Centre for Internet and Society

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (Nov 03, 6:30 pm)

sumandro — 2019-03-13T00:30:39Z

We are delighted to have William F. Stafford, PhD candidate in UC Berkeley, present on "Public Measurements, Private Measurements, and the Convergence of Units" at the CIS office in Delhi on Thursday, Nov 03, at 6:30 pm. Please RSVP if you are joining us: .

CISxScholars are informal events organised by CIS for presentation, discussion, and exchange of academic research and policy analysis.

Public Measurements, Private Measurements and the Convergence of Units

In this discussion I will focus on a comparison between the standard government prescribed meters for autorickshaws and taxis and the role of ridesharing apps as instruments which take measurements, as the basis for the calculation of fares, and the more general questions which arise for commerce, technology and their regulation. I will organise the paper around the observations of a paratransit operations engineer on the distinction between public and private instruments, and explore the possible implications of new forms of commercialisation of location and proximity and reactions to such developments for understanding questions of fairness and corruption.

William F. Stafford

William F. Stafford, Jr., is a PhD candidate in the Department of Anthropology, UC Berkeley. William's research focuses on the auto-rickshaw meter in New Delhi, as a way to engage with classical questions concerning the relationship between measurement, quantification and delimitations of domains of labour. William's general interests concern the analytics of labour and the reconfiguration of what are often taken as its axiomatic aspects. Before joining Berkeley, he studied Sociology at Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Delhi School of Economics.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisxscholars-delhi-william-f-stafford-thursday-nov-03

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selection of Sessions

sumandro — 2016-12-12T13:37:23Z

We have a wonderful range of session proposals for the second Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC17) to take place in Bengaluru on March 03-05, 2017. From the 23 submitted session proposals, we will now select 10 to be part of the final Conference agenda. The selection will be done through votes casted by the teams that have proposed the sessions. This will take place in December 2016. Before that, we invite the session teams and other contributors to share their comments and suggestions on the submitted sessions. Please share your comments by December 14, either on session pages directly, or via email (sent to raw at cis-india dot org).

The Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) will be organised by the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in partnership with the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy at the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B).

Proposed Sessions

01. #NotFewNotWeird (Surfatial: Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, and Satya Gummuluri)

02. #VirtualFringe (Ritika Pant, Sagorika Singha, and Vibhushan Subba)

03. #StudentIndicUsageOnline (Shruti Nagpal and Sneha Verghese)

04. #SpeakMyLanguageInternet (Anubhuti Yadav, Sunetra Sen Narayan, Shalini Narayanan, Anand Pradhan, and Shashwati Goswami)

05. #ArchivesForStorytelling (V Jayant, Venkat Srinivasan, Chaluvaraju, Bhanu Prakash, and Dinesh)

06. #SelfiesFromTheField (Kavitha Narayanan, Oindrila Matilal and Onkar Hoysala)

07. #OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing (Nirmala Menon, Abhishek Shrivastava and Dibyaduti Roy)

08. #DigitalPedagogies (Nidhi Kalra, Ashutosh Potdar, and Ravikant Kisana)

09. #DigitalMusicAndDigitalReactions (Shivangi Narayan and Sarvpriya Raj)

10. #RenarrationWeb (Dinesh, Venkatesh Choppella, Srinath Srinivasa, and Deepak Prince)

11. IndicLanguagesAndInternetCoHabitation (Sreedhar Kallahalla, Ranjeet Kumar, Mohan Rao, and Anjali K. Mohan)

12. #DigitalPedagogy (Padmini Ray Murray and Dibyaduti Roy)

13. #CopyLeftRightLeft (Ravishankar Ayyakkannu and Srikanth Lakshmanan)

14. #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance (Marine Al Dahdah, Rajiv K. Mishra, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sohan Prasad Sha)

15. #MaterializingWriting (Sneha Puthiya Purayil, Padmini Ray Murray, Dibyadyuti Roy, and Indrani Roy)

16. #DotBharatAdoption (V. Sridhar and Amit Prakash)

17. #DigitalDesires (Dhiren Borisa, Akhil Kang, and Dhrubo Jyoti)

18. #TheDigitalCommonplace (Ammel Sharon and Sujeet George)

19. #DigitalIdentities (Janaki Srinivasan, Savita Bailur, Emrys Schoemaker, Jonathan Donner, and Sarita Seshagiri)

20. #ToolsToAMultitextUniverse (Spandana Bhowmik and Sunanda Bose)

21. #DigitalisingKnowledge (Sneha Ragavan)

22. #ICTDEthics (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

23. #RepresentationAndPower (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selection

CIS-A2K

sumandro — 2015-12-15T07:42:37Z

The key mandate of the Access to Knowledge project at CIS (CIS-A2K) is to work towards catalysing the growth of the open knowledge movement in south Asia and in Indic languages. From September 2012, CIS has been actively involved in growing the open knowledge movement in India through a grant received from the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF). The current focus of the CIS-A2K team spans over 5 language areas (Kannada, Konkani, Marathi, Odia, and Telugu), 2 community strengthening initiatives, and 6 stand-alone Wikimedia projects.

