Centre for Internet and Society

Make a Wish

nishant — 2013-04-16T06:37:16Z

It is that time of the year again, where we ring in the new, ring out the old, and say goodbye to another year that has passed us by. The earnest will take the time to reflect on things gone by, the romantics will look forward with hope to the future and the realists will point out that we are now one decade into the 21st century, and the world is changing. However, if you are a true digital native, you are probably going to head over to a website that helps you figure out 43 things that you want to do, not just in the next year, but in your foreseeable future.

43things.com is a unique social networking site, where you make a to-do list of things that you want to do in life. The list is a zeitgeist of possibilities: from losing that extra weight that has always bothered you, to spending quality time with your family to getting that degree you have desired for long from the university of your choice, to finding bliss. The lists are varied, unique and challenging. In almost six years of its existence, this website has drawn more than 2 million users from 82 countries, who have created a list of more than 30,000 unique goals that people want to fulfil in their lives.

Why is making such a list important? And why would you want a website to do it? Probably because in our humdrum lives, where every minute is spent in thinking about the next, we often forget the dreams that are important. On an everyday basis, the most interesting or important things in our lives are always things that we shall do “tomorrow”.

43 Things injects life back into the passions and hopes that we have for our future. It helps people to take a step back from routine life, to reflect on what is important to them. It works on the old idea of birds of a feather flocking together, this time enabling it through the power of the Web. People find connections because other people want to do the same thing as them. People describe their experiences, their failures, obstacles and the strategies they deployed in order to reach goals they thought were unreachable. There are stories being told and lessons being learned. And if nothing else, you are bound to get “cheer” from a passing stranger because your goal made them smile. Often a unique goal becomes a source of inspiration for others who might shape their lives around it. Sure, some goals will lose their charm, some will be replaced, and some will never be achieved, but you will always have the space to know that you have a dream, and you shared it with somebody else.

My favourite story is of a 22-year-old friend who, ever since she was three years old, wanted to be a fairy. As she grew up, she realised that it is not something that you can share with everybody. She knew that she would be laughed at, if she ever made it public. Earlier this year, she stumbled across 43 Things and just on a whim, put down as one of her goals “I want to become a fairy”. To her surprise, she discovered other adults around the world who have the same goal. They don’t really want to become fairies, but it is a dream about how they see themselves, and they all got together to voice it on the website. They connected and started talking about what attracted them to fairies, and why there is more to fairies than magic wands and gossamer wings.

They realised that what attracts them to thinking about themselves as fairies are kindness, generosity and the happiness in helping each other. From this discussion, 19 people from 11 countries, who were involved in the conversation, decided to do 12 random acts of kindness through 2010. And as the year draws to an end, they tell the stories of how in their role as fairies, they brought joy and smiles to strangers because they went out of their way to do something special for them. As my friend tells me the story, her eyes sparkle, and there is a big grin on her face. “I know this sounds stupid, but I feel like a fairy,” she wrote in her notes, as she was going through her goals. And somewhere out there, 18 other people also put a small tick-mark against their goals and dreamt of fairy dust.

Read the original in the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/column-on-digital-natives

Uploads

nishant — 2009-11-12T07:35:46Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads

Histories of the Internet

nishant — 2010-06-17T07:45:03Z

For the first two years, the CIS-RAW Programme shall focus on producing diverse multidisciplinary histories of the internet in India.

Histories of internets in India

The CIS-RAW programme is designed around two-year thematics. Every two years, we shall, looking at our engagement and the questions that are emerging around us, come up with new themes that we would like to commission, enable and encourage research on.

The selection of the theme of the History of Internet and Society is a unanimous decision made by our researchers in-house, the members of the Society, distinguished fellows, supporters, and peers who all gathered for a launch workshop for the CIS. There is a severe dearth of material on the histories of Internet and Society in India and we find it necessary to contextualise and historicise the contemporary in order to fruitfully and critically engage with the questions and concerns we are committed to. In the first two years of its programme, the CIS-RAW hopes to come up with alternative histories of the Internet and Society, which chart a wide terrain of the field that we are engaging with and produce one of the first such resources for researchers working in this field.

Scope of the Theme:

We are looking at a wide range of accounts of the different forms, imaginations, materialities and interactions of the internets in India. As we excavate its three-decade growth in India, it becomes increasingly clear that there is no homogenised Internet that has evolved in the country; Instead, what we have is a technology, which, through its interactions and intersections with various objects, people, contexts and regulation, has emerged in many different ways. The theme of 'Histories of internets in India' hopes to address these pluralities of the internets and how they have been shaped in the unfolding of these technologies.

We have collaborated on the following histories with different researchers in India:

Rewiring Bodies - Asha Achuthan, Centre for Contemporary Studies, Indian Institute of Sciences, Bangalore.
Archive and Access - Rochelle Pinto (Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; Aparna Balachandran, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore; and Abhijit Bhattacharya, Centre for Sudies in Social Sciences, Calcutta.
Pleasure and Pornography - Namita Malhotra, Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore
Transparency and Politics - Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society
Rethinking the Last Mile Problem - Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore
Using the Net for Social Change - Anja Kovacs, (Research) Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore
Queer Histories of the Internet - Nitya Vasudevan, Centre for Study of Culture and Society and Nithin Manayath, Mount Carmel College

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/histories-of-the-internets

Re:wiring Bodies: Call for Review

nishant — 2015-04-03T10:50:15Z

The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.

Dr. Asha Achuthan's research project on "Rewiring Bodies" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. From her vantage position, straddling the disciplines of medicine an Cultural Studies, through a gendered perspective. Dr. Achutan historicises the attitudes, imaginations and policies that have shaped the Science-Technology debates in India, to particularly address the ways in which emergence of Internet Technologies have shaped notions of gender and body in India. Her work at the Centre for Contemporary Studies (IISC, Bangalore) gives a further context to unpack Internet Technologies in a larger context of Technology-Society interface. This original monograph draws from Gender studies, STS research, extand policies, empirical data, Cultural Studies and Feminist epistemological of Sciences, to build a new knowledge framework to address the Internet questions which popular cybercultures or mainstream media studies have ignored.

The monograph by Dr. Asha Achuthan, has emerged out of the "Rewiring Bodies" project which started nine months ago. The project has involved many public entries available at http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.

Word [word file, 339 kb]
PDF [PDF, 712 kb]

We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rewiring-bodies/rewiring-call-for-review

Inquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*

nishant — 2011-08-02T09:25:30Z

Research and activism on the Internet in India remain fledgling in spite the media hype, says Anja Kovacs in her blog post that charts online activism in India as it has emerged.

