The network exists to circulate information and transfer information. Take that away and the network is just a whole lot of dead hardware.

So, if a computational network is our default mode of existence, then we will have to accept that these networks will continue to incessantly circulate traffic and keep the edges that connect us as nodes, busy, with a continued information stream. This is why our machines are in a state of continued update, and this is why we expect to receive and share new information in all states.

This state of information overload has led to some alarming signals about human relationship with information: We find our attention now shallow, because even before we have processed the first stream of information, something else comes and dislocates that information. Information intensity is replaced by information scale, so we are no longer invested in a deep engagement with the information that comes to us. For information to keep our attention longer than the click, we need information to be repeated, consolidated, and updated over and over again, so that we can keep focusing on the same topic, but on multiple screens and interfaces.

The hashtag is a great example of this. Even though a hashtag excites us, inspires us, and motivates us to engage with an information stream, hashtags immediately dislocate us to other hashtags and other tangents. It is easy to hijack hashtags by coupling them with others. It is equally easy to make hashtags die by infusing them with misinformation which makes the user disengage from the stream. Hashtags can make things go viral, by being shared, and they can hold attention only if they are fed by multiple and many voices that keep them alive.

While viral hashtags have public attention and hold, they also lead to a different phenomenon — what I call #hashtag fatigue. We get bored of the hashtag, because the same few ones show up so many times, that even when they have new material, we presume that we already know what accompanies them. We also get tired of the hashtags, because they fill up almost all our attention span. We get desensitised, often ignoring the individual and collective experiences they consolidate. We learn to ignore hashtags, because as more people share it, the more it seems to be everyday, losing easily to other information sets that are screaming for eyeballs.

We see this in the way #MeToo is developing in India. As more women come out, naming their abusers and enablers, we see a hashtag fatigue stepping in. We already see people raising an emoji eyebrow and rolling their digital eyes while there are abusers who are maintaining silence hoping that this will phase out soon. There are people who have started making jokes about how everything is now #MeToo, and this also feeds into the patriarchal powers who are using this moment to paint themselves as victims of vindictive women, dismissing their collective and individual trauma. We see many survivors getting overwhelmed by the scale of voices trickling in, feeling deafened by the continuous traffic that surrounds the hashtag, but also creating an isolated island where nothing else trickles in. We see news media already finding either new angles or other controversies, because in the lifeline of the news cycle, this is already old news.

In order for #MeToo to remain a sustainable social justice movement and a long-standing solidarity, we will have to find other ways of engaging with this movement. While the digital offers the first platform and catalysis, we will have to find other spaces for the movement and its ambitions to survive. It is time for us to simultaneously find forms that will capture the urgency but move beyond the viral fatigue of the #hashtag.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-october-28-2018-digital-native-hashtag-fatigue

Digital Native: System Needs a Reboot

nishant — 2018-12-31T02:06:02Z

It’s time to replace the schizophrenic need for variety with ingenuity — the truthiness of the information.

The article was published in Indian Express on December 30, 2018.

On the internet, we produce information to be forgotten. The life of digital information is shaped by conditions of volume, velocity and variety (the three Vs). The scale of our collective digital content production has now reached massive proportions. We produce more information in a day than we have produced over entire centuries. So trying to make human sense of this information is futile. We can be assured that almost everything we write will be forgotten and archived before it is consumed and remembered. The large volume also means that in order for information to stand out, it needs velocity. The trend of today will be replaced in a few clicks by something else. Fomo, the fear of missing out, is not just a millennial anxiety, it is the new natural. It is because information is continually being forgotten, transferred from memory to storage, it needs to have variety. It needs to be new but familiar, expected but exciting. Let’s call it, same same, but different.

Renewal is the default of all our digital transactions. Our data streams need constant renewal, our platforms demand updating, our habits of social media engagement need maintenance, and we find new ways of doing the same things over and over again. Our devices light up, with frantic energy, with seductive beeps and sounds, reminding us of the need to renew and update. The poetics of hope and regeneration have long since given way to the politics of manipulation and transactions.

It is the state of continual renewal that perpetuates the fake news economies, as people share without verifying, and consume without reflection. It enables lynch mobs and vigilante violence. It is at the heart of why outrageous claims, provocative politics and a state of extreme apathy make their way into our digital conversations and responses. This is why, hate speech has now become acceptable, and actions without consequences is the new ethos online. It perhaps accounts for why we seem to care more about our gadgets and services than the people behind them. This is why, when we see a food-delivery person stealing some food from our expensive orders, we ask for them to be sacked, rather than being shocked by the deep irony of getting food that costs more than anything the person can ever afford. It puts our attention on to things that have more engagement value than things that matter — which perhaps explains why three weddings with their obscene displays of wealth and power had more social media engagement than conversations about #MeToo in the country.

This renewal has been naturalised as our new mode of being and becoming, making us hypermobile drones that are always on the go, always working, always interacting. The state of perpetual renewal is here to stay, and we will have to figure out ways by which to live with these three Vs. As we approach that time of the year, when we make new resolutions, I want to offer the three Is which perhaps need to be brought back into consideration in our unthinking digital actions: intensity, intimacy, ingenuity.

The volume imperative of digital information favours scale. It wants more clicks, more eyeballs, more users. We get passionately invested for a brief period of time and then are moved on to the next thing. Instead of continually looking for volume, let us focus on intensity. We don’t need a thousand likes, we just need people who we care for, to like things that we do. Something doesn’t become important only when it circulates and goes viral — it becomes so because of the people who are involved in it.

Similarly, the velocity of digital networks demands high speed. We click before we think, and we share before we verify. Our relationship with information has been reduced to sharing as opposed to processing. Maybe it is time to replace velocity with intimacy. When we encounter information, let us take a small pause, process and analyse, and instead of just blindly sharing, maybe respond and critique it, so that it is a relationship of value.

The expectations of variety provoke information that is often untrue or removed from reality. Our filter bubble echo chambers often establish this information as true through repetition rather than verification. We need to get out of the schizophrenic need for variety and concentrate instead on ingenuity — the truthiness of the information and our capacity to stand behind things that we say and share.

The three Vs of digital information are machine protocols. They put the computational in the centre and dictate how human behaviour will be shaped. Maybe it is time we think of the three Is instead, to focus on human needs and aspirations, and demand that our technologies measure up to what we can expect from each other.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-december-30-2018-digital-native-system-needs-a-robot

Off the Record

nishant — 2013-04-26T05:58:47Z

Social networks track our world but not relationships. We live in a world where things happen. And yet, with the presence of digital objects, the things that happen have increased in intensity and volume.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on April 6, 2013.

Never before have we lived in a world that is so seen,documented, archived and forgotten. Early Enlightenment philosophers had wondered, if a tree falls in loneliness and there is nobody there to see it, does the tree really fall? In the world of instant documentation, chances are that if the tree falls, there is somebody there to tweet it.