Mission

The mission of CIS-A2K is to catalyze the growth of open knowledge movement in South Asia and in Indic languages. Within the Wikimedia universe CIS-A2K specifically strives to further grow the Indic and English Wikimedia projects and communities by:

supporting and serving the Indian Wikimedia communities in all possible ways;
building institutional partnerships;
bringing more content under free license;
designing and executing projects with community participation;
strengthening the Wikimedia volunteers; and
fostering and enabling an appropriate legal and technological ecosystem.

Work Plans

Work plans and other programme documents can be accessed here:

Activities and Feedback

If you have a general proposal/suggestion for Access to Knowledge team you can write on the requests page. If you have appreciations or feedback on our work, please share it on feedback page.

Odia Wikipedia Projects

sumandro — 2015-12-15T08:48:19Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/odia-wikipedia

Kannada Wikipedia Projects

sumandro — 2015-12-15T08:52:30Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/kannada-wikipedia

Konkani Wikipedia Projects

sumandro — 2015-12-15T08:53:29Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/konkani-wikipedia

Telugu Wikipedia Projects

sumandro — 2015-12-15T09:03:11Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/a2k/telugu-wikipedia

Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015

sumandro — 2015-11-23T06:03:06Z

Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/globalcongress2015.png

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #AFCinema2.0

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:12:03Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.

Session

Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness of obsession. (Bey, 1985)

Confronted with consolidating rhizomatic concerns that inevitably crop their heads in any forum on internet discussions, let alone cinema, AF, or Amour fou encapsulates the very essence of free access cinema – AF is “not the result of freedom but rather its precondition” (Bey, 1985), AF is Cinema in web 2.0.

The proposed session will be an interactive conversation exploring the Indian scenario of internet based independent filmmaking. The key concerns mediating this dialogue are the mobilization of the internet as a space of exhibition and distribution and its implications in moving through extra-legal spaces, garnering cultural capital and articulating desires of its audience. The purpose here is to engage with cinema within “the broader industrial, institutional, and market contexts in which film exists” moving away from film scholarship focusing solely on the “meaning of the text” while disregarding the very circumstances in which those texts or discourses are “produced and circulated” (McDonald, 2013: 147).

Drawing from traditional methods in cinema scholarship, we turn to our own research methods in trying to articulate contextual engagements with amorphous forms of medium, media and archive. We explore the research potentials that the internet provides as an immediate archive of the contemporary while providing provocations to engage with the internet as an alternative space for film exhibition, distribution and funding. While Ishani Dey explores the mobilization of internet’s potential as an alternative space for film exhibition tracing connections that link pirate circuits, film festivals and subversive mainstream aesthetic shifts; Akriti Rastogi provides an overview of entrepreneurial space of internet based independent filmmaking and the surge in DIY filmmaking in web 2.0.

The session concludes with mediations over the poetics of technological access. The internet’s prolific open access archive’s potential to foster cinephilia and the mutations in viewing habits that ensue lead to novel cinematic experiences and their implication for the profilmic aesthetic. In continuum our encounters with the mainstream and anonymous figures etches out the narrative of experiencing cinema and filmmaking in web 2.0.

Plan

This session proposes to conceptualize the implications of open access digital media spaces for cinema in India. Reading cinema as a product of market driven industry factors it interrogates the shifting industrial, institutional, and market contexts which contemporary India cinema negotiates and the implications of contingent media, mode and exhibition on the cinematic experience. The primary concern is to form methods to navigate the expansive archive of the internet and mark the potentials for alternate production and distribution practices that lie within. The session proposes to walk through a number of case studies illustrating the dissolution of dichotomies that is brought about by the interventions of digital and new media technologies. Drawing parallels between earlier shifts in cinema studies discourses with the coming in of videotape and satellite television in India in the 80s and the contemporary debates surrounding digital film practices and direct to home transmissions, the session attempts to historicize cinephilia within the milieu of technophilia in India.

Provocations

Informal distribution networks like peer-to-peer distribution and pirate circles come to the foreground in the discussion on the construct of the cinephile. While the space of the auteur-entrepreneur claims the spotlight in discussions surrounding linkages in film exhibition – navigating through pirate circles to film festivals, bootlegging to the big league.

