Centre for Internet and Society

CIS Cybersecurity Series (Part 10) - Lawrence Liang

purba — 2013-09-10T08:31:31Z

CIS interviews Lawrence Liang, researcher and lawyer, and co-founder of Alternative Law Forum, Bangalore, as part of the Cybersecurity Series.

"The right to privacy and the right to free speech have often been understood as distinct rights. But I think in the ecology of online communication, it becomes crucial for us to look at the two as being inseparable. And this is not entirely new in India. But, interestingly, a lot of the cases that have had to deal with this question in the Indian context, have pitted one against the other. Now, India doesn't have a law for the protection of whistle-blowers. So how do we now think of the idea of whistle-blowers being one of the subjects of speech and privacy coming together? How do we use the strong pillars that have been established, in terms of a very rich tradition that Indian law has, on the recognition of free speech issues but slowly start incorporating questions of privacy?" - Lawrence Liang, researcher and lawyer, Alternative Law Forum.

Centre for Internet and Society presents its tenth installment of the CIS Cybersecurity Series.

The CIS Cybersecurity Series seeks to address hotly debated aspects of cybersecurity and hopes to encourage wider public discourse around the topic.

Lawrence Liang is one of the co-founders of the Alternative Law Forum where he works on issues of intellectual property, censorship, and the intersection of law and culture. He is also a fellow with the Centre for Internet and Society and serves on its board.

This work was carried out as part of the Cyber Stewards Network with aid of a grant from the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/cis-cybersecurity-series-part-10-lawrence-liang

Collaborative Projects Programme

nishant — 2011-08-23T03:04:56Z

The Centre for Internet and Society recognises collaboration and consultation as its primary mode of engaging with research and intervention. The Collaborative Projects Programme (CPP) is CIS’ platform for partnering (intellectually, logistically, financially, and administratively) with other organisations, individuals and practitioners in projects which are of immediate concern to the work that CIS is committed to.

The Collaborative Projects Programme also expands the scope of research to produce a synergy between research and praxis. The CPP is, in many ways, the in-house research that CIS undertakes, in collaboration and consultation with other organisations, institutions and individuals who have a stake and a say in the field of Internet and Society. The CPP is not bound by any theme of programmatic modalities and is envisioned more as a way for CIS to extend its field and establish a strong network with other exciting spaces in the Global South.

The Collaborative Projects Programme can include, but is not limited to, organising of large conferences or workshops; developing tools for better research and advocacy; data mining towards a specific goal that complements CIS’ vision; producing original monographs/publications/books targeted at different audiences; experimenting with new technologies to affect policy and usage; implementing pilot studies and instances of existing ideas; developing schemes to integrate education and technology; public intervention and awareness campaigns geared towards particular outcomes; celebrating certain aspects of internet technologies; engaging with digital natives; and creating new environments of learning and participation online.

The CPP is NOT a grant making programme. However, we are interested in partnering on new and innovative ideas and would welcome conversations with people and organisations in the field. If you have an interesting idea that you think fits our larger vision, please contact us and we can begin the discussions.

List of Projects under the Collaborative Projects Programme:

1. The Promise of Invisibility: Technology and the City - A seven month research project initiated by Nishant Shah, in collaboration with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Shanghai University, enabled by a grant from the Asia Scholarship Foundation, Bangkok.

2. Disability, Learning and Digital Participation - in partnership with Inclusive Planet

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/collaborative-projects-programme

i4D Interview: Social Networking and Internet Access

nishant — 2011-09-22T12:51:57Z

Nishant Shah, the Director for Research at CIS, was recently interviewed in i4D in a special section looking at Social Networking and Governance, as a lead up to the Internet Governance Forum in December, in the city of Hyderabad.

Mechanism of Self-Governance Needed for Social Networks

Should social networking sites be governed, and if yes, in what way?

A call for either monitoring or censoring Social Networking Sites has long been proved ineffectual, with the users always finding new ways of circumventing the bans or the blocks that are put into place. However, given the ubiquitous nature of SNS and the varied age-groups and interests that are represented there, governance, which is non-intrusive and actually enables a better and more effective experience of the site, is always welcome. The presumed notion of governance is that it will set processes and procedures in place which will eventually crystallise into laws or regulations. However, there is also another form of governance - governance as provided by a safe-keeper or a guardian, somebody who creates symbols of caution and warns us about being cautious in certain areas. In the physical world, we constantly face these symbols and signs which remind us of the need to be aware and safe. Creation of a vocabulary of warnings, signs and symbols that remind us of the dangers within SNS is a form of governance that needs to be worked out. This can be a participatory governance where each community develops its own concerns and addresses them. What is needed is a way of making sure that these signs are present and garner the attention of the user.

How do we address the concerns that some of the social networking spaces are not "child safe"?

The question of child safety online has resulted in a raging debate. Several models, from the cybernanny to monitoring the child's activities online ,have been suggested at different times and have more or less failed. The concerns about what happens to a child online are the same as those about what happens to a child in the physical world. When the child goes off to school, or to the park to play, we train and educate them about things that they should not be doing -- suggesting that they do not talk to strangers, do not take sweets from strangers, do not tell people where they live, don't wander off alone -- and hope that these will be sufficient safeguards to their well being. As an added precaution, we also sometimes supervise their activities and their media consumption. More than finding technical solutions for safety online, it is a question of education and training and some amount of supervision to ensure that the child is complying with your idea of what is good for it. A call for sanitising the internet is more or less redundant, only, in fact, adding to the dark glamour of the web and inciting younger users to go and search for material which they would otherwise have ignored.

What are the issues, especially around identities and profile information privacy rights of users of social networking sites?

The main set of issues, as I see it, around the question of identities, is the mapping of the digital identities to the physical selves. The questions would be : What constitutes the authentic self? What is the responsibility of the digital persona? Are we looking at a post-human world where online identities are equally a part of who we are and are sometimes even more a part of who we are than our physical selves? Does the older argument of the Original and the Primary (characteristics of Representation aesthetics) still work when we are talking about a world of 'perfect copies' and 'interminable networks of selves' (characteristics of Simulation)? How do we create new models of verification, trust and networking within an SNS? Sites like Facebook and Orkut, with their ability to establish looped relationships between the users, and with the notion of inheritance (¨friend of a friend of a friend of a friend¨), or even testimonials and open 'walls' and 'scraps' for messaging, are already approaching these new models of trust and friendship.

How do we strike a balance between the freedom of speech and the need to maintain law and order when it comes to monitoring social networking sites?

I am not sure if the 'freedom of speech and expression' and the 'maintaining of law and order' need to be posited as antithetical to each other. Surely the whole idea of 'maintaining law and order' already includes maintaining conditions within which freedom of speech and expression can be practiced. Instead of monitoring social networking sites to censor and chastise (as has happened in some of the recent debates around Orkut, for example), it is a more fruitful exercise to ensure that speech, as long as it is not directed offensively towards an individual or a community, needs to be registered and heard. Hate speech of any sort should not be tolerated but that is a fact that is already covered by the judicial systems around the world.

What perhaps, is needed online, is a mechanism of self-governance where the community should be able to decide the kinds of actions and speech which are valid and acceptable to them. People who enter into trollish behaviour or hate speak, automatically get chastised and punished in different ways by the community itself. To look at models of better self-governance and community mobilisation might be more productive than producing this schism between freedom of speech on the one hand and the maintenance of law and order on the other.

Link to original article on i4donline.net

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/i4d-interview-social-networking-and-internet-access

Digital Natives Workshop in Taipei: Only a Few Seats Left!!!

praskrishna — 2011-08-04T10:29:26Z

The Centre for Internet and Society in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation is holding a three day Digital Natives workshop in Taipei from 16 to 18 August, 2010. The three day workshop will serve as an ideal platform for the young users of technology to share their knowledge and experience of the digital and Internet world and help them learn from each other’s individual experiences.

Everybody has a story to tell, and with the Internet, it is possible to tell the story and be heard. Young people around the world use digital technologies to find a voice, an expression, a creative output and a space for dialogue. Gone are the days when the young were only to be seen and not heard. In the Web 2.0 world, the young are seen, heard and are making a dramatic change in the world that we live in.

As Internet and digital technologies become more widespread, the world is shrinking, time is replaced by Internet time, we are constantly connected and intricately linked to our contexts, our people, our cultures and our networks. And you, yes YOU are a part of this change. In fact, as Digital Natives – people who have found technologies as central to their lives – you are directly affecting the lives of many, sometimes even without knowing about it.

An Open Call for Participation

The Centre for Internet and Society (Bangalore, India) in collaboration with the Frontier Foundation (Taipei, Taiwan) are calling out to young technology users to share stories about how they have tried to change things around them with the use of digital and Internet technologies. Conversely, if you feel that the presence of these technologies has significantly changed you in some way, we want to hear about that too! These can be stories where you have made a significant impact by initiating campaigns or movements for a particular cause, stories where you have used technologies to cope with problems in your personal and social life through your online persona in the virtual World Wide Web or stories where a small blog you started, or a facebook group you created, or a plurk network that you started, or a discussion group that you participated in, led to a change that has a story to tell.

