Centre for Internet and Society

The Right Words for Love

nishant — 2018-10-02T06:23:58Z

Queer love is legal. Which means that all of us are finally free to find a language that can match our desires.

The article was published in Indian Express on September 23, 2018.

I don’t think, in all my years of growing up, I ever had my parents say “I love you” to me. Not because they did not love me, but because in Gujarati, the language we predominantly use at home, there is no possibility of saying it. Any attempt — ‘Hoon tane prem karu chu’, or ‘Mane tara par prem che’, would sound bookish, and thus, empty. But Gujarati has lots of words for love. The love between father and son is pitrutva, that of a mother towards her child is mamta, and of the child for its parents is vatsalya; the sister’s preet finds a brother’s whal, and siblings are bound in sneh. But these words have no translation outside the rich tapestry of sociality they exist in, and this is the same for almost all of our Indian languages.

These are words that are nouns and it is difficult to use their verb forms. They remain ideal types of feeling rather than descriptions of action. So, it wasn’t a surprise to me that our parents didn’t — not till long after we left home and English entered our family spaces — ever tell us that they love us. We did not have the vocabulary for the precise sentiment, and so we never said it. Instead, it manifested in the touch, the embrace, the smile and the active intimacy of actions which stood as testimony of the love that we could not define.

The lexicon of touching — the natural expression of love for me — was the vocabulary of intimacy, trust, affection and acceptance in my sociality. The clap on the back between friends, the hand on the shoulder or the exuberant hug were manifestations of love. Who you can and cannot touch was linked closely to who you can and cannot love, and how. While the expression “I love you” waited for a reciprocal response, the hand held in silence demanded no answer. Love in India, be it social, familial or romantic, has always had that sense of the tactile. Perhaps, that is the reason why kissing came to Bollywood so late, because to kiss was to also claim and express love. To kiss without love was obscene. Love, in India, is a physical verb.

Queer love, then, is no exception. It also did not have a local vocabulary or language to express itself in. Our myths, legends, fables, and epics are filled with queer practices — male gods taking female forms, consummating their desire with same-sex persons, changing their sexuality and genders in a fluid allegory of social intimacy. These were not merely practices. They were the physical verbal languages, signposts and registers of desire and love.

In implementing Section 377, the British ensured that they colonised not only our country but also our bodies. They imported shame and put it on practices and desires, which were accepted and celebrated in the country. They insisted that the only acceptable love is one of penile transaction that essentially leads to procreation — a violent law that not only denied the actions of love between consenting adults of same and different sexes, it alsoactively disallowed any local grammar of love to emerge in the country.

The judgment decriminalising consensual sex between adults, irrespective of their orientation or sex, is momentous because it doesn’t just condone an action. It suggests that we are finally free to locate and celebrate a language that can match our desires. The British law criminalised our many ways of claiming love. This judgment elevates our right to love as a fundamental right, and continues our Swaraj movements by decolonising our intimacies.

Decriminalisation of homosexuality, then, is not about queer love. It is about all love. It is about recognising that as a society we can only grow strong if we learn to love at intersections. In our increasingly polarised times when actions of hate — lynching, murdering, intimidation, bullying, trolling, and abuse — are on the rise, this judgment reminds us that the only counter to such violence is going to be in our right to love without fear, and, in any form that brings happiness in our lives.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/indian-express-nishant-shah-september-23-2018-the-right-words-for-love

The Private Eye

nishant — 2012-05-24T06:25:48Z

The world’s largest digital social networking system, oh ok, Facebook, to just name names, was recently in a lot of buzz.

Nishant Shah's article was published in the Indian Express on May 14, 2012

The world’s largest digital social networking system, oh ok, Facebook, to just name names, was recently in a lot of buzz. For once, it was not about the laments of how we are downgrading the meaning of friendship, eroding social relationships, and visions of an apocalyptic future where people will lose the knack of face-time to interface intimacies. Instead, the buzz was about Facebook’s collaboration with the American non-profit coalition Donate Life America to encourage more people to sign themselves up as organ donors. The feature that allows the American users to sign up as organ donors, promising their organs, in the event of their death, to others who might live through them, has been an instant hit. More than a lakh people have updated their status to reflect their volunteering as organ donors, and thousands others have signed up for the noteworthy initiative.

There is no doubt that harnessing the powers of social networks for such causes is laudable, and indeed, follows the trends that we have been witnessing the last few years, where people have mobilised their networks for a range of things — from overthrowing governments to dancing in flash mobs. It is interesting that initiatives which were already working with large-scale networks are now collaborating within the social media space to tap into the immense potential of social networking. It is also noteworthy that Facebook Connect, which is a slowly growing system by which users authenticate themselves to different portals and can use their Facebook credentials instead of creating new profiles with more passwords to remember, was used effectively to facilitate registering for a new system. It is a testimony to Facebook’s growing omnipresence, that initiatives like these can use those credentials in their systems.

There is a wide range of interests that punctuate this phenomenon and there is a rich discourse that reports, analyses and maps it. However, I want to take this opportunity to make a distinction between data types that is often lost in the presumption that all information on a social network is the same kind of information. With the enabling of this feature, Facebook has started mining a new set of personal data that is at once fiercely private and vulnerable. Till now, Facebook and other such social networking systems were already harvesting a wide range of data — personal data such as name, gender, birth-date, pictures, etc.; social data such as relationships, interactions, communities, groups, likes, etc.; usage data like preferences, navigation, search, frequency of interaction et al. While all this data has been about the personal, it is also data that we share and display in our everyday life. Who we are, what we look like, the politics that we subscribe to, the communities we are a part of, languages we speak, products we consume and people we hang out with is physical data that is available to anybody who cares to watch us.

While there are serious repercussions on what happens when such data falls into malicious hands, there is still objectivity to this data. This is data which we can understand as personal — as referring to the person, but not necessarily private. Private data is actually the information that we have singular access to. And this distinction between the personal and the private is good to understand, because with the Organ Donor badge, Facebook has entered a new realm of data mining, which is truly private. Till now, privacy arguments around Facebook have not been as fuelled as they might otherwise be, because there is an innate understanding that there is a certain performative aspect to our personal data, because it facilitates different kinds of negotiations, transactions and engagements. However, with private data — health and medical history, gender and sexual orientations, desires and fantasies, moral and ethical choices — we are entering murky waters. This happens because while violation of personal data can be easily rectified by resorting to the law, the private is more in the grey zone, subject to interpretations and often unquantifiable in its intensity.

The concerns that will emerge are the same kinds that we have seen in other large projects that deal with private data like the Aadhar project that uses biometric identification data to identify citizens in India. While Facebook might not be collecting biometric data, it is important to recognise that this new kind of data disclosure, which puts our private information in the public domain, only mandates better security and privacy control within these social networks. As we move towards a data-driven future, we need to be more aware of the different kinds of data sets that we are making public and educate ourselves about the risks of this disclosure, without being carried away by the sway of meme-like behaviour and viral trends online. The next time you decide to reveal some new kinds of data about yourself, pause for a moment and reflect on whether it is personal or private, and whether it is absolutely necessary to facilitate your interaction within that information system and the rewards and dangers it comes with.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/private-eye

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 new language of Internet: A report on the Chutnefying Hinglish Conference

nishant — 2011-04-02T15:10:19Z

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, was an institutional partner to India's first Global Conference on Hinglish - Chutnefying English, organised by Dr. Rita Kothari at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad. A photographic report for the event is now available here.

In January of 2009, Dr. Rita Kothari, at the Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad, organised the first global conference called “Chutneyfying English”, calling in various stakeholders from different walks of life – academics, scholars, researchers, actors, cultural producers, authors and consumers to critically examine the growing phenomenon of Hinglish and how it intersects with our globalised lives. The two day conference brought together a series of presentations, ranging from academic papers to lively round table discussions to panels that looked at the different manifestations of Hinglish and the political and aesthetic potential of this particular form. Scholars like Rita Kothari, Harish Trivedi, Nishant Shah, Daya Thussu, Shanon Finch and Rupert Snell were complemented by cultural producers like Nandita Das, R. Raj Rao, and Shuchi Kothari. Literary stakeholders like Urvashi Bhutalia, Bachi Karkaria, and Tej Bhatia rubbed shoulders with more mainstream practitioners like Prasoon Joshi, Mahesh Bhatt and Cyrus Broacha.

The Centre for Internet and Society was an institutional partner for the event, and supported the panel on New Media, which saw four paper presentations and a discussion moderated by Nishant Shah, Director Research at the CIS. The panel explored diverse presentations from Mattangi Krishnamurthy, Pramod Nair and Supriya Gokarn, who looked at the diverse ways in which the rise of Internet and digital technologies is not only changing the ways in which people express themselves, but they are also leading to complex ways in which new conditions of identity, consumption and politics are manifesting themselves. Nishant Shah responded to the panel by positing the idea of Hinglish as a paradigm, rather than a set of characteristics, which goes beyond the questions of language and actually resides in the aesthetic conditions of the internet technologies.

A photographic documentation of the event with an introduction by Dr. Rita Kothari, the chief organiser and curator for the conference is now available for a free download here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/Hinglish

The Making of an Asian City

nishant — 2012-08-10T08:33:48Z

Nishant Shah attended the conference on 'Pluralism in Asia: Asserting Transnational Identities, Politics, and Perspectives' organised by the Asia Scholarship Foundation, in Bangkok, where he presented the final paper based on his work in Shanghai. The paper, titled 'The Making of an Asian City', consolidates the different case studies and stories collected in this blog, in order to make a larger analyses about questions of cultural production, political interventions and the invisible processes that are a part of the IT Cities.

The Promise of Invisibility: The Making of an Asian IT City

Abstract: This paper understands that in emerging Asian contexts, the proliferation and adoption of Internet technologies leads to two distinct changes in the material (re)construction of the city:

1. Built Form of the City: The physical and material aspects of the city are restructured, redesigned and realigned to house the infrastructure of Internet Technology economies.