The figure of the anonymous filmmaker stands precariously on the divide of the legal and extra-legal boundary that the internet thrives in traversing, thus emerging as a vast platform for exhibition that is then mobilized by the DIY filmmaker. The growing popularity of the short film format and the shifts in viewing screens are seen as symptomatic of internet’s effect on cinema’s aesthetic.

The essential provocation here is that while cinema affects the modes of archiving on the internet, the internet in turn affects the cinematic form.

Readings

McDonald, P. (2013). "Introduction: In Focus Media Industries Studies." Cinema Journal, 52(3).

Lobato, R. (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution.

Zimmerman, R. D.H. (2009). "Cinephillia, Technophilia and Collaborative Remix Zones." Screen, 135-147.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ArchiveAnarchy (Archives, Accessibility, and Social Media)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:11:45Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.

Session

In the last decade, the internet has aided a proliferation of information networks - Google Books, archive.org, Hathi Trust, pad.ma and similar archive based knowledge platforms – and cloud based data storage has become a useful and accessible alternative to file based systems.

The session opens up with questions of accessibility, ownership and hegemonies in an active archive. It takes up three archives that are being built at Ambedkar Univeristy and other similar archives to explore the emerging issues of knowledge sharing on the internet.

The Lotika Vardarajan archive is an ethnographic archive putting together an academic’s research on indigenous Maritime and Textile traditions and their indepth documentation.
The Delhi Oralities Archive is an oral history archive of city memories and resident narratives that seeks to be accessible to the city as an open resource.
The Institutional Memory Archive is a living archive continuously reinventing itself according the needs of the university campus that it documents.

The archiving impulses in each case are different as are the dissemination needs of the archive. How do Internet tools like social media, audio and video distribution platforms like Soundcloud and YouTube intervene in the archiving space to enable and catalyze access? Do dissemination strategies provided by Twitter and Facebook affect the use and usability of archives? Does such access threaten questions of ownership and privacy? Who owns a public archive like Delhi Oralities? What hierarchies operate in living archives to decide what is archived and who archives it? What are the limits of such knowledge repositories and the open access movement itself, especially in the light of traditional knowledge structures?

Plan

The discussion session explores questions of archives outside the academic research space. It discusses the possibility of using non-traditional platforms for data sharing to maximize access, sustainability and co-authorship for living archives.

Readings

Basic knowledge about existing social media platforms, open source repository softwares such as DSpace and familiarity with Creative Commons licensing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptingRhetorics

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:09:30Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Marialaura Ghidini.

Session

In "The Braindead Megaphone" (2007) writer George Saunders discusses the power of 21st century voices of high-tech mass media; the voices with whom one converse mentally all the time and often unaware. Saunders uses the metaphor of "The Megaphone Guy at a party" to describe the effects that such voices have on other people's thoughts, even when they are just passive listeners of what is said. The Megaphone Guy "crowds other voices out" because of "the volume and omnipresence of his narrating voice", and his power does not reside in his intelligence or acuity, but in his "dominance". This guy's rhetoric — read also, the mass media’s rhetoric — becomes central because of its unavoidability", and the web, with its now easy-to-use tools and shiny platforms, along with the seeming global interconnectedness of the Internet have made his dominance more portable and accessible, less unavoidable.

Simultaneously, such easiness and interconnectedness have allowed the reversal to happen, that is the development of strategies aimed at obstructing or diverting the dominant rhetoric. Artistic practices from all over the world have shown us different modes of intervention that disrupt the hegemonic discourses facilitated by the adoption of 'global' platforms of communication, entertainment and commerce. From the duo ubermonger to artists Paolo Cirio and IOCOSE and the labs like F.A.T. Lab, artists have developed strategies to weaken the power and dominance of The Megaphone Guys; they have developed methods of research, analysis and action which effects go beyond the art circuit and being on the internet.

All that said, however, the question of accessibility remains pressing and open to discussion: the bandwidth of common internet access and the way in which the web is entangled with everyday life still differs according to geographical areas. And this factor has often been overlooked in the researches into artistic practices online and their potentials to generate discourses that offer an alternative to the dominant ones. This difference in infrastructure and cultural uses has determined a diversity in artistic interventions aimed at disrupting dominating narratives: India shows a different history and approaches that this session would like to bring to light with the help of the participants.

Both through looking within the art field and outside it, such as in the work of social and community enterprises like the collective BlankNoise, this session aims to look artistic practices as methods of research and intervention that can be used to understand the effects of the Internet and web tools on society and, in turn, to put forward new ways in which web technology can be critically used by many, and non-artists, in their everyday life.

