Centre for Internet and Society

Making a difference, online and offline

praskrishna — 2011-09-28T07:09:35Z

A new collection examines how technology and issues of connectivity are shaping the lives of ‘digital natives’—and how the Net can influence social change, writes Gopal Sathe in an article published in LiveMint on September 27, 2011.

The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, and The Hague, Netherlands-based Hivos Knowledge Programme recently launched a four- book collection, Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen. Jansen is the knowledge officer for the Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Programme at Hivos. In the book, researchers look at the identities, networks, actions and role of the “digital” generation. The researchers talked to people identified as “digital natives” about the way in which the Internet has shaped the way they interact with the world. We spoke to Nishant Shah, co-founder and director-research for the Centre for Internet and Society, about the collection. Edited excerpts:

The research this book talks about is based mostly in other countries, such as Chile, Taiwan and South Africa. How does this connect to the situation in India?

The researchers looked at young people’s use of digital technologies to make changes in their immediate environments within the information landscape of the “Global South” (countries with low to medium rankings in the human development index). We were interested in looking at macro structures that would help us understand what is happening globally.

We did not impose our frameworks and concepts on the communities we were working with. Hence, we did not have the expected discussions of digital divides and digital access. What they found interesting across locations was the question of connectivity and dis-connectivity. In the ubiquitous, unforgetting world of the Internet, we leave traces all the time. This incessant connectivity can come with its own pressures, problems and repercussions, and hence there were discussions around “right to disconnect”, “right to be forgotten” and “right to be non-digital”.

In the early 1990s, there were people who did not have phones, could not make national and international phone calls and had poor communication infrastructure—that changed in less than 10 years. Instead of focusing on access and infrastructure, it became more important to look at the ways in which they shape people’s usage, behaviour, engagement with technology, and with their larger physical realities.

When we consider the “digital landscape” of India, whom are we really discussing?

Popular definitions—somebody who is born with technologies, who did not have to make a transition to digital—are inadequate to account for the realities we experience every day. We made a more inclusive identity, which gets inflected by questions of age, sex, location, class and politics, et al.

The way we understand a digital native now is somebody whose life has been significantly restructured because of their relationship with digital technologies and their ability to see the potentials of change in these technologies. Just having access to digital technologies is not enough. Their purposes, causes, ambitions, intentions are what is going to change the way they use technologies. People are not “born digital” but they “become digital” and the processes of becoming digital are more complex than merely getting access.

New devices and cheaper connections have granted access to a huge number of people—what impact has this had on people’s choices?

The “natives” belong to different communities, families and regions. They are influenced by the cultural practices in their everyday life. They depend on different structures of work for their economic survival. They live in differently marked political regimes—from the extreme liberal to the highly authoritarian. Their ways of thinking and engagement, influenced by their practices online, change the larger realities within which they live. For example, digital natives who are used to the peer-to-peer processes of knowledge production online are already changing the ways in which classroom learning is happening in schools around the country.

At the same time, the larger structures of education, literacy, economic choices, cultural productions like TV and cinema, all influence the content and expectations from the Internet as well. What really matters is how the capacities and capabilities of one medium, the digital, for example, influence and are influenced by the experiences and knowledge in the other—the physical, for instance.

Would the addition of more Indian-language content on the Internet make a difference to the digital landscape in India? Would it spur greater engagement and therefore have a bigger impact? Is this what’s holding back technologies like telemedicine and distance education?

There are many user-generated content platforms like Wikipedia and other blogging platforms like WordPress that are promoting the localization of content. It is good that we are offering some resistance to the very quick “Englification” of the online world. But with the current flow of globalization, there is no denying the fact that English is a language with the highest currency and that in our physical realities, it is getting a stronghold in our everyday practices.

The Internet is a tool, a process, a technology but not a solution. The mere presence of the Internet is not going to lead to social change. Just introducing the Internet to existing structures is only going to lead to a more flawed model of development.

For example, telemedicine has exciting possibilities but the basic problem of healthcare is not the unavailability of medical resources. What is missing is a universal health Bill to make it affordable to all.

This is why in this book, we pay specific attention to how and why people engage in processes of change. We have been trying to address the questions of how people see themselves as agents of social change and what are the ways in which digital and Internet technologies enable them to make changes in their immediate environments.

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? is available as a free download at http://www.cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/dnbook.

Read the original story published in LiveMint here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/making-difference-online-offline

September 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T06:34:19Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage that happened in the month of September 2011.

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organizations and individuals in order to focus on its two year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs were recently launched at a workshop, Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum held in Ahmedabad from 19 to 22 August 2011.

Re:Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan
The Last Cultural Mile by Ashish Rajadhyaksha
Porn: Law, Video, Technology by Namita A Malhotra
Archives and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto
Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS, India and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

Featured Publication

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? - This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around ‘digital revolutions’ in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Book Review

Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg - The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011, writes Maarten van den Berg. The review was published in "The Broker" on 19 September 2011.

Event Organised

Digital AlterNatives book launch – CIS and Hivos launched this book at the Museum for Communication, Hague on 16 September 2011.

Accessibility

Estimates of the percentage of the world's population that is disabled vary considerably. But what is certain is that if we count functional disability, then a large proportion of the world's population is disabled in one way or another. At CIS we work to ensure that the digital technologies, which empower disabled people and provide them with independence, are allowed to do so in practice and by the law. To this end, we support web accessibility guidelines, and change in copyright laws that currently disempower the persons with disabilities.

Event Participated

Stakeholders Meeting of the USOF on Facilitating ICT Access to Persons with Disabilities in Rural Areas, on 7 September 2011. Nirmita Narasimhan made a presentation.

Access to Knowledge

Access to Knowledge is a campaign to promote the fundamental principles of justice, freedom, and economic development. It deals with issues like copyrights, patents, and trademarks, which are an important part of the digital landscape. CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential, and such access promotes creativity and innovation, and helps bridge the differences between the developing and developed worlds in a positive manner. Towards this end, CIS is campaigning for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-challenged people, advocating against laws (such as the PUPFIP Bill) that privatize public-funded knowledge, call for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, question the demonization of 'pirates', and support endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime.

New Blog Entries

Copyright Amendment Bill in Parliament by Nirmita Narasimhan, 30 August 2011.
Photocopying the past by Sunil Abraham in the Indian Express, 2 September 2011.
Calling Out the BSA on Its BS by Pranesh Prakash, 9 September 2011.

Internet Governance

Internet technologies have fundamentally questioned the notion of governance, not only at the level of administration but also at the level of mechanisms of control, regulation and shaping of the individual. e-Governance initiatives, in combination with other regimes of surveillance, control and censorship, are redefining what it means to be a citizen, a subject, and an individual. We look at questions of governance — at the micro level of the individual and the private (family, relationships, community structures, etc.) as well as the level of governmentality — at the macro level of nation state, citizenship, market economies, and the public (spaces of consumption, work, leisure, political engagement, etc.) under the umbrella of digital governance.

New Blog Entry

Understanding the Right to Information by Elonnai Hickok, 28 September 2011.

Events Organised

Using the Internet as a Tool for Political Change: Lessons Learned and Way Forward, IGF, Nairobi, 27 September 2011.

Telecom

The growth in telecommunications in India has been impressive. While the potential for growth and returns exist, a range of issues need to be addressed for this potential to be realized. One aspect is more extensive rural coverage and the second aspect is a countrywide access to broadband which is low at about eight million subscriptions. Both require effective and efficient use of networks and resources, including spectrum. It is imperative to resolve these issues in the common interest of users and service providers.

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website.

Reviving Growth, published in the Business Standard on 1 September 2011.

Event Organised

Open Spectrum for Development in the Context of the Digital Migration, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011.

Miscellaneous

Film Screening

Screening of Partners in Crime, Vikalp@Smriti Nandan along with CIS screened the film and followed it with a discussion with the director of the film, Paromita Vohra, Smriti Nandan Cultural Centre, 9 September 2011.
Prime Security: The Mathematics of RSA Encryption, a one-day workshop with Rohit Gupta, a leading Mathematician.

