The Centre for Internet and Society
https://cis-india.org
These are the search results for the query, showing results 341 to 355.
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The Rules of Engagement
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement
<b>Why the have-nots of the digital world can sometimes be mistaken as trolls. I am not sure if you have noticed, but lately, the people populating our social networks have started to be more diverse than before.</b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">Nishant Shah's column was <a class="external-link" href="http://www.indianexpress.com/news/the-rules-of-engagement/1022938/0">published in the Indian Express</a> on October 29, 2012.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">Oh, sure, we are still talking about a fairly middle-class hang-out that happens largely in English and is restricted to people in urban environments who have the economic and cultural capital of access. But if you browse through your friends’ lists and compare it with, say, the network from five years ago, you will realise that the age demography has changed quite dramatically. I am not suggesting that the Web was only the realm of the young – let us face it, the people who actually created the infrastructure of the Web were not tiny tots. However, with Web 2.0 at the turn of the millennium, we have had an extraordinary focus on young people online.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">But as the networks grow to include more people, there are now a lot of people online, who might not be the 16-year-old BlackBerry-wielding digital native, nor be in the “business of internet” but are finding a space for themselves, tentatively and steadily negotiating with this new space. Some of it might be because, those of us who were new kids on the block in the Nineties, are now older by a decade and are still on the block, but replaced by newer kids around the block. Some of it might be because there is an ease of access as portable computing devices grow more personal and get more people to use their smartphones as a gateway into the online worlds. But a lot of it is actually because the fold of the Web is expanding. The digital spaces of conversation are being integrated into our everyday lives and practices, replacing older forms of media and information structures and processes of social and cultural belonging.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">And so, even though the penetration of the interwebz is not as rapid in countries like India as one would have hoped for, we do see a wide age group of people coming online, forming networks, and entering into conversations. I hadn’t really realised this, even though I was adding them to my social networks, that the digital immigrants are now here, and they are here to stay. It suddenly surfaced in my thoughts, because I recently heard a few narratives which made me dwell on the effort and the learning that one takes for granted but is a prerequisite for belonging to these new social spaces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One of the first complaints I heard was about a hostility that many digital immigrants face when they start engaging with the social media. They follow the manuals. They read the FAQs. They look at patterns, and learn. And yet, even when they seem to be doing what seems to be exactly what everybody else is doing, they are often told that they got it all wrong. This is bewildering for many, because they cannot really see the difference. And the reason is that the social web is governed by a whole lot of unwritten rules and codes, which clearly are the rites of passage into the online world. These are not things that can be taught. These are not written in a guideline that tells you how to behave on Facebook or how to sift through the live-streams on Twitter. It is a fiercely guarded set of dos and don’ts which clearly distinguish between the digital natives and the digital immigrants, reinforcing exclusivity and exclusion. And when the digital immigrant violates these rules, they are often faced with a sneer, a sarcastic comment, or a dismissal as “not with it”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The second thing I have repeatedly noticed is “calling troll” to people who do not always know these rules. Trolling is not new to the world of the internet. People who disrupt conversations and discussions by posting provocative or tangential information, by voicing hateful opinions, by passing harsh judgments, or sometimes by willfully breaking the rules of the communities, in order to seek attention and interrupt the flow of conversations are called trolls. Trolls are universally frowned upon and trolling wars often take up epic proportions because people get emotionally invested in them. Trolls are often shamed publicly, their mistakes brought into an embarrassing spot-light and ridiculed in back-channels or even in public discussions.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Calling somebody a troll presumes that the user is conversant with the rules of the game and is then breaking them, working with the idea that if you are online, you are naturally a digital native. The digital immigrants often create noob mistakes that can appear troll-like but are not intended to be so, and are often on the receiving end of a community’s hostility. And it is time, now that our online networks are growing, for us to realise that our presumptions about who is online need to change. If we are looking at an inclusive Web, we need to stop imagining that the person on the other side of the interface is necessarily like us, and develop new networks of nurture, which allows the digital immigrants safe spaces to experiment, make mistakes, and learn like the best of us. The next time, before you call somebody a troll, see if it might just be somebody learning the tricks of the trade. If they are doing something wrong, just politely point it out to them. And remember, acceptance is not only for people who are like us, but about people who are markedly unlike us.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/india-express-news-nishant-shah-oct-29-2012-the-rules-of-engagement</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Digital Activism
Researchers at Work
Internet Governance
Digital Natives
2015-04-24T11:48:54Z
Blog Entry
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Korean Trans Cine-Media in Global Contexts: Asia and the World
https://cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts
<b>This conference to be held from March 27 to 29, 2013 is being organized by Trans - Asia Screen Culture Institute, Cinema Studies, Korean National university of Arts, Korean Film Archive and Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum, Waseda University. </b>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://www.trans-review.com/conferenceabout">Click</a> to read about the conference published on the website Trans-Asia Screen Culture Institute</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Nishant Shah will be participating in this event as part of our collaboration with the Inter Asia Cultural Studies consortium, to launch a new research cluster around trans-cine-media in the global context along with Kim SoYoung and Earl Jackson. He will speak on "The Asian Intercourse : Reimagining the Inter-Asia moment through ‘net-porn’ In networks".</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The conference is a response to what we see as a new epistemic shift, a new possibility for the reading of Korean cinema and Korean media texts. The previous “discovery” or “acceptance” of Im Kwon-Taek at Cannes, and the ambivalent Japanese obsession with “Winter Sonata” are moments in a recognition of Korean textual achievements that, at best, maintain a hierarchical (and highly circumscribed) “tolerance” of Korean cultural production. The subsequent achievements of other directors such as Pak Chan-wook and Kim Ki-duk deepened and expanded the hermeneutic situation internationally – a tendency that has continued in recent European conferences dedicated to Korean auteurs and most recently, Kim Ki-duk’s receiving the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">Moreover, Korean transformations of Japanese media texts have advanced a new kind of alchemical conversation across media that engages both the present and the past in new, multi-vocal ways. Beyond these mass-media events that can capture the attention of journalists, is the years of work of the scholars involved with the decentering of film history and canon in the work of scholars such the late Paul Willemen. And in addition to the “external” legitimation of the international film festival circuit are the internal developments within Korean cinema – namely the recent resurgence of a vital and engaged independent cinema – in both fiction documentary films. These events create an environment in which we can return anew to Korean cinema- past, present, and future – to read and realize in ways not-here-to-fore possible.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">These readings will include taking Korean cinema seriously on its own terms, but also to set Korean cinema in dialogue with other East Asian Cinemas in a global context.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; ">The outcome of the conference will be contributed to the project entitled as “A Compendium of History of Korean Cinema” sponsored by National Research Foundation of Korea.</p>
<p class="1" style="text-align: justify; "><a href="https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts.pdf" class="internal-link">Click</a> to download the full program.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts'>https://cis-india.org/news/trans-review-korean-trans-cine-media-in-global-contexts</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Researchers at Work
Digital Humanities
2013-03-21T10:32:40Z
News Item
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Rethinking the last mile Problem: A cultural argument
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1
<b>This research project, by Ashish Rajadhyaksha from the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, is mainly a conceptual-archival investigation into India’s history for what has in recent years come to be known as the ‘last mile’ problem. The term itself comes from communication theory, with in turn an ancestry in social anthropology, and concerns itself with (1) identifying the eventual recipient/beneficiary of any communication message, (2) discovering new ways by which messages can be delivered intact, i.e. without either distortion of decay. Exploring the intersection of government policy, technology intervention and the users' expectations, with a specific focus on Internet Technologies and their space in the good governance protocols in India, the project aims at revisiting the last mile problem as one of cultural practices and political contexts in India.</b>
<p></p>
<p>THE CULTURAL
LAST MILE</p>
<p>Ashish
Rajadhyaksha</p>
<p><u>The Argument</u>:</p>
<p>Mapped onto
developmental-democratic language since at least Independence, this concept,
further mapping concrete benefits with the delivery of the message, has come to
define the classic model by which the Indian state attempts to ensure that <em>policy</em> designed for <em>local implementation</em> actually reaches its <em>intended beneficiaries</em> without <em>distortion</em>.
The immense link between communication theory and democracy thereby defines not
only the Indian state’s historic dependence on <em>technologies</em> of communication – radio, terrestrial and satellite.
It goes further, as the technological apparatus – and its variants of the
classic ‘broadcast’ model of single sender-multiple receiver – comes to
underpin the very definition of democratic development.</p>
<p>One consequence
is an <em>evolutionary</em> definition of
technology, with the last mile defined as a means of eternal purification of
the message, combining content ‘corruption’ with socio-economic corruption, as
newer generations of technology tirelessly eliminate distortion in both. This
could well be the history of Indian state policy, from radio broadcasts
representing the ‘voice of the State’ to the era of e-Governance. Such an authority is somewhat graphically in evidence in
recent years in the deployment of ‘neutral’ technology such as computers within
e-governance initiatives, which have, when successful , seen
computer-illiterate farmers make wide use of ICT services where they ‘do not
feel that there is a barrier to their obtaining information’, a ‘tribute to the
grassroots staff and their training’, but also to ‘faith in the technology’
(Shaik, Jhamtani and Rao 2004: 9). The attribution of such ‘neutrality’ to
modern ‘scientific’ technology has been in evidence from late
nineteenth-century still photography to the use of technologies such as ‘First
In–First Out (FIFO)’, a way that prevents queue-jumping, biometrics and double
screens for users to view typed in matter, including touch screens
(Parthasarathy 2005, VIII: 9).</p>
<p><u>The Research
Project</u></p>
<p>This project
assumes that, given the chronic historic failure in bridging the last mile,
whether in communication theory or in the standard functioning of development
projects (a key component of the relatively new discipline of disaster
management) – a failure stemming from difficulties in both naming and accessing
intended beneficiaries – it becomes necessary to reinvestigate the model
itself, along with its historic failures.</p>
<p>The project is
split into three parts: <br />
(1) The conceptual argument: a historical trace of the theoretical origins of
the concept ‘Last mile’ (even if not named as such), and key technical
locations of its deployment: the telegraph, the ‘film trains’ in the 1920s, the
radio (extended to transistorization in the 1960s), and the first experiments
with terrestrial and satellite technology. <br />
(2) It will then take three specific examples (perhaps but may be
changed),(a) the SITE experiment of the
1970s with specific new field work on the well known Kheda experiment; (b) the
Cable Television movements in India in the 1980s, and (c) Experiments with WLL
in IIT Chennai in the 1990s. <br />
(3) The concluding section will address locations where the last mile has in
fact been bridged successfully, in the review’s estimation, and will inquire
into how it came to be functional. It is at this point speculated that it
worked mainly because (a) the original model was either tampered with or used
contrary to stated intentions, and (b) when it worked, this happened with the
connivance of the state. The project will therefore perhaps conclude with the
following investigations: that historically significant occasions when
alternative definitions were thrown up for the last mile worked mainly because
they were dependent on error and accident (rather than seeing these as
interruptions or distortions to the signal), and that they functioned more on
both peer-to-peer and reverse broadcasting than on the
single-sender-multiple-recipients model.</p>
<p><u>References</u>:</p>
<p>Ashish Rajadhyaksha
(1990), ‘Beaming Messages to the Nation’, <em>Journal of Arts &
Ideas</em>, No. 19 (May): 33–52.</p>
<p>Ashish Rajadhyaksha
(1999), ‘The Judgement: Re-Forming the Public’, <em>Journal of Arts &
Ideas</em>, Nos. 32–33 (April)</p>
<p>N. Meera Shaik, Anita
Jhamtani and D.U.M. Rao, ‘Information and Communication Technology in
Agricultural Development: A Comparative Analysis of Three Projects from India’,
Agricultural Research and Extension Network (AGREN), 2004.</p>
<p>Balaji Parthasarathy et
al (ed), ‘Information and Communications Technologies for Development: A
Comparative Analysis of Impacts and Costs from India’, Bangalore: International
Institute of Information Technology, 2005.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/post1</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Histories of Internet
Researchers at Work
Internet Histories
Digital Governance
2015-04-03T10:54:21Z
Blog Entry
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The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance: Call for Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem
<b>Re-thinking the Last Mile Problem research project by Ashish Rajadhyaksha is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. The ‘last mile’ is a communications term which has a specific Indian variant, where technology has been mapped onto developmentalist–democratic priorities which have propelled communications technologies since at least the invention of radio in the 1940s. For at least 50 years now, the ‘last mile’ has become a mode of a techno-democracy, where connectivity has been directly translated into democratic citizenship. It has provided rationale for successive technological developments, and produced an assumption that the final frontier was just around the corner and that Internet technologies now carry the same burden of breaching that last major barrier to produce a techno-nation. The project has fed into many different activities in teaching, in examining processes of governance and in looking at user behaviour.