Since the late 1990s when protesters against the WTO in Seattle used a variety of new technologies to revolutionize their ways of protesting so as to further their old goals in the information age, much has been made of the possibilities that new technologies seem to offer social movements. The emergence of Web 2.0 seems to have only multiplied the possibilities of building on the Internet's democratising potentials, so widely heralded since the rise of the commercial Internet in the 1990s, and since then, the use of social media for social change has received widespread media attention worldwide. From Spain to Mexico, activists used the Internet as a central tool in their efforts to organise and mobilise – be it to express their stand against a war in Iraq, against a Costa Rican Free Trade Agreement with the United States, to mobilise support for the Zapatistas of Chiapas, or more recently, to push for a change of guard in Iran.

In 2009, when Nisha Susan launched the Pink Chaddi campaign, the 'ICT for Revolution' buzz finally seemed to have reached India as well. Phenomenally successful in terms of the attention it generated for the issue it sought to address, the campaign sought to protest in a humorous fashion against attacks on women pub-goers in Karnataka by Hindu right wing elements. In only a matter of weeks, Facebook associated with the campaign – 'The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women', which gathered tens of thousands of members. It was ultimately killed off when Susan's Facebook account was cracked by rivals. The campaign was perhaps the singular most successful account of ‘digital activism’ in India so far, and an impressive one by all measures.

The creativity of the campaign should not come as a surprise to those familiar with the long and rich history of activism for social change in India. Organised social actors have been critical influences in the emergence of new social identities as well as on critical policy junctures from colonial times onwards, developing a fascinating and unmistakably Indian language of protest in the process (see Kumar 1997 and Zubaan 2006 for examples from feminist movement).

As Raka Ray and Mary Faizod Katzenstein (2006) have pointed out, in the post-independence period, such organised activism for long was connected by at least verbal – if not actual – commitment to the common master frame of poverty alleviation and the ending of inequality and injustice, and this irrespective of the particular issues groups were working on. Since the late 1980s, however, a number of far-reaching changes have taken place in India. This period has been marked by the definite demise of secular democratic socialism as the dominant script of the Indian state and its simultaneous replacement by neo-liberalism. Moreover, in the same period, Hindu nationalism as an ideology too has gone from strength to strength, with only in the last five years a slowdown in its ascendancy. While for many traditional social movements of the Left the commitment to social justice remains, in this context a space has undeniably been created for groups with a very different agenda. The considerable popularity of organisations such as Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, both Hindu nationalist organisations, are prime indications of these transformations. However, the fragmentation of the activist space did not only benefit reactionary elements of society. The final emergence into visibility of a well-articulated middle class queer politics, for example, too, may well in many ways have been facilitated by the evolutions of the past 20 years. Although this point has been mostly elaborated in the context of the US (Hennessey 2000), in India, too, this seems to ring true at least in some senses.

The general shape-shifting of activism in India since the 1990s is not the only contextual factor that deserves obvious consideration in a study like this. In addition, since independence a close link has been forged in policy and people's imagination alike between science and technology on the one hand and development paradigms in India on the other. Not everyone agrees on the benefits of this association: all too frequently, the struggles of grassroots social movements are directed precisely against the outcomes or consequences of a supposedly 'scientifically' inspired development policy. The neo-liberal era is no exception to this: as Carol Upadhya (2004) has shown quite convincingly, the economic reform policies that are at the heart of neo-liberalism have been inspired first and foremost by the information technology sector in India, which has also in turn been their first beneficiary. And today as earlier, Asha Achuthan (2009) has pointed out, in the resistance to these policies, the subaltern who is the agent of grassroots social movements is frequently associated with a pre-technological purity that needs to be maintained in order to resist discourses and material consequences of technological change themselves. In popular discourses, at least, attitudes towards technology inevitably come in a binary mode.

Seeing the context in which digital activism in India has emerged, a number of pressing questions regarding the new forms that even progressive activism takes as it adopts new tools and methods, then, immediately offer themselves. Leaving aside the activities of right wing groups in India, who are the actors that occupy this space for activism and what are their relationship with offline activists groups? Which are the issues online activism seeks to address, and what are its master narratives, goals and audiences? Where does it locate problems in today's society, and what kind of solutions does it propose? How does it posit its relation to the global/international and to the offline-local; to dominant understandings of science and technology, development, or desirable social change? How are these understandings reflected in online activism, including in the choice and use of technologies but also in the discourses that are deployed and the audiences that are targeted? What are its methods, its strategies, its ways of organising? What role is played by organisations, collectives, networks, individuals? In what ways is the field marked by the conjuncture at which it emerged? Do those who first occupy (most of) it also set the parameters? Or do its tools fashion online activism's very conditions of existence?

The value of greater insight into these issues is not immediately apparent to all. For one thing, some would argue that, as connectivity in the emerging IT superpower remains limited, the importance of these questions to those concerned with social justice in India is really marginal. It is true that while commercial Internet services have been available in the country since 1995, for long the number of connections remained abysmally low. Even today, the number of subscriptions has only just crossed the 14 million mark, and barely half of these are broadband subscriptions, severely limiting the usefulness of a wide range of potential online activism tools (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India 2009 – figures are for the second quarter of 2009). According to I-Cube 2008 report (IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India 2008), there were an estimated 57 million claimed urban Internet users in the country in September 2008 and an estimated 42 million active urban Internet users. Corresponding figures for Internet users in rural areas in March 2008 were 5.5 million and 3.3 million respectively. Almost 88 million Indians were believed to be computer-literate at the time. Clearly, then, online activists are a tiny section of an already fairly small, privileged group, and at least in a direct sense, the availability of new tools is thus indeed unlikely to affect all activists or activism in the country.

Some of my own starting points while embarking on this study may seem to further give fuel to arguments against the value of this research. The idea of investigating online activism in India as it emerges followed from my observation – and a troubling one at that for me – that so far, and despite all the hype internationally, more traditional grassroots movements in India seem to have been slow to embrace the Internet as an integral part of their awareness raising and mobilisation strategies. Although they may attract the largest numbers of activists offline, the many so-called 'new' social movements that have emerged since the 1970s and that remain important actors pushing for social change seem most conspicuous by their relative absence online. This is especially true of those critical of current development paradigms and practices: movements fighting against dams, special economic zones or land acquisitions for “development” purposes seem visible only in relatively fragmented and generally marginal ways. Instead, middle-class actors addressing middle class audiences on middle class issues seem to be the flag bearers of Internet activism in India – the Pink Chaddi campaign or VoteReport India, a “collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring platform for the 2009 Indian general elections” (see votereport.in/blog/about) perhaps among the most well-known illustrations of this argument.