The three day workshop will select 20 participants from all around Asia and in the Middle East to come and share these stories, to interact with facilitators and scholars who have worked in different countries and areas, and to form a network of collaboration and support. We will give your stories a face, a voice and a platform where they can be heard in your own voice, in your own style and in your own formats. Participants can fill in an application form (as given below) and forward it to digitalnatives@cis-india.org by 15th July 2010.

Simultaneously a website will also be hosted online where the Digital Natives will contribute to the content. Selected participants will be encouraged to document in it. Expenses relevant to the project will be granted to the selected participants.

Application Form

Name:
Gender:
Age:
Primary language of communication:
Other languages you can read and write:
Email:
Postal address:
Describe your Internet related experience / initiative(s) in 300 words. Furnish with URLs where necessary. Optionally, if images and videos are part of the description, then upload them in a high resolution version to a secure website and provide the URL.
Write in a few sentences about your expectation from the workshop.
I declare that the above information is true to the best of my knowledge.
I agree that Digital Natives will use the material I have provided for public use.

Please note that the information you provide will be kept for purposes of the Digital Natives project. Materials which you submit will be used for reporting to sponsors and for public use relevant to the project.

Dates: 16, 17 and 18 August, 2010
Venue: Taipei (Taiwan)

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

Political is as Political does

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:30:51Z

The Talking Back workshop has been an extraordinary experience for me. The questions that I posed for others attending the workshop have hounded me as they went through the course of discussion, analysis and dissection. Strange nuances have emerged, certain presumptions have been questioned, new legacies have been discovered, novel ideas are still playing ping-pong in my mind, and a strange restless excitement – the kind that keeps me awake till dawning morn – has taken over me, as I try and figure out the wherefore and howfore of things. I began the research project on Digital Natives in a condition of not knowing, almost two years ago. Since then, I have taken many detours, rambled on strange paths, discovered unknown territories and reached a mile-stone where I still don’t know, but don’t know what I don’t know, and that is a good beginning.

The researcher in his heaven, all well with the world

This first workshop is not merely a training lab. For me, it was the extension of the research inquiry, and collaboratively producing some frames of reference, some conditions of knowing, and some ways of thinking about this strange, ambiguous and ambivalent category of Digital Natives. The people who have assembled at this workshop have identified themselves as Digital Natives as a response to the open call. They all have practices which are startlingly unique and simultaneously surprisingly similar. Despite the great dissonance in their geo-political contexts and socio-cultural orientations, they seem to be bound together by things beyond the technological.

Each one chose a definition for him/herself that straddles so many different ideas of how technologies interact with us; there are writers who offer a subjective position and affective relation to technologies and the world around them; there are artists who seek to change the world, one barcode at a time; there are optimist warriors who have waged battles against injustice and discrimination in the worlds they occupy; there are explorers who have made meaning out of socio-cultural terrains that they live in; there are leaders who have mobilized communities; there are adventurers who have taken on responsibilities way beyond their young years; there are researchers who have sought higher grounds and epistemes in the quest of knowledge. The varied practice is further informed by their own positions as well as their relationship with the different realities they engage with.

How, then, does one make sense of this babble of diversity? How does one even begin to articulate a collective identity for people who are so unique that sometimes they are the only ones in their contexts to initiate these interventions? Where do I find a legacy or a context that makes sense of these diversities without conflating or coercing their uniqueness? This is not an easy task for a researcher, and I have struggled over the two days to figure out a way in which I can start develop a knowledge framework through which I can not only bring coherence to this group but also do it without imposing my questions, suggestions or agendas on you. And it is only now, at a quarter to dawn, as I think and interact more with the different digital natives that things get shapes for me – shapes that are not yet clear, probably obscured by the blurriness of sleep and the rushed time that we have been living in the last few days – and I now attempt to trace the contours if not the details of these shapes.

Questioning the Question

The first insight for me came from the fact that the Digital Natives in the workshop talked back – not only to the structures that their practice engages with, but also the questions that I posed to them. “What does it mean to be Political?” I has asked on the first day, knowing well that this wasn’t going to be an easy dialogue. Even after years of thinking about the Political as necessarily the Personal (and vice versa), it still is sometimes difficult to actually articulate the process or the imagination of the Political. It is no wonder that so many people take the easy recourse of talking about governments, judiciaries, democracies and the related paraphernalia to talk about Politics.

I knew, even before I posed the question, that this was going to lead to confusion, to conditions of being lost, to processes of destabilising comfort zones. However, what I was not ready for was a schizophrenic moment of epiphany where I tried to ask myself what I understood as the Political. And as I tried to explain it to myself, to explain it to others, to push my own knowledge of it, to understand others’ ideas and imaginations, I came up with a formulation which goes beyond my own earlier knowledges. There are five different articulations of the legacies and processes of the Political that I take with me from the discussions (some were suggested by other people, some are my flights of fancy based on our conversations), and it is time to reflect on them:

Political as dialogue

This was perhaps, the easiest to digest because it sounds like a familiar formulation. To be political is to be in a condition of dialogue. Which means that Talking Back was suddenly not about Talking Against or Being Talked To. It was about Talking With. It was a conversation. Sometimes with strangers. Sometimes with people made familiar with time. Sometimes with people who we know but have not realised we know. Sometimes with the self. The power of names, the strength of being in a conversation – to talk and also to listen is a condition of the Political. In dialogue (as opposed to a babble) is the genesis of being political. Because when we enter a dialogue, we are no longer just us. We are able to detach ourselves from US and offer a point of engagement to the person who was, till now, only outside of us.

Political as concern

This particular idea of the political as being concerned was a surprise to me. I have, through discourses and practice within gender and sexuality fields, understood affective relationships as sustaining political concerns and subjectivities. However, I had overlooked the fact that the very act of being concerned, what a young digital native called ‘being burned’ about something that we notice in our immediate (or extended) environments is already a political subjectivity formation. To be concerned, to develop an empathetic link to the problems that we identify, is a political act. It doesn’t always have to take on the mantle of public action or intervention. Sometimes, just to care enough, is enough.

Political as change

This is a debate that needs more conversations for me. Politics, Knowledge, Change, Transformation – these are the four keywords (further complicated by self-society binaries) that have strange permutations and combination. To Know is to be political because it produces a subjectivity that has now found a new way of thinking about itself and how it relates to the external reality. This act of Knowing, thus produces a change in our self. However, this change is not always a change that leads to transformation. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake can often be indulgent. Even when the knowledge produces a significant and dramatic change, often this change is restricted to the self.

When does this knowing self, which is in a condition of change, become a catalyst for transformation? When does this knowing-changing translate into a transformation for the world outside of us? Just to be in a condition of knowing does not grant the agency required for the social transformation that we are trying to understand. Where does this agency come from? How do we understand the genesis and dissemination of this agency? And what are the processes of change that embody and foster the Political?

Political as Freedom

On the first thought, the imagination of Political as Freedom seemed to obvious; commonsense and perhaps commonplace. However, I decided put the two in an epistemological dialogue and realised that there are many prismatic relationships I had not talked about before I was privy to these conversations. Here is a non-exhaustive list: Political Freedom, Politics of Freedom, Free to be Political, Political as Freedom, Freedom as Political... is it possible to be political without the quest of freedom? Is the freedom we achieve, at the expense of somebody else’s Political stance? How does the business of being Political come to be? Not Why? But How? If Digital Natives are changing the state of being political what are they replacing? What are they inventing? Where, in all these possibilities lies Freedom?

Political as Reticence

We all talked about voice – whose, where, for whom, etc. It was a given that to give voice, to have voice, to speak, to talk, to talk back were conditions of political dialogue and subversion, of intervention and exchange. So many of us – participants or facilitators – talked about how to speak, what technologies of speech, how to build conditions of interaction... and then, like the noise in an otherwise seamless fabric of empowerment came the idea of reticence. Is it possible to be silent and still be political? If I do not speak, is it always only because I cannot? What about my agency to choose not to speak? As technologies – of governance, of self, and of the social constantly force us to produce data and information, through ledgers and censuses and identification cards – make speech a normative way of engagement, isn’t the right of Refusal to Speak, political?

Sometimes, it is necessary to exercise silence as a tool or a weapon of political resistance. The non-speaking subject holds back and refuses to succumb to pressures and expectations of a dominant erstwhile, and in his/her silence, produces such a cacophony of meaning that it asks questions that the loudest voices would not have managed to ask.

The Beginning of a Start; Perhaps also the other way round

These are my first reflections on the conversations we have had over the two days. I feel excited, inspired, moved and exhilarated as I carry myself on these flights of ideation, thought and conceptualisation. It is important for me that these are questions that I did not think of in a vacuum but in conversation and dialogue with this varied pool of people who have spent so much of their time and effort to not only make their work intelligible but also to reflect on the processes by which we paint ourselves political. I have learned to sharpen questions of the political that I came with and I have learned to ask new questions of Digital Natives practice. I don’t have a definition that explains the work that these Digital Natives do. But I now have a framework of what is their understanding of the political and what are the various points of engagement and investment.