We live in a spectacular world. That is not to say that it is the best or worst of all possible. I want to ponder on the fact that we create spectacles of things that were otherwise swept under the carpet. Every little detail of our myriad and mundane life is potentially spectacular. From medical technologies that can decipher our chemical DNA to the mobile phone that Instagrams the food we eat and things that we see, we are surrounded by spectacles of everyday life. Pictures, tweets, blogs, geolocation services, status updates, likes, shares — the texture of living has never been this richly and overwhelmingly documented.

However, the data and information that constitutes the recognition of our life, have increased to such a scale that we have overturned the course of human history writing. We identify ourselves as a species that is able to document, store and relay information from one passing generation to another. So much so that we have invested a vast amount of our energies in creating museums, writing histories, building archives, and obsessively collecting facts and fictions of our origins, from the big bang to flying reptiles.

But big data has made us reach a point where we are trying to manage, filter the onslaught of data. We have, for the first time, created information that is no longer intelligible to the human eye or brain. From machines that can verify god particles to artificial intelligence which can identify patterns every day we have replaced the human being from its central position as consumer, producer and subject of data.

These are conditions of living in information societies that are producing, archiving and reorganising information for these information ecosystems. The multiple information streams remind us of the multitude and diversity of human life which cannot be reduced to a generalising theory of similarity. The rise of big data brings to focus the promise of the World Wide Web — a reminder that there are alternatives to the mainstream and that there are unheard, contradictory voices that deserve to be heard. Yet, even as the burgeoning information society explodes on our devices, there is another anxiety which we need to encounter. If the world of information, which was once supposed to be the alternative, becomes the central and dominant mode of viewing the world, what does it hide?

Take friendship, for instance.You can quantify how many friends exist on your social networks. Algorithms can work out complex proximity principles and determine who your closer connections are.

Data mining tools are able to figure out the similarities and likelihood of enduring conversations in your social sphere. But these are all human actions which can be captured by the network and the big data realities. They may be able to give us new information about what friends do and how often, but there is still almost no way of figuring out, which friend might call you in the middle of the night.

Friendship, like many other things, is not made of spectacles. It does not produce information sets which can be mapped and represented as information. Friendship cannot be reduced to pictures of being together or dramatic stories of survival and togetherness. More often than not, true friendships are made of things that do not happen. Or things, if they happen, cannot be put in a tweet, captured on Instagram or shared on Tumblr.

As we take these social networked realities as 'real' realities, it might be worth asking what is being missed out, what remains unheard and unrepresented in these information streams. Because if you love somebody and there is nobody to know it, report it, record it and convert it into a spectacle, does it make your love any less special? Any less intense? Any less true?

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-april-6-2013-nishant-shah-off-the-record

10 Ways to Say Nothing New

nishant — 2015-04-14T13:17:52Z

The rise of the listicle, a safe, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on January 19, 2014.

I Always Like to begin the New Year with a self-fulfilling prophecy, assured in the fact that like New Year resolutions, it will quickly be forgotten in the attention deficit times that we live in. Nevertheless, it is always a fun exercise, to play Cassandra, and utter ominous things about the time to come. I am looking at my fasterthan-byte feeds online and trying to figure out the new trend that is going to be the absolute death of us in 2014. I did some research (Google search), consulted some experts (asked friends on Facebook),analysed critiques (trolled on Twitter), and looked at current trends (followed funny Tumblrs) and finally have the answer. The thing that we must brace for is the list — or rather the listicle (an article that is written like a list).

Have you noticed it? Almost anything that is anything on the internet lately has been presented to us as a list. There are lists for everything — of things people say, of things people do, of things people want to say about people who do things. On websites in the business of making things go viral (and slightly fermented), the listicle has emerged as the next best thing.

Now, I don’t want us to run away with the idea (10 ways to run away with ideas — coming soon on Viral Nova) that lists are new. Lists have always existed and have been one of the most basic forms of archiving, sorting and storing human knowledge and information. However, the new lists that are doing the rounds on BuzzFeed, Reditt, Viral Nova and everywhere else need attention. The listicle is an incredible performance of the strange, the silly and the deranged. Like reality TV judges, they are empty, cliché-ridden and yet seductive. They are supposed to produce profound truths, give us insights into our everyday practices, harness the wisdom of crowds and help curate overloaded information feeds to distil what is most relevant and useful. In itself, that is a fantastic ambition and for somebody who is constantly moaning about there not being enough time to follow everything on the internet (way too many videos of pandas making friends with wallabies on Vimeo these days), I appreciate the ability that listicles have of reducing read-time and giving us tweet-sized nuggets of wisdom. Bam! Our lives have changed!

And yet, as you look at these lists, you slowly start realising that listicles are significantly empty. They try to pass on the banal, the boring, the insipid and the extraordinarily common-sense as knowledge, information and wisdom. I am randomly looking at the last five listicles on my timeline — 20 reasons why a 20-something would never survive Hunger Games (right, because that’s the message of the books — get children to kill each other!), 31 insanely clever ideas to remodel your new house (a lot of them using chopped up coke bottles and toilet paper rolls for that intimate ambience), 18 ways of discovering happiness through travel (my first rule is “be very rich”), 25 universal horrors of hair removal (let it grow! Let it grow! Let it grow!) and seven ways of making a to-do list that works (get it? Get it? A list about making an efficient list. May I please say #FacePalm?)

So, snide remarks aside (10 ways to let go of sarcasm?) what does this mean for us? Why are listicles so popular? Why are the tech-savvy, educated people online, who could be overthrowing authority (all hail, Snowden) and feeding starving children in a poor country of their choice — why are they all spending the time with listicles? I am proposing that the listicle is the final death of politics, criticality and thought on the internet. We have already seen how online conversations quickly devolve into an exercise in creative name-calling and racist, bigoted bullying. The internet has already shown us that all debates end in accusations of fascism (Godwin’s law) and that anything that you say online is going to offend somebody who will then come back, like the ghost of Christmas past, and haunt you. In the hostile space that the internet has become, not the very least because everybody is not watching porn, searching for pictures of animals, or pirating music and movies, we are all trained to be the saints who were persecuted for their beliefs. There is no such thing as a bad person on the internet. Everybody is smug, holier- than-thou, and even when wrong, are saintly wrong, and thus martyrs. For a medium that was supposed to encourage conversation, unless you are in the company of people you know, the internet has become a hunting ground, where the only thing you can do safely is make a list. And hence, the listicle.

True, once in a while, there are some really cool listicles (though they might lead to mild electrocution or house burning down, but hey, no pain, no gain, right?) and they do help in visualising and transmitting information very fast. At the end of the day, listicles are the space that conversations go to die. The listicle is a safe, non-offensive, non-thinking information piece that tells us what we already know, confirms what we had always suspected, and gives validation to the impressive schools of thoughts like “My grandmother says so” and “I have heard that”. It is a way by which we escape deep thought or engaged talk, basking in the enchantment of our own brilliance, no longer in need of thinking anymore, because look, look how beautiful our thoughts look in the listicle, and look, how many people are sharing it! The listicle has risen and it looks like it is just going to get more popular. Maybe it is time to write a listicle about why we shouldn’t be writing listicles.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/indian-express-january-19-2014-nishant-shah-10-ways-to-say-nothing-new

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:51:06Z

Nishant Shah was invited to do a book review of a new anthology 'Deconstructing Digital Natives', edited by Michael Thomas. The review was published in Routledge's Journal of Children and Media on July 18, 2012.

