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Habits of Living: Global Networks, Local Affects
“Networks” have become a defining concept of our epoch. From high-speed financial networks that erode national sovereignty to networking sites like Facebook that transform the meaning of the word “friend,” from blogs that foster new political alliances to unprecedented globe-spanning viral vectors that threaten world-wide catastrophe, networks allegedly encapsulate what’s new and different.
Interface Intimacies
Sherry Turkle, in her book Alone Together, talked about how the digital technologies, replacing interface time with face-time, are slowly alienating us from our social networks. There has been an increasing amount of anxiety around how people in immersive and ubiquitous computing and web environments are living lives which are connected online but not connected with their social and political contexts.
Locating the Mobile: An Ethnographic Investigation into Locative Media in Melbourne, Bangalore and Shanghai
From Google maps, geoweb, GPS (Global Positioning System), geotagging, Foursquare and Jie Pang, locative media is becoming an integral part of the smartphone (and shanzhai or copy) phenomenon. For a growing generation of users, locative media is already an everyday practice.
We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.
The Digital Classroom in the Time of Wikipedia
The digital turn in education comes across a wide range of initiatives and processes. The Wikipedia which is the largest user generated content website stands as a figurehead of such a digital turn, writes Nishant Shah.
Material Cyborgs; Asserted Boundaries: Formulating the Cyborg as a Translator
In this peer reviewed article, Nishant Shah explores the possibility of formulating the cyborg as an author or translator who is able to navigate between the different binaries of ‘meat–machine’, ‘digital–physical’, and ‘body–self’, using the abilities and the capabilities learnt in one system in an efficient and effective understanding of the other. The article was published in the European Journal of English Studies, Volume 12, Issue 2, 2008. [1]
Porn: Law, Video, Technology
Namita Malhotra’s monograph on Pornography and Pleasure is possibly the first Indian reflection and review of its kind. It draws aside the purdah that pornography has become – the forbidden object as well as the thing that prevents you from looking at it – and fingers its constituent threads and textures.
Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities
The monograph on Internet, Society and Space in Indian Cities, by Pratyush Shankar, is an entry into debates around making of IT Cities and public planning policies that regulate and restructure the city spaces in India with the emergence of Internet technologies. Going beyond the regular debates on the modern urban, the monograph deploys a team of students from the field of architecture and urban design to investigate how city spaces – the material as well as the experiential – are changing under the rubric of digital globalisation. Placing his inquiry in the built form, Shankar manoeuvres discourse from architecture, design, cultural studies and urban geography to look at the notions of cyber-publics, digital spaces, and planning policy in India. The findings show that the relationship between cities and cyberspaces need to be seen as located in a dynamic set of negotiations and not as a mere infrastructure question. It dismantles the presumptions that have informed public and city planning in the country by producing alternative futures of users’ interaction and mapping of the emerging city spaces.
Re:Wiring Bodies
Asha Achuthan initiates a historical research inquiry to understand the ways in which gendered bodies are shaped by the Internet imaginaries in contemporary India. Tracing the history from nationalist debates between Gandhi and Tagore to the neo-liberal perspective based knowledge produced by feminists like Martha Nussbaum; Asha’s research offers a unique entry point into cyberculture studies through a feminist epistemology of science and technology. The monograph establishes that there is a certain pre-history to the Internet that needs to be unpacked in order to understand the digital interventions on the body in a range of fields from social sciences theory to medical health practices to technology and science policy in the country.
Archives and Access
The monograph by Aparna Balachandran and Rochelle Pinto, is a material history of the Internet archives. It examines the role of the archivist and the changing relationship between the state and private archives for looking at the politics of subversion, preservation and value of archiving. By examining the Tamil Nadu and Goa state archives, along with the larger public and state archives in the country, the monograph looks at the materiality of archiving, the ambitions and aspirations of an archive, and why it is necessary to preserve archives, not as historical artefacts but as living interactive spaces of memory and remembrance. The findings have direct implications on various government and market impulses to digitise archives and show a clear link between opening up archives and other knowledge sources for breathing life into local and alternative histories.
Between the Stirrup and the Ground: Relocating Digital Activism
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.
We, the Cyborgs: Challenges for the Future of being Human
The Cyborg - a cybernetique organism which is a combination of the biological and the technological – has been at the centre of discourse around digital technologies. Especially with wearable computing and ubiquitous access to the digital world, there has been an increased concern that very ways in which we understand questions of life, human body and the presence and role of technologies in our worlds, are changing. In just the last few years, we have seen extraordinary measures – the successful production of synthetic bacteria, artificial intelligence that can be programmed to simulate human conditions like empathy and temperament, and massive mobilisation of people around the world, to fight against the injustices and inequities of their immediate environments.
Internet, Politics and Transparency
On 15th April 2009, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) hosted a talk by Barun Mitra on “Internet, Transparency and Politics”. Barun Mitra is the Chairperson of Liberty Institute, a think tank based in Delhi. Liberty Institute conducts research and advocacy on policy issues ranging from health, environment and trade to democracy and governance.
CEPT to Set up Centre to Research Role of Internet in Social Development
Nishant Shah, Director (Research) at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in Bangalore who will assist the centre, said: "No one predicted the outcome of the Arab Spring, because everyone was looking at the way Internet was being used globally, not at the local level. We had the pink chaddi campaign, the anti-corruption calls of the Hazare camp, and those against sexual violence in New Delhi, but they were largely ad-hoc and temporary, and disappeared."
A History of Transparency, Politics and Information Technologies in India
In this blog post, Zainab Bawa reviews the different spectrums of information, transparency and politics.
Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review
Pratyush Shankar's research project on "Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. His monograph explores the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space.
Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities - A Call for Peer Review
Pratyush Shankar's research project on "Internet, Society & Space in Indian Cities" is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. His monograph explores the trajectories of transformation and perception of cities in India in context with the rise of Information Technologies for communication and presence of an active digital space.
Pornography & the Law - A Call for Peer Review
Namita Malhotra's research project on "Pornography & the Law". is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Her monograph is an attempt to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary.
Transforming urbanscapes: ATM in cities
This is the first in series of posts where I will try and articulate the transformation in the urban landscape that one can attribute either directly or in-directly to information and communication technologies. I am keen in discussing changes that are more fundamental in terms of architectural typology and spatial constructs and all this while looking for things that are specific to an Indian city. And that is where the story becomes rather interesting; Indian cities are unique and so when a shift occurs in its material constructs it must be analyzed with reference to its peculiar context.
From the Stock Market to Neighbourhood Mohalla
The stock markets have been the symbol of trade and commerce of the city and the region. In this post I will analyze the stock market; an important commercial institution and try and articulate its changing architectural configuration and its impact on neighborhoods and other public domain of the city. The change in information technology has had a profound effect on the business methodologies of the stock brokers and traders in the last few years with possibilities for buying and selling during the market hours from any internet enabled device. The pundits have announced that the “market is in your pocket or at the comfort of your home”. Is it really so or is the change more subtle? Moreover how will our cities and their public place transform from such shift?
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