</b>
<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger.</p>
<p>Laying out a theoretical review of the history of technologies of archiving in the country, the project aims at building case studies of public and private archives in the country and the needs for a local capacity building network of historians, archivists, technologists and state bodies which exploits the digital and Internet technologies for building new archives of Indian material.</p>
<p>The monograph has emerged out of the "Rethinking the Last Mile Problem" project that was initiated in September 2008. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback.Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document:</p>
<ol>
<li> <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/leap-of-rhodes" class="internal-link" title="Last Mile Problem">PDF</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/rethinking-last" class="internal-link" title="Rethinking Last">Word</a></li></ol>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback by 30 December 2010 to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/the-last-cultural-mile/last-mile-problem</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Researchers at Work
Histories of Internet
Internet Studies
2015-04-03T10:55:07Z
Blog Entry
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Production Sprint — A Public Exhibition at CIS
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis
<b>The Making Change project invites you for a public exhibition of stories of change from all over Asia, where the first of its Production Sprints will take place. The exhibition will be held at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) office in Bangalore on June 7, 2014 between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m.</b>
<hr />
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/mc-flyer.pdf" class="internal-link">Download the event flier</a> [PDF, 402 Kb]</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">What does 'Making Change' mean to you? What are the processes of change? The infrastructure of change? The actors of change? A round-table discussion and exhibition by 23 change makers from 15 countries in Asia, at the Centre for Internet & Society, Saturday, 7th June, 5 - 7 p.m. Please do come.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Making Change project questions traditional understandings of change –where change is employed in the name of power, reduced to a ‘spectacle’ by global media and goes largely unquestioned in the public discourse- and aims to build more adequate frameworks to address the idea of change in the context of common knowledge, networked media and information societies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Making Change is hosting focused, intensive, and production-oriented workshops called <strong>Production Sprints</strong> to facilitate the convergence of actors and ideas.These will be spaces of knowledge exchange between change-makers around processes, narratives and experiences of change and of experimentation with multi-modal forms and formats of knowledge production (text, image, sound, etc). Participants will be asked to group around four topics: concepts, crises ecologies and networks of change. These visions and practices, we hope will produce new ways of thinking about change.</p>
<p>During the Bangalore production sprint, we will document the various knowledges acquired through the pre-production stage and the 5 day intensive sessions on formats, storytelling and visual presentation modes; and we will close with an exhibition of the resulting narratives of change. We invite you to come and participate in the exhibition.</p>
<p>Date: June 7th, 2014<br /> Time: 5pm- 7pm<br /> Location: The Center for Internet and Society</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/events/production-sprint-public-exhibition-at-cis</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
RAW Events
Making Change
Net Cultures
Researchers at Work
Event
2015-10-24T14:23:30Z
Event
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January 2017 Newsletter
https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2017-newsletter
<b>Welcome to the January 2017 newsletter of the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS). </b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Dear readers,</p>
<p>We are pleased to bring you the Centre for Internet & Society's January newsletter. Previous issues of the newsletters can be <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters">accessed here</a>.</p>
<hr style="text-align: justify; " />
<table class="listing grid" style="text-align: justify; ">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th>Highlights</th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPD) Act, which was passed in December 2016, seeks to give effect to the rights and obligations enshrined in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with disabilities, which India signed and ratified nearly a decade ago. Nirmita Narasimhan <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/digital-accessibility-in-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-act-2016">in a blog entry</a> has summarized the key provisions of the Act relating to digital accessibility.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/super-cassettes-v-myspace">latest judgment</a> in the matter of Super Cassettes v. MySpace is a landmark and progressive ruling, which strengthens the safe harbor immunity enjoyed by Internet intermediaries in India. CIS was one of the intervenors in the case, and has been duly acknowledged in the judgment. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">Meena Gayathri <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/meet-telugu-wikipedian-surampudi-meena-gayathri-2013-the-first-south-indian-wikiwoman-completing-100wikidays-challenge">became the first South Indian Wikiwoman to complete 100 Wikidays challenge</a>. The challenge required Wikipedians to create one new article per day for one hundred days in a row. Gayathri's contribution and passion towards Telugu language and culture have transcended into a "knowledge revolution".</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The Committee on Digital Payments constituted by the Ministry of Finance and chaired by Ratan P. Watal, Principal Advisor, NITI Aayog, submitted its report on the "Medium Term Recommendations to Strengthen Digital Payments Ecosystem" on December 09, 2016. The report was made public on December 27, and comments were sought from the general public. CIS <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-report-of-the-committee-on-digital-payments-dec-2016">submitted its comments</a>. The comments were authored by Sumandro Chattopadhyay. </li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">ICANN sought community input on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy on 7 November 2016. In response to this CIS <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-proposed-icann-community-anti-harassment-policy">submitted its comments</a>. The comments were authored by Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; ">The eleven sessions selected for the Internet Researchers' Conference 2017 (IRC17) to be held at the IIIT Bangalore campus during March 3-5, 2017 has been announced. The <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions">conference is being organised</a> by the Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy (CITAPP) at IIIT Bangalore and CIS.</li>
</ul>
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p><b>CIS in the news</b></p>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/wall-street-journal-gabriele-parussini-january-13-2017-indias-digital-id-rollout-collides-with-rickety-reality">India’s Digital ID Rollout Collides With Rickety Reality</a> (Gabriele Parussini; Wall Street Journal; January 13, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/washington-post-january-14-2017-rama-lakshmi-millions-of-indians-move-from-cash-to-digital-payments">Millions of Indians move from cash to digital payments. But some ask whether it’s safe</a> (Rama Lakshmi; Washington Post; January 14, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-january-14-2017-sunil-abraham-on-aadhaar-misuse-during-demonetisation">Sunil Abraham on Aadhaar's misuse during demonetisation</a> (Economic Times; January 14, 2017)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/economic-times-indulekha-aravind-january-15-2017-the-soon-to-be-launched-aadhaar-pay-will-let-you-make-purchases-using-your-fingerprint">The soon-to-be launched Aadhaar Pay will let you make purchases using your fingerprint</a> (Indulekha Aravind; January 15, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-january-16-2017-sanjay-kumar-singh-lost-your-phone-here-is-how-you-can-make-your-mobile-theft-proof">Lost your phone? Here's how you can make your mobile theft-proof</a> (Sanjay Kumar Singh; Business Standard; January 16, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/bloomberg-mayank-jain-january-17-2017-dangers-of-aadhaar-based-payments-that-no-one-is-talking-about">The Dangers Of Aadhaar-Based Payments That No One Is Talking About</a> (Mayank Jain; Bloomberg; January 17, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/business-standard-mj-antony-ayan-pramanik-apurva-venkat-supreme-court-issues-notice-to-whatsapp-centre-on-data-privacy">Supreme Court issues notice to WhatsApp, Centre on data privacy</a> (MJ Antony, Ayan Pramanik and Apurva Venkat; Business Standard; January 17, 2017).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/ndtv-december-24-2016-demonetisation-cost-versus-benefit">Demonetisation: Cost Vs Benefit</a> (NDTV; December 24, 2016). <i>Sunil Abraham took part in the Big Fight programme aired by NDTV. The video was published on January 17, 2017</i>.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/financial-times-amy-kazmin-january-23-2017-for-indias-complaints-department-visit-facebook-live">For India’s complaints department, visit Facebook Live</a> (Amy Kazmin; Financial Times; January 23, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
</ul>
<p><b>CIS members wrote the following articles:</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-shyam-ponappa-january-4-2017-cashlessness-needs-connectivity">Cashlessness Needs Connectivity</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-8-2017-digital-native-the-dream-of-the-cyborg">Digital Native: The Dream of the Cyborg</a> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 8, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/london-school-of-economics-and-political-science-january-16-2017-digital-transitions-in-the-newsroom-how-are-indian-language-papers-adapting-differently">Digital transitions in the newsroom</a>: How are Indian language papers adapting differently? (Zeenab Aneez; London School of Economics and Political Science; January 16, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again">Digital native: Back at it Again</a> (Nishant Shah; Indian Express; January 22, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<ul>
</ul>
<p><b>Jobs</b></p>
<div class="keyResearch">
<div id="parent-fieldname-text-79790f6fc21648dba6d4ca3a23773ac5">
<ul>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/jobs/policy-officer-cyber-security">Policy Officer (Cyber Security)</a> </li>
<li><a href="http://cis-india.org/jobs/senior-policy-officer-cyber-security">Senior Policy Officer (Cyber Security)</a> </li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/jobs/internship">Internship</a> - Application accepted throughout the year</li>
<li><a class="internal-link" href="http://cis-india.org/jobs/seeking-survey-participants-for-research-on-musician-livelihood">Survey Participants for Research on Musician Livelihood</a><a class="internal-link" href="http://cis-india.org/jobs/community-advocate-on-consultancy-basis-access-to-knowledge-language-anchor"><span class="internal-link"> </span></a></li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">-------------------------------------<br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility">Accessibility & Inclusion</a> <br /> ------------------------------------- <br /> India has an estimated 70 million persons with disabilities who don't have access to read printed materials due to some form of physical, sensory, cognitive or other disability. As part of our endeavour to make available accessible content for persons with disabilities, we are developing a text-to-speech software in 15 languages with support from the Hans Foundation. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed <a href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer">here</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/blog/digital-accessibility-in-the-rights-of-persons-with-disabilities-act-2016">Digital accessibility in the Rights of Persons With Disabilities Act 2016</a> (Nirmita Narasimhan; January 23, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p> </p>
<p><b>Participation in Event</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/accessibility/news/workplace-solutions-champions-consultative-workshop">Workplace Solutions Champions Consultative Workshop</a> (Organized by Enable India, January 21 - 22, 2017; Ecumenical Christian Centre, Bangalore). Nirmita Narasimhan attended the workshop.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>----------------------------------- </b><br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k">Access to Knowledge</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br />Our Access to Knowledge programme currently consists of two projects. The Pervasive Technologies project, conducted under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), aims to conduct research on the complex interplay between low-cost pervasive technologies and intellectual property, in order to encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The Wikipedia project, which is under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation, is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Copyright and Patent</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/super-cassettes-v-myspace">Super Cassettes v. MySpace</a> (Redux) (Anubha Sinha; January 16, 2017).<br /><br /></li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/events/seminar-on-rethinking-copyright-and-licensing-for-digital-publishing-today-delhi-jan-23-2017">Seminar on Rethinking Copyright and Licensing for Digital Publishing Today</a> (Organized by Pro Helvetia - Swiss Arts Council, Goethe-Institut Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi, and CIS; New Delhi; January 23, 2017). Anubha Sinha attended the event.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Wikipedia</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of the <a href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan">project grant from the Wikimedia Foundation</a> we have reached out to more than 3500 people across India by organizing more than 100 outreach events and catalysed the release of encyclopaedic and other content under the Creative Commons (CC-BY-3.0) license in four Indian languages (21 books in Telugu, 13 in Odia, 4 volumes of encyclopaedia in Konkani and 6 volumes in Kannada, and 1 book on Odia language history in English).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/wikisangamotsavam-2016">WikiSangamotsavam 2016</a> (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-hyderabad-book-fair">Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Hyderabad Book Fair</a> (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/telugu-wikipedia-stall-at-rajahmundry-book-fair-1">Telugu Wikipedia Stall at Rajahmundry Book Fair</a> (Manasa Rao; January 18, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/blogs/mini-workshop-on-tools-wikipedia-monthly-meetup-hyderabad">Mini Workshop on Tools: Wikipedia Monthly Meetup, Hyderabad</a> (Manasa Rao and Pavan Santhosh; January 18, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/meet-telugu-wikipedian-surampudi-meena-gayathri-2013-the-first-south-indian-wikiwoman-completing-100wikidays-challenge">Meet Telugu Wikipedian Surampudi Meena Gayathri – the first South Indian Wikiwoman completing 100 Wikidays Challenge</a> (Ting-Yi Chang; January 23, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Event Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/a2k/events/odia-wikipedia-and-orientation-training-programme">Odia Wikipedia and Orientation Training Programme</a> (Organized by CIS-A2K team; Indian Institute of Mass Communication, Dhenkanal; January 31, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">►Openness</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">Our work in the Openness programme focuses on open data, especially open government data, open access, open education resources, open knowledge in Indic languages, open media, and open technologies and standards - hardware and software. We approach openness as a cross-cutting principle for knowledge production and distribution, and not as a thing-in-itself.</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><b>Participation in Event</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/openness/news/cbga-consultation-on-opening-up-access-to-budget-data-in-india-delhi-jan-27-2017">CBGA - Consultation on Opening Up Access to Budget Data in India</a> (Organized by CBGA; January 27, 2017; New Delhi). Sumandro Chattapadhyay was a speaker.</li>