News & Media Coverage

India's social media "spring" masks forgotten protests [Alistair Scrutton in Reuters, 25 August 2011].
Social media holds the key to Hazare's campaign success [Alistair Scrutton in NEWS.scotsman.com, 26 August 2011].
Digital divide: Why Irom Sharmila can’t do an Anna [FirstPost.Ideas, 25 August 2011].
When revolutions go viral [Times of India (Crescent Edition), 27 August 2011].
IBSA Seminar on Global Internet Governance, organised by the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations, with support from the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI.br) and the Center for Technology & Society (CTS/FGV) and governmental and non- governmental actors from India, Brazil and South Africa, 1 to 2 September 2011, Fundacao Getulio Vargas (FGV) - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Pranesh Prakash participated in this event.
Copyrights Amendment Bill to Be Tabled in Indian Parliament – Parallel Import provisions have Been Removed [Mike Palmedo in infojustice.org, 5 September 2011]
The Power of Information: New Technologies for Philanthropy and Development [Indigo Trust, 15 September 2011]. Sunil Abraham participated in this event. A video of his speech is now available on YouTube.
Planning Commission, Census 2011 and India Post using social media to understand people's pulse better [Vikas Kumar in the Economic Times, 20 September 2011]
The Impact of Regulation: FOSS and Enterprise, organised by FOSSFA and ICFOSS, IGF, Nairobi, 28 September 2011.
Privacy, Security, and Access to Rights: A Technical and Policy Analyses, organised by Expression Technologies, IGF, Nairobi, 29 September 2011.
Putting Users First: How Can Privacy be Protected in Today’s Complex Mobile Ecosystem?, organised by GSM Association, 29 September 2011.
The Truman Show, in Kerala [Times of India, posted on CIS website on 23 September 2011].
Making a difference, online and offline [LiveMint, 27 September 2011].

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/september-2011-bulletin

Digital (Alter)Natives with a Cause? — Book Review by Maarten van den Berg

praskrishna — 2015-05-15T11:30:47Z

‘Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?’ is a collection of four books with essays published by the Centre for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India, and the Dutch NGO Hivos. The books come in a beautifully designed cassette and are accompanied by a funky yellow package in the shape of a floppy disk containing the booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’, a corresponding DVD, and a pack of postcards portraying the evolution of writing - in the sentence ‘I love you’, written with a goose feather in 1734, to the character set ‘i<3u’ entered on a mobile device in 2011.

Digital Natives

The publication is the outcome of a programme initiated by the two organizations to investigate the potentials for social change and political participation in emerging societies through the use of internet and communication technologies (ICTs). The programme is particularly interested in the strategic use of ICTs among young people, those who are born and have grown up with ‘things digital’ – hence, the ‘digital natives’, a term coined by Marc Prensky in 2001.

But in the preface of the collection and the introduction to the first book, entitled ‘To Be’, the editors Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen are quick to stress that by naming digital natives, they do not want to exclude any position whether defined by age, gender, class, language or location. Still, ‘we continue with the name’, they say, ‘because we believe that replacing this name with another is only going to be an epistemic change which tries to disown the earlier legacies and baggage that the name carries’. I am not quite sure what that means. I take it they just like the hashtag #DigitalNatives – and I can’t blame them.

Testimonies

So who are these digital natives or how have they become? The booklet ‘D:coding Digital Natives’ portrays some of them. For instance, there is Frank Odaongkara from Uganda. He says that already in primary school he had the feeling that computers would change his life. Now Facebook is his homepage, and he has 1000 ebooks on his laptop, of which he’s read 350 already. Or there is Leandra Flor from the Philippines who says she became more dynamic and in touch with her surroundings because of the ‘wonders of technology in communication’. She has built her social life around it.

What emerges from these testimonies, what many of the digital natives share is the sense of empowerment. They feel empowered by ICTs to connect to others, to learn something, to engage with the world and build social lives. Contrary perhaps to the aspirations of the editors, I do find that the digital natives in emerging societies portrayed in the publication tend to come from relatively well-to-do families. The digital divide is still very real, when it comes to access to ICTs and their life-changing potentials.

Personal > political

That digital natives feel empowered by ICTs to build a social life does of course not necessarily entail that they bring about social change or pursue political goals. But one thing can lead to the other, even accidentally. Take the story of Manal Hassan, an Egyptian woman who found herself trapped in Saudi Arabia when her family went to live there. She started a blog to write about her problem and got in contact with other Egyptian bloggers and digital activists. Women rights organizations adopted her cause, a lawyer took up her case, and she made news in the mainstream media. She had become a political actor.

There are more such stories in the publication. In the digital age, it seems, social change has gone viral. Digital natives can become political actors by sheer coincidence. I believe there is an important lesson to learn from that for sociologists and political scientists. We have to come to terms with the serendipity of collective action.

Digital methodology

For social scientists, there is more to be learned from the publication. In the introduction to the essays brought together in the chapter ‘To Think’ the editors pose that the rise and spread of digital and online technologies elicit new methods of understanding and research. And they are quite right. In the essay ‘Digital methods to study digital natives with a cause’, Esther Weltevrede uses Twitter as a platform to study digital natives and their practices. And because the retweet is a practice adopted by digital natives to forward, or give voice to a message, she proposes that for the researcher the retweet becomes a way to quantify those messages that have ‘pass-along value’.

Mob rule 2.0

As many of the authors are themselves digital natives and activists of sorts, most of them cannot hide their excitement about the opportunities that ICTs afford. But there is some room for skepticism too. Thus, essayist Yi Ping Zou rightly observes that ‘the newly imagined communities that we call digital natives […] may not be all progressive, liberal and striving to make a change for the better’. In her contribution she warns us for ‘mob rule 2.0’ as the very digital technologies that allow us ‘to create processes of change for a just and equitable world’ are also technologies that ‘enable massively regressive and vigilante acts that exercise a mob-based notion of justice’.

That vision thing

And as is the case with any form of collective action, digitally mediated or not, there is the question of purpose. In an essay that compares the youth-led ‘revolution’ of 1968 and the Arab Spring of 2011, David Sasaki observes that both are essentially anti-establishment movements and that, so far, the latter has prioritized the removal of the current political class without offering a concrete vision of what ought to come next. As far as this author is concerned, the digital natives have yet to develop a vision of their own future – and the future of their governments.

I believe that we should not expect from today’s youth what yesterday’s young ones did not accomplish. Let us consider the digital natives and the technologies they employ for what they do, not for what they ought to be doing. And after reading some of the testimonies of digital natives in this publication, I cannot but conclude – as Eddie Avila does in the last book – that what brings them together is “a vision that the everyday technologies in their lives can help them make changes in their immediate environments”. Such is not a vision about politics writ large. It is about change at the personal level, the ability to connect and engage with others, and, from there, the possibility to act collectively – and give it a larger direction.

'Digital (Alter)Natives with a cause?', Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen (eds), is available for download in four parts at the website of the Hivos Knowledge Programme.

The review by Maarten van den Berg was published in "The Broker" on September 19, 2011. Please click here to read the original review.

About the author

A political scientist by training (University of Amsterdam, York University, Canada), Maarten van den Berg is senior editor of The Broker,an independent magazine on globalization and development. Before he joined The Broker in 2011, Maarten worked as a communication and knowledgement professional for a variety of international organizations, and still has his own consultancy, RISQ. After work, Maarten loves to cook and shares in the care of his son Titus.

Photo credit main picture: Postcard 'Digital Natives' designed by Jonathan Remulla.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/book-review-digital-alternatives

Digital AlterNatives with a Cause?

nishant — 2015-04-10T09:22:29Z

Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society have consolidated their three year knowledge inquiry into the field of youth, technology and change in a four book collective “Digital AlterNatives with a cause?”. This collaboratively produced collective, edited by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen, asks critical and pertinent questions about theory and practice around 'digital revolutions' in a post MENA (Middle East - North Africa) world. It works with multiple vocabularies and frameworks and produces dialogues and conversations between digital natives, academic and research scholars, practitioners, development agencies and corporate structures to examine the nature and practice of digital natives in emerging contexts from the Global South.