2. Governance and Administration: The technologies of governance (and also, the governance of technologies) that reconfigure the city for better control, regulation and containment of the subjects of the state.

These changes are articulated and understood, in contemporary scholarship and discourse, through the tropes of Access and Transparency, which propose Technology as neutral. These studies also locate technology as outside of the changing socio-political transformations that the city undergoes in its attempt to emerge as an IT City. The framework, by contextualising technology differently – in larger narratives of continuity and disruption – opens up a dialogue between cybercultures and social sciences to look at conditions of change It also shows how the It demonstrates how such an approach to technology studies enables new and nuanced forms of social sciences inquiry into processes like Dislocation and Migration, which have never addressed the technology question as central to the phenomena.

Context

The 21^st Century has seen accelerated urbanisation and spatial restructuration of cities in emerging information societies around the world. These cities are created as global hubs that shall not only house the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure, but also embody the aesthetics, politics, practices and lifestyles that the global cultural revolutions are bringing in. The technologies are significantly involved in the production of the dominant, the hegemonic and the coercive, all under the rubric of economic growth and development, and have affected domains of life, labour and language (Foucault,1998) in different contexts. It is easy to trace the ways in which lifestyle, cultural expression (Bagga, 2005), texture of social interaction and mobilisation, and political and administrative reorganisation (Roy, 2005) have changed in emerging contexts like India and China.

The efforts at creating ‘global countries’ (Kalam, 2004) that can harness the powers of ICT, have lead to three distinct forms of changes. These changes can be seen in the built form of the city, in structures of governance and administration, and in attitudes and Imagination of technologies as they emerge in popular discourse and cultural production. Each of these changes is articulated and explained through the tropes of Transparency and Access. The paper has a specific interest in looking at sites of dislocation and migration, to illustrate the arguments it seeks to make. The paper relies on secondary and tertiary literature (often in translation), unstructured interviews and participant observation to make an argument about how the aesthetics, mechanics and political [i] imaginaries of technology are a part of the physically changing and transforming IT cities in Asia. In order to make the argument, however, a brief context that explains the material signification of these three kinds of changes, is necessary to be explicated.

Beyond the Blogosphere

There has been an equal amount of optimism and scepticism when it comes to talking about the new public spheres that emerge with the Internet. Clubbed under the short-hand ‘Blogosphere’, both the evangelists and the critics of the blogosphere, have explored the Habermassian notion of the engaging public that is crafted with the emergence of new technologies of literacy, expression and participation. In many ways, the governance structures that have been discussed earlier, also endorse the positions taken by these interlocutors. However, much of the discourse, understands the blogosphere as contained in the digital domains. While a cause-and-effect model is often posited, the chief interest and focus remains on the new public, new voices and new spaces within the virtualities of the World Wide Web. This paper challenges such narrow definitions of the public sphere, and in fact, goes back to Habermass to locate technologies and public spaces within a certain historical context. In fact, this paper proposes that the increasing need for the faith in the blogosphere and the clamour that surrounds it is symptomatic of how the physical and built public spaces, in most Asian IT cities, is slowly diminishing.

In Shanghai, it is the loss of a political public space of socialist capital and industry that marks the beginning of this disappearance. 20 years ago, the announcer on every passenger train entering Shanghai would introduce the city as “the largest industrial city in China.” When W. E. B. Du Bois, an African-American writer, visited Shanghai in 1959, he was particularly invited to visit the balcony of Shanghai Mansion, which sits at the mouth of the Suzhou River and was the tallest building of its time, to catch a bird’s eye view of the new urban socialist landscape and the innumerable factory chimneys that speared the sky (Zhang, 2002).[ii] Indeed, an abundant number of factories, warehouses and dockyards cropped up in the three decades after 1950, and, together with the existing industrial constructions, made Shanghai a “new metropolis.” Some of them were clustered in suburban areas, more were scattered in the city area. Some were even squeezed into Longtangs (the narrow alleyways of old Shanghai). The industrial constructions include not only factory buildings but also workers’ residential buildings in factory-concentrated areas. The workers’ residential buildings were targeted primarily at the senior or skilled workers among the industrial population. Life in the residential buildings became an extension of factory life since neighbours were most probably co-workers in the same factory. It is precisely the great number of old and new industrial constructions and the rhythmic life going on in them that composed the socialist industrial space of Shanghai. Needless to say, it was the fastest growing space in the forty years after 1949.

However, nine out of ten such spaces have been wiped out during the fifteen-year urban renewal project, which is perhaps embodied in the restructuring of the Bund as a space of tourist attraction, and eventually the building of the Pudong skyline that has now become the iconic face of the city (Yatsko, 1996, pp 59).[iii] Factories—let alone warehouses—within the Inner Ring Road have either closed down or been removed. With the closing of the factories, the workers also have no place to work anymore. Dr. Wang XiaoMing, in his essay on the changing public space mentions how, once the factory he worked in “had its signboard removed in 1997, the workers have no place to work anymore. The inhabitants of Caoyang New Village have thrown away the signboard off the gate a long time ago and could barely remember that the place was once called the “Workers New Village.” Large factories located on the outskirts of the city are mostly shut down and the places are as quiet as cemeteries” (forthcoming, 2010).

As Americanised industrial parks sprout up in places such as the Pudong District of Shanghai, and Kunshan and Suzhou to the north of Shanghai, the socialist industrial space is shrinking rapidly both within and without Shanghai. Another space that has significantly diminished is the public political space. One of the most important requirements socialism places on urban space is to be able to facilitate large-scale political rallies and parades (Kewen 2006 and Liang 1959).[iv]

Therefore, apart from industrial constructions, the most eye-catching constructions in Shanghai’s new urban constructions from the 1950s to the 1960s were squares and large meeting halls, which include the People’s Square, the Sino-Russian Friendship Building, the Cultural Plaza, and so on.[v] Moreover, government agencies of all levels and factories endeavoured to build conference halls of various sizes for political meetings by transforming theatre halls or building new ones. In the past, tens of thousands of people have paraded down the People’s Square to pay tribute to the officials perched high above on reviewing stands. People rallying in various meeting halls, changing slogans to express joy, and echoing the instructions from the speakers on stage, were frequent occurrences. During the Cultural Revolution, the Rebels staged the final resistance here; in the late 1980s, fervent university students had swarmed into People’s Square to turn it into a place of revelry (Feuchtwang, 2004).

In the blink of an eye, these histories have faded from the public memory and been completely erased from the city’s architectural space. Sino-Russia Friendship Building is renamed Shanghai Exhibition Center, which hosts a constant blur of Expos. After repeated segmentation, People’s Square is now only a nominal square with a long and narrow driveway and most of its space has been occupied by new buildings such as the majestic Shanghai Grand Theatre, the Shanghai Museum, the sunken commercial street and a parking lot. Cultural Plaza was first transformed into a large flower market which was later torn down and pushed to a corner to make way for the new “Music Plaza.” With mass meetings completely eradicated from the life of Shanghai’s residents, the numerous assembly halls and meeting places of various sizes have naturally been restructures for other purposes. People participate with zeal in large assemblies such as concerts, performance competitions, and so on, which have nothing to do with public politics. It is even possible to say that the audience’s shrieks in the stadium symbolize the massive decrease of the public political space in both architectural and spiritual sense (Tang, 2009, pp 327).

Another cluster of spaces that have significantly disappeared are the gossip centres concentrated in areas such as the mouth of NongTang, Lao Hu Zhao [vi], variety store and lane. It is a cultural given that the Shanghainese like to strike up a conversation with strangers and to engage in gossip; this is indeed one of the city’s hallmarks. The Shanghainese can always spare time for gossip: no matter how busy the atmosphere is, there are always some people who loiter around with hands in pockets; even the working class who work from dawn to dusk like to exchange a few words with their neighbours after work. It so happened that the living space was very cramped for the Shanghainese after the 1950s.[vii] The rich can idle away their time in places such as cinemas whereas the low-income people can only manage to find a free space of leisure near their residences. The first choice is the mouth of NongTang adjacent to the footpath, from which all the comings and goings of residents and the traffics on the streets could be perceived. There will always be a Lao Hu Zhao near the mouth of a big NongTang, where you can sit for a whole afternoon and exchange hearsays with neighbours coming for hot water over a cup of tea; or there is a family-run variety store whose female boss is quite fond of trading rumours and gossip with customers across the narrow counter. In times of local or national crises, this is always the first place where the news is spread and gets distorted.

Things have now changed. Lao Huo Zhaos are gone. Variety stores are quickly replaced by different kinds of convenience stores (Huang, 2004, pp 49-50). Although many similar or even smaller family-run variety stores are opened at the newly-formed district bordering the city, a stable communication space cannot form in these stores since the male or female boss is mostly “non-native population”[viii], who not only is unable to blend in with the local residents but also may move away at any time. Although being one of the hallmarks of old Shanghai houses, the nongtangs have been pulled down in large numbers. Those narrow, winding streets have been either diverted, or straightened and widened. Shabby houses on both sides of the streets have disappeared. Also gone are the hustle and bustle, the interfusion of public and private space, and street gossips, which have been replaced by heavy traffic with exhaust gas and noise. With the increasingly neat arrangement of construction space within the city, the influx of transient population, residents increasingly accustomed to shutting doors to the world and to their neighbours, the overwhelming clamour in the media, and the young people’s addiction to internet and game bars, the space where rumours and gossips are spread via mouths and pointing fingers is naturally contracted (Yeung, 1996, pp. 78-84).