</ul>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>----------------------------------- </b><br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance">Internet Governance</a> <br /><b> -----------------------------------</b></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and IDRC) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on restrictions that the Indian government has placed on freedom of expression online.</p>
<p>►Privacy</p>
<p><b>Submission</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-report-of-the-committee-on-digital-payments-dec-2016">Comments on the Report of the Committee on Digital Payments</a> (Sumandro Chattapadhyay and Amber Sinha; January 12, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entries</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/the-design-technology-behind-india2019s-surveillance-programmes">The Design & Technology behind India’s Surveillance Programmes</a> (Udbhav Tiwari; January 20, 2017)</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/privacy-after-big-data">Workshop on ‘Privacy after Big Data’</a> (Amber Sinha; January 27, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p><b>Events Organized</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/discussion-on-ranking-digital-rights-in-india-delhi-jan-07-2017">Discussion on Ranking Digital Rights in India</a> (India Islamic Cultural Centre, New Delhi; January 7, 2017).</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/events/rankathon-on-digital-rights-delhi-jan-08-2017">Rankathon on Digital Rights</a> (CIS office, New Delhi; January 8, 2017). </li>
</ul>
<br />
<p><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li> <a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/global-governance-futures-2027-session-3-new-delhi">Global Governance Futures 2027 - Session 3</a> (Organized by Global Public Policy Institute and supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung; New Delhi; January 17, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay joined Ankhi Das (Facebook) and Arun Mohan Sukumar (Observer Research Foundation) to discuss the "data governance" scenarios developed by the GGF 2027 Fellows.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/cpdp-computers-privacy-and-data-protection-2017">CPDP (Computers, Privacy and Data Protection) 2017</a> (Organized by Privacy International; Brussels, January 26, 2017). Amber Sinha participated as a panelist.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p>►Big Data</p>
<p><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/new-media-personalisation-and-the-role-of-algorithms">New Media, personalisation and the role of algorithms</a> (Amber Sinha; January 2, 2017).<br /><br /></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Participation in Events</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/training-programme-for-chairs-convenor-and-experts-for-international-standardization-work">Training programme for Chairs, Convenor and Experts for International Standardization Work</a> (Organized by National Institute of Training for Standardization, under the Bureau of India Standards; January 19 - 20, 2017; NOIDA). Udbhav Tiwari attended the training programme.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/news/seminar-on-understanding-financial-technology-cashless-india-and-forced-digitalisation-delhi-jan-24-2017">Seminar on Understanding Financial Technology, Cashless India, and Forced Digitalisation</a> (Centre for Financial Accountability; New Delhi; January 24, 2017). Sumandro Chattapadhyay spoke on the emerging architecture of FinTech in India.</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p>►Free Speech & Expression</p>
<p><b>Submission</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/comments-on-the-proposed-icann-community-anti-harassment-policy">Comments on the Proposed ICANN Community Anti-Harassment Policy</a> (Padma Venkataraman, Rohini Lakshané, Sampada Nayak and Vidushi Marda; January 13, 2017).<br /><br /></li>
</ul>
<p><b>Blog Entry</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/social-media-monitoring">Social Media Monitoring</a> (Amber Sinha; January 13, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<br />
<p>----------------------------------- <br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/telecom">Telecom</a> <br /> ----------------------------------- <b><b><br /> </b></b>CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources, and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate:</p>
<p><b>Article</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/telecom/blog/business-standard-shyam-ponappa-january-4-2017-cashlessness-needs-connectivity">Cashlessness Needs Connectivity</a> (Shyam Ponappa; Business Standard; January 4, 2017 and Organizing India Blogspot; January 5, 2017).</li>
</ul>
<p><b>-----------------------------------</b><br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/raw">Researchers at Work</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br /> The Researchers at Work (RAW) programme is an interdisciplinary research initiative driven by an emerging need to understand the reconfigurations of social practices and structures through the Internet and digital media technologies, and vice versa. It aims to produce local and contextual accounts of interactions, negotiations, and resolutions between the Internet, and socio-material and geo-political processes:</p>
<p><b>Event</b></p>
<ul>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://cis-india.org/raw/irc17-selected-sessions">Internet Researchers' Conference 2017</a> (IRC17) - Selected Sessions (Organized by Centre for Information Technology and Public Policy and CIS; IIIT, Bangalore; March 3 - 5, 2017). Eleven sessions have received 10 or more nominations.</li>
</ul>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><b>----------------------------------- </b><br /><a href="http://cis-india.org/">About CIS</a> <br /><b> ----------------------------------- </b><br /> The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) is a non-profit organisation that undertakes interdisciplinary research on internet and digital technologies from policy and academic perspectives. The areas of focus include digital accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge, intellectual property rights, openness (including open data, free and open source software, open standards, open access, open educational resources, and open video), internet governance, telecommunication reform, digital privacy, and cyber-security. The academic research at CIS seeks to understand the reconfigurations of social and cultural processes and structures as mediated through the internet and digital media technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Follow us elsewhere</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<ul style="text-align: justify; ">
<li> Twitter:<a href="http://twitter.com/cis_india"> http://twitter.com/cis_india</a> </li>
<li> Twitter - Access to Knowledge: <a href="https://twitter.com/CISA2K">https://twitter.com/CISA2K</a> </li>
<li> Twitter - Information Policy: <a href="https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy">https://twitter.com/CIS_InfoPolicy</a></li>
<li> Facebook - Access to Knowledge:<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k"> https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k</a> </li>
<li> E-Mail - Access to Knowledge: <a>a2k@cis-india.org</a> </li>
<li> E-Mail - Researchers at Work: <a>raw@cis-india.org</a> </li>
<li> List - Researchers at Work: <a href="https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers">https://lists.ghserv.net/mailman/listinfo/researchers</a></li>
</ul>
</div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Support Us</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<div style="text-align: justify; ">Please help us defend consumer and citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of 'The Centre for Internet and Society' and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru - 5600 71.</div>
</div>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">► Request for Collaboration</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; ">
<p style="text-align: justify; ">We invite researchers, practitioners, artists, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to engage with us on topics related internet and society, and improve our collective understanding of this field. To discuss such possibilities, please write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil@cis-india.org (for policy research), or Sumandro Chattapadhyay, Research Director, at sumandro@cis-india.org (for academic research), with an indication of the form and the content of the collaboration you might be interested in. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia projects, write to Tanveer Hasan, Programme Officer, at <a>tanveer@cis-india.org</a>.</p>
<div style="text-align: justify; "><i>CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects</i>.</div>
</div>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2017-newsletter'>https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/january-2017-newsletter</a>
</p>
No publisher
praskrishna
Access to Knowledge
Telecom
Accessibility
Internet Governance
Researchers at Work
2017-03-01T06:00:37Z
Page
-
Digital native: Back at it Again
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again
<b>The Indian digital landscape has put us in a loop of hashtags and outrage, a space where we have mastered the art of shame.</b>
<p>The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/digital-native-back-at-it-again-4485235/">published in the Indian Express</a> on January 22, 2017.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Writing a regular column is daunting. One of the things that I constantly have to check is that I am not repeating myself. At the same time, in the digital age where all memory has become storage, and all that is stored is quickly forgotten, I also hope that what I write has life beyond the first few clicks, the Sunday morning coffee, the shares and likes that mark the beginning of the end of digital information.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">However, as I write the column this new year, I find myself in a strange situation where I am repeating what I have done the last three years at the beginning of each new year, and where I am desperately wishing that things I had last written became dated. Three years ago, while commenting on the Indian digital landscape, I had written about the rage, the fury, and the almost deafening battle cry that had captured the national imagination, when, at the turn of the year, a young woman we named Nirbhaya lost her life to violent sexual abuse on a moving bus in Delhi. #NeverAgain, we tweeted. #AlwaysRemember, we chanted. We called her #OurBraveheart and, in that moment of national outcry and dialogue about gender and sexual abuse in our public spaces, it seemed as if the digital landscape was reflecting a pivotal change in the fabric of the country.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The year after that, as we struggled to find ways in which law can keep us safe, the apex court in India re-criminalised homosexuality, reverting the judgment of the Delhi High Court which had given life and dignity to same sex and queer couples. The legal system proved that it is not only blind but also susceptible to mass populism that denies the rights to consenting adults to live their lives in dignity. That was the year when we hashtagged our solidarity with #NoGoingBack, making it trend so that umpteen number of people came out in support of homosexuality in the country. Support to the queer community came from unexpected quarters, like the generally reticent Bollywood celebrities who supported #Scrap377, and even religious and political representatives who recognise that the continued abuse of queer communities is a violation of our constitutional rights.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">While the struggles for gender and sexual equality continue in the country, and tireless activists and civil society advocates persist in their demands of justice and protection, here we are, waking up to yet another year of public shame and private grief, as reports came of the aggressive sexual abuse that women had to endure on the streets of Bangalore. The incident unfolded with all the trappings of victim blaming, slut shaming, and a sentence that should never be allowed — “She was asking for it.” On the digital social web, in the meantime, some sanctimonious men, indignant at the thought of being accused of patriarchal silence and misogynist privilege, decided to take attention away from the victims and decided to steal the spotlight with a hashtag that says #NotAllMen. These tweeters, who have no problem in enjoying the benefits of an abusive sexist social order — they might not actively go out to inflict gendered violence, but they are complicit in enjoying the privileges of that system — had a problem with taking responsibility for that system. They would not be shamed. Not even when an overwhelming number of women wrote back with #YesAllWomen, would they concede their grounds.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">As it occurs so often on the Interwebz, the conversation that demanded both a private reflection and a public dialogue, devolved into personal name calling and collective anger deflected from the problem at hand. In the midst of the sensationalism that passes off as discussion in populist media channels, I want to think of something else. If all these voices in our public discourse were to be heard, it would feel like gendered and sexual safety are national preoccupations and bipartisan concerns. The customised expressions of our personalised media abound with anger, shame, critique, and analyses of why our country is increasingly becoming unsafe for certain bodies to walk through it. Social media accounts are producing a spectacle of concern for safety so effectively that it would seem these questions will be resolved immediately.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">And yet, even as I look at my biographical history of writing this column, I realised that I have revisited these discussions over and over again. This is a debate that now occurs regularly, each time, giving us the chance to identify a problem, go online and make a lot of noise about it, and then settle down, with a smug smile on our faces of having done our public performance, without ever translating it into action. On the digital web, we seem to have mastered the art of shame without guilt. We continue to hashtag, like, tweet, share, and click our ways, using prepackaged formulae of expression without translating it into personal reflection or collective action. And the digital seems to be enabling this where having an opinion seems to matter more than actual transformation, and spectacles of shame seem to acquit us of the responsibility of action.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-january-22-2017-digital-native-back-at-it-again</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Researchers at Work
Digital Natives
2017-02-02T15:04:46Z
Blog Entry
-
Porn: Law, Video, Technology
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology
<b>Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures. </b>
<p>This monograph is not so much about a cultural product called porn as it is a meditation on visuality and seeing, the construction and experience of gazing, technology and bodies in the law, modern myths, the interactions between human and filmic bodies. And technology not necessarily as objects and devices that make pornography possible (but that too), but as history and evolution, process and method, and what this brings to understanding what pornography is.</p>
<p>Namita’s approach brings film studies, technology studies, critical theory, philosophy, literature and legal studies into a document that reads as part literature review, part analysis, going deep, as a monograph should. Reading through this I was struck by the ways of seeing and writing, that a subject like pornography demands – and allows for. I found the structure of the entire piece well conceived, akin to 3D models of spirals rather than linear, much like the experience of watching itself, perhaps. Personally, I know I’m going to keep going back to this monograph for its rich references as much as for how Malhotra examines visual (con)texts across multiple disciplines. And, far from being a distant academic paper, I see how Namita has worked in and been informed by her own fond appreciation of diverse texts with useful and unusual departures into literature and philosophy.</p>
<p>The emphasis on amateur pornography is critical considering the pandemic of hysterical blindness that afflicts public conversations in India around this phenomenon in particular, and the Obscene more generally. A line from the monograph ‘pornography does ideological work’ stands out for me, as Namita shows how it (the monograph, amateur porn, pornography) effectively slices through the careful fabrications called Nation, Culture and Justice in particular; and also in terms of how porn constitutes particular kinds of knowing, speech and experience that reflect on the status quo of politics and of seeing/visuality. The deep engagement with the Mysore Mallige movie/case is an interesting and tender one, perhaps one of the first such in-depth analyses, and a great example of how amateur porn works and what it means.</p>