Plan

Led by a curator/researcher, in collaboration with an artist and another curator/researcher, this discussion session will start with a general overview of artistic interventions, i.e. methods, aimed at disrupting the world's views created by mass media. This general overview will include examples of both national and international artists and community-based projects, from artists ubermonger, IOCOSE, Paolo Cirio and labs like F.A.T. Lab outside India, to the work of collectives such as Cybermohalla and BlankNoise, and artist like Archana Hande in India. It will be then followed by a discursive moment during which the participants will be divided in groups, according to specific key words collectively agreed upon, to discuss artists works and non-artistic activities pertaining the subject of the session. What will emerge from the group discussions will be presented to all participants in a short session, and will be followed by an attempt to create a mapping of current methods of intervening and acting online. Prior to the workshop participants will be given suggested readings and a series of questions that will help them for the breakout groups.

With this structure the session will not be based on one-way communication but it will allow to generate collective research into online behaviours—of platforms, corporations, people and communities of interest—through expanding on the views proposed by the proponents of #DisruptingRhetorics.

Readings

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption. Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking. DARC PRESS (Aarhus University), Denmark, 2013 (Excerpts)

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone. Riverhead Books, US, 2007

F.A.T. Lab, We Lost, http://fffff.at/rip/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-disruptingrhetorics

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #InternetMovements

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:04:11Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Becca Savory, Sarah McKeever, and Shaunak Sen.

Session

Since its early days the Internet has been conceived in terms of both movement and landscape - from “cyberspace” to the “Information Superhighway” - and in popular perception is often viewed as a boundless space imagined in terms of limitless possibilities. Indeed, across our research fields, from digital media to performance and social activism, we find that the Internet is frequently perceived as a space of mobilisation: where moving bodies are remediated within online content; where the movement of images, ideas and bodies can occur freely, with the rapid transmission of the “viral”; and where movement(s) frequently spill over into physical geographies.

Yet increasingly the Internet is also a space of fractured and fragmented movement(s): of blockages and blockades, discontinuities and disappearances. Landscapes become territorialized and movement(s) confined or obstructed. On this basis, we propose an interdisciplinary discussion session around the theme of "#InternetMovement(s)". We ask how we can conceive of movement(s) in relation to the Internet in India, in terms of both mobility and immobility, fissure and flow.

To encourage fluidity, we propose to structure the session around three "nodes" rather than three separate research papers. Our nodes are as follows:

How can we conceive of movement(s) in relation to Internet research in India?
What are the forms that movement(s) take in our respective fields?
What "stop" or blocks" movement in these cases?

The three co-conveners will each prepare a 5-minute response to each of these nodes, based on our specific areas of research. At each nodal point we will then allow time for wider discussion, enabling inter-disciplinary discussion and flow to underpin the session.

We perceive the session to speak to the first of the conference’s core questions: “How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?”

Each of the three co-convenors is approaching this question in their own research, asking how online media and communications mediate, remediate and transform the fields of film-media, social activism, and performance. We also ask the corollary: what are the limits and impediments to those transformations or mediations? The following section outlines the co-convenors’ approaches in more detail.

Plan

Statement of Intent I

The internet increasingly impresses traces on nearly all media technologies everyday. The once stable film body, gets disaggregated into various new forms of loop videos, GIFS, photo-memes, as clips and stills from disparate films get extracted, re-edited, patched and re-moulded into new user-generated media material. Solitary moments and gestures from films (a menacing wink by Jack Nicholson from The Shining, a clap from Charles Kane, a tear from the Tin-Man in The Wizard of Oz) get completely unchained from the original narrative context and used as discrete independent communicative units (Kane’s a popular Birthday wish gesture, while Nicholson’s Is a common linguistic unit signifying playful flirtation.) One of the primary ontological pegs of cinema - movement, today becomes the center of urgent debate around the status of photographs, movement-image forms like GIFs, and traditional moving images as the basic configuring elements of contemporary cinema. Using the film-GIF form as its primary vector this paper opens up the category of ‘movement’ philosophically as well as a constituent form to understand cinema today within the context of India.

As the cinematic object disperses into thousands of fragments hurtling through innumerable new online contexts, questions related to stardom also get radically transformed. I will be investigating a particular site of cinematic re-instansiation - the recent Alok Nath meme phenomenon. Long relegated to the margins of films as the venerable Hindu middle class father, the ‘’Alok Nath is so sanskaari..’’ set off a viral maelstrom that suddenly recast his cinematic body and the memory of a whole host of films (the Suraj Barjatya Hindu joint-family films). The paper focus on questions around movement as a philosophical arena as well as radical new form re-inscribing the cinematic in hitherto unprecedented shapes today.

