Centre for Internet and Society

Habits of Living: Being Human in a Networked Society

nishant — 2012-10-23T10:26:19Z

Recently, in Bangalore, a cluster of academics, researchers, artists, and practitioners, were supported by Brown University, to assemble in a Thinkathon (a thinking marathon, if you will) and explore how our new habits of everyday life need to be re-thought and refigured to produce new accounts of what it means to be human, to be friends, and to be connected in our networked societies.

Nishant Shah's column was published in DML Central on October 22, 2012.

There is no denying the fact that life on the interwebz is structured around various negotiations with information. Even as we go blue in the face, in the face of information overload, we have a sacred trust in the idea that information is the new currency of society. In our networked worlds, it is our role and function to transmit information to the nodes we are connected to. On a daily basis, we commit ourselves to the task of producing content, consuming information, relaying and sharing resources, saving and archiving material. We add, through our transactions and interactions, new data sets of information to the already burgeoning world of the web. These information practices, for those of us who are immersed in the info-networks, have become so naturalised, that we have become oblivious to the effort, care, time and resources that go into a sustained engagement with them. They have become a part of our everyday lives, creating structures of comfort and desire, so that the reward and gratification we experience masks the physical and affective energy we invest in sustaining these networks. The discussions at our Thinkathon, spread over four intense days, brought out some really interesting insights I want to map, in a series of posts, providing new ways of thinking about life as created through habits within a network.

Habits of Being Human

One of the most effective human turns the digital networks have produced is about connections. Beyond the interfaces, the platforms, the networks and the infrastructure of access, on the other end is a human being who emerges as a friend, mediated by the huge complex of hardware and software that facilitates this relationship. We have learned how to make these mediations invisible, talking about real-time, and instant messaging, and live-chats, concentrating only on the human actors that engage with us in this networked state of being. This making invisible of the network is not a natural thing. Even for digital natives who are supposed to be immersed in these environments like ‘fish taking to water’, there is a recognition that the network demands time, attention, financial and emotional investment in order to sustain the social relations web we create within these worlds. Wendy Chun from Brown University suggested we have converted these networks into habits – unthinking, visceral, prewired responses that gloss over the toll they take over us. Which is why, for instance, we habitually connect to our networks, and the human beings within that, and yet face information fatigue and network tiredness that takes us by surprise.

Renee Ridgeway (NEWS, Amsterdam) introduced us to the idea that networked habits stand-in for the transactions we make, ignoring the fact that they are largely a commodification of social relationships, making the labour of care invisible in the quantification through systems of Like, Share, Retweet, Follow, Ping, etc. It becomes important to unpack this idea of ‘labour of care’ because we generally think of care as an essentially human condition. Which is why, we connect, share information, help, offer sympathetic shoulders to cry on, for people who are separated from us through geographies and lifestyles. Care is the way in which we separate ourselves from the technological bots and algorithms which can often outstrip us in performing networked habits but cannot emotionally invest in the relations as we human beings can.

Radhika Gajjalla (Bowling Green State University) furthered this notion of care to look at crowdfunding platforms like Kiva and Kickstarter, which essentially bank on the lay-user’s idea of care, and helps them invest a small sum to better the living conditions of somebody in need. She showed us however, that care is not a ‘natural’ response. The interfaces, the representations of the people, the narrative structures of the stories told within these kind of microfinance websites, are all geared towards shaping a particular kind of first world guilt on the user, inviting them to quantify their ‘care’ towards those in the poorer worlds, in need of financial support. The ways in which networks shape our habits, make them natural and encourage us to believe in them as the preconditions of being digitally human, need to be given more attention.

These so-called habits have direct implications on how young people learn and engage with conditions of knowledge production. That which we think of as a natural response within the networked worlds is often a habit that disguises the complex mechanics of control, containment, societal pressures and expectations, and systems of reward and punishment which all get flattened as we rethink what it means to be human in the digital worlds. Looking at the infrastructure, the interface, the processes of training, the threshold of critical competence and the incessant personal investment that is actually labour but is disguised as a habit within the networks of learning, makes us more conscious of the fact that the young users are not ‘born digital’ and nor are they going to become experts left to their own devices. It brings back to the surface the question of the role of technology in education, and the form and function of new knowledge actors in our systems of learning.

Banner image credit: timparkinson http://www.flickr.com/photos/timparkinson/3788726140/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-humanities/blogs/habits-of-living/dml-central-blog-oct-22-2012-nishant-shah-habits-living-being-human-networked-society

Digital native: You can check out, you can never leave

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:31:46Z

Aadhaar is not something you define and opt into, it is something that defines you.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 2, 2017. Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore.

Ok. I get it. You don’t want yet another piece on the horrors and perils of the surveillance state that has come to the forefront with Aadhaar numbers now being tied to our taxes. I know that you must have already made up your mind about whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. If you believe that the way to streamlining bureaucracy and making our systems more accountable is transparency, then you are ready to welcome the digital ecosystem of Aadhaar, as introducing checks and balances that might help to curb some of the excesses and wastes of our governance systems . If you are of the opinion, however, that the state cannot be trusted with our information, without the oversee of the Parliament and the judiciary, then you want to resist this mandatory implementation of the “voluntary” Aadhaar. And, for once, I am unable to take a side, favouring one set of arguments over the other. This ambiguity does not come from a lack of political conviction. I continue to fear about the future of our lives when these technologies of control and domination fall in the hands of governments which have an authoritarian bend of mind.

Instead, my lack of preference on the good, bad and ugly sides of Aadhaar stems from a completely different concern around network technologies of digital connectivity that has found very little attention in the almost zealous discourse about “yes Aadhaar, no Aadhaar”.

This is a concern about the relationship between technological networks and the messy realities that we embody. There has been an easy acceptance of a digital network as a description of our everyday life. If you look at any network that you belong to — from public discussion forums to private WhatsApp groups — you will realise that these networks offer to visualise your connections and transactions with the people, places and things in your circles. Thus, it is possible to say that Facebook describes your collection of friends and your social life. Or you could suggest that LinkedIn is a visualisation of your professional landscape. And, in a similar vein, we can also propose that Aadhaar is a representation of the working of our government systems of identification.