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

Change has come to all of us

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:38Z

The general focus on a digital generational divide makes us believe that generations are separated by the digital axis, and that the gap is widening. There is a growing anxiety voiced by an older generation that the digital natives they encounter — in their homes, schools and universities and at workplaces — are a new breed with an entirely different set of vocabularies and lifestyles which are unintelligible and inaccessible. It is time we started pushing the boundaries of what it means to be a digital native.

In this connected world, the geek is everyone — from a grandma on Skype to a teen on Second Life.

Two self-proclaimed digital natives, on a cold autumn morning in Amsterdam, decided to leave the comforts of their familiar virtual worlds and venture into the brave new territories of real-life shopping. Though slightly confused by the lack of click-and-try options and perplexed by the limitations of the physical spaces of shopping, we plodded along, shop after shop, thinking how much easier it is to chat on IM while flying through Second Life as opposed to face-to-face interactions while walking on crowded streets. After we had run out of shops (and patience), we decided that it was time to rely on better resources than our own wits. The Dutch girl fished out her Android smartphone and with the single press of a button, opened up channels of information. She called her mother. She asked for the location of the store that was eluding us. And then she looked at me in silence before bursting into laughter. Her 64-year-old mother, in response to our question, had said, “Why don’t you just Google it?”

We spent five minutes in stunned laughter when we realised that we should have instinctively done that and that we were being asked by somebody from Generation U to “get with it”. Funny (and slightly embarrassing) as it is, it brings into focus, the question, “Who is a digital native?” For those of you who have been reading this column, it has been defined in terms of age and usage. A digital native is generally somebody young, somebody who is tech-savvy, somebody who can perform complicated calisthenics with digital technologies — throwing virtual sheep, having instant relationships, writing complex stories and pirating their favourite movies — in one nonchalant click of the mouse. However, these kinds of digital natives are only stereotypes.

If we move away from these descriptions of novelty, of excitement and of youth, a different kind of digital native emerges for us. A digital native is somebody whose way of thinking (about himself and the world around) is significantly informed because of the presence of and familiarity with the internet and digital technologies. In other words, a digital native is a person who has experienced (and is often led to) change because of their interactions with new technologies.

It can be a middle-aged man whose business changed when he started tracking his supplies using complex and sophisticated databases. It can be a mother of two, finding support and help raising her children on online communities like Bing. It can be a senior teacher re-discovering pedagogy through distributed knowledge systems on Wikipedia. It can be grandparents who interact with their grandchildren over Skype and text messaging, across international borders and lifestyles. It can be a mother telling her digital native daughter to “just Google it!” over the cellphone.

And as things might be, Shamini, my 15-year-old bonafide digital native correspondent from Ahmedabad, recently wrote that she got off Facebook and deleted her account. “It felt like I had retired from a job,” she said. But she was away from Facebook only for four months, dissociated from all the “time, energy and drama that it caused” and was quite enjoying it. After four months of self-imposed exile, she, however, resurfaced on Facebook. And it was to stay in touch with her aunt and uncle, who live in faraway lands, and cannot keep in touch with her unless she is on Facebook. Shamini was surprised at this. After spending much time convincing them about trying to use email and phones to keep connected, she finally gave in and started a new account that nobody knows of. And she asked me the important question: Who is the digital native now?

My grandmother used to tell us, “Nobody is born knowing a language.” I think it is time to start applying the same logic here. Nobody is born with technologies. But there are people — perhaps not yet a generation, but still a population — who are changing their lives and significantly transforming the world by turning Google and Facebook and Twitter into verbs and a way of doing things. So the next time, somebody asks you if you know a digital native, don’t look for somebody out there — it might just be you!

The original column can be read in The Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/change-has-come

Reflecting from the Beyond

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:21:29Z

After going ‘beyond the digital’ with Blank Noise through the last nine posts, the final post in the series reflects on the understanding gained so far about youth digital activism and questions one needs to carry in moving forward on researching, working with, and understanding digital natives.

Throughout the series, I have argued the following points. Firstly, the 21^st century society is changing into a network society and that youth movements are changing accordingly. I have outlined the gaps in the current perspectives used in understanding the current form and proposed to approach the topic by going beyond the digital: from a youth standpoint, exploring all the elements of social movement, and based on a case study in the Global South – the uber cool Blank Noise community who have embraced the research with open arms. The methodology has allowed me to identify the newness in youth’s approach to social change and ways of organizing. Although I do not mean to generalize, there are some points where the case study resonates with the broader youth movement of today. In this concluding post, I will reflect on how the research journey has led me to rethink several points about youth, social change, and activism.

While social movements are commonly imagined to aim for concrete structural change, many youth movements today aim for social and cultural change at the intangible attitudinal level. Consequently, they articulate the issue with an intangible opponent (the mindset) and less-measurable goals. Their objective is to raise public awareness, but their approach to social change is through creating personal change at the individual level through engagement with the movement. Hence, ‘success’ is materialized in having as many people as possible involved in the movement. This is enabled by several factors.

The first is the Internet and new media/social technologies, which is used as a site for community building, support group, campaigns, and a basis to allow people spread all over the globe to remain involved in the collective in the absence of a physical office. However, the cyber is not just a tool; it is also a public space that is equally important with the physical space. Despite acknowledging the diversity of the public engaged in these spaces, youth today do not completely regard them as two separate spheres. Engaging in virtual community has a real impact on everyday lives; the virtual is a part of real life for many youth (Shirky, 2010). However, it is not a smooth ‘space of flows’ (Castells, 2009) either. Youth actors in the Global South do recognize that their ease in navigating both spheres is the ability of the elite in their societies, where the digital divide is paramount. The disconnect stems from their acknowledgement that social change must be multi-class and an expression of their reflexivity in facing the challenge.

The second enabling factor is its highly individualized approach. The movement enables people to personalize their involvement, both in terms of frequency and ways of engagement as well as in meaning-making. It is an echo of the age of individualism that youth are growing up in, shaped by the liberal economic and political ideologies in the 1990s India and elsewhere (France, 2007). Individualism has become a new social structure, in which personal decisions and meaning-making is deemed as the key to solve structural issues in late modernity (Ibid).

In this era, young people’s lives consist of a combination of a range of activities rather than being focused only in one particular activity (Ibid). This is also the case in their social and political engagement. Very few young people worldwide are full-time activists or completely apathetic, the mainstream are actually involved in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism made easier with Web 2.0 (Harris et al, 2010).

A collective of everyday activists means that there are many forms of participation that one can fluidly navigate in, but it requires a committed leadership core recognized through presence and engagement. As Clay Shirky (2010: 90) said, the main cultural and ethical norm in these groups is to ‘give credit where credit is due’. Since these youth are used to producing and sharing content rather than only consuming, the aforementioned success of the movement lies on the leaders’ ability to facilitate this process. The power to direct the movement is not centralized in the leaders; it is dispersed to members who want to use the opportunity.

This form of movement defies the way social movements have been theorized before, where individuals commit to a tangible goal and the group engagement directed under a defined leadership. The contemporary youth movement could only exist by staying with the intangible articulation and goal to accommodate the variety of personalized meaning-making and allow both personal satisfaction and still create a wider impact; it will be severely challenged by a concrete goal like advocating for a specific regulation. Not all youth there are ‘activist’ in the common full-time sense, for most everyday activists their engagement might not be a form of activism at all but a productive and pleasurable way to use their free time - or, in Clay Shirky’s term, cognitive surplus (2010).

Revisiting my initial intent to put the term activism under scrutiny, I acknowledge this as a call for scholars to re-examine the concepts of activism and social movements through a process of de-framing and re-framing to deal with how youth today are shaping the form of movements. Although the limitations of this paper do not allow me to directly address the challenge, I offer my own learning from this process for the quest of future researchers.

The way young people today are reimagining social change and movements reiterate that political and social engagement should be conceived in the plural. Instead of “Activism” there should be “activisms” in various forms; there is not a new form replacing the older, but all co-existing and having the potential to complement each other. Allowing people to cope with street sexual harassment and create a buzz around the issue should complement, not replace, efforts made by established movements to propose a legislation or service provision from the state. This is also a response I offer to the proponents of the aforementioned “doubt” narrative.

I share the more optimistic viewpoint about how these new forms are presenting more avenues to engage the usually apathetic youth into taking action for a social cause. However, I also acknowledge that the tools that have facilitated the emergence of this new form of movement have existed for less than a decade; thus, we still have to see how it evolves through the years.

Hence, I also find the following questions to be relevant for proponents of the “hope” narrative. Social change needs to cater to the most marginalized in the society, but as elaborated before, the methods of engagement both on the physical and virtual spaces are still contextual to the middle class. Therefore, how can the emerging youth movements evolve to reach other groups in the society? Since most of these movements are divorced from existing movements, how can they synergize with existing movements to propel concrete change? These are open questions that perhaps will be answered with time, but my experience with Blank Noise has shown that these actors have the reflexivity required to start exploring solutions to the challenges.

The research started from a long-term personal interest and curiosity. In this journey, I have found some answers but ended up with more questions that will also stay with me in the long term. As a parting note before, I would like to share a quote that will accompany my ongoing reflection on these questions.

