Centre for Internet and Society

Colour Me Political

nishant — 2011-08-04T10:34:27Z

What are the tools that Digital Natives use to mobilise groups towards a particular cause? How do they engage with crises in their immediate environments? Are they using their popular social networking sites and web 2.0 applications for merely entertainment? Or are these tools actually helping them to re-articulate the realm of the political? Nishant Shah looks at the recent Facebook Colour Meme to see how new forms of political participation and engagement are being initiated by young people across the world.

On Facebook, now acclaimed as one of the most popular social networking sites in the world, the one thing that almost all the users engage is, in updating their status updates. These updates can be varied – capturing personal moods and emotions, reporting on things that strike one in the course of a normal day, offering political opinions, suggesting movies and books to friends, and often making public announcements of important events in life. The updates appear as a live feed, updates in almost-real time, letting people in networks connect, know, discuss and share information about their personal lives. Often, to outsiders, these updates would appear pointless; I remember somebody asking me, “But why would I want to know what you had for breakfast?” Many status updates indeed border on the everyday and ordinary, of no interest to anybody but the immediate networks.

However, in the first half of January in 2010, Facebook users across the world started observing a strange pattern. Many people in their networks were making one word status updates with the name of a colour. Just that. A colour. Facebook users woke up to find “Green!”, “Red!”, “White!” “Black!” in their live feed. No explanations and a cryptic silence. It was a viral phenomenon, with the colours appearing across the board, in different parts of the world, spanning all languages, cultures, and contexts. Also, it was observed, almost all of the users putting this update, were women. It created a lot of discussion, speculation, curiosity and conspiracy theories. Blog posts discussing this phenomenon started appearing. People were twitting about it. There was an element of surprise, and perhaps of frustration, because the people making those colour updates were refusing to offer any explanations.

Eventually, after a few internet years (about 3 days, I think!) the word got out. It was a meme. A meme is an internet gene (because it replicates) which spreads virally, through different social communication and networking sites. It invites people to participate in a series of actions, either to answer a question or perform a certain act, and pass it along. The colour updates were a part of the meme which was doing the rounds on the internet:

"Some fun is going on.... just write the color of your bra in your status. Just the color, nothing else. And send this on to ONLY girls, no men .... It will be neat to see if this will spread the wings of cancer awareness. It will be fun to see how long it takes before the men will wonder why all the girls have a color in their status."

What the message managed to do was take an important cause and through fun, and play, and a little bit of excitement, got young women around the world to ponder on the possibility, cure and prevention of breast cancer. What was just a personal update capturing space suddenly became a place of political mobilisation and participation. Both, men and women, reading those colours, took a moment to think about breast cancer and spread the word among their friends. Discussions, which started with curiosity, ended with a sombre note. While there are speculative theories about how some women in Detroit started this particular meme, there is no credible source of information.

What is particularly of interest, is how, without any apparent funding, or organisation, or the infrastructure that generally accompanies such behemoth projects, this viral meme captured more attention and had more people participating than most campaigns started by traditional activists or governments. What Facebook, and other spaces like it offer, is the infrastructure and the potential for such massive movements. As the Digital Natives grow up with new technologies, they change the landscape of political and social transformation. And the cryptic colour updates is telling us the story of how things will change in the future.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dn2

Digital Natives at Republica 2010

nishant — 2015-05-15T11:35:48Z

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

Abstract:

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

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

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

The power of the next click...

nishant — 2012-03-13T10:43:41Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Digital Tipping Point

maesy — 2011-08-04T10:36:56Z

Is Web 2.0 really the only reason why youth digital activism is so successful in mobilizing public engagement? A look into the transformation of Blank Noise’s blog from a one-way communication medium into a site of public dialogue and collaboration reveals the crucial factors behind the success.

What images popped in your head when you hear the term ‘digital activism’? Those that popped in mine are of campaigns that originated in the Internet, perhaps with a blog, a Youtube video, or a Facebook group, mobilizing people to take part in a certain action to advocate for a cause or to respond to a specific event. Whether the request is to sign a petition for a new legislation or to wear a specific colour on a specific day, the campaigns also ask people to spread the message, usually responded by re-tweets, status updates, and link-shares that appear on my timeline. These campaigns, like the famous Wear Red for Burma or the Pink Chaddi, are usually responses to certain events and dwindle after the events have passed.