Deconstructing Digital Natives: Young People, Technology and the New Literacies is an anthology that revisits the debates and scholarship that have arisen around youth and technology in the last decade or so. It is a timely intervention that invites some of the most influential scholars who have contributed to and shaped the discourse around “digital natives” to come and revisit their original ideas from the last decade. The term “digital native” probably bears witness to the strident discourses that, more often than not, fall into the trap of exotically glorifying or despairingly vilifying young peoples’ engagement with digital technologies. As Buckingham points out in his foreword to the book, these conversations either take up the language of a “generation gap [that] entails a narrative of transformation and even of rupture, in which fundamental continuities between the past and the future have been destroyed” or they guise themselves in an “almost utopian view of technology—a fabulous story about technology liberating and empowering young people, enabling them to become global citizens, and to learn and communicate and create in free and unfettered ways” (p. ix). The essays seek a point of departure from these tried and tested arguments in order to provide a “balanced view” on the topic. And so we have a distinguished author list from the world of digital natives scholarship, coming together not only to ponder on their own contributions to the field and how those ideas need to be upgraded, but also to provide new contexts, concepts, and frameworks to understand who, or indeed, what, is a “digital native,” often in tension with their earlier work.

In its ambition of revisiting existing debates and providing a “research-based approach by presenting empirical evidence and argument from international researchers in the field,” the book succeeds unevenly (p. xi). Despite its efforts to chart a point of departure, some of the essays end up falling into some usual traps. For example, despite the fact that the oldest digital natives are probably in their thirties, they are thought of as being young. They are defined only as “students” within formal learning institutions without looking at the radical potential of learning outside organized education, embedded in their everyday practices. The digital natives remain an object of research and the peer-to-peer structures that are supposed to shape them, but do not feature in the methodologies of researching them. This notwithstanding, the essays still offer a historical and social perspective on the debates around digital natives in certain developed pockets of the world.

In the first section, “Reflecting on the Myth,” Thomas’ essay “Technology, Education and the Discourse of the Digital Native” introduces a tension between the techno-euphorists and the “digital luddites,” which replays itself through the rest of the contributions. While Thomas places himself between “technoevangelism” and “technoskepticism,” Prensky, who coined the term “Digital Natives” in 2001, then introduces to us a new binary of “digitally wise” and “digitally dumb” (p. 4). Prensky reviews the responses that his opposition of “digital natives” and “digital immigrants” have produced over the last decade and emphasizes that his coinage was at the level of a metaphor, and was not to be taken seriously. Prensky agrees that the earlier opposition might be discarded because it evokes too many simple responses based on skills with technology. Digital wisdom, for Prensky, is in the ways in which digital technologies enhance the human brain “to anticipate second- and third-order effects to which the unaided mind may be blind” as the world becomes too complex for the “unenhanced human brain” to cope with it (p. 23). Typically, Prensky’s argument creates a dichotomy of those who can (and will) and those who will be outside of this web of digital enhancements. His analysis tries to complicate the idea of human wisdom by looking at questions of ethics and agency, but the final formulations appear cliche´d, merely re-creating the older tensions rather than thinking through them. Jones’ following essay on the “Net Generation” is more persuasive, where he argues for dismissing the idea that “nature of certain technologies . . . has affected the outlook of an entire age cohort in advanced economies” and instead should unpack how “new technologies emerging with this generation have particular characteristics that afford certain types of social engagement” (p.42).

In the second section, titled “Perspectives,” the essays take up two different tones.The first is about looking at digital literacy, skill, and fluency in everyday practices of digital natives, and how they shape our contemporary and future sociopolitical and cultural landscapes. Banaji, in exploring the EU Civic Web Project, echoes Jones’ ideas. The presumptions within education about an entire generation as “born with technologies” has consequences in the field of civic action, where programs for citizen action are designed with expectations that the young people will have core digital competencies and literacy. She does not push that argument further, but in her study of the two Scottish e-initiatives, one can see the promise of a radical reconstruction of civic engagement movements, where the young participants are not going to be satisfied as mere participators, and will demand a space for their voice to be heard.

Takahashi’s essay on the oyaubibunka (“thumb culture”) mobile generations in Japan stands alone in its analysis of an Asian context—though many might argue that Japan, with its developed economy, can hardly be counted as a typically “Asian” perspective. Takahashi is rooted, both in practice and discourse, in youth and technology in Japan, where the youth often experience close-knit community experiences through mobile interfaces, in their otherwise alienated modern habitats. Almost as a response to Turkle’s Alone Together (2011), Takahashi shows how collaborative and cocreation cultures ranging from the mobile novels on Mixi to everyday interaction on Social Networking Systems is bringing in new kinds of social spaces of belonging. The essay, however, resists simply celebrating this space and works in complex ideas of freedom, control, risks, and the tensions between traditionalization and modernity in Japan.

Zimic and Dalin, writing from a similar heavily connected Nordic region, pose a different set of questions in their essay, “Actual and Perceived Online Participation Among Young People in Sweden.” For Zimic and Dalin, in a space where connectivity can be taken for granted, the further question to ask is not whether digital natives participate online or not, but whether they participate in ways that are expected of “a digital citizen in the information age” (p. 137). Through empirical data and case studies, the essay shows the different kinds of activities that youth engage with and also concludes that though engaging in civic issues is important to the young people’s sense of belonging to participatory cultures, using the Internet does not provide an “automatic guarantee” toward participation, and “assistance is required in order to engage them in relevant activities” (p. 148).

The second set of essays in this section all cluster around the digital native as a student. Locating the digital native within educational institutions, they look at the ways in which the ideas of learning, pedagogy and engagement with the text are changing with the rise of digital technologies. Levy and Michael look at two case studies involving students in Australian high schools, to “facilitate a deeper understanding of products and processes in multimodal text construction,” which they think is core to interactive communication technology literacy skills (p. 85). The data is rigorous and rich, but the conclusions are a bit of a disappointment: digital natives need to better manage their time and resources and they need to learn traditional skills in order to cope with their educational environment.