These old spaces of early Shanghainese modernity are quickly replaced by three new built forms. The first are the various above-ground, underground, and overhead expressways. Intersecting and intertwining together, they make the whole city look as if it were trapped in a python’s nest. The second thing that comes to the mind is commercial space.[ix] Shopping malls[x] line both the sides of the streets in downtown Shanghai, whereas hypermarkets cluster at the periphery of the city (Diao, 2006)[xi]. With the speedy expansion of space (Li, 2006)[xii], the style of constructions are increasingly uniform: nearly all of them name themselves “squares”; shopping malls are lined with chain stores on every level; chain supermarkets create mazes of different sizes with dense goods shelves; in office buildings, glass doors and plastic boards partition the office into many honeycomb-like cubicles, making the people working in them increasingly look like worker bees; the hospitality industry is overwhelmed with chain hotels of similar facilities and styles, even customers often forget which hotel they stay in last time (Fulong, 1999). The accelerated standardization process in Shanghai’s space highlights a tendency to obtain the standard outlook of the imagined “international metropolis” and an urgency to erase the distinct features inherited from the past.

Thirdly, the office space of governments and state monopolies expands in a unique sense: although the floor area has increased significantly[xiii], it is the upgrading and the move towards luxury that marks the change. Since the early 1990s, luxurious office buildings with halls paved with marble floor, central air conditioning system, shiny wood floors, CEO office suite with separate bathroom, were built first by banks, then revenue departments, telecommunication agencies, newspapers offices, television stations, courts, and police stations of different levels, and at last governments of municipal, district and even lower levels.[xiv] Not only the connotation of “work” has been enriched, but also other business spaces outside the office have expanded with restaurants, coffee bars, official reception hotels, training centers and vacation centers located in the office buildings or on the outskirts of town or other cities (Leaf, 1997, pp. 156-159).

The changes in the built form of the new IT City that has emerged, are particularly important because they signal the ways in which certain kinds of populations are made redundant in the city as it grows physically more hostile to their life in it. The erasure of histories, of public spaces, of spaces of political negotiation is symptomatic of the new ideologies, policies and dreams that Shanghai-Pudong embody. Most of the studies that look at these changes, concentrate only on the physical and material aspects of it, and ignore the aesthetics, politics, and changes that Internet technologies are bringing in, not only in the imagination of what constitutes a city, but also in the material and lived practices of the people in it (Appadurai, 1990). Government policies that ignore technologies, come to dead-ends in their intervention, as they fail to recognise the new geographies and terrains that the technology users navigate through. Interventions by the Development Sector or the Civil Society Movements often fail to recognise the structures of governance as informed by internet technologies, thus perpetrating the very evils that they fight against. Dislocation and Migration, which are complex issues, get reduced to only geography and physical places – leading to a simplified structure of rehabilitation, largely propelled by the vocabulary of the market and the state. Remunerations, economic rights and livelihood are the only questions addressed. In the process Community rights, structures of communication and networking, relationships within families and societies, ineffable ties and bonds that keep the communities coherent – these affective categories which are dislocated and forced to migrate because of the presence of technologies, fail to register either in the scholarship or in the practices in these areas.

This is where the blogosphere needs to be located – as not merely producing a new space of engagement, but helping in recovering the lost spaces of public participation and community communication. The blogosphere is not merely the invention of a technology marked digital native or the discovery of groups seeking alternative narratives. It is recognition of the fact that the regular mainstream public discourse, interacts with the social transformations and politics of our time and depend on the sustenance of public spheres for the socio-cultural categories like communities, neighbourhoods, public space, etc. to survive. The blogosphere, in the quickly changing, hyper-real landscape of Shanghai-Pudong’s geography is the new variety store, the new location for the Lao Hu Zhao and the space that the labyrinthine networks of nongtangs are mapped on.

e-Governance and its discontents

The change in the physical reorganisation of the city is not only a pragmatic decision. This disappearance of the public space of gossip, information dissemination and distortion, of informal conversations and deliberations tied in closely to the three levels of government in Shanghai – district government, street office and alley office – being able to increasingly control the leisure life of the Shanghainese through administrative planning and organisation (Zhang, 2004). There is a clear link between the government’s imagination of its own territory, the notion of the citizen who is to occupy these spaces, and the material practices that happen in these technology marked spaces (Feuchtwang, 2004). While it is an acknowledged fact that the Chinese government does not follow the structures and paradigms that a North-Western Democratic Liberal ideology that has produced the category of Nation-State in most contemporary discourse, there are still two specific forms of technology inflected governance structures which China seems to share with other contexts which might be geo-politically different.

The e-Governance models, which find resonances in most emerging contexts in the Global South, seem to develop two simultaneous and often ironically related approaches towards citizenship and administration, especially in the context of China. With its already forked governance policies, which treat HongKong – its colonial success story – differently from the rest of Mainland China (and the added complication of Taiwan) the governance structures are marked by technology in significant ways. These structures are suffused with irony, because of the tropes of transparency and invisibility that they use to articulate their rationale and processes.

The first is the approach of Rural Development through ICT networks, positing an access based model of participatory citizenship (Tarlo, 2003) and continuing the Development rhetoric of uplift and reform of the deprived citizen. This particular kind of governance structure re-imagines the beneficiary of state/government processes as existing in a condition of invisibility, and outside of the folds of technology. The particular emphasis on e-government, while it is located in the urban settings, is actually intended for reaching the citizen in the remote parts of the country, who does not have any engagement or direct interaction with processes of governance. Despite China’s three tiered government structure, the imagination of e-governance hold a strong currency because it makes visible, the people, practices and communities which otherwise exist in the subliminal and grey areas which were hitherto not in the focus of the government. Fuelling the rhetoric of e-government is the premium on information dissemination and transparent administration in order to enhance the domains of life and labour in the rural parts of the country.

This approach draws its strength from the Development agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’. However, the valourisation of transparency goes hand-in-glove with the production of the invisible (but cognisable) citizen who needs to be reproduced within the paradigms of technology. The peasant, who has been at the back-bone of China’s socialist political ideology, under this new articulation of transparency, becomes invisible – robbed of the historicity, the cultural iconoclasms and the empowerment that such policies earlier provided. Instead, the peasant becomes a worker who needs to be rehabilitated into the changing geographies of Pudong, the new IT city that requires a worker equipped with new skills and lifestyles. This approach draws its strength from the Developmental agenda of reform and uplift as it markedly emphasises the distance between the ‘haves and the have-nots’ (Jaswal, 2005) and offers ICT enabled development as the panacea for the problems of unemployment, illiteracy, chronic poverty, etc. This approach is made manifest in the establishment of Telecentre kiosks, rural BPOs, e-literacy schools and mobile vans, setting up of mobile and internet technology centres, digitisation of the state’s resources, digital access centres to important data-sets, initiation of projects like ‘One Home One Computer’, the e-literacy campaigns, and the building of special economic zones (SEZ) and IT Corridors under the aegis of e-governance (Hawks, 2009).

The second approach is invested in the massive restructuration of the urban spaces to create infrastructure that attracts foreign investment and ICT enabled multinational corporations. This approach uses the language of creating a S.M.A.R.T. (Smart, Moral, Accountable, Responsive, Transparent) State, modelling the new spaces and politics around the new models of capital modernity (Appadurai, 1996) like Singapore, Shanghai, Tokyo and Taipei. This model is nuanced by a vocabulary of ‘global citizenship and globalised economy’ (Abbas, 1997), glorifying the new economic opportunities, flows of foreign capital, enhancement of lifestyle, and the promise of hypervisibility in the globalisation networks. The building up of network-neighbourhoods (Doheny-Farina, 1996), spaces of incessant commercial consumption, post modern digitalised aesthetics of living and housing, (Mitchell, 1996) infrastructure for ICT augmented lifestyles, spaces for sculpting hyperspatial bodies, and recreational zones that offer apolitical aesthetics of living (Chua, 2000), are all a part of this restructuration.

Contemporary analyses that deploy both these approaches are often contained within the language and the universes created by these approaches. Studies on e-governance concentrate on the processes of infrastructure development, the economic parameters of efficient administration, questions of rights and transparency and impact analyses of the public private partnership which is at the basis of most e-governance projects in India. Urban restructuration has found critique from disciplines that focus largely upon the promissory implementation of State policies, on the imbalance in the urban eco-systems, the new patterns of migration in the city, the cultural and class mobility that the new economies offer, and the emergence of the new middle class that becomes the figurehead of the IT revolution (Huang, 2005). Most studies look upon technology as incidental or instrumental; a tool towards an end. The relationship between ICTs and the State, and the kind of technosocial evolution they produce are generally zones of silence in most discourse. Both these discourses produce a certain hyper-visual citizen subject who is either the champion of the new Information societies or the victim of the digital divide that has ensued.

ICTs are often posited as neutral and transparent because they allow us to look at these two kinds of citizenships on the opposite end of the digital spectrum. It can be argued that the divides of ICTs are transparent and hence it offers clearly defined spaces of intervention and uplift. The development sector around the world has accepted this as a given and hence, along with the Governments, they have also been urging a blanket development of infrastructure of access to technology for a particular section of the society, in an attempt to ‘cure’ certain long standing problems. As in the case of India, China is also fuelled by this transparency rhetoric, which allows for the production of the power-user versus the un-networked and has pinned its hopes on the transformative powers of Internet Technologies. With more than two decades of ICT development in the country, and especially in spaces like Shanghai-Pudong, behind them, China seems to be facing a moment of crisis. On the one hand is its promotion and adoption of internet and digital technologies, which encourages younger users entering in “schools, colleges, universities and workforces to transform the economic conditions” (Heng, 2006). On the other hand is the imagination of these IT forces as transgressive, uncontrollable and in need of constant supervision in order to retain existing government-citizenship relationships and power structures. In the middle of this crisis, is another factor that the obvious suspects and users of technology, who are more under the radar, are not the people who are deploying technologies for political negotiation and using technology platforms for political mobilisation. Despite the efforts at green-washing its technologies and the production of the infamous Great Fire-wall of China, there has been a sustained use of internet technologies for resistance and subversion.