Each one of these propositions, seemingly innocent, is blatantly wrong. Facebook, for example, didn’t just connect you with your friends. It has fundamentally changed the idea of what is a friend. For a generation of young people who grew up naturalised in social media, the notion of a friend has lost all its meaning and nuance. Every connection, acquaintance, friend of a friend, a random stranger who likes the same band as you do, is now a friend. And the increasing anxiety we have about people falling prey to predatory friendships is because Facebook has now normalised the idea that if somebody calls you their friend, you don’t have to worry about sharing personal and private information with them. Similarly , for anybody who has spent time on LinkedIn, we know that it is not just a portal that describes our work. It is the space where we stay connected with events and people far removed from us. It is the resource pool that we draw on while looking for new work. It is also the space that we keep an eye on just to see if a better job has opened up. It is a collection of events, links and connections that not only shows what you do but what you aspire for, who you connect with and what are the kinds of professional ambitions you see for yourself.

Just like Facebook and LinkedIn, which don’t just describe a reality but actually simulate, prescribe and shape it, Aadhaar is a digital network that is seeking to change the very foundational reality of our lives. Like most digital networks, it is not merely an explanation of how things are but the context within which who we are and what we do finds meaning and validation. Thus, Aadhaar might propose that it is merely trying to describe your identity but it is actually offering to shape a new one for you. The programme might suggest that it is trying to implement a system already in place, but it is, in reality, creating an entirely new system within which you and I have to now find space, function and identity. The latest announcements of mainstreaming Aadhaar merely betray this fact – that Aadhaar is not something you define and opt into, Aadhaar defines you. And opting out is going to have severe penalties and consequences.

Digital networks have long masqueraded as benign visualisations of the world. But they are, in principle, blueprints that transform the world as we know it. This, in itself, is not bad. However, hiding this transformation is. Because when a transformation happens, especially at systemic levels, it is always the people who are the most vulnerable that suffer the most from it. Think about the older friend who might not be the most tech savvy and how they struggle for inclusion on Facebook and WhatsApp messages. Pay some attention to people who did not understand the public nature of LinkedIn and ended up getting fired because they wrote about their current work conditions and the desire to change them. And, similarly, do think if the people who are being pushed into these digital ecosystems without adequate digital literacy, care and information about the consequences of their actions, are being made vulnerable in their access to resources of life and dignity.

Whether you and I like Aadhaar or not is not really the question. The question is not about the right to privacy either. What is at stake in this deployment of Aadhaar is a government that is pushing radical transformations of the life of its citizens without consulting with them and addressing their needs. In the past, when governments have done this, we have developed strong voices of protest and correction asking the state to be responsible towards those affected by the transformation. The reliance on the digital, however, allows these governments to escape this responsibility and, in the guise of description, are making prescriptions of reality which need to be resisted.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-2-2017-digital-native-you-can-check-out-you-can-never-leave

Digital native: Snap out of outrage mode

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:45:12Z

Rage at the inequality of the digital world is good. But why stop at the Snapchat CEO?

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. The article was published in the Indian Express on April 30, 2017.

If you are reading this right now, let’s just get something out of the way — you are not poor. Just the affordability of English language literacy and access to national news media marks you as belonging to a very small elite group in the country. If you are reading this online, the point is driven home even more. So, when you heard about the CEO of Snapchat (If you are asking SnapWhat, don’t feel crestfallen, you are not “out of it”, you are just not 17) being quoted from a statement he made two years ago, that he is not interested in expanding in poor countries like India, you were obviously riled.

There were many things wrong with the alleged statement that Evan Spiegel made. He betrayed his own ignorance and arrogance, where he was unable to understand the growing consumer base of mobile-based apps in emerging networked countries like India. He also more or less failed to understand that poverty is layered, and while India continues to struggle with poverty, it has a growing population of extremely wealthy and affluent users, who are not only driving global consumption trends but also the key focus of digital growth. His biggest faux pas was to not recognise that in the global information technologies development cycles, there is a huge chance that a large number of his employees and contractors might be located in India, and that Digital India is an undeniable extension of Silicon Valley apps and platforms.

Speigel’s cockiness is actually so common in how digital ecosystems are mapped, that you could almost ignore it because “everybody says it”. It is great that he was called out on his neo-colonial viewpoints. Users from India (and around the world) joined in to not only to protest against his bravado, but also to call for an action that hurts private companies in the one way they recognise — revenue. #BoycottSnapchat has been trending this last week, and millions of people using this visual filtered storytelling app are uninstalling it from their devices. People have been making jokes and criticising Snapchat, leading to a huge dip in the user base of Snapchat.

These moments of digital collective action are admirable and we need more instances where we call out such acts of discrimination and exclusion. We do need to make sure that we do not make Snapchat Enemy No. 1, pretending that the rest of the web is all good. Speigel is profoundly wrong, in his comments or in his defence that his app is “free” to download, which shows that he is not excluding India. However, Speigel cannot be singled out in all of this. Across the digital landscape, countries like India are always trapped in a strange dichotomy. On the one hand, Indian engineers and knowledge workers are being harvested as the cheap labour who “steal global jobs” and on the other, India is always seen as poor, underdeveloped, in need of saving.

This distilling of the Indian landscape, in all its complexity, into these two polarised identities, allows for these tech companies to continue unfair practices which affect both the glamorous white-collar techies and the invisible labours of IT cities. It emphasises the idea that the IT worker, upwardly and geographically mobile, is being offered a path to escape either the country or their context, because they are touched by the economic power of the digital corporation. It also justifies the exploited labour conditions of IT industries, where the story of transformation is presented as an excuse for underpaid overworked production environments.