With its four blogs, two Facebook groups, a YouTube channel, and a Twitter account, at first glance Blank Noise certainly resembles the images in my head. However, they popped one by one as I got to know Blank Noise better. For one, as I have shared before, Blank Noise was not a response to a specific event but rather the long term, ongoing, structural problem of street sexual harassment. For another, street interventions started as the main core of Blank Noise and have remained a crucial element despite its prolific online presence. Blank Noise did not start in the Internet nor did it immediately turn to Web 2.0 for its mobilization.

The main blog was created soon after Blank Noise started in 2003 to serve as an archive, information center, and space to announce future street events. The diverse online campaigns, lively discussions in the comment section of blog posts, and abundant blog post contributions by people who have experienced, witnessed, or committed street sexual harassment started after two unexpected events that I call ‘the digital tipping point’.

The first was when Jasmeen Patheja, the founder of Blank Noise, started uploading pictures of her harasser, taken with her mobile phone, to the blog in March 2005. The first picture was of a man who had stalked and pestered her for coffee despite her rejection to his unwelcomed advances. While some readers applauded her action, many challenged the post. How is the action different from “Can I buy you a drink?” Can it trigger the change wanted, especially since the guy might not even have access to the Internet? Is the action of publicly labeling the man as a perpetrator of street sexual harassment ethical, especially since the man has not been proven guilty?

These challenges then spiraled into a long discussion (72 comments!) about the grey areas of street sexual harassment and the ethics around confronting perpetrators. Although Blank Noise still continue to upload snapshots of harassers (this intervention is called ‘Unwanted’), their pictures have since then been blurred until the face is unrecognizable, including the one in the original post. This event was when Jasmeen realized that the blog also has the potential of being a space for discussions, opinions, and debates – the public conversation that Blank Noise aims for.

The second tipping point was when one of Blank Noise volunteers proposed an idea of a blogathon to commemorate the International Women’s Day in 2006. Blogging had become a major trend in India around 2004 and the blogathon basically asked bloggers around India to write about their experience with street sexual harassment in their private blogs and link the post to the Blank Noise blog. The bloggers invited were both women and men, people who have either experienced, witnessed, or committed street sexual harassment. The blogathon was an immense success, perhaps due to the frustration on the silence and downplay of street sexual harassment into eve teasing. Suddenly, eve teasing became a booming topic on the web and Blank Noise received media and (mostly the cyber) public attention.

This is when the idea of online interventions started. In the following year, Blank Noise created the first of its blogs that consist entirely of contributions from the public: the Action Heroes blog, a growing compilation of women’s experiences in dealing with street sexual harassment. It is then followed by Blank Noise Guys and Blank Noise Spectators, which respectively concentrates on the experiences of men and people who have witnessed street sexual harassment. Other than the community blogs, the main blog also introduced collaborative online campaigns in 2008, such as the ‘Museum of Street Weapons’ (a poster project that explores how women uses everyday objects to defend themselves against street sexual harassment) and ‘Blank Noise This Place’ (a photo collection of places where street sexual harassment occurs). These interventions were not only online; they were also collaborative and invited the public to participate.

These tipping points are intriguing not only for being the triggers to Blank Noise’s transformation to one of the most important digital activism in India (Mishra, 2010), but also for the reason why they are successful in doing so: they are able to attract public participation.

The first tipping point was able to attract people to participate by commenting on a post. The said post was very simple; it consists of a picture and a one-paragraph text that depicts a conversation between the harasser and the woman:

“stalker no. 1: " Excuse me, have we met before?" machlee: no Stalker no. 1: Yes we have! On commercial street! I work in a call centre. I am a science graduate." machlee: why are you telling me all this? stalker no. 1: can I have coffee with you? machlee: can i photograph you? stalker no. 1: yes! sure you can! stalker no.1: blah blah blah” (Patheja, 2005)

Having been used to NGO pamphlets and blog posts, I have come to equate discussion on sexual harassment as a very serious discussion with long text and formal language. This post is so different from what I was used to, but it was clear to me that even though the language was casual, the issue and intention were serious. The casual presentation spoke to me “we would like to share our thoughts and activities with you” rather than “we are an established organization and this is what we do”. It is not the space of professionals, but passionate people. As a blogger myself, I recognize the space as being one of my peer’s and immediately felt more attracted and comfortable to jump into the conversation.