Both points are valid, and yet, while inquilab it may not be, to conclude from this that the study of online activism automatically is of only very limited value would be short-sighted. Indeed, even if the hypothesis that Internet activism is dominated by middle class actors who address middle class concerns is validated (note that in any case considerable segments of the leadership and cadre of grassroots movements, too, tend to come from middle class backgrounds), this is likely to affect all those interested in affecting social change, even if perhaps in varying degrees. For one thing, it would mean that as the public sphere is reshaped, important new quarters of its landscape are inhabited only be the elite, contradicting the still widely popular and even cherished belief (at least among those who are familiar with the Internet) that the Internet is a democratising force. Instead, the proportional visibility in the public sphere of dissenting viewpoints on development, science, neo-liberalism, progress, the state will only decrease. In addition, then, it may also indicate a further refracting of the activism landscape and its master narratives and methods, where different segments of activists increasingly need to vie with each other for recognition and validation of their respective understandings of political processes and of appropriate forms of engaging with these. As such battles intensify it is not too risky to make a prognosis on who will be the main losers. If, in an era in which the old activist master narrative of justice for all remains under strident attack, civil society has come to occupy at the expense of political society (a useful distinction first made by Parth Chatterjee in Chatterjee 2004) a whole arena of activism, this would indeed need to be a cause of concern for all. In order to gauge its ramifications, it is however, crucial to first of all understand in which ways and to what extent this statement rings true.

The current study may well not be able to fully develop all the above and other theoretical strands as they emerge in the course of this research. But what it does promise to do is to outline the breaks and continuities that mark the make-up, strategies, audiences and goals of those who embrace the new possibilities that the Internet provides at the same time as the information age so fundamentally reconstitutes our society. As a starting point for the analysis, this research will therefore, attempt to map the online activism that has taken place in India so far, focusing more specifically on the forms of activism that leave a public record on the Internet (a more extensive debate of various definitional issues is in order – I will take this up in a separate blog post, to follow later, however). At the core of the research will be the construction of a database pertaining to online activism in India with links to email lists, blogs, Facebook groups, popular hash tags and the like. Although much of the activism I will be looking at will be centred around what has come to be known as 'social media', my focus is thus broader than that, as older tools such as e-petitions, discussion boards and list servs, too, will be included in this study. The aim is to be as comprehensive as possible, although for the database to ever be complete will, of course, be an impossibility. Moreover, since only data available in the English language will be collected, the database will automatically have its limitations. The database will be further complemented by interviews with activists who have been involved in key online campaigns and, where appropriate, case studies. It is the data thus gathered that will form the basis of our analysis.

While the scope of the study is thus admittedly ambitious, the fact that online activism in India is a fairly recent affair – little happened before 2002, and it has only really taken off in the past three years or so – makes this venture not an impossible one. The contribution I hope to make through this research is not simply to work on the Indian context, however. Despite the media hype surrounding the possibilities of the Internet for social change, research on the Internet and activism more generally remains limited so far. The paucity is perhaps particularly acute where activism and social media are concerned (Postill 2009). Moreover, the work that does exist, I argue, tends to look mostly at activists' use of one particular tool, for example YouTube, or Facebook. Sight is thus generally lost of the larger cyberecology of communication in which this use must be located, preventing an opportunity for genuine insight into the ways in which activism is reconfigured from materialising. By using a much wider lens, this research hopes to make a beginning to correcting this lacuna. It is in this way that the importance of the changes that are underway in the Indian activist landscape as elsewhere can be appropriately assessed.

* Inquilab means revolution

References

Achuthan, Asha (2009). Re-Wiring Bodies. Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. http://www.cis-india.org/research/cis-raw/histories/rewiring/review, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Chatterjee, Partha (2004). The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World. Delhi: Permanent Black.

Hennessy, Rosemary (2000). Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities in Late Capitalism. London: Routledge.

IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India (2008). I-Cube 2008: Facilitating Citins, Altins, Fortins (Faster, Higher, Stronger) Internet in India. IMRB and Internet and Mobile Association of India, Mumbai. www.iamai.in/, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Kumar, Radha (1997). The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of Movements for Women's Rights and Feminism in India 1800-1990. New Delhi: Zubaan.

Postill, John (2009). Thoughts on Anthropology and Social Media Activism. Media/Anthropology, http://johnpostill.wordpress.com/2009/11/14/thoughts-on-anthropology-and-social-media-activism/, last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Ray, Raka and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (2006). Introduction: In the Beginning, There Was the Nehruvian State. In Raka Ray and Mary Fainsod Katzenstein (eds.). Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power, and Politics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (2009). The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators, April-June 2009. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, New Delhi. www.trai.gov.in , last accessed on 15 January 2010.

Upadhya, Carol (2004). A New Transnational Capitalist Class: Capital Flows, Business Networks and Entrepreneurs in the Indian Software Industry. Economic and Political Weekly, 39(48): 5141-5151.

Zubaan (2006). Poster Women: A Visual History of the Women's Movement in India. New Delhi: Zubaan.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/digiactivprop

Topic Images

nishant — 2010-07-29T05:43:58Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/topic_images

IT, The City and Public Space

nishant — 2011-08-02T06:07:02Z

In the Introduction to the project, Pratyush Shankar at CEPT, Ahmedabad, lays out the theoretical and practice based frameworks that inform contemporary space-technology discourses in the fields of Architecture and Urban Design. The proposal articulates the concerns, the anxieties and the lack of space-technology debates in the country despite the overwhelming ways in which emergence of internet technologies has resulted in material and imagined practices of people in urbanised India. The project draws variously from disciplines of architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to start a dialogue about the new kinds of public spaces that inform the making of the IT City in India. You can also access his comic strip visual introduction to the project at http://www.isvsjournal.org/pratyush/internet/Dashboard.html

Introducion:

There has been, in the fields of design and architecture, a close link between the shape and imagination of the city spaces and the dominant technologies of the time. The study of space (Architecture, Public places and City form) can lead to very interesting insights into the expression of the society with respect to the dominant technologies. Manuels Castells argues that space is not a mere photo-copy (reflection) of the society but it is an important expression. Fredric Jameson, in his identification of the condition of post-modernity demonstrates how the transition into new technologies is perhaps first and most visibly reflected in the architecture, as physical spaces get materially reconstructed, not only to house the needs and peripheries of the emerging technologies but also to embody their aesthetics in their design and built form.Earlier technologies have led to new understandings of the notions of the public and commons. Jurgen Habermas argues, how the emergence of print cultures and technologies led to a structural transformation of the public sphere by creating new and novel forms of participation and political engagement for the print readers. Within cinema studies in India, Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Madhav Prasad have looked at the ‘cinematic city’ - how material conditions of the city transform to house the cinema technologies, and how the imagination of certain cities is affected by the cinematic representations of these spaces. Mike Davis’ formulations of an ‘Ecology of Fear’ and Sean Cubbit’s idea of ‘The Cinema Effect’ also show the integral relationship that technologies have with the imagination and materiality of urban spaces.