<p>Considering the appalling lack of insight in responding to the Obscene and the Pornographic, the messy rhetoric and outrage that result when the Pornographic is made public, when the law acts on the visual, on technology, Namita’s analysis is a sharp lens that provides much-needed rejoinders. The sections dealing with these kinds of past events – the moment of public outrage around the revelation of a piece of porn, it’s journey of creation and circulation, the public and institutional esponses to it, are really excellent analyses of a particular kind of moment in contemporary Indian society that have become (to my mind) increasingly difficult to talk about.</p>
<p>There can only be more sharing of this document, perhaps re-purposed, in parts, to become more accessible to communities engaged with commenting, acting and responding to the Obscene, the Visual and the Law (I say this from a perspective of utility and instrumentality that “activism” necessarily deploys, but within what is possible for cannibalisation. Also, because people don’t read) because there just isn’t enough thoughtful work on pornography in the current climate.</p>
<p>The monograph moves to examining the ‘being’ of the pornographic artifact as a digital image and how and why it, especially “video pornography provides a new model for relating to the mass-produced, one in which the body’s susceptibility constitutes both a yielding and a resistance to the hypnotic seduction of the image.”</p>
<p>I find this quote tantalising for it offers a critical perspective on pornography as a challenging politics rather than as ‘merely’ text, which is what this monograph attempts to do. To take this further and to explore the response between the visual and the human, the “something that takes place between the text and the person watching”, could be to move towards reception studies and studies of the experiencing of porn either as star/creator, fan or audience. There are fascinating possibilities here for inventive methodologies and formats in which this could be done, montage-ing academic text with visual ethnographies, online aggregation and collation of visual data and experiences, and so on. This next stage could be exciting in how it could really engage with the body of porn and its people.</p>
<p><strong>Introduction by Maya Ganesh</strong></p>
<div>Download the monograph <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law.pdf" class="internal-link" title="Porn: Law, Video, Technology">here</a> [PDF, 3.73 MB]</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/porn-law-video-technology</a>
</p>
No publisher
Namita A Malhotra
Researchers at Work
Histories of Internet
RAW Publications
Publications
2015-04-14T12:43:14Z
Blog Entry
-
The Bots That Got Some Votes Home
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home
<b>Nilofar Ansher gives us some startling updates on the "Digital Natives Video Contest" voting results declared in May 2012, in this blog post.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">It was a hint of suspicion raised by one of our colleagues at the Centre for Internet & Society that spurred our Web Analytics team to check into the voting activity of the contest that was all about the ‘<a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/vote-for-digital-natives" class="external-link">Everyday Digital Native</a>’. And while we acknowledged and celebrated the ‘digital’ in the native (users of technology), we forgot the human part that the digital has to engage with. Following weeks of deliberations, we now have conclusive evidence that points to irregularities in voting numbers of the Top 10 contestants. We are now staring at the elephant in the room: those innocuous little automated scripts we sweetly nicknamed, ‘bots’.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Internet bots, also known as web robots or simply bots, are software applications that run automated tasks over the Internet. Typically, bots perform tasks that are both simple and structurally repetitive, at a much higher rate than would be possible for a human alone. The largest use of bots is in web spidering, in which an automated script fetches, analyzes and files information from web servers at many times the speed of a human. Each server can have a file called robots.txt, containing rules for the spidering of that server that the bot is supposed to obey. In addition to their uses outlined above, bots may also be implemented where a response speed faster than that of humans is required (e.g., gaming bots and auction-site robots) or less commonly in situations where the emulation of human activity is required, for example chat bots (Source: Wikipedia).</p>
<h3>What irregularities?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">You would see how a script or bot would have played a role in ‘automating’ the votes for a video. The Top 10 videos received a combined voting number of 20,000+. The discrepancy occurs at the juncture where the votes polled on the front end (the webpage where the contestant video was visible to the public) did not match with the number of hits the page received on the backend (this is the analytics part). For instance, the top polled video has some few thousand votes more than the number of people who actually visited our CIS website in the same duration. This prompted a review of the logs and the possible “hand” of a nonhuman agent acting on its human creator’s command to drive up the votes.</p>
<h3>How was this done? The Technicalities</h3>
<p>The following graph shows the extremely high level of voting requests just before the closing date (March 31, 2012). This would not be extraordinary except for the fact that two or three entries had an exceptionally higher vote count relative to their page views as per the analytics statistics.</p>
<p><img src="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/quickhist_march_april.png" alt="null" class="image-inline" title="Voting requests by date" /></p>
<h3>Analysis of the voting against the http requests for the voting link against page views</h3>
<div>
<table class="vertical listing">
<tbody>
<tr style="text-align: center;">
<th>
<p>Entry</p>
</th>
<th>Actual Votes Recorded (1)<br /></th>
<th>Direct http requests to votes (2)<br /></th>
<th>http requests for normal page view access (3)<br /></th>
<th>Recommended adjusted vote count (4)<br /></th>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-media-dance" class="internal-link">Digital Dance</a></p>
</td>
<td>268</td>
<td>448</td>
<td>198</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">198</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/big-stories-small-towns" class="internal-link">Big Stories, Small Town</a></p>
</td>
<td>3</td>
<td>10</td>
<td>112</td>
<td>3</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-natives-contest/entries/connecting-souls-bridging-dreams" class="internal-link">Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams</a></p>
</td>
<td>1113</td>
<td>2018</td>
<td>1685</td>
<td>1113</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/finalist-summary/deployed" class="internal-link">Deployed</a></p>
</td>
<td>191</td>
<td>479</td>
<td>195</td>
<td>191</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p class="internal-link"><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/from-the-wild-into-the-digital-world" class="internal-link">From The Wild Into The Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>10317</td>
<td>11880</td>
<td>810</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">810</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/i-am-a-ghetto-digital-native" class="internal-link">I Am A Ghetto Digital Native</a></p>
</td>
<td>321</td>
<td>365</td>
<td>844</td>
<td>321</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/life-in-the-city-slums" class="internal-link">Life in the City Slums</a></p>
</td>
<td>13</td>
<td>18</td>
<td>94</td>
<td>13</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/who-is-a-digital-native" class="internal-link">Digital Natives</a></p>
</td>
<td>111</td>
<td>328</td>
<td>102</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">102</span></td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/with-no-distinction" class="internal-link">With No Distinction</a></p>
</td>
<td>369</td>
<td>557</td>
<td>1232</td>
<td>369</td>
</tr>
<tr style="text-align: right;">
<td>
<p><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/entries/digital-coverage-in-a-digital-world" class="internal-link">Digital Coverage in a Digital World</a></p>
</td>
<td>9622</td>
<td>13650</td>
<td>181</td>
<td><span class="visualHighlight">181</span></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<h3></h3>
<span class="internal-link"> </span>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are the public votes displayed on the contestant’s page through the thumbs up icon</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests to the voting link against each video when the user clicked on the thumbs up icon.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">These are http requests which are collectively related to the video page (page view). A normal human user would browse through a page first, which downloads some other urls, such as the HTML for the page, JavaScript, images, and so on. A normal vote request would be included collectively. A direct http request to the voting link on the other hand does not do this, and only makes a specific request to vote without downloading the other parts that make up the page.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">A normal human vote count should be the same or less than the number of page views. Only three videos highlighted show abnormal behaviour and it is recommended these be adjusted to the page view counts.</li></ol>
<h3>Are you saying contestants cheated?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the use of programming scripts to accrue votes is no new tactic and we should, in fact, have a more robust mechanism to monitor such activity during a contest, we cannot prove the culpability of the human agents. The contestants might be innocent actors with overzealous friends or colleagues who ran the voting scripts. As of now, since there is no way to ascertain their part in this irregularity, it’s best we give them the benefit of the doubt. What comes through loud and clear is that once you do away with the scripted votes, four contestants still manage to have enough votes to maintain their positions in the final five. In the fifth position, we now have a contestant from the top ten finalists, who has secured the requisite votes (after vote adjustment) to propel him into the final five.</p>
<h3>Recommendation</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘Digital Dance’ (Cijo Abraham), ‘From the Wild into the Digital World’ (John Musila) and ‘Digital Coverage in a Digital World’ (T.J. Burks) had additional vote url counts than page views. It is recommended that the total votes for these videos be adjusted to the page view counts, and not the actual vote counts as displayed on their individual web pages (thumbs up icon) during the voting period.</p>
<p>The rankings of the adjusted voting would now read as:</p>
<ol>
<li>Connecting Souls, Bridging Dreams – Marie Jude Bendiola (1113)</li>
<li>From The Wild Into The Digital World - John Musila (810)</li>
<li>With No Distinction - T.J. K. M. (369)</li>
<li>I Am A Ghetto Digital Native – MJ (321)</li>
<li>Digital Dance – Cijo Abraham (198)</li></ol>
<h3>Transparency at CIS</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">‘The Digital Natives with a Cause?’ research inquiry is shaped around concerns of transparency, equity and community accountability. In our research methods as well as in outputs of the different activities, we have always maintained a complete transparency of decision making processes as well as in depending upon the incredible people we work with to help us learn, grow and reflect openly on the concerns that we have been engaged with. We strive to follow this method and in publishing these statistics, we want to ensure that there is complete transparency about the votes that were accrued and how the final winners were selected. We also take this opportunity as a learning experience to re-think the question of the non-human actors in our networks and further about the nature of participation and reputation online. We hope that the publishing of these results will help answer any inquiries on how the process unfolded.</p>
<h3>View Logs and Source Code</h3>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/logs-during-voting-period" class="external-link">All logs from the web server for this period</a> (24.7MB) Identical IPs are from caching server.</li>
<li><a class="external-link" href="http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/video-contest/scripted-voting-report/main.R">R script to evaluate data for table</a></li></ul>
<h3>What next?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Since we spotted the error in time, we haven’t disbursed the prize money of EUR 500 to each of the Top 5 contestants. They will now receive the prize along with a chance to participate in the Digital Native workshop-cum-Webinar, slated to be held in July 2012. The top 10 videos will be showcased in this event.</p>
</div>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/bots-got-some-votes-home</a>
</p>
No publisher
Nilofar Ansher
Featured
Researchers at Work
Digital Natives
2015-04-24T11:56:10Z
Blog Entry
-
Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 (IRC22) - Selected Sessions
https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-home-selected-sessions
<b>Here is the list of selected sessions and individual presentations for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC22) - #Home. IRC22 will be held online from May 25-27, 2022. The conference announcement, along with details on registration will be published in the first week of May.
</b>
<hr />
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/internet-researchers-conference-2022">Call for Sessions</a></strong></p>
<p><strong>Internet Researchers' Conference 2022 - #Home: <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-sessions">List of Proposed Sessions</a></strong></p>
<hr />
<p><strong>Selected Sessions and Total Scores</strong> </p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-waitingforfood">#WaitingForFood </a>- Rhea Bose and Nisha Subramanian (85.00)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-thismightnotbeonline">#thismightnotbeonline </a>- Kaushal Sapre; Aasma Tulika (81.88)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-goinghomeconstructionofadigitalurbanplatforminterfaceindelhincr">#GoingHome: Constructions of a Digital-Urban Platform Interface in Delhi-NCR</a> - Anurag Mazumdar (80.63)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-covidconfessions">#CovidConfessions</a> - Indumathi Manohar (80.63)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identitiesvulnerabilitiesopportunitiesdissentir">#IdentitesVulnerabilitiesOpportunitiesDissent </a>- Saumya Tewari; Manisha Madhava; Dhrupadi Chattopadhyay; Aparna Bose (79.38)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homeandtheinternet">#HomeAndTheInternet </a>- Dona Biswas; Bhanu Priya Gupta (77.50)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-letsmovein">#LetsMoveIn </a>- Arathy Salimkumar; Faheem Muhammed; Hazeena T; Manisha Madapathy (76.25)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-lockdownsandshutdowns">#LockdownsAndShutdowns </a>- Michael Collyer; Joss Wright (73.75)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-actfromhome">#ActFromHome </a>- Maya Sherman; Rai Sengupta (73.75)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-socialmediaactivism">#SocialMediaActivism </a>- Anushka Bhilwar (69.38)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-transactandwhatfollowed">#TransActandWhatFollowed </a>- Brindaalakshmi K (68.75)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-identifyingtheideaoflabourinteaching">#IdentifyingtheIdeaoflLaborinTeaching </a>- Sunanda Kar; Bishal Sinha (68.75)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-homebasedflexiworkincovid19">#HomeBasedFlexiworkInCovid19 </a>- Sabina Dewan; Mukta Naik; Ayesha Zainudeen; Gayani Hurulle; Hue-Tam Jamme; Devesh Taneja (67.50)</p>
<p dir="ltr"><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-involutejaggedseamsofthedomesticandthevocational">#Involute:Jagged Seams of the Domestic and the Vocational -</a> Akriti Rastogi; Deepak Prince; Misbah Rashid; Satish Kumar (65.63)</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-proposed-session-digitisingcrisesremakinghome">#DigitisingCrisesRemakingHome </a>- Vidya Subramanian; Kalindi Kokal; Uttara Purandare (61.88)</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;"><span class="discreet"> Note: The total scores were derived from anonymous peer selection by all teams and scores by a panel of external reviewers, with both processes given a 50% weightage.</span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-home-selected-sessions'>https://cis-india.org/raw/irc22-home-selected-sessions</a>
</p>
No publisher
Puthiya Purayil Sneha
IRC22
Internet Studies
Internet Researcher's Conference
Researchers at Work
2022-04-26T07:00:30Z
Blog Entry
-
Digital Native: Delete Facebook?
