Centre for Internet and Society

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DisruptingRhetorics

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:09:30Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Marialaura Ghidini.

Session

In "The Braindead Megaphone" (2007) writer George Saunders discusses the power of 21st century voices of high-tech mass media; the voices with whom one converse mentally all the time and often unaware. Saunders uses the metaphor of "The Megaphone Guy at a party" to describe the effects that such voices have on other people's thoughts, even when they are just passive listeners of what is said. The Megaphone Guy "crowds other voices out" because of "the volume and omnipresence of his narrating voice", and his power does not reside in his intelligence or acuity, but in his "dominance". This guy's rhetoric — read also, the mass media’s rhetoric — becomes central because of its unavoidability", and the web, with its now easy-to-use tools and shiny platforms, along with the seeming global interconnectedness of the Internet have made his dominance more portable and accessible, less unavoidable.

Simultaneously, such easiness and interconnectedness have allowed the reversal to happen, that is the development of strategies aimed at obstructing or diverting the dominant rhetoric. Artistic practices from all over the world have shown us different modes of intervention that disrupt the hegemonic discourses facilitated by the adoption of 'global' platforms of communication, entertainment and commerce. From the duo ubermonger to artists Paolo Cirio and IOCOSE and the labs like F.A.T. Lab, artists have developed strategies to weaken the power and dominance of The Megaphone Guys; they have developed methods of research, analysis and action which effects go beyond the art circuit and being on the internet.

All that said, however, the question of accessibility remains pressing and open to discussion: the bandwidth of common internet access and the way in which the web is entangled with everyday life still differs according to geographical areas. And this factor has often been overlooked in the researches into artistic practices online and their potentials to generate discourses that offer an alternative to the dominant ones. This difference in infrastructure and cultural uses has determined a diversity in artistic interventions aimed at disrupting dominating narratives: India shows a different history and approaches that this session would like to bring to light with the help of the participants.

Both through looking within the art field and outside it, such as in the work of social and community enterprises like the collective BlankNoise, this session aims to look artistic practices as methods of research and intervention that can be used to understand the effects of the Internet and web tools on society and, in turn, to put forward new ways in which web technology can be critically used by many, and non-artists, in their everyday life.

Plan

Led by a curator/researcher, in collaboration with an artist and another curator/researcher, this discussion session will start with a general overview of artistic interventions, i.e. methods, aimed at disrupting the world's views created by mass media. This general overview will include examples of both national and international artists and community-based projects, from artists ubermonger, IOCOSE, Paolo Cirio and labs like F.A.T. Lab outside India, to the work of collectives such as Cybermohalla and BlankNoise, and artist like Archana Hande in India. It will be then followed by a discursive moment during which the participants will be divided in groups, according to specific key words collectively agreed upon, to discuss artists works and non-artistic activities pertaining the subject of the session. What will emerge from the group discussions will be presented to all participants in a short session, and will be followed by an attempt to create a mapping of current methods of intervening and acting online. Prior to the workshop participants will be given suggested readings and a series of questions that will help them for the breakout groups.

With this structure the session will not be based on one-way communication but it will allow to generate collective research into online behaviours—of platforms, corporations, people and communities of interest—through expanding on the views proposed by the proponents of #DisruptingRhetorics.

Readings

Tatiana Bazzichelli, Networked Disruption. Rethinking Oppositions in Art, Hacktivism and the Business of Social Networking. DARC PRESS (Aarhus University), Denmark, 2013 (Excerpts)

George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone. Riverhead Books, US, 2007

F.A.T. Lab, We Lost, http://fffff.at/rip/

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-disruptingrhetorics

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ArchiveAnarchy (Archives, Accessibility, and Social Media)

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:11:45Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Ranjani M Prasad and Farah Yameen.

Session

In the last decade, the internet has aided a proliferation of information networks - Google Books, archive.org, Hathi Trust, pad.ma and similar archive based knowledge platforms – and cloud based data storage has become a useful and accessible alternative to file based systems.

The session opens up with questions of accessibility, ownership and hegemonies in an active archive. It takes up three archives that are being built at Ambedkar Univeristy and other similar archives to explore the emerging issues of knowledge sharing on the internet.