The trend of an exciting hypothesis and conclusion, which do not necessarily leave you with anything more than what you already knew, continues in this section. Erstad sets out on a journey to see how digital literacy posits challenges to educating the digital generation and ends by suggesting that the digital divide should address questions of “how to navigate in the information jungle on the Internet, to create, to communicate, and so forth” (p. 114). Similarly, Kennedy and Judd want to unravel the mystery of why “students, who are so clearly familiar and apparently adept with Internet tools, are at times so poor at using the Internet academically” (p. 119). Through empirical research and interaction with students, they end up making an argument against the Googlization of everything (Vaidhyanathan, 2011), suggesting that “satisficing strategies” of information search, defined by a need for instant gratification and not looking beyond the first information sets, has produced “a generation of students that has grown up with Google [who] may over-value expediency when locating and selecting appropriate scholarly information” (p. 132). On similar trends, Levy proposes to question the assumption of whether all “young children are inherently ‘native’ users of digital technology” for implications on our future pedagogy within the new textual landscape (p. 152). The case studies and the frameworks built are interesting, but they reveal nothing more than the claim that the essay begins with by Marsh et al. (2005) and Bearne et al. (2007) that “young children are immersed in ‘digital practices’ from an early age and that they often develop skills in handling screen texts even when they are not exposed directly to computers at their own homes” (Levy, 2011, p. 163). The implication is clear: change our schools to accommodate for these new textual practices and help children capitalize on their digital competence and develop “digital wisdom.” But it is a recommendation that has been around for at least a decade, if not more.

The third and concluding section of the book, “Beyond Digital Natives,” is possibly the most promising part of the book. Bennett and Maton seek to look beyond “nuanced versions of the idea” and move the debate on to firmer grounds of how the rise of the digital natives is going to affect the policies around educational technology” (p. 169). They engage with a body of work that is specifically oriented toward building empirical evidence-based frameworks for understanding the potential role of technology in education. With a fine conceptual tool that makes distinctions between access and usage, they systemically dismiss the “academic moral panic” that characterizes conversations around youth-technology-change.

For Bennett and Maton, the object of inquiry is not the digital native but the body of discourse that surrounds this particular entity—and they make a plea for research rather than imaginings, showing how the influential work in the area has been plagued by unsupported claims, unevidenced observations, and futuristic imaginations, which paint a poetic picture of digital natives but offer very little in terms of furthering the argument. It is also noteworthy that they do not flinch from critiquing the colleagues who also feature in the same book, as an idealizing and homogenizing group that has shown “diversity rather than conformity” (p. 181).

Palfrey and Gasser, whose Born Digital (2008) has been the guide for lay readers to understand the nuances and complexities of the area, in their essay, begin by acknowledging that “digital natives” is an awkward term. However, they argue, it is still a term that resonates deeply with parents and educators, and that this resonance should not be taken lightly by researchers. Their decision was to use this term, albeit with caution and discretion, strategically to refer to a small subset of young people and the gamut of relationships and engagements they have with digital technologies. The suggestion is to use the term and in every usage, look at the unevennesses and awkwardness it creates, thus actually unpacking an otherwise opaque relationship which is reduced to “usage” or “access.” Their concerns are more about the quality of information and access, infrastructure for critical literacy and digital fluency, and making legible these everyday practices to larger implications for a future that they posit is bright and hopeful.

Deconstructing Digital Natives is an interesting revisit of a term that has grown in different ways through the first decade of the new millennium. However, the book still remains located in the same geopolitics in which the early discourse of digital natives were grounded—developed, privileged locations where connectivity, affordability, and ubiquitous digital literacy are taken for granted—reminiscent of the frantic cries one hears in piracy markets in Bangkok, “same, same, but different.” The revisiting does not seem to feel the need to explore other contexts. A few essays talk about factoring in local and contextual information in understanding digital natives, but the scholarship reinforces the idea of how technologies shape and are shaped by identities in some parts of the world, and that these identities can be heralded as universally viable, with a little nuancing.

The questions that have emerged in this discourse in the recent years, remain ignored. What does a digital native look like in the Global South? Can we have new concepts and frameworks which emerge from these contexts? Is it possible to produce accounts in languages and ideas that are embedded in everyday practices rather than forcing them to become legible in existing vocabularies? One would hope that the next book that deconstructs digital natives would also deconstruct the prejudices, presumptions, and methodological processes that are embedded in this field.

References

Bearne, E., Clark, C., Johnson, A., Manford, P., Motteram, M., & Wolsencroft, H. (2007). Reading on screen. Leicester: UKLA.
Marsh, J., Brookes, G., Hughes, J., Ritchie, L, Roberts, S., & Wright, K. (2005). Digital beginnings: Young children’s use of popular culture, media and new technologies. Sheffield: Literacy Research Centre, University of Sheffield.
Palfrey, J., & Gasser, U. (2008). Born digital. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other, NY. New York: Basic Books.
Vaidhyanthan, S. (2011). The Googlization of everything: (And why we should worry). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Nishant Shah is the Director-Research at the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society. He is the principal researcher for a Global South inquiry into digital natives and sociopolitical change, and recently edited four-volume book, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, which is available as a free download at http://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook. Correspondence to: Nishant Shah, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. E-mail: nishant@cis-india.org

Download the file (originally published by Taylor & Francis) here [PDF, 66 Kb]

Read the original published by Taylor & Francis here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/young-people-technology-new-literacies

Internet Censorship: Anonymous Can’t be Just Harmful Hackers

nishant — 2012-08-06T06:56:50Z

If there was ever an interesting time for people concerned with freedom of speech and expression to live in, it is now, and it is definitely in India. It has been a series of battles the last couple of years, where a slightly out-dated government machinery has been trying to control and contain the burgeoning online spaces, only to be put in their place by the new-age tech-ninjas that have risen as the new heroes in our digital times.

Nishant Shah's column was published in the First Post on July 13, 2012

We might not have had our Wikileaks moment in India yet, but the recent consolidation of resources by civic hacker groups and a public outrage against top-down blocking of everyday webspaces have steadily and surely put the questions of censorship and freedom on our minds.

The protests have taken many forms – from civic action routes of campaigns and petitions by civil society and non-governmental organisations to guerrilla warfare in the shape of distributed denial of service attacks and hacking of government websites.

Anonymous must be more than just a hacker group: AP	A lot of these efforts have found popular interest and media attention, but they haven’t always found a solid ground for negotiation and dialogue with the policy makers and legislators designing this information regime. However, after the first off-line mobilisation of protests by Anonymous in India, the government has had to face the fact that the clicktivist users are not going to remain passive, merely venting their discontent on their blogs and social networking spaces. With the sustained and systemic attacks on government, public and corporate websites, revealing sensitive information and taking down web resources the new hackers have shown that they mean business. In a recent attack, Anonymous hacked the Tamil Nadu police’s websites and revealed information about the complaints people have made and the actions taken on them.

Anonymous must be more than just a hacker group: AP

A lot of these efforts have found popular interest and media attention, but they haven’t always found a solid ground for negotiation and dialogue with the policy makers and legislators designing this information regime. However, after the first off-line mobilisation of protests by Anonymous in India, the government has had to face the fact that the clicktivist users are not going to remain passive, merely venting their discontent on their blogs and social networking spaces.

With the sustained and systemic attacks on government, public and corporate websites, revealing sensitive information and taking down web resources the new hackers have shown that they mean business. In a recent attack, Anonymous hacked the Tamil Nadu police’s websites and revealed information about the complaints people have made and the actions taken on them.