Introduction

In the 21^st Century, we have witnessed the simultaneous growth of internet and digital technologies on the one hand, and political protests and mobilisation on the other. Processes of interpersonal relationships, social communication, economic expansion, political protocols and governmental mediation are undergoing a significant transition, across in the world, in developed and emerging Information and Knowledge societies.

The young are often seen as forerunners of these changes because of the pervasive and persistent presence of digital and online technologies in their lives. The “ Digital Natives with a Cause?” is a research inquiry that uncovers the ways in which young people in emerging ICT contexts make strategic use of technologies to bring about change in their immediate environments. Ranging from personal stories of transformation to efforts at collective change, it aims to identify knowledge gaps that existing scholarship, practice and popular discourse around an increasing usage, adoption and integration of digital technologies in processes of social and political change.

Methodology

In 2010-11, three workshops in Taiwan, South Africa and Chile, brought together around 80 people who identified themselves as Digital Natives from Asia, Africa and Latin America, to explore certain key questions that could provide new insight into Digital Natives research, policy and practice. The workshops were accompanied by a ‘Thinkathon’ – a multi-stakeholder summit that initiated conversations between Digital Natives, academic researchers, scholars, practitioners, educators, policy makers and corporate representatives to share learnings on new questions: Is one born digital or does one become a Digital Native? How do we understand our relationship with the idea of a Digital Native? How do Digital Natives redefine ‘change’ and how do they see themselves implementing it? What is the role that technologies play in defining civic action and social movements? What are the relationships that these technology based identities and practices have with existing social movements and political legacies? How do we build new frameworks of sustainable citizen action outside of institutionalisation?

Rationale

One of the knowledge gaps that this book tries to address is the lack of digital natives’ voices in the discourse around them. In the occasions that they are a part of the discourse, they are generally represented by other actors who define the frameworks and decide the issues which are important. Hence, more often than not, most books around digital natives concentrate on similar sounding areas and topics, which might not always resonate with the concerns that digital natives and other stake-holders might be engaged with in their material and discursive practice. The methodology of the workshops was designed keeping this in mind. Instead of asking the digital natives to give their opinion or recount a story about what we felt was important, we began by listening to their articulations about what was at stake for them as e-agents of change. As a result, the usual topics like piracy, privacy, cyber-bullying, sexting etc. which automatically map digital natives discourse, are conspicuously absent from this book. Their absence is not deliberate, but more symptomatic of how these themes that we presumed as important were not of immediate concerns to most of the participants in the workshop who are contributing to the book.

Structure

The conversations, research inquiries, reflections, discussions, interviews, and art practices are consolidated in this four part book which deviates from the mainstream imagination of the young people involved in processes of change. The alternative positions, defined by geo-politics, gender, sexuality, class, education, language, etc. find articulations from people who have been engaged in the practice and discourse of technology mediated change. Each part concentrates on one particular theme that helps bring coherence to a wide spectrum of style and content.

Book 1: To Be: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The first part, To Be, looks at the questions of digital native identities. Are digital natives the same everywhere? What does it mean to call a certain population ‘Digital Natives”? Can we also look at people who are on the fringes – Digital Outcasts, for example? Is it possible to imagine technology-change relationships not only through questions of access and usage but also through personal investments and transformations? The contributions help chart the history, explain the contemporary and give ideas about what the future of technology mediated identities is going to be.

Book 2: To Think: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

In the second section, To Think, the contributors engage with new frameworks of understanding the processes, logistics, politics and mechanics of digital natives and causes. Giving fresh perspectives which draw from digital aesthetics, digital natives’ everyday practices, and their own research into the design and mechanics of technology mediated change, the contributors help us re-think the concepts, processes and structures that we have taken for granted. They also nuance the ways in which new frameworks to think about youth, technology and change can be evolved and how they provide new ways of sustaining digital natives and their causes.

Book 3: To Act: Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

To Act is the third part that concentrates on stories from the ground. While it is important to conceptually engage with digital natives, it is also, necessary to connect it with the real life practices that are reshaping the world. Case-studies, reflections and experiences of people engaged in processes of change, provide a rich empirical data set which is further analysed to look at what it means to be a digital native in emerging information and technology contexts.

Book 4: To Connect : Digital AlterNatives with a Cause? Download here

The last section, To Connect, recognises the fact that digital natives do not operate in vacuum. It might be valuable to maintain the distinction between digital natives and immigrants, but this distinction does not mean that there are no relationships between them as actors of change. The section focuses on the digital native ecosystem to look at the complex assemblage of relationships that support and are amplified by these new processes of technologised change.

We see this book as entering into a dialogue with the growing discourse and practice in the field of youth, technology and change. The ambition is to look at the digital (alter)natives as located in the Global South and the potentials for social change and political participation that is embedded in their interactions through and with digital and internet technologies. We hope that the book furthers the idea of a context-based digital native identity and practice, which challenges the otherwise universalist understanding that seems to be the popular operative right now. We see this as the beginning of a knowledge inquiry, rather than an end, and hope that the contributions in the book will incite new discussions, invoke cross-sectorial and disciplinary debates, and consolidate knowledges about digital (alter)natives and how they work in the present to change our futures.

Click here to order your copy. We invite readers to contribute reviews of an essay they found particularly interesting. Contact us: nishant@cis-india.org and fjansen@hivos.nl if you want more information, resources, or dialogues

Nishant Shah

Fieke Jansen

For media coverage and book reviews, read here.

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

Digital AlterNatives book launch

praskrishna — 2012-01-04T06:56:41Z

On Friday the 16th of September Hivos will launch the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? book, which looks at the dynamics of a new generation that is growing up with digital technology. In 2011 the digital native generation has been all over the front pages of the major newspapers in the world. CNN, BBC, de Volkskrant and the NRC gave prominent coverage on the ‘digital’ revolutions in the Middle East and North Africa and dubbed them as ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’ revolutions. However, the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa, Spain, Greece, Israel, India, Chile and England show that there is more to this generation then just a nice tool. By framing it as Facebook actions we are simplifying the complex processes that are taking place and denying and underestimate the challenges and dynamics of this younger generation.

In this last year Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India have tried to shed some light on the actions, identities, networks and implications of the digital natives generation. We started by asking the basic questions: Who are they? Do they have a cause? What is their role in social and political processes? This exploration has resulted in new insights, reflections, anecdotes, case studies and opinion pieces by digital natives, academics and policy makers around the world, which have been synthesized in the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? collection.

We would like to invite you to the Museum for Communication in the Hague for the book launch of the Digital AlterNatives with a cause? collection. Here we will share our insights into the dynamics of this younger generation. Then Rebecca MacKinnon and Maarten van den Berg will give their opinion on our work which will be followed by an open debate. Please join us for the book launch on the 16th of September from 17.00 till 18.00.

See the information on the Hivos website here.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/events/book-launch

August 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-08-13T05:13:23Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Porn: Law, Video, Technology by Namita Malhotra, The Last Cultural Mile by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar were officially launched at the Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop in Ahmedabad.

Workshop organised in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

Digital Natives with a Cause? is a knowledge programme initiated by CIS and Hivos, Netherlands. It is a research inquiry that seeks to look at the changing landscape of social change and political participation and the role that young people play through digital and Internet technologies, in emerging information societies. Consolidating knowledge from Asia, Africa and Latin America, it builds a global network of knowledge partners who want to critically engage with the dominant discourse on youth, technology and social change, in order to look at the alternative practices and ideas in the Global South. It also aims at building new ecologies that amplify and augment the interventions and actions of the digitally young as they shape our futures.

Featured Research

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism (This paper by Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011).

Accessibility

Interview

An Interview with David Baines (Maureen Agena interviewed David Baines of Mada Centre for Assistive Technology in Khattar).

Access to Knowledge

New Blog Entry

Govt for Legalising Parallel Import of Copyright Works; Publishers Oppose

Openness

CIS believes that innovation and creativity should be fostered through openness and collaboration and is committed towards promotion of open standards, open access, and free/libre/open source software.

Featured Research

Call for Comments on Draft Report on Open Government Data in India (v2) (Nisha Thompson has updated the Open Government Data Report prepared by CIS last year including additional case studies and the National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy).
Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India: A Status Report: Call for Comments (The report has been prepared by Prof. Subbiah Arunachalam and Madhan Muthu. It surveys the field of scholarly and scientific publication in India and provides a detailed history of the open access movement in India).