The Lotika Vardarajan archive is an ethnographic archive putting together an academic’s research on indigenous Maritime and Textile traditions and their indepth documentation.
The Delhi Oralities Archive is an oral history archive of city memories and resident narratives that seeks to be accessible to the city as an open resource.
The Institutional Memory Archive is a living archive continuously reinventing itself according the needs of the university campus that it documents.

The archiving impulses in each case are different as are the dissemination needs of the archive. How do Internet tools like social media, audio and video distribution platforms like Soundcloud and YouTube intervene in the archiving space to enable and catalyze access? Do dissemination strategies provided by Twitter and Facebook affect the use and usability of archives? Does such access threaten questions of ownership and privacy? Who owns a public archive like Delhi Oralities? What hierarchies operate in living archives to decide what is archived and who archives it? What are the limits of such knowledge repositories and the open access movement itself, especially in the light of traditional knowledge structures?

Plan

The discussion session explores questions of archives outside the academic research space. It discusses the possibility of using non-traditional platforms for data sharing to maximize access, sustainability and co-authorship for living archives.

Readings

Basic knowledge about existing social media platforms, open source repository softwares such as DSpace and familiarity with Creative Commons licensing.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-archiveanarchy

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #AFCinema2.0

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:12:03Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Akriti Rastogi and Ishani Dey.

Session

Amour fou is saturated with its own aesthetic, it fills itself to the borders of itself with the trajectories of its own gestures, it runs on angels' clocks, it is not a fit fate for commissars & shopkeepers. Its ego evaporates in the mutability of desire, its communal spirit withers in the selfishness of obsession. (Bey, 1985)

Confronted with consolidating rhizomatic concerns that inevitably crop their heads in any forum on internet discussions, let alone cinema, AF, or Amour fou encapsulates the very essence of free access cinema – AF is “not the result of freedom but rather its precondition” (Bey, 1985), AF is Cinema in web 2.0.

The proposed session will be an interactive conversation exploring the Indian scenario of internet based independent filmmaking. The key concerns mediating this dialogue are the mobilization of the internet as a space of exhibition and distribution and its implications in moving through extra-legal spaces, garnering cultural capital and articulating desires of its audience. The purpose here is to engage with cinema within “the broader industrial, institutional, and market contexts in which film exists” moving away from film scholarship focusing solely on the “meaning of the text” while disregarding the very circumstances in which those texts or discourses are “produced and circulated” (McDonald, 2013: 147).

Drawing from traditional methods in cinema scholarship, we turn to our own research methods in trying to articulate contextual engagements with amorphous forms of medium, media and archive. We explore the research potentials that the internet provides as an immediate archive of the contemporary while providing provocations to engage with the internet as an alternative space for film exhibition, distribution and funding. While Ishani Dey explores the mobilization of internet’s potential as an alternative space for film exhibition tracing connections that link pirate circuits, film festivals and subversive mainstream aesthetic shifts; Akriti Rastogi provides an overview of entrepreneurial space of internet based independent filmmaking and the surge in DIY filmmaking in web 2.0.

The session concludes with mediations over the poetics of technological access. The internet’s prolific open access archive’s potential to foster cinephilia and the mutations in viewing habits that ensue lead to novel cinematic experiences and their implication for the profilmic aesthetic. In continuum our encounters with the mainstream and anonymous figures etches out the narrative of experiencing cinema and filmmaking in web 2.0.

Plan

This session proposes to conceptualize the implications of open access digital media spaces for cinema in India. Reading cinema as a product of market driven industry factors it interrogates the shifting industrial, institutional, and market contexts which contemporary India cinema negotiates and the implications of contingent media, mode and exhibition on the cinematic experience. The primary concern is to form methods to navigate the expansive archive of the internet and mark the potentials for alternate production and distribution practices that lie within. The session proposes to walk through a number of case studies illustrating the dissolution of dichotomies that is brought about by the interventions of digital and new media technologies. Drawing parallels between earlier shifts in cinema studies discourses with the coming in of videotape and satellite television in India in the 80s and the contemporary debates surrounding digital film practices and direct to home transmissions, the session attempts to historicize cinephilia within the milieu of technophilia in India.

Provocations

Informal distribution networks like peer-to-peer distribution and pirate circles come to the foreground in the discussion on the construct of the cinephile. While the space of the auteur-entrepreneur claims the spotlight in discussions surrounding linkages in film exhibition – navigating through pirate circles to film festivals, bootlegging to the big league.