They leaked the document under their Twitter handle ‘opindia_revenge’ to show the police inaction. The documents have redacted some information but it has also revealed personally identified data about the people involved, without taking into consideration that it might affect the people involved in the cases adversely. Acts like these have the cybercrime bureau now tracking down the attackers and taking the help of Internet Service Providers and other intermediaries to punish those responsible.

What the outcomes of this battle are going to be, will eventually change the ways in which our digital publics shape up. Given the lack of resistance that ISPs have shown in the past, when pressed for private information on suspicious users, the chances are that we might soon have a public spectacles of hacker-criminals. Looking at the past bungles in this arena, one also hopes that it will not be yet another instance of mixed up administration leading to wrong and misplaced prosecution.

But more than anything else, one hopes that the attackers, who have seen their protests as a part of their civic action and right to protest and demonstrate, have been wise enough to protect themselves because they are going to be tracked and tried as criminals if they are caught.

Much can be said about the nature of civic hacking, and much has already been said, heralding them as code warriors and berating them as a public nuisance. But in all that cacophony, we might need to separate the ideology (constitutional rights, free speech and expression) from the tactics (DDoS, hacking, parking on websites) and see what interests they eventually serve.

Because even as my heart sings with these sounds of protests, there is a growing alarm that these seemingly radical guerrilla warfare might actually be more counter-productive than helpful to the cause of building an open and inclusive internet.

Over the last years, many civil society and citizen collectives have realised that policies and regulation are more a dialogue than open warfare. Polarising ourselves on an axis of ‘good versus bad’, at the end of the day, only leads to more regulation and draconian measures because it makes the state feel under threat. Considerable energy has gone into building a culture of public policy consultations and dialogue that allows for different stakeholders to work towards a collective future of the internet.

And so we come back to the question of whose interest gets served in the spate of these attacks? This is the same question that haunts us when we hear about our favourite political parties taking to destroying public property and blocking public infrastructure. It is the question that resurfaces when you realise that you might agree with the politics but the tactics are actually harming what you think is important.

In the case of the Anonymous attacks, it unfortunately seems more bravado and aspiration to radical heroism than a sustained and strategic set of interventions. With this particular act they seemed to have not only hurt the people on whose behalf they are fighting, but also given the government more reasons and plausible excuses to exercise more regulation and control over the digital technologies.

The attacks are a bold move to put the questions of censorship into public discourse, and force the state to acknowledge the problems with its governance. But it would be great to see if we can build on these energies and momentum and lead to a more sustained engagement with the political questions at stake, so at to construct a larger movement to protect our rights to free speech and expression that is beyond the world of ad-hoc hacking and random acts of protest.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/internet-censorship

Spy in the Web

nishant — 2012-03-26T06:38:51Z

The government’s proposed pre-censorship rules undermine the intelligence of an online user and endanger democracy.

Kapil Sibal’s recent remarks demanding that private social media companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook remove "objectionable" content from their social networks has created a lot of furore. It should not come as a surprise to us that just like any other platform of publication and content creation, several rules and regulations already regulate online content while still respecting our constitutional right for freedom of speech and expression in India.

From terms of services of the different web 2.0 products that seek to moderate "offensive" or "harmful" material to strictly defined punishable offences as defined in the Information Technologies Act, framed by the Government of India, there are various ways by which material that might incite violence, hatred or pain is systemically removed from the digital space.

Largely, this happens silently. Unless you are particularly keen on certain spurious websites, you wouldn’t even realise that there is a list of blacklisted websites that remain inaccessible to us in India. Once in a while, we realise the regulatory nature of state censorship when certain actions come to light. In 2006, the Indian government blocked Blogspot, the popular blogging platform, because they had detected "anti-national" activities by certain groups using the blog.

More recently, India’s first home-grown erotic comic series Savita Bhabhi was banned and taken off its Indian servers, without realising that in the era of cloud-computing, the comic still remains available through different containers and spaces. In both these cases, while one might be able to provide a critique of the Indian government’s attempts at censoring and regulating information, there is reasonable sympathy to the idea that some control on information is possibly a good thing.

It is in the very nature of information to be filtered. I am sure everybody will agree that censoring, controlling and regulating information of certain kinds — involving child pornography, calls for violence and vandalism aimed at insulting and offending vulnerable sections of the society — is probably in the interest of a healthier information society. And hence, one nods one’s head, rather grudgingly at some of the censorship laws (print, TV, internet, et al) and accepts that we need them, at least in principle, if not in execution.

However, what Sibal is asking for is not in the same vein. Censorship laws have always been very cautious of what constitutes "offensive" content and have relied both on the larger opinions of the community as well as the informed expertise of legal bodies to censor information. More often than not, an act of censorship is implemented when certain sections of the society, in their interaction with certain information, find it offensive or insulting and ask for a block. Pre-emptive censorship, the kinds performed by the Central Board of Film Certification, is in service of existing legal infrastructure around production and distribution of information.

Protective guidelines for censoring information, as was recently seen in the Broadcast Editors’ Association’s mandate around not intruding into the privacy of the Bachchan baby and the mother, during the birth of the child, are demonstrably for the protection of a person’s private life.

Sibal’s new calls for censorship against material “that would offend any human being” is separate from all these instances in three ways. First, while Sibal is an important political figure in this country, he is not the lord of information production. Using the power of his office to call for taking down of content that he found offensive (fortunately it did not incite him to violence and moral decrepitude) is undemocratic and possibly extra-legal (as in not within the boundaries of law, but who will bell the cat?).

To ask private companies and use his influence to bully them into curtailing the constitutionally provided freedom of speech and expression is in bad taste. There is enough regulation that could be invoked to seek arbitration between Sibal’s opinion and somebody else’s about how Sonia Gandhi should be represented online.

Second, Sibal might pretend that he is only asking for censorship of online content the way in which we have for other media, but that is a fallacy. What he is advocating is an ethos of pre-censorship, where, even before the material becomes public, it is screened through human agents who, through some divine right would know the right from wrong — read as what the powers to be want and don’t. To override existing regulation and ask for this extra layer of human scrutiny of all information being produced online is the equivalent of certain unnamed people in Mumbai, who, when Mani Ratnam was about to release his film Bombay, asked for a private screening of the film and then recommended some friendly cuts in it.

Third, is perhaps, and I write this with regret, Sibal has undermined the critical intelligence and engagement of the social media’s ardent users. He has fallen into the trap of suggesting that impressionable minds will be easily corrupted if they are introduced to "undesirable" information online, the same information that will apparently not drive human pre-screeners to prurient activities because they will be protected by the mantle of government sanction. Instead of drawing upon the wisdom of crowds, which invites communities and people to flag information that they find offensive and asks for independent arbitration, he has asked for an undemocratic and unconstitutional call for censorship which threatens the very structures of political protest, resistance and dialogue in the country.

If such draconian measures are going to be carried through, we might soon regress to a dystopia where all information is censored, filtered and reshaped only to suit the interests of those in power.