My advice to other young activists of the world: study and respect history... but ultimately break the mould. There have never been social media tools like this before. We are the first generation to test them out: to make the mistakes but also the breakthrough.

(Tammy Tibbetts, 2010)

This is the tenth and final post in the Beyond the Digital series, a research project that aims to explore new insights to understand youth digital activism conducted by Maesy Angelina with Blank Noise under the Hivos-CIS Digital Natives Knowledge Programme.

References:

Bang, H.P. (2004) ‘Among everyday makers and expert citizens’. Accessed 21 September 2010. http://www.sam.kau.se/stv/ksspa/papers/bang.pdf

Castells, M. (2009) Communication Power. New York: Oxford University Press.

France, A. (2007) Understanding Youth in Late Modernity. Berkshire: Open University Press.

Harris, A., Wyn, J., and Younes, S. (2010) ‘Beyond apathetic or activist youth: ‘Ordinary’ young people and contemporary forms of participaton’, Young Vol. 18:9, pp. 9-32

Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. London: Penguin Press

Image source:

http://blog.blanknoise.org/2009/08/street-signs.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/reflecting-from-the-beyond

One for the avatar

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:19:34Z

With increasing instances of online avatars being victimised, users who are part of these identities need to be protected against vicious attacks. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on April 3, 2011.

On March 21 the digital natives I worked with, across three continents, blogged to celebrate Human Rights Day in South Africa. The topic: What should be a right in the digital age? While the blogathon captured the diverse contexts and voices of digital natives around the globe, it got me thinking about the question of rights, technology and identity.

When it comes to technology-based rights — right to access, right to information, right to dis/connect, right to be online, right to privacy, etc. — there seems to be an understanding that these rights are granted to the person who engages with digital and internet technologies.

For instance, if somebody steals your identity online, you can ask for legal arbitration. The right of the physical user who is interacting with digital technologies is clearly violated. Similarly, other kinds of economic abuse through phishing or spam are also instances in which the right of the individual is clearly breached and hence justice can be dispensed.

However, in the wide world of the Web, things often become blurry. For those who simultaneously live their lives in the fused spaces of the physical and the digital, there are instances when violence takes place but there are no arbitrators for justice. One way of thinking about this, is by looking at the digital avatars that we create online. Avatars are generally visual simulations that people create for themselves to mark their presence on the Web. Within the more traditional digital interactions, avatars are straightforward — pictures of people, icons, brands, photographs of pets, cartoons, or even text based signatures . Within role-playing games and virtual immersive environments, avatars can be more adventurous, often taking up the form of fantasy bodies that the users might aspire to have.

These avatars, for digital natives, are extensions of the self and an integral part of their online presence. A lucrative industry sells digital amenities, luxuries and brands to clothe and accessorise the avatars, so that they resemble the real-life user. The users invest time, money and resources to create unique avatars. However, these avatars, which are a combination of hardware, software and wetware — part machine, part code, part human being, despite their very material presence, do not really have any rights of their own.

Because they are treated only as cultural products, they are looked at only as objects rather than as animated identities. Popular law and culture treat avatars as external and not related to the users who create them. Within a digital universe, when an avatar gets abused, there are no rights that it can claim in order to find safety or justice. Our understanding of digital rights are so tied to the idea of physical loss and injury that unless a material loss to the physical body can be demonstrated, it becomes difficult to actually invoke the rights of the victim.

For example, in social networking sites like Facebook, it is common for younger users to bully people from their schools. Instead of a direct physical attack on the person, a series of “Hate pages” crop up, where conversations which were hitherto restricted to the circle of friends, are now openly hosted, attacking one particular person. Even more subtle are the campaigns to “De-friend” people, making them social pariahs by not allowing them access to social cliques. A common practice has also been to spam the person’s account with so many unnecessary emails that they can no longer access their important mails, which get lost in the deluge. These are serious attacks, which have direct impacts on the victim’s social and mental state.

Because no obvious physical harm is done, because there is no straightforward attack on the person involved or a demonstrable loss to any physical person, these attacks go unnoticed and unresolved. Even when these claims are brought to the notice of authority, the victim is asked to “move on” because it is “merely the internet”.

It is time to realise that there is nothing “mere” about the internet and the world of digital social interaction. What happens to the online persona has direct and often horrifying consequences to bodies in the physical world. And it is time to think of the right of the avatar, so that the users, who are a part of these identities, can also be protected. If I had to choose, in the digital age, the right to be an avatar, would be the right to vote for.

Read the original in the Indian Express here

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

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:34:22Z

Digital Natives live their lives differently. But sometimes, they also die their lives differently! What happens when we die online? Can the digital avatar die? What is digital life? The Web 2.0 Suicide machine that has now popularly been called the 'anti-social-networking' application brings some of these questions to the fore. As a part of the Hivos-CIS "Digital Natives with a Cause?" research programme, Nishant Shah writes about how Life on the Screen is much more than just a series of games.

In the new year, 2010, one of the most startling stories was of mass suicides. About 50,000 people were affected. Legal cases were filed. The interwebz were abuzz with the tale of how they did it. There was talk about a website that was responsible for this. The blogosphere went into a frenzy discussing the ‘new lease of life’ that these suicides provided. Videos of people caught in the act found their way onto popular video distributing spaces. And for everybody who talked about it, it was partly a joke and partly a gimmick. However, for a significant population, across the globe, the news came as a shock and a moment of self-reflection.

Meet the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. It is a simple online machine which helps people commit digital suicide by destroying their digital identities on popular social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace. It is software that deletes every single transaction which you may have ever performed in your digital avatar. Messages sent to and received from friends, stored notes, results of viral quizzes, pictures of the last party that you attended, status messages describing state of mind, high scores and social assets on social networking games, links shared, videos uploaded – everything gets deleted, allowing you one last chance to re-live your digital life before it locks you out of the 2.0 web for once and for all. To many this might sound funny, but for the people, whose lives are lived, stored, shared and experienced in the online spaces that Web 2.0 has developed.

We find them in universities and colleges, multitasking, preparing a classroom presentation while chatting with friends and keeping track of their online gaming avatars. We encounter them in offices, glued with equal passion, to dating or social networking sites, and moderating geek mailing lists. We chance upon them in homes and bedrooms, sharing the most private and intimate details of their lives using live cam feeds and audio/video podcasts. If these images are familiar to you, you have encountered a digital native. It might have, recently, been a ‘child’ who knows how to use the mobile phone more effectively than you do, or a teenager who can connect your machine online while thumb typing on the cell phone, in a language which is not very familiar to you. It could also be the saucy colleague in office, who is always on the information highway, making jazzy presentations and animations or playing games with their virtual avatars, or the taxi driver who has learned the power of GPS maps or even the chaiwallah around the corner who uses his mobile phone to download new music and conduct a romantic affair.

These techno-mutants are slowly, but surely taking over the world. By the end of 2010, the global youth population will be about 1.2. Billion and 85 per cent of it will be in the developing countries of the world, growing up with digital and Internet technologies as an integral part of their life. They might not be a significant number now, but they are going to be the citizens of the future, taking important decisions about the destinies of nations and states, creating businesses and running economies, educating young learners and shaping public opinions. And they are learning the fundamentals of these actions in their online interactions on Web 2.0 spaces using digital tools to morph, mobilise, mutate, and manage their social, cultural and political lives and identities. It is of these people that this column writes of – people who are marked by digital and Internet technologies in strange and unprecedented ways.

Originally published at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause/News as a part of the Knowledge Programme: "Digital Natives with a Cause?"

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn1

Digital Natives at Republica 2010

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:35:48Z

Nishant Shah from the Centre for Internet and Society, made a presentation at the Re:Publica 2010, in Berlin, about its collaborative project (with Hivos, Netherlands) "Digital Natives with a Cause?" The video for the presentation, along with an extensive abstract is now available here.

Abstract:

As a growing population in emerging Information Societies, particularly in Asia, experience a lifestyle mediated by digital technologies, there is also a correlated concern about the young digital natives constructing their identities and expressions through a world of incessant consumption, while remaining apathetic to the immediate political and social needs of their times. Governments, educators, civil society theorists and practitioners, have all expressed alarm at how the digital natives across the globe are so entrenched in practices of incessant consumption that they have a disconnect with the larger external reality and contained within digital deliriums. They discard the emergent communication and expression trends, mobilisation and participation platforms, and processes of cultural production as trivial or unimportant. Such a perspective is embedded in a non-changing view of the political landscape and do not take into account that the Digital Natives are engaging in practices which might not necessarily subscribe to the earlier notions of political revolution, but offer possibilities for great social transformation and participation.

The oldest Digital Native in the world – if popular definitions of Digital Natives are accepted – turned 30 this year, whereas the youngest is not yet born. In the last three decades, a population has been growing up born in technologies, and mediated their sense of self and their interactions with external reality through digital and internet technologies. These interactions lead to significant transitions in the landscape of the social and political movements as the Digital Natives engage and innovate with new technologies to respond to crises in their local and immediate environments. However, more often than not, these experiments remain invisible to the mainstream discourses. The mechanics, aesthetics and manifestation of these localised and contextual practices hold the potentials for social transformation and political participation for the future. This presentation looks at three different case studies to look at how, through processes and productions which have largely been neglected as self indulgent or frivolous, Digital Natives around the world are actively participating in the politics of their times, and also changing the way in which we understand the political processes of mobilisation, participation and transformation.