The second tipping point attracted the more active, substantial participation than commenting; many people actually created texts, photos, or posters for Blank Noise. It was possible because Blank Noise opened itself. Jasmeen opened up to an idea of a volunteer, who opened up to the possibilities offered by the cybersphere. Instead of depending on a core team to conduct an intervention, Blank Noise opened up to a project that entirely depended on the public’s response to be successful. Moreover, Blank Noise opened up to diverse points of views and many types of experiences with street sexual harassment.

It is widely acknowledged that the success of a digital activism lies on its ability to attract public collaboration; however, the digital tipping points of Blank Noise underline several important factors behind the ability. Attracting public engagement is not always a result of a meticulous pre-planned intervention. On the contrary, it might spawn from unintentional events that welcome diverse points of view, adopt a peer-to-peer attitude, invite contributions, and most importantly, touched an issue that is very important for many different people. Web 2.0 is an enabling tool and site for dialogue, but it is certainly not the only reason behind the success of digital activism in galvanizing youth’s engagement.

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

Reference:

Mishra, G. (2010) ‘The State of Citizen Media in India in Three Short Ideas’. Accessed

19 May 2010 < http://www.gauravonomics.com/blog/the-state-of-citizen-media-in-india-in-three-short-ideas/>

Patheja, J. (2005) ‘Unwanted. Section 354 IPC.’ Accessed 25 October 2010. < http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/03/stalker-no.html>

SOURCE OF PICTURE

http://blog.blanknoise.org/2005/07/he-placed-his-hand-on-my-breast-and.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-digital-tipping-point

The Class Question

maesy — 2011-09-22T12:45:35Z

Blank Noise aims to be as inclusive as possible and therefore does not identify any specific target groups. Yet, the spaces and the methods they occupy do attract certain kinds of volunteers and public. This raises the class question: what are the dilemmas around class on digital interventions? Are they any different from the dilemmas on street interventions?

My first click to Blank Noise’s main blog was a surprise. Having read so many media coverage about them, I expected to see a professional, minimalist looking website like other women’s organizations[1] where the menu is immediately visible. Instead, I have arrived at the most common and basic form of blogging: the personal blog.

I was greeted by entries on their latest thoughts and activities with photos and text with red font against a black background. I scrolled down a long list of permanent links on the right side of the site and arrived only at its Frequently Asked Questions link on the 28^th item while it would be one of the easiest to spot in other websites. For me, this discovery said, “we would like to share our thoughts and activities with you” rather than “we are an established organization and this is what we do”. It is not the space of professionals, but passionate people. As a blogger myself, I recognize the space as being one of my peer’s and immediately felt more attracted to it.

Reflecting on my own position, my familiarity with the space is due to my background as a young, urban, educated, English-speaking woman for whom the Internet is a key part of life. My ‘peers’ who are also attracted to this place apparently share the same background with me. The main demography of Blank Noise’s volunteers, almost equally men and women, are those between 16-35 years, urban, and English speaking (Patheja, 2010). My interviewees were all at least university educated, some in the U.S. Ivy league, and are proficient users of social media, most of them being bloggers or Twitter and Facebook users.

This dominant base reflects the discourse on the ‘youth of India’, which represents only a fragment of India’s vast population of young people. The two narratives on the youth of India are described by Sinha-Kerkhoff (2005) as ‘the haves’ and ‘have-nots’, a reflection on the broader discourse on the deep social economic inequities in India. ‘The have-nots’ are the majority of Indian youth who are struggling with the basic issues of livelihood, health, and education, while ‘the haves’ are painted as the children of liberalization: the mostly urban, middle class, technologically savvy, and highly educated students and young professionals up who maintain a youthful lifestyle up to their 30s.

Although ‘the haves’ only consist 10% of the total youth population, they are the ones identified as the youth of India by popular discourses. Lukose (2008) explained this by stating that youth as a social category in India is linked to the larger sense of India’s transformation into an emerging global economic powerhouse together with Brazil, Russia, and China (popular as BRIC) after its liberal economic reform in the 1990s. India’s information and technology industry is spearheading this transformation, thus it feeds into the discourse of youth as Digital Natives.

Although there are exceptions to this dominant demography, they are far fewer. Does this then mean that Blank Noise is ‘contextually empowering’ (Gajjala, 2004), given that it reaches only ‘the haves’ due to the digital divide and their sites of participation?