At the same time, these companies seek to take up state-like responsibilities without the accountability, destroying fundamental media and information rights in the guise of bridging the digital divide. Remember Internet.Org’s attack on #NetNeutrality in their attempt to provide free Internet to the poor. Pay attention to Uber’s continued exploitation of its drivers, refusing to treat them as employees and yet regulating them more than any employer can dare to. Realise that despite our #MakeInIndia campaigns, we have very little investment in creating localised, Indian language digital infrastructure. Notice that the Indian digital scene, far from being start-up friendly, is turning into a monopoly of a handful of telecom companies, which nonchalantly discard the legal apparatus of safeguards. Reflect on how we are building biometric databases like Aadhaar, without any regard for data protection and security, so that millions of people are compromised through data leaks. All of these different phenomena need to be read along with our outrage at Snapchat. All of these are stern reminders that our act of questioning the digital does not stop at uninstalling an app, but at reorganising our policies and politics of the digital in the country.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-30-2017-digital-native-snap-out-of-outrage-mode

Digital native: Free speech? You must be joking!

nishant — 2017-06-08T01:16:01Z

India’s digital landscape is dotted with vigilante voices that drown out people’s right to free speech.

The article was published in the Indian Express on May 14, 2017.

Freedom of speech and expression has always been a tricky issue. While all of us are generally in favour of defending our rights to speak what is in our hearts, we are not equally thrilled about the speech of others that we might not enjoy. While we know that free speech and expression are not absolute — there are blurred lines of things that are offensive, might cause harm, and are directed with malice at different individuals or collectives — we also generally accept that this is a freedom that marks the maturity and sustainability of a stable democratic system.

Thus, even when confronted with speech and expression that might be undesirable: a political view that contradicts ours, an expression of blasphemy or profanity, a voice of dissent that questions the status quo, or an unsavoury information tidbit that mocks at somebody we admire, we generally take it in good stride, and learn to deal and engage with these actions. We do this, because we know that trying to curtail somebody else’s rights to free speech, would eventually restrict our own capacity for it, thus reducing the scope of an engaged and critical society. Especially in countries like India, where everybody has an opinion, where people offer critiques over chai and join heated debates over paan, there’s no denying that we are fond of our rights and capacity to speak
our minds.

However, within Digital India, these things seem to be changing fast. Every day we wake up to the cacophonous clamour of social media to realise that increasingly we are becoming an intolerant society filled with vigilantes bent on stopping people from saying things that we might just not like. In the ongoing saga of shrinking spaces of free speech, we now add the shameful incident at the Embassy of Sweden in India. On May 8, following mass populist trolling and complaints from the Twitteratti, the Embassy disinvited two women print and TV journalists — Swati Chaturvedi and Barkha Dutt — and cancelled their event, ironically, in the honour of World Press Freedom, on the topic of women’s participation in the online public space, to talk about trolls.

I shall wait here for the bitter irony to sink in: two of the strongest women voices in Indian public media, were disinvited to speak from an event where they were to talk about their experience of being trolled, harassed, bullied and intimidated in the newly emerging digital media landscape. Instead of giving them a voice, sharing their experiences, and engaging with their stories, the hypermasculine army of right wing vigilantes who object to these women’s history of critique of the current government and its leaders, decided to show their Twitter might, and celebrated as they succeeded in putting one more nail in the coffin of free and fearless speech in the country.

Some Twitter users went ahead and tagged their favourite leaders — @Narendramodi and @manekagandhibjp. They demanded, using their freedom of voice, to stop others from speaking. Social media networks have often been celebrated as alternative spaces where new, and unexpected voices can express their opinions without the fear of physical retribution or penalisation. While this has been consistently proven wrong by government authorities who have regularly policed, penalised and punished voices of dissent or disfavour, that at least is something we can notice, challenge and contest through legal redressal. However, with this new mob justice where the volume of voices engineered to amplify their disapproval, coupled with threats of violence and economic downfall (the users this time threatened to make a list of Swedish products and boycott them) is a recurring and disturbingly new phenomenon.

Crowds have always had the power to demand and leverage change of their liking. However, on social media, this can take up more sinister forms, because a handful of people through Twitter bots and chat scripts can create the illusion of a hugely amplified voice that can then be used to threaten and restrict the scope of free speech. The mass bullying effect needs a strong counterpoint in the form of better internet governance policies and regulations that nurture safe spaces for the tinier voices to be heard.

At the same time, however, the stifling attempts require another strategy — the need to speak up against such acts of intimidation and silencing, not only from the regular people on the web, but from the officials and leaders who have sworn to protect our constitutional rights. And this is, perhaps, where our leaders are failing us. Because, in an age of hypervisibility, where every step they take is a selfie moment, where every move they make makes it to the headlines, and they take pride in documenting their life in exceedingly boring detail, it creates a deafening silence when the leaders remain mute to the slow dissipation of the rights to free speech and expression by the angry mobs of networked digitality.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-14-2017-digital-native-free-speech-you-must-be-joking

Digital native: Look before you (digitally) leap

nishant — 2017-06-08T01:22:54Z

Creating a digital future is great, but there’s a serious need to secure the infrastructure first.

The article was published in the Indian Express on May 28, 2017.

Digital technologies of connectivity have one unrelenting promise — they offer us new ways of doing things, augmenting existing practices, amplifying capacities and affording new possibilities of information and data transactions that accelerate the ways in which we live. This idea of the internet as infrastructure is central to India’s transition into an information technologies future.

Nandan Nilekani, almost a decade ago, in his book, Imagining India, had clearly charted how the digital is the basis for shaping the future of our communities, societies and governance. As one of the architects of Aadhaar, Nilekani had argued that the country of the 21st century will have to be one that seriously invests in the digital infrastructure.

In 10 short years, we have reached a point where we no longer question the enormous investment we make in digital systems of governance and functioning, and we appreciate the economic and networked values of projects like #DigitalIndia and #MakeInIndia that shape our markets and cities into becoming the new cyber-hubs.

There is no denying that digital offers a new way of consolidating a country as polyphonic, multicultural, expansive and diverse as India. We also have to appreciate that, even if selectively, the digitisation of public records, government services, and state support is clearly producing an administrative momentum that is reforming various practices of corruption and incompetence in the massive state machinery. The role of the digital as infrastructure has been a boon for many developing countries.

This positioning, however, masks the fact that infrastructure needs its own support and care systems. Take roads, for example. Roads allow for connectivity, movement and mobility between different spaces. They are one of the most important of state and public infrastructures and for all our jokes about pot-holes and eroding spaces for pedestrians, roads remain the life-line of our everyday life. A complex mechanism of planning, regulation and maintenance needs to be put into place in order to make roads survive.