The spaces for subversion rises from the fact that with the making of the IT city, there has been a complex phenomenon of dislocation and migration, as several communities were made redundant in the logic of the IT City and were removed from the city. Many people from these communities re-entered the city as the new IT workforce after going through a ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘skill building’ to not only be a part of the IT labour groups but also to support the IT industry in the construction of the physical infrastructure. Moreover, there has been a steady flow of anonymous ‘outsiders’ who have found homes in the older nontangs and factories, and are in the subliminal zones of regulation. As the city is re-formed to make these people invisible (Abbas, 1997), their leisure space and time shrink and they find themselves increasingly forming the new prosumers of internet in Shanghai. However, in the transparency discourse that unfolds, these populations remain invisible and find spaces of resistance and political negotiation that their invisible status provides them. The promise of Invisibility that treats them as Wetware (the biological combination of a network consisting of Software and Hardware), allows for hope in the otherwise diminishing spaces of political articulation in a growing authoritarian regime in China.

Invisibility, Transparency and the Internet

The paper ends by re-formulating the relationship between the making of an IT City and the way in which transparency as a rhetoric and technology-as-instrumental method fail to account for the different kinds of changes that accompany the restructuring of these cities. On the one hand, there is shrinkage of physical space and built form, as new forms of technology infrastructure, global lifestyle and late capitalistic economies expand to fill up the spaces which were earlier available for political mobilisation, organisation and inhabitation. On the other, there is a diminishing political landscape, where, with the integration of the government with the market, there is a tendency to establish larger regulation and censorship in order to retain the status quo relationship between the government and the citizen, in the face of massive governance transition. Both these conditions are produced by the rise and spread of Information Technologies.

In the process, there are also only two kinds of citizenships that are addressed by the e-governance structures which work on a double edge: Firstly, they make the direct access (defined either by abundance or lack of access) citizenships hyper-visual, robbing them of nuances and looking upon them as implicated only in the discursive practices of Internet technologies. Second, they render invisible, the other supporting structures in order to highlight and focus on the economic development and growth propelled by the rise of the IT industries. In other words, they make the citizens who are central to the discourse, invisible, by treating them as embodiments of the new economic markets and aspirations, removing them from their traditional contexts, histories and spaces. Moreover, they make invisible/transparent, populations who are not marked by the aura of the Internet technologies, in order to bring into focus, the extraordinary changes – both in the physical built form as well as in the realms of governance – that have been initiated and accomplished with the making of the IT City Shanghai-Pudong.

References:

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Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. "The Coming Community." In Global Culture, edited by Michael Featherstone. London: Sage.

Feuchtwang, Stephen. 2004. Making Place: State Projects, Globalisation and Local Responses in China. New York: Routledge Cavendish

Hawks, F.L. 2009. A Short History of Shanghai: Being an account of the growth and development of the international settlement. Beijing: China Intercontinental Press.

Hiibbard, Peter. 2008. The Bund Shanghai : China Faces the West. Odyssey Books and Guides.

Huang, Tsung-yi Michelle. 2004. Walking Between Slums and Skyscrapers : Illusions of open space in HK, Tokyo and Shanghai. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Leaf, Michael. 1998. ‘Urban planning and urban reality under Chinese economic reforms’, Journal of Planning Education and Research. 18(2): 145–153.

Li, Heng. 2006. “Behind the Spectacle of Commercial Real Estate,” Xinmin Weekly, 3rd issue (2006)

Mirsky, Jonathan. 2008. The Britannica Guide to Modern China : A comprehensive introduction to the world’s new economic giant. London: Constable and Robinson Ltd.

Diao Wenjun, “Analysis of the Present situation and Development Trend of Hypermarkets in Shanghai,” Shanghai Articles, 3rd issue (2006)

(STSN) Shanghai Times Square Newsletter. 2008. Issue No. 4. Shanghai.

Shu, Kewen. 2006. “the dynastic History of Tiananmen Square”, Life Week, Issue 11. 27^th March.

Sicheng, Liang. 1959. “Tiananmen Square”, Architectural Journal Issue 9-10. pp. 12.

SSY (Shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 1986, Shanghai Statistics Bureau, (September, 1986), p18, p412.

SSY(a) (shanghai Statistical Yearbook) 2005. Shanghai Statistics Bureau. China Statistics Press. August 2005.

Stanat, Michael. 2005. China’s Generation Y: Understanding the Future Leaders of the World’s Next Superpower. NY: Homa and Sekey Books.

Tang, Shih-che. 2009. ‘The club and the carrot of China’s globalization.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. Volume 10, Number 2. Delhi: Routledge Journals.

Wu, Fulong. 1999. ‘The global and local dimensions of place-making: remaking Shanghai as a world city’. Urban Studies, 37(8): 1359–1377.

Xixian, Xu and Xu JianRong. 2004. A Changing Shanghai. Shangai: Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House.

Yeung, Yue-man. 1996. Shanghai: Transformation and Modernization Under China's Open Policy. Shanghai: Chinese University Press.

Zhang, Jishun. , “The Linong of Shanghai: the political mobilization of grass-roots and the trend of national social integration (1950-1955),” Chinese Social Sciences Today, 2nd issue, 2004

Zhang, Xudong. 2002. “The Construct of Shanghai: Criticism of Urban Idols, Non-mainstream Writing and the Diminishment of Modern Myths” Literary Review, the 5th edition

[i] The project wants to emphasize that it is not attempting a historiography of the building of the IT City of Shanghai-Pudong. Instead, by drawing selectively, different ways in which the technology imaginaries (technopolises, intellectual labour, globally homogenous geographies and time-lines, bodies marked by technology in their material practices, etc ) of the Internet, find structure and form in the emerging IT cities in Asia.

[ii] Zhang Chunqiao, Secretary of the Culture and Education Department of the Shanghai Municipal Committee who accompanied DuBois to Shanghai Mansion, specially mentioned DuBois’ visit in an article entitled “To Climb the New Summit of Victory.”.

[iii] In 1994, one Shanghai government officer stated, “the government plans to remove or close down two thirds of the factories located within [the range of] 106 square kilometers from the city centre, namely, within the Inner Ring Road.”. Due to different reasons (one of the main reasons is the increase of transferee cost because unsolved problems, such as the proper placement of a large number of former workers, have been bundled with the factory buildings and factory land), some factories still remain in their original places, although most of them have already stopped manufacturing and the workers dismissed. The industrial life/space has disappeared with the disappearance of the factories. Ruins of this life/space become some sort of commodity only because the land under the ruins still has some value.

[iv] On the day (1 October 1949) of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong suggested rebuilding Tiananmen Square and making it a “grand and magnificent square.” See (Kewen, 2006). Liang Sicheng, who always insisted on preserving the old Beijing and opposed massive makeover, finally realized that the makeover was never about architecture but about politics: “As for the scale of Tiananmen Square … apart from considering the scale of man as a biological being and the scale of construction appropriate to the man’s physiology, we should also take into account the scale for the great collective requested by the political men in the new society.” Liang, 1959, pp 12).

[v] The People’s Square, transformed in 1953 from the original racecourse (which was nationalized in 1951 by the Municipal Military Control Commission), surrounded by woods, and paved with tiled and cemented floor, is the largest public space in Shanghai and can accommodate over one million people. The Sino-Russian Friendship Building, which was built in 1955 and was covering an area of 80,000 square meters, was the city’s largest building after the liberation of Shanghai and still ranks top in terms of its indoor space in today’s Shanghai. The Cultural Plaza, transformed in 1952 from the Greyhound Racecourse, had 12,500 seats and was the largest indoor hall in Shanghai.

[vi] It is a unique store that sells boiled water in Shanghai.

[vii] Shanghai’s housing shortage started in the early 20th century instead of the 1950s. The living space within Shanghai city is 16,100,000 square meters in total but 3.9 square meters per capita. During the 32 years from 1952 to 1985, 21,720,000 square meters of housing were built within the city and the registered population increased from 5,300,000 to 6,980,000. The housing shortage was still serious since by 1985, the living space had only reached 5.4 square meters per capita. (SSY, 1986). What needs to be clarified is that the statics of 1949 does not include the shabby slum houses commonly referred to as “gun di long.”

[viii] This is an increasingly popular new word in Shanghai over the last 20 years, which refers to the people who come from other provinces, especially the rural areas, and live in Shanghai but do not have permanent residence in Shanghai. According to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau’s report on March 2006, the immigrating labor population in Shanghai was 3,750,000. 2,840,000 of this population is in the manufacturing, construction, retail, and catering industry and engaged in low-income manual work. The immigrating population should be over 4 million if the large number of people (such as those in the household service business) and their children be taken into calculation.

[ix] In Shanghai, the floor area of shops has increased seven-fold from 4,030,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,857,000 square meters in 2004 and that of hotels has increased three-fold from 6,580,000 square meters in 1990 to 2,204,000 square meters in 2004. The increase of commercial space is even greater if that of commercial office buildings is calculated as well. (SSY(a), 2005, pp. 198)

[x] Take the area around Zhongshan Park for example, although it was one of the earliest developed leisure areas in Shanghai, there was only one small department store in the mid-1980s and the retail business developed slowly. However, within these ten years, with the completion of Zhongshan Park Station along the subway line 2 and light rail line 3, five multi-story shopping malls have been built, all within a radius of 500 meters. The newest among them is a 58-storey building with four levels of basement and nine levels of shopping mall.

[xi] By the end of 2005, hypermarkets measuring over 5000 square meters within Shanghai have reached 97 and 28 more have chosen their locations and would be opened soon. Because of a large number of hypermarkets and the intense competition brought about, a considerable number of them mainly profit from land appreciation rather than from retail.

[xii] By the end of 2005, the commercial real estate in Shanghai has reached a total of 2,900,000 square meters with 2.6 square meters per capita, far exceeding Hong Kong’s 1.2 square meters per capita.