https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook
<b>You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">The article was <a class="external-link" href="http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/digital-native-delete-facebook-5127198/">published in Indian Express</a> on April 8, 2018.</p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span>One fine day, we all woke up and were told that </span><a href="http://indianexpress.com/about/facebook/">Facebook</a><span> sold our data to Cambridge Analytica and then they made dastardly profiles of us to target us with advertisement and political propaganda, so, we made a beeline for #DeleteFacebook. The most surprising part about the expose is how much of a non-event it is. We have been warned, at least since the Edward Snowden revelations, if not earlier, that our data is the new oil, coal and gold. It is being used as a resource, it is being mined from our everyday digital transactions, and it is precious because it can result in a massive social engineering without our consent or knowledge. Ever since Facebook started expanding its domain from being a friends-poke-friends-with-livestock website, we have been warned that the ambition of Facebook was never to connect you with your friends but to be your friend.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span>Time and again, we have been told that the sapient Facebook algorithm remembers everything you say and do, anticipates all your future needs, and listens to the most banal litany of your life. More than your mom, your partner or your shrink, it’s the Facebook algorithm which is interested in all your quotidian uselessness. It is not the stranger who accesses your post that should worry you. The biggest perpetrator of privacy violations on Facebook is Facebook itself. There is good reason why a company that offers its prime products for free is valuated as one of the richest corporations in the world. The product of Facebook – it has always been known – is us.</span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span>Why, then, are we suddenly taken aback at the fact that Facebook sold us? And while we are sharing our thoughts (ironically on Facebook) about deleting our profiles, the question that remains is this: How much of your digital life are you willing to erase? Because, and I am sorry if this pricks your filter bubble, Facebook’s problem is not really a Facebook problem. It is almost the entire World Wide Web, where we lost the battle for data ownership and platform openness more than two decades ago. Name one privately owned free service that you use on the internet and I will show you the section in its “terms and services” where you have surrendered your data. In fact, you can’t even find government services, tied up with their private partners, where your data is safe and stored in privacy vaults where it won’t be abused.</span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span><span>It is time to realise that the popular ’90s meme “All your base are belong to us” is the lived reality of our digital lives. As we forego ownership for convenience, as our governments sold our sovereignty for profits, and as digital corporations became behemoths that now have the capacity to challenge and write our constitutional and fundamental rights, we are waking up to a battle that has already been fought and resolved. A large part of our physical hardware to access the internet is privately owned. This means that almost all our PCs, tablets, phones, servers are owned and open to exploitation by private companies. Every time your phone does an automatic update or your PC goes into house-cleaning mode, you have to realise that you are being stored, somewhere in the cloud in ways that you cannot imagine.</span></span></span></span></p>
<p style="text-align: justify; "><span><span><span><span><span>It is tiring to hear this alarm and panic around Facebook’s data trading. Not only is it legal, it is something that has been happening for a while, most of us have been aware of it, and we have resolutely ignored it because, you know, cute cats. If somebody tells you that they are against privately owned physical property and are going to start a revolution to take away all private property and make it equally shared with the public, you would laugh at them because they are arriving at the battle scene after the war is over. This digital wokeness trend to #DeleteFacebook is the digital equivalent of that moment. If you want to fight, fight the governments and nations who can still protect us. Participate in conversations around Internet governance. Take responsibility to educate yourself about the politics of how the digital world operates. But stop trying to feel virtuous because you pulled out of a social media network, pretending that that is the end of the problem.</span></span></span></span></span></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook'>https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-8-2018-digital-native-delete-facebook</a>
</p>
No publisher
nishant
Social Media
Privacy
Internet Governance
Facebook
Researchers at Work
2018-05-06T03:08:25Z
Blog Entry
-
Revealing Protesters on the Fringe: Crucifixion Protest in Paraguay
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/revealing-protesters-on-the-fringe
<b>An analysis of the crucifix protest in Paraguay in the light of Nishant Shah’s piece: Whose Change is it Anyway? The blog post looks at the physical and symbolic spaces in which narratives of change were conceived and the extent to which information circulating within activates citizen action. </b>
<p style="text-align: justify;">“What constitutes change? What are the intentions that make change possible? Who are the actors involved?” These are the questions with which Nishant Shah opens the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway’, a series of reflections and provocations exploring the future of citizen action and digital technologies in emerging information societies. The project, in collaboration with the HIVOS Knowledge Program, begins a process of unlearning conventional understandings of ‘change’ and redefining it in the light of less visible narratives of political, social and cultural transformation. Three pivots of analysis are at the backbone of this piece. First, it locates change by looking at the historicity and stressing the role of invisible crises that lead to digital activism. Second, it moves on to unpack our definition of change and the language framing activism as system-overhaul practices rather reformative experiments. Third, it looks at the outcomes of change proposing a redefinition of failure that enables us to recognize instances of change outside of what is dubbed ‘successful’ citizen action. All in all, the piece is reflective rather than conclusive and when paired up with contemporary events of political and social change, it serves as a framework to challenge existing paradigms and overlooked narratives.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This was precisely my experience when at the end of August I came across the Paraguayan crucifix protest in the BBC News website: the story of eight bus drivers who led by union leader Juan Villalba, crucified themselves onto wooden crosses to protest against labour exploitation in Asuncion.<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a> In spite of its international media coverage, the protest has to this day failed to mobilize digitally fluent Paraguayan and global netizens into joining the ranks<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a> of their plea, keeping protesters at the fringes of the online sphere. This is surprising compared to other publicized Paraguayan protests, such as Pro-Ache Tribe campaigns back in 2011<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> and the anti-corruption protests earlier this year,<a name="fr4" href="#fn4">[4]</a> which featured politically active students mobilizing through technology to influence public policy in Paraguay.</p>
<hr />
<table class="invisible">
<tbody>
<tr>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th></th>
<th><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/XF_KKXSGXKM" frameborder="0" height="300" width="360"></iframe></th>
<th></th>
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<th></th>
<th></th>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<th style="text-align: center;">Video of crucifixion protest</th>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify;">Before jumping into deeming the crucifix protest a success or a failure, I would like to refer back to the first axis of analysis in Shah’s work and discuss the history, context and structures in which the intent for change was crafted. I will follow Anat-Ben David´s framework based on her research on the geopolitics of digital spaces, and look at how “hybrid geographical and digital spaces” intertwine with “situated knowledges and practices” in order to localize change (2011). I will first focus on the political and social context of Paraguay and how it framed two online campaigns: the Aché Tribe campaign in 2011 and the anti-corruption campaign in June 2013. Then, I will move on to the symbolic and knowledge context in Paraguay and how it determined the outcome of the offline crucifix protest in August 2013. The objective is to identify the factors that drove the first two issues into the online sphere vis-a-vis those that impeded the latter from making that transition. This will be instrumental to understand what —and what not— activates youth mobilization and citizen action in Paraguay and how their vision of change aligns with their experience in crises.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Political and social context of Paraguay</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Landlocked, Catholic and <em>mestizo</em>, Paraguay was under a 30 year oppressive dictatorship that finally came to an end in 1989. Since then, the succeeding thirteen years of democracy have been characterized by citizen upheavals, as younger generations are breaking the silence and conformity of older times (Zavala, 2011). Among the most pressing issues addressed by coup attempts, strikes and protests,<a name="fr5" href="#fn5">[5]</a> corruption remains the standing evil in the Paraguayan political system. Seventy-eight per cent of its citizens perceive the government as ineffective at fighting corruption,<a name="fr6" href="#fn6">[6]</a> and with good reason. Paraguay is ranked as the second most corrupt country in Latin America and 24th in the world, according to Transparency International.<a name="fr7" href="#fn7">[7]</a> The Paraguayan head of Seeds for Democracy, Marta Ferrara commented on corruption being absolute in the public sector due to the legacy of dictatorship, and hence called civil society groups to exert more pressure on the government to fight it.<a name="fr8" href="#fn8">[8]</a> This sentiment is consistent with the loss of faith in democracy in Latin America to which research has attributed the rise of the left and a growing desire for social change (Barret et al, 2008).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Another important contextual question to consider on a par is how relevant are digital technologies in Paraguay to mobilize change. The country has one of the lowest rates of internet penetration in the continent at 27.1 per cent, <a name="fr9" href="#fn9">[9]</a> suggesting that the remaining 70 per cent is comprised of disconnected Guarani voices whose stories remain untold. This is in a country with a 52.4 Gini coefficient, where 40 per cent of citizens live below the poverty line and 56 per cent of the income is controlled by the upper 20 per cent.<a name="fr10" href="#fn10">[10]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Delving deeper into this divide, we can infer that the success behind the digitally enabled protests comes as a result of socioeconomic inequality and an alignment of the interests of this privileged class and the issues behind their actions. Based on this profile, my follow up questions are a) what is the common thread joining the online campaigns that is absent from the crucifix protest and b) how this digital class is defining these priorities.<br /> <br /><strong>The anti-corruption discourse<br /></strong>The legacy of the dictatorship and the anti-corruption discourse is a strong response to the first question. While the concept of corruption is severely stigmatized in society, it is also very loosely defined (Harrison, 2006), making it a versatile stimuli for change. Harrison states that in developing countries, the focus remains on the perception of the relationship between the state and those they are meant to be serving (2006), while for Haller and Shore it also refers to money transactions within power relationships that stratify and exclude in any structure (2005). In this way, the concept remains all-encompassing, perception-based and relevant to the democracy crisis in Paraguay. Hence, protesting against it is locally appropriate, and fits in the moral project Sampson dubbed the global anti-corruption industry (2010). He argues that condemning corruption is now a global trend grounded on uncontested ‘good governance´ and integrity values. Its rhetoric has been mainstreamed and infused with a “feel good character” that turns it into an appealing campaign, easy to identify with, simple to embark on and consistently present in the human-rights discourse both in the online and offline sphere.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The anti-corruption protest in June and the Pro-Aché mobilization in 2011 fit this criterion. In the first case, 3000 Paraguayans took to the streets inspired by neighbouring Brazil´s anti-corruption protests<a name="fr11" href="#fn11">[11] </a>to condemn a new retirement law project for parliamentarians that allowed them to retire after only ten years of public service. Framed as an indicator of state inefficiency, the online campaign <em>PorUnParaguayMejor</em> [For a better Paraguay] went viral compelling students to mobilize against the project in Asuncion.<a name="fr12" href="#fn12">[12]</a> The event was reported immediately by international media publicizing Paraguayan youth as revolutionary agents of change.<a name="fr13" href="#fn13">[13]</a></p>
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<p>Above: "[Parlamentarians] are retiring in 10 years and demanding full pension (100% of their salaries). Paraguay, take the streets and denounce them", (pictured by Global Voices online: <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aXGzA7">http://bit.ly/1aXGzA7</a>)</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The second case was also based on state inefficiency experienced by a specific community: the Aché indigenous tribe. The dispute was a consequence of the Ministry of Environment dishonouring an agreement and not granting property titles of the land <em>Finca 470</em> to the tribe. As a result, a group of young Paraguayans created social media accounts to organize food and clothes drives, mobilize protests, attract further attention from the press and communicate horizontally with government authorities. Due to their extensive lobbying, the authorities acceded to declare the land an indigenous reserve for the Aché, making it another hailed example of successful technology usage by youth (Zavala, 2011).<a name="fr14" href="#fn14">[14]</a></p>
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<p>Above: Members of the Aché tribe take to the streets in Paraguay (photo courtesy Sulekha: <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aPxeXv">http://bit.ly/1aPxeXv</a>).</p>
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<td style="text-align: justify;">In both cases, the vaguely defined corruption was at the core of citizens’ claims. In the first one, the general outrage and dutifulness drove citizens into the anti-corruption discourse both on the online and offline spheres. Based on Shah’s conceptualization of the technologies of the state (2013), the issue of corruption was perceived as a threat to the survival of the citizen and its rights, and created a generalized sense of precariousness among the populace. Ergo, they intervened to secure their future and as put by Sampson, to convey the message that they ‘were doing something’ about it regardless of whether that ‘something’ would have a long-term structural impact.</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">On the other hand, the second online protest had a more altruistic tone. The members of the digitally privileged 30 per cent, in spite of not being directly implicated in the conflict, took the disconnected group’s plea and mobilized support networks on their behalf. Although the Aché did not request this intervention, nor intend to utilize technology during their camped protests, the digital group’s strategy was largely more effective at bringing the issues to the attention of media and the government. The successful mainstreaming of the Aché’s story upon being digitalized questions the extent to which staged protests will remain appropriate in information societies vis-à-vis online campaigning.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">These developments show how the anti-corruption discourse not only mobilizes citizens in Paraguay but also their power and resources. Therefore, if corruption is the common thread we are looking for, to what extent is it applicable to other social conflicts? Will good governance values always trump individual pursuits of assurance? In the following section I will return to the crucifix protests in the light of the aforementioned and address non-geographical spaces of knowledge and practices, as recommended by Ben-Davis. This will shed light on this question and on the spectrum of citizen motivations framing how digital actors articulate change.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Knowledge, Symbolisms and Visibility</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Yochai Benkler describes our networked society as an economy centered on information, cultural production and the manipulation of symbols (2006). These contain and pertain to different ways of understanding the world. In the optimistic view of Benkler, digital technologies enable these views to circulate freely in our network; amplifying all voices, however, as seen in the case of Paraguay, information is being produced by one sector of society that determines and constrains the visibility of other worldviews; reproducing socioeconomic inequalities in the digital sphere. In this section I will look at how different articulations of the present and the conflict between spaces of knowledge and symbolisms derive into different ways of telling the same story, in the light of the extremely visual crucifix protest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The protest had a very different impact in the national scene, as opposed to its portrayal in international media. This is because crucifixes had already been staged in the past by people of indigenous descent<a name="fr15" href="#fn15">[15]</a> or union workers<a name="fr16" href="#fn16">[16]</a> to call for the attention of the Paraguayan state. Being a predominantly Catholic country, utilizing the charged image of the crucifixion of Jesus is the equivalent of cultural <em>bandwagoning</em> on its symbols of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Eric Tyler reflecting on activism martyrs in the light of the role Khalid Saed in the Arab Spring, called them “catalysts with a profound amplifying impact when combined with the viral force of technology”.<a name="fr17" href="#fn17">[17] </a>Amy Sample Ward added another lesson from Egypt, noting that you do not need a high penetration rate in order for massive impact to occur, “as long as the community is connected”.<a name="fr18" href="#fn18">[18]</a> If the digital class had taken on the bus drivers case in the same way they supported the Aché, mobilization would have been likely. However, the cause did not resonate with the Paraguayan digital public. This lack of connection did not derive from the digital divide, but instead from the long-standing conflict between the transport sector and the citizens.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">There are several points to be made about this case of citizen inaction. First, the citizen-market crisis played a large role in creating apathy around the crucifix protest. Shah states that technologies of the market must “assure us of the future in terms of material resources and infrastructures upon which happiness depend” (2013), which was not being delivered by the CETRAPAM (Transport Companies of the Metropolitan Area) in the eyes of the citizen. The CETRAPAM director is perceived as corrupt and inefficient<a name="fr19" href="#fn19">[19]</a> and earlier that month a transportation strike left 700,000 immobilized.