The amount of attention we pay to roads — the material quality, the land that it occupies, the lanes for different vehicles, the traffic lights and zebra crossings, blockages and streamlines, authorising specific use of roads and disallowing certain activities to happen there — is staggering. A public planner would tell you that before the road comes into being, the idea of the road has to be formulated. The road needs protection and planning and its own infrastructure of support and creation.

When it comes to the information superhighway of the digital web, this remains forgotten. We are so focused on the digital as infrastructure that we seem to pay no attention to its infrastructure. Thus, when we proposed, deployed and now enforced a project like Aadhaar, the focus remained on its unfolding and its operations. Aadhaar as an aspiration of governance has its values and has the capacity to become a system that augments statecraft.

However, the infrastructure that is needed to make Aadhaar possible — rules and regulations around privacy, bills and acts about data sharing and ownership, contexts of informed consent and engagement, community awareness and data security protocol — have been missing from the debates. For years now, activists have been advising and warning the state that building this digital infrastructure without building the contexts within which they make sense is not just irresponsible, but downright dangerous.

Different governments have turned a deaf ear to these protests. Now, when the Aadhaar portals are found disclosing massive volumes of public data, making people vulnerable to data and identity theft and fraud, we are realising the massive projects we have started without thinking about the context of security.

With the ongoing controversies around #AadhaarLeaks, the question is not whether the disclosure of this information was a leak, a breach or an ignorant exposure of sensitive information. The response to it cannot be just about fixing the infrastructure and building more robust systems. The question that we need to confront is how do we stop thinking of the internet as infrastructure and start focusing on the infrastructure that needs to be set into place so that these digital systems promise safety, security, and protection for the lives they intersect with.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-may-28-2017-digital-native-look-before-you-digitally-leap

Social media, SMS are not why NE students left Bangalore

nishant — 2012-08-28T10:48:06Z

I woke up one morning to find that I was living in a city of crisis. Bangalore, where the largest public preoccupations to date have been about bad roads, stray dogs, and occasionally, the lack of night-life, the city was suddenly a space that people wanted to flee and occupy simultaneously.

Nishant Shah's article on North East exodus was published in FirstPost on August 20, 2012.

Through technology mediated gossip mill that produced rumours faster than the speed of a digital click, imagination of terror, of danger and of material harm found currency and we found thousands of people suddenly leaving the city to go back to their imagined homelands.

The media spectacle of this exodus around questions of religion, ethnicity and regionalism only emphasised the fact that there is a new wave of connectedness that we live in – the social web, or what have you – that can no longer be controlled, contained or corrected by official authorities and their voices.

Despite a barrage of messages from the law enforcement and security authorities, on email, on large screens on the roads, and on the comfort of our cell-phones, there was a growing anxiety and a spiralling information mill that was producing an imaginary situation of precariousness and bodily harm.

Much has been said about the eruption of this irrationality that pokes holes in the mantle of cosmopolitanism that Bangalore (and other such ‘global cities’) is enveloped in, in its quest to represent the India that is supposed to shine. It has been heartening to see how communities that were supposed to be in conflict have worked so hard in the last few days, at building human contacts and providing assurances of safety and inclusion, which are far more effective than the official word.

There has been a rich discourse on what this means for India’s modernity, especially when such an event marks the so-called neo-liberal cities, showing the darker undercurrents of discrimination and suspicion that seem to lie just beneath the surface of networked neighbourhoods.

While there is much to be unpacked about the political motivations and the ecologies of fear that our immigrant lives are enshrined in, I want to focus on two aspects of this phenomenon which need more attention.

The first is the fierce localisation of our global technologies. There is an imagination, especially in cities like Bangalore, of digital technologies as necessarily plugging us in larger networks of global information consumption. The idea that technology plugs us into the transnational circuits is so huge that it only tunes us towards an idea of connectedness that is always outward looking, expanding the scope of nation, community and body.

However, the ways in which information was circulating during this phenomenon reminds us that digital networks are also embedded in local practices of living and survival. Most of the times, these networks are so naturalised and such an integral part of our crucial mechanics of urban life that they appear as habits, without any presence or visibility, In times of crises – perceived or otherwise – these networks make themselves visible, to show that they are also inward looking.

The visibility of the networks, when they suddenly crop up for public viewing, for those of us who are outside of that network, it signals that something has gone wrong. There is a glitch in the matrix and we need to start unpacking the local, the specific and the particular that signals the separation of these networks from our habits of living.

The second point I want to make is about the need to look at the ellipsis that occurs in this spectacular emergence of the network and the apparatus that is set into place to control and regiment it. The hyper-visibility of the information and technology network destabilises the ways in which we think of our everyday, thus emerging not only as a sign of the crisis but a crisis unto itself.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

This is a problem about the nation-wide building of mega-cities filled with immigrant bodies that are not allowed their differences because they all have to be cosmopolitan and mobile bodies. The solution, however, is offered at the level of technology.

Instead of addressing the larger issues of conservative parochialism, an increasing back-lash by conservative governments and a growing hostility that emerges from these cities which nobody possesses and nobody belongs to, the efforts are being made to blame technology as the site where the problem is located and the object that needs to be controlled.

So what we have is redundant regulation that controls the number of text messages we are able to send, or policing of internet for those spreading rumours. The entire focus has been on information management, as if the reason for mass exodus of people from the North East Indian states and the sense of fragility that the city has suddenly been immersed in, is all due to the pervasive and ubiquitous information gadgets and their ability to proliferate in peer-2-peer environments outside of the control of the government.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope in the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

This obsession with governance of technology to resolve a much more nuanced problem is akin to fabulous stories of mad monarchs banishing spinning wheels from their kingdoms or sentencing hammers to imprisonment for the potential and possibility of crime.

And these solutions are always going to fail, because they fail to recognise either the intimate penetration of digital technologies in our everyday life, or the ways in which our local structures are constructed through the presence of ubiquitous technologies and gadgets and screens and networks.

These ellipses of the crisis – replacing the crisis with the network – as well as the collusion between the crisis and the network are the easy solution that state authorities pick up on.