The classed nature of the virtual public space is something Blank Noise fully acknowledges. Some interviewees stated that this is why street interventions are so important; they reach people who may not be Internet users. However, people who have been involved in Blank Noise for more than two years acknowledged that class issues are also present in the physical public space.

Dev Sukumar, one of Blank Noise’s male volunteers, explained to me that the British colonial legacy still shape the way public spaces in Bangalore are organized. The commercial areas in the city centre where Blank Noise interventions were initially organized, such as M.G. Road and Brigade Road, are dominantly inhabited by English speaking people, but in other parts of the city there are many who can only speak the local language, Kannada. After recognizing this, Blank Noise organized street interventions in such places, like the Majestic bus stand, and making flyers and stencils in Kannada. In order to do this, Blank Noise specifically called for volunteers who knew the local language.

The interventions might be in a non-elite space, but the main actors remain those from the middle class. Hemangini articulated the class issue in Blank Noise, saying “Like it or not, a lot of the people in Blank Noise are from the middle class and a lot of the people we have been talking to on the streets are of a certain class. What is the ethics in a middle class woman asking ‘why are you looking at me?’ to lower class men? It is if we already assumed that most perpetrators are lower class men while it is definitely not true.”

The reflexivity Hemangini shows led me to rethink the assumptions around digital activism. It is often dismissed as catering only to the middle class, privileging only one side of the digital divide. But then again, the class issue is also present in the physical sphere. If middle class youth mostly attracts their peers in their digital activism, is it problematic by default or is it only problematic when there is no accompanying reflection on the political implications of such engagement? How is it more problematic than the ethical dilemma of middle class people addressing their ‘Others’ in street interventions? Is the problem related to the sphere of activism (virtual versus physical), or is it more about the methods of engagement and the reflexivity required for it?

Hemangini told me that her dilemma is being shared and discussed with other members in Blank Noise’s core group, consisting of those who dedicate some time to reflect on the growth and development of the collective. They have no answer just yet, but they intend to continue reflecting on it. I have no idea what their future reflection looks like, but I do know that the class implications of the cyber sphere will be resolved with more than simply taking interventions to the streets. Considering that the actors of youth digital activism are, like it or not, urban, middle class, educated digital natives, Blank Noise’s reflection will indeed be relevant for all who is interested in this issue. And if you have your own thoughts on the strategies to resolve this dilemma, why don’t you drop a comment and reflect together with us?

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

References:

Gajjala, R. (2004) Cyber selves: Feminist Ethnographies of South Asian Women. Walnut Creek: Almitra Press.

Lukose, R. (2008) ‘The Children of Liberalization: Youth Agency and Globalization

in India’, in Dolby, N. and Rizvi, F. (eds.) Youth Moves: Identities and Education in a Global Perspective, pp. 133-150.

Patheja, J. (2010) Case Study: Blank Noise. Accessed 7 November 2010 <http://www.indiasocial.in/case-study-blank-noise/>

Sinha-Kerkhoff, K. (2006) ‘Youth Activism in India’, in Sherrod, L.R., Flanagan, C.A.

and Kassimir, R. (eds.) Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia, pp. 340-348. London: Greenwood Press.

Source for picture: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/photo.php?fbid=73473166363&set=o.2703755288&pid=2095143&id=687356363

[1] For example: http://www.jagori.org/ , one of the most established women organizations in India.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/the-class-question

Activism: Unraveling the Term

maesy — 2015-05-14T12:25:05Z

After discussing Blank Noise’s politics and ways of organizing, the current post explores whether activism is still a relevant concept to capture the involvement of people within the collective. I explore the questions from the vantage point of the youth actors, through conversations about how they relate with the very term of activism.

Youth's Popular Imagination of Activism

As a start, I need to clarify that ‘activism’ is not a concept that the participants are generally concerned with. For a majority of them, the conversation we had was the first time they thought of what the term means and reflect whether their engagement with Blank Noise is activism. Regardless of whether one identifies Blank Noise as a form of activism or not, all participants share a popular idea of what activism is.