Nishant Shah, Director-Research wrote this article for the Indian Express. It was published on December 18, 2011. The original can be read here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/spy-in-web

Of Surrogate Futures and Scattered Temporalities

nishant — 2011-12-30T10:15:12Z

There can be no refuting Michael Edwards’ claim that the world we live in is not only thick with problems, but that the problems that we are collectively trying to address are ‘thick...complex, politicized and unpredictable...complicated and contested’.

This is what he calls the ‘magic bullet’ approach to accounting for the work we do in a language and framework shaped by neo-liberal and corporate productivity in the age of late-capitalism. It is also difficult to disagree with the fact that the solutions we work with, are often too thin, fetishising enumeration of impact more than actual systemic change in areas of intervention.

His call for significantly transforming ‘existing systems of knowledge, politics and economics’ reminds me of another moment of crisis that Michel Foucault was addressing when he called for a systemic change in conditions of ‘Life, Labour and Language’ as a means of restructuring the human condition. I find Foucault’s formulation as a direct complement to Edwards’ triangulation because in his design of the futures, there is an inspiring prominence given to affect, affection, belonging, cohesion, and happiness – things which are often lost in the world of ‘quantiphilia’ that accompanies the ‘quick-fix cost efficient’ alternatives that are gaining centrality in contemporary development discourse..

I find myself nodding vigorously at Edwards’ fine critique of technocratic social innovation that is being offered as the panacea that shall cure all our problems from authoritarian regimes (as in the case of the Arab Spring) to poverty and mortality (as being supported in Asian and African countries to counter unemployment and AIDS).

In the knowledge collaboration on Digital Natives with a Cause? with Hivos, we have increasingly found that it is necessary to think of technology, not as a tool of mediation and arbitration (or of mobilisation and organisation) but as a condition of living. The extraordinary focus on granting access and facilitating inclusion in the digital world often misses out on the need to build social, cultural, political, intellectual, financial and emotional infrastructure that allows for a new kind of collaboratively formed action to come into being.

Instead, following the battle cries of an almost redundant ICT for Development (ICT4D) warrior, governments, NGOs and civil societies are obsessively building physical infrastructure without taking into consideration the quality of access, life, safety, responsibility and change that these technologies bring in. A concentration on these technologies as benign tools (much as a hammer is, till it comes and hits you on the head) obfuscates the complicated, or to use Edwards’ term ‘thick’ reality of technology ecology (politics, power and culture) and instead produces ‘thin’ solutions which are generally one-size, and fit nobody.

These thin solutions also, often depend on heroic individuals rather than Everyday Digital Natives who can actually produce change from the bottom-up, in ways that might be outside the scale, scope and understanding of traditional NGO work.

And yet, I have some reservations in the futures that Edwards conjures for those of us who work with, at, within and through INGOs towards a collective vision of global human development. I shall try and work through them, deeply appreciative of the provocations that Edwards sets forward in this thought-piece and recognising this as building upon his ideas - more a dialogue than an irresolute conflict. And to map my arguments, I am going to fall upon 2 metaphors that I have been thinking through in the last few months.

Surrogacy: Quickly defined as a process where One takes the place of Another, I offer Surrogacy as a way of problematizing Edwards’ rather persuasive metaphor of ‘bridging’. While the essay insightfully looks at the problem of INGOs as a product of their times, and their need to radically restructure their form and practice, the idea of bridging does not offer enough departure from the very points of origin that are being critiqued.

The imagination of an INGO of the future as mediating, arbitrating, managing, making interventions still strongly adheres to the idea that the INGO is essentially a surrogate structure that stands in for the State, the Community, the Society, the Individual, in the furtherance of its goal.

This surrogate structure has been at the centre of most rights based and development design in the last half-century and has led to many problems that fail to address questions of sustainability and longevity. If, we were to rethink the role of the INGO in the future, they cannot be merely about acknowledging different local movements and political happenstance.

We need to look at what happens when the surrogate structure of peerage, patronage and protection is dismantled to initiate change.

One possible solution is to look at the INGO – like I was arguing with technologies – not as actors or agents of change. The ambition might be to imagine the INGO as producing conditions within which change happens, thus looking at a wider investment within different sectors and actors of change, which goes beyond merely capacity building or short term thin solutions.

Temporality: The commonsensical understanding of the contemporary is something that belongs to its own time. We use the idea of the contemporary to refer to simultaneity of events. Martin Heidegger, in his brilliant treatise on ‘Being and Time’ suggests that the Contemporary does not refer to 2 things happening at the same time but actually refers to 2 things that do not belong to the same time, happening together.

It is a powerful way of proposing a Heterotemporality or diverse times within which different geo-political contexts and socio-cultural movements exist. There seems to be a unified future that we are talking about when we look at the notion of our collective futures. However, it might be more fruitful to realise that there are various futures which might actualise at different times and that there has to be a way of accounting for this temporal diversity, which does not yet reflect in our plans for the future.

The Heterotemporality demands different languages, concepts, pasts and practices to come together to form specific and flexible futures for the people we work with. If the century of development work has taught us something, it is the fact that imagining false futures for people who live in different temporalities often create great conditions of precarity, danger and violence for them.

Maybe it is time to first ask the question, “whose future are we addressing, when we talk about a future of the INGOs?” and start a new set of conversations about selective histories, visible presents and imagined futures that inform our discourse and practice in contemporary times.

Photo credit main picture: A connection between past and future, by Gioia De Antoniis

Read the original published in The Broker here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/surrogate-futures-scattered-temporalities

Digitally Analogue

nishant — 2015-04-24T12:00:09Z

Why there is nothing strictly analogue anymore, examines Nishant Shah in this column that he wrote for the Indian Express.

It is a given, that in the fight between the digital and the analogue, you have a certain perspective or an opinion. If you are a bibliophile and crave for the smell of second-hand books and the feel of freshly uncut pages, you probably object to e-readers and tablets which give you a book-like experience that is not quite the same. If you enjoy photography, you still value old film rolls, techniques of complex editing, and the sepia-coloured flatness that the film has to offer. If you are a cinegoer, you cherish a secret fondness for those days when the camera attempted to capture a realism which was stark and more believable than reality. You might miss receiving and writing letters, might get annoyed by the lightning fast expectations of communication, and are horror struck at the idea of buying clothes online, foregoing the pleasures of window shopping.

For each argument that is made in favour of the analogue, there will be an equally strong and strident voice that elucidates the joys and possibilities that the digital has to offer. The techno-savant will point out that the easy availability of digital technologies has democratised the realms of cultural production, granting more access and diversity to expressions from different cultures. It should be mentioned that the huge possibilities of manipulating, reproducing and transferring digital data, without any loss to the original has resulted in new forms of intricate and subversive cultural production. The speed of access and communication has mobilised resources and people in unprecedented ways, to make changes in their environments, empowering the citizen as an agent of change rather than a beneficiary of change.