The figure of the anonymous filmmaker stands precariously on the divide of the legal and extra-legal boundary that the internet thrives in traversing, thus emerging as a vast platform for exhibition that is then mobilized by the DIY filmmaker. The growing popularity of the short film format and the shifts in viewing screens are seen as symptomatic of internet’s effect on cinema’s aesthetic.

The essential provocation here is that while cinema affects the modes of archiving on the internet, the internet in turn affects the cinematic form.

Readings

McDonald, P. (2013). "Introduction: In Focus Media Industries Studies." Cinema Journal, 52(3).

Lobato, R. (2012) Shadow Economies of Cinema: Mapping Informal Film Distribution.

Zimmerman, R. D.H. (2009). "Cinephillia, Technophilia and Collaborative Remix Zones." Screen, 135-147.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-afcinema2.0

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #FollowTheMedium

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:12:19Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Zeenab Aneez and Neha Mujumdar.

Session

It was media theorist Marshall McLuhan who popularised the phrase ‘the medium is the message’; to him, different kinds of media engage the senses in different ways, affecting how we process it and engage with its contents. Before situating research in the digital space, it is important to ask ourselves: what is the nature of the medium are we dealing with here? How do people interact with it? What are the opportunities it provides and the risks it poses? How can we study new digital objects, such as online-first news outlets, podcasts, etc in a way that recognises the medium’s newness?

The proposed session is an exploration of a methodology that is informed and defined by specific characteristics of the medium, with a special focus on digital news and journalism in India. Through this, it seeks to tackle the first of the four key focus areas of the conference: How do we conceptualise, as an intellectual and political task, the mediation and transformation of social, cultural, political, and economic processes, forces, and sites through internet and digital media technologies in contemporary India?

Keeping this key question in mind, we ask: how can digital methods research contribute to the study of news and journalism in the digital space? How can we use digital objects such as tags, Likes, and Comments to understand how user feedback works in the new information economy? What can the interface of a news creation platform tell us about the changing roles of Indian journalists in today’s media environment? How can we formulate a methodology for studying the metamorphosis of a news story by using Twitter and what skills are required to gather and process information for research of this nature?

In order to inform our responses to such questions, we borrow from Richard Rogers’ adage ‘Follow the medium’ (Rogers 2013), which argues that “natively digital”(Ibid. 19) objects like tags, links, Likes or Comments, which originate in digital networks, cannot be fully understood with methods, such as, say content analysis; an example of a non-digital method that does not recognise its digital nature. The proposed session will make use of the general philosophy embodied by Rogers’ approach and urge participants to acknowledge the specific properties of the Internet as a medium and look at news and journalism as part of the larger media ecology of the web. This calls for the use of new methods that are digital in nature; the discussion on contemporary news should expand from how the news industry is coping with the digital transition, to how we can better understand the specific elements of this transition and use this understanding to reflect upon the changing nature of journalism and news itself.

In order to channel the discussion, the session proposes using the framework from one particular field of digital research: platform studies. With the advent of Web 2.0 and the emergence of the ‘web as platform’ (O’Reilly 2007) and the strengthening relationship between the news industry and social media platforms(‘Reuters Institute Digital News Report’ 2015), traditional as well as digital-born news sites are increasingly adopting a platform model. Therefore, platform studies makes for a fitting framework within which to understand the workings of these platforms, their technological and formal structures, and the specific ways in which they allow users to interact with news content.

Plan

The session will begin with a brief introduction to digital methods (Rogers 2013) and the field of ‘platform studies’ (Bogost and Montfort 2009; Gillespie 2010; Dijck 2013), which will serve as a loose framework through which to study existing news platforms as well as perform analyses on social media platforms as sites for news and journalism. This will be supplemented by the works of Anne Helmond (2015) and Tarleton Gillespie (2010).

Following this, participants will be divided into groups of four-six, with each group anchored by a volunteer, with added support from the two co-leaders. They will then be given the task of formulating a research question that makes use of one or more of the digital methods presented and are also required to frame a methodology that makes allowances for the particularities of the Indian news environment. The session will conclude with a brief discussion based on their findings.

The goal of the workshop will be to explore how digital methods can be aligned with current concerns about news and journalism in India, and open up avenues for research that acknowledges that online news occupies a space that includes natively digital objects and information architectures and hence demands research methods specific to this environment. The workshop also aims at reflecting on potential collaborations between researchers in media studies, data scientists and technologists in developing a comprehensive methodology using which to study digital media in India.