Statement of Intent II

An examination of social movements with digital components in India begs several questions: What forms do social movements take in the digital world? How do we conceptualise social movements using digital and physical evidence? How does the context of India – as a functioning democracy - allow or restrict digital and physical social movements and define what is an “acceptable” protest movement? Engaging with these questions demands an interdisciplinary perspective, and exploring the interplays between the physical and the digital in regard to social issue protest movements.

Movement in my particular research area is understood in two aspects: the physical mobilisation of individuals to protest against perceived grievances and the movement of information around specific issue areas. The physical movement of bodies in public places is intimately connected to flow of information throughout digital networks, generating entangled and complex interfaces between the digital and the physical and creating new imagined possibilities of the efficacy of social protest (Castells 2012; Gerbaudo 2012). Examining recent social movements in New Delhi allows us to explore the linkages and disjuncture between the physical and digital, using theoretical developments in social movement theory to anchor the study (Earl, Hunt, and Garrett 2014; Krinsky and Crossley 2014).

Examining the repercussions and strategies of physical/digital mobilisation can lead to a confrontation between the “imagined” possibilities of digital mobilisation and the realities of technological and physical blockages. These blockages can exist at the level of the network – both in digital and physical limitations – but also at the level of digital informational flow and who is allowed to view data? Confronting the “imagined” capabilities with the reality of entrenched power networks contests the notion of the digital as a free superhighway of information into a series of blocks and stoppages, restricting what is possible and feasible. By exploring question of movement(s) in New Delhi, I will explore the disjuncture between the imagined possibilities and the restriction of information – by nature of the algorithms that govern our capabilities and our own social networks – and complicate the triumphal narrative of the affordances of digital mediums on protest movements.

References

Castells, M. (2012) Networks of Outrage and Networks of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press

Earl, J., Hunt, J., and Kelly Garrett, R. (2014) ‘Social Movements and the ICT Revolution’ in van der Heijden (Ed.) Handbook of Political Citizenship and Social Movements, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Pgs. 359-383

Gerbaudo, P. (2012) Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism, London: Pluto Press

Krinsky, J. and Crossley, N. (2014) ‘Social Movements and Social Networks: An Introduction’, Journal of Social, Cultural and Political Protest, Vol. 13, No. 1. Pgs. 1-21

Statement of Intent III

My research centres on the recent history of flash mob performance in India and analyses the transformations that have taken place within the genre: firstly, as an initially American, then “global,” performance form becomes re-situated and adapted within an Indian context; and secondly, as the form has evolved over time in relation to the transitioning of the Internet from a predominantly text-based medium to a predominantly image- and video-based one (see Strangelove 2010).

In the field of flash mob performance, we see moving bodies becoming re-mediated as moving images, and mobilised into the flow of global circuits of online reception. My underlying concern when approaching this research is: who is mobile in these contexts? Who becomes visible through movement, and by extension, who may disappear in these same moments?

I intend to approach this session by examining what is enacted through the movements of flash mob performance, focusing on the more recent phase of the genre in which flash mobs become mobilised through online video-sharing practices. I argue that they perform mediated representations of “New India” for an online national and international audience, valorising the new “non-places” (Augé 1992) of Indian supermodernity, through the acts of a mobilised “digerati” (Keniston 2004). If we consider that performance can play a role in the construction of cultural memory (Roach 1996; Taylor 2003), and that the Internet as an archive can become a repository of performances and thus memories(Gehl 2009), I ask if online performance in these contexts may be seen as an aspect of the processes that structure a “politics of forgetting” (Fernandes 2006) in globalising India. Which narratives are rendered visible and which invisible through these performances? Who appears and who disappears? Movement on the Internet thus becomes a political question concerned with comparative mobilities, visibilities, and participation in the narratives of “India” that are constructed for global circulation.

References

Augé, M., 1992. Non-places : introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity. Translated by J. Howe. 1995. London & New York: Verso.

Fernandes, L., 2006. The politics of forgetting: class politics, state power and the restructuring of urban space in India. In Y. Lee and B.S.A. Yeoh eds., Globalisation and the Politics of Forgetting, London; New York: Routledge.

Gehl, R., 2009. YouTube as archive: Who will curate this digital Wunderkammer? International Journal of Cultural Studies, 12(1), pp.43-60.

Keniston, K., 2004. Introduction: The four digital divides. In K. Keniston & D. Kumar eds., IT experience in India: bridging the digital divide, New Delhi; Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.

Roach, J.R., 1996. Cities of the Dead: Circum-atlantic performance. Chichester and New York: Columbia University Press.

Strangelove, M., 2010. Watching YouTube: Extraordinary videos by ordinary people. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Taylor, D., 2003. The archive and the repertoire: Performing cultural memory in the Americas. USA: Duke University Press.

