Questions to Nishant Shah
by
Prasad Krishna
—
last modified
Mar 06, 2014 08:54 AM
Dr. Nishant Shah had a text interview with the Hybrid Publishing Lab around questions on Digital Humanities.
The interview was published on the website of Leuphana University in February 2014.
Nishant Shah is the co-founder and Director-Research at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, India. He researches at Leuphana and in The Netherlands. His topics are cyborgs and cyberspaces.
- Why do you think we are all cyborgs?
Shah: Generally, when we think of cyborgs we think of futuristic beings – things that we want to become. But that imagination pretends that we don't have an intimate and intricate relationship with different technologies. When we look at the world that we live in, we can immediately recognize that we continually live with technologies that help us live and to live together. These technologies are so natural a part of our life that we have forgotten to think of them as technologies – like electricity or think of technological products – like clothes. It is good to remind ourselves, when we think of ourselves as 'already cyborgs', that our lives are intertwined with technologies of different kinds, and that we need to think of our human, social and political conditions as mediated by the technological. - What does this knowledge mean to our society?
Shah: Thinking of ourselves as cyborgs living in cyborg societies helps us look at the role of technologies differently. We come to realize that technologies are not just something that we use in order to achieve a task. Our usage of technologies changes who we are, individually and as a society. So we need to take the politics of technology infrastructure and regulation seriously. For example, the privatization of knowledge industries, closed and proprietary publishing of research that is produced through public funding, produces societies where only a privileged elite can access this knowledge. We will have to look at questions of open access, open source, open knowledge, etc. as a part of our larger social problems instead of thinking of them as 'technology' questions. Similarly, technologies of access define how different identities and groups are shaped and consumed and we need to now start looking at intersections of technology and society rather than imagining them as separated domains. - Does the Digital Change bring about advantages or disadvantages for our society?
Shah: I feel that this is a wrong question to ask. It presumes that we actually have only these two options, and that there is a normative, universal truth that determines what the advantages and disadvantages are. Every shift in technological development comes with a bunch of possibilities. Some of these possibilities might offer us the promise of a just, open, inclusive and fair society. Some of them might portent a compromise of our basic human and social rights. The processes used for both are the same. In that case, the questions of power, or ownership, of accountability and transparency will need to be built into the conversations around digital. So the question is not to ask whether the digital in itself is good or bad. However, the digital does provide us with alternatives to some of the most endemic problems around power imbalance, abuse and discrimination. And it remains for us to see, how we are going to shape our societies to fulfill these promises. If we don't take these questions seriously, we might end up amplifying our problems through the very technologies that can otherwise be used to achieve these dreams. - Which advantages do you see, especially for students?
Students, for me, are the people who are going to live the science fiction futures that we imagine in the present. So while we can make a list of all the different tools and practices that students can use right now, for education, for collaboration, for sharing and for research, what is more important is to realize what these technologies help students in thinking about their futures. One of the biggest things that the digital produces for students, or any young people, is that it makes them think of themselves as agents of change. With the digital, with the ability to mobilize and connect resources and people together, the young are often able to make strategic interventions to correct problems in their immediate environments. And that is the future of our societies – to build an active civil society that is going to contribute to sustainable, relevant and nuanced solutions for the worlds that we want to live in.