Internet Governance

Although there may not be one centralized authority that rules the Internet, the Internet does not just run by its own volition: for it to operate in a stable and reliable manner, there needs to be in place infrastructure, a functional domain name system, ways to curtail cyber crime across borders, etc. The Tunis Agenda of the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), paragraph 34 defined Internet governance as “the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet.” Its latest endeavour has resulted into these:

New Blog Post

Bye Bye email? (Email might be the default method of communication for most of us, but could it be going the telegram way, writes Nishant Shah. The article was published in the Indian Express on August 21, 2011).

Public Lecture

The Mirror in the Enigma: How Germany lost World War II to a Mathematical Theorem (Rohit Gupta gave a lecture at CIS on August 12, 2011).

CIS is doing a project, ‘Privacy in Asia’. It is funded by Privacy International (PI), UK and the International Development Research Centre, Canada and is being administered in collaboration with the Society and Action Group, Gurgaon. The two-year project commenced on 24 March 2010 and will be completed as agreed to by the stakeholders. It was set up with the objective of raising awareness, sparking civil action and promoting democratic dialogue around challenges and violations of privacy in India. In furtherance of these goals it aims to draft and promote over-arching privacy legislation in India by drawing upon legal and academic resources and consultations with the public.

Featured Research

IP Addresses and Expeditious Disclosure of Identity in India (Prashant Iyengar reviews the statutory mechanism regulating the retention and disclosure of IP addresses by Internet companies in India and provides a compilation of anecdotes on how law enforcement authorities in India have used IP address information to trace individuals responsible for particular crimes).

New Blog Entries

Whole Body Imaging and Privacy Concerns that Follow (by Elonnai Hickok)
Financial Inclusion and the UID (by Elonnai Hickok)
CCTV in Universities (by Merlin Oommen)
Re-thinking Key Escrow (by Natasha Vaz)

Event Report

Privacy Matters, Chennai – the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, Madras Institute of Development Studies, Consumer and Civic Action Group, Privacy India and CIS on August 6, 2011.

News & Media Coverage

Net Gain [The Telegraph, 24 August 2011]
IISc students boycott UID, don’t want Big Brother to keep watch [Bangalore Mirror, 23 August 2011]
In the Right Circle [Indian Express, 24 July 2011]
The Siege of Android: How Google Lost The OS War [Business.in, 17 August 2011]
The Unsocial Network [Mail Today, 14 August 2011]
Hazare 'clicks' with city techies [India, 18 August 2011]
Govt wants to monitor Facebook, Twitter [Times of India, 8 August 2011]
Nothing unique about this identity [Deccan Chronicle, 5 August 2011]
Tired of tele-marketing calls? Act on privacy right: Experts [Times of India, 7 August 2011]
When Knowledge Isn’t Written, Does It Still Count? [New York Times, 7 August 2011]
Indian super-cops now patrol the www highway [Hindustan Times, 6 August 2011]
Better Understanding of the Idea of Privacy Sought [Hindu, 7 August 2011]
Converting Indian Slacktivists Takes (Offline) Time [Wall Street Journal, 2 August 2011]

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/august-2011-bulletin

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-05-14T12:14:04Z

In this peer reviewed research paper, Nishant Shah and Fieke Jansen draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south. It suggests that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency. The paper was published in Democracy & Society, a publication of the Center for Democracy and Civil Society, Volume 8, Issue 2, Summer 2011.

Introduction

The first decade of the 21st century has witnessed the simultaneous growth of the Internet and digital technologies on the one hand and political protests and mobilization on the other. As a result, some stakeholders attribute magical powers of social change and political transformation to these technologies.

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and pro6ts. Civil society organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

This paper suggests that this dialectic is fruitless and results from too strong of a concentration on the functional role of technology. The lack of vocabulary to map and articulate the transitions that digital technologies bring to our earlier understanding of the state-market-citizen relationship, as well as our failure to understand technology as a paradigm that defines the domains of life, labour, and language, amplify this knowledge gap.

This paper draws on a research project that focuses on understanding new technology, mediated identities, and their relationship with processes of change in their immediate and extended environments in emerging information societies in the global south (Shah 2009). We suggest that endemic to understanding digital activism is the need to look at the recalibrated relationships between the state and the citizens through the prism of technology and agency.

Context

It is appropriate, perhaps, to begin a paper on digital activism, with a discussion of analogue activism[1] (Morozov 2010). In the recent revolutions and protests from Tunisia to Egypt and Iran to Kryzygystan, much attention has been given to the role of new media in organizing, orchestrating, performing, and shaping the larger public psyche and the new horizons of progressive governments. Global media has dubbed several of them as ‘Twitter Revolutions” and “Facebook Protests” because these technologies played an important role in the production of :ash-mobs, which, because of their visibility and numbers, became the face of the political protests in di)erent countries. Political scientists as well as technology experts have been trying to figure out what the role of Twitter and Facebook was in these processes of social transformation. Activists are trying to determine whether it is possible to produce replicable upscalable models that can be transplanted to other geo-political contexts to achieve similar results,[2] as well as how the realm of political action now needs to accommodate these developments.

Cyber-utopians have heralded this particular phenomenon of digital activists mobilizing in almost unprecedented numbers as a hopeful sign that resonates the early 20th century rhetoric of a Socialist Revolution (West and Raman 2009). (ey see this as a symptom of the power that ordinary citizens wield and the ways in which their voices can be ampli6ed, augmented, and consolidated using the pervasive computing environments in which we now live.

In a celebratory tone, without examining either the complex assemblages of media and government practices and policies that are implicated in these processes, they naively attribute these protests to digital technologies.

Cyber-cynics, conversely, insist that these technologies are just means and tools that give voice to the seething anger, hurt, and grief that these communities have harboured for many years under tyrannical governments and authoritarian regimes. They insist that digital technologies played no role in these events — they would have occurred anyway, given the right catalysts — and that this overemphasis on technology detracts from greater historical legacies, movements, and the courage and efforts of the people involved.

While these debates continue to ensue between zealots on conflicting sides, there are some things that remain constant in both positions: presumptions of what it means to be political, a narrow imagination of human-technology relationships, and a historically deterministic view of socio-political movements. While the objects and processes under scrutiny are new and unprecedented, the vocabulary, conceptual tools, knowledge frameworks, and critical perspectives remain unaltered. They attempt to articulate a rapidly changing world in a manner that accommodates these changes. Traditional approaches that produce a simplified triangulation of the state, market and civil society, with historically specified roles, inform these discourses, “where the state is the rule-maker, civil society the do-gooder and watchdog, and the private sector the enemy or hero depending on one’s ideological stand” (Knorringa 2008, 8).

Within the more diffuse world realities, where the roles for each sector are not only blurred but also often shared, things work differently. Especially when we introduce technology, we realize that the centralized structural entities operate in and are better understood through a distributed, multiple avatar model. For example, within public-private partnerships, which are new units of governance in emerging post-capitalist societies, the market often takes up protostatist qualities, while the state works as the beneficiary rather than the arbitrator of public delivery systems. In technology-state conflicts, like the well-known case of Google’s conflict with China (Drummond 2010), technology service providers and companies have actually emerged as the vanguards of citizens’ rights against states that seek to curb them.

Similarly, civil society and citizens are divided around the question of access to technology. The techno-publics are often exclusive and make certain analogue forms of citizenships obsolete. While there is a euphoria about the emergence of a multitude of voices online from otherwise closed societies, it is important to remember that these voices are mediated by the market and the state, and often have to negotiate with strong capillaries of power in order to gain the visibility and legitimacy for themselves. Additionally, the recalibration in the state-market-citizen triad means that there is certain disconnect from history which makes interventions and systemic social change that much more difficult.

Snapshots

We draw from our observations in the “Digital Natives with a Cause?”[3] research program, which brought together over 65 young people working with digital technologies towards social change, and around 40 multi-sector stakeholders in the field to decode practices in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the relationships between technology and politics.