Generally speaking, at an abstract level all participants saw activism as passionately caring about an injustice and taking action to create social change. At a more tangible level, all participants mentioned three elements as popular ideas about doing activism. The first is the existence of a concrete demands as a solution to the identified problem, such as asking for service provision or state regulations. Since these demands are structural, activism is also seen dealing with formal authority figures in the traditional sense of politics, the state. The second is the intensity and commitment required to be an activist, for many participants being an activist means having prolonged engagement, taking risks, and making the struggle a priority in one’s life. In other words, being an activist means “... being neck-deep, spending most if not all of your time, energy, and resources for the cause” (Dev Sukumar, male, 34). The third element relates to the methods, called by some as ‘old school’: shouting slogans, holding placards, and doing marches on the streets – all enacted in the physical public space. This popular imagination of activism becomes the orientation for participants in deciding whether Blank Noise is a form of activism and whether they are activists for being involved in it.

Activism as the Intention and Action

“I have an idea of what activism is but not what it exactly looks like.”

(Apurva Mathad, male, 28).

For those who think that Blank Noise is a form of activism, there was a differentiation between the idea at the abstract level and how it is manifested at a more tangible level. The definition of activism is the abstract one, while the popular ideas of doing activism do not define the concept but present the most common out many possible courses of actions. Blank Noise is fulfils all the elements in the abstract definition: a passion about an injustice, having an aim for social change, and acting to achieve the aim. Hence, Blank Noise is activism, but the way it manifests itself does not adhere to the popular imagination of doing activism. The distinction between Blank Noise’s methods with popular ones was emphasized, along with the difference in articulating goals.

Interestingly, not all participants who share this line of thinking called themselves as activists for being involved in an activism. Again, it must be reiterated that no participants ever really thought of giving a name to their engagement prior to the interview. Instead of saying ‘I am an activist’, they said ‘I guess I could be called an activist’ for the fact that they are sharing the passion and being actively involved in a form of activism, albeit in an unconventional manner.

Those who would categorize Blank Noise as activism but not call themselves activists related with a particular element on the popular idea of doing activism, which is getting “neck-deep”. They were helpers, volunteers, idea spreaders, but not an activist because their lives are not dedicated for the cause or their involvements were based on availability. On the other hand, these participants all said that Jasmeen is an activist for being completely dedicated to Blank Noise from its inception until today.

Activism as Particular Ways of Doing and Being

“What are the repercussions if activism is so fluidly defined? It can mean not questioning

privilege... not seeing the class divisions and still call yourself activist.”

(Hemangini Gupta, female, 29).

Most participants did not consider Blank Noise as an activism. Generally, this can be explained by the discrepancies between Blank Noise and the popular imagination on the tangible ways of doing activism. Blank Noise does not propose a concrete solution or make concrete demands to an established formal structure nor did it march on the streets and make slogans. However, the underlying attitude to this point of view is not of a younger generation finding the ‘old’ ways of doing activism obsolete. Rather, there was an acknowledgement that the issue itself causes the different ways of reading an issue and taking actions to address it.

Furthermore, there is an appreciation to the achievements and dedication of activists that deterred them from calling themselves activists. These people referred to their occasional participation and the fact that Blank Noise is not the main priority in their lives as a student or young professional despite being a cause they are passionate about. As reflected in the opening quote, being an activist for some participants also means deeply reflecting on their self position in terms of class, acknowledging their privileges, and putting themselves in a position that will enable them to imagine the experience of people who are also affected by the issue but has a different position in the society. In other words, being an activist is not just about doing but also about critically reflecting on one’s position in relation to the issue and how it influences the way an issue is being pushed forward. Thinking that they are not up to these standards, these youth choose to call themselves ‘volunteers’, ‘helpers’, or ‘supporters’.

Youth: The Activist, the Apathetic, and the Everyday

“Blank Noise is a public and community street arts collective that is volunteer-led and attempts to create public dialogue on the issue of street sexual violence and eve teasing.”

(Jasmeen Patheja)

“... a group of people against street sexual harassment and eve teasing.”

(Kunal Ashok, men, 29)

“... an idea that really works.”

(Neha Bhat, 19)

As clarified before, the participants did not use the words ‘movement’ and very few used ‘activism’ during our conversations. Instead, the terms they used to describe Blank Noise are represented in the quotes above: collective, community, group, project, and even as an idea. These phrases do not carry the same political baggage that ‘movement’ or ‘activism’ would; they also do not conjure a particular imagination that the other two terms would. These phrases are de-politicized and informal; they imply fluidity, lack of hierarchy, and room for manoeuvre.