Research Area:

The rise of the Internet in India in last decade poses interesting questions concerning ways of studying city spaces and its architecture. The Internet evokes and represents space in more than one way. Communities that represent the present urban social processes often mediate this visual and textual reference to space on the Internet but it is also an unwitting expression of way people choose to imagine their city, its places and its built form. It is important and pertinent for example to understand how Internet communities choose to abstract their own city through various direct or indirect discourses. The following will be the key questions

· It will be interesting to observe how the idea of a city gets represented on the Internet through both intended and casual references. For example is the City seen as a finite clarified artifact (as many political leadership would like us to believe) or is it seen as complex set of relationships or systems of places.

· How does the city get represented through the Internet with reference to its regional physical context (both geographical and cultural landscape)? Such an enquiry can help us in knowing how representation of city through the Internet acknowledges, neglects or fails to read its relationship with the local fundamental conditions[i] (of topography, water and culture)

The actual morphological context of the city will then become an important precursor for such an enquiry. The structure and flows in the city have often been compared to the Internet itself in popular discourses. This assumption can be further analyzed through spatial study of the city as a node in large region and as many several nodes within the city itself. The idea of Spaces of Flow in metropolis cities and places as nodes serving the flow has been very well articulated by Manuel Castells at a generic level. The issue of place[ii] and its representation (through internet) can be another area that can offer us very interesting insights into the relationship between the Cartesian and imagined space. The evolution of a new graphic language on the Internet needs closer examination from both its use of spatial symbolism as well as its impact on urban space.

However the contextual issue of an Indian idea of space will becomes the important narration as a background to such studies. This inquiry needs examination from a more contextual point of view: from both geographical (nature of cities) and building typology perspectives (spatial and programmatic types)

The following questions will be investigated further

a. How do the current Internet technology, processes and language reflect in Architecture and urban spaces of cities?

b. Will the form of the City and its Architecture understood any differently now[iii]?

The relationship between the building skin and spatial typology of some recent architectural and urban design project can form an interesting narrative to understand these issues. Here the issue of urban and architectural lighting, signage and graphics can be examined more closely and hence a study of the building skins and typology. The other largely ignored area of study concerns the role of the Government of India with the Internet. When was the last time we visited the railway reservation center to get a ticket or stood in a queue for hours to be the first on the window? Many Indians still do, but for many an Internet based on-line tickets reservation site largely substitutes that experience of the place (railway reservation center), people and the early morning tea on the gate. This needs closer examination from point of view of understanding the transformation and gentrification of some of the most democratic public service spaces in India such as the Railway stations, Municipal offices and banks. Apart from the material practices of the people, it is interesting to see how the integration of technologies within various urban governance practices affect the way in which cities morph, develop and change.

Methodology:

The aim is to engage with the spatial context of Indian cities while teasing out issues of the cultural phenomenon associated with the Internet. The following will be the key methods used in research

· To identify and narrate the social structures and processes that engage both with the intangible (meanings, symbols, communication etc.) and the tangible (morphology, structure, geography) in select Indian cities. This elaboration will form an important theoretical premise specific to further understanding space in Indian Cities.

· To document stories of individuals and groups of the city that demonstrates the typical changes that are taking place in various social and economic processes as related to the Internet. The aim will be to address both the tangible and intangible aspects while narrating the stories

· To map the spatial implication (structure and nature of spaces) of the above mentioned changes on the city

· To derive a broader narrative while weaving through different stories, that attempts to address the issue of Internet, society and space in Indian Cities

The research can be largely narrated through documentation of such representative situations but will require a clear articulation of the theoretical premises at the onset.

A review literature chapter which specifically marks the different contours of city-technology relationship – from IT cities which are planned to house technologies, to SEZ’s which emerge as new forms of technologised cities, to the gradual transformation and restructuration of city spaces and publics would also be undertaken. Moreover it will combine the contextual based study of cities, their public place and Architecture along with studies of the discourses on the Internet. The project will look at different actors who play an active, but often invisible role in the transformation of these spaces.

Dissemination and Outputs:

The project shall bring forth a monograph (approximately 50,000 words) that looks at a relationship between internet technologies and the city with a historical perspective, in order to explore the notions of public, built form, city spaces etc. within the Indian context.

A journal paper that engages with the contemporary discourses in Architecture and produces a new theoretical formulation of the city-technology relationship.

Part of the research method could possibly include an elective course or workshop at CEPT University to tap on variety of narrations through different students to strengthen both the premise and contextual focus of the study.

[i] This is to say that city form and its perception is very much a result of the both the local geographical and cultural context

[ii] “Place” can be defined through both space and character of an area and where the human experience is important. We experience places and hence understand it as they hold different processes and meanings.

[iii] So does the presence of Internet in our lives impact the way we begin to understand the Architecture of our city?

Bibliography

Venturi, Robert. Learning from Las-Vegas : the forgotten symbolism of architectural form. MIT Press, 1976

Castell, Manuel. The Rise of the Networked Society. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

Adorno Theoder. The Culture Industrty (Routledge Classics). Routledge, 2001

Benjamin Walter. The Arcade Project. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002

Jameson Fredric. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capatalism. Verso, 1999

Davis Mike. Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. Random House, 1998

Ashish Rajadhayaksha. Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (South Asian Cinemas).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/internet-society-and-space-in-indian-cities/Introduction

Researchers At Work

nishant — 2012-01-04T05:27:06Z

CIS-RAW stands for Researchers at Work, a multidisciplinary research initiative by the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. CIS firmly believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and Society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. The CIS-RAW programme hopes to produce one of the first documentations on the transactions and negotiations, relationships and correlations that the emergence of internet technologies has resulted in, specifically in the South. The CIS-RAW programme recognises ‘The Histories of the Internet and India’ as its focus for the first two years. Although many disciplines, organisations and interventions in various areas deal with internet technologies, there has been very little work in documenting the polymorphous growth of internet technologies and their relationship with society in India. The existing narratives of the internet are often riddled with absences or only focus on the mainstream interests of major stakeholders, like the state and the corporate. We find it imperative to excavate the three-decade histories of the internet to understand the contemporary concerns and questions in the field.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/cisraw-faq

The worrying survival of moon landing conspiracy theorists

nishant — 2019-07-31T02:33:26Z

The moon landing deniers were the original fake news propagandists. Only, they didn’t have the internet.