The first case study is from Taiwan, where the traditionally accepted uni-linear idea of senders-intermediaries-passive receivers is challenged by adopting a digital information architecture model for a physical campaign.[4] The story not only provides insight into these blurred boundaries and roles, but also offers an understanding of the new realm of political intervention and processes of social transformation.

As YiPing Tsou (2010) from the Soft Revolt project in Taipei explains, "I have realised how the Web has not only virtually reprogrammed the way we think, talk, act and interact with the work but also reformatted our understanding of everyday life surrounded by all sorts of digital technologies."

Tsou’s own work stemmed from her critical doubt of the dominant institutions and structures in her immediate surroundings. Fighting the hyper-territorial rhetoric of the Internet, she deployed digital technologies to engage with her geo-political contexts. Along with two team members, she started the project to question and critique the rampant consumerism, which has emerged as the state and market in Taiwan collude to build more pervasive marketing infrastructure instead of investing in better public delivery systems. The project adopted a gaming aesthetic where the team produced barcodes, which when applied to existing products in malls and super markets, produced random pieces of poetry at the check-out counters instead of the price details that are expected. The project challenged the universal language of barcodes and mobilized large groups of people to spread these barcodes and create spaces of confusion, transient data doubles, and alternative ways of reading within globalized capitalist consumption spaces. The project also demonstrates how access to new forms of technology also leads to new information roles, creating novel forms of participation leading to interventions towards social transformation.

Nonkululeko Godana (2010) from South Africa does not think of herself as an activist in any traditional form. She calls herself a storyteller and talks of how technologies can amplify and shape the ability to tell stories. Drawing from her own context, she narrates the story of a horrific rape that happened to a young victim in a school campus and how the local and national population mobilized itself to seek justice for her. For Godana, the most spectacular thing that digital technologies of information and communication offer is the ability for these stories to travel in unexpected ways. Indeed, these stories grow as they are told. They morph, distort, transmute, and take new avatars, changing with each telling, but managing to help the message leap across borders, boundaries, and life-styles. She looks at storytelling as something that is innate to human beings who are creatures of information, and suggests that what causes revolution, what brings people together, what allows people to unify in the face of strife and struggle is the need to tell a story, the enchantment of hearing one, and the passion to spread it further so that even when the technologies die, the signal still lives, the message keeps on passing. As Clay Shirky, in his analysis of the first recorded political :ash-mob in Phillipines in 2001, suggests, "social media’s real potential lies in supporting civil society and the public sphere — which will produce change over years and decades, not weeks or months."

Propositions

These two stories are just a taste of many such narratives that abound the field of technology based social transformation and activism. In most cases, traditional lenses will not recognize these processes, which are transient and short-lived as having political consequence. When transformative value is ascribed to them, they are brought to bear the immense pressure of sustainability and scalability which might not be in the nature of the intervention. Moreover, as we have seen in these two cases, as well as in numerous others, the younger generation — these new groups of people using social media for political change, often called digital natives, slacktivists, or digital activists — renounce the earlier legacy of political action. They prefer to stay in this emergent undefined zone where they would not want an identity as a political person but would still make interventions and engage with questions of justice, equity, democracy, and access, using the new tools at their disposal to negotiate with their immediate socio-cultural and geo-political contexts.

In their everyday lives, Digital Natives are in different sectors of employment and sections of society. They can be students, activists, government officials, professionals, artists, or regular citizens who spend their time online often in circuits of leisure, entertainment and self-gratification. However, it is their intimate relationship with these processes, which is often deemed as ‘frivolous’ that enables them, in times of crises, to mobilize huge human and infrastructural resources to make immediate interventions.

It is our proposition that it is time to start thinking about digital activism as a tenuous process, which might often hide itself in capillaries of non-cause related actions but can be materialized through the use of digital networks and platforms when it is needed. Similarly, a digital activist does not necessarily have to be a full-time ideology spouting zealot, but can be a person who, because of intimate relationships with technologized forms of communication, interaction, networking, and mobilization, is able to transform him/ herself as an agent of change and attain a central position (which is also transitory and not eternal) in processes of social movement. Such a lens allows us to revisit our existing ideas of what it means to be political, what the new landscapes of political action are, how we account for processes of social change, and who the people are that emerge as agents of change in our rapidly digitizing world.

About the Authors

NISHANT SHAH is Director-Research at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and Society. He is one of the lead researchers for the “Digital Natives with a Cause?” knowledge programme and has interests in questions of digital identity, inclusion and social change.

FIEKE JANSEN is based at the Humanist Institute for Development Cooperation (Hivos). She is the knowledge officer for the Digital Natives with a Cause? knowledge programme and her areas of interest are the role of digital technologies in social change processes.

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Godana, Nonkululeko. 2011. “Change is Yelling: Are you Listening?” Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/content/download/ 40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Knorringa, Peter. 2010. A Balancing Act — Private Actors in Development, Inaugural Lecture ISS. Available at: http://www.iss.nl/News/Inaugural-Lecture-Professor-Peter-Knorringa. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

Shah, Nishant and Sunil Abraham. 2009. “Digital Natives with a Cause.” Hivos Knowledge Programme. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://cis-india.org/research/dn-report. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

Tsou, YiPing. 2010. “(Re)formatting Social Transformation in the Age of Digital Representation: On the Relationship of Technologies and Social Transformation”, Digital Natives Position Papers. Hivos and the Centre for Internet and Society publications. Available at: http://www.hivos.net/ content/download/40567/260946/file/Position%20Papers.pdf. Retrieved: February 3, 2011.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1]Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2]Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/ story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3]More information about the programme can be found at http://www.hivos.net/Hivos-Knowledge-Programme/Themes/ Digital-Natives-with-a-Cause.

[4]Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

Cross-posted from Democracy & Society, read the original here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/stirrup-and-the-ground

Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism

nishant — 2015-10-25T05:58:59Z

Cross-posted from Democracy and Society.

Introduction

In the post-Wikileaks world, governments try to censor the use of and access to information technologies in order to maintain the status quo (Domscheit-Berg 2011). With the expansion of markets, technology multinationals and service providers are trying to strike a delicate balance between ethics and profits. Civil Society Organizations for their part, are seeking to counterbalance censorship and exploitation of the citizens’ rights. Within discourse and practice, there remains a dialectic between hope and despair: Hope that these technologies will change the world, and despair that we do not have any sustainable replicable models of technology-driven transformation despite four decades of intervention in the 6eld of information and communication technology (ICT).

Context

Snapshots

Propositions

About the Authors

References

Domscheit-Berg, Daniel. 2011. Inside Wikileaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the World’s Most Dangerous Website. New York: Crown Publishers.

Drummond, David. 2010. “A New Approach to China.” Available at: http:// googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html.

Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs.

Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, (1); p. 28-41.

West, Harry and Parvathi Raman. 2009. Enduring Socialism: Exploration of Revolution and Transformation, Restoration and Continuation. London: Berghahn Books.

End Notes

[1] Morozov looks at how ‘Digital Activism’ often feeds the very structures against we protest, with information that can prove to be counter productive to the efforts. The digital is still not ‘public’ in its ownership and a complex assemblage of service providers, media houses and governments often lead to a betrayal of sensitive information which was earlier protected in the use of analogue technologies of resistance.

[2] Following the revolutions in Egypt, China, worried that the model might be appropriated by its own citizens against China’s authoritarian regimes, decided to block “Jan25” and mentions of Egypt from Twitter like websites. More can be read here: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/01/29/2110227/China-Blocks-Egypt-On-Twitter-Like-Site.

[3] More information about the programme can be found here.

[4] Models of digital communication and networking have always imagined that the models would be valid only for the digital environments. Hence, the physical world still engages only with the one-to-many broadcast model, where the central authorities produce knowledge which is disseminated to the passive receivers who operate only as receptacles of information rather than bearers of knowledge. To challenge this requires a re-orientation of existing models and developing ways of translating the peer-to-peer structure in the physical world.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/between-the-stirrup-and-the-ground-relocating-digital-activism

July 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T07:00:26Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Five monographs: Re: Wiring Bodies by Asha Achuthan, Archive and Access by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, Pornography and the Law by Namita Malhotra, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem – An Inquiry into Technology and Governance by Ashish Rajadhyaksha and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities by Pratyush Shankar were sent for peer review.

Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline for submission – 26 July 2011; Participants to be selected by 30 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

The Digital Natives Newsletter

"Links in the Chain" is a bi-monthly publication which highlights the projects, ideas and news of the "Digital Natives with a Cause?" community members. It includes opinion posts by participants from the three workshops — Talking Back (Taipei, 15 – 18 August 2010), My Bubble, My Space, My Voice (Johannesburg, 6 – 9 November 2010) and From Face to the Interface (Santiago, 8 – 10 February 2011) as well as the facilitators, interviews with them, comics and cartoons highlighting current issues affecting the community, as well as current news and discussions happening at the project website, www.digitalnatives.in.

The Digital Dinosaurs [Links in the Chain, Volume 7]
Special Mid Year Edition [Links in the Chain, Volume 8]

Accessibility

Featured Research

Accessibility Policy Making: An International Perspective (Revised Edition 2011) [A G3ict White Paper researched and edited by the Center for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. Editor: Nirmita Narasimhan, Revised edition: May 2011]

Access to Knowledge (previously IPR Reform)

CIS believes that access to knowledge and culture is essential as it promotes creativity and innovation and bridges the gaps between the developed and developing world positively. Hence, the campaigns for an international treaty on copyright exceptions for print-impaired, advocating against PUPFIP Bill, calls for the WIPO Broadcast Treaty to be restricted to broadcast, questioning the demonization of 'pirates', and supporting endeavours that explore and question the current copyright regime.

Featured

Don't Shoot the Messenger: Speech on Intermediary Liability at 22nd SCCR of WIPO (speech by Pranesh Prakash at a side-event co-organized from 15 to 24 June 2011, by WIPO and the Internet Society on intermediary liability).

Openness

Documentary

People are Knowledge – Experimenting with Oral Citations on Wikipedia (co-produced by CIS in association with the Wikimedia Foundation, on Oral Citations in India and South Africa)

Featured

Opening Government: A Guide to Best Practice in Transparency, Accountability and Civic Engagement across the Public Sector (published by Transparency & Accountability Initiative, CIS contributed the section on Open Government Data).

Internet Governance

New Blog Post

RTI and Third Party Information: What Constitutes the Private and Public? [by Noopur Raval]

Events Organised

Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms – A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [at CIS, Bangalore on 8 July 2011]
Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [at TERI, Bangalore on 27 June 2011]

Featured

Privacy & Media Law (by Sonal Makhija). The research examines the existing media norms governed by Press Council of India, the Cable Television Networks (Regulation) Act, 1995 and the Code of Ethics drafted by the News Broadcasting Standard Authority, the constitutional protection guaranteed to an individual’s right to privacy upheld by the courts, and the reasons the State employs to justify the invasion of privacy.

Comments

Right to Privacy Bill 2010 — A Few Comments (by Elonnai Hickok). CIS has given specific recommendations and specific comments on the Right to Privacy Bill, 2010, which was introduced in the Rajya Sabha by Rajeev Chandrashekhar.

Event Report

Privacy Matters, Guwahati – the event was organised by IDRC, Society in Action Group, IDEA Chirang, an NGO initiative working with grassroots initiatives in Assam, Privacy India and CIS on 23 June 2011.

New Blog Entries

My Experiment with Scam Baiting (by Sahana Sarkar)
When Data Means Privacy, What Traces Are You Leaving Behind? (by Noopur Raval)
Video Surveillance and Its Impact on the Right to Privacy (by Elonnai Hickok)
Consumer Privacy in e-Commerce (by Sahana Sarkar)
An Overview of DNA Labs in India (by Shilpa Narani)
UID: Nothing to Hide, Nothing to Fear? (by Shilpa Narani)

News & Media Coverage

Indian SMEs still fail to harness the power of Net [Sunday Guardian, 19 June 2011]

Sorry Wrong Number [Telegraph, 3 July 2011]

Aadhaar’s moment of truth [Deccan Herald, 5 July 2011]
The Walls Have Ears [Outlook, issue, 11 July 2011]
Transparent Government, via Webcams in India [New York Times, 17 July 2011]; news also published in other languages in wprost (Polish), ictnews (Vietnamese) and @rret sur images(French)
NYT lauds Oommen Chandy’s 24/7 office webcast [Deccan Chronicle, 19 July 2011]
UID: The World’s Largest Biometric Database [International School on Digital Transformation, 21 July 2011]. Sunil Abraham made a presentation.
Facebook, my boyfriend is lousy [Bangalore Mirror, 24 July 2011]

Portal augurs well for transparency [The Hindu, 25 July 2011]

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter

Follow CIS on identi.ca

Join the CIS group on Facebook

Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/july-2011-bulletin

June 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T07:14:57Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage:

Researchers@Work

RAW is a multidisciplinary research initiative. CIS believes that in order to understand the contemporary concerns in the field of Internet and society, it is necessary to produce local and contextual accounts of the interaction between the Internet and socio-cultural and geo-political structures. To build original research knowledge base, the RAW programme has been collaborating with different organisations and individuals to focus on its three year thematic of Histories of the Internets in India. Six monographs Rewiring Bodies, Archive and Access, Pornography and the Law, The Leap of Rhodes or, How India Dealt with the Last Mile Problem - An Inquiry into Technology and Governance, Transparency and Politics and Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities are published online and will be launched later this year.

CEPT to Set up Centre to Research Role of Internet in Social Development [Published in the Indian Express on June 18, 2011]

Upcoming Event in CEPT, Ahmedabad

Locating Internets: Histories of the Internet(s) in India — Research Training and Curriculum Workshop: Call for Participation [Deadline for submission – 15 July 2011; Workshop from 19 to 22 August 2011]

Digital Natives with a Cause?

The Digital Natives Newsletter

The Digital Dinosaurs [Volume 5]

Pathways

HE Cell's initiative on social justice, in collaboration with CIS, has initiated the Pathways Project for Learning in Higher Education. It is supported by the Ford Foundation. Under this project, nine under-graduate colleges in different parts of India will be identified to provide special skills in livelihood, knowledge and technology to underprivileged students in those colleges.

New Blog Entry

Pathways for Learning in Higher Education

Accessibility

New Blog Entries

Policy Spotlight: 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act [Written by Deepti Bharthur; contains an e-mail interview with Jenifer Simpson, Senior Director for Government Affairs and head of the Telecommunications & Technology Policy Initiative at the American Association of People with Disabilities ]
ICT Accessibility in Sri Lanka [Written by Nirmita Narasimhan]

Intellectual Property

Statement

Statement of CIS, India, on the WIPO Broadcast Treaty at the 22nd SCCR

New Blog Entry

Putting a Lid on Royalty Outflows — How the RBI can Help Reduce your IP Costs [Written by Sanjana Govil]

Openness

Submission

Comments on the draft National Data Sharing and Accessibility Policy [submitted to the National Spatial Data Infrastructure]

Internet Governance

New Articles

The Present — and Future — Dangers of India's Draconian New Internet Regulations [By Anja Kovacs in the Caravan on June 1, 2011]
Big Brother is Watching You [By Sunil Abraham in Deccan Herald on June 1, 2011]
The Digital is Political [By Nishant Shah in Down to Earth, Issue of June 15, 2011]
Do You Want to be Watched? [By Sunil Abraham in Pragati on June 8, 2011]
Snooping Can Lead to Data Abuse [By Sunil Abraham in Mail Today on June 9, 2011]
Privacy and Security Can Co-exist [By Sunil Abraham in Mail Today on June 21, 2011]

Column in Indian Express

Nishant Shah, Director-Research will be writing a series of columns on Internet and Society issues:

Say 'Password' in Hindi [By Nishant Shah in the Indian Express, May 15, 2011]

Upcoming Event

Socio-financial Online Networks: Globalizing Micro-Credit through Micro-transactional Networked Platforms – A Public Lecture by Radhika Gajalla [at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, July 8, 2011]

Featured Research

New Articles

A Street View of Private and the Public [By Prashant Iyengar in Tehelka on June 4, 2011]
The new Right to Privacy Bill 2011 — A Blind Man's View of the Elephunt [By Prashant Iyengar in Privacy India website on June 8, 2011]