Readings

Noys, B. (2004) Gestural Cinema?: Giorgio Agamben on Film. In Film Philosophy Vol. 8 no. 22. Available at: http://www.film-philosophy.com/vol8-2004/n22noys.

Couldry, N. (2015) ‘The Myth of ‘Us’: Digital Networks, Political Change and the Production of Collectivity’, Information Communication and Society, Vol. 18, No. 6. Pgs. 608-626 .

Appadurai, A., (2010) How histories make geographies: circulation and context in a global perspective. Transcultural Studies, 1. Availabile at: http://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/transcultural/article/view/6129.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-internetmovements

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalDesires

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:03:52Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Silpa Mukherjee, Ankita Deb, and Rahul Kumar.

Session

We propose to design the panel as a workshop with three paper presentations followed by an open discussion with the house exploring the key question of media objects‟ (in the form of film/film music/memes/gifs/trolls) changing relations with law; copyright and piracy having attained newer connotations in the age of media convergence. While we deal with the materiality of cinema in the new media moment, the session will open out debates on the mutability of media objects in a networked digital terrain ushered in by fast growing and cost-effective internet culture in urban India.

In terms of methodology the panel deploys media archaeology to trace the mutations that film culture has undergone in the digital age. The coexistence of the obsolete media copyright with its meme and its digitally re-mastered copy on torrent informs the research that the three papers involve. A certain engagement with the logic of informed/fan-cinephilic digital labour that unwittingly maintains and updates the algorithmic database of Web 2.0 services will run through the presentations. Along with archival research and interviews with professionals involved with online media companies and “users” who are now the "pirate/prosumer-cinephiles" of media objects, we will carry out extensive digital ethnography to map the chimera of digital territory that user traffic based internet culture in India helped produce.

The digital is a space of intervention: a space for the users to intervene and play with the material online. It is a constant form of participation underscoring a potential for democratic authorship. The definitive notion of authorship voices the overarching body of the state through its legal status. Thus copyright as a legal entity produces a discourse of power through this form of authorship. The contemporary medium or rather the multi-media constellation driven by internet culture in India produces an alternative discourse on authorship, complicating the notion of copyright and piracy at the same time. This charged terrain of (il)legality is also due to the nature of piracy in the digital domain, which does not exist in isolation but have now created bodies or spheres where it has been appropriated as a sub-cultural practice. The figure of the “pirate”/ the “troll”/ the “fan” and the “cinephile” now merges with the technologically enabled body of the user of new media who negotiates with the medium in multiple ways (and morphs it) and thereby touches all kinds of spaces within and outside the webspace. It has changed the physical scope of cinephilia as addressed in the paper "A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar," where the culture of networked sharing evolves from and further complicates physical stations. It has permeated into the body of film music in the paper "Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item numbers and the web", which interrogates the layers of user-based morphs that the text of a dance number in Bollywood undergoes in the culture of web based remixing and hacking. It changes the way protected materials like films circulate in the space designated as YouTube, marked by its ability to reproduce copyright materials without violating the law as the third paper titled "Online Streaming in the Era of Digital Cinephilia" points out; the logic of the obsolete license of old Hindi films which gains a new viral life on YouTube with its official upload vying with the multiple hacker-user uploads.

Thus the panel intends to explore the dizzying overlaps that produce this internet induced distinct zone of ambiguity that neither the law nor the state or the author can claim ownership over. The very embodiment of the material in the digital is in transition i.e. in a state of being morphedby the blurring of the identities of the multiple bodies at work at each moment. Through the three papers we intend to chart this transitional aesthetic sometimes contained and sometimes flowing out of the body of the media text onto the physical, technological and extra textual objects as well. The panel seeks to position this new world of media objects that overlap and form an uncontainable entity, seeking newer forms of negotiations with the older existing order. We seek to explore then what happens to the very essence of author(ity)ship when digital enters its domain.

Plan

A Laptop and a Pen-drive: Cinephiles of Mukherjee Nagar

With the changes technology has brought to contemporary life, cinephiles – for whom movies are a way of life, films and how they are experienced have undergone major changes. The classic cinephile, as the term was adopted in the 1960s has undergone a major change in the era of internet piracy. I will look at the way pirated films via torrent downloads are consumed by students in certain pockets in New Delhi especially around Mukherjee Nagar area. These students who come from the upwardly mobile Indian middle class families are engaged inpreparations of competitive exams to land a lucrative government job. Circumstances dictate that these students own a laptop to watch films but not a high speed internet connection. To fuel their cinephilic urge, they are dependent upon soft copy vendors of pirated films. These vendors are like a video library, the repository here being a laptop and a storage drive. These professional film pirates depend upon the p2p file sharing commonly referred as "torrent." DVD and Blu Rays released by official sources are ripped at a bigger size by certain uploaderswhich are downloaded by another one who rips it to an even smaller size, fit enough to be downloaded by pirates with a slower broadband till it reaches places like Mukherjee Nagar. Using this particular case study, where the world of online film piracy merges with a third world piracy domain, I plan to interrogate the logistics of a new kind of cinephilia and try and frame this particular form of informal circuit of media production and consumption into a coherent perspective.