<a name="fr20" href="#fn20">[20] </a>These incidents resulted in a citizen online campaign demanding a reliable and transparent service from the companies<a name="fr21" href="#fn21">[21] </a>having anti-corruption, once again, at the core of their claims.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This background determined how national media reproduced the crucifix protest story. ABC, one of the largest news corporations in the country, covered the story portraying drivers as ‘aichinjaranga’s” (‘poor little thing’ in Guaraní), who were appealing to <em>“wake people up through pity and pressure, not resources.</em><a name="fr22" href="#fn22">[22]</a> On the other hand, the most popular entry on the topic in Crónicas Ciudadanas (ABC’s citizen journalism forum) reads: <em>“We [Luque citizens] are tired. These drivers waste our time and we are sick of it.”</em><a name="fr23" href="#fn23">[23]</a> The digital class, having the power and resources to mobilize, chose to remain idle in order to disempower a group that has been causing precariousness in their present and future establishing a hierarchy of citizen priorities. By withdrawing their support, the drivers are now left with offline strategies and conventional protest tools to address their demands with only the support of their immediate community.<a name="fr24" href="#fn24">[24]</a> It is unclear whether this will represent a disadvantage for their ability to create structural change, but it does show that internal citizen crises leads to inequality of strategies and resources for mobilization.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Second, this case also highlights the dark side of Benkler’s argument in favour of citizen information production. He claims that citizen journalism curbs the power away from mass media and hands it over to autonomous citizens who can now exchange information, making them less susceptible to manipulation by the owners of communications infrastructure and media (2006). In the case of Paraguay, this power has been handed over to the digitally fluent who are only putting forward causes aligned with their interests and value scheme.Issues of access and digital inclusion come afloat, as the disconnected status of the crucifix protesters keeps them out of social spaces of debate and political conversation. This deems social status a determining factor between “statements that are heard and those that wallow in obscurity” (Benkler, 2006) and a serious constraint for the fulfillment of the drivers’ capabilities and freedoms.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Third, the use of symbols is effective depending on the audience, as shown by the narrative of international news corporations. The use of crucifixes came across as an ancient and peculiar tool protest for western media — especially in the digital era— earning them a space in the global public’s interest eighteen days into the protest. As commented by Al Jazeera’s opinion columnist Courtney Martin, in the light of the Tibetan self-immolations in February,<a name="fr25" href="#fn25">[25]</a>“in a world that tends to shine new power [on] online activism only”, other people need to resort to “attention-getting schemes on the hopes of calling attention to issues that remain unresolved”.<a name="fr26" href="#fn26">[26]</a></p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The highly visual crucifixes caught the attention of the international media, yet the focus remained on the props instead of the underlying issues around union workers’ rights. This was evident on the picture included by the CNN, showing the workers lined up on their crosses lying next to a coffin claiming that this will become their "final resting place" if their demands were not met;<a name="fr27" href="#fn27">[27]</a> adding to the thriller effect of what is in fact a social justice crisis.</p>
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<td style="text-align: center;">Crucified bus drivers in Paraguay (pictured by CNN International), http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs</td>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">In regards to the audience’s response, I would dare to speculate that the absence of the “language of revolution” that surrounds hyped narratives around digital activism (such as the June anti-corruption campaign accounts) played a role in the inactivity from international human-rights activism communities. Being a global audience “engaged with a spectacle of the rise of the citizen” (Shah, 2013), information circulating through mass media is either discarding or othering the less attractive, under-the-radar citizen struggles that do not fit this sale pitch. If a show must be staged in order to attain global attention, it is only natural to wonder if this plot will require a dramatic twist to become viral, one of the key ingredients for effective information dissemination according to Mary Joyce (2010). Having the protesters reach “the end” in order to achieve attention and support, is evidence of some of the morbid criterion steering our motivations for change.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;">Conclusion</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">This analysis localized some of the invisible conflicts underpinning action for change in Paraguay. Rather than focusing on a specific cause, such as workers’ rights; through a particular method, say crucifixions; I have looked at the structures framing the understandings around citizen action. It attempted to go beyond the spectacle of digital mobilization and instead look at two spaces: the geopolitical context of Paraguay and the symbolic knowledge framing the development of the crucifix protest in Asuncion, and how the bus drivers envisioned their future before and after the protest.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Paraguayan political and social imaginary and their understanding of change are infused with the historicity of corruption. As explored in the first section, campaigning against corruption in Paraguay has risen as a convenient check-and-balance, citizen-led strategy to demand transparency and accountability from state and market actors. It fosters values of responsible citizenship and is endorsed by the national and international community. The prevalence of this discourse, even if it worked against the crucifix protest, is an indicator that ‘making change’ is not necessarily understood as a practice of material transformation in Paraguay, but that is has been legitimized at the stage of awareness and political engagement without tying citizens into long-term advocacy efforts.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The actions and reactions around the crucifix protest varied in the online and the offline sphere. In the online realm, the story was orchestrated by the group with access to information and communication technologies. The bus drivers, having remained at the fringes of digital production, had no control whatsoever of how their narrative was shaped by citizen journalists, national or international media. This was reflected in the offline sphere, where the lack of support to the protesters was a result of market-citizen conflicts and the inability of the crucifix symbolisms to speak to an urban population. These factors also show how socioeconomic divides at the political and knowledge levels were digitalized, determining information production, dissemination and reproduction as well as responses to the protesters’ narratives in the long-run.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In conclusion, this analysis has offered a broader view of how change is understood, in terms of the socioeconomic and information constraints in the making of change in Paraguay. Altruistic activism is only possible when the cause being fought for does not jeopardize the interests and assurances of a powerful class who is in control of the resources for online mobilization, in spite of the social justice nature of the claim. Some questions remain unresolved, particularly in regards to how digital activity is overshadowing offline initiatives in a spectacle driven environment. An interesting research avenue relevant to the larger project of <em>‘Whose Change is it Anyway?’</em> would be to collect narratives and stories of change that gauge the relevance of offline protests, to understand if they can remain relevant and appropriate in information societies and whether we, as an audience and potential supporters, are only defining change and citizen action in light of its digital possibilities.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. “Sacked Paraguay bus drivers stage crucifixion protest” BBC News Latin America & Caribbean. August 28, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bbc.in/17n5NSm">http://bbc.in/17n5NSm</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. “Choferes de la linea 30 en huelga” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed September 6<sup>th</sup>, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3">http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. “Indígenas Ache Acampan frente a SEAM y piden transferencia tierras ancestrales” Ultima Hora. March 14th, 2011. Accessed September 18th, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/15aszv5">http://bit.ly/15aszv5</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn4" href="#fr4">4</a>]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, <em>Caracol Radio Colombia</em>. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn">http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn5" href="#fr5">5</a>]. BBC Timeline: Paraguay. Last modified July 3<sup>rd</sup>, 2012, <a class="external-link" href="http://bbc.in/B6UFV">http://bbc.in/B6UFV</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn6" href="#fr6">6</a>]. Alexander E.M. Hess and Michael Sauter. “The Most Corrupt Countries in the World”, 24/7: Wall Street: <em>Insightful Analysis and Commentary for U.S. & Global Equity Investors.</em> July 11, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/16jVxrE">http://bit.ly/16jVxrE</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn7" href="#fr7">7</a>]. Corruption Perceptions Index 2012”, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/TBjshd">http://bit.ly/TBjshd</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn8" href="#fr8">8</a>]. “Paraguay’s Cartes: The man to lead anti-corruption efforts?” Thomson Reuters Foundation, May 3<sup>rd</sup>, 2013. Accessed: September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aXTd28">http://bit.ly/1aXTd28</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn9" href="#fr9">9</a>]. "Percentage of Individuals using the Internet 2000-2012", International Telecommunications Union (Geneva), June 2013, accessed August 30, 2013<strong>, </strong><a class="external-link" href="http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2013/Individuals_Internet_2000-2012.xls">http://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Documents/statistics/2013/Individuals_Internet_2000-2012.xls</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn10" href="#fr10">10</a>].The World Bank “Poverty Gap at the Poverty Line” <em>Catalogue Sources: World Development Indicators</em>. Accessed September 10, 2013 <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/14oMRDI">http://bit.ly/14oMRDI</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn11" href="#fr11">11</a>]. RT Actualidad, “La ola de protestas de Brasil ‘rompe fronteras’ y ya salpica a Paraguay” <em>RT Noticias, </em>June 22, 2013, accessed August 30,2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aBAqqj">http://bit.ly/1aBAqqj</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn12" href="#fr12">12</a>]. Agencia EFE, “Protestas contra presunta corrupción en Paraguay”, <em>Caracol Radio Colombia</em>. June 22, 2013, accessed August 30, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn">http://bit.ly/1aPHfEn</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn13" href="#fr13">13</a>]. Gabriela Galilea “The Brazil Effect: Thousands Protest for a Better Change” <em>Global Voices English </em>June 26, 2013. Accessed August 30, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/15FKwAW">http://bit.ly/15FKwAW</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn14" href="#fr14">14</a>]. For further information on the Pro-Aché online campaign, refer to Maria del Mar Zavala’s essay: Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn15" href="#fr15">15</a>]. Protesters in Paraguay staged a public crucifixion in the past calling for a jailed former army general General Lino Oviedo to be set free. “Paraguay man crucified in public” BBC News November 30, 2006. Accessed on September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bbc.in/1aPI7Zq">http://bbc.in/1aPI7Zq</a>. Also see "Homeless in Paraguay protest with Crucifixion” Cleveland News. August 6<sup>th</sup>, 2009. Accessed September 20, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1gGyZHk">http://bit.ly/1gGyZHk</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn16" href="#fr16">16</a>]. A bus driver crucified himself for more than 10 hours demanding the recognition of his labor union. “Se crucifico para lograr el reconocimiento sindical” ABC Color, July 6, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1buNKiL">http://bit.ly/1buNKiL</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn17" href="#fr17">17</a>]. Mary Joyce, January 27, 2012 comment on Arab Spring: “The Meta-Activism Community Reflects” <em>Meta-Activism Blog</em>, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/wfXhiW">http://bit.ly/wfXhiW</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn18" href="#fr18">18</a>]. Mary Joyce, comment on Arab Spring.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn19" href="#fr19">19</a>]. 40 companies went on strike demanding further subsidies from the government, paralyzing public transport in Asuncion and leaving almost 700,000 immobilized. As a result, citizens organized a mobilization through Facebook to denounce corruption in the CETRPAM and demand an efficient transportation system, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/15I7Mnl">http://bit.ly/15I7Mnl</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn20" href="#fr20">20</a>]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay” <em>Global Voices English. </em>Translated by Victoria Robertson. August 8, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1bdllum">http://bit.ly/1bdllum</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn21" href="#fr21">21</a>]. Gabriela Galilea, “Public Transit Strike Paralyzes Paraguay”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn22" href="#fr22">22</a>]. “Huelguistas quieren despertar lástima según gerente de Línea 30” ABC Color, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3">http://bit.ly/1ffyGp3</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn23" href="#fr23">23</a>]. ABC Color “Choferes de la linea 30 en Huelga”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn24" href="#fr24">24</a>]. “Sindicalistas de Paraguay fueron recibidos por el presidente tras jornadas de protestas” Telesur, September 4, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013. <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/14kntkF">http://bit.ly/14kntkF</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn25" href="#fr25">25</a>]. “The 100<sup>th</sup> Self-Immolation in Tibet – A case for the world to answer” Central Tibetan Administration, February 14, 2013. Accessed on September 10, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/X65jvA">http://bit.ly/X65jvA</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn26" href="#fr26">26</a>]. Courtney E Martin “Building a slower, longer fire among the digital flares” <em>Al Jazeera English, </em>February 4, 2013. Accessed on August 30, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://aje.me/X9YNDj">http://aje.me/X9YNDj</a>.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">[<a name="fn27" href="#fr27">27</a>]. Rafael Romo “Fired Paraguayan bus drivers crucify themselves in protest” CNN International. August 31, 2013. Accessed August 31, 2013, <a class="external-link" href="http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs">http://bit.ly/1fpxKvs</a>.</p>
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<h3><strong>Sources</strong></h3>
<ol>
<li>Ben-David, Anat “Digital Natives and the return of the local cause” <em>Digital AlterNatives with a Cause – Book One: To Be.</em> (2011) 10 -22.</li>
<li>Barrett, P. S., Chavez, D., & Garavito, C. A. R. <em>The new Latin American left: utopia reborn</em>. Pluto Press, 2008.<br />Benkler, Yochai. <em>The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom</em>. Yale University Press, 2006.</li>
<li>Harrison, Elizabeth. "Unpacking the anti-corruption agenda: dilemmas for anthropologists." <em>Oxford Development Studies</em> 34, no. 1 (2006): 15-29.</li>
<li>Haller, C. & Shore, C. (Eds) Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives London: Pluto Press (2005).</li>
<li>Joyce, Mary C., ed. <em>Digital activism decoded: the new mechanics of change</em>. IDEA, 2010.</li>
<li>Sampson, Steven. "The anti-corruption industry: from movement to institution."<em>Global Crime</em> 11, no. 2 (2010): 261-278.</li>
<li>Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? <em>Hivos Knowledge Program. </em>April 30, 2013.</li>
<li>Zavala, Maria del Mar “Youth and Technology: An Unstoppable Force” <em>Digital AlterNatives with a Cause- Book Three: To Act </em>(2011) 46-53.</li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/revealing-protesters-on-the-fringe'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/revealing-protesters-on-the-fringe</a>
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2015-04-17T10:51:56Z
Blog Entry
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Not a Goodbye; More a ‘Come Again’: Thoughts on being Research Director at a moment of transition
https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again