[xiii] Barely 6 million square meters in 1990, the floor area of office buildings in Shanghai reached a total of 4,012,000 square meters in 2004. See Shanghai Statistical Yearbook 2005. Edited by Shanghai Statistics Bureau, published by China Statistics Press in August 2005, p 198. The statistical material on the increase of floor area of commercial office building cannot be found for the present. Even if the material were obtained, it would not be enough since a large area of commercial office building has been rented by many state-owned monopoly agencies. However, the expansion of government office space is great even if it take up only one tenth of the space of office buildings.

[xiv] Such phenomenon exists not only in Shanghai but all over the country, especially in cities and towns of low economic level. The towering and luxurious government, bank, taxation, and police buildings create an ironic contrast with the low and shabby constructions close by.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/grants/the-promise-of-invisibility-technology-and-the-city/finalpaper

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

The Idea of the Book

nishant — 2012-04-10T09:53:27Z

Its future lies in a trans-media format that is ever evolving, writes Nishant Shah in an article which was published in the Indian Express on April 8, 2012.

If you are a true bibliophile, you have long transcended making mortal judgements about books, based on insignificant factors such as plot, narrative, or writing style. A true bibliophile is in love with the form of the book — the joy that comes from the rustle of a turned page, the euphoria of holding a book in your arms, the satisfaction that rises from watching a tottering stack of books. For hardcore bibliomaniacs, the love is at a sub-molecular level, so to speak, finding their happiness and content in shapes of fonts, thickness of paper, methods of binding, imprints and meta-data that tells its own story. For all these true lovers of books, their affection goes beyond the content of the book. They love the book as an artefact, as an object of desire. It is as if there was a “bookness” to the book that they deeply appreciate.

It is these people, along with many others, who mourn the death of the book in the age of digital mass production. With the advent of the e-book and the ubiquitous presence of reading devices, many have announced the death of the book. The ‘dead-tree book’, as it is often derisively described in many circles, is a thing of the past. As we live in worlds of increasing interface, the surfaces we read on, the way we read, and the forms that we read have undergone a dramatic reconfiguration. Swype-and-touch has replaced turn-and-fold and the book as we know it, is growing extinct.

Professor Bruno Latour — one of the first theorists and critics of digital technologies, large-scale networks, and new methods of knowledge production — from Sciences Po in Paris, during his recent visit to Bangalore, suggested that instead of accepting the imminent death of the book and mourning its demise, it might be more fruitful to look at its future. The digital, he says, does not question the idea of the book, but merely the form. This, for me, is a fascinating idea. We often recognise the book as a form — something that is written, something that is bound, or something that is found in libraries. If you were to define a book, you would talk about the different kinds, shapes, colours and sizes of books but you won’t necessarily be able to explain it. This is because a book is only a material manifestation of a much larger idea and this is what we need to focus on.

The book has seen many transitions in its form from the pre-print, hand-written manuscripts by trained scribes to the print-on-demand paperbacks which can be assembled easily. Technologies have not threatened but actually helped it change, evolve and keep up with the times. When we think of the digital book and the possibilities it offers, these are much more exciting than the rather Luddite lament about how the book is dead.

In the digital medium, the future of multimedia narratives is convergence. An ability to tell stories, record knowledge, share information and make connections through a variety of media forms and styles changes the future of the book. Imagine a book that begins with a text, continues through music, blends into user-generated pictures and ends with a video. Imagine this book being written, not only in different media but also by different people, simultaneously, resulting in a layered palimpsest rather than a static page. Imagine each page and every word on the page not as a fixed thing but one of a series of alternatives. Imagine a book that is written as it is read, and no longer excludes print-challenged or differently-abled people from contributing to the writing, reading and sharing process.

A trans-media format would stay true to the democratic and inclusive vision of a book and correct the limitations of print. Such a book would also free knowledge and information from businesses — let’s not forget that the publishing and education system is a business — and allow a new audience to participate in knowledge production. This is not a mere fantasy. We already have new models such as mash-ups which give us a new logic to sort and store information. Imagine Facebook as a collaborative platform where different information can come together to supplement the traditional book. Wikipedia is a space of knowledge production, which might simulate the older encyclopaedia form, but it is written by unpaid contributors, collaboratively, even as the Encyclopaedia Britannica announces its last ever print publication.

The form of the book is going to change as it has over the last 500 years. However, the idea of the book — a receptacle that contains and records collective wisdom, information, ideas, knowledge, experiences and imagination of humankind – is here to stay. The digital book has to be understood not merely as a digitisation of an older book, but has to be imagined as a smorgasbord of possibilities which will revolutionise the form of the book and bring it closer to its intended vision. It is time indeed to announce, ‘The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book!’

Read the original from the Indian Express

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/idea-of-the-book

The Historian Wins Over the Biographer

nishant — 2011-12-31T12:15:10Z

In Walter Isaacson's eponymous biography of Steve Jobs, the multibillion dollar man who is credited with single handedly changing the face of computing and the digital media industry, we face the dilemma of a biographer: how do you make sense of a history that is so new, it is still unfolding? Nishant Shah's detailed review of Steve Jobs' biography is now out in the Biblio and is is available online (after a free registration) as a PDF.

And how do you stitch it together around a person so iconic that he was always larger than life? Steve Jobs, the authorised story, that Steve Jobs never got to read because of his death to cancer on 5th October 2011, captures the tension between being a biographer and a historian that marks Isaacson's ambitious project. As a biographer, he hasn't yet achieved enough critical distance with the subject at hand, and hence, instead of engaging with Jobs to give us inroads into his mind, we get a history that dons the mantle of objectivity and accuracy, to create a eulogy that would fit Steve Jobs' journey from Apple II to Apps.

Written lucidly in a fairly conversational style reminiscent of Isaacson’s time spent with the Time Magazine, Steve Jobs is a story stitched together with love, care, rigour and honesty, to look at the times, people, places and circumstances that created the megalith icon Steve Jobs. Isaacson, whose earlier works include biographical histories of Benjamin Franklin (Simon & Schuster, 2003) and Albert Einstein (Simon & Schuster, 2008), confesses to his love of exploring the intersections of technology and humanity. He establishes Steve Jobs as a worthy successor in the series, using Jobs’ own description of himself – “I always thought of myself as a Humanities person as a kid, but I liked electronics” – as the springboard for writing this ambitious history.

Like a good historian, Isaacson refuses to take Jobs at face value, well aware of his ‘Reality Distortion Field’ that sucks you in even if you are aware of it, making reality appear in morphed forms. With a rigour that befits the project, he sets out in search of the historical truth using over a hundred interview sources comprised of influential people in Jobs’ life, an exhaustive riffling through the public discourse around Apple and its poster boy, a shrewd hand on the economic and technological pulse of the late 20th century and an uncanny ability to read between the lines. The result is a biography filled with tales that we know, stories that we speculated about, anecdotes about what we suspected.

In one of the most memorable interviews in the book, Isaacson interviews Debi Coleman, one of the early managers at Apple, who says, “He would shout at a meeting, ‘You ---hole, you never do anything right.’ ... Yet I consider myself the absolute luckiest person in the world to have worked with him.” Isaacson traces
this peculiar power that Jobs had over people in his life, to make them feel special and worthless at the same time, to Jobs’ own early knowledge of his adoption and of his oscillations between feeling “Abandoned. Special”. Isaacson shows how Jobs’ own life constantly referenced these two positions – from his dysfunctional relationships with women (the short story of how he got his girlfriend pregnant at 23 and then abandoned her, even denying paternity), to his long travels to India in search of spiritual belonging, and the lessons he learned from his adoptive father, who he hero-worshipped only to later realise that he was “smarter than him” — the adoption and its effects on his young mind, come up repeatedly. It serves as a way of understanding his abrasive attitude to authority, his rude and insensitive behaviour with colleagues and friends, and his strange fads at self improvement that ranged from fruitarian diets to extreme purging and fasting.

Steve Jobs offers a wide range of examples of his awful behaviour – the bullying, the belittling, the lying – till you are numbed by them. At the same time, there is a fanboy who takes us gleefully through the history that preceded the world of iPod, iPhone and iPad, with backstories of the known, the presumed and the plausible. The book quenches the thirst for information about one of the most private public figures and confirms the polarity, not only of Jobs’ dealings with the world, but also his own life and how he saw it. There is an explosion of facts – unknown facts – that entice you into reading the book, but facts alone do not a good biography make.

What is missing from the book, is insight. Throughout the book, while Jobs’ own dramatic life choices sustain your attention and interest, the author does not work too hard at either creating his own impressions of Jobs or at giving insight in more than the surface. There is no doubt that Isaacson is an expert historian— the most enjoyable parts of the book are when he looks at the histories that came together to create Jobs. Using his rich knowledge of the ’70s and the ’80s in the USA he portrays an enchanted universe of the hippy lifestyle, rebellious attitudes to authority, reforming education system, the transition from the analogue to digital technologies, and the heyday of creative experimentation enjoyed by a plush economy.

The layers of enchantment start fading when Isaacson lets go of the mantle of history and starts talking about the person he is studying. It is almost as if after having done his research on Jobs and then failing to invest in him as an author, he sought respite in writing history rather than giving us more of the person involved. Which is why, after reading the first half of the book, going through a series of strategic beginnings, looking at a wide range of people like Steve Wozniak, Nolan Bushnell, Andrea Cunningham, Daniel Kotke and Mike Markkula, one gets a feeling that you know more about these people than you know about Jobs. While each one of these characters, even in their cameo appearances, bring flavour, variety, complexity and emotionality to the tale, Jobs remains the “enlightened but cruel” person who, even as he grows and transforms, remains tied to that description. Jobs becomes an organising principal for making sense of the jumbled influences behind the making of Apple rather than a person we can know more about. He is often named as an enigma but there is very little effort put into actually exploring his mystery. The historian wins over the biographer in getting you more interested in the time-space continuum rather than in the person.