Relevant websites: https://kat.cr, https://yts.la/, https://torrentfreak.com.

Relevant software: Handbrake, uTorrent / Deluge / Vuze.

Relevant reading: Treske, Andreas. The Inner Life of Video Spheres: Theory for the YouTube Generation. Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2013

Licensed, Remixed and Pirated: Item Numbers and the Web

The coming of new digital technologies has rendered the relationship of media objects’ with law extremely malleable and volatile. It urges us to rethink certain categories we have been working with, viz. piracy and copyright. The specific focus of the paper will be on item numbers’ relationship with changing technology and the law. The proprioceptive body being the central node of enquiry here: the law that affects the body that moves on screen and the body that is moved by the screen is made flexible in the digital age with Web 2.0’s unique design that spawns hackability and remixability. Through the registers of music licensing to YouTube, circulation of content offline as MP3 downloads in cheap mass storage devices, user generated morphed content related to item numbers (in the form of memes, GIFs, trolls, posters, tumblr blogs and listicles) spawned by amateur digital culture and remixing videos of film content the paper traces the gray zone between web based music piracy and its copyright rules. It will interrogate the moment when the entertainment industry has recognized the clear shift of its spectatorship from the older media to the more digital platforms and appropriates the contingency brought in by the algorithmic anxiety of Web 2.0 and its unique relationship with law and hence censorship regulations to innovate newer means of mass circulation and bypassing censorship.

Relevant content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2O2dBonBok.

Relevant user-traffic-oriented platforms: http://www.memegenerator.com, http://www.trolldekho.com, http://www.imgur.com, https://www.tumblr.com/.

Relevant curated online media platforms: ScoopWhoop, Buzzfeed India, blog.erosnow.com.

Online Streaming in the era of Digital Cinephilia

Digital piracy has allowed for certain democratization of film distribution and consumption through a parallel economy of piracy. The lack of control over these channels of distribution produces a blatant threat to the copyright and intellectual property rights that are quintessential to the mainstream culture of commercial film distribution. This paper will focus on the intersection of these two dichotomous cultures through the experience of watching old films via online streaming. The resurfacing of old films hosted by big corporations like Shemaroo, Venus and Ultra who began as film rights and video rights owners at one point host their old video content in a user generated space called youtube. The video content is a very specific form here. It is an obsolete entity, defined by its ambiguity with copyright that is able to make a legal transgression in order to circulate.

The circulation of the feature films in a web space that is primarily known for its clip culture also provides an interesting paradigm for the copyright material. The big corporate copyright floats in a culture of pirated experiences where the legal domain becomes a dizzying site of contradictions. Through this paper I will draw parallels between the history of these companies and their work in the field of film circulation and to the creation of a new form of cinephilia and its complicated relationship to the law. I will use a variety of archival sources, legal documents and discourses on online streaming to contextualize my argument.

Relevant websites: https://www.youtube.com/user/ShemarooEnt, https://www.youtube.com/user/VenusMovies, https://www.youtube.com/user/UltraMovieParlour

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaldesires

Launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1

sumandro — 2015-11-26T04:32:41Z

Please join us on Friday, November 27, 2015 at 6.30 pm for the book launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1.

Born from a collaboration with or-bits.com and the Researchers at Work (RAW) programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Silicon Plateau is the first volume of a publishing series aimed at observing how the arts, technology and society intersect in the city of Bangalore. Guided by our belief in the importance of understanding technologies in their specificity rather than their universality, Silicon Plateau presents observations emerging from the personal experiences and perspectives of a variety of contemporary artists, writers and researchers, national and international, who either live in or have spent a period of time in the city, or have just crossed paths with its communities.

Silicon Plateau Vol–1 features works by Abhishek Hazra, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Achal Prabhala, Sunita Prasad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Renuka Rajiv, Anja Gollor & Mirko Merkel, and Christoph Schäfer.

VENUE: T.A.J. Residency, No. 21 (New No. 53), 2nd Cross, Wheeler Road Extension, Cooke Town, Bangalore, 560084.