The implied meanings in the terms reflect the debates on the average youth and political engagement. For the past decade, various youth scholars criticized the dichotomy of youth as either activists or apathetic in explaining the global trend of decreased youth participation in formal politics. The activists are either politically active Digital Natives engaged in new forms of social movements influenced heavily by new media or sub-cultural resistances, which only account for a fraction of the youth population that are mostly completely apathetic. This dichotomy ignored the ‘broad “mainstream” young people who are neither deeply apathetic about politics on unconventionally engaged’ (Harris et al, 2010).

These mainstream young people actually are socially and politically engaged in ‘everyday activism’ (Bang, 2004; Harris et al, 2010). These are young people who are personalizing politics by adopting causes in their daily behaviour and lifestyle, for instance by purchasing only Fair Trade goods, or being very involved in a short term concrete project but then stopping and moving on to other activities. The emergence of these everyday activists are explained by the dwindling authority of the state in the emergence of major corporations as political powers (Castells, 2009) and youth’s decreased faith in formal political structures which also resulted in decreased interest in collectivist, hierarchical social movements in favour of a more individualized form of activism (Harris et al, 2010). Internet and new media technologies are credited as an enabling factor, being a space and a medium for young people to express their everyday activism.

All of the research participants, perhaps with the exception of Jasmeen as the only one who has constantly been the driver Blank Noise its entire seven years, are these everyday makers, people who were involved with the Blank Noise either on a daily basis as a commentator, one-time project initiator and leader, or people who were active when they are available but remain dormant at other times. Blank Noise is a space where these individual forms of engagement could be exercised while remaining as a collective. The facilitation is not only by the flexibility of coming and going, but also the lack of rigid group rules and the approach of allowing Blank Noise to be interpreted differently by individuals. Considering that the mainstream urban youth are everyday makers who would not find ‘old’ or ‘new’ social movements appealing, this can be the reason why Blank Noise became so popular among youth; however, I would also argue that the fact that Blank Noise is the first to systematically address eve teasing is a determining cause.

The implications of this finding, together with other concluding thoughts, will be shared in the next and final post in the Beyond the Digital series.

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

References:

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

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

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

Image source: http://blog.blanknoise.org/2010/02/tweet-now-feb-17-27.html

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/activism-unraveling-the-term

Inquilab 2.0? Reflections on Online Activism in India*

nishant — 2011-08-02T09:25:30Z

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Inquilab means revolution

References

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's in a Name? Or Why Clicktivism May Not Be Ruining Left Activism in India, At Least For Now

anja — 2011-08-02T09:25:39Z

In a recent piece in the Guardian titled “Clicktivism Is Ruining Leftist Activism”, Micah White expressed severe concern that, in drawing on tactics of advertising and marketing research, digital activism is undermining “the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society”. His concerns are certainly shared by some in India: White's piece has been circulating on activist email lists where people noted with concern that e-activism may be replacing “the real thing” even in this country. But is the situation in India really this dire?

Among those who consider themselves activists in a more traditional fashion, critical debates on what it means to be an activist certainly remain alive and well. Among India's social movements, perhaps most prominent, over the past decade, have been those that protest against large-scale “development” projects and the displacement they tend to cause – projects of which especially India's tribal people, or adivasis, often are the victims. In these circles, arguments against the use of the Internet for activism often focus on the elitist character of this tool: in a country where Internet penetration rates continue to hover around a meagre five percent, frequently neither the people affected nor the wider groups that need to be mobilised have access to this resource. Clearly then, organising online is never sufficient and, perhaps not surprisingly, debates about what is called “armchair activism” consequently are both common and intense. In a recent video posted on YouTube, for example, the respected Himanshu Kumar – who everyone will recognise as a grassroots activist – called on the nation to support the adivasis and their causes. In the same video, he also explicitly requested people to get off the Internet:

Is me jo shehero me rehne wale log hai, mujhe unse khas tor se kehna hai ki aap sheher me baithe rahenge, net par thoda sa likh denge – usse sarkar ko koi farak padne wala nahi hai. Na janta Internet padthi hai na sarkar Internet padthi hai. Hum jo activist hai wohi aapas mein Internet par pad lethe hai. Usse sarkar ki koi policiyan nahi badal payenge, sarkar par pressure nahi create kar payenge. Jab tak ham aam janta ke beech mein nahi jayenge, na to hame desh ki problems pata challenge, na ham desh ke logon ko jaga payenge.