I don’t want you to go away with the idea that there is not much substance to Isaacson’s writing. With a fine pen (which could have done with a little reflexive editing — and I am sure this would have happened had the book been released as planned in January of next year instead of being brought forward to fill the void created by Jobs’ death), Isaacson does lead us into Jobs’ universe (if not into his head) in interesting ways. He paints little sketches of the past — like Jobs’ run-in with Bill Gates, like Apple’s rivalry with IBM, like Apple’s ‘stealing’ of the GUI (Graphic User Interface) ideas and technology from Xerox PARC, like the first Mac advertisement that posited Apple as the rebel against the ‘thought police’ in George Orwell’s dystopian epic 1984, or even in the parting of ways between the two Steves (Jobs and Wozniak). Isaacson knows how to tell even an oft-told story well and takes you through a simple but intricate narrative of how Jobs became the poster-boy of the company he founded and his eventual ousting from it as a result of his obnoxious behaviour and the obsessive compulsive personality that was affecting the productivity and business of Apple.

However, the second half of the book, separated with some poignant and memorable pictures from Jobs’ life, makes it clearer than ever that Isaacson’s interest in Jobs is not as a biographer but as a historian. It deals with Jobs’ ousting from Apple, his near bankrupt status as both Next and Pixar fell to bad days, and the eventual return of Jobs to the Apple empire not as the prodigal son but the ascendant angel. In pithy prose, Isaacson captures the turmoil, frustration and chaos that emerged when the brightest star of the computing industry almost collapsed in his own overambition. We get a sense of the ruthlessness, the hard heartedness and the short memory of a technology industry that is simultaneously unforgiving, forgetful and hinged on a business ethic of capital and market expansion. If Isaacson notices the irony of Jobs’ own firing of “B grade players” from his Macintosh project and the abrasive dismissal of “shitheads” that Jobs regularly engaged in, to feed his own sense of power and control, he doesn’t dwell on it.

The most dramatic rags-to-riches fairy tale of Jobs’ rise to power and his subsequent emergence as a tech superstar who changed the world as we know it with the iPod, iTunes, iPhone and iPad, in a quest to make his mark in history, is a lacklustre effort. The narrative is slow and sluggish, often making you want to skim through the page and move on. There is also a repeated emphasis on how Jobs was a visionary, was brilliant, was a man who, as he grew, was getting to deal with his life better, instead of an analysis of the different events that have marked Jobs’ public and personal life. The historian, when faced with the present just rushes through it to complete the book. Yet, the last interviews with Jobs, where he refers to himself as a machine, “one click, and it is all gone” are rich in emotions and texture. Isaascon does justice to Jobs’ belief in his being good “at making people talk”. There is a sense of closure that comes with angst, grief, pain and the feeling of loss that Jobs’ death must incite.

The discontent I am left with is that in what is being read as a homily to the man, there is very little of the man in it. I knew Steve Jobs, through the legends and stories that surround him, as an abrasive and arrogant whizkid who manipulated everybody around him ruthlessly to execute his own visions and dreams. I knew Steve Jobs, through the public discourse and rumours, as a flawed man who could be at once the best and the worst thing that could happen to you, using people as gods when he needed them and shattering them when he no longer needed them in his new visions. I knew Steve Jobs, through the grapevine and the gossip as a man who was obsessed with control and as one who sought spirituality in design and salvation in a good sale. I knew Steve Jobs as a bundle of contradictions and contrariness and while this book explains in fascinating ways the confluences that created this legend, it gives me very little in terms of understanding the man behind the mask.

The interwebz are already abuzz with the debates for or against Steve Jobs. There is surprise at how Isaacson waters down some of the personal and professional scuffles, often bordering on the unrelenting and the unethical, in his rendering of Jobs’ life. Speculation is rife about some of the more controversial decisions that Jobs took and whose side Isaacson is on. The book captures, comprehensively, so much of Jobs’ life that it is bound to lead to infinite discussion and critique. However, I would recommend that you read the book not as a biography but as a history. If you read it as a history where Steve Jobs features prominently, because, after all, histories are written by those who win, you will be rewarded richly. It is a history that offers innovative ways of looking at technology, one that maps one of the most crucial transitions of the 20th century from the analogue to the digital and shows how a handful of people have shaped the information age we live in. However, if you approach Steve Jobs as a way of understanding Steve Jobs, chances are you will feel short changed.

Read the original published in the Biblio VOL. XV NOS. 11 & 12, NOVEMBER- DECEMBER 2011

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/historian-wins-over-biographer

The Gay Pride Charade

nishant — 2016-07-25T01:10:28Z

For most of the milllenials, news is formed by trends, what goes viral, and often open to speculation, projection, manipulation and deceit.

The article was published in Indian Express on July 3, 2016.

The world of social media can be a minefield of misinformation, and it does get difficult to verify facts and ensure the veracity of the information that comes to us on the winged notifications of our apps. This becomes starkly clear in times of crises. Hence, when the historic and heinous shootout at a gay night club in Orlando, USA, shook the world with horror and grief a couple of weeks ago, when the first tweets appeared on my timeline, my initial reaction was denial. Instead of believing those first responders, I was already searching for more credible news lines that could confirm — or hopefully deny — the massacre. It took only a few minutes, though, to realise that #StandWithOrlando was a reality that we will have to accommodate in the story of continued violence and abuse of sexual minorities around the world.

However, not all deception is bad. One of the most fantastic responses to the shoot-out was from a Quebec-based satirical website called JournalDemourreal.com that published a photoshopped image showing the Canadian PM Justin Trudeau kissing the leader of the Canadian opposition party Tom Mulcair, with a headline that the two, despite their differences, are “united against homophobia”. I know that I liked this fake story four times on different newsfeeds, half-believing, half-wishing that it was true, before I realised that it is a hoax. Morphed as it might be, the doctored image enabled people to talk about the tragedy as demanding a personal and a policy-level action, ranging from acceptance and freedom, to control of guns and protecting the rights of life and dignity for the sexual minorities who continue to remain persecuted in the world.

The image also allowed many queer people in different parts of the world — especially in the countries where homosexuality continues to be criminalised and severely punished — to participate not only in the global grief but also to demand that their governments take more responsibility towards its queer population.

While this photoshopped picture was making the rounds, another tweet showed up on my timeline. This time it was a tweet from our media-savvy PM, Narendra Modi, who claimed that he was “shocked at the shootout in Orlando.”And further added that his “thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved families and the injured”. When I saw this tweet, my reaction again, was that this must be another joke. Because even as queer rights activists in the country struggle to fight for the decriminalisation of homosexuality, through their curative petitions in the Supreme Court in India, PM Modi’s government has continued its hateful diatribe against queer people in the country. His party has called homosexuality “anti-Indian” and “anti-family”. The party’s favourite, Baba Ramdev, continues his hate speech, offering to cure homosexuality through yoga.

Ever since the current government took power, documented hate crimes against queer people have more than doubled in the country. So when the PM decided to offer his condolences to those in Orlando, I figured that either it was a fake Twitter account masquerading as the PM or it was some kind of a hacker troll — maybe Anonymous, the online guerrilla activists, who recently took over ISIS- friendly websites and filled them up with information about male homosexuality as a response to the shoot-out — had taken control of the Twitter account. But it turned out that this piece of information was not photoshopped or hacked. It was actually true, and we were to believe in earnest that while the government doesn’t care about the millions of queer people being denied their rights to live and love in their country, it is heartbroken about what happened in the USA.

It does make you wonder about the world we live in, where a photoshopped image sounded more plausible than an undoctored tweet. It emphasises why Orlando cannot be treated as one isolated instance in another country, but that #WeAreOrlando. For right now, Orlando is also in India. It is a reminder that while we have been fortunate not to have such an instance of dramatic violence, there are millions of people in the country who are forced to live and die in deception for their sexual orientation.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-nishant-shah-july-3-2016-gay-pride-charade

The Future of the Moving Image

nishant — 2008-11-11T09:06:57Z

All dissimilar technologies are the same in their own way, but all similar technologies are uniquely different. This was probably at the core of the zeitgeist at the international seminar on “The Future of Celluloid” hosted by the Media Lab at the Jadavpur University, Kolkata, at which Nishant Shah, Director - Research CIS, presented a research paper. Practitioners, film makers, artists, theoreticians and academics, blurring the boundaries of both their roles and their disciplines and areas of interest, came together to move beyond convergence theories – to explore the continuities, conflations, contestations and confusions that Internet Technologies have led to for earlier technologies, but specifically for the technology of the moving image.

How Digital Cinema changes the notion of authorship...

The concerns that emerged at the Jadavpur University Media Lab's international seminar on The Future of Celluloid, were manifold and not confined to cinema or the moving image. These are concerns that are voiced on all realms of cultural production, where the traditional forms feel stranded at digital intersections, threatened by the emergence of new cultural productions which are so much more quintessentially the form and ideal that the traditional forms aspired to.

The blog, as we saw at the “Writing the Future Conference” was seen as a threat and more fundamentally replacing the novel form. Ars electronica or digital music has long since played the swan song of traditional orchestration practices. Similarly, the digital film (often broadcast on video sharing spaces like YouTube and MySpace) or even mainstream feature films that embody digital technologies of hypervisualisation, show necessarily more than celluloid could ever capture. As Ashish Rajadhyaksha pointed out, “The capacity to pay almost infinite attention to the celluloid image was made possible only with the digitisation of the celluloid image”.

Through the different presentations, this strain of thought was apparent – will we lose celluloid altogether? Is the future of cinema going to be in infantile pre-lapsarian representations of smiling/dancing/gurgling babies and furry pets made by indulgent mothers and doting pet owners? When cinema transitions from deep celluloid to shallow pixels, will the loss in depth also result in the death of meaning and processes of reading the image? And finally, the question that seems to surface, sometimes in the guise of academic concern, sometimes in the shape of alarm and anxiety, and sometimes in the form of paranoia and raging uncertainty: “Is this the end of Celluloid? “ to which Matt Hanson, who presented his open source film A Swarm of Angels, nuancedly added: "Only the end of celluloid as we know it!”