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

The power of the next click...

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:41Z

P2P cameras and microphones hooked up to form a network of people who don't know each other, and probably don't care; a series of people in different states of undress, peering at the each other, hands poised on the 'Next' button to search for something more. Chatroulette, the next big fad on the internet, is here in a grand way, making vouyers out of us all. This post examines the aesthetics, politics and potentials of this wonderful platform beyond the surface hype of penises and pornography that surrounds this platform.

In his futuristic novel 1984, George Orwell conceived of a Big Brother who watches us all the time, tracking every move we make, every step we take, and reminding us that we are being watched. The Internet has often been seen as the embodiment of this fiction. There are many who unplug computers, look over surreptitious shoulders and wear tin-foil hats so that their movements cannot be traced. While this caricatured picture might seem absurd to funny, there is no denying the fact that we are being stalked by technologies. As our world gets more connected and our dependence on digital and internet objects grow, we are giving out more and more of our private and personal information for an easy trade-off with convenience and practicality.

As a reply to the question “Who watches the watchman?” several Internet theorists had suggested as a reply, a model where everybody looking at everybody else so that there is no one person who has exclusive powers of seeing without being seen. In this utopian state, people would be looking at each other (thus keeping a check on actions), looking after each other (forming virtual care networks) and looking for each other (building social networks with familiar strangers). After about 20 years of the first emergence of this discussion vis-à-vis the World Wide Web , comes an internet platform that produces a strange universe of people looking at.for.after each other in a condition of extreme vouyerism, performance, exhibitionism, surveillance and playfulness. It is a website that the Digital Natives are flocking to because it changes the way they look at each other. Literally.

Chatroulette! is a new MMORPG (Massively Multiple Online Role Playing Game) that uses a Peer-2-Peer network to constantly pair random people using their web cams, to look at each other. You start a Game and you begin a series of ‘lookings’ as people look back at you. Connect, cruise, watch, interact, boot – that is the anatomy of a Chatroullete! game. If you like what you see, you can linger a while or begin a conversation, or just ‘boot’ your ‘partner’ and get connected to somebody else in the almost infinite network. In the process you come across the unexpected, unpredictable and the uncanny. In the last one month of betting my time on Chatroullete!, I have seen it all and then some more – masturbating teenagers, strip teasing men and women, animals (including a very handsome tortoise) staring back at me, groups of friends eating dehydrated noodles and giggling, partners in sexual intercourse, graphic images of human gentilia, clever advertisements, pictures, art, musicians performing, dancers dancing, conference delegates staring bemusedly at a screen, ... the list is endless and probably exhausting. A growing community of users now dwell on Chatroulette! to connect in this new way that is part speed dating, part networking, part performance, part voyeurism.

The verdict on the blogosphere is still not in whether this is a new fad or something more long-lasting. Irrespective of its longevity, what Chatroullete! has done is show us a new universe of social interaction that Digital Natives around the world find appealing. The possibilities of cultural exchange, collaborative working, love, longing and learning that emerge around Chatroullete! are astounding. For Digital Natives the appeal of Chatroullete! is in forging viral and temporary networks which defy the Facebook way of creating sustained communities of interaction. This is the defining moment of virtual interaction and online networking –A model that is no longer trying to simulate ‘Real Life’ conditions online by forming permanent networks of ‘people like us’. Chatroulette! marks the beginning of a new way of spreading the message to completely random strangers, enticing them into thought, exchange and mobilisation through the world of gaming. The potentials for drawing in thousands of unexpected people into your own political cause are astounding. It might be all cute cats and sexual performance now, but it is only a matter of time when Digital Natives start exploring the possibility of using Chatroulette! to mobilise resources for dealing with crises in their personal and public environments. The wheel has been spun. We now wait to see where the ball lands.

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

Watson knows the Question

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:24:38Z

Now that an algorithm has given humans a run for their money on a quiz show, it’s time to rethink the idea of a machine. A fortnightly column on ‘Digital Natives’ authored by Nishant Shah is featured in the Sunday Eye, the national edition of Indian Express, Delhi, from 19 September 2010 onwards. This article was published on March 6, 2011.

Quantum theory suggests that multiple universes exist where every possible alternative can come true. If this were the case, somewhere there must be a world filled with machines that are looking at human evolution and figuring out new and advanced human machine relationships. Or for those who are not very quantum minded, imagine a world where machines are the evolved species and they depend upon human technology — emotional connections, semantic learning, etc. — for their daily transactions and survival. I am not suggesting a futuristic dystopia, like the kind that science fiction specialises in. However, it would be interesting to imagine a world where technology is not only at the periphery of human civilisation but at the centre of it.

I am proposing this world view to revisit the idea of a digital native. We have, so far, in scholarship and practice, education and policy, only looked at digital natives as young human beings who interact in new and innovative ways with evolving technologies, to form human-machine networks and assemblages. However, as Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence Augmentation develop to produce thinking technologies, it is time to start looking at being sapient as not necessarily a human condition.

Early last month, an artificially created super computing system called Watson (elementary, surely?) took the world by a storm as it competed against two human contestants on a popular American quiz show called Jeopardy! The trivia-based show provides answers clustered around a particular theme, and contestants have to ask the correct question to the answer, to win prize money. It is not a straightforward question-answer show because it relies on more than human memory and recollection. It gives cryptic clues (like the ones we are used to in a crossword), offers semantic relationships which need more than just a database memory, and relies on the contestants’ abilities to make creative connections between the clues in order to guess the right questions.

Watson, a product of seven years of research by IBM Research, works on an algorithm which simulates human language and cognitive patterns to make intelligent connections and deductions to understand the context of the clues and then provide answers. Powered by 2,800 super powered computers on a high-speed network, Watson competed against Jeopardy!’s biggest champions and made history as it showed extraordinary human learning and predictive powers. It has been one of the biggest achievements in advanced computing to develop an algorithm that mimics human learning and has changed the way in which we look at the human-machine relationship.

While much commentary on Watson revolves around what it means to be human, and subsequently, what it is to be a digital native, I have a different proposition to make. Perhaps, Watson’s debut on American television is not only about thinking what is human, but also about what it means to be a machine.

First, the Watson that appeared on TV was a sleek display screen that stood behind a lectern in the studio along with the human contestants. The original Watson was next door, being cooled by refrigeration units, but it appeared to the human audience (in and outside the studio) in its avatar. This was a radically new idea because we have always thought of the avatar as a technology based representation of human users. We find avatars on Facebook and in online role-playing games. To think of a machine appearing in a human form was radically new.

Second, Watson was not able to just make predictions by mining information. It was also able to display levels of confidence. If Watson was not confident about an answer, it did not push the buzzer to answer. In fact, once the information was harvested, it displayed its top three guesses to show that, like human contestants, it calculated risks of wrong answers.

Third, Watson was able to display or at least simulate human emotions. It took guesses even when in doubt. It showed a spirit of adventure and played big. It was disappointed when it lost or was happy when it got the answers. It was able to display its “emotions” through various displays in its form and could get the audience’s attention, applause and support.

What this experiment suggests to me is that Watson is perhaps a digital native. All our concentration has always been on human subjects, but synthetic life forms and technology-based intelligence, are blurring this distinction between humans and technologies. We should start thinking of a digital native as neither machine nor human being, but a combination of the two, residing simultaneously in both the realms of the physical and the digital. Watson is perhaps a new digital native, a technology that is growing and slowly learning from its interactions with the human world around it. One of these days, we might be living in the midst of computational devices, which, when we are flummoxed, might turn to us and say, “Elementary, my dear Sherlock!”

Contact: digitalnative@expressindia.com

Read the original in the Indian Express here

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

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

Separating the 'Symbiotic Twins'

Nitya V — 2019-09-18T14:10:06Z

This post tries to undo the comfortable linking that has come to exist in the ‘radical’ figure of the cyber-queer. And this is so not because of a nostalgic sense of the older ways of performing queerness, or the world of the Internet is fake or unreal in comparison to bodily experience, and ‘real’ politics lies elsewhere. This is so as it is a necessary step towards studying the relationship between technology and sexuality.

Here, I would like to deal with ‘openness’ as an idea that seems to structure discussions on the nature of both the Internet and queerness, in different ways. What does it mean to read an object/phenomenon/practice as signalling the acts of opening? What is opening placed in opposition to? The terms that come together to constitute the field of openness, so to speak, are these – transparency, publicness, privacy, safety, freedom, expression, anonymity (not so paradoxically), communication, virtuality on the one hand and opacity on the other, the closet, danger, morality, prohibition, lack of access and real life.