In all these debates, there will be valid and contradictory arguments that will coexist, each extolling the virtues of their analogue or digital positions. While there is no correct position to take in this debate, there is something else that I want to draw our attention to. In both these debates, which seem to be about technologies, there is a presumed focus only on consumption of technology products. Or, in other words, in this over-emphasis about whether the final product should be consumed using digital or other technologies, there is a complete and total neglect of technologies of production that shape these cultural objects. This betrays two things for us to ponder over.

The first is about our relationship with the technologies that we use. As technologies, especially digital technologies become ubiquitous, easily affordable and available to us on mobile interfaces, and emphasises ease of access, there also seems to be an alienation of the user from conditions and modes of production. We seem to position ourselves only as consumers of tech products — often reducing our interaction with these technologies as spectators, or audiences or users. This is ironical because, it seems to perpetuate the schism between the digital and the analogue, while actually hiding the fact that most of our so-called analogue products have undergone dramatic change in their modes of production, which are facilitated and shaped almost entirely by digital technologies. You might enjoy the tactical experience of picking up a print book, but it might be good to realise that the entire book was put together by using digital interfaces. And while the book might seem to be a non-digital object, even the way it reaches the last mile — through e-commerce websites like Flipkart, or even your local stores, where it gets stored, sorted, and indexed — is also through a digital environment.

The second thing that this faux debate exposes to us is the futuristic dream of convergence. Convergence as a concept has been bandied around for about a decade now, where all our existing modes of living, facilitated by different technologies, are to be translated into the digital, thus seamlessly available through a single device which can perform everything. Convergence is the Holy Grail that marks our aspirations of the future. And debates of the analogue versus the technological sustain that illusion that it hasn’t really been achieved yet. However, as you look around you, you quickly realise that the analogue networks that we fantasise about very rarely exist. The analogue-digital divide is often reduced to the physical-virtual dichotomy and this is a false one. Analogue referred to certain kinds of technological practices where the human agent, by using the technological network could perform certain functions. So the older telephone networks, for instance, were electronic but analogue. However, our telecommunication went digital way before the phone became smart.

While those of us who were not born digital natives — we still remember what an audio cassette looks like and the smell of screen printing — will negotiate with the form of our access to cultural objects, it is also time to realise that being non-digital is no longer an option. And that what we think of as analogue, is often only a form, because the mode of production, design and distribution has gone digital when we were not looking. So it is good that you are reading this in print, as a part of a newspaper, but this column (like all other items in this publication) was conceived, written, delivered and printed entirely using digital interfaces. These are objects which now need to be thought of as digitally analogue.

Read the original published by the Indian Express on May 27, 2012

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

IT and the cITy

nishant — 2009-09-18T10:45:27Z

Nishant Shah tells ten stories of relationship between Internet Technologies and the City, drawing from his experiences of seven months in Shanghai. In this introduction to the city, he charts out first experiences of the physical spaces of Shanghai and how they reflect the IT ambitions and imaginations of the city. He takes us through the dizzying spaces of Shanghai to see how the architecture and the buildings of the city do not only house the ICT infrastructure but also embody it in their unfolding. In drawing the seductive nature of embodied technology in the physical experience of Shanghai, he also points out why certain questions about the rise of internet technologies and the reconfiguration of the Shanghai-Pudong area have never been asked. In this first post, he explains his methdologies that inform the framework which will produce the ten stories of technology and Shanghai, and how this new IT City, delivers its promise of invisibility.

Shanghai. City of bits, bytes and Baozi. China’s home-grown success story that eclipses the colonial legends of HongKong. The city that was, until the Bejing Olympics, the showcase city which is now working hard at recovering some of its stolen glory as it prepares for the World Trade Expo in 2010. A city that is constantly at war with itself, trying to museumise its past, eradicate pockets of history and times, and running to escape its present and live in a futuristic tomorrow. A city that broke the distinctions of the public and the private, by privatising all that was public, and by encouraging the private to be constructed for a public spectacle. There are many stories of Shanghai to be told, but the one that needs to be told now, is about the space of the city and how, in its attempt to become an IT city, it has become a city of surfaces, all reminding you, in an overwhelming hypervisual way that is the predominant aesthetic of cyberspaces, that it is the city that not only houses technology but also embodies it, becoming, possibly, the only city in Asia that brings the IT back into the City.

A cursory glance around you, perhaps travelling in the uber efficient metro system that feeds into the mobile metaphor of accelerated speed and space that Shanghai has become, or just walking down the more touristy XinTianDi where the rich and the famous of Shanghai’s society hang out, or walking down the HuaiHai Road where sky-scrapers fortress the sky and shopping malls greet you with neon-lit spaces of consumption, you are overwhelmed at the significant and ubiquitous presence of internet technologies. The buildings are designed to be interfaces, rather than walls, covered constantly with the graffiti of digital advertisements, live weather and stock updates, displaying the latest block-buster movie, or just presenting a kaleidoscopic array of lights spiralling in a dizzying, schizophrenic style on the surfaces of the buildings. As you walk through the sci-fi inspired urban landscape, you try and suppress the feeling of being inside a giant-size arcade game, waiting for a gobbling monster to come and devour you, and continue browsing at the city that never remains the same – either the surfaces mutate so that not even signboards or billboards remain the same, or the very buildings disappear into rubble under the shadows of gigantic cranes, as a concentrated demand for real estate necessitates a constant recycling of limited space (The estimate says that 60 per cent of Shanghai gets rebuilt every ten years), or high speed transport dissolves the city into a blur so that only the biggest and the brightest buildings stay as north-stars to the fluid geography of the city.

If you happen to stand on the magnificent Bund in PuXi (The older Shanghai), you keep on looking down at the ground beneath your feet, making sure that it is still there, because the slightly lurid but dazzling sky-line that faces you, with huge LCD screens mounted on buildings, lights flirting with low lying clouds on the top of gigantic buildings, and a constant buzz of electricity breaking the waves in the Huangpu river, you know that you are in a city that gives IT its address. No other city in Asia – not even the almost-not-Asia spaces of Tokyo or Singapore – gives you the assurance of being completely and totally immersed in the glory of Internet technologies. Shanghai stands, networked, connected, mobile, accelerated, and in a time-less vacuum that hoovers the future into the present, as a city that technology studies will have to reckon with in a paradigm of its own.

And so strong is this seduction of technology that conversations about technology and its place in Shanghai, always revolves around the surface – about the building of the surface, about the dissolution of depth (temporal or spatial), and about imagining the city only in terms of light, connectivity, and speed. So that the historicity in PuXi becomes a flat display of the Chinese Way (Zhongguo Fangshi) and the work-in-progress present in PuDong remains a quest for the future. In this split discourse, the questions and concerns - about governance, about citizenship, about regulation, about cultural production and political negotiation - become invisible. Like the buildings, which get guised in digital cloaks, the questions that pressingly need to be asked but are always postponed, also get cloaked in the rhetoric of development propelled by ICTs and globalisation. In a city that was constructed to eternally deflect attention, ownership or voices, how does one begin to scratch at the surfaces (Literally and figuratively) to search for something more than narratives of consumption, solipsist self-gratification, and self-congratulatory development?