The article by Nishant Shah was published by the Indian Express on July 22, 2019.

Last week, I was pretending to have a rational conversation on Reddit about vaccination. When I say “rational conversation”, I, of course, mean that this person was ranting at me for being a “stooge of science” and an “agent of insurance companies” because I was pointing out to them that vaccination is a collective ethical good and has proven efficacy at eradicating lethal and chronic diseases. After about an hour of back-and-forth, the user taught me a whole new string of profanities and ended with two particularly strange comments. He said he is done talking to “Nazis like me who are so stupid that we would even believe in the moon landing”.

While anti-vaxxers are all the rage right now, it is easy to see why, as conspiracy theorists, they are closely aligned with the moon landing conspiracy theorists and the flat-earthers, more recently. It is the 50th anniversary of human landing on the moon (“kinda-allegedly-look-there-are-grey-areas-I-don’t-know-I-wasn’t-born-then”). Even in the world of fake news, alt-right, algorithmic trolling, and a collective suspension of disbelief on the internet, it looks like the moon landing is still the reference point that all fake-news peddlers go back to.

Moon landing conspiracy theorisation used to be serious business. They conducted painstaking research, met in secret circles, and tried to convince the world that the government was out to fool us. They were thwarted by the lack of a global platform that would amplify their voice and connect the conspirators of the world together. So, they remained in hiding, and away from common sense, caught in their own bubbles.

While the social web has done much for democratising information, there is no denying that it is also the platform that was made for the moon-landing hoax investigators. Not only is the current social media amenable to the easy distribution of dubious controversies, but it has also made these conspiracy theories a vehicle for entertainment. With multiple social media celebrities relying on attention economies of click-bait headlines and controversial statements, conspiracy theories are now produced not as facts but as opinions, and as entertainment.

The moon-landing deniers were zealots. They worked passionately at producing what they thought was counter-evidence to support their claims. The current fake news peddler does not need anything more than a streaming platform, an entertaining hook, a unique aesthetic, and a personal opinion with all the gravitas of an emoji, to put forward theories that no longer depend upon fact. In the mix and stream universe of social media, they can refurbish old conspiracies, and instead of championing a cause, merely present an ambivalent “anything is possible” attitude and presto, they are influencers.

The moon landing conspiracy theorists were quite strident in their belief but they were largely harmless — the equivalent of a man on a public transport shouting that the end is near. However, the new conspiracy theorists have very real, material consequences. We have already seen how they have been able to move elections and influence public behaviour. We have been witnessing how they have normalised fake news so that when we are faced with information that is apparently dubious, we still circulate it or shrug it off without denying it, thus reinforcing its aura.

They are dangerous not just because of what they talk about — let’s face it, people who actually believe flat earth theories are not really a great loss to civilisation, and if they want to live in Discworld, we can smile at them with benign frustration. What makes these conspiracy theorists alarming is that they are gateway drugs leading to something more frightening: the world of radicalised, alt-right, internet armies that translate the militant zeal of their digital disbelief into acts of violence in real life. It is not a surprise that social media platforms have become the default spaces where real-time shooters and persons with terrorist intent publish their live videos and radical manifestos. There is a reason why the alt-right populist movements target the anti-vaxxers as their key ambassadors for the distribution of messages. It is not a coincidence that neo-Nazi groups ally with flat-earthers and encourage them into real-life violence.

Fifty years after the moon landing, if we are still dabbling in moon-landing conspiracy theories, it is not because we are fascinated with the moon — surely, Mars is our new moon — but because the internet is the platform that the moon-landing deniers had dreamed of. With the social web, without any mechanisms for verification and an infinite possibility of producing counter-narratives, we have a telling story of what happened when information became really free and the protocols for filtering and parsing information transitioned from human understanding to artificial intelligence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-july-31-2019-the-worrying-survival-of-moon-landing-conspiracy-theorists

Why I’m not going to tell you about the dangers of apps like FaceApp

nishant — 2019-07-31T02:37:09Z

Concerns about privacy, aimed solely at users, are better directed at owners of digital infrastructure.

The article by Nishant Shah was published by Indian Express on July 28, 2019.

I want to write about our data, your security, and the ever-burning question of privacy and its discontent on the social web, all triggered by the viral FaceApp challenge. Timelines have been flooded by people using this free app to see what an AI thinks they will look like 20 years from now. And they haven’t stopped at just themselves. Their friends, their families, their pets, their favourite celebrities, and stars have all been morphed by this “free” Russian-made app, which takes data, overrides all consent, and shows your future old-face.

However, I know that by the time this column reaches you, you will not only have moved on from the viral seduction of FaceApp, but will also have been admonished by every critic, activist, advocate, and woke friend on Facebook, for trading your privacy and personal data to join the mass-sheep movement that we call social apps. You are either irritated by now about people lecturing you of the risks of using apps that exploit your digital footprint to manipulate your future behaviour, or you are shrugging it off as a trade-off that you are happy to make because you have “nothing to hide”.

Any alarm or pangs that you might have felt when you first read about the potential privacy vulnerability hidden in this app have long since been assuaged by the mindless scrolling through the thousands of pictures of your social circles ageing. If you are like me, perhaps, you have gone over to the dark side and laughed at the naiveté of people who talk of graceful ageing in the face of imminent climate collapse.

So I won’t talk to you about the danger of these apps and how you must be more careful with protecting your privacy. Because, the bottom-line is that you don’t care. And I don’t mean you, the individual reader. I mean the collective, Facebook-friends-forever you, that has long since stopped caring about what happens to things that we can’t see. Data Privacy indifference is not just a new normal, but alarmingly, even after the stunning expose of data-driven manipulation and AI regulation post the Cambridge Analytica revelations, it seems that we don’t care.