Digital Technologies have become the de facto scapegoats of many problems in our past. It invites more regulation, containment and censorship of the freedom that digital technologies allow you – from the infamous Delhi Public School MMS Scandal in the early 2000s to the recent attempts at filtering the social web – we have seen the repeated futility of such measures of technology control, and yet it appears as a constant trope n the State’s solution to the problems of the contemporary.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/www-first-post-com-aug-25-2012-nishant-shah-social-media-sms-are-not-why-ne-students-left-bangalore

One. Zero.

nishant — 2015-04-24T11:50:32Z

The digital world is the world of twos. All our complex interactions, emotional negotiations, business transactions, social communication and political subscriptions online can be reduced to a string of 1s and 0s, as machines create the networks for the human beings to speak. So sophisticated is this network of digital infrastructure that we forget how our languages of connection are constantly being transcribed in binary code, allowing for the information to be transmitted across the web.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on September 16, 2012

Indeed, we have already reached a point where we don’t even need to be familiar with code to perform intimate functions with the machines that we live with, as they respond to us in human languages. While this human-machine duality has been resolved with the presence of intuitive and interactive interfaces that allow us to seamlessly connect to the person(s) at the other end of a digital connection, there is another binary that still remains at the centre of much discussion around all things digital.

This is the duality of the Real and the Virtual. In geekspeak, this particular separation has been coded as a divide between RL (Real Life) and VR (Virtual Reality). This separation between the two is so naturalised that it has become a part of our everyday imagination where things that happen online are ‘out there’ and ‘an escape’ whereas things that are offline, are ‘real’ and ‘believable’. However, as digital technologies become pervasive and ubiquitous, these lines between RL and VR have blurred. Especially with new technologies of augmented reality and simulated layers like Google Goggles or even location-based services on your smartphone that help you navigate through the offline world, it is becoming difficult to clearly say what is online and what is offline.

There are two questions that help demonstrate this blurring of boundaries very clearly. The first is an existential one, something that doesn’t crop up often in conversations, but suddenly haunts you on at 2 pm on an idle Thursday: Who are you, when you are online? A famous cartoon on the web had two dogs sitting on a connected computer, their paws on the mouse, and telling each other, ‘On the internet, nobody knows you are a dog’. But in the hyper-connected world that we live in, everybody knows exactly who we are, even as we ourselves are confused about where our bodies end and where our digital extensions and avatars begin. Things that we do in RL affect and shape the ways in which our avatars evolve on social networking sites. The interactions that our avatars have with other digital objects map back on our understanding of who we are and how we dress our bodies. Even when we are not connected, our avatars interact, constantly, not only with other avatars in the system, but also machines and artificial intelligence scripts, and robots and networks, masquerading as ourselves even outside our knowledge. We might be tagged, liked, shared, transmitted and morphed; we might be photoshopped, reduced to a tweet, condensed to a status message, embodied in an avatar on our favourite role playing game, or hovering as a signature to emails. These are all parts of us, but they are not just extensions of us. These are things that not only stand in for us but also shape the ways in which we understand ourselves and how we connect to the world.

The second question crops up regularly in digitally mediated conversations. When your parents call you on the cell phone, or your friend messages you on the Blackberry, or your colleague pings you on Skype or your IRC buddies see you on a chat channel. As our modes of access have become mobile and devices of access have become portable, we can never really clearly answer the question, ‘Where are you right now?’. It is a question worth dwelling on. Where are you when you are walking down a street, using GPRS data on your cellphone, and a friend uses a Voice Over IP service like Whatsapp to ask you, ‘Where are you right now?’. Are you on the street? On your phone? On an application? Located somewhere on a server? Bits of data on a high-speed optic fibre, zooming across the ionosphere? Depending upon who is asking the question, you would be able to and in fact have to give a different answer about where you are when you are online.

This blurred duality might be seen as confusing, taking away the assurance of our body and our geography from everyday practices. In fact, one of the reasons why the digital revolution has been so well received is because these technologies facilitate an almost seamless transfer of ideas, emotions and connections across the different realms of RL and VR, offering us new ways of thinking about being human, being social, and being connected. The strength of the digital is in this coupling together, of the hitherto irreconcilable realms of our life in messy and enchanting ways, giving us new opportunities to think about who we are and where we are in our quotidian lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/www-indianexpress-com-one-zero

The Internet Way

nishant — 2014-02-14T06:59:48Z

Dr. Nishant Shah's review of the book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” by Bantam Press/Random House Group, London was published in Biblio Vol. 19 No.8 (1&2), January – February 2014.

Click to download the file (PDF, 2436 Kb). Dr. Nishant Shah's review can be found on page 16.

The Age of Amazon’ is not just the title of a book, it is a retrospective on the history of e-commerce as well as a prophecy for the shape of things to come. In his meticulously reported book, Brad Stone takes us through the roller coaster ride of the ‘Everything Store’ that Amazon has become, building a gripping tale of an idea that has become synonymous to the world of online shopping in just over two decades.

The book reads well as a biopic on the visionary lunacy of Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, as well as a gripping tale of how ideas grow and develop in the digital information age. Stone is an expert storyteller, not only because of his eye for the whimsical, the curious and the enchantment of the seemingly banal, but also because of his ability to question his own craft.

At the very outset, Stone warns us that the book has been compiled through workers at employee, but not Bezos himself. This helps Stone separate the maker from the brand — unlike Steve Jobs who became the cult icon for Apple, Bezos himself has never become the poster child of his brand, allowing

Amazon to become not only an everything store but everybody store. But it means that Stone’s task was to weave together the personal biography of Bezos, his dramatic journey through life with the tumultuous and adventurous inception and growth of Amazon, and his skill lies in the meeting of the twines, which he does with style, ease and charm.

One of the easiest accusations to throw at a book like this is to state that it reduces the murky, blurred, messy and incoherent set of events into a narrative that establishes causes and attributes design and intention where none existed. However, Stone was confronted with the idea of ‘Narrative Fallacy’ — a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his Black Swan, referring to the tendency of human beings to reduce complex phenomenon to “soothing but oversimplified stories”. In fact, the challenge to not reduce the book to a series of connected anecdotes was posed by Bezos when Stone pitched the book to him. And what has emerged is a book about accidents, serendipity, risk, redundancy, failure charting the ineffable, inscrutable and inexplicable ways in which digital technologies are shaping the worlds we live in.