In my presentation titled ´Of Pranksters, Jesters and Clowns – YouTube Videos and Conditions of Collaborative Authorship´ I made a call to identify these questions as symptomatic of another more deep seated anxiety which makes for a fundamental revisiting of the relationship between the author, the text and the reader. Looking particularly at YouTube videos and the kind of arguments that have surrounded them – on copyright, defamation, plagiarism, piracy, sampling, remix, authorship, ownership – I proposed that at the centre of all these anxieties is the question of authorship, what constitutes it and the need to expand the scope of authorship by looking at the series of engagements that happen online.

I presented two cases to make my argument. The first was the case of 13-month-old Holden Lenz, dancing to Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy. In February 2007, Stephanie Lenz’s family had a digital equivalent of a Kodak moment. Her 13-month-old son Holden, pushing a walker across her kitchen floor, started moving to the addictive rhythms of Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy song and Stephanie recorded him on her digicam. Wanting more of the family to share the joy, she uploaded the video on to YouTube and it was viewed scores of times. Laughs were shared, gaps were bridged, digital technologies brought families scattered across time-zones and lifestyles together.

However, the lawyers at Universal Music did not seem to share the enthusiasm or the joy. They fired off a notice to YouTube asking them to remove the video because it amounted to a copyright infringement. YouTube, fearing legal ramifications, removed the video. Stephanie Lenz approached the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which challenged Universal’s claims that held Lenz liable for up to 150,000 USD in fines for sharing the 29 seconds of her son dancing. While it is very easy to draw the battle-lines and look upon the well educated, highly paid lawyers of Universal as ‘idiots’ who spent probably millions of dollars in starting the legal battle, I think there is more at play here than who is right and who is wrong. What is really being debated, is not whether Lenz indulged in wilful copyright infringement or not, but the questions of who is an author, what are the mechanisms of attribution, and how do we understand these in the complex digital worlds that we populate?

Historically, the author was constructed as a communitarian figure whose work depended on and was enhanced by the collaborations and the collective knowledge of the people s/he interacted with. Chaucer, to quote the most canonical example, for instance, was recognised as the author of The Canterbury Tales only after the print industry finds its footing, thus neglecting the fact that the text was heavily distorted, enhanced, mutated, corrected, revised, edited and transformed by the various users of the manuscripts, who were not merely audience or receptors but also collaborative authors of the text. It is only with the establishment of the cultural industries, that such a fluid understanding of authorship gets crystalised into specific forms of engagement, where the author, the reader, the distributor, the consumer, the audience and the end user are all clearly defined and contained within presumed roles.

It is the blurring of these boundaries in the digital world that leads to the kind of debates that we observe around the Stephanie Lenz case. The inability of the newly emerging digital cultural industry to recognise different forms of engagement – remixing, sampling, embedding, referencing, distributing, editing, etc. – as creative and productive forms of authorship is at the basis of the anxieties that run amok in these debates. My presentation made a call for not only a de-criminalisation of pirate positions in the realm of cultural production, but also to recognise and celebrate the various conditions of collaborative authorship – be it by Holden Lenz who probably made the song twice as popular than it was, or by Avril Lavigne fans who went on a spree to make her song Girlfriend, the first video to be viewed one million times on Youtube – not merely as derivative or acts of prank and jests, but as legitimate and distinctive forms of authorship which expand the scope of the cultural object and give it unprecedented layers of meaning and engagement.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/research/conferences/conference-blogs/future-of-the-moving-image

The Future of Journalism: EJC @ Picnic 2010

nishant — 2010-10-13T07:13:29Z

Nishant Shah was a speaker at the PICNIC 2010, in Amsterdam, where he made a presentation titled "Citizens in the time of Database Democracies : Information ecology and role of participatory technologies in India"

The relationship between citizenship and government informatics have historically been shaped through a series of debates around questions of citizenship, security, State-market collaborations, and right based discourse in India. Even before the information explosion caused by the emergence of digital and internet technologies, there has been a strident discourse around participatory democracy and technology mediated governance as ways of empowering the citizen's access to rights and resources in the country. With the emergence of new technologies of storage, retrieval and dissemination, these expectations have become more visible. The Indian Government has officially accepted the transition to become a S.M.A.R.T. (Simple, Moral, Accountable, Responsible and Transparent) State, with the rise of 'Netizens' who, in their access to new digital and internet technologies will change the very shape and structure of governance.

However, as the digital infrastructure develops and new kinds of citizen services and consumption come to the fore, battle-lines are being drawn between stakeholders. On the one hand are those who believe that this might be the opening of a Pandora’s Box for a country like India where a stark digital divide might create great inequality in citizens' access to State services and resources, producing unjust and discriminatory structures based on access, bandwidth and education. . On the other hand are those who celebrate the need for transparency, participation and access to governmentality that these e-governance initiatives usher in, addressing long standing questions of plutocratic governance, bureaucratic systems of denial of rights and widespread corruption. Both the warring factions draw upon partial data – of failed attempts and projects by different government initiatives to pilot studies initiated by different government and civil society organisations respectively – to make their arguments for and against the emergence of a 'Database Democracy' .premised on participatory politics facilitated by new media practices in the country.

Especially with the current rolling out of a Unique Identity Project (named Aadhar – The Hindi word for ‘Support’) these discussions have become more severe and the arguments have become angrier. It is not only timely but also necessary to examine the ecology of participatory technologies and processes in the country in order to look at the different sides of the debates and explore the role that new media practitioners and stakeholders would play in efficiently and responsibly establishing a protocol of open and transparent governance structures without compromising either the privacy, rights or safety of the citizens. This presentation explores the project Aadhar as symptomatic of a changing relationship between the State and its Citizens mediated by ICT technologies and stakeholders, to look at the ways in which new Citizenships are being forged in emerging information societies like India.

More news about the panel on Future of Journalism, arranged by the European Journalism Commission, is available at

http://futureofjournalism.net/index.php/EJC_at_PICNIC2010

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

The Digital Other

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:07:42Z

Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. One of the binaries posited as the Digital ‘Other’ -- ie, a non-Digital Native -- is that of a Digital Immigrant or Settler.

I am not comfortable with these terms and they probably need heavy unpacking if not complete abandonment. Standard caricatures of Digital Others show them as awkward in their new digital ecologies, unable to navigate through this brave new world on their own. They may actually have helped produce digital technology and tools but they are not ‘born digital’ and hence are presumed to always have an outsider’s perspective on the digital world order.

As I’ve interacted with young people in the Global South, one thing suddenly started emerging in dramatic fashion -- that many of the youth working extensively with digital technologies in emerging ICT contexts often shared characteristics of the Digital Other. In countries like India, where the digital realm became accessible and affordable to certain sections of the society as late as 2003, there is a learning curve among youth that does not necessarily match the global thinking on Digital Natives. Even though these young people might be considered Digital Natives, because they are at the center of the digital revolution in their own countries, there is no doubt they are also Digital Others relative to Global North and West conceptions of young people in digital networks.

There is a very popular tweet that was making the rounds recently, which suggested that Digital Natives don’t have an account of the digital just like fish don’t have a theory of water -- they take to the digital as fish take to water. In this analogy lies a very important distinction between Digital Others and Digital Natives. Out of necessity, Digital Others have a relationship of production, control and design with the technologies they work with. They have a critical engagement with technology, as they code, hack, design, and create protocols and digital environments to suit their needs and resources. Digital Natives, on the other hand, have a purely consumption based interaction with the technology they use.

I want to repeat that. The Digital Natives I’ve observed have a purely consumption based interaction with the technologies they use. I know this sounds weird in the face of widespread perceptions that Digital Natives have participatory, engaged, intuitive relationships with technology. We are supposed to be living in prosumer times, where the user on the Infobahn is a consumer and producer of information. But Web 2.0 entities like Facebook have created a business where the user is not just consuming but indeed the user is the consumed. While Facebook and Twitter revolutions are interesting in how users have been able to ‘abuse’ information censorship and create new communities of political protest, we still have to remember that the technologies that supported these revolutions were closed, proprietary, and coercive -- often even putting users in danger.

From my perspective and my research, we have conflated access to information with access to technology, and we have misread this increased access as a sign of intimate relationship with digital technology and the Internet. However, for many youth, media production and information sharing are actually merely forms of consumption.

What is most alarming to me is that the individual’s relationship with original production and design of technology is on the decline. More and more, technology platforms and apps that Digital Natives interact with are closed hardware and software systems. Private corporations produce and shape the tools of interaction, producing seductive interfaces and information engagement choices that make opaque the actual working of the technologies we use. I am concerned that, increasingly, Digital Natives are acting as pure consumers of technology and gadgets, and seem willing to do so.

Banner image credit: World Bank Photo Collection http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldbank/3492673512/

Nishant wrote the original blog post in DML Central. Read it here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/the-digital-other

The Digital is Political

nishant — 2016-06-05T03:58:46Z

To speak of technology is to speak of human life and living.

The article was published in the Indian Express on March 20, 2016.

“You are supposed to write about the internet, why do you keep talking about all this politics?” I was taken aback when I was faced with this question. It is true – since the year has begun, I have talked about digital education and the ways in which it needs to account for unexpected and underserved communities, about net neutrality and why the Indian government needs to build a stronger, safer, and a more inclusive digital ecosystem. I have written about freedom of speech and expression and how this is going to be the year when we stand together to save the internet from vested interests that seek to convert it from a public commons into a private commodity.

In my head, all these questions — of inclusion, of access, of presence, of rights — are questions of human life and living, but they are also those that are being hugely restructured by the internet and digital technologies. When faced with the query, I was reminded of a deep-seated division that has been at the heart of digital cultures.

Way back in the ’90s, when the internet was still a space of science fiction and the World Wide Web was in its nascent stages, there was a distinction made between Virtual Reality (VR) and Real Life (RL). The presumption in the construction of these categories was that the digital is only an escape, the technological is merely a prosthesis, and the internet is just a thing that a few geeks engaged with in their free time. However, the last three decades have made this distinction between VR and RL redundant.