Readings

Gillespie, Tarleton. "The Politics of 'Platforms'." New Media & Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347-364.

Rogers, Richard. "The End of the Virtual: Digital Methods," Digital Methods. MIT press, 2013: 19-38.

Van Dijck, José. "Disassembling Platforms, Reassembling Sociality," The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media. Oxford University Press, 2013: 24-44

References

Anderson, Christopher W. "Towards a Sociology of Computational and Algorithmic Journalism." New Media & Society, 15, no. 7 (2013): 1005-1021.

Bogost, Ian, and Nick Montfort. 2009. "Platform Studies: Frequently Questioned Answers." Digital Arts and Culture 2009 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/01r0k9br.pdf.

Helmond, Anne. 2015. Presentation by Anne Helmond - Becoming Data Point. Panel. Transmediale. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smXLCAGafqs

Lovink, Geert. 2008. Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture. New York: Routledge.

O’Reilly, Tim. 2007. ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’. SSRN Scholarly Paper ID 1008839. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network. http://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=1008839.

Procter, Rob, Farida Vis, and Alex Voss. "Reading the Riots on Twitter: Methodological Innovation for the Analysis of Big Data." International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16, no. 3 (2013): 197-214.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report. 2015. Oxford, England: Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism, Oxford University. https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/Reuters%20Institute%20Digital%20News%20Report%202015_Full%20Report.pdf

Rogers, Richard. Digital Methods. MIT press, 2013.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-followthemedium

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #SpottingData

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:11:12Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Dibyajyoti Ghosh and Purbasha Auddy.

Session

The proposed workshop will focus on internet usage in India and the possibilities that the internet offers for representation of data. The workshop will be divided into two parts, the first, of a more general nature, and the second, will focus on one specific aspect of data—representation. While the first part will be more of a documentation exercise, the second part will be a hands-on exercise of some data representation tools that are available on the internet.

Plan

Part I: The Nature of Internet Usage in India

The workshop will engage the participants in trying to map the ways that they use the internet in their daily lives, such as circulating emails, using social networks, downloading software, online commerce, academic research, circulating audio and video, etc. This part of the workshop will try to study ‘the starkly hierarchical and segmented experiences and usages of the [internet] in India’. The study will try to distinguish between those who are consumers of data and systems and those who, in addition to consuming, also produce data and systems. Various types of production of data will also be looked at, such as crowdsourcing data (such as in Wikipedia, or restaurant review or hotel review websites).

The workshop will be conducted in an interactive manner, where the participants will enter their responses in an online collaborative platform (Google Sheets), which will be editable by all the participants. This brief documentation exercise will also be used to prepare a report at the end of the conference.

After completing this exercise of mapping the usage of the internet, the second segment of the workshop will try to explore various ways of representing data. This exercise will be done by using tools available online.

Part II: Representation of Data

This part of the workshop will deal with various kinds of data representation, of various kinds of data that users contribute to the internet through websites, such as social networks, blogs, etc. The workshop will try to look at the various existing ways in visualising and representing such data through the internet, such as chronology timelines, location mapping, network mapping, enhanced text representation such as through display of XML-Text Encoding Initiative (XML-TEI) files, etc. so as to enhance the data and open up other aspects of the data not usually evident in forms such as lists and spreadsheets.

The participants will be led through to the creation of small chronology timelines and location mapping in particular. Therefore participants will be requested to contribute data in the form of simple and small English texts which have either several markers of time, or several markers of location, so as to enable such visualisation. Examples of such texts include biographies, travel narratives, etc. The workshop will discuss how to filter ‘structured data’ from prose text to get desirable result from the softwares.

This part of the workshop will try to answer the question as to ‘how do we begin to use the internet as a space for academic and creative practice and intervention?’ The workshop will use open-access tools and software so as to highlight the low-investment infrastructure that is often sufficient enough to represent and enhance data.

Readings

Participants are requested to look at two visualisation tools in particular (both of which were developed by the Knight Lab in Northwestern University, USA), one for creating a chronology timeline (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/timelinejs) and the other for creating a location map (https://projects.knightlab.com/projects/storymapjs).

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-spottingdata

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #ExperienceMapIntentMap

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:14:39Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Anand Jha and Ashima Mittal.