With the rigour and journalistic inquiry that Stone has displayed in his regular writings in The Businessweek, The Everything Store has stories which are as memorable as they are unexpected. Stone does a fantastic job of charting Bezos’ life — from tracking down the lost father who had no idea what his son, who he had abandoned at age three, has become, to the chuckleworthy compilation of Bezos’ favourite quotes (Stone calls it his ‘greatest hits’), the book is filled with pointed and poignant observations and stories that give us an idea of the extraordinary life of Jeff Bezos. But unlike the expected character creation of a mad genius, what you get is the image of a man who lived in contradictions: wedded to his internal idea of truth but also ruthless in his business policies which were predatory and competitive to say the least; a businessman who once wrote a memo titled ‘Amazon.love’ about how he wanted a company to be “loved not feared” but also used the metaphor of a “cheetah preying on the gazelles” in its acquisition of smaller businesses; a man who thought of himself as a “missionary rather than a mercenary” and yet built a business empire that embodies some of the most discriminatory, exploitative and stark conditions of adjunct, adhoc, underpaid and contract-based labour of our precariously mobile worlds.

Stone is masterful as he segues from Bezos’ personal life and ambitions into the monomaniacal and turbulent trajectory of Amazon. Amazon is not a simple success story. It tried and failed at many things, but what remains important is how, it failed at the traditional way of doing things and succeeded at the internet way of thinking. So when Amazon failed, it was not a failure to succeed, but a failure that resulted because the infrastructure needed to make it succeed was not yet in place. Stone’s narrative that effortlessly takes us through the economics, trade, policies, regulation, administration and struggles of Amazon, shows how it was a company that had to invent the world it wanted to succeed in, in order to succeed. In many ways, the book becomes not only about Amazon and its ambitions to sell everything from A-Z, but about how it built prototypes for the rest of the world so that it could become relevant and rule.

But the book is not a Martin-Scorsese-type homage to the scoundrel or the villain. While it is imbued up and spit you out. And if you are good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.” Or as Stone himself suggests, that is the way the company is going to grow “until either Jeff Bezos exits the scene or no one is left to stand in his way”. This policy of taking everything from its employees and channelling it to the relentless growth of the company accounts for not only the high attrition rate of top executives but also the growing controversies about work and labour conditions in Amazon warehouses and on-the-ground delivery services.

Stone’s book does not go into great detail about the new work force that companies like Amazon produce — a work force that is reduced to being a cog in a system, performing mechanical tasks, working at minimal wage, and without the protections that are offered to the white collar high-level technology executives that are the popup children of the digital trade. Stone reminds us that behind the incredible platform that Amazon is, is a massive physical infrastructure which almost reminds us of the early industrial days where the labourer was in a state of exploitation and precariousness. And even as we celebrate the rise of these global behemoths, we might forget that behind the seductive interfaces and big data applications, that under the excitement of drone-based delivery systems and artificial intelligence that will start delivering things even before you place the order, is a system that pushes more and more workers in unprotected and exploitative work conditions.

All in all, The Everything Store is a little bit like Amazon itself. It is a love story of a man with his ideas, and how the rest of the world has shifted, tectonically, to accommodate these eruptions. In its historical retrospective, it shows us the full scope of the ideas and possibilities that inform Amazon, and thus the future that it is going to build for us. And with masterful craftsmanship, Brad Stone writes that it is as much about the one man and his company, as it is about the physical and affective infrastructure of our rapidly transforming digital worlds.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/biblio-january-february-volume-ix-8-nishant-shah-the-internet-way

Digital Native: The e-wasteland of our times

nishant — 2018-05-06T03:21:49Z

How digitising isn’t necessarily a fast-track to a sustainable future.

The article was published in the Indian Express on April 22, 2018.

Digitise Everything” is the mantra of the day. Offices take pride in being paperless, hot-desking because our laptops and mobile computing devices have, more or less, become our workspaces. Governments are investing heavily in digitising archives, putting faith in the notion that digital preservation is the way forward for the future. Magazines and newspapers have had no alternative but to move into the digital realm to keep up with the new information ecosystems. Various campaigns make us believe that to be smart we need to be digital, and that it is more sustainable to have digital real estate which enables ease of access and reduced travel time and energy in engaging with different information systems.

The digital infrastructure is often presented as green, sustainable and efficient. These claims might have had some merit in the early days when computing was still exclusive and open only to a select few. The classic example that would be given within the research circles in the late ’90s would be, that in order to do historical archival research from India, a researcher would have to travel all the way to the archives of the British Library in England. The costs of travel, the energy required for the overseas journey, the finances of access that would be required to complete such research were characteristic of the pre-digital era. Now, a historian looking at the same archives through a simple broadband connection, can access this information at a fraction of the cost, speed and time.

However, it is difficult to take at face value the fact that this efficiency is sustainable in any form. As we go increasingly digital in almost all our devices, there are three massive environmental costs which are often made invisible. The first is in the sheer amount of electricity that our digital ecosystems consume. We all know the frustration that arises out of batteries dying and phones not carrying enough charge is, indeed, a harrowing experience. But at the back-end of it is an enormous power surge. The large network of service providers, surveys, information storage and distribution consumes an extraordinary amount of energy which is, generally, still dependent on fossil fuels. It is estimated that one hour of cellphone usage with data connection uses the same amount of energy that a family house uses in an entire day. Because while your device might be energy compliant and very low in emissions, the large array of the Internet of Things that needs to be in place to support your device, is an invisible energy cost that takes its tolls on the environment.

Even more than active usage, it is the storing of everything on the cloud that is, perhaps, more problematic. As we stream everything on Netflix, Spotify and YouTube, we have to realise that all this information is being stored in huge data centres powered by massive electricity sources to keep it all alive. The energy cost of our digital histories is almost impossible to compute in environmental measures.