‘Openness’ is seen as the fundamental principle of the Internet. [1] The ramifications of this statement for Internet studies and by extension for studies on the ‘cyber queer’ or on the implications of Internet technology for alternative sexuality practices are then the concern of this post. What does this idea refer itself to in terms of how we live in the world? It refers to:

communication – the idea that with the Internet, communication has broken free of the temporal, spatial, linguistic and national restrictions imposed by earlier technologies;
space – that space is no longer defined in material terms and the binary or inside/outside and public/private, has been radically recast by the entry into our lives of ‘cyberspace’ and of space thought of in virtual terms;
body – dematerialization, disembodiment, terms that imply that on the Internet, you become an entity of the mind and of a desire that does not need the material body. The implications of this then being that the threat to the body, posed by its circulation in ‘real’ space and time, is now reduced, because that body no longer has as much at stake as the mind does, in the world of virtual technology. It also means release from a body that is encumbered by class difference and the various ‘markers’ of social relations;
decentralization – that the Internet adopts the mode of ‘weaving’, which is seen as a refusal of hierarchisation, the kind imposed by the ways in which information is made available, or production and consumption are managed, the ways in which class, race and gender restrict the ways in which individuals ‘participate’. Weaving then refers to a network system in place of a top-down system.

“The evidence of the trend towards openness is all around. Young people are sharing their lives online via Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Google, and whatever comes next. Though that mystifies their elders and appalls self-appointed privacy advocates, the transparent generation gains value from its openness. This is how they find each other, share, and socialize.”[2] (Jeff Jarvis, author of What would Google do?). We are henceforth titled the ‘transparent generation’, and we find the same value in the technology that defines our lives – the Internet. Why we are ‘transparent’ when compared to earlier generations? ‘Transparent’, ‘strawberry’, etc., are all terms that have come to describe the present generation of Internet users, the youth, a category born out of an idea of freedom from both moral and political constraint. In this imagination of them, they use technology in order to gain this freedom, in order to give their minds and bodies, which are straining at the leash, the required escape routes, from institutions (family, school and legal systems), from social relations (class and sexuality), and earlier forms of political identification.

The 90s was seen as the decade of openness, both in terms of new media technology and sexual practice. “With liberalisation sweeping the Indian mindset, more and more people are determined to enjoy the secret thrills sex has to offer. While high-profile executives are being seduced by escort services, the middle-class minds are being titillated by 'parties'. Those who are more discreet go for phone sex or MMS.”[3] What comes across is an idea of a new relationship to the temporal and the spatial, the cultural and the social. And sexuality seems to be central to this relationship. “A sexual revolution is sweeping through the small and big towns of India, and to stay immune to it is a big (t)ask.”[4] This article from The Week tells us how the ‘new sexual’ or the ‘newly sexual’ is described in popular discourse. So much so that the violence of the right-wing groups against women and against ‘obscene’ texts are sometimes explained through this very revolution of/in sex. It is read as a backlash, in a moment that is producing this new relationship, with the help of new media technologies such as the mobile phone, the Internet, the web camera and the ‘things’ that enable this openness. And because it is read as a backlash, the practices of the Hindu right are read as wishing to close, to reverse this process of opening out and to keep things as they used to be. Openness is not just a set of practices; it is read as a mindset, a shift from an older era of being bound within certain social structures. “Earlier only newly married women had the right, indeed were expected, to advertise their sexuality before receding into wall-flowers as respectable married women but today all that has changed….Walk into any college or even a school campus across the country and you have young men and women equating liberation and sexuality” (Patricia Uberoi). The linking of sexuality and liberation or freedom is here crucial, because what is particular to this era is the fact that ‘sexual expression’ is seen an indicator of freedom, whether this freedom is placed against moral or political orthodoxies, or on the other hand posited as Westernisation. Popular discourse reveals us as having arrived at the desire for sexual freedom (whether or not sexual freedom itself).

Queerness, a phenomenon of the 90s in the Indian context, is similarly described as an opening out. ‘Queer’ signifies a stepping out of the binary of heterosexuality/homosexuality, which will no longer encumber the body or the mind. It is a conscious move away from identities like lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender, in fact identity in itself is rendered fragmented and cannot emerge from a monolithic location.

“There was excitement and apprehension in the early '90s as an endless diversity of images flowed into private and public spaces…. Sexual speech came under special attention as newscasts, talk shows, sitcoms and a variety of TV shows challenged conventional family values and sexual normativity including monogamy, marriage and heterosexuality” (Shohini Ghosh – “The Closet is Ajar”, in Outlook[6]). Queerness is then linked to this rapid spread, this breathless circulation, this new access. Technological change is inextricably tied to this idea of the closet being ajar. “…the rapid spread of satellite TV and new media technologies continue to transform the cultural practices of the urban middle class.” It seems to be an era in which the boundaries of the sexual norm are being forced to redraw themselves, simply by the massive onslaught of ideas, speech and images. Queer identities are then seen as riding the crest of a wave of sexual revolution that has been washing over India over the past two decades.

These two formations, the Internet and the queer (we have not yet established what kind of formations they are), have been brought together in the term ‘cyber queer’ for the purpose of sociological and other analyses. The Levi’s ad for ‘innerwear’ shows a young black man saying, “On my web profile, I am a girl”. You can be a beer-bellied man in real life and turn into a voluptuous woman in second life. The virtual life, the virtual body and the virtual sex – the Internet is often spoken of as performing two functions for someone practicing alternative sexualities:

that it lets them be ‘other’ than they are (or are forced to be in real life);

by doing this, they are allowed to express their ‘real’ sexual desire or gender in a ‘safer’ space than in real life, thereby allowing for a freeing up or an opening (however, secretively it is done). “Cruising in physical spaces of the city has always been an affair which dangles on the edge of unsafety. Arrests and blackmail by policemen loaded with section 377, or extortion for money are often reported within queer circles. The Gay Bombay website has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. has several articles and personal narratives which function as cruising guidelines and warnings. In this context, Internet portals like guys4men provide forums which can be used to manoeuvre cruising in a different manner, possibly much safer than in moonlit Nehru or Central Parks in Delhi or train-station loos in Bombay.” (Mario d’Penha, gay activist [7])

Again, the notion of ‘space’ as suddenly emerging from the shadowy realms of ambiguity and secrecy, to stand in for freedom, is something that one often encounters in relation to cyber-queerness. And it is not just physical space which is pulled into this discourse of the technological shift, it is desire itself - “Desire is unabashed, playful and complex here”[8]. Desire, personified thus, is then seen as something set free by and through technological innovation.

Though this notion of sudden freedom is contested by researchers and scholars within the field, the result of that contestation has often been to:

affirm, in place of a single figure of the liberated cyber queer, the multiplicity of behaviours, dangers and freedoms that are generated. This is a little like affirming, in place of a single body called the public, several bodies that are termed multiple publics, or subaltern publics. The problem with this approach is that the nature of this public, the public-ness of it, is not then fully interrogated. It is assumed that the multiplicity in itself will be contest enough;
return to the body as existing at the root of queer existence. This return then, in claiming something that has been forgotten, or disavowed (our bodily existence), finds a strange comfort in this body, settling within it as if having found a location from which to speak, about the virtual, about cyberspace. For example, though Jodi O’Brien, in her essay “Changing the Subject”[9] refutes the claim “There are no closets in cyberspace”, she finds it necessary to return to the ‘body’ and not to subjectivity in order to do so – it is as if the materiality of the body is the only concrete thing that will allow this contestation. “The ‘alternative’ experiences that are enacted in ‘alternative’ or queer spaces are based on realities of the flesh: real, embodied experiences and/or fantasies cultivated through exposure to multisensory stimuli.” The body then becomes the explanatory fulcrum, and it is only from here that any kind of relationship to what is seen as virtuality can be understood.

An ancestor to the above problem - “What precisely does the cyber add to the queer identity which it lacked previously?”[10] This question, framed as the most basic one can ask of this figure, makes the following assumptions – that ‘queer’ is a human subject that precedes ‘cyber’, a.k.a non-human technology that the latter adds to this human subject and how it performs in the world, or has transformed it after the fact.

It is remarkably easy to say that in the great saga of sexual practices, technology has been an agent of transformation. Or, more importantly, to place cyberspace and queerness on par with each other, as sharing the same nature, or functioning on the same fundamental principle – of decentering or destabilizing a previously integrated or unified subject. Nina Wakeford asks of the term cyberqueer, “…what is the purpose of creating a hybrid of the two? It is a calculated move which stresses the interdependence of the two concepts, both in the daily practices of the certain and maintenance of a cyberspace which is lesbian, gay, transgendered or queer, and in the research of these arenas.”[11] By this logic, they are interdependent because there is some inherent quality in each that makes it offer itself to the other. “Queer sex is about following the desires of the flesh into an unnamed, uncategorized, uncharted realm, and doing something that neither of you can 'code'.”[12] The value of queerness therefore, derives from this lack of naming, an escape from coding of a particular kind, the zone of ambiguous enactments of desire.[13] “While it is this open transparent character of online existence that lays the Internet vulnerable to surveillance, it is also its self-inscribing character that makes it the playground of possibilities it is at its best. Cyberspace is habitat, playground, university, boulevard and refuge” (Shuddhabrata Sengupta, ‘Net Nomad on a Rough Route: A Despatch from Cyberspace’[14]). It is a zone of enactments of desire, a playground of possibilities, undefined, unbound.