New Blog Entry

Bloggers' Rights Subordinated to Rights of Expression: Cyber Law Expert

Event organised in Guwahati

Privacy matters [Donbosco Institute, Kharguli, Guwahati, June 23, 2011]

Upcoming Events

Internet Surveillance Policy: “…the second time as farce?” – A Public Lecture by Caspar Bowden [TERI, Bangalore, June 27, 2011]
Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Hyderabad [Osmania University Center for International Program, Hyderabad, July 9, 2011]

Telecom

Articles by Shyam Ponappa

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

NTP 2011 Objective: Broadband [published in the Business Standard on June 2, 2011]

Miscellaneous

Technology, Transparency and Accountability: A Bar-Camp in Delhi [June 5, 2011, Delhi]
Communication Policy Advocacy, Technology, and Online Freedom of Expression: A Toolkit for Media Development [June 20 – July 1, 2011, Budapest, Hungary]

News & Media Coverage

Your cyber space is a hackers paradise [Mail Today, June 6, 2011]
Centaur website reveals guests' personal info [Times of India, June 20, 2011]
Mumbai Takes Note of Sexting, the Seamier Side of Texting [Times of India, June 19, 2011]
Look what the state just did to you [Mid Day, June 12, 2011]
Tough neighbourhood tests India's e-tolerance [Times of India, June 12, 2011]
India Weighing Looser Web Rules [Wall Street Journal, May 30, 2011]
Public data on the Web leaves much to be desired [Hindu, May 28, 2011]
What documents will you need, to get UID? [CitizenMatters.in, May 28, 2011]
Mobile education comes to villages [Mail Today, May 27, 2011]
Google now stalks your street [Hindu, May 27, 2011]
Women in love with Facebook [Deccan Herald, May 27, 2011]
Google Unveils Controversial Street View Mapping in B’lore [Economic Times, Mumbai, May 27, 2011]
NGOs say eG8 report must stress internet rights [TELECOMPAPER, May 26, 2011]

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CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/june-2011-bulletin

Mumbai Takes Note of Sexting, the Seamier Side of Texting

praskrishna — 2011-06-23T09:55:25Z

When Chitra started getting SMSs and emails laced with sexual innuendoes from an unknown individual, she didn't tell her mother or rush to the police. The 21-year-old grew so despondent that she dialed a psychologist for help. This article was published in the Times of India on June 19, 2011.

But last week, a 17-year-old student of L S Patkar College in Goregaon didn't react like Chitra (name changed) did when she got lewd SMSs from her teacher. The teenager approached the police and got her computer hardware teacher, Rahul Sarangle, arrested. Sarangle was subsequently released on bail, but not before Mumbai had sat up and taken note of the seamier side of texting or sexting as it is known.

Sexting is, in simple terms, text messages with a sexual overtone. It's not new; in fact, every state in the US has worked out guidelines and laws to keep a check on unsolicited sexting, especially when children are the recipients. The American Academy of Pediatrics has coined a definition: "Sending, receiving, or forwarding sexually explicit messages, photographs, or images via cell phone, computer, or other digital devices."

Sexting has been at the forefront of news and online search engines due to the 20-day drama of US Congressman Anthony Weiner, who resigned on Friday after it emerged that he had sent explicit pictures of himself to six women using various online tools.

The moot question is why do men such as lecturer Rahul Sarangle or politicians like Anthony Weiner sext when it can be easily traced back to them?

Experts said unsolicited sexting is about sex and perversion. Psychiatrist Dr Harish Shetty said, "Such sexting occurs when the mind is obsessed; sexual thoughts are supreme and reasoning fails." He believes that a person who sexts also feels a sense of power. "The person's fingers work faster than the vocal cords. In such individuals, rational thought that should stop such urges seems paralysed," said Dr Shetty.

Said psychologst Hingoranney, "Some people are obsessed with sex or have supressed sexuality problem. They would derive sadistic thrills by sexting."

India is not without its share of sexting tales; the most infamous being the widely circulated MMS of two Delhi high school students in 2004. Said Nishant Shah, director (research) of the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet & Society, "Sexting is essentially about mobile phones. While there is no study in India on sexting, it's obvious from our sessions with youngsters that sexting is a part of the new communication patterns emerging among young people."

At times, sexting can have disastrous outcomes. While Chitra is a nervous wreck who feels she may have invited the sexts with her behaviour, American teen Jessica Logan committed suicide in 2008 after her ex-boyfriend circulated nude pictures that she had earlier in their relationship MMSed him. Shah said, "During our research in Bihar, we came across youngsters in Bihar who have suffered a great deal when an older family member read SMSs that they had sent." Any SMS to a male friend could be misconstrued as sexting in non-metro parts of India, he added.

All experts said that measures should be taken by families, schoolscolleges and society at large to protect youngsters from the ills of sexting. "Victims could feel shocked, violated and frightened,'' said Dr Shetty. "The words jump from the screen bringing a deep sense of disgust and a feeling of pain. The experience may be converted to bad memories if counseling is not done.''

Read the original published in the Times of India here

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/news/seamier-side-of-texting

May 2011 Bulletin

praskrishna — 2012-07-30T10:23:01Z

Greetings from the Centre for Internet and Society! In this issue we are pleased to present you the latest updates about our research, upcoming events, and news and media coverage.

Digital Natives with a Cause?

New Blog Entry by Samuel Tettner

Samuel Tettner is a Digital Natives Coordinator in CIS. He has written the following blog entry:

What Scare a Digital Native Blogathon?

Accessibility

New Blog Entry

Universal Service — An Instrument for Accessibility

Openness

Internet Governance

Column in Indian Express

Nishant Shah, Director-Research will be writing a series of columns on Internet and Society issues. His first column on transparency, technology and NGOs in India came out on Sunday:

Power to the People [Indian Express, May 15, 2011]

New Blog Entries

Killing the Internet Softly with Its Rules [By Pranesh Prakash in Indian Express, May 9, 2011]
Rebuttal of DIT's Misleading Statements on New Internet Rules
CDT Provides Answers to Questions on Internet Neutrality

Featured Research

Limits to Privacy

Conference Report

Privacy By Design — Conference Report

Workshop

Second IJLT-CIS Lecture Series, National Law School [National Law School of India University, Nagarbhavi, Bangalore, May 21-22, 2011]

Upcoming Conferences

Panel Discussion on UID – Its Feasibility, Utility and Legality [May 26, 2011]
Privacy Matters - A Public Conference in Hyderabad [The English and Foreign Languages University (TBC), Hyderabad, June 18, 2011]

Telecom

Column

Shyam Ponappa is a Distinguished Fellow at CIS. He writes regularly on Telecom issues in the Business Standard and these articles are mirrored on the CIS website as well.

Spectrum reforms - Good & Bad news [published in the Business Standard on May 5, 2011]

Miscellaneous

Public Lecture

The Task of the Translator after Google [CIS, April 30, 2011]