It is easy to blame the users — call them ignorant, label them indifferent, chastise them for not being digitally literate, call for awareness and outreach — but that is perhaps the easiest of the scapegoats. All the people who have been smugly announcing that they won’t use this app because they don’t want to feed the machine-learning beast with more of their private data, have largely been targeting individuals for their callous agnosticism when it comes to data sharing. However, what most of these responses fail to take into account is that the user has long since been installed in a condition of precarious data mining with no way out.

We can blame FaceApp, but we have to realise that every app, platform, service, device, institution and organization involved in the digital social web ecosystem has been primarily working as a data broker, selling us all without knowledge, but with consent. FaceApp is the flavour of the week, but it is merely following in the tradition of all our digital intermediaries who have now naturalised the system of capitalizing on our private data for profits. The woke bros can go around pointing fingers towards those who did use the app, but they must surely recognise the hypocrisy of using the social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram on their Android and iOSphones in order to perform their digital sapience. Because we might ban FaceApp, mount a scrutiny to evaluate the vulnerabilities, and help people avoid it, but FaceApp is just one in millions of data leaks that are built as the default in our digital deliriums.

To call the user ignorant or negligent is to conveniently abdicate the digital infrastructure owners and providers of their wilful, deliberate, and designed policies that compromise user data and privacy for gain. To put the onus of using this app and leaking data on to the user is to gloss over the fact that our laws and policies are woefully inadequate to protect the individual user against this continued data extraction, correlation, and consolidation. To laugh at the user who used an app for fun is to ignore the reality that these apps are verified, promoted, and shared without impunity because it is merely doing what the social web was designed for. So use FaceApp. Don’t use it. It doesn’t matter. Your individual actions are not to be blamed or celebrated. The only real change that can come in how we manage our data privacy is going to be in collective accountability of digital intermediaries and an active responsibility on the part of civil and political societies to step out from under their influence.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-july-28-2019-why-i-am-not-going-to-tell-you-about-the-dangers-of-apps-like-face-app

Digital Native: How an information overload affects what you forward

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:12:30Z

The information overload of social media sharing can make us act against our better judgement.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 10, 2019.

I had to do a double take when the post flashed on my feed. It was a post filled with armchair bloodlust, calling for war and justifying it through emotional bulls***. In many ways, it wasn’t shocking, because in its misdirected anger and emotional patriotism, it mimicked the charged nature of conversations that we have naturalised on the social web. It also followed the familiar paths of writing about action — from the safety and comfort of a sheltered life, where it is clear that the people sharing it would never have to participate in the war that they are baying for, and that even the destructive aftermath of the war would not interrupt their latte lifestyles.

It was clearly authored by one of those social media savants who indulge in random acts of capitalisation, which give you a brain rash. It did not even claim to be factual — the excesses of exclamation points were supposed to make up both for the hate speech and xenophobia that were being couched as nationalism.

This time, though, the post came from an unexpected source. It was shared in a group that generally has rational, fairly academics and measured discussions about the politics of everyday life. In the past, the most offensive thing anybody had done in a disagreement was to make threatening cat memes. And yet, here was a post that had the community howling for violence and fighting among each other with a vitriol that they would have generally decried and derided.

Unable to understand this completely unexpected behaviour, I started pinging a few familiar people through private messages, asking them why they were deviating into uncharacteristic behaviour. In a dozen different conversations, one thing that everybody talked about was how they did not begin with this emotional state when they heard the first susurrations of war. They all shared that their first reaction to the portents of war was cautious concern and a thoughtful contemplation of its consequences. However, somewhere between that first reaction and now, something obviously had switched. They had gone from people wanting to think about the possibilities of war to mobs who were supporting rabid and radical calls for action not grounded in anything more than an emotional excess.

Their emotional state, they were saying, was not their own, but was something they learned as they were bombarded with incessant torrents of similar posts that valorised, championed and positioned war as the only option available. At some time in their information overload, facts, truths, thoughtfulness and critique all disappeared and they got sucked into a viral sharing habit where they inherited the anger, the hate, and the militarised trolling that flooded their timelines.

When we talk of information overload and the constant engagement with social media streams, we often talk about people doing strange things, which they would not do in real life — if there is a real life that can be separated from the digital domains. Especially when looking at gender-based violence, non-consensual distribution of sexual content, and cyber-bullying, the perpetrators often find themselves in a state of shock when confronted personally with their actions and their consequences. Many people, swept in the fashions of the digital delirium, begin their confessions in a state of denial: “This is not who I am… I just lost control”, is a common refrain.

Researchers have pointed out that one of the most dramatic effects of information saturation is the suspension of emotional guards and affective patterns. Information overload sometimes leaves the subject in an emotional state that resembles victims of mental abuse. It leads to such a state of stress and tension that many people just give in to the onslaught of information and follow the patterns rather than resisting or questioning it. Continued sharing and circulation makes our emotional judgement fickle, and we often act against our impulses.

Algorithms of manipulation, coordinated bot attacks, and commissioned troll campaigns exploit this, because this emotional state is one that can be easily controlled — towards making political choices, buying things we don’t want, towards attacking people, communities, countries. It is time to realise that our sharing is not just about our own impulses and ideas. We are continuously being nudged and taught to inherit an emotional state that is being engineered in the circuits of the social web. So the next time you share something, pause, and think about whether this is what you want to say or this is what you are being trained to say, because what we say and share has consequences, often beyond that quick click.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-march-10-2019-indian-express-digital-native-how-an-information-overload-affects-what-you-forward

Digital Native: Lessons from Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp going down

nishant — 2019-04-03T01:19:29Z

The day when three social-media apps refused to load.

The article was published in Indian Express on March 24, 2019.

It was a day of chilly silence. I first registered something was wrong when the phone, that one true love, seemed to be giving me the silent treatment. The purple, blue and red lights that mark the notifications from three of my most-used apps — Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — were missing from my daily habits. When I tried to open and refresh the apps and nothing showed up, I confess I had a sense of foreboding.

Three immediate scenarios came to my mind. I surreptitiously looked outside the window to see if I had missed the memo for the apocalypse while I was reading. However, because there were no zombie masses thronging the streets, I realised that the collapse of my information channels was not the end of the world. I also tried to see if the internet in the house had cracked, because surely, if Facebook wasn’t loading, the problem must be with my local service providers. But even as I looked around, all the Internet of Things devices at my home beeped, chirped, winked, and flashed merrily, reassuring that all was still the same. As a last resort, I tried reinstalling all the apps to see if my phone had gone bonkers but to no avail.