<b>As I slowly make the news of my transition from being the Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, to taking up a professorship at the Leuphana University, Lueneburg, Germany, there is a question that I am often asked: “Are you going to start a new research centre?” And the answer, for the most part, is “No.”</b>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">Not because I don’t see the value of creating institutional spaces like these or that starting and running CIS has been anything short of a dream, but because I don’t how to. When I tell people I don’t know how CIS came into being, they suspect that I am being either facetious or dismissive. But I am not. If somebody asked me to write an Origin Story for CIS, I would be baffled – or probably sum it up by saying that it happened. There was the germ of an idea, a whole lot of people who responded to it, and like the great Tolkienian epic, it was a story that grew in its telling.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">I was 27, when Sunil Abraham, the now Executive Director and I met together in New Delhi, to talk about what a research organisation that represents the public interest at the intersections of Internet & Society would look like. We spent three days in the Delhi heat, coming up with the most fantastic ideas about methods, structures and core areas of interest. It was one of those divine exercises where you build the template for your dream work and then, like a fairy-tale, we had incredible people who came and supported us to make that dream a reality. In six months of that first conversation – I had just turned 28 and was completing the last drafts of my Ph.D. dissertation – CIS got officially registered and with some of the most incredible people, who have been with us, both in their generous affective investment as well as in their intellectual and professional support, we kicked-off a research centre, that has become not only hard to ignore but also significantly important in bringing about scholarly and practice based research around the different facets of how the emergence and widespread reach of the Internet is changing the ways in which we become human, social and political in emerging information societies of the Global South.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify; ">In the 7 years since that first conversation started, I have learned so much from CIS and the networks that built around it, that it would be impossible to write an exhaustive account of it. However, as I now take up a new position at the CIS as a member of its board, and continue to collaborate with the on-the-ground teams intellectually, from my new position as a Professor, there are five things I want to dwell upon, more to remind myself of important lessons learned, but also as approaches that the new director and team might want to reference:</p>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Research cannot be individually focused</b><br />One of the things that academic training does is that it promotes the idea of an individual researcher. We write, publish, seek grants and present our work, taking individual credit and building a body of work that is centred on us. True, we collaborate and we participate and we are opening up more distributed modes of learning and research, but at the end of the day, there is still an imagination of a research community that is built of individual scholars who work in a happy symbiosis and synthesis.<br /><br />The biggest lesson I learned with the CIS was that research requires collectives – peers, supporters, and critics – that can help materialise a vision. Instead of trying to do ‘my’ research, it was the first time that I was enabling others’ research. I had a say in building the research vision, and establishing protocols of rigour and review, but to have a dream, and then to share it with others, so that it becomes a collective dream was an incredible experience. It was the beginning of a method that I hope informs all my work, where research methods are constantly going to accommodate for and be shaped by collective visions and approaches rather than just the individual as a lone warrior. More than anything else, it reassures us that we are not alone, either in our triumphs or our road-blocks, and it builds a community of thinkers that is more important than just the single authored outputs that we bring out.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Research requires infrastructure</b><br />Institutions are infrastructure. However, our jobs are so segregated, that we don’t always realise the incredible effort that goes into building such institutions and then making them work as efficient infrastructure to support research. It is very rare, in research publications that we thank our everyday office staff, the accounts team that processes the complicated bureaucracies of research funding, the programme managers who create networks and evaluation formats, or the numerous people who perform ‘non-research’ jobs so that we can do the research. <br /><br />I had worked in project and programme manager positions before CIS. I had also worked as an independent researcher and consultant before that. But this was the first time I actually took the dual responsibility of not only initiating research but also providing the infrastructure for it. And I know that I am a wiser person for it. The intricate world of fund-raising, managing and developing networks, of implementing and monitoring research projects and contracts, and the need to constantly find sustainable options for the research programmes is something that requires an incredible amount of effort and resources. The researchers often are kept away from this world, or we often just ignore the intense quotidian activities that give us the privilege of doing our work, and my time with CIS taught me not only to appreciate this, but also to recognise these tasks as research.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>All research must try and answer the ‘So What?’ question</b><br />Within academic circles, research has inherent value. We do have the freedom to develop new frameworks and ideas that might not have any immediate relevance and might in fact even fail without seeing the light of day. Academia is privileged because as long as we perform our pedagogic tasks, we have the space to experiment and often work on areas that might not benefit anybody outside the disciplines that we are located in.<br /><br />At CIS, working at such close quarters with colleagues who are experts in policy and regulation, research became critical for me. It wasn’t research for research’s sake. It was research with a cause. At the same time, making the research relevant was not an exercise in dumbing it down so that it can be reduced to easy implementation. The effort required at making academic and intellectual research accessible, while still retaining its complexity has been a heady experience for me. Since CIS, I have tried to make sure that all research is able to answer the ‘So What?’ question, and every time, it has made the research more robust, more rigorous and having a greater audience and impact than it would otherwise have. </li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>To be a research organisation is to be unafraid</b><br />One of the most fantastic things about being a young research organisations was that we were not afraid to voice our opinions and voice them loud. In the last 6 years, CIS has evolved into a strong voice that is not unanimous, but is still clear. We have had disagreements with established research and policy actors. We have critiqued decisions taken by policy and development institutions when we felt that they were flawed. We have provided a critical commentary to different instruments of law and regulation when necessary. We have challenged academic researchers in their methodology as well as in their disconnect from the ‘real world’. And we did it, because early on, the people who guided us, taught us, that research organisations have to be unafraid. <br /><br />Unafraid, not just to ask tough questions of those outside, but also of asking tough questions internally. The team, as it has grown, has been a smorgasbord of disciplinary and stakeholder locations. We don’t necessarily speak the same language. We don’t also, agree on many critical points. But we never tried to be a consensus generation institute. Instead, we learned to coexist and even collaborate in our differences – it was something that external partners often had problems with. How can one set of people work towards critically opposing a phenomenon when others might actually write in favour of some of the aspects of that same phenomenon? How is it possible that some in the institute have great collaborations with a network that the others critique persistently in their work? These tensions, for me, have been generative and I hope that they continue, both in the institution but also in my future work.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify; "><b>Researchers are people too</b><br />This is one of the strangest things to realise, but it is a good lesson to remember. Academia and research work through abstractions. At some point, the researchers become names. They become only a body of work, a certain number of words. But dealing with researchers is to deal with human beings. We have to remember that researchers, while they are often driven and passionate and unable to extricate their lives from their work, do have lives and bodies and socialities that need to be managed. Institutions often get driven by matrices of measurement and politics of promotion and evaluation, at the neglect of the people who actually build it. The constant push at CIS was to recognise that we are all too human in our everyday lives. And to build work environments, relationships and spaces that nurture the people we work with is the primary responsibility of all research. <br /><br />These points are probably too vague, but this blog post is already too long. I just wanted to take this opportunity to write some ‘Notes to the self’ about things that have been the most important to me in being the co-founder and Research Director at the Centre for Internet and Society. And now, it is time for me to move on. I want to place myself in an academic setting where I learn, I get some headspace to think and write, and do the one thing that I enjoy the most – teach. Starting 1st October 2014<a href="#fn*" name="fr*">[*] </a>I am stepping down as the Research Director and taking up a professorship in a new and exciting university, designing courses and research agendas at the intersections of internet studies, media studies, culture studies and aesthetic studies, bringing together some of my most passionate areas of interest. However, I continue to be interested and invested in CIS’ institutional growth. I shall be a part of the search committee as we invite a new Research Director in the Bangalore office, I shall be a part of the Board that governs the CIS, and I shall always think of CIS as my home, continuing mentoring and implementing existing collaborations but also building more, especially towards the pedagogic and knowledge production side of things.<br /><br />When the final decisions about this transition were made last week, I had thought I would be emotional and heart broken. Instead, I only feel excited. I have a wonderful set of colleagues in Bangalore, and they, in turn, are at the centre of networks of support, love, empathy and trust. CIS will benefit from having a new Research Director who will bring new visions, new methods, new processes and infrastructure to the table, and I hope that as my own academic career grows, I shall find myself returning to CIS in different capacities and roles, both for what I could contribute to it, but also for what I continue to learn from the rich range and variety of activities that it anchors.</li>
</ol>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: justify; ">[<a href="#fr*" name="fn*">*</a>].For me, this is not a goodbye, but just a change in roles at the CIS. I will continue to use my CIS credentials and email address, and will be found on the existing contact details there for any queries or interactions with and on behalf of the CIS. So no need to change your address books, just yet.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again'>https://cis-india.org/raw/not-a-goodbye-more-a-come-again</a>
</p>
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nishant
Researchers at Work
Featured
Internet Studies
Research
2014-06-15T02:17:06Z
Blog Entry
-
Living in the Archival Moment
https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment
<b>The archive has been and continues to be a key concept in Digital Humanities discourse, particularly in India. The importance of the archive to knowledge production in the Humanities, the implication of changes in archival practice with the advent of electronic publishing and digitisation, and the focus on curation as a critical and creative process are some aspects of the debate that this blog post looks at. </b>
<p> </p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">In a rather delightful essay titled ‘Unpacking my Library’, published in 1968, Walter Benjamin dwells upon the many nuances of the art of collecting — books in this particular case — on everything from the sometimes impulsive acquisition to the processes of careful selection and classification which go into creating a library. This figure of the collector and practice of collecting are important to our understanding of a central concept in Digital Humanities - the archive - particularly as it occupies a predominant space in the imagination of the field in India, and processes of knowledge production and the history of disciplines in general. The influx of digital technologies into the archival space in the last decade has been an impetus for the large scale digitisation of material, but it has also thrown up several challenges for traditional archival practice, including the preservation of analogue material, the problems of categorising and interpreting large volumes of data, and the gradual disappearance or re-definition of the traditional figure of the collector — a concern echoed across several spaces extending from private online archival efforts to large collaborative knowledge repositories like the Wikipedia. With the questions that the Digital Humanities seems to have posed to traditional notions of authorship or subject expertise, the ‘digital humanist’, when we imagine such a person, can be seen as a reinvention of this figure of the collector — a curator of materials and traces, here of course, digital traces.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The concept of the archive has been important to knowledge production and particularly the development of academic disciplines; whether driven by concerns of the state or the impulses of the market, there have been different ways of defining and understanding the archive, not only as a documentary record of history, but as a metaphor for collective memory and remembrance which includes technology in its very imagination. One of the most elaborate formulations of the archive has been in the work of Jacques Derrida, where apart from proposing the death and preservation drives as primary to the archival impulse, he also highlights the process of archiviation, or the technical process of archive-building that shapes history and memory. Michel Foucault in his concept of the archive looks at it as ‘a system of discursivity which establishes the possibility of what can be said’,<a name="fr1" href="#fn1">[1]</a>thus pointing to the archive as a space not just of preservation but also production, with an impact on the process of knowledge creation. There is today a consensus, at least in its academic understanding that archives cannot be relegated to being self-contained linear spaces of objective historical record, but that archival practice itself has political implications in terms of how collective memory and history, or as indicated by Foucault, <em>histories</em> are preserved and retold through a process of careful selection. Disciplines themselves may therefore be seen as archives of knowledge, and one may stretch this analogy to say that they may also appear as self-contained spaces with restrictions on entry for different ways of remembering and reading. More importantly, the question of what constitutes the archive and what objects or materials may be archived reflects a larger debate about problems with the definition of disciplines and shifting disciplinary boundaries.<a name="fr2" href="#fn2">[2]</a>The issue of access is what several archival and digitisation projects in the early phase of Digital Humanities in the West seemingly sought to address, by ‘opening up’ and animating the archive in some sense through the use of digital technologies, which has allowed one to envisage a model of the networked or conceptual archive developed through a process of sharing and collaboration. However, as is apparent, the conditions of access to such archives and their interpretation have not been problematised enough, if at all, particularly with respect to how they contribute to generating new kinds of knowledge or scholarship. (For more on a theoretical overview of the concept and function of the archive, see the post on ‘Archive Practice and Digital Humanities’ by Sara Morais).</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">While the focus of Digital Humanities debates in the West now seem to primarily encompass methods of visualising data that the archive is an important source for, in the Indian context it is the ‘incompleteness of the archive’ that still seems to be a bone of contention. Many scholars and practitioners we spoke to see archive creation as one of the key questions of Digital Humanities as it has emerged in India, and the possibilities and challenges that this brings to the fore, (particularly in terms of access to rare materials and extending these debates to regional languages) as something that the field will need to contend with at some point. The role of digital technologies in fostering this activity of archive-building is stressed in these debates. In an earlier monograph titled Archives and Access produced as part of CIS-RAW, Dr. Aparna Balachandran and Dr. Rochelle Pinto trace a material history of archival practice in India, specifically looking at conflicts and debates surrounding state and colonial archives, and the politics of access, preservation and digitisation. The monograph also points towards in some way the move of the archive from being solely the prerogative of the state to now being within the reach of the individual, engendered by increased access to technology, and the ‘publicness’ that the visual nature of the internet fosters. However they also talk of the possibility of continuing forms of state or market control over the archive precisely through the internet and digital technologies, with the nature of individual access and use again being mediated through digitisation. Abhijeet Bhattacharya, Documentation Officer with the archives at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Kolkata who was also part of the Archives and Access project, speaks about this change. From a time even twenty years ago, when it was difficult to define the archive, it has slowly transformed into a practice that encompasses various methods of digitisation and has become increasingly personal. While digitisation may have resolved the problems of physically accessing archives to a large extent, it may not always be the best option, as the archival or analogue material needs to be in good condition so as to make for good digitised copies, thus emphasising the need for preservation. The growth of private collections, which create new kinds of intellectual and nostalgic spaces, have also been important in this shift to archiving the personal and the everyday, though in many instances such material may not be available for public use or consumption. The publicness or hyper-visibility that the visual nature of the internet and digital technologies accords to the archive is seen tied to a narrative of loss here, and against the rhetoric of preservation which is still in many spaces deemed to be the primary function and imagination of the archive.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The increased availability of space for data accumulation due to digital technologies also contributes to a ‘problem of excess’, and that is where curation and building new kinds of tools come in as a critical and creative exercise. Dr. Amlan Dasgupta, Professor of English and director of the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University reiterates this opinion. He talks about the internet as fostering an ‘age of altruism’, where the proliferation of technological gadgets has brought about a culture of voluntarily sharing materials online. This of course challenges notions of authority and brings forth the problems of the unarranged library which Benjamin’s essay also points towards, but the archive can be used as a metaphor to understand how notions of authorship and authority are being challenged as is apparent in the Digital Humanities discourse. The theory-practice divide is also something that ails this particular domain like many others; not only is there an inadequate understanding of how to access and use the archive on the part of students and researchers alike, but there is a lack of standardisation of the practice of archive management and the science itself, in terms of metadata, problems of ownership and copyright, and most importantly inadequate infrastructure, training and expertise on preservation of analogue materials. While it may not be within the ambit of digital humanities to address all of these questions, the renewed interest in archival practice and the diversification of its modes is something is that would continue to be an integral aspect of its practice. In fact what digitisation has also led to is diversity in the modes of documentation itself, and the larger process of archiving, which has important implications for the kinds of questions one may ask within certain disciplinary formations, history being an important example. The nature of material in the archive is never quite the same, so is the manner of working with and interpreting them. Dr. Indira Chowdhury, historian and faculty member at the Srishti School of Art, Media and Design, Bangalore and the Centre for Public History (CPH) speaks of the changes that digital technologies have produced in studying oral history, specifically in terms of recording and interpretation of interviews. The mode of documentation, particularly the digital, adds a new layer to the manner in which the voice, sounds or even silence is recorded or interpreted. Although there are still some basic but crucial obstacles such as with transcription, the digital space may allow for tools that help with more nuanced interpretation of recorded material, and large volumes of it; a possibility that CPH is looking into at the moment. One of the approaches of Digital Humanities may be address these knowledge gaps through critical tool-building, in terms of how one may work with different ways of reading and interpreting material.