The third big problem that we often don’t recognise is our obsession with updating our devices. We throw and exchange our electronic devices at the blink of a trend. Mostly, older phones and laptops are not recycled but broken down into e-waste. Huge landfills are now the graveyards of old electronics which have components that cannot be recycled, and have elements that are no longer useful. Most of these electronic devices are made with metals and precious components that are mined at huge environmental costs.

I was recently at a conference where we were given books as mementos. One of the delegates jokingly exclaimed, “Why am I being given a dead-tree object?” referring to the pages of the book and the trees that must have been felled to make the book. It was telling that he didn’t realise that his ebook, loaded on his tablet, probably killed more trees than that one physical book, which will lend itself to recycling more easily than his tablet would.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/digital-native-the-e-wasteland-of-our-times

Digital Native: Cause an Effect

nishant — 2018-06-26T15:21:01Z

Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign.

The article was published in the Indian Express on June 17, 2018.

Statistically, it has been proven, that the consumption of ice cream in the country increases significantly in the summer months. In the same months, the number of housebreak incidents also increase. It might be possible, though ridiculous, to now make an argument that eating ice cream leads to increased frequencies of housebreakings, and, hence, sale and consumption of ice cream should be regulated more rigorously. The humour in this situation arises out of the fact that we know, at a very human level, that correlation is not the same as causation.

We know that just because two things happen in temporal or spatial proximity with each other doesn’t necessarily mean they are connected or responsible in a chain of events. This is because human communication is designed to make a distinction between cause-and-effect relationship and happened-together relationship between two sets of information.

However, when it comes to computation, things turn slightly different. Within the database logics of computation, two sets of data, occurring in the same instance, are subjected to a simple scrutiny: Either one of them is linked with the other, or, one of the two is noise, and, hence, needs to be removed from the system. Computation systems are foundationally anchored on logic. Within logical systems, all the events and elements described in the system are interlinked and have a causal relationship with each other. Computational learning systems, thus, do not have the capacity to make a distinction between causal and correlative phenomena.

This is why computation systems of data mining and profiling are so much more efficient than human cognition. Not only are these systems able to compute a huge range of data, but they are also able to make unprecedented, unforeseen, unexpected, and often unimagined connections between seemingly disparate and separate information streams. I present to you this simplified notion of computer logic because it is at the heart of the biometric identity-based debates around Aadhaar right now. Recently, Ajay Bhushan Pandey, CEO, UIDAI, wrote an opinion piece that insisted that the data collective mechanisms of Aadhaar are not only safe but also benign. His opinion is backed by Bill Gates, who also famously suggested that “Aadhaar in itself” is not dangerous.

And, in many ways, Gates is right, even if Pandey’s willful mischaracterisation of Gates’s statement is not. For Gates, a computer scientist looking at the closed architecture of the Aadhaar system, it might appear, that in as much as any digital system could be safe, Aadhaar is indeed safe. In essence, Gates’s description was, that as a logical system of computational architecture, Aadhaar is safe, and the data within it, in their correlation with each other, does not form any sinister networks that we need to worry about.

However, Pandey takes this “safe in itself” argument to extend it to the applications and implementations of Aadhaar. He argues that because Aadhaar is a self-contained safe system, its interaction with other data and information systems is also equally safe and benign. In this, Pandey, either out of ignorance or willful mischaracterisation, confuses correlation with causality. He refuses to admit that Aadhaar and the biometrics within that are the central focal point around which a variety of data transactions happen which produce causal links between disconnected subjects.

Thus, the presence of a digital biometric data set might not in itself be a problem, but when it became the central verification system that connects your cellphone with your geolocation data, your presence and movement with your bank account and your income tax returns, your food and lifestyle consumption with your medical records, it starts a causal link between information which was hitherto unconnected, and, hence, considered trivial.

The alarm that the critics of Aadhaar have been raising is not about whether the data on Aadhaar is safe or not, but, how, in the hands of unregulated authorities, the correlations that Aadhaar generates and translates into causal profiles have dire consequences on the privacy and liberty of the individuals who carry the trace of Aadhaar in all facets of life. Pandey and his team of governors need to explain not the safety of Aadhaar but what happens when the verification information of Aadhaar is exploited to create non-human correlations of human lives, informing policy, penalisation and pathologisation through these processes.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-17-2018-digital-native-cause-an-effect

Facebook sees its salvation with its cryptocurrency Libra

nishant — 2019-07-02T03:58:08Z

Facebook’s Libra is designed to take control of our digital lives.

The article by Nishant Shah was published in the Indian Express on June 30, 2019.

In the early days, when we were still discussing the possible implications of building a data-surveillance system like Aadhaar in India, one of the persistent narratives was that in return, Aadhaar will build the infrastructure that gives legal and financial identity to the homeless, underserved, and the unbanked populations of the country. I remember how, at one consultation, Nandan Nilekani had jokingly mentioned that the single entry login framework of Aadhaar is easy to understand as the “Facebook of government services”. There were actual rumours that Aadhaar was seeking to collaborate with Facebook to see if we could log in to the public delivery systems using Facebook’s technical infrastructure.

The probable Aadhaar-Facebook collaboration never happened, but the other idea of Aadhaar enabling mobile payment, financial inclusion through digital outreach, and the possibility of leapfrogging an entire demography into digital transactions, has a different take. Aadhaar did not necessarily build a public infrastructure for banking. However, in establishing a unique identity, it did pave the way for the notorious demonetisation that pushed people into virtual and cashless transactions, and ironically, opening up the Indian market for the Chinese-controlled Paytm app to take over. Paytm is a clear symptom of China’s digital global dominance where TenCents and Alibaba are monopolising the world financial systems by becoming the de facto digital financial delivery systems for the emerging financial inclusion markets.

A little late in the game, but perhaps with a blockchain advantage, Facebook has entered this business of converting unique identification and engagement into a financial service, with the announcement of their new cryptocurrency endeavour, Libra. Much like those early days of Aadhaar, Facebook has positioned Libra as a pro-poor facilitator of financial inclusion for the large user base who are going to be connected to the Internet for the first time. The progressions of its interest in becoming the naturalised platform for all digital activities, as opposed to its presence as a space for sharing cute cat pictures and passive aggressive videos of relationships, is clear.