[To the people in the cities, I want to especially say that, you keep sitting in the cities, you write something on the Internet - it doesn't make any difference to the government. Neither do people read the Internet, nor does the government read the Internet. Only activists like you and me read on the Internet. Through that, we cannot change the policies of the government, we cannot create pressure on the government. As long as we don't go among/approach the common people, neither will we come to know the country's problems, nor will we be able to awaken the people].

Not everybody I spoke to would have agreed with Kumar's argument. The importance of mass mobilisation and the need to be in touch with grassroots realities are recognised by all movement activists, as is consequently the requirement to get active offline as much as online. But whether mass mobilisation at the grassroots is the only way forward is not something that everyone is convinced of. In the context of the Free Binayak Sen campaign, for example, there is considerable recognition that the website was a vital complement to a well-organised offline campaign to free Dr. Binayak Sen from jail, which kicked off in the spring of 2008. Sen is a community health doctor and civil liberties activist who had worked for more than twenty five years among the adivasis of Chhattisgarh, the heart of the current Maoist conflict, when he was arrested on the basis of what many considered completely baseless, yet non-bailable charges of being a Maoist himself, and left to languish in jail for two years. A regularly updated website, and related Facebook group and email list, soon became the focal point for a massive outpouring of support for Sen from different parts of the world, including in the form of a letter from twenty Nobel Prize winners, as well as an important source of information on the campaign for activists within the country. In May 2009, the Indian Supreme Court finally released granted bail to Dr. Binayak Sen. The Doctor's trial is currently ongoing.

In this context of critical debates, how do those who do see themselves as activists, yet draw on the Internet as a significant tool to publicise struggles, justify themselves? If the Internet can play a role in changing matters at the grassroots, and has proven to do so in the past, does it become possible to intensely use this tool and still be recognised as an activist in a more traditional reading of this word? The fact that most middle-class English speaking cadres of movements are online, despite their protestations against online activism for being elitist, may well play in the favour of advocates of online protest: it does open up a space to argue for the relevance of this medium, even if for a limited group, and for the importance of its responsible use. Indeed, it may well be for this reason that it is possible to watch on YouTube a number of videos in which Himanshu Kumar shares his experiences at the grassroots, his own discomfort with the medium notwithstanding. But it is not this ambiguity that is at the heart of the claims to credibility of advocates of online activism. Rather, as has always been the case, it is their continued connectedness to the grassroots. How much you are in the know of what happens at the grassroots; whether you have physically joined struggles; to what extent you get your hands dirty offline and show up for meetings, rallies, poster pasting, rather than limiting your engagement to the online route – these are the kind of elements that determine whether you are an online activist. What you do offline remains as important as ever. To only work online is not sufficient.

Importantly, such readings are frequently mirrored by those who do not have such connections to the grassroots. In my research, I have more than once come across “online activists” who started their conversation with me by stating that they were not, in fact, activists at all. Interestingly, Maesy Angelina has observed a similar reluctance to identify as an activist among participants in the Blank Noise project (personal communication and Angelina, forthcoming), a campaign to combat street sexual harassment and, with its extensive use of online tools over the seven years of its existence, one of the paragons of online activism in India. While Maesy herself will blog more about how Blank Noise participants understand activism later on here, (earlier posts are available as well) at least in my research, the reason why people refused the “activist” label was generally not because they disapproved of what it might stand for. Rather, they saw a clear difference between their own contribution and that of the full-time activists who ceaselessly mobilise and organise people on the ground, those who in many cases draw on a distinct and easily-recognisable language of protest that infuses everything from the shape protests take to activists' dressing sense in the process – the “jholawallahs”, as one person I follow on Twitter calls them, after the trademark cotton bag that they often carry around. Those who refused the namecard of an “activist” were clear that they would never have chosen such a full-time activist's life; what new technology allowed them to do, however, was to nevertheless make a contribution, even if often on a smaller scale, of their own. As one person put it quite movingly:

I believe that, I think that ordinary people, and I am convinced, that they can do, can use this medium to actually make a difference, you know or bring about change, to change the world. You know, these dreams that you have sometimes, “I want to change the world in some way” [laughs]. You know? I do believe that... it's possible. And you don't have to be an activist or working in an NGO. You can be working anywhere, you can be doing anything as your day job, you know, or your regular job. But, you can contribute.