That is when I decided to go to the “other” service that was still working — Twitter — and was delivered the digital reassurance that I was not alone. In fact, I was arriving to the party late because by then, all the thumb-click addicts, aghast at the loss of their platforms, had already flocked to Twitter getting their quick-fix of social media vagaries, and also complaining in horror at the biggest outage in internet history. The hashtags #facebookdown, #instagramdown, and #whatsappdown were already trending. Ironically, all the three companies were also using Twitter to update people about their engineering fixes, and also letting us know that this was just a “machine error” and not the cyberwarfare that we have been preparing for by downloading all our favourite shows on unconnected hard-drives stored in secure locations.

While this #downgate continued, it was a lot of fun to see people trolling their favourite platforms threatening to go back to MySpace and Orkut accounts (remember those?) while they wait for their lives to be restored. While the outage slowly became an inage (yes, I know that’s not a word, but it’s the internet, okay?) and we went back to the habits of the endless scroll, one question remained — what happens to the internet when we start giving up the ownership of all our information channels to a few megalithic corporations?

This question is particularly pertinent because just before #downgate, Facebook had already announced its intentions of clubbing all its messenger services together to achieve a seamless experience for its users. Seamlessness sounds like a great idea but it is also another word for assimilation. It is also another word that reminds us that the internet, once imagined as a disruptive force of independent voices and local collectives is obviously heading (if not already there) for a complete takeover by private companies.

We seem to be in the paradox where everyday we have a new app, offering new choices, new filters, new manipulations, and yet almost all of these apps are owned by the same companies. We have arrived at the moment of the “same same but different” where the plethora of choices is hiding the lack of creative freedoms on the web. The implications of these are not just about the boredom of our appified lives but about the politics of control. In closed information-architecture countries like China, we have already seen what a monopoly of digital data technologies can lead to — from social-credit-score systems to databases of “breed-worthy women”.

It has been the fun (and the racially marked prerogative) of the global West to mock China and its curtailing of civil liberties and exercise of control. Most digital media outlets have encouraged this trend of setting up China as the laughing stock while the same happens to our global internet landscapes. Despite the continued reporting on data breaches, security overrides, and blatant exploitation of our digital practices, we continue to believe in the emancipatory potentials of the web, while turning a blind eye to the silent control of the technologies we use at the level of hardware, software, standards, protocols, code, and usage.

As we TikTok our ways into the rabbit hole of the endless stream of blink-and-miss viral content, it is easy to forget that behind the immense diversity of users creating this content is an increasingly monolithic technology infrastructure that can shut it all down at the whim and fancy of the next person who holds the switch.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/nishant-shah-indian-express-march-24-2019-digital-native-lessons-from-facebook-instagram-and-whatsapp-going-down

Digital Native: Three things we need to realise about what TikTok is doing to us

nishant — 2019-06-09T05:27:52Z

Fifteen seconds is all that will take for TikTok to own you.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in Indian Express on May 19, 2019.

If there is one thing that has been building more suspense and drama than our politicians this election season, it is the microblogging site TikTok. From complete ignominy to viral popularity, and then the dramatic ban by a high court to its resurgence offering Rs 1,00,000 daily reward prizes, #ReturnofTikTok has been trending with great enthusiasm and being embraced by the populace, who obviously think that 15-second videos are the pinnacle of human cultural production and expression. But, my friends, followers, TikTokers, I come here not to bury TikTok, but to praise it.

At first glance, TikTok appears to be just a miniaturised version of the popular social media platforms we know — YouTube, Vine, Snapchat — and merely one more step in figuring out how granular we can make our appified attention. With each video post that can only last 15 seconds, TikTok is often heralded as naturalising the new unit of attention in an informationally saturated environment. Many have looked at it as competition to the grandfathers of social media apps, like Facebook and Instagram, and there is much speculation about how it will take these giants down.

However, the radical departure of TikTok is not in the smallness of its engagement — and thus the extremely low threshold for participation — or in the hashtag organisation of its social media, and the subsequent viral potentiality. What makes TikTok tick (and then, of course, tock), is its embrace of artificial intelligence and big data analytics to power the platform.

China-based ByteDance that owns TikTok, unlike any of its Big Tech competitors, is not a content production or curation company. It is invested in machine learning, and at its backend are extremely sophisticated algorithms that are using facial recognition, data correlation, and targeted customisation technologies to create the world of TikTok. Unlike Facebook and Twitter, the two templates of “user-generated-content” platforms, where what we see, what we do, and what we say require us to define our social circles and connections, TikTok’s algorithms do not need us to do any social definition.

From the minute you sign up for it, giving up your personal information and data to extreme mining which bears the same pitfalls of privacy and surveillance that all other big data apps do, TikTok starts presenting content to you. This is not content created by friends, or colleagues, or randos you connect with because you couldn’t be bothered to decline their invites. Instead, this is content created by people you don’t know at all, and brought to you by algorithms that know, even without you telling them what you might like. The more time you spend tapping across the vides, searching hashtags, and going through complex tutorials to make your own 15-second fun video, the more the machine learning algorithms learn you.

TikTok is such a threat to existing social media companies because they make no apologies of the fact that their human users are not influencers, friends, followers, or connections. They are merely users, who produce content and then their algorithms go around the world, connecting us through reasons and logic that are completely opaque. With TikTok, we see the future of automated technologies, where both the content and the logic of connectivity are no longer dependent on human action or desire, but on algorithmic curation and presentation. Geared towards maximum engagement, TikTok’s algorithms have one task — to completely make us lose all sense of time as we cycle through an almost endless stream of videos that have neither content nor style, but seduce us in their short-lived flash.

TikTok as a platform might turn out to be another fad. It is already being copied and mimicked by others. It might run out of its global steam. However, what it has opened up for us are three critical things that need more attention in our digital action. First, on TikTok, you don’t have friends because your friend is TikTok, and it tells you, in an easy, gossipy way, all the things that everybody else is doing. Second, TikTok does not pretend to respect individual choice and agency, instead it trains us to accept what is presented as content. In many ways, it is the reverse Spotify — your playlist does not represent your taste in music, but the music shapes you to become the kind of person who likes that music. And, lastly, TikTok infantilises its users, embedding them in a juvenilia, which has no meaning other than the moving images that keep us engaged but distant, responsive but irresponsible, as children of all ages, ready to escape from a world that increasingly seems too complex to live in.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bengaluru. This article appeared in print with the headline ‘Digital Native: Time’s Up’

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-may-19-2019-nishant-shah-digital-native-three-things-we-need-to-realise-about-what-tik-tok-is-doing-to-us

Digital native: Let there be life

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:05:37Z

The first robot citizen of the world is from Saudi Arabia, and she has the dubious fame of having more rights than human counterparts in the country.