It is with this agenda, in this city, torn and marked and seamlessly stitched by technology, that I start to unravel my questions about Internet and Society in China, trying to look at relationships between technologies, city spaces and identities, drawing from seven months spent at the Centre for Contemporary Studies at the Shanghai University. These stories, written with retrospective memory and embellished by the privilege of hindsight, posit a set of questions about Internet technologies, construction of city spaces, and manifestation of identities in China, but especially in Shanghai, to locate potentials of social transformation, political participation, engagement and discourse, which has not been transplanted on technology studies in China. In the process it also lays down a framework to understand how, in an oppressive or authoritarian regime, the cultural becomes the grounds upon which foundations of new political intervention and social change can be built.

This blog, in its ten different entries, relies on academic and popular discourse, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, field work, conversations, and personal experiences that I collected in my stay there, trying to deal with the double translations of culture and language. Whenever I have been unsure – and those moments have been many – I have tried to discuss and debate ideas with colleagues, friends, peers and participants, to ensure that the observations or arguments are qualified by more than just a neo-colonial meaning making sensibilities. Despite that rigour, if faults remain, they are all mine, and hopefully will serve as points of entry into a fruitful discourse.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/itcity

China's Generation Y : Youth and Technology in Shanghai

nishant — 2009-09-21T14:09:16Z

Within the context of internet technologies in China, Nishant Shah, drawing from his seven month research in Shanghai, looks at the first embodiment of these technologies in the urbanising city. In this post, he gives a brief overview of the public and academic discourse around youth-technology usage of China's Generation Y digital natives. He draws the techno-narratives of euphoria and despair to show how technology studies has reduced technology to tools and usage and hence even the proponents of internet technologies, often do a disservice to the technology itself. He poses questions about the politics, mechanics and aesthetics of technology and offers the premise upon which structures of reading resistance can be built. The post ends with a preview of the three stories that are to appear next in the series, to see how youth engagement and cultural production can be read as having the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the Digital Natives in China.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/GenerationY

Breaks and Ruptures: In the midst of IT

nishant — 2009-12-19T10:12:47Z

In this first story, Nishant looks at the ways in which internet technologies shape multiple imaginations. In the narration of the story, the contextualisation and the responses that the story-tellers make apparent, he located the internet in the midst of contestation, as it restructures social boundaries, traditions and communities. The story of an 'internet wedding' that stands as an iconic landmark for different generations, looking upon the Internet as a radical catalyst for change, lays out the first foundations for the framework of transformation and invisibility this project has embarked upon.

Breaks and Ruptures: IT and its discontents

In Shanghai, conversations of technology, eventually become conversations about younger users of technology who are looked upon the legitimate users of these technologised spaces, and more conversant with the quickly changing trends and fashions on the internet. As the country invests heavily into ICT development, promotes the making of Shanghai as the global hub of ICT industries and economies, and encourages younger users to extensively use digital technologies in their life, the digital generation gap has never been more visible than in the crowded, buzzing, video-game-like streets of Shanghai.

These Xiao Huangli (Little emperors), who have already been heralded as brats because of China’s one-child policy and the growing up in the liberalised China, are an object of great anxiety and concern for an older generation who doesn’t seem to understand them. Sometimes called The Strawberry Generation (CaoMei Zu), this population of young adults is looked at with derision or wonder – Wonder because of their soft and pink strawberry like appearances which reflect their new ethos and lifestyle expectations, and derision because they are ‘soft’, indulging only in acts of self-gratification which seem pointless, selfish, or sometimes foolish. Stories trickle out from old retired army men who sit in the few public parks playing Mahjong, or the women in the gardens, dancing with their fans and practicing Tai-Chi to keep their spirits in balance, or from the middle-aged men and women who grew up in the time of the revolution, who talk about how their children/grand-children/nieces-and-nephews all seem to occupy a world that is alien, disrupting the harmony of the established Chinese life.

In the Special Economy Zones in Shanghai – What is popularly called the Free Trading Zone – scores of immigrants who have shifted to the new city from rural parts of China, recreate, with nostalgia, the past where children were trained to be responsible and connected to their environments. In these economy zones, where the designer brands have exploded on every street and consumption is the only re-creation, hard working parents who dote on their only child, shake their heads in despair about the way the new generations lead their lives – “they work, they spend and when they run out of money, they borrow from their parents to sustain a life devoted entirely to enjoyment” said one of my subjects – mother to a seventeen year old teenage daughter, who works along with her school and earns enough pocket money to indulge her desires. “There is no saving. There is no worry about the future. And there is no care for the family” her friend, another mother to a twenty year old boy agrees.

In our conversations, they tell me a story which I must narrate to you. For the Chinese families, I have been told, the biggest occasion of celebration is a wedding. Conducted with great gusto, it involves a lot of people, noise, drinking, laughing, dancing, fireworks and grand lavish parties. Especially in Shanghai, weddings are incredibly rich and occasions for the involved families to show their affluence, status, wealth and success to the rest of the communities. Like in India, people in China rarely have marriages – what they have are big elaborate weddings which are almost vertiginous in their opulence. But with technology, and the changing times, especially with the yintewang (one of the many words Mandarin has for Internet), there are young people who are doing strange things.

The story is a few years old, but in the minds of both these women, it is illustrative of how times have changed and the Chinese family, caught in these Hard Times, is on the rocks. The story is quite brief – a young man and a young woman, were wangyou (Internet friends) and had met on a site devoted to a particular automotive brand. Their friendship quickly blossomed into love and they decided to get married. However, instead of having a wedding which their families participated in, they put out an open invitation to strangers on the internet to come and attend the wedding – the caveat? That only those who owned the particular brand of car over which the happy couple fell in love were invited. And thus a Car-Wedding came into being. About a month after the announcement, when the bride and the groom proceeded to the venue of the party, they were at the head of a procession of 97 cars, each one exactly like the other. The parking lot was eventually filled with owners of the cars who had come, bearing gifts and smiles, to attend the wedding of strangers who they never met, but knew because they had the same interest in cars.

For the two women narrating the story to me, this was obviously a symptom of breaking families, traditions and social structures with the introduction of the internet in their lives. Interestingly, not long after I had heard the story from them, I also stumbled across it in my conversations with a younger set of people, largely in high school, and ranging from ages 15 – 19. For them, the story was a fascinating account of how this is a symptom of a break from families, communities, traditions and social structures. It was interesting to me, how they said almost the same things but their tone was more of celebration and joy, optimism and hope rather than the despair and shock that had been expressed by the two women. This dichotomous approach to the internet in Shanghai, for me, becomes symptomatic of the tensions, the imaginations and the problematic that the emergence of Internet technologies and their potentials for subverting the erstwhile dominant is producing.

I am going to leave this first story here for the time being. Let us think of this as the foundation of the larger framework that I want to build for you. However, we will come back to that once I have told the other two stories about youth, technology, and the changing shape of Shanghai.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/wedding