Clearly, then, critical readings of what it means to be an activist are common not only among those who are activists in a more traditional sense, but among those who focus on exploring the use of new tools for social change as well: the kind of credibility, based on offline experience, that attaches to more traditional activists is not something they claim for themselves. But what they understand is that new technologies have facilitated a qualitatively new kind of engagement with movements, with activism, with social change. And what such “not-activists” do claim is that this has made it possible for ordinary people to now also make a difference, even though small that difference often may be.

In many ways this type of involvement is actually not new, as contributions of non-activists have always played an important role in the survival and evolutions of movements, especially at times of great urgency: doctors who are ready to treat patients for free; lawyers who supply legal advice without expecting anything in return; people with comfortable jobs in the private sector who one knows one can rely on for donations when required (most movements in India survive financially by relying solely or mostly on donations by private persons). What is new with the introduction of the Internet is that the possibility of contributions by people who are not activists are now extended into new areas, as it has become much easier to contribute to publicising and building community around issues that are close to movements' heart as well.

So how to evaluate White's claim that clicktivism is ruining Left activism in the Indian context then? For one thing, it is important to remember that we simply do not – or not yet at least – have platforms such as MoveOn or Avaaz, that draw, as White explains, on market ideology to conveniently break down a seemingly endless number of political campaigns into little bites for easy individual consumption with the click of a mouse button. Left activism in India, even online, remains firmly embedded in communities of engagement. Surely e-petitions, for example, are popular here as much as elsewhere. But the point to remember is that they rarely circulate in isolation. Instead, they emerge from the email lists, from the postings and repostings as well as conversations on Facebook, from the blogs around which much Left activism online revolves. And crucial to these uses of the Internet as a tool for social change is not clicking, but engagement and conversation. Perhaps it is for this reason that even a landmark campaign such as Free Binayak Sen has hardly received any attention in the international online activists' arena: campaigns such as this do not revolve around the number of clicks they get, nor around flash-points or events shaped to satisfy the hunger of the international media, valuable as some may argue these can be; rather, they are intended for the long haul, as they attempt to build on existing collectives to extend the communities of solidarity around issues that move and drive the Left in this neoliberal age. Even online, the politics can and does infuse the method, at least for now.

This, then, gives something to ponder over. It is true that working among people, offline, remains of crucial importance if Left movements in the country are to achieve their goals. But perhaps it is worth considering more seriously the value and role of this pool of people willing and available to help building such communities in a more or less sustained fashion online (I am not talking about the accidental activist here), without necessarily wanting to take on a core “activist”'s role. Yes, perhaps their work does not amount to activism as we know it. But nevertheless, it may well be that in many cases the efforts of these committed individuals do not amount to distractions, but to gravy: extras that help ensuring that more and more people start to care as the message of social movements is amplified to a much larger audience than might have otherwise been the case, perhaps even getting many more people involved, while also acutely aware of their own limitations when it comes to achieving fundamental, lasting social change. In fact, perhaps the Left would also do well to wonder whether it can afford to lose this valuable support: as I will document in a future blog post, with the rise of the Internet in India, online initiatives have also emerged that take neither of the stances described above, but that instead explicitly, and at times aggressively, seek to present themselves as a forward-looking alternative to the existing progressive politics in this country. A lack of engagement on the part of the Left with supporters online would effectively entail a ceding of the space to such challengers.

The point to remember for now, however, is that many of those active in online campaigns are acutely aware themselves not only of the potential of their work, but also of its limitations. What we do need to do, however, is to keep firmly alive this tension and debate surrounding what it means to be an activist, as well as to remain vigilant that the dazzling charms of the tools do not, in the long term, blind us to our politics. At the moment, it seems to be the continuing vibrancy of the Left in India that makes it difficult for anyone who wants to get seriously involved with movement politics to consider online activism a sufficient replacement. It is the endurance of these attitudes of continuous critical inquiry that will ensure that, clicktivism or not, Left activism will remain firmly alive in this country in the future as well – in the hearts and minds of activists and non-activists alike.

With thanks to Prasad Krishna for assistance with the translation.

References

Angelina, M. (forthcoming). 'Beyond the Digital: Understanding Contemporary Youth Activism in Urban India' (working title). MA thesis. The Hague, International Institute of Social Studies – Erasmus University of Rotterdam.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/revolution-2.0/whats-in-a-name-or-why-clicktivism-may-not-be-ruining-left-activism-in-india-at-least-for-now