There is then a reading of technology and sexuality as feeding off each other - “The relationship between technology and sexuality is a symbiotic one. As humankind creates new inventions, people find ways of eroticizing new technology. So it is not surprising that with the advent of the information superhighway, more and more folks are discovering the sexual underground within the virtual community in cyberspace” (Daniel Tsang)[15]. The above quote assumes the following:

that humankind existed before technology;
that first a technology is born and then there is the eroticization of this technology. It is only because of these assumptions that technology (in this case the Internet) as such can be seen as fundamentally open. Latour’s critique of the first assumption is that “Without technological detours, the properly human cannot exist.”

At the point of encountering this strange euphoria, we need to pause and consider, with Latour, this very relationship between technology and sexuality. “There has been a persistent silence on matters of sexuality in critical cultural studies of technology, perhaps partially because technology was associated with the instrumental to the exclusion of the representational (Case 1995). The creation of the term ‘cyber queer’ is itself an act of resistance in the face of such suppression” (Nina Wakeford). If the relationship between the two is viewed along representational lines, then the only direction that can be taken is one which will posit the human before the technological, will posit technological as that which enables (or not) representations of this human subject. In this sense, the representational is not far from the instrumental as an explanatory framework.

In all the explanations we have seen above, at one level or another, technology has viewed as the ‘thing’[17], and morality as that which ascribes meaning in a particular way to this thing. For example, the mobile phone is seen as the thing, the technology, with concrete attributes and use value. Morality is what then prescribes how this thing is to be used or not used, or the dangers that follow from its use in the world of social relations. Latour argues against this way of positioning technology and morality, and instead calls them both modes of ‘alterity’, albeit two different modes. Alterity in his definition is being-as-another, technology and morality both then constituting a particular way of being-as-another. Technology is not what you use, it is not a means to an end, it in fact changes the end to which it is the means. It is the curve, the detour. Morality is what questions means and ends and prevents the easy categorization of objects or people as one or another.

We are used to thinking of morality as keeping things static, wanting them unchanged, preventing new ideas or practices from being absorbed into the domains of our existence. Especially when it comes to sexuality, morality is seen as that which blocks, which lives in the past, which ‘ossifies’ – “…morality consists precisely of the willingness/ability to accept and organize one's behaviour in accordance with… ‘ossified’ recipes for interaction. If gender is a primary (read: coded as ‘natural’) institution for organizing social interaction, then boundary transgressions are not only likely to arouse confusion but to elicit moral outrage from the boundary keepers.”[18] Morality here refers to boundary keeping. Latour shifts our understanding of morality in ways that allow us to read beyond the boundary keeping. According to him, morality constantly interrupts the means-to-end process by questioning the use of something/someone as a means towards an end. Morality is then a hindrance to this process, not an ossification of social relations or practices.

This argument disrupts the location of technology as that which signals an opening out of the universe, and morality as signalling a closing off. True, Latour himself reads technology as creating new functions, or as creating new ends but he does not categorise these and the technologies they derive from as ‘open’. For him, technology is opaque, unreadable. Sexuality also then cannot be read as feeding off of technology, as some kind of symbiotic twin to it. The relationship between technological shifts and sexual practices or identities has to be read alternately to this idea of freedom from the shackles of social relations and bodily constraints. Sexuality cannot also then be opposed to morality, as it has often been done.

[1] www.openinternetcoalition.org.

[2] Jarvis, Jeff. “Openness and the Internet”, http://www.businessweek.com/managing/content/may2009/ca2009058_754247.htm.

[3] Doval, Nikita. “Bold Bodies”, in The Week, September 7, 2008.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Quoted in Doval, Nikita. "Bold Bodies", in The Week, September 7, 2008, p 50.

[6] http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?227507

[7] Quoted in Katyal, Akhil. “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html

[8] Katyal, Akhil “Cyber Cultures/Queer Cultures in Delhi”. See http://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/urbanstudygroup/2007-July/002827.html

[9] Women and Performance: Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.

[10] Wakeford, Nina. “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000

[11] “Cyberqueer”, in Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader.

[12] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”. In Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace.

[13] Here I deal with the idea of queerness at an almost commonsensical level, not at the level of the queer theory of Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick, just as cyberspace is also dealt with at the level of what it seems to be seen as doing.

[14] Quoted in the Sarai discussion.

[15] Tsang, Daniel. “Notes on Queer ‘n’ Asian Virtual Sex”. In Bell, David and Barbara Kennedy, eds. The Cybercultures Reader. Routledge: London, 2000.

[16] Latour, Bruno. “Morality and Technology: The End of the Means”. See http://www.bruno-latour.fr/articles/article/080-en.html.

[17] I put this in quotes because latour has a very specific definition of ‘thing’ or Ding, which this is not.

[18] O’Brien, Jodi. “Changing the Subject”, in Women and Performance, Issue 17: Sexuality and Cyberspace. See http://web.archive.org/web/20040604123458/www.echonyc.com/~women/Issue17/art-browning.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/symbiotic-twins

Sexuality, Queerness and Internet technologies in Indian context

Nithin Manayath — 2019-09-18T14:08:52Z

This blog post lays out the discursive construction of sexuality and queerness as intelligible domains in the Indian context while engaging with ideas of visibility, representation, exclusion, publicness, criminality, difference, tradition, experience, and community that have come into use with the critical responses to queer identities and practices in India.

In Brief

To understand the relationship between queerness and Internet technologies we must start with a critical analysis of what ‘queer’ inaugurates in the Indian context and to think forward from there with the technological— a thinking forward that is removed from a purely calculable instrumentality. What we will in this post try to argue is that practices of same-sex love in the Indian context operates through a setting up of sexual and nonsexual spaces for expression of same-sex desires and towards the end of this post attempt to delineate instances in the spatial domain of cyber space where this enframing is revealed. Simultaneously we will also then set up the critically queer as a mode of encountering and negotiating the domain of the sexual in the nonsexual.

Sexuality in the Indian context

The last four decades has seen the particular reiteration of the ‘gender and sexuality’ frame in the social sciences in India. As Mary E John and Janaki Nair in their introduction to ‘A Question of Silence’ note, sexuality since the 1980s “tended to condense into the more specific question of sexual preference associated with identity politics of the gay and lesbian communities.” The claim has been that this discourse has, in the Foucauldian sense, led to structuring the possible field of the action of people. This emergence of the sexuality question in India has not come with a rigorous examination of ‘sexuality’ as an intelligible domain in the Indian context. Here domain refers to a discursive space that is contingent on the theoretical existence of certain phenomena. Queer studies in the west have set up sexuality as a domain that cuts across social disciplines. As Eve Sedgwick puts it, "[A]n understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition." (Epistemology of the Closet, 1990) The question, then, is if this condition of analysis is also true for the non-West.

The emergence of gay and lesbian politics in India is tied to a development discourse that saw in the post-stonewall assertion of sexuality identities a radical potential that was, as yet, missing in the Indian context. The mushrooming of support groups as noted in Shakuntala Devi’s book ‘The World of Homosexuals’ as far back as the 1980s notes the critical function of pedagogy that they performed by creating a discourse of sexuality and identity. This is evidenced even today when people who introduce their homosexual orientation by describing it as a field they entered at a particular point in their lives are corrected to describe it ‘accurately’ as an orientation in the identitarian sense of the word; our Marxist legacies pointing to a false consciousness of their own experience and locating practices firmly within the domain of sexuality. Similarly an assertion that uses the phrase ‘doing gay sex’ is corrected to ‘being gay’. Another instance where practices are seen as inhering in identity is the familiar scene of a practicing homosexual man or woman who has pointed out the schizophrenic nature of being married to the opposite sex while still continuing to do ‘gay sex’. In fact, most, frameworks of peer counselling set up in the metros are infused with various degrees of pathologisations that reify identity ignoring aspects of social relations altogether.

The new left project that is best exemplified in the writings of John D Emilio— that attempted a structural approach to oppression based on sexuality by looking at the heterosexual family as an institution that reproduces capitalist ideology in the modern world, also gains currency in the field of resistance that marks rights based sexuality activism in India which draws much from an already existing global network of Marxist thinking and practice. In this argument heterosexual coupling is seen as the primary institution that disciplines us into the binaries of male and female sexed subject positions through a fixing of the woman as mother and wife valuing them as reproducers of labourers over their production as labourers and a containment of male sexuality through monogamy and normative heterosexuality wherein homosexuality is then seen as being disruptive of this reproduction of the form of sexual economy that is both a product of and reproduces modern capitalism.

Emerging from these constructions was also another academic procedure in the construction of homosexualities outside the west which was to discover a tradition of same-sex relations. Geeti Thadani’s Sakhiyani: Lesbian Desire in Ancient and Modern India and Ruth Vanitha and Saleem Kidwai’s Same-Sex Love in India are examples of this. Geeti Thadani poses a pre-modern utopia of gynefocal same-sex love between women (named lesbian as well) that were put paid to by Islam, colonialism and shifts in Hinduism.