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The digital archive is one space where many of these questions about the process of archive-creation and the separation between preservation and production that is often made in the existing discourse come into conflict, thus inflating the definition of the term much more. New technologies of publishing, the proliferation of electronic databases and growth of networks that in turn encourage production and the increasing amount of born-digital materials then present new questions for the concept of the archive and scholarship.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The role of technology has been significant in the development of the concept of the archive; in fact the archive, in its very nature would be a technological object, or a space where one can trace a history of the disciplines in relation to technology. The introduction of the digital has added yet another dimension to this question. Dr. Ravi Sundaram, Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, who also initiated the Sarai programme speaks of how the advent of the digital has brought about several shifts in the imagination of the archive, which he sees as two distinct phases. Sarai was one of the early models of a concept driven, networked archive, based on a culture of ‘mailing lists’ that built conversations around topics which in themselves constituted the archive. The shifts came with Web 2.0 with which archiving the everyday became a possibility, given the access to inexpensive gadgets and the pervasiveness of social media. While the model of the networked, curated and public archive still has valence today, a significant next step would be to see how one can extend these questions to thinking differently about the archive, by developing new protocols for entering, sharing and circulation of material, and producing new knowledge or concepts around these ideas. This would be crucial in terms of generating research and scholarship around the archive itself as a concept, and realising the full potential of network-generated information. Another pertinent question is that of infrastructure, which is a political question as well. The investment on infrastructure for the archive is determined by different kinds of interests and will play an important role in how archival efforts will ultimately develop. As Dr. Sundaram reiterates, the point to note is that new archival efforts are not only general repositories, but critical interventions in themselves. They foster new kinds of visibilities, like the Pad.ma archive for example which works with existing footage and reinvents or adds new layers of meaning to it through annotations and citations. This also opens up possibilities for new kinds of questions to be asked about existing material. Private archival efforts, many initiated by individuals are also becoming more niche and specific, driven by a specific research agenda, public interest in conservation or as critical and creative interventions in a particular area. Some examples of this are the Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW), Pad.ma and Indiancine.ma, the Indian Memory project and Osianama. In some of these examples, the archive may be used as more of a metaphor rather than a description or classificatory term, because of the layers of meaning that they generate around an existing object or ‘trace’. However, while entering the digital space may have enabled more sharing and dissemination of material, how much of these efforts also make their way into larger civil society and policy debates, scholarship and pedagogy is a crucial question. Arjun Appadurai, in an essay titled ‘Archive and Aspiration’, which was also reproduced as part of a research art project,<a name="fr3" href="#fn3">[3]</a> traces the growth of the migrant archive and how electronic mediation shapes collective memory and aspiration. He points out that ‘The archive as a deliberate project is based on the recognition that all documentation is a form of intervention and, thus, that documentation does not simply precede intervention, but is its first step. Since all archives are collections of documents (whether graphic, artifactual or recorded in other forms), this means that the archive is always a meta-intervention. This further means that archives are not only about memory (and the trace or record) but about the work of the imagination, about some sort of social project. These projects seemed, for a while, to have become largely bureaucratic instruments in the hands of the state, but today we are once again reminded that the archive is an everyday tool. Through the experience of the migrant, we can see how archives are conscious sites of debate and desire. And with the arrival of electronic forms of mediation, we can see more clearly that collective memory is interactively designed and socially produced." In another essay reproduced as part of the same project, Wolfgang Ernst talks about the change in the notion of archive from ‘archival space’ to ‘archival time’, in a digital culture, in which the key is the dynamics of the permanent transmission of data. Cyberspace or the internet, according to Ernst produces a new kind of memory culture, which is devoid of organisational memory that is essentially the premise of the traditional text-based archive. He says "In cyber ‘space’ the notion of the archive has already become an anachronistic, hindering metaphor; it should rather be described in topological, mathematical or geometrical terms, replacing emphatic memory by transfer (data migration) in permanence. The old rule that only what has been stored can be located is no longer applicable.13 Beyond the archive in its old ‘archontic’ quality, the Internet generates, in this sense, a new memory culture. Digitalization of analogous stored material means trans-archivization. Linked to the Internet rather than to traditional state bureaucracies, there is no organizational memory any more but a definition by circulating states, constructive rather than re-constructive. Assuming that the matter of memory is really only an effect of the application of techniques of recall, there is no memory. The networked data bases mark the beginning of a relationship to knowledge that dissolves the hierarchy associated with the classical archive."</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">One can therefore trace the definite shift in the concept and nature of the archive from being a static repository to a critical intervention and creative exercise, and technology being quite integral to its imagination. Most significantly perhaps, the change has been one from the notion of record to that of affect. Archive-building as an affective practice, which has an impact on how knowledge is produced, organised and disseminated is a crucial aspect of meaning-making practices. Related to this is another issue in terms of the amount of data that is available in the archives, which demands new protocols of access and collaboration, and the role of curation in making such data relevant and comprehensible. The notion of the archive or as in this case data as an affective object becomes pertinent here. The problem of excess mentioned by many of the scholars and practitioners would be relevant to the question of big data or big social data; accessing or interpreting such large volumes of information would require critical tools and new kinds of architecture. These shifts also relocate the figure of the collector from traditional practices to new ways of visualising collections and the art of collecting itself, which are now beyond the scope of the human subject. The matter of immediate import here would then be the changes in modes of reading and writing that are brought about by the proliferation of and engagement with big social data. How do we read data, what are changes in reading practices, how do they affect writing and visualisation and what is the nature of the reader thus constructed form some of the areas of exploration for the Digital Humanities, and will be taken up in the forthcoming blogs.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn1" href="#fr1">1</a>]. Foucault quoted in Manoff (2004), p.18.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn2" href="#fr2">2</a>]. Ibid.</p>
<p>[<a name="fn3" href="#fr3">3</a>]. Archive Public is a research art project that looks at bringing together archival art and solidarity actions. See http://archivepublic.wordpress.com/ for more on this.</p>
<hr />
<h2>References</h2>
<ol>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Benjamin, Walter, “Unpacking My Library”, in Illuminations, trans.Harry Zohn, Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schoken Books (1969) pp 59 - 67.</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Derrida, Jacques: “Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression”, trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press (1995).</li>
<li style="text-align: justify;">Manoff, Marlene:” Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.”<em> </em>In: <em>Libraries and the Academy</em>, Vol. 4, No. 1 (2004), pp. 9–25. Copyright © 2004 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD 21218. accessed May 5, 2014 :<a href="http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1">http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/35687/4.1manoff.pdf?sequence=1.</a></li></ol>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment'>https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/living-in-the-archival-moment</a>
</p>
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sneha
Digital Knowledge
Mapping Digital Humanities in India
Research
Digital Humanities
Researchers at Work
2015-11-13T05:27:34Z
Blog Entry
-
Methods for Social Change
https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change
<b>On this brief introduction, I outline the main targets of my research project for CIS and the HIVOS Knowledge Program. As a response to the thought piece ‘Whose Change is it Anyway’ I will explore civic engagement among middle class youth over the course of the next 9 months by interviewing change makers and collectives that are part of multi-stakeholder projects in Bangalore.</b>
<h3>Why look at the civic engagement of digital natives?</h3>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Some of the main knowledge gaps in the literature revolve around understanding the type and extent of political motivation and engagement of citizens (Fowler and Biekart, 2011) and how these motivations translate into sustainable and meaningful participation (Cornwall and Coelho, 2007) in the public space. Having the digital platforms as a space of participation, expression and experience (Cornwall and Coelho 2007, Pleyers, 2012) is necessary but insufficient infrastructure for civic engagement. It is the equivalent of building highways to improve the mobility and communication transactions of a community, disregarding the extent to which it connects the interests, knowledges and identities of those who transit these roads. Through the ‘Methods for Social Change’ project I want to explore the different factors behind building a strong sense of citizenship and sustained civic engagement through technology-mediated change practices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">The project seeks to respond to the questions around change-making raised in the thought piece '<em>Whose Change is it Anyway?', </em>as part of the Making Change project.<em> </em>One of the main challenges today is how to move beyond the ‘spectacle’ created around digitally mediated change. The third axis of the piece specifically refers to what Shah calls the ‘spectacle imperative’, and suggests us to take a look at the less visible, undocumented narratives that are currently shaping change. Maro Pantazidou also makes the distinction between mass events and every-day practices of change; an interesting complement to Shah’s critique. Both frame ‘spectacle’ events that signal change in the public space as frequently short-lived instances of change, that lack a strong foundation to carry the “revolution” forward through every-day behaviour and practices.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">This is not to say I am discrediting the impact of visibility of mass event citizen action. Change must be tackled from different fronts; whether it is by occupying the social imaginary through highly visible displays of civil disobedience or by tackling smaller community battles. However, according to John Gaventa and Gregory Barrett and their findings on mapping the outcomes of citizen engagement, there must be two elements to sustain activism culture: a) the presence of informed active citizens in the movement and b) practicing prefigurative activism, which is establishing horizontal democratic values in the internal organization of this movement. In other words, one of the ways to move beyond the ‘spectacle’ paradigm in citizen action, is through embedding civicness and solidarity networks in its citizens. Hence, my research will be based on the hypothesis that in order to make a transition from spectacle to quotidian activism, change practices must be infused with citizenship-building methods and the negotiation of the citizen identity in public and private spaces.</p>
<h3 style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Who, Where and How</h3>
<p>From this proposition, there are three areas to be explored:</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">First, the profile of our <strong>change agents. </strong>The population interacting with political and social issues through digital technologies is a very specific and privileged demographic. This group, assuming motivation and disposition, must count with the corresponding access and resources to act. As brought up in the Mapping Digital Media: India Report, recently published by the Open Society Foundation, middle class activism is not only on the rise but is currently experiencing the highest visibility when compared to political and social activism. This is the case not only for India but also for emerging economies in the Global South where the internet penetration rate is very much related to socio-economic status as well as to the urban-rural divide. Shah refers to this as the gentrification of contemporary politics and it is one of the core poignant critiques of his piece.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">However, it also leads to the question of how to channel the resources and privileged accessibility of this group for the 'greater good'. Instead of focusing on the problematic behind this power inequality, I would like to look at how this group is using these resources to create partnerships that allows them to disseminate knowledge, awareness and confidence to other citizens; the formula behind strong citizenship and willingness to act according to Gaventa. This underscores the need for a mapping exercise that looks at the Indian political and social context in Bangalore and India, and identify the main challenges and opportunities to build citizenship and engagement among the middle class.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Second, <strong>the spaces </strong>where responsible citizenry must be instilled. As mentioned above, one of the main questions is how to translate the horizontal values of pre-figurative activism proposed by Gaventa into the horizontal forms of organization at the community level proposed by Pantazidou. The latter claims that establishing solidarity networks fights citizen alienation by providing a sense of belonging and adds that in order to strengthen these communal relations, citizens must be fully active, present and available in the social arena. In this respect, the possibilities for collaboration through online tools are grand for activism. Online tools and net-ability as pointed out by Fowler and Biekart in their exploration of post-2010 trends in activism, increase connected solidarity and collective consciousness, which are paramount for engaging the populace with its civic duties both in the community as in the larger public space.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Nevertheless, digital tools remain neutral in the question of how to translate it into sustainable every-day practices for change. In order for online engagement to be truly sustained it must be backed up by a solid offline community that carries this lifestyle forward; a question at the backbone of this research. I will be looking at individuals and collectives from different fields that build partnerships to create positive and sustainable change in Bangalore and India. The objective is to see how further collaboration between change agents translates to the ground level by bringing new groups of people, with different skill sets, lenses and networks into the field of social change. Another interesting possibility is exploring whether these new amalgams of change practices prove to be more enticing and provoking for the 21st century citizen.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Along these lines, the <strong>methods </strong>utilized to engage this group will be the third area of research. Although the prevalence of the ‘spectacle’ blurs the lines between engaging in meaningful civicness and succumbing into the fad of ready-made activism, it would be interesting to look at what makes the ‘spectacle’ appealing and borrow some of those elements to improve advocacy practices. As outlined in the piece, events of change now seem to demand three characteristics to be effective: legibility, intelligibility and accessibility. Creating an image following these criteria provides the message a degree of visibility and clarity that enables its recognition and further amplification through digital technologies.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Therefore, the final research goal is to explore multi-stakeholderism and its potential to enhance visibility for social change. Identify artists, graphic designers, start-ups, entrepreneurs and collectives who are remixing their skills with technology to revisit the question of impact and influence on their audience. I would like to test whether Pleyers’ thesis on the cross-fertilization of activisms also applies to strategie and analyse whether this approach helps overcome the limitations of each tactic, foster ownership by different stakeholders and ultimately empower citizens. Furthermore, as part of a generation that is highly stimulated by the 'visual', I am curious to see how the role of aesthetics and inter-disciplinary collaboration behind middle class activism unfolds. Particularly in Bangalore, a crossroads of technology, activism and creativity, innovation is becoming a praxis norm among change makers. What is left to explore is the extent to which this creative ecosystem can produce and attract the apathetic citizen into the camp of sustainable civic action.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">All interviews and change-makers profiles will be published regularly on the <a href="https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/" class="external-link">Making Change</a> page on the CIS Website.</p>
<hr />
<h2 style="text-align: justify;" class="normal">Sources</h2>
<ol>
<li>Biekart, Kees, and Alan Fowler. "Transforming Activisms 2010+: Exploring Ways and Waves." <em>Development and Change</em> 44, no. 3 (2013): 527-546</li>
<li>Cornwall, Andrea, and Vera Schatten Coelho, eds. <em>Spaces for change?: the politics of citizen participation in new democratic arenas</em>. Vol. 4. Zed Books, 2007.</li>
<li>Gaventa, John, and Gregory Barrett. "So what difference does it make? Mapping the outcomes of citizen engagement." <em>IDS Working Papers</em> 2010, no. 347 (2010): 01-72.</li>
<li>Open Society Foundations “Mapping Digital Media: India, 2012. Retrieved from: <a href="http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/mapping-digital-media-india-20130326.pdf">http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/sites/default/files/mapping-digital-media-india-20130326.pdf</a></li>
<li>Shah, Nishant “Whose Change is it Anyways? <em>Hivos Knowledge Program. </em>April 30, 2013.</li>
<li>Pantazidou, Maro. "Treading New Ground: A Changing Moment for Citizen Action in Greece.</li>
<li>Pleyers, Geoffrey. "Beyond Occupy: Progressive Activists in Europe." <em>Open Democracy: free thinking for the world</em> 2012 (2012): 5pages-8.</li></ol>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change'>https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/making-change/methods-for-social-change</a>
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Web Politics
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2015-04-17T10:42:11Z
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