News & Media Coverage

Sunil Abraham, CIS : "Avec l’e-G8, Nicolas Sarkozy veut promouvoir de nouvelles restrictions à la liberté d’expression" [LE MAG IT, May 24, 2011]
As Simple as a Tweet [Deccan Chronicle, May 24, 2011]
A Network of Chains [Outlook, Issue of May 30, 2011]
Bangalore-based NGO files RTI query asking list of websites blocked by Indian govt [Daily News & Analysis, May 18, 2011]
IT Act if enforced will leave internet use in India no freer than in China [Daily News & Analysis, May 15, 2011]
Your Privacy is Public Property [Mail Today, May 15, 2011]
Point By Point Rebuttal Of Indian Government’s Statement On Internet Control Rules [Medianama, May 13, 2011]
New rules to ensure due diligence: IT dept [Times of India, May 11, 2011]
Indian civil liberties groups are now geared to fight the draconian IT Rules [Weekend Leader.com, Vol 2 Issue 18, 6 - 12 May, 2011]
New Internet rule: 'Objectionable' content can be removed without notifying users [dailybhaskar.com, May 11, 2011]
India Chills Online Speech [digitalcommunities, May 3, 2011]
Consumers International World Congress - Day 3 roundup [Consumer's International Blog, May 5, 2011]
Digerati See Censorship in New Web Rules [Wall Street Journal, May 2, 2011]
Free expression [Watertown Daily Times, May 2, 2011]
India curbs on Bloggers and Internet [TruthDrive, April 29, 2011]
Bright lights, geek city [Hindu, April 28, 2011]
India Cracks Down on Internet Free Speech [April 28, 2011]
India's cyber cafes going porn-free [msnbc.com, April 28, 2011]
Thousands queue for iPad 2 across Asia [AFP, April 28, 2011] [News hosted by Google]
New internet rules open to arbitrary interpretation [Times of India, April 27, 2011]
India Puts Tight Leash on Internet Free Speech [New York Times, April 27, 2011]
India Can Restrict 'Objectionable' Web Content under New Rules [TMCnet Legal, April 27, 2011]
Iraqi Minister meets Secretary, Indian Ministry of Panchayat Raj [Karnataka News Network, April 27, 2011]
The world is your oyster, by invitation only [Livemint, April 26, 2011]
No access to pornography in cyber cafes, declare new rules [Times of India, April 26, 2011]
India Proposes Restrictions on Tapping Telephone Calls [PC World, TechWorld and CIO, April 26, 2011]

Follow us elsewhere

Get short, timely messages from us on Twitter
Follow CIS on identi.ca
Join the CIS group on Facebook
Visit us at www.cis-india.org

CIS is grateful to Kusuma Trust which was founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin, for its core funding and support for most of its projects.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/about/newsletters/may-2011-bulletin

What scares a Digital Native? Blogathon

tettner — 2015-05-14T12:16:14Z

What Scares technologized young people around the world? In an effort to present a view often not heard in traditional discourses, on Monday the 18th of April 2011, young people from across the world blogged about their fears in relation to the digitalisation of society.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/digital-natives/blog/what-scares-a-digital-native-blogathon-1

Bright lights, geek city

praskrishna — 2011-05-01T02:41:34Z

Bangalore serves as my anchor because this is where the geek is, says Nishant Shah. The news was published in the Hindu on April 28, 2011.

I have spent the last couple of years on the fly, measuring life in cups of coffee consumed in transit at airports, working largely with young people in the Global South about their use of digital technologies for social change and political transformation.

It was interesting to live in non-localised time zones and out of suitcases, treating Bangalore as some sort of a laundermat where I largely came to get fresh clothes. But, in this year, as I spend more time in the city, I have started rediscovering the reason why I came to Bangalore eight years ago and decided to call it home.

I realise now, that despite my geographically distributed lifestyle, Bangalore serves as my anchor because this is where the Geek is! And I use the word ‘geek' not only to refer to the (largely male) technology population of the city, but to the people who, in their own quest for knowledge, have made a supportive, symbiotic and inclusive ecosystem of interventions, interests and interactions.

Over the years, many small and big spaces and organisations, collectives and meet-ups have made the city into a mashup that willingly or unwittingly, is a consequence of the digital technologies which are often held responsible for the ‘ruin and decline' of ‘good old Bangalore'.

Here are my three favourite such spaces: one, the experimental make-shift curatorial space Jagaa that ‘makes things happen' in the crowded topography of Shanthinagar. Over time, I have been a part of a bar-camp on digital archiving, audience to an electronic music remix concert, and learned about Dutch Colonial history at Jagaa, making it the official Geek Centre for those who want to be a part of things as they happen.

Two, the Blank Noise Project (BNP) that has now made substantial interventions in discourse on safety on our streets and gender. Using digital technologies and capital, BNP constantly involves young people in and outside the city to reclaim the public spaces through performances and writing.

Three, Kiran ‘Jace' Jonallagadda, who should be in a travel book for Geeks. Jace started the first bar-camps in Bangalore so that geeks of a feather could flock together. His technology-based, community-based venture called HasGeek is all set to become the only way of capturing the burgeoning tech interest and talent in the city.

I realise, as I write this, that this list of ‘Geeks' Up!' in Bangalore is almost exhaustive. I run through the fun, the excitement and the energy that digital and internet technologies have brought the city and I feel recharged. And I am glad that the Centre for Internet and Society, which I co-founded and work with, is in this city, with all these exciting people, just a click or a corner away.

Read the original news published in the Hindu here

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

Who the Hack?

praskrishna — 2015-05-14T12:16:59Z

A hacker is not an evil spirit, instead he can outwit digital systems to bring about social change, writes Nishant Shah in this column published in the Indian Express on April 24, 2011.

One of the most sullied words that have pervaded public discourse, with the rise of the internet, is “hacker”. The word conjures up images of a silent, menacing, technology-savvy young man, who, with his almost magical control over the digital realm, manipulates systems, changes the laws, rewrites the rules and takes complete control. We hear stories about criminals hacking often enough — people who break into national security systems and retrieve sensitive information, teenagers who crash servers by spamming them with unnecessary traffic, users who commit credit fraud by phishing or breaking into bank accounts, or shutting down entire systems by erasing all the code.

Hackers v/s Crackers

As many of us know, the term hacker has a different origin and meaning than its abused application. In fact, people who perform maleficent activities using their technological prowess are called “crackers” — these are people who use their ability to interact with a system in order to make personal gains or to harass others. A hacker is a person who has extraordinary technology skills and is able to manipulate digital systems and makes them perform tasks which were not a part of their original design. Which means that a geek who can hack into a server and uses the free space to host a free website, aimed for public good, or a techie who writes a programme that can use the idle computing time of your machines to run peer-to-peer networks, or a teenager who can break the constraints of an existing software to integrate it with other programmes, are all hackers. A hacker is defined by his ability to play around with the basic elements of a system (not necessarily digital and internet-based) and perform actions, sometimes for social good, but often, for fun and to explore the digital world’s frontiers. They are not the evil spirits that we often imagine them to be.

Hackers can be suffused with a spirit of civic good and of social beneficence. Around the world, hackers have used their technology skills to make public interventions to resolve a crisis in their environments. From the now notorious Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks platform to more positive efforts like Ipaidabribe.com, a civic hackers have emerged as our new heroes. Ipaidabribe.com is a civic hacking website, which allows users to use digital storytelling as a method by which they can start discussions on corruption and what we can do to change the systems.

Many digital natives are civic hackers. Aditya Kulkarni, one of our earliest participants with the “Digital Natives with a Cause” programme, is a digital native civic hacker. Like many young people in India, Aditya, from Mumbai, found the field of electoral politics opaque. He found it difficult to understand why good people voted for bad leaders and why large sections of the society shirk their responsibility to vote, thus leading to flawed governments. He, with his friends, started VoteIndia.in, a website where they collected information from public domain sources about electoral candidates in their local constituencies, so that voters could make informed decisions. The website was an instance of civic hacktivism.

I talk about hacking because I want to draw your attention to the phenomenon that started with Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption stance and the series of public interventions that surrounded it. Hazare has emerged as a hero for many. He has been trending on Twitter, there are pages dedicated to him on Facebook, Tumblr blogs have been spreading his word, text messages have urged people to come out in support. While there is much speculation about Hazare’s politics and the media spectacle that it has created, little attention has been given to Hazare’s almost exclusively off-line campaign and the way in which social media tools have been able to capture his momentum and turn it into a series of civic hacktivist interventions.

Flashmobs with people bearing candles and chanting against corruption emerged in cities. Public consultations organised by young people saw critical engagement with questions of corruption. The interwebz have been abuzz with people expressing opinions and calling for public mobilisation. Anti-corruption convictions have found resonance with people who, otherwise, despite having access to these technologies, would not necessarily have engaged in these kinds of civic hacktivities. This, for me, is not only a sign of hope but also a moment of understanding that digital activism is not always restricted to the digital domain.

As in the case of Aditya, and that of Hazare, the germ of an idea is often offline. The processes of protest and demonstration towards social change travel across the physical and the digital world. The idea of a digital native as a civic hacktivist reminds us that the young person behind the computer, in a virtual reality, is not dissociated from the embedded contexts of everyday life. Their skills with the computer often help them make critical interventions to mobilise social change.

See the original article published by the Indian Express here

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