Same-sex Love in India explicitly seeks to tackle the contemporary claim that homosexual behaviours are alien imports from the west. Even when they speak of passion, erotic emotion, love as opposed to sex, shame as opposed to guilt they rarely set out to explain these in terms of social relations and construct these ideas as pre-colonial realities that are disrupted by colonial modernity. The authors state in their introduction about the work’s mission to “help assure homo-erotically inclined Indians that large numbers of their ancestors throughout history and in all parts of the country shared their inclinations and were honoured and successful members of the society who contributed in major ways to thought, literature and their general good. These people were not regarded as inferior in any way nor were they always ashamed of their loves or desires. In many cases they lived happy and fulfilling lives with those that they loved.”

The Khoti and the Hijra

The search for indigenous categories has also led us to the kothi and the hijra. Categories marked as traditional and remainders, we are told, of the pre-colonial and pre-modern. The hijra is offered two possible positions. A possible translation through a transnational medico-legal discourse into the transsexual or the inter-sexed or under a cultural citizenship model into the institutionalised or culturally intelligible tradition of a third gender, who are, to quote Serena Nanda, “…neither male nor female but contain elements of both”.

In medical science the becoming of the hijra is explained as a gender identity disorder— a confusion over the apparent misfit between biological sex (of which there are only two) and a psychological true gender (again only two). Biological men who identify themselves as women are hijras— an identification that is made possible only through institutionalised relationships of power, in particular the power of relegation, which psychiatric discourse in India too reproduces to a large extent.

Narratives of hijras who state that if they only knew that men could have sex with other men as men then they would not have opted for castration is something we would find hard to illuminate in the translations effected on these bodies by the present categorisations of hijraness as transgender/transsexual/M2F/third gender all of which fundamentally cannot allow for such a claim. Such a narrative is a question posed in relation to knowledge about ‘gayness’ as identity and more importantly as the visibly dominant identity within the broad spectrum of alternatives. The medico-legal discourse of course now can jump in, and who is to say that it hasn’t already, to claim that the scientific knowledge that enables them to recognise gender identity disorder would have prevented such misrecognition and the ensuing decision to castrate.

So from a colonial practice that saw hijras as a criminal tribe and criminalised emasculation in 1888 and later also listed emasculation in the IPC as a criminal offence we have now a medical science that claims for itself to be the sole arbiter of gender identity. The many stories of the violence of medical practices that rarely grant recognition of gender identity disorder for years on end and instead identify a horde of other psychological illnesses such as schizophrenia, multiple personality disorder, etc as the true disorder are but indicative of the substantive ways in which such knowledge systems affect lives. We still need to consider if epistemic force fields have no effect whatsoever in relation to the modernisation of these categories as distinct identities in relation to the state?

The kothi is understood both as synonymous with hijra and as an attribute of hijraness. The kothi is also the hijra prior to nirvan, the castration experienced as generative of hijraness. That is to say that kothiness is what makes intelligible a hijra where kothiness would be that very set of acts that is often characterised by, to quote Serena Nanda, “adopting feminine mannerisms, taking on women’s names and using female kinship terms and a special, feminised vocabulary…they use coarse and abusive speech and gestures in opposition to the Hindu ideal of demure and restrained femininity”. Kothiness is in many ways all this and more but the kothi is defined for us today solely through the optics of penetration.

The kothi as identity is today strengthened and discursively constituted by the strategies of the HIV/AIDS industry and various NGOs. If we are to trace movements in HIV/AIDS discourses on same-sex attraction we will find a replication of the very same models we set out earlier. Initial interventions in this regard like those of the ABVA and Humsafar trust saw ‘gayness’ as a possible identity through which HIV strategies in this regard could form. An invocation of visibility versus invisibility was stressed which pushed forth the idea that the homosexual as population that was presently under a false consciousness will first have to group themselves under the identity ‘gay’ from where a protracted politics of position will enable the end of oppression on the basis of sexuality in particular through a relationship with HIV/AIDs much like it happened in the west through groups such as ACT-UP. It was also supposed that these identities based on sexual orientation could, now empowered, decide that they are not gay but some ‘x’ identity where ‘x’ becomes a culturally translatable, and indeed culturally intelligible, term for gayness.

Another position that was rhetorically differentiated from this orientation/identity model was another model of HIV strategic framing of India as a truly ‘queer’ space where the western categorisation of identities based on sexual orientation do not and indeed cannot exist (exemplified in the writings and statements of Shivananda Khan of Naz Foundation International.) This framework in denouncing sexual orientation as a culturally intelligible characteristic posits gender identity as the organising principle of male to male sexual encounters in India. The kothi, the panthi and the dupli are then pointed out as proof of this theory by a process of defining these categories. The kothi becomes the woman identified performer of femininity who takes on the passive penetrated role in sex and who only desires the panthi, the active non-feminine male identified. The dupli is then presumably within such a logic placed as someone who desires both the active and passive roles like the bisexual self who is characterised through an essential desire for both orientations/sexes.

It becomes clear that both these seemingly diverse positions are engaged in the discursive construction of a specific notion of sexualities as object choice positions where the object of desire is framed within the sameness/difference, male/female model and as identity.

What these moves do not explain is why these identities take their particular forms of expression here. Instead what we have is only an enumeration of new categories with the discovery of newer non-heterosexual practices.

Critically Queer

The post 1990s saw the emergence of the critically queer which at its most rigorous was theorised as a breaking out of heterosexual iterations of power. At its heart was the Foucauldian historicising of sexuality as an accumulating domain in the West beginning from the Roman period to the Western modern. We suggest that a similar accretion of the social domain into the domain of sexuality never takes place here and what instead accumulates is a mode of separating same-sex sociality into sexual and non-sexual domains with the scope of regulation restricting itself to this separation as opposed to the repression hypothesis that Foucault proffers for the West, which is not only to say that a range of sexual practices are performative to the extent that they mark out for themselves a separate domain of sociality for the sexual but also that identity has little or no part to play in this performative.

Let us look at two particular instances in everyday LGBT sociality to highlight this separation of domains.

Many of the male support groups that were set up in the formative years of what is being referred to as the LGBT movement in India emerge from public or privately created sexual spaces and over the years has seen an active regulation of this space to keep out the sexual. This mode of being is even evidenced online when a new member to an online forum set up for LGBT people expresses a sexual desire. Other members of the group almost immediately ask him to refrain from expressing his sexual desires in this space and suggest instead a networking site like ‘Planet Romeo’ for “such activities”. The last decade also saw the rise of parties, aimed at increasing visibility, that are organised for gay identified men in Mumbai, Bangalore or Delhi that often follow a strict no drag no sex rule which also includes self-policing of all toilets. So we have men dressed within clearly regulated notions of how men should dress who are dancing, whereas even two decades ago stories of parties organised similarly did not have these rules. The Bangalore karaga for instance allows for not just cross-dressing but also same-sex sexual encounters and that too in public spaces as opposed to the private spaces where entry is regulated. There are of course differences between the two but the point is that we are increasingly expected to accept as natural and necessary for the greater common gayhood these limits that we impose on ourselves and our actions.

This frame of marking out a separation between sexual and non-sexual sociality might better explain the various levels of incomprehension exhibited in the recent case of professor Ramchandra Srinivas Siras. Professor Srinivas Ramchandra Siras of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) was found dead just days after the Allahabad High Court ordered his reinstatement to his position as reader and chairman of the department of Modern Indian languages from which he had been summarily dismissed by AMU authorities on the basis of misconduct. The misconduct in question being Siras’s perfectly legal act of having consensual sex with another adult man within the privacy of his allotted living quarters on campus. The legal act was shot on tape by three sting-crazed citizen-journalists who violently broke into his house, followed by the AMU proctor, deputy proctor, media advisor and public relations officer. AMU’s decision to suspend Siras came significantly seven months after the Delhi High Court legalized consensual homosexual sex. Most accounts of LGBT activism relate this narrative as one of homophobia, despite the fact that a fact finding team of sexuality activists note that almost everyone they spoke to in the university knew that Professor Siras was sexually attracted to men for the last 22 years that he has taught there or for that matter that the university has also thrown out lecturers who chose to break any similar sexual code like marrying outside of their religion.

One would be hard-pressed to find a similar narrative in the West. One can argue that AMU authorities acted with a moral outrage only in relation to the tape that suddenly threatened the sanctity of this marked space of Siras’ private sexual act that had through its capture in public technology threatened to enter the non-sexual realm. If we are able to look at this event through the lens suggested then we have a better explanation for the long-term acknowledgement of Siras’s sexual practices and the ways in which any transgression of this space (here forcibly induced by the violent intrusion into Siras’s room and the recording of acts marked out constantly as sexual. A condemning of the violence of intrusion into Siras’s home, while being both important and necessary, does not in any way address the rigidity of the marking out of sexual and non-sexual fields. A demand for privacy in this context, as is seen in the instance of legal activism against and shift effected in section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, we suggest, operates in keeping these two fields distinct and does not challenge, in any way, the separation of the two domains. It is precisely in this transgression of fields that we wish to locate the project of the critically queer and the question of the technological.

Gender and Sexuality: A note: We want to flag here that while we agree that gender is a domain available for understanding social practice and identity its link to sexuality is not implicit. We will take this up at length in future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/queer-histories-of-the-internet/sexuality-queerness-and-internet-technologies-in-indian-context