The article was published in Indian Express on November 19, 2017.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. (Image Source: Thinkstock)

Last week, Saudi Arabia made Sophia — a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence and neural networked computation — an honorary citizen. Saudi Arabia, thus, becomes the first country to recognise that the boundaries of human life and technology have been blurring for quite a while. This is not unprecedented because in other countries personhood has been granted to many other non-human agencies. For example, companies like Google, across the globe, have exercised their rights to free speech and expression. In other parts of the world, conversations have emerged around environmental rights where rivers and forests were given human rights in order to save them from exploitation and erasure. In Japan, the committee for the regulation of artificial intelligence for social good, since 2016, has already forwarded the idea of companion robots who will become quasi members of society, and, how artificial intelligence will help these robots integrate into human lives.

The publicity stunt that Saudi Arabia pulled with Sophia as the first robot citizen, however, does bring to the fore some more disconcerting points. While this well-calculated public relations gimmick might be positioned to put Saudi Arabia on the innovations map of the future, it does betray the fact that it now has the dubious fame of being a country where female-shaped robots have more rights than human women. In its press conference, Sophia appeared without the traditional headscarf, which is mandatory for all Saudi women to wear in public at all times. Sophia is allowed a voice, an agency and a sense of humour. It has been given the capacity and choice to talk to strangers and, in the future, the freedom to drive cars and stand up for its rights in a way that women in Saudi Arabia can’t.

Sophia, with its humanoid futures rendered in silicon and fibres, also gets citizenship in a country where tens of thousands of immigrant workers — who live in conditions of slavish exploitation — are not allowed citizenship or even permanent residence. Saudi Arabia’s laws do not allow for citizenship by naturalisation. Sophia’s honorary citizenship is yet another signal of how the future of human rights and entitlements is going to be blurred when technological artefacts and artificial intelligences start competing for similar status.

However, the most interesting part of Sophia’s new found personhood, is that Sophia, in fact, is not an individual entity. The robot might mimic human form and emotions, but, as a product of deep neural networking and machine learning, Sophia is extensively connected to multiple layers of computational data processing. There are super computers processing all its sensory input, algorithms that help it to navigate physical and social structures, distributed databases drawing from a language corpus that help it to formulate meaningful sentences; and, there are multiple artificial intelligence softwares that evolve and change Sophia’s behaviour through pattern recognition and deep learning.

Sophia is not just a thing in isolation. It is a gateway robot that opens up a series of questions of what happens when we actually interact with and invite sapient technologies into our lives. Granting Sophia citizenship also includes granting citizenship to a server situated somewhere else in the world. In fact, if you establish a connection between Sophia and your machine, and manage to merge the two computing systems, your machine could easily make claims to be a part of the extended citizenship that has been granted to Sophia.

It is important to remember that even as our machines appear more human, more personalised, they are not just a single thing. As we develop new intimacies with our neural networked devices, it is good to take a step back and remember that the rights of humans might still be worth championing over the state of machines.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-november-19-2017-nishant-shah-digital-native-let-there-be-life

Digital native: Rebellion by Google Doc

nishant — 2018-01-09T16:19:49Z

The List is an example of the power of digital anonymity and solidarity. But we need to move beyond it.

The article was published in the Indian Express on November 5, 2017.

For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence. For the last few weeks, the social web has been preoccupied with a hashtag and a list. #MeToo has been trending in different parts of the world, as it invites people who have suffered sexual abuse and violence — especially women — to come out and narrate their experience to name the problem that remains a well-known secret. The hashtag is a call for action to break through the taboo of owning sexual abuse and calling out the cultures of silence that protect sexual predators and perpetrators of violence.

While there have been many battle calls in the past for victims of sexual abuse to not give in to shame, the response to this hashtag appears unprecedented because of two conditions that digital networks offer. The first is the possibility of anonymity. The victims can, while remaining anonymous, still express their grief, anger, frustration and despair at continued cycles of abuse. The second is the breaking of the isolation chambers, where they no longer feel isolated but realise that they are struggling to fight a larger problem — and that they have allies they can depend on.

This digital invitation has generated an inspiring number of people — expectedly, largely women — who have produced the largest consolidated testimony of how everyday experiences of abuse become allowed, condoned, and even defended by institutions like families, markets and governments. The hashtag created a particular furore in India, because it elicited a militant response — #himtoo.

There was a suggestion that maybe it is also time to name the perpetrators rather than just reliving grief and facing a politics of despair. A list was curated, first on Facebook and then on an open Google document, which named some very influential names within Indian (and some global) academic institutions. Some of these names already have a history of public accusations and legal cases. Some of the names opened up a stream of accusations, which have been shored up but never released for the power that their institutional positions wield. And a few of the names were shocking because they are people who have positioned themselves as allies in the social justice movements in the country. Indeed, some of the men on the list have made professional academic careers out of their solidarity with women’s and queer rights activism.

The list — digital in nature and hence, unforgiving and unforgetting — has performed the act of transgression that digital technologies always offered the scope of. The list isn’t just content, but a potent digital object. It connects, circulates, and finds new relationships of causality and correlation that transcend localised human networks. The list has become a space of huge contention because the digital native feminists who are using social media to find solidarity in numbers and catharsis in naming are using newer strategies. These are particularly different from the pre-digital feminist tactics, which have depended more on secret connections and expanding circles of trust. There is, in the feminist groups within the country, a lot of debate (and some hostile name-calling) for and against the list.

While there is much to think about and discuss, something that strikes me is that the debates follow an expected trope in digital activism. Researchers of digitally mediated activism have long warned that digital technologies have a strange way of turning the conversations inwards. Every time there is a digital platform or technology used to effect change, more often than not, the conversations end up being about the digital and its efficacy rather than the problems that are at hand. In this case, the entire debate seems to now be focused on whether the list is valid, whether the anonymous spaces of the social web are the best space for this activism, the potential for abuse if people with false agendas infiltrate these list-making exercises, and the labour of due process that must be performed to give the list credibility. All of these are fair debates. But it’s quite telling that the energy that should have been invested in thinking about systemic injustice and structural abuse is being diverted to thinking about digital technologies, forms, and processes.

There are not going to be any easy answers to the list. However, there’s something we need to remember from the history of digital activism: we can’t lose focus of what is really at stake here — cultures of sexual violence that perpetuate themselves in silence — and we need to stop fetishising digital objects and processes as primary objects of our obsession.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-november-5-2017-digital-native-rebellion-by-google-doc