We live in digital times. The digital is not just something we use strategically and specifically to do a few tasks. Our very perception of who we are, how we connect to the world around us, and the ways in which we define our domains of life, labour, and language are hugely structured by the digital technologies. The digital is ubiquitous and hence, like air, invisible. We live within digital systems, we live with intimate gadgets, we interact through digital media, and even though we might all be equally digital natives, there is no denying the fact that the very presence and imagination of the digital has dramatically restructured our lives. The digital, far from being a tool, is a condition and context that defines the shapes and boundaries of our understanding of the self, the society, and the structures of governance.

The pervasive nature of the digital technologies and internet can be found at multiple levels. For instance, we do not think about going online anymore, because most of our devices are connected 24×7 to the digital web. Even when we are not online, sunk in a bad network connection, or protecting our precious data usage, we know that our avatars and digital identities are online and talking without us.

So established is this phenomenon that we even have a name for the anxiety it creates: FOMO — the Fear Of Missing Out. Similarly, the digital can be located at the level of human understanding. We are used to thinking of ourselves as digital systems. We talk about our primary identity as one marked by information overload. We often complain, when faced with too many demands on our time and space, that we don’t have enough bandwidth to deal with new problems, and we are not referring to digital connectivity.

The digital also has space at the level of policy and governance. If you, like the many millions of Indians, have registered for an Aadhaar card, you have already been marked by a digital identity whether or not you have broadband access. When our government launches Digital India campaigns, it is not merely about an economic model of growth, but it is suggesting that the digital is going to be at the foundations of the new India that we want to build for the future.

If the digital is so central to our fundamental understanding of the self, the society, and the state, then surely it is time to stop thinking that these technologies have nothing to do with politics? There remains a forced imagination of technologies as devices, as tools, as prostheses which do not have any other role than the performing of a function. However, this is a fallacy, because not only do technologies shape our sense of who we are, but they also prescribe new templates and models of who we are going to be. In the process, these technologies take political action, create social structures, mobilise cultural possibilities, and often, because they are technologies that are still elite and available to the privileged few in the country, they enable decisions which are not always fair, open, and just.

Hence, a technological decision cannot be read merely as a technical decisions but as human decisions. To speak of technology is to speak of human life and living. To write about technology is to write about politics, because a separation between the two is not only futile but downright dangerous.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/indian-express-march-20-2016-nishant-shah-digital-is-political

The Digital is Political

nishant — 2012-03-21T09:14:23Z

Technologies are not just agents of politics, there is politics in their design, writes Nishant Shah in this article published in Down to Earth in the Issue of June 15, 2011.

The links between digital technologies and politics, especially in the light of the recent West Asian-North African uprisings, have been well-established. But there is a pervasive belief that the technologies of computing, in themselves, are apolitical. There are two warring groups when it comes to debates around political participation and social change that the digital and Internet technologies have fostered.

On the one hand are people who celebrate the negotiation- and intervention-making power of these technologies and attribute to them great power that can change the world. On the other are those who look at these developments with suspicion, trying to make a case for the power of the human will rather than the scope of technology design.

Both sides remain convinced that there is a cause-and-effect link between technology and politics, but nobody talks about the politics of technology. The functional focus on digital technologies—economic prosperity, time-space shrinkage, transparent interaction and governance—has been overwhelming. This fosters a pervasive belief that technologies of computation and communication are agnostic to politics: there is a disconnect between everyday practices of technology and spectrum of politics within which we operate.

Let me give an example to explain this. Take a blank sheet of paper. To all appearances, it is completely agnostic to the uses it can be put to. It can become a letter of love, it can become a note of dismissal, shattering the dreams of somebody who is fired, it can be a promissory note facilitating legal and economic transactions, or it can become the rag to mop a spill on your desk. It is generally presumed that the piece of paper does not have any design or agency. And yet, it is obvious from history that this sheet of paper did indeed revolutionise the world.

The advent of the printing press, the ability to mass-produce paper, the possibility of sending disembodied messages, the power of the paper to store information which can then be retrieved, has been transforming the world the last 500 years. It is a technologised platform that, by its very design possibilities and limitations, is able to shape, not only how we have communicated with each other, but also how we think. Let us remember the first proof of our identity is not in images or in sounds, but in a document, printed on a piece of paper, that declares us human and alive and legally present—the birth certificate.

We have grown so used to the world of writing and of printing that we have appropriated paper as an integral part of the human socio-cultural fabric. However, technology interfaces and products have not only a political agenda in their design, but also the power to shape the ways in which human history and memory function. The blank sheet of paper, in its inability to capture oral traditions, eradicates them. The tyranny of a piece of paper brings a fixity to articulations which are fluid. To think of the paper as bereft of political design, ambition and destiny, would be to neglect the lessons learned in history.

The digital interface needs to be understood through similar prisms. It is presumed that the digital interface in itself is not political in nature. Or politics is reduced to the level of content. In the process certain significant questions remain unanswered: who owns the digital technologies? Who supports them? Who benefits from them? Who controls them? Who remains excluded? Who is being made to bear the burdens?

Questions about exclusion and discrimination, built into the very structure of technology, are often overlooked. How do technologies determine who gets a voice? How do the digital webs exclude those who shall always remain outcasts? What happens to our understanding of the relationship between the state and the citizen? What are our digital rights? How does the technology design mitigate social evils? How does technology emerge as the de-facto arbitrator of law?

Politics plays a part in the very presence and design of these technologies. It is perhaps time to proclaim that like the personal, the “The Technological is the Political.”

Read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/internet-governance/blog/digital-is-political

The Digital Classroom: Social Justice and Pedagogy

nishant — 2015-05-08T12:36:29Z

What happens when we look at the classroom as a space of social justice? What are the ways in which students can be engaged in learning beyond rote memorisation? What innovative methods can be evolved to make students stakeholders in their learning process? These were some of the questions that were thrown up and discussed at the 2 day Faculty Training workshop for participant from colleges included in the Pathways to Higher Education programme, supported by Ford Foundation and collaboratively executed by the Higher Education Innovation and Research Application and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore.

The workshop focused on 3 chief challenges in contemporary pedagogy and teaching in higher education in India as identified by HEIRA: The need for innovative curricula, challenges to social justice in education, and possibilities offered by the intersection of digital and internet technologies with classroom teaching and evaluation. In the open discussions, the participating faculty members used their multidisciplinary skills and teaching experience to look at possibilities that we might implement in our classrooms to create a more inclusive and participatory environment. The conversations were varied, and through 3 blog entries I want to capture the focus points of the workshop. In this first post, I focus specifically on the changing nature of student engagement with education and innovative ways by which we can learn from the digital platforms of learning and knowledge production and implement certain innovations in pedagogy that might better help create inclusive and just learning environments in the undergraduate classroom in India.

Peer 2 Peer: One of the observations that was made unanimously by all the faculty members was that students respond better, learn faster, engage more deeply with their syllabus when the instructor has a personal rapport with them. Traditionally, the teachers who have established human contact which goes beyond the call of duty are also the teachers that have become catalysts and inspirations for the students. Especially with the digital aesthetics of non-hierarchical information interaction, this has become the call of the day.

Establishing the teacher as a peer within the classroom, rather than the fountainhead of information flow, is an experiment worth conducting. Like on other digital platforms, can we think of the classroom as a space where the interlocutors each bring their life experience and learning to start an information exchange and dialogue that would make them stakeholders in the process of learning? This would mean that the teacher would be a facilitator who builds conditions of knowledge production and dissemination, thus also changing his/her relationship with the idea of curriculum and teaching.

Reciprocal evaluation: It was pointed out that the grade oriented academic system often leads to students disengaging with innovative and meaningful learning practices. With the pressure of completing the curriculum, the students’ instrumental relationship with their classroom learning and the highly conservative structures of higher education that do not offer enough space to experiment with the teaching methods, it often becomes difficult to initiate innovative pedagogic practices. Learning from the differently hierarchised digital spaces, it was suggested that one of the ways by which this could be countered is by introducing reciprocal evaluation patterns which might not directly be associated with the grades but would recognise and appreciate the skills that students bring to their learning.

Inspired by the Badges contest at HASTAC, it was suggested that evaluation has to take into account, more than grades. Different students bring different skills, experiences, personalities and behaviours to bear upon the syllabus. They work individually and in clusters to understand and analyse the curriculum. Recognising these skills and the roles that they play in their learning environments is essential. Getting students to offer different badges to each other as well as to the teachers involved, helps them understand their own learning process and engages them in new ways of learning.

Role based learning: Within the Web 2.0 there is a peculiar condition where individuals are recognised simultaneously as experts and novices. They bring certain knowledges and experiences to the table which make them credible sources of information and analysis in those areas. At the same time, they are often beginner learners in certain other areas and they harness the power of the web to learn. Such a distributed imagination of a student as not equally proficient in all areas, but diversely equipped to deal with different disciplines is missing from our understanding of the higher education classroom.

We discussed the possibility of making the student responsible not only for his/her own learning but also the learning of the peers in the classroom. Making the student aware of what s/he is good at and where s/he is lacking allows them to gain confidence and also realise that everybody has differential strengths and aptitudes. Such a classroom might look different because the students don’t have to be pitched in stressful competition with each other but instead work collaboratively to learn, research and produce knowledge in a nurturing and supportive learning environment.

These initial discussions look at the possibility of innovative classroom teaching that can accommodate for the skills and differences of the students in higher education in India. The conversations opened up the idea that the classroom can be reshaped so that it becomes a more inclusive space where the quality of students’ access to education can be improved. It also ties in with the larger imagination of classrooms as spaces where principles of social justice can be invoked so that students who are disadvantaged in language, learning skills, socio-economic backgrounds, are not just looked at as either ‘beyond help’ or ‘victims of a system’. Instead, it encourages to look at the students as differential learners who need to be made stakeholders in their own processes of learning and education.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/pathways/facultyworkshop