PLEASE NOTE: Coming from Pottery road up to Wheeler Road Extension there are three roads called 2nd Cross. Take the third one on the right-hand side, just after D'Costa Café. The road is also marked with a blue sign for CCBI. Also note that our building does not have parking.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/launch-of-silicon-plateau-vol-1

Silicon Plateau Vol. 1 - Cover

sumandro — 2015-11-26T04:21:49Z

Silicon Plateau Vol. 1 - Cover

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/SiliconPlateauVolume1_Cover.png

Centre for Internet and Society

CISxScholars Delhi - William F. Stafford (Nov 03, 6:30 pm)

Public Measurements, Private Measurements and the Convergence of Units

William F. Stafford

Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) - Selection of Sessions

Proposed Sessions

01. #NotFewNotWeird (Surfatial: Malavika Rajnarayan, Prayas Abhinav, and Satya Gummuluri)

02. #VirtualFringe (Ritika Pant, Sagorika Singha, and Vibhushan Subba)

03. #StudentIndicUsageOnline (Shruti Nagpal and Sneha Verghese)

04. #SpeakMyLanguageInternet (Anubhuti Yadav, Sunetra Sen Narayan, Shalini Narayanan, Anand Pradhan, and Shashwati Goswami)

05. #ArchivesForStorytelling (V Jayant, Venkat Srinivasan, Chaluvaraju, Bhanu Prakash, and Dinesh)

06. #SelfiesFromTheField (Kavitha Narayanan, Oindrila Matilal and Onkar Hoysala)

07. #OpenAccessScholarlyPublishing (Nirmala Menon, Abhishek Shrivastava and Dibyaduti Roy)

08. #DigitalPedagogies (Nidhi Kalra, Ashutosh Potdar, and Ravikant Kisana)

09. #DigitalMusicAndDigitalReactions (Shivangi Narayan and Sarvpriya Raj)

10. #RenarrationWeb (Dinesh, Venkatesh Choppella, Srinath Srinivasa, and Deepak Prince)

11. IndicLanguagesAndInternetCoHabitation (Sreedhar Kallahalla, Ranjeet Kumar, Mohan Rao, and Anjali K. Mohan)

12. #DigitalPedagogy (Padmini Ray Murray and Dibyaduti Roy)

13. #CopyLeftRightLeft (Ravishankar Ayyakkannu and Srikanth Lakshmanan)

14. #ObjectsofDigitalGovernance (Marine Al Dahdah, Rajiv K. Mishra, Khetrimayum Monish Singh, and Sohan Prasad Sha)

15. #MaterializingWriting (Sneha Puthiya Purayil, Padmini Ray Murray, Dibyadyuti Roy, and Indrani Roy)

16. #DotBharatAdoption (V. Sridhar and Amit Prakash)

17. #DigitalDesires (Dhiren Borisa, Akhil Kang, and Dhrubo Jyoti)

18. #TheDigitalCommonplace (Ammel Sharon and Sujeet George)

19. #DigitalIdentities (Janaki Srinivasan, Savita Bailur, Emrys Schoemaker, Jonathan Donner, and Sarita Seshagiri)

20. #ToolsToAMultitextUniverse (Spandana Bhowmik and Sunanda Bose)

21. #DigitalisingKnowledge (Sneha Ragavan)

22. #ICTDEthics (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

23. #RepresentationAndPower (Bidisha Chaudhuri, Andy Dearden, Linus Kendall, Dorothea Kleine, and Janaki Srinivasan)

CIS-A2K

Mission

Work Plans

Activities and Feedback

Recent Posts

Odia Wikipedia Projects

Kannada Wikipedia Projects

Konkani Wikipedia Projects

Telugu Wikipedia Projects

Global Congress on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest 2015

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #AFCinema2.0

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ArchiveAnarchy (Archives, Accessibility, and Social Media)

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptingRhetorics

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #InternetMovements

Session

Plan

Readings

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitalDesires

Session

Plan

Readings

Launch of Silicon Plateau Vol-1

Silicon Plateau Vol–1 features works by Abhishek Hazra, IOCOSE, Tara Kelton, Anil Menon, Achal Prabhala, Sunita Prasad, Sreshta Rit Premnath, Renuka Rajiv, Anja Gollor & Mirko Merkel, and Christoph Schäfer.

VENUE: T.A.J. Residency, No. 21 (New No. 53), 2nd Cross, Wheeler Road Extension, Cooke Town, Bangalore, 560084.

PLEASE NOTE: Coming from Pottery road up to Wheeler Road Extension there are three roads called 2nd Cross. Take the third one on the right-hand side, just after D'Costa Café. The road is also marked with a blue sign for CCBI. Also note that our building does not have parking.

Silicon Plateau Vol. 1 - Cover