By launching Libra — the details are still scarce, but it seeks to create its own currency for the next generation, in collaboration with companies like Uber and Visa — Facebook has thrown its hat into a complete Black Mirror control of our digital lives. They want the user to first get connected to the Internet through Internet.org. Next, they want to control the websites that the users can use for free, by making Facebook the default entry point into digital data sharing. They would then collect and sell the data mined from these free services, and target the users to buy and consume using money developed by Libra. It is a fascinating, if not an ominous, cradle-to-grave scenario.

Currently, Facebook, in its humanitarian guise, is putting forth Libra as a .org service that selflessly seeks to transform the lives of financially excluded populations, who, in one fell swoop, would be online, on Facebook, and using Facebook’s currency in one single access point. However, it is clear to see that Libra is not a service for social good — Facebook is converting its advertisement-based exploitation of user data into clear financial goals. Remember, how we darkly used to laugh that data is the new currency? Well, here is Facebook’s Libra proving that data is not just the new currency, it can be the currency.

Facebook’s wealth has entirely been predicated on data as currency and attention as economy. The last few years have been a revelation of how Facebook has capitalised on its data and attention monopoly. In this new step, Facebook is no longer interested in using data to facilitate the financial expansion — with Libra, Facebook is going to become an actual broker of the money that we use. And once we have bought enough of this currency and use it in our everyday transactions, it can never devalue, because if it’s false, the biggest loser will always be the newly banked individual whose first financial identity is not going to be a banking account but Facebook.

In Libra, Facebook sees its salvation. It has long been critiqued that Facebook is facing obsolescence and threat from other social media networks and Libra is yet another way by which Facebook diversifies its portfolio and secures its future by making it the default service for how we live, work, talk, and love.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-june-30-2019-facebook-sees-its-salvation-with-its-cryptocurrency-libra

Digital native: Are You Still Having Fun?

nishant — 2017-05-05T01:37:40Z

Before you accept a fun app into your digital ecosystem, prepare yourself for the data you will be giving away.

Nishant Shah is a professor of new media and the co-founder of The Centre for Internet & Society, Bangalore. The article was published in the Indian Express on April 17, 2017.

So, I hope, by now, you have figured out who your celebrity lookalike is. Mine, for her sins, is Emma Watson. Now, as you scratch your heads and wonder how a “facial recognition algorithm’”decided that my mug matches with the stunning actor who shall always remain imprinted as Hermione Granger to my Harry Potter- fan-boy self, it is worth wondering how on earth I know this.

If you have been on Facebook the last week or two, you will have noticed that almost all of your friends, as if drawn in a zombie apocalypse, taking this quiz and posting their results. It was a simple enough app — you upload a picture, and then using advanced computer morphing, it shows how your face transitions from yours to the stunning celebrities that we love and worship.

Nothing better on a Monday morning to know that the barely human face you are wearing — a mixture of grump and where-is-my-coffee — actually looks like the photoshopped avatar of a celeb. In many ways, this was a truly progressive app because it refused to look at gender, race, ethnicity, age or any of the other criteria of biometric representation and no matter what super-grouch face you presented, it always matched you with the celebrity you always secretly wanted to look like anyway.

Now, listen! I know that the earnest value of social media is essentially in apps like these. The point of these apps, which are largely just a continuation of the old trash magazine quizzes about self-determination and expression, is that they continue to enthrall, enchant and make our everyday click-and-scroll lives slightly more memorable and enjoyable. However, unlike those old Cosmo and Vogue quizzes which you secretly took to see if you are more a Miranda or a Carrie (I know that is an old reference, but hey, this is an old quiz!), these apps have a more sinister dimension.

When you clicked on that small app, because your friend did so, you did not count on three things. One, that as you nonchalantly clicked on ‘OK’ giving permission to this app to your Facebook profile, you also gave it consent to access your almost entire social media profile. Most of these apps are able to now look at your friends list, your contact list, your messaging history, your photo-gallery, and can access your microphone and camera, to give an answer that is so fake, it can easily masquerade as an elected official.

Second, that you might have taken the test for a moment of childish fantasy and then decided to move on with your life. Except that even if you did not share that post, the results were saved because you gave that app consent to use your uploaded picture in its own advertisement and also gave it authority to show your friends that you were stupid enough to take this test. This also includes your boss on Facebook, who might see what you were doing at 2.44 that afternoon when you were sitting in a serious meeting that was supposed to engulf you. Just like your friend might not have actively shared the first click-bait post but the app posted on their behalf.

And third, you gave this app the permission to not only harvest your Facebook profile for data that it is going to sell to third-party consumers who are curious to know about your location, age, eating habits, cultural preferences, friendship networks, and mood representations so that they can customise advertisements to sell you things that you didn’t know you wanted. In the world of Big Data, a single click-based consent can be the beginning of an avalanche of data mining, where, before you know it, all your correlated data across all your apps – sometimes sensitive data that might even betray your financial and physical safety — can easily be harvested, and all because you wanted to check out a fun app.

Apps pretend to be benign and often are so. However, when you accept an app into your digital ecosystem, it is sometimes useful to be slightly more cautious of what the added value of the app is. And before you say yes, it might also be good to just take a little more caution about what permissions you are granting it, and whether you really want to give away that data for a moment of fun. Facebook and other social media networks will continue to warn you about keeping your information private and safe from strangers. However, they will refuse to remind you that when you are online, your private data is more likely to be harmfully abused and used by apps with celebrity pictures and dancing babies, rather than the friend from school who has already probably put you into a block list.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-april-17-2017-digital-native-are-you-still-having-fun

WikiWars: Programme

nishant — 2010-01-05T17:37:43Z

The programme for Wikiwars, 12th, 13th January - MS Office document

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/uploads/wikiwarsprog

WikiWars: Programme - pdf

nishant — 2010-01-06T10:15:46Z

The WikiWars programme, 12th, 13th January - PDF document P.S. Thanks, A. Kumaran, for making this better formatted copy

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/uploads/wikiwarsprog1

Digital Natives with a Cause? - Report

nishant — 2009-11-12T07:28:45Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/uploads/dnrep1