Session

The session is intended to present a toolkit to deconstruct websites through navigation, experience them analogous to lived space through an information architecture. Every deconstructed component is read through content, imagery and affordance to unpack it's Intent/ subtext. A reclustering of the website is done around major intent/ subtext buckets thus revealing a completely different structure than the one experienced.

Plan

Explanation of toolkit is done through examples. Two exercise sessions follow where participants use the toolkit to carry out the activities discussed above.

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-experiencemapintentmap

IRC16 - Proposed Sessions

sumandro — 2015-11-23T06:44:05Z

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-sessions

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #DigitaIndiaUnpacked

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:17:41Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Deniz Duru Aydin and Amrita Sengupta.

Session

According to International Telecommunication Union (ITU), four billion people from developing countries remain offline, which represents 2/3 of the total population of developing countries. As policymakers around the world are increasingly becoming aware of the impacts of connectivity for socio-economic development, bridging the digital divide and bringing access to the unconnected are seen as one of the most critical policy issues of our time. Most recently, the newly adopted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set an ambitious goal of "significantly increasing access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”

As a country with the third largest Internet user population - despite a low penetration rate of 24% - India has recently put its connectivity agenda to the forefront of national policy making with its Digital India campaign. At the same time, new business models put forward by global tech giants (with the partnership of local telecom providers) are also changing the ICT landscape (Facebook – Free basics, Google – internet Saathi). At the intersection of these two trends lies an increased focus on mobile broadband, which is today the most widely used substitute for computer-based internet access, not only in India but also elsewhere.

In this Workshop Session, we want to critically analyze the objectives of these policy proposals. We suggest the following themes, as starting points for discussion:

While mobile phones bridge certain kinds of social divide, it also a perpetrates a second level of digital divide where the user experience through a cheap mobile phone and a limited data package is different and more restricted than a PC / an advanced smart phone / tablet with high speed internet access.
The need for an effective database/measurement system which not only tracks the access but also the kind of access provided, its penetration into marginalized backward communities and how it is really impacting development as one sees it.

Plan

We will divide the participants into smaller groups and each group will be asked to engage in a series of topics and come back with 3 key recommendations in their proposed topic.

Series of questions / challenges / (subject to review as we work on the workshop materials):

How does the current digital India campaign perpetrate divides by not looking into the question of user experience?
Is it enough to look at the rural/Urban divide? Is there a need to look specifically at the Government defined backward classes / communities while one speaks of internet connectivity?
What is an effective measure of success for these programmes? How can we critically set up measures for this programme such that it looks not only at the user penetration but also look at things like user experience / digital literacy / specific penetration into backward communities, as well as opportunities for self-expression?

Readings

None.

For more details visit https://cis-india.org/raw/irc16-proposed-digitaindiaunpacked

IRC16 - Proposed Session - #UnconfiedArchivesUnboundHistories

sumandro — 2016-01-03T07:16:34Z

This is a session proposed for the Internet Researchers' Conference (IRC) 2016 by Kausik Bandopadhyay and Sugata Nandi.

Session

The archive as we know it today was an official invention of the nineteenth century. It was taken to be a repository of information which aided and validated the creation of a new specialized scientific knowledge called History. With the archive was born was official histories. Being constituted of official documents the archive served official objectives. The professional historian born with the archive was a practitioner of a new science of the state, who produced knowledge verifiable at the archive. In the nineteenth century the archive served imperialist objectives, from the mid twentieth century it catered to states which emerged from erstwhile colonies and continued to serve official interests while producing histories which often rendered the earlier histories into mere cultural artifacts of a bygone age devoid of scholarly value. Through this period historians remained bound to archives which granted them access and they were compelled to narrowly demarcate territories. i.e. states, provinces within them or even smaller areas like a city or a village, which were to become their subjects. With the coming of the Internet the archive is now taking on a new meaning altogether as it no longer confined spatially. With the easy availability of technology for creation and preservation of documents and their public accessibility , the archive is being constituted and re-constituted continuously. As it is no longer bound down by statist objectives alone the questions come up: a) are we in the threshold of the demise of official histories? And, b) has time come for de-territorialization of histories altogether?

Plan

Abstracts of three hundred words are invited which critically assess the archive today from this perspective and its implications for history writing